Lineage(7)

The machine gun shuddered as it spit a dashed line of bullets into the ground and then into his wife’s flesh. The boy heard several hollow thuds and felt something warm splash onto the top of his head. He blinked as whatever was in his hair began to run into his eyes. As he released his mother’s hand to wipe at his face, he heard an anguished scream, full of sorrow and grief. He didn’t know what tore loose inside of him and ached from that sound, but it centered on the scene before him, like the needle of a compass pointing north.

His father stood staring at the sky, one hand limply holding the machine gun. The dull metal fell from his grasp to the white ground. The other arm pumped a jet of blood out of the stump where his hand used to be. The officer stood several feet away, the knives in each hand dripping blood.

The boy’s mother stumbled backward. As she tried to maintain her footing, her eyes roamed wildly in her skull. Soon they met her son’s and held them. They bulged with pain and sadness, and when the boy looked down, he saw several large blotches of blood spreading across her abdomen. She blinked once and opened her mouth to say something into the cold air, but without uttering a sound, she fell away and flopped limply into the ditch behind her.

The boy turned just in time to see a blur of motion where his father stood. The officer had leapt toward the other man in a single stride and then lithely stepped off to the side, his left arm swinging down in a graceful curve. The boy watched his father’s frozen face grimace. Then his father’s head tipped at a right angle onto his shoulder, a thin strap of skin and sinew the only things keeping his head from falling off completely. Blood surged from the wound like floodwater from a broken dam, and his father’s legs unhinged, his lifeless body crumpling in a heap of rags and sharp-angled limbs.

Silence pervaded the grounds and soaked into every surface therein. The pressure that had been building seemed to coalesce into a sharp zenith that pushed the surrounding soldiers down and made several cover their ears, as though a sound were causing the heaviness they felt, though nothing could be heard in the damp air.

The boy stood staring at the officer’s back, which, surprisingly, was free of gore. The officer, in turn, was watching the last of the man’s blood seep away, when he felt the eyes of the boy on him. He turned, and they stood facing each other, their gazes locked. The boy’s jaw clenched and unclenched mechanically, while the officer’s face remained slack and unmoving. The snow fell between them like a lace curtain. An eternity ticked by, and then the officer began to move. He strode across the distance between them, his hands close to his sides.

The boy seemed almost in a trance as his parents’ killer approached with quickening footsteps. His eyes clouded over with delayed shock, and his muscles slackened from their earlier constriction. The officer recognized acceptance in the little boy’s posture, and he readied himself for his last execution of the day—and for all he knew, the war.

When he was within a few feet of the boy, the officer drew back his arm and twisted his body as he slung the blade in his right hand in a viscous sweeping motion. The boy reacted, stepped back, and teetered on the edge of the ditch. His arms automatically came out to balance him as he fell, and the blade flashed brightly in and out of his line of sight while pain bloomed on his left cheek.

The officer watched as his knife missed its mark—the boy’s neck—and cut a deep line in his cheek and across the bridge of his nose instead. The boy tipped back, arms flailing, and fell onto the corpse of his mother in the trench behind him. He struggled there, on his mother’s still-warm body, as he tried to right himself. The officer watched with a degree of amusement while he tried to decide whether to venture in after his quarry or to pull his sidearm and dispatch the boy where he lay. He was still trying to choose when he realized that a high whining sound was invading the relative quiet of the camp around him.

A plane came in fast and low from the bleak western horizon. At first it could have been mistaken for a large black vulture or a bird of prey. But as it neared the camp, the white and black outline of a five-pointed star could be seen on its fuselage. Smoke billowed from both wings and from several places over the engine cowling. A clever artist had drawn a gaping mouth lined with teeth along the front of the aircraft behind the sputtering propeller. The P-40 dropped lower and lower, until the whine of the failing engine became a roar that overrode even the concussive pressure in the soldiers’ heads. A few tried to run, while others simply fell onto the freezing ground.

The officer watched the plane as it dove sharply, directly toward the spot where he stood. With only a split second to spare, he jumped to his left and rolled several times as the sound of the plane’s engine shrieked against altitude and ate up the air around him.