The Lesson. Horror for Your Halloween
The Lesson
15:31, May
18th, 1985, Lansmen , West Germany
Private Aleksei Nikitin of the 62nd Motor Rifle Regiment
knew Lansamen had been a lesson. Not the sweet type that Mrs. Olga, his
secondary school teacher with the large breasts, had taught him on a pile of
warm coats in the darkened cloakroom, but the hard kind. The kind his brother,
Pyotr, who was beheaded three years ago in Afghanistan , was fond of.
The worst of his brotherly lessons had been when Pyotr had
caught him stealing money from his dresser drawer. They were a poor family,
living in a run-down apartment in the center of Stalingrad .
What the Americans would call the inner city. The building was filthy, paint
peeled from the walls, and the garbage only taken away at random intervals. The
rats were plentiful, large, and unafraid of the two-legged inhabitants.
Both his parents worked. His Papa at the ancient tractor factory, and
his Mother at the textile mill, sewing blue jeans that his family couldn’t
afford to buy. Pyotr, then fifteen, sold newspapers in front of the Isaakievsky
Cathedral, saving the pitiful rubles he earned in the top drawer of his
dresser. Sometimes Aleksei would help Pyotr. Sometimes—in fact, many
times—Pyotr wouldn’t pay him. One such time Aleksei, raided the top drawer,
seeking the money he was owed. He was only seven, and small. The dresser was
old, and tall, and he needed to precariously balance on his tip-toes, hook his
hand into the drawer, and fish for the rubbles. He found and pocketed them, but
somehow Pyotr knew. Back then Pyotr seemed to know everything. Not so much so
when his BMP was ambushed by Mujahadden in the Panjshir Valley
So Pyotr found out, but said nothing to his brother. Neither did he pay
him the next time Aleksei help sell papers, or the next. He was, as they say,
forcing Aleksei’s hand. When the hand was ultimately forced, he snuck to the
dresser—snuck because he shared a room with Pyotr, and didn’t want to wake his
slumbering brother. At the dresser he rose onto his tiptoes, carefully and
quietly pulled the drawer, and hooked his hand inside. The pain, accompanied by
the sharp crack of a rattrap snapping on his fingers, was as intense as it was
sudden. He stumbled back from the dresser, tripped and fell on his bottom,
clawing at the rattrap with is good hand, blinded by tears and the searing,
throbbing agony that only seconds before had been his hand.
His brother sat up in the bed, laughing and pointing. “Looks like I
caught another rat in my trap.” Aleksei didn’t care what his brother said,
didn’t hear what his brother said. He only cared about freeing
his throbbing fingers from the trap, the tight, excruciatingly painful, trap.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t see, and the trap was slick with… slick with what?
It was then that he realized he had heard his brother. Heard him very well. Another
rat. “Pyotr, turn on the light,” he screamed at his brother.
The laughing suddenly stopped. Pyotr answered, his voice chilling. “Why
certainly, my little brother. My little thief. I’ll be glad to turn on the
light.”
The beside lamp clicked, and a pool of light illuminated Pyotr’s
wickedly grinning face, spread over the threadbare bedcovers, and onto Aleksei.
Then Aleksei saw the reason for the slickness. The trap’s last victim resided
there still, caught between his already blackening fingers, its stomach split,
entrails mixing with blood to grease the rattrap and Aleksei’s fingers, it’s
beady, black eyes looking as if they would pop out of the narrow, rat skull. He
fainted then and remembered nothing of his parents rushing into the room, his
mother freeing his shattered hand, or his Father beating Pyotr. He didn’t
remember that, but he would never forget the trap or the eviscerated rat, its
eyes bulging, its intestines glistening between his mangled fingers.
His fingers were mangled still. Not horrifically, but they certainly
weren’t straight, and Aleksei had learned to cope, which was more than could be
said for the townsfolk of Lansamen. Again, the thought swept through his
mind, Lansamen was a lesson.
Days after the battle had swept through the Eisenbach Gap, a company of
Bundeswehr troops continued hold out in Lansamen. Surrounded and under constant
attack from the 87th Motor Rifle Regimen--of which Aleksei was a part… a very,
very small part, but a part nonetheless--the West Germans fought on. Unbeknownst
to Aleksei, Lansamen drew first the corps, then the army, and then finally the
front commander’s attention. If every bypassed town in West Germany fought
with the fanaticism shown by the Bundeswehr in Lansamen, the entire offensive
would grind to a halt as more and more troops were peeled from the front to
subdue the resistance in the Lansamens of West Germany. The Germans were to be
taught a lesson and the chalkboard was Lansamen.
