As requested by a number of the comments, here is a list of the current important characters in the story so far. It's not a short list, nor is it comprehensive. Sorry about that.
Pete - The main character and our hapless hero
Jimmy - Pete's best friend, currently away with his girlfriend, Lori.
The nurses.
Becky - Pete's first lover. Killed by Jean-Pierre Toussant during the night of blood and fury
Phillipa - Becky's roommate and sometime lover. Compelled by a rebel Evo to betray Becky, leading to her death. Her mind is currently broken, and she is with the Sect for treatment.
Charlotte - Also an Evo, Pete's confidant, and one of his closest friends. A member of the Sect
The Evos (Conclave)
Uri - Head of the Black Knights and suspected of being the conclave traitor
Marco - Pete's mentor and the Evo who awakened him
Fiona - A member of the Black knights
Jerry - A member of the Black Knights and currently with Henry.
Faye - Partially bonded with Pete and his mate. Killed during the attack on the Party, but her psyche is currently living in Pete's city
The Inquisitors. (Good and bad)
Bob (good) - Real name Arnold. The head of Princess Isabella's personal security, currently with Pete and leading the investigation into the missing Ukrainian branch of the Inquisition
Jean Pierre Toussant (bad) - The man who led the attack against Pete during the night of Blood and Fury. Responsible for the death of Becky. Tortured and broken by Pete, and has had his consciousness ripped from his mind and replaced by an Avatar of Pete. Currently changing his identity, and in Ukraine
Isabella Bernhard (good) - Princess of the Bernhardt line of Royal Inquisitors. Bob's direct superior, second in command of the European branch of the Inquisition Royal family
The Escorts.
Henry - French, the leader of the team. Shot through the throat and airlifted to hospital after the ambush at the Inquisitor office. Kept alive by Jerry
Jakob - The second in command, Polish
Hans - Swiss.. Yes, Swiss, member of the team
Antoni - Another Polish member of the team
Gabriel - Possibly Greek/Spanish/Italian member of the team
Karl - Finnish member of the escort team.
Evie - One of Pete's former lovers and has a mind he cannot read, leading to questions about her nature. She was suspected, then cleared of involvement in the night of blood and fury. Currently with Charlotte and Philippa in the Sect collective
********
We couldn't quite smell the internment camp before we saw it, but it was damned close.
The Alchevs'k relocation center had been a soccer stadium in a former life, and having waited most of the day in Donetsk for the investigating rogue inquisitors that never came, then traversing the city before hitching our ride to Alchevs'k, the sun was starting to dip lower in the sky as the later afternoon winter sun continued its journey toward the western horizon when we finally arrived. The stadium wasn't huge, but it was big enough for its size to cast long and tendrilous shadows onto the nearest parts of the large town around it.
The pride of a local community had been turned into a place that would forever be associated with war, cruelty, and death.
Surrounded by solid brick walls that held up the spectator stands and towered above the streets that marked the outline of the stadium, all four sides of it were completely blocked off, with gaps left in the corners for people to enter. The same security measures that kept fans without tickets out did a pretty good job of keeping prisoners in. Add in a dozen or so holding pens and what must have been a few hundred guards, and there was nowhere for the internees to go.
Even the briefest glances into the area that once contained the playing field - now covered in midnight black, swamp-like, mud - it was not hard to imagine there being room for a few thousand prisoners inside.
Jakob, the de facto military leader of our group, decided that we should check the outer perimeter before venturing inside. We'd all had enough ambushes for one lifetime, and he was intent on checking for another before putting ourselves into another killzone. My senses were on full alert for anyone even remotely tied to the Russians, but with a town full of people surrounding us, some of them not friendly, that was harder than it sounded. Mostly, I was looking for those voids.
Three sides of the stadium backed straight onto the street, but the fourth looked out over a patch of snow-covered scrubland. The sight that met us as we crept cautiously around the corner to it was enough to turn the strongest of men's stomachs. Pot-marked with bullet holes and covered with dark stains of dried blood, the Northernmost wall stood sentinel over the pile of executed corpses that had been left exposed to the elements.
We certainly smelled those before we saw them.
