Page 72 of Besieger
He began moving stones and pieces of wood, torn tires and window frames. Broken porcelain spilled between his fingers, a woman’s tattered dress. The poor soul on the inside of the rubble kept pushing, Victor heard him huff and heave; a miserable wail rose from within, and the pile shifted. His hand brushed a fur coat, wet and bulky, and he dug in with both hands, trying to pull the coat out of the way.
The mass under his palms pulsed and heaved, the wail now growing desperate. Was he trying to save a dog? Victor laughed, sweat ran down his neck and back. How fitting, he thought, he failed to save his brother—his own flesh and blood—and here he was digging a mongrel out of the rubble.
“I am taking you with me. The two of us,” Victor said, feeling jittery. “Two mongrels, the Reich’s finest.”
I will call youPflicht[25], little one.
The wet tip of a muzzle peeked through, a panting maw between the wreckage: black fur, matted with blood and plaster. Slowly, the dog started to force its way out, the whole pile shuddered. Victor lost his footing and fell back, scraping his palms. He watched Pflicht emerge and shake its fur, the muzzle with its thick tongue and sharp teeth, pressing to Victor’s face, as it looked down on him. The animal stood on all fours and loomed in its crooked form. The fur black and clotted with pus and blood; torn patches of muscle and flesh bore the signs of starvation and gangrene. Like Fenrir of old, the creature rose, its jaws yawning wider, a nightmare growing bigger and bigger.
The sirens died away and the creature growled, slavering, its yellow eyes glowing. Victor fumbled for his revolver in the holster… having forgotten that he had thrown it away. His hand closed on the only thing strapped to his belt, the dagger’s sheath that he had not yet discarded. The beast pounced. Victor tore the dagger free and slashed, its blade like a sewing needle against the thick pelt.
The crunching grew louder, like teeth tearing through connective tissue, pulling and ripping. Victor opened his mouth, desperate to breathe, the air going down his throat made him gag as the blood surged up. The left side of his torso felt slick and dripping. His whole body was dissolving into one large sodden mass, merging with the snow and the pavement. He tried to lift an arm, wipe some of the blood and muck off his face, but the muscles refused to obey.
His arm burned; the dagger was gone. Only the crunching echoed in the night. It had suddenly gotten too quiet. The bombs had ceased. The earth lay in wait, embracing him after he had fallen with the beast. And where was the mongrel creature? That gangly, foul thing—
The edges of his vision turned red, pulsing, mingling with the whiteness of the snow.
The crunching stopped close to Victor’s head. He tried to turn and again coughed and gagged. His spittle stained the ground black, some of it splattering a pair of leather boots.
He heard voices, the words smeared and dripped. A hand reached out and cupped his face, turned it towards the light of a torch. The man crouching over him wore a black uniform with insignia sewn into the collar of the shirt and lapels. Victor recognised the diamonds and runes stitched in silver; they made his heart race, his chest fighting to expand with each raggedbreath. The long winter coat pooled around both of them like a dark shroud.
Victor could not make out the man’s face—the peaked cap cast a shadow across it—but he saw the mouth move. It twisted in a grimace full of curiosity. There was a kind of vitality and youthfulness to the face that seemed grotesque in the middle of all this suffering and wreckage. He did not understand the words the men spoke, yet he knew the language.How strange, Victor thought,why was a lieutenant of the Schutzstaffel speaking French?
He must have spoken his thought aloud because the man barked with laughter, his mouth opened wide. Victor did not like the sight of those teeth.
The hand pulled away, letting Victor’s head thump back into the filthy snow. Iron fingers clamped across his torn shirt and hauled Victor upright. Pain lanced through his whole body; the ragged flesh of his torso and arms leaked, leaving a crimson trail in the snow as they dragged him away.
Sound echoed and broke against the pain like waves crashing at the rocks of his consciousness. Victor did not remember how he had risen and crossed the street. He did not remember climbing the stairs and lying down in bed. He found himself under warm covers that smelled of dust and mothballs. Bandages were tight around his torso and chest; a makeshift cast held his arm in place. Parts of his face hurt—not where the creature had clawed him, but where his father had hit him. The ghost of Wolfgang’s knuckles made Victor’s face ache.
Carefully, he raised his good hand and traced it over his cheekbone and jaw, hissing as the pain flared and trickled downhis temple. His forehead was bandaged; his fingers dug into the gauze and tangled in his sweat-drenched hair.
Water. He remembered water washing over his body, dirt and blood running down in black rivulets, and his face slammed against a tiled wall. Something had scraped up and down his face…something soft and wet, pulling at the flesh as if skinning it. Victor shivered at the memory—at how alive his skin had felt, moving and reshaping.
Salt oozed into his mouth, mingling with the water. He gulped it down greedily, suddenly desperate for the taste. A hand pressed against the back of his neck and pulled, wrenching him away from the wall. His legs gave way beneath him; he reached out, searching for balance, grabbing onto something—or someone.
“Oh, you’re awake,” a voice brought Victor back into the present, into this foreign room and bed.
A shadow flickered at the edge of his vision before it quickly disappeared. He heard doors open and close. The mattress sank under the weight of another body, and a shadow reached towards Victor’s face. Instinctively, he swatted at it and tried to move back, his head and shoulders sunk into the pillows.
The room lay in darkness: either the windows had been boarded over or the curtains had been drawn closed, as if they were enough to shield the inhabitants and muffle the bombing outside.
Bombs.Tobias.
Victor’s body jerked upwards, his feet tangled in the covers as he tried to get up. Someone pushed him back.
“Easy,” the voice seemed to spill into Victor’s very mind; a hand clasped his shoulder and eased him against the bedframe and the sheets. “You are safe. Wounded, but safe.”
The man’s German was tinged by a slight accent, giving it a touch of a lilt, almost a singsong quality. Panic pumped into Victor’s heart and he inhaled sharply. His nostrils filled with the smell of blood and iodine, but also the smell of death and rotfrom somewhere within the building. The man let go of him and stood up, momentarily vanishing into the darkness. He fumbled with something near the bed, the room suddenly bursting with so much light Victor hissed and tried to cover his face.
“It is only a candle,” the man explained, and tilting it so the wax could drip onto a nearby dresser, made a small puddle for a makeshift candle holder. “There. Now you can see.”
Victor frowned in the direction of the voice, forcing his eyes to focus and make out the shape, its back turned to the candle. The light was small, but it cast more shadows into the room, crowning the stranger with a horrid halo. Something scurried outside, in the corridor. The floorboards groaned under the weight.
No, look at me. Look at me, Tobias, a voice cooed and bubbled in his head like the running of a mountain stream. Victor turned his head to the stranger. The man looked younger than Victor, anchored in the late twenties: too young to be wearing such a uniform. Yet hadn’t the war claimed so many children and rushed them to the Front? This theatre of war: a playground ripe with bodies and loud toys.
In the light of the candle the man’s skin was honey-coloured, suggesting he had spent his days stretched out on the sand, basking in the sun. His hair was black and short. It was not a regulation cut, not like Victor’s undercut. It seemed too tousled and uneven in places, as if a barber had done a poor job when cutting it. The lines on his face were defined, no wrinkles or scars; he looked almost ethereal. As for his clothes—Victor had never liked the sight of that black uniform. But it looked definitely wrong on this man.
The stranger allowed the silence to stretch, unbothered by Victor’s wordless scrutiny. He walked back to the bed and gathered the scattered bandages and bottles into a box. A metal tray lay by the bedside, full of bloodied strips of cloth and cotton wool. It reeked of surgical spirit. Once inhaled, the smell haunted Victor, upsetting him.