Aleksei wasn’t privy to these discussions, but two days ago he heard
rumors that something was afoot. Yesterday his regiment pulled back from the
small town. At first Aleksei believed another formation would relieve them, and
they would be sent to the rear to rest and refit. Morale was high that morning,
but a refit was not to be. The regiment, as far as Aleksei could tell, broke
contact with the enemy in the small town, but only pulled back a kilometer or
two, maintaining a loose ring around the city. He could still see the town’s
cluster of shops, houses, and taller office buildings if he walked to the edge
of the woods where his company was bivouacked. The good news was that Aleksei’s
company was put into regimental reserve. They were allowed to sleep, and were
fed hot meals straight from the field kitchens. Hot meals that were actually
hot; not chilled by the trek to the front line. That afternoon the lesson began.
A battery of odd-looking rocket launchers pulled into a small clearing a
couple of hundred meters from Aleksei’s platoon. He had seen BM-27 launchers
many times, so many times that the squat trucks and bundled launching tubes
ceased to interest him, but these were different. Sleek, with launchers mounted
on a tank chassis, and freshly painted. The tracked launchers gray-green
camouflage starkly contrasted with the very plain, and very muddy, dark green
T-62 tanks and BTR-60s of Aleksei’s regiment. And security? Normally any
available infantry provided security for a contingent of artillery, but these
futuristic-looking weapons had their own detachment. Hard men armed with stubby
submachine guns and cold eyes. Aleksei and his friends let them be, but word
leaked out. Word always leaks out. The launchers fired a new type of missile.
Not nuclear, but thermobaric. He didn’t know what that meant, but he wouldn’t
need to wait long to find out.
Shortly after Aleksei’s platoon finished their lunch of black bread and
sausage, the launchers fired. The sound was like nothing Aleksei had ever
heard. No, perhaps it was similar to the bottle rockets he and his young
friends would fire on Army Day, but only in the way that watching a toy train
in the window of the old Upper Trading Rows in Moscow is similar to standing a
meter from the tracks when the Stalingrad-bound train blasted by. Each
launcher shot tens of rockets, and each rocket whooshed away with the sound of
a Mig-29 on full afterburner. The ground shook, trees were blown leafless by
the backwash, and Aleksei’s eyes wept, the tears sucked from the ducts by the
pressure drop. The rocket flight was short. It was only two or three kilometers
to the village. Their impact was catastrophic.
Aleksei didn’t know how many rockets were fired. Sixty? One hundred and
sixty? But they all dove into the unfortunate town within in a seconds of each
other. First rose an immense cloud of dust, then the crack-boom, and
then the mushroom, the billowing, red mushroom. Almost nuclear, but they had
been told it wasn’t nuclear. Right? And it wasn’t. The mushroom was not what
Aleksei imagined a nuclear detonation must look like. Either way, he doubted
that anyone in the town lived to measure the difference, but he was wrong.
Thermobaric explosives use the oxygen from the surrounding air to fuel
their detonation, sucking it into the fireball like a demon with a voracious
appetite for destruction, flattening everything within its kill radius.
Aleksei didn’t know that. He only knew that the rockets struck the town,
the mushroom cloud, billowed toward the heavens, and then evaporated, leaving
little but a burning shell of what had been a German town. There was no sign of
life. He wasn’t surprised; he knew nothing could have lived through the
explosion, but he was wrong.
Men, women, children, and Bundeswehr soldiers with MG-3 machine guns and
Pz-44 anti-tank rockets lived. Well-emplaced Marder fighting vehicles and
Leopard I tanks lived. Not many. The destruction wrought by the Thermobaric
warheads was cataclysmic. But here and there the people, the defenders, lived.
And the German’s will to fight still lived. Once again, the 87th Motor
Rifle attacked. The attack was short, vicious, and repulsed. Aleksei thanked
God—whatever god watched over war, whatever god took sides in a war—that his
company wasn’t involved.
But the lesson wasn’t over.
During the short, vicious, and repulsed attack Aleksei and his comrades
watched the rocket troops reload the launchers. These rockets were different
than those fired as his sausage was digesting. These rockets had green bands
painted behind the warhead. Aleksei didn’t need rumors to know what that meant,
didn’t need to ask the hard-nose guards. Green bands meant gas. Aleksei guessed
nerve. He guessed right.