Almost all of the frozen, frost-covered bodies were those of men, but there were more than a few women in the pile of dead, too. I considered myself lucky that I didn't see any children, but to be fair, I didn't look too hard for them either. Anyone with even a passing interest in contemporary history has seen the pictures of the piles of dead from the Holocaust; this was much more of a reminder of that than I would have liked. Innocent people had been killed like livestock and then left to freeze and decompose in the subzero temperatures. The executions that had happened here may have lacked the Nazi's penchant for industrialized killing, but it certainly showed all the hallmarks of the same callous brutality.
What was strange, though, at least to me, was that with the frigid air keeping away most of the louder insects, the whole scene was completely and utterly silent. There was no birdsong; there was no rustling of leaves on the trees or branches swaying in the wind. Hell, there wasn't any wind. Just frozen, muted silence. As if all of nature itself was bowing in quiet respect to the innocent slain.
It was more than a little eerie.
We had all heard the stories of war crimes and atrocities since the invasion had begun, each side accusing the other of some horrendous act, the other denying all wrongdoing, and, of course, the media then picking a side in the debate. But seeing the aftermath of one up close was much, much different from seeing the pictures of them on the news.
Hans, the first of us to round the corner on our perimeter check, reeled away from it and threw up the remains of his ration pack onto the ground. He then spent longer than he probably intended to on his hands and knees, watching the steam rise from his regurgitation— anything to avoid looking back at the horrors behind him.
I, on the other hand, didn't look away. I couldn't, I refused to.
This was the cost of the war, the real cost, and I needed to see it. Questions over my own conduct or my dubious feelings were immediately silenced in the face of the evidence of what would happen - what was already happening - if I did nothing. I may not have been able to stop the war, but I could do something.... Anything... to stop this.
All of us, with the exception of Hans, just stood there, rifles hanging and shoulders slumped and just looked at it.
Horrified, contempt filled silence.
For the others, this was another example of the reality of this cruel war, where the humanity was ripped out of the most ordinary of men. For me, however, it was a little more acute, and for once, it had nothing to do with my powers. At that moment, I felt extraordinarily... young.
Not even a year ago, I was just a normal, everyday college kid with a few comparatively minor hang-ups about my parents and a moderate case of shyness around women. The absolute pinnacle of my worries was a college project and a slight over-reliance on alcohol. The scene I was now looking at was the sort of thing I would have half-paid attention to on the news: foreign, incomprehensible, and so very far away, and because it was far away and beyond my comprehension, I would have done the same as most people in my part of the world did. Felt a little righteous indignation, maybe put up an angry post on Facebook - the technological equivalent of "thoughts and prayers" - felt a little better about myself and how morally superior I was, and then forgot all about it.
Seeing the sheer, indiscriminate barbarism before me now, though, I was starting to understand how war changed people because I knew, without any shadow of a doubt, that even without my powers, this was a sight that would haunt me for as long as I lived.
This, of all the things I had seen, was the greatest and most horrific demonstration of the inhumanity of humanity.
We all just stood there, just... looking. Minutes seemed to bleed together as each of us, in our own ways, struggled to come to terms with what we were seeing. The dead had been dumped in a pile, about 30 feet long and maybe 10 feet wide. The corpses hadn't been laid out neatly or even shown the most basic modicum of respect; it was like they had been tossed onto the pile like so much trash. Cold, dead eyes, frozen faces, and frozen expressions stared lifelessly into nothingness as the flesh rotted away from their bodies. There was no buzz of flies, no writhing blanket of maggots or other insects; it was simply too cold for them to survive. There was just the stench of death and those vacant, dead stares. A patch of frozen, dried blood, along with the other unmentionable bodily fluids, pooled around the base of the pile, and many of its residents showed clear signs of the gunshot wounds whose bullets were now lodged in the stadium wall. There were easily over a hundred people in there.
Jakob finally moved first. He set his rifle against the wall next to him, pulled out a digital camera, and started taking pictures of the whole scene. The bodies, the bullet holes, the blood spray, from every angle he could. At first, I couldn't quite understand what he was doing, but it quickly dawned on me that he was, in fact, gathering evidence.
One day, a reckoning would come, and if the perpetrators of this atrocity survived the war, then this was the evidence that would see them punished.
