Lineage(6)

“Shoot him!” the officer screamed into the young soldier’s ear. The soldier flinched but brought the machine gun to bear on the running man’s back. Bullets sprayed from the barrel of the gun, and the escaped man pitched forward into the snow, with his arm hanging off his body at a strange angle. From where the officer stood, it looked as though only a few inches of meat attached the limb to the starved body that now lay twitching on the ground.

The officer spun in a tight turn and slit the throat of another prisoner who stood a few feet to his left. The blood that flew from the wound sprayed into a fine haze that settled in the chilled air like a mist descending over a cold field. The officer watched the blood spray fall to the ground and paint the snow a faint pink among the deeper reds. It was simply art. There was no other way to describe it. The way the substance ran from the skin when cut. How it soaked into the ground, how it pooled so black. He knew his own veins were pumping the same liquid.

Without pausing as he bore down on the next person in line, he slit his right wrist just enough to allow a small stream to escape, to fall among the rest and mix into the abstract masterpiece he was painting on the ground.

The boy’s mother and father began to back up. Something was very wrong, the boy knew. People still screamed and fell down. He looked up imploringly at his mother, but her face was turned toward his father, who stared intently into her eyes. His father’s mouth was drawn straight across his narrow face like a pale gash. His eyes were wide behind his glasses, and he now held his wife’s other hand in both of his own. Something was passing between them, the boy knew. His mother and father weren’t talking, but things were being said. After another moment like this, his father nodded and looked down into his face. The boy felt a pang of panic that rose sharply above all the other fears that barraged his senses. It was like a spike of electricity running through his mind that cut off all other thought. His father smiled, and the boy reached out to him. It was a desperate act, the reaction of someone falling from the deck of a ship into roiling waters. His father squeezed his hand for one beat, two, then released it, at the same time letting go of the connection with his wife.

A soldier stood several yards to the father’s right, toward the center of the camp, the same direction the fleeing prisoner had tried to escape. The soldier’s face was drawn up in a grimace of disgust, his eyes narrowed into slits, as arc after arc of blood flew into the air farther down the line. The boy’s father stepped calmly toward the soldier, his hands held by his sides. When the soldier didn’t turn or notice him, the boy’s father leapt in his direction and grasped the rounded edges of the other man’s machine gun. A moment too late, the soldier realized what was happening and tried to pull the gun back from the boy’s father. With a swift movement that seemed uncorrelated with his physical state, the boy’s father slammed the gun up and into the soldier’s nose, breaking it and knocking him to the ground. The two men fell heavily, the soldier onto his back and the boy’s father on top of him. The soldier’s eyes fluttered for a moment as blood began to pour from his broken nose, and the boy’s father used the momentary lull to pull the gun’s sling up and over the supine man’s head.

Without pausing, he slammed the butt of the gun into the downed soldier’s face, silencing him, smashing his already-broken nose completely flat. As he regained his feet, he heard a stillness in the air. For a moment he wondered why this would bother him. Then he realized that there were no more screams filling the air. He breathed in and out as he listened to the footsteps that approached from behind. The seconds stretched into millennia as the boy’s father stared at the far end of the camp where a supply truck sat idling. There was a small patch of paint missing from the truck’s front fender. Edges of rust were beginning to erode the metal, and he could see every intricate layer of the orange disease in minor detail. He could see each individual snowflake as it fell, and he imagined he could discern the pattern the ice crystals formed as the flakes floated to the ground. He heard another footstep fall and he spun, preparing to fire.

The heavy-bladed knife cut through his wrist as easily as a line through water. The officer stood several feet away, crouched and ready to deliver another blow, as the disembodied hand fell to the pallid earth. It landed between the two men, and the fingers curled in on the palm like a dying spider’s legs. The boy’s father tried to bring the machine gun to bear on the blood-spattered SS officer just as he saw silver bloom into life on his right side. The slim blade in the officer’s left hand sliced cleanly into the paltry flesh of the father’s forearm. It carved off a long, slender chunk of tissue, the rigid blade skittering on the bone. The chunk also fell to the ground, causing the nerves in the man’s arm to twitch.