A few minutes after the last of the regiment’s attackers withdrew, the
launchers fired. If Aleksei had thought about it, he would have realized that
the speed of the 87th’s withdrawal necessitated leaving Russian
wounded on the battlefield, but he had learned to specifically not think about
those things.
The rockets flew.
Aleksei knew a little about nerve gas. All Soviet troops knew a little
about nerve gas, the Red Army expected to use chemicals when it fought and
understood that their enemies might retaliate in kind. First off, it wasn’t a
gas. It was a liquid, and needed to be converted to aerosol to effectively
saturate an area.
The rockets didn’t dive into Lansamen this time. Each detonated over the
doomed town, a small exploding charge ripping open the cell of VX nerve gas and
converting it into a cloud of death. Viewed from the edge of his woods, the
hundreds of popping rockets formed a man-made cloud of smoky dispersal charge
residue and VX vapor, which looked a bit like a morning mist.
But it wasn’t a morning mist. Aleksei knew what would happen when that
vapor reached the ground. It would kill. There was no prolonged illness, and
very little time to inject the only cure, Atropine Sulphate. As the mist fell
on Lansamen everyone it touched would feel a tightness in their chest, their
nose would begin to run, and then they would have difficulty breathing. Severe
difficulty, as if an unseen villain had pulled a plastic bag over their head.
Then the victim would fall to the ground, convulse, and die. It no doubt began
happening before the cloud of smoke from the explosive charges cleared, and it
ended, within a minute or two.
There was no resistance to the second attack. For that Aleksei was glad,
because it was his company, clad in their Nuclear-Chemical-Biological,
abbreviated NBC, suits that attacked. But it really wasn’t an attack. It
was a survey, a hunt, an exploration, but not an attack, and that was fine with
Aleksei. No machine gun chattered as they approached the village, no assault rifle
burped its death. There was nothing. Once again, as Aleksei crunched through
the rubble that had been a town, his comrade Private Petrov Ketasarin beside
him. Aleksei thought, Lansamen was a lesson.
It was the third street his squad had searched. They had not found a
living being. They were past looking for resistance, beyond looking for
survivors; they were looking for life, any life. Of course they still
maintained discipline. Discipline meant life, and amidst the death of war, life
was everything. But as the extent of the devastation became more apparent, and
the likelihood of resistance less, the company had divided into platoons, and
then squads, and then two-man teams, as they surveyed the rubble that had once
been a town. The quiet was surreal, the devastation complete. Not a building
was untouched, desk-sized chunks of concrete lay in the street; at times the
rubble was thick enough to block the passage of the company’s BTR-70 transports
and the supporting tanks. Skeletal walls hinted at structures that had been
buildings but two hours previously. Although the absence of life was profound,
the presence of death was subtle. What the Thermobaric warheads hadn’t killed,
the VX had, either when the cloud descended on the city, or afterwards. VX was
persistent, after all. To touch with one’s bare hand a piece of metal coated
with VX, was to die. Still there was little sign of the dying. A hand
protruding from a pile of rubble, the green cuff and coarse material obviously
belonging to a Bundeswehr uniform, a woman, glimpsed through a basement window,
sprawled on the unfinished floor, her dress soaked in a puddle of surrounding
urine—VX often caused its victims to lose bowel control—these were the only
signs of Lansamen’s former occupants. Until street number four.
Aleksei imagined street number four had been a typical suburban lane
eight days ago. No doubt they were pretty houses, not large—although they would
have been enormous compared to his family’s slum dwelling—but comfortable, with
bright yellow flowers in the front yard. Aleksei could still see some of those
bright flowers, where yards remained. Yes, pretty eight days ago, but now no
more than a jumbled collection of used construction materials. The houses were
flattened as if stepped on by a malevolent giant, or shoved sideways instead,
and just to keep things interesting, the giant had taken a couple of cars,
wadded them up, and tossed them into the street, lighting them on fire for good
measure. The street was a complete, lifeless ruin. At least that was what
Aleksei thought, but he was wrong. Three rubbled houses into the block Aleksei
saw them. A man, casually, dressed—spotless, at least as far as Aleksei could
tell, light-blue sports shirt, and clean blue jeans with sandy brown hair and a
clean-shaven, ruggedly handsome face. The man was sitting on the doorstep of
house number four. It was one of those houses that the giant had decided to
shove sideways, and it leaned at a crazy angle, an almost flat angle, a very
precarious angle, right behind the man.