The rest of the group started to move backward, none of us wanted to be the asshole who photobombed a picture used in a war crimes tribunal, and we watched as Jakob did his thing. I found myself standing next to Bob; he was just staring at the victims, a hand over his mouth as even the rosiness from the frigid winter air bled from his face. I couldn't pretend to know much about this sort of thing, at least not in practical terms, but I could tell what was on his mind.
"Are any of these our people?"
There was no point asking the question, though; these bodies had been here for a while and were far too far along the decomposition process for any meaningful visual identification to be made. And yet, I could tell he was trying anyway. Jesus, I couldn't even imagine how it would feel to recognize one of the people in that pile of bodies. Maybe it was something of a small mercy that he didn't.
He eventually pulled his eyes away, his gaze falling on me instead. He opened his mouth to say something, but the words simply wouldn't come; he just closed it again and shook his head helplessly as tears started to roll down his haggard cheeks before he turned away completely. For all he knew, not a single one of his people was among the dead in that pile, but of course, that isn't how the mind works, and in the deep recesses of his psyche, he was already wrestling with the possibility that we had found his brethren. There was certainly enough of them in the pile to account for the numbers of missing Inquisitors. At the same time, I could hear the thoughts of the others in the group; they had considered the same thing, but each of them had settled on the same, slightly different conclusion.
These were people. Bob's people, someone else's people, it didn't matter, they were people. They were clearly all civilians; none of them wore combat fatigues or military uniforms; they were all innocent... people, and they had been butchered. Murdered in the most callous way and left here without even the decency of a proper burial. Collateral damage, the unintentional deaths of civilians in a warzone, was a tragic but almost unavoidable consequence of all conflict, but this wasn't that. This was pure savagery. Each of the men in our escort was angry, very, very angry, not just at the events that had left this macabre scene for us to find, not even at the question of if we had found Bob's people or not, but because of one simple fact.
This was not the first atrocity that had been found since the war had started, and it was unlikely to be the last.
I still felt nothing.
Only young... and completely in over my head.
The atmosphere of horror was ephemeral and haunting; it was heavy and tangible enough to give the air it hung in an almost physical weight. This was a place that would forever have known death. A stain that would never wash away, and a memory that not only would never be forgotten, but didn't deserve to be.
I finally turned away, taking a deep breath and trying not to gag on the stench of what must have been 150 corpses behind me, and followed a few dozen feet behind Bob, back around the corner and toward the still waiting truck. Bob rounded the corner first and disappeared beyond it, and I let my gaze wander out toward the town around us.
Some people like the winter, they like the cold. They enjoy the feeling of the crisp, biting air on their skin; they like the sensation of frozen or snow-covered ground crunching underfoot, and they like the dimness of the light, even in the daytime. They liked the way the light twinkled off frozen surfaces and thought that snow made a place look clean, or pure, or untouched... I was not one of them. I hated the winter. I didn't like being cold, I didn't like being wet, and I didn't like the sun taking a break from its job of warming me up for half of the year. I used to joke with Jimmy that I was solar-powered and needed a decent amount of sun and heat to function fully. But now, looking out over the silent, frozen town, I wondered if I would ever be able to see another frosty winter morning or a blanket of snow over the countryside and not think of this.
Snow was no longer pure; it certainly wasn't clean anymore. It only served to provide a backdrop to the blood that had been spilled on it. Blood stains that would forever be carved into my memory.
My eyes traced a few windows, the rooms beyond them lit against the fading evening light, but even with those, the place still managed to look deserted. There was an eerie stillness about the place, as if the whole town were holding its breath, waiting for the inevitable storm to break when the horrors committed within it were finally made known to the rest of the world. I could only sigh, shake my head, and turn back ahead as I rounded the corner after Bob.
And straight into the business end of a raised AK47.
"Don't fucking move!" The voice of the scruffy, bedraggled man holding it hissed quietly in Ukrainian.
His use of Ukrainian rather than Russian immediately told me to check his mind. Sure enough, we had not stumbled into the hands of our enemy but into the waiting trap of local partisan fighters. Fighters who were not only battle-hardened and ready to kill us on the slightest provocation, but were more than a little suspicious of our presence in the area of the massacre.
His hardened eyes glanced over my shoulder to make sure none of the rest of our escorts were following behind me before turning his attention back to me. Bob was a couple of feet away from me, on his knees, with his fingers interlaced behind his head. Beyond him, the five Russian soldiers whom I had convinced to give us a ride here were in the same position, the only difference being that they were being made to lean their foreheads up against the shell of the truck. Two men were guarding them, their rifles pointed with dangerous intent at them, while the hissing man and five of his friends surrounded Bob and me.
Time did that thing again where it slowed down, and a hundred things happened at once. Bob looked at me, and I looked at Bob. He gave me an apologetic look signaling that, just like me, he had completely lapsed in his judgement of where we were and had walked straight into the exact ambush we had been looking for. At the same time, the rest of our escort were snapped out of their pre-occupation with the massacre by a sudden and inexplicable urge to get their weapons and come to check on us, each of them more than a little concerned by the fact we had suddenly stopped our check for an ambush long before it was complete. And one of the Russian soldiers being held prisoner made a move that his guard was apparently displeased about and took a rifle butt to the side of the head. But most importantly, the group of men around us parted, and a woman stepped through.
For the briefest of moments, my mind flashed to Evie.
Evie had told me that her college project was to address the gender stereotypes in the gaming industry, specifically where they dealt with the area of female character design. Video game logic said that any warrior woman should be dressed in armor that highlighted her curves and that looked sexy, despite the very obvious flaws that design would have on its function, and there should always be cleavage. A female character would run around in snow-drenched environments wearing what basically amounted to a sheer, flimsy dress or a metal bikini and nobody questioned that.
She would also do it while wearing completely flawless makeup.
The woman who stepped between the group of our assailants was, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, a real soldier. Not some fancy title like "warrior", but a soldier. She had weathered the storm of this conflict without a hint of cleavage, make-up, or perfectly manicured hair. She had clearly suffered the tolls of warfare as much as the rest of us and was showing the signs of it as much as anyone else.
Her grey eyes were hard and uncompromising, and her hair, a dirty copperish color that may have looked attractive in any other circumstances, was cut to an untidy and uneven length that fell to just above her shoulders and probably hadn't seen the business end of a hairbrush in a while. Her skin was pale, partly from the cold, partly from the grief of the massacre, and partly from the fact that she hadn't eaten a proper meal in weeks. A deep, jagged scar ran from the apex of a once prominent cheekbone and back toward her ear from where a Russian bullet had missed its mark by the narrowest of margins.
She wasn't wearing a bikini.
Black combat pants clung to toned legs and disappeared beneath a military-style trench coat that hung to just above her knees. It was buttoned to the very top of her collar to keep out the bitter, bitter cold. Fitting to her form was about as important to the aesthetic as it should have been in an actual combat zone; only the bottom third of it was open to allow for proper movement and to show the dangerous-looking sidearm strapped to her thigh. The assault rifle in her hands was not slung casually over her shoulder like you see in the movies, but - while not directly pointed at me - was ever at the ready.
No vest top, no cleavage, no glossy hair, and I couldn't even guess the size of her chest.
This was a woman who could beat the ever-loving shit out of Xena Warrior Princess or Buffy without breaking a sweat. She was a soldier and felt no need to look pretty for the men while she was fighting to defend her country and her people.
But in her steely grey eyes and in the hardened expression on her face was pure, undiluted hostility.
Except I didn't feel that from her mind. I didn't feel that from any of the people who had captured us. I had been so distracted by the horrors of the massacre that I had let my mind's scan of the area slip, but now that I was looking at them, my powers invaded their minds as easily as they would any other human. Their anger was directed at the people who had murdered those civilians, not at me specifically, so my mind hadn't overtly heard their thoughts. They didn't know if it was me or not, just that I was armed, I wasn't one of them, and I was there.
The fact that I had arrived in a truck full of Russians hadn't helped my cause either.
She held my eye as the hissing man reached out and unslung my weapon from my shoulder, then squinted at it. It was hardly standard issue in the Russian military; neither was the rest of the gear I was carrying, a thought that flashed through her head as well. "Who are you?" she asked quietly, again in Ukrainian.