The man was no more than five meters from Aleksei, and that surprised
him. In fact it surprised him very much. He had looked at the house a moment
before and no one had been there. Could have sworn he had looked a moment
before, but it didn’t matter now. Now there was a man, but even the man didn’t
surprise him as much as the leash the man held. It was a standard leash that
you might use to walk your medium-sized dog in Gorky Park
“My God,” gasped Private Petrov Ketasarin beside him.
“Hey,” barked Aleksei, raising his AK-74 to his shoulder. The clean man
looked at him, unhurriedly, and his eyes froze Aleksei. They weren’t eyes, at
least not like any eyes that he had ever seen. They were swirling, black,
bottomless, pits. Aleksei looked at those pits and saw the emptiness of good,
the complete lack of light.
“And now your right eye, Alice .”
The man with the black eyes said. His voice was sweet, the sweetest thing that
Aleksei had ever heard, he would have killed, killed himself, just to hear it
again, but he wouldn’t need to.
“No, Alice,” the man said, his eyes never leaving Aleksei’s. “You need
to eat the eyeball, Alice .”
And she did. Sobbing wildly, she picked up the gooey, bloody orb, and smashed
it into her mouth. The vomit, which had pre-staged in the back of Aleksei’s
mouth came on up, filling the NBC mask. Clogging the breathing ports, and
breaking the spell the man held over Aleksei. He ripped the mask off, willing
to risk death by nerve agent over suffocating in his own vomit, And then he
raised his AK-74 and pulled the trigger. At least that was what he meant to do,
but the man was looking at him again, and his finger wouldn’t obey. It was then
that he saw the rat, poking its pointy nose from beneath the steps, its beady
eyes glaring balefully at him. But as the rat came out from beneath the steps,
Aleksei saw that it wasn’t just a rat, it was a rat disfigured, horribly
disfigured, by the rat trap that had snapped shut on it, breaking its back. But
still the rat advanced on him, it’s body bent double, blood smearing the trap,
brains leaking from its skull, and then there was another, and another, and
another, soon there twenty, no thirty, no, and then uncountable numbers of
broken-back rats and an equal number of traps, scurrying from beneath the
house, swarming toward Aleksei.
He wanted to run, would have run, but the man’s eyes held him in place,
and still the rats came, they were covering his boots, swarming on his legs, he
didn’t know how rats, with broken backs, attached to rat traps could move, let
alone crawl up his legs but they could, and they were biting, gnawing chewing
through his clothes, into to his flesh, gnawing, gnawing, killing, bleeding,
hurting him just like the trap in his brother’s drawer had hurt him, but only
much worse. And these were the rats from that drawer. The rat that had smeared
his paining fingers with blood.
“And now I need you to stop your heart.” The man’s voice was
sweetness itself, an island of calm in the sea of chaos and pain that was
enveloping his body. Stop his heart? Why yes, he could stop his heart for this
nice, sweet man. He could stop his heart and escape from the onslaught of the
broken-backed rats. He didn’t know that he knew how, but he did, his brain had
always known how, deep in its subconscious, in its primal regions, and Aleksei
knew, somehow knew, that that’s where this man was from… some primal region.
The pain was unbearable now, and the man’s voice so sweet. Aleksei’s brain gave
the command. His heart stopped, and his now lifeless body dropped.
Private Petrov Ketasarin was past quivering, sobbing, or crying out for
help. The man from nowhere, the self-devouring woman, and now Private Aleksei
Nikitin, his friend since the first day of training, dropped beside him.
Dropped for no reason, no shot, no signs of nerve agent, nothing. It was too
much. Petrov turned to run, but not really, his eyes caught the man’s before he
could really turn. Those warm, black eyes.
“Put the rifle under your chin, my son.”
Such sweetness, such kindness.
“Pull the trigger.”
The above is an excerpt from my novel, World at War: Revelation.
The above is an excerpt from my novel, World at War: Revelation.
Mark H. Walker served 23 years in the United States Navy, most of them as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal diver, he is the author of Desert Moon, an exciting mecha, military scifi novel with a twist, with plenty of damn science fiction in it despite what any reviewer says, as well as World at War: Revelation, a creepy, military action, with a love story, alternate history, World War Three novel thing, Everyone Dies in the End, and numerous short stories. They are all available from Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing right here. Give them a try. I mean, what the hell?
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