With a single thought, I could have made her let us go, and I could have made her trust me implicitly, I could have made us the closest of friends and the strongest of allies, as we should have been. We were on the same side, after all. But there was something that stopped me. It was more of an instinct than a product of logic; it was just a feeling... but it was a strong one.
For the past few weeks, at least, my powers had been used almost exclusively on my enemies. The wiping of Mary's mind had been the only exception to that since the night I had spent with Olivia. In my head, my abilities had become equated with hostility, with war, with the vanquishing of my enemies, and despite the myriad of rifle barrels currently pointed at me, these people were not my enemy.
"We are friends," I answered back in English, perfectly aware that she understood.
Her eyes narrowed slightly as the hissing man took a step back, not able to understand my answer but knowing that it hadn't been spoken in Russian. The woman kept her eyes on me, her finger stroking idly over the trigger guard of her rifle.
Our escort chose that exact moment to round the corner, their weapons raised and leveled on the group surrounding us.
The cacophony of barked orders and shouted warnings was enough to shatter the illusion of stealth for half a mile in every direction. The command to "Put your weapons down!" or "Don't move!" was barked from every mouth in both groups, in every language. Ukrainian, French, Polish, Finnish, Russian, all of them expect English. Our escorts had spaced themselves out perfectly, holding the stance that only highly trained soldiers can pull off effectively: legs parted to spread their weight and steady their footing, leaning forward slightly to compensate for the anticipated recoil when they were forced to fire their weapons and eyes, unblinking, picking out a target and locking onto him with laser-focused intent.
The partisans were a little less disciplined. Some had raised their rifles to their shoulders, including the woman who clearly led them, but a few of them had just swung their bodies toward our escorts and kept their rifles at their hips. None of them had their weapons pointed at Bob or me anymore.
I slowly held up my hand. Everyone saw it, and the shouted orders stopped. "They are partisans," I said to my escorts as calmly as my nervous voice allowed. "They are friendlies. Lower your weapons."
Jakob blinked for a moment and then stood upright again, "Oh, well why didn't you say so." He smiled disarmingly as he slung his weapon back over his shoulder. The rest of our escorts followed suit a few moments later. The partisans glanced nervously at each other, and at our escorts, before their eyes inevitably fell on the woman.
She stayed quiet for a lot longer than I was comfortable with. The maelstrom of thoughts bouncing around her head echoed her caution, her nervousness, her grief, and her fear before she finally nodded and lowered her weapon. The rest of her men did the same. All of them now looking confused as to what to do next and, more pressingly, what to do about us.
"You chose interesting travel companions, friend." She said, no small amount of challenge in her tone.
I looked over toward the truck. The five former occupants were still kneeling on the frozen ground and leaning their foreheads against the equally frozen shell of the truck, and their guards splitting his attention between them and the commotion around their superior. "Yeah, they..." I paused, actually completely unsure how to phrase my answer. Of course, I could have just made her forget all about them or at least accepted my answer as gospel truth, but it still didn't feel right. At least not until I absolutely had to. "Let's just say they have been compelled to behave."
She narrowed her eyes, but in a war where personal information was about as available as standard ration packs, if you knew where to look, I allowed her to think that I was leveling threats against their families back home or something equally nefarious, and she just nodded. "Did they lead you here?" She asked, nodding toward the corner and the pile of bodies beyond it. The connotation was clear. She was asking if they were involved.
A question I didn't actually know the answer to.
I shook my head after confirming quickly that the men in the truck were not, in fact, part of the unit that had been involved in the slaughter. None of them had been within twenty miles of the town before this afternoon. More than that, none of them had the slightest clue what had happened in the stadium, let alone what had happened against one of its walls. To be fair, four out of the five of them would have been as sickened and horrified as we had been, and the fifth would have actively switched sides for significantly less. They were just soldiers fighting on the wrong side of history. They were not murderers. "No, we actually led them here."
"Why?" She cocked her head to one side.
"We are looking for some people. We think they were brought here."
"...Oh... I see."
Bob didn't need powers to see that look on her face. Anyone brought to this camp, including the people not butchered against the wall, did not have a happy future to look forward to.
He pulled himself to his feet, startling the man watching him almost enough for him to reflexively pull the trigger. "Please," he said imploringly as he stepped closer. "They were... family. I need to know what happened to them."
The woman, whose name I still didn't know and still didn't want to pry out of her, held his gaze for a moment before letting out a deep sigh and nodding. "Okay, but not here. Too exposed. We go inside."
"Thank you," Bob whispered, his shoulders slumping as if preparing himself for bad news.
"What of them?" The woman asked, turning and nodding to our five Russian chaperones.
"They weren't involved with anything here; they are just soldiers. Enough blood has been spilled here."
"And if they talk?"
"They won't."
"How do you know?"
"Because," I said ominously, playing on her underlying assumption, "they know what happens if they do."
The woman held my eye for a moment and then nodded again before casting a glance over to the Russians' guards and waving her hand. The men said something to the prisoners and then let them nervously stand.
Of course, there was no way the woman nor her men could have known that all five of the soldiers would have forgotten all about us, everything they had seen, and everything that had happened about five minutes after driving away. As far as our travel companions were concerned, they'd had a few too much home-brewed vodka at their checkpoint and lost track of time. It was a perfectly reasonable, even expected occurrence in Modern Russia's army. They would go on to live out their lives completely oblivious to how close they had come to death.
The woman, her men, our escort, Bob, and I all stood and watched as they got in their truck, started the engine, whipped the truck around in a somewhat rushed three-point turn, and sped off into the fading light.
"Americans?" The woman asked as she turned toward me.
I snorted out a laugh. "No, you don't have any oil. I'm British."
She smiled softly at the joke, "And yet you carry American equipment, apart from your gun.."
I blinked down at myself. "Am I? I was just told to put it on."
Her smile grew a little wider, and she called out over her shoulder in Ukrainian. "His wife tells him what clothes to wear." The rest of her men gave a nervous chuckle.
"Hey! I'm not his wife!" Jakob called back in the same language. "He's not pretty enough for me."
The woman laughed, despite herself , and the group of men she led seemed to visibly relax as the woman nodded to her men. "Come. Our camp is this way." Her men understood the meaning of the glance and started filing out toward the entrance to the stadium. "I am Anastasia; my friends call me Anna."
"It's nice to meet you, Anna. I'm Pete, this is Bob..."
Bob opened his mouth to correct his name, but instead, he just rolled his eyes and closed it again, nodding to her in greeting instead, before the rest of our escort introduced themselves too.
********
The stadium was exactly how you would imagine a stadium to be. The stands, or terraces, or bleachers, or whatever they are called in various parts of the world, wrapped around the four edges of what was once the playing field. Above the stands were various VIP boxes and homes for the presumably rare television equipment when the games here were televised, and there were far too few bathrooms, which, unsurprisingly - being in a warzone and all - were currently not working. It was in one of the windowed VIP booths that the partisans had made their camp.
It was a large room that, for reasons I couldn't quite put my finger on, reminded me of the meeting room in the Sect's mansion despite it looking nothing like it. Instead of the large conference table, there was a spattering of sofas and chairs, all facing toward the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the pitch. Almost all of the sofas had been turned into beds, as I had expected, but what was missing - the one thing I expected a camp to have - was a fire. There wasn't one.
I suppose that made sense, given the context. A fire made light, and it made smoke. Both of which were very likely to draw some very unwanted attention. A campfire in this room, even a small one, would have turned the massive windows into something akin to a lighthouse.
The field itself was the only thing that was majorly out of place.
I should be clear here; it was some sort of sports ball field. Sports were not my thing, they had never been my thing, and the fascination people held for watching adults chase a ball around a patch of grass was something that I never understood. It was one of the many things my father had berated me for when I was younger. Apparently, real men played sports, and I didn't. But whereas computers, history, and other book-ish subjects could pique my interest with ease, sports were a complete and total mystery to me. It's not something I ever felt the need to apologize for, and I had nothing against people who fanatically supported their home sports teams; I just wasn't one of them.
I did understand one basic principle, though.
Fields were supposed to have grass on them.
The light of the day had faded fast, as it was oft to do at this time of year, and between the time that we had been accosted by the partisans and made it to their camp, the bright winter sun had been replaced by the dimming shadows of the January sunset. But even in that lower light, it was clear that the playing field had been torn up under the weight of what must have been thousands of feet, leaving what looked like a black, tarry mud pit in its place. Twelve large wire-lined pens, the kind you would assume contained livestock, were spread at regular spots around the field, completely open to the elements and lacking even the most basic of sanitation. I could almost see the paths around the perimeters of each pen where the guards had paced.
Judging from the overwhelming smell of dog shit, it was safe to assume that those guards had not just been brandishing firearms as weapons.
For a moment, I could almost see it. The scene of thousands of people crammed into those cages, men pacing impotently or huddled around their families, women tending to crying children, too scared and too young to know what was happening to them. Dogs barking viciously. Perpetual freezing misery, tinted with the base alloy of indescribable fear. I could hear their pitiful, woeful cries, I could smell their sorrow, and as the lowering sun's shadows crept inexorably up the eastern stands, I could almost picture watching, from this spot, as the closest thing to hell frozen over that I would ever know, played out beneath me.
That anger was boiling up inside me again.
Like a coiling snake, needing something to strike at in punishment for this offense to humanity.
"What happened here?" I asked as Anastasia stepped up next to me.
She shook her head. "I don't know. We only arrived here from the North a few days ago. It was like this when we arrived. We have tried asking the locals but..."
I pulled my eyes away from the impromptu prison and looked at her.
"They are scared." she sighed. "They are not fighters; they are old men, women, and children, and they have seen what happens to the people who fight back." There was a long pause as both of us turned back to look out over the darkening field of misery. "The people brought here were the protesters, the people who spoke out. The actual fighters were just killed, but the people... the normal people... who wouldn't just go quietly, they came here."
"It's a common tactic in history," Bob's voice came from behind us as he stepped closer and stood next to me to look out into the town. "The easiest way to pacify a population is through fear. If one group of people won't be subjugated, they are made an example of. That sends a message to the towns and the people in every direction for miles. One act like this could save an invading army months, maybe years of fighting an insurgency."
"Animals!" Anastasia spat onto the floor.
Neither Bob nor I had any grounds on which to disagree with her.
"Your people?" I asked him, already strongly suspecting the answer.
He just shook his head. "They could be in the pile out back. They could have been moved on to somewhere else, I don't know. There is nothing here, and I can't imagine I'll find anything out there in the morning," he nodded down to the field. "I found the clue that got us here stapled to the bottom of a desk. There are no desks, no pens, no pieces of paper, no anything in those pens. Maybe one of them left something in one of the bathrooms, but..." he didn't finish his sentence.
If the smell of the place was anything to go by, it was very unlikely that the prisoners had been allowed to even go there, let alone given a chance to leave us another clue.
"Do we know where they were moved to? After here, I mean?" I asked Anna.
She shook her head sadly. "This happened months ago; they could be anywhere by now."
A brief, albeit slim, flash of inspiration hit me. "Do we know how they were moved?"
"Buses," Anna responded simply.
"Jeeves?"
"On it, Sir."
"Okay, we may be able to do something with that, Satellite tracking or... something."
Anastasia just nodded and then turned away from the scene below us. The VIP box may have given excellent views of the approaches to this location, but it was hardly a pleasant view. Besides, the sun had set, darkness had fallen, and there wasn't much left to see. "What will you do if you find the people responsible for this?"
I opened my mouth to answer, but Bob beat me to it. His eyes still staring grimly out into the darkness.
"We will make the things done here look like an afternoon picnic. They will suffer for everything they have done."
Anna stared at him for a moment as if appraising him in a different light before she nodded. "Good. There is a woman who may be able to help you."
It was Bob's turn to look away from the window.
"We get our information from a network of civilian... " she frowned, trying to translate the words in her mind into English. "...informers, spies. They send information to our intelligence agency, and they pass it on to us. That is how we knew to come here. Our contact is a woman in Horlivka, I don't know her name, but I can make a request for her to meet with you. If anyone knows where your people are, it would be her."
Bob wasn't naive enough to think that this was anything more than a vague hope, but it was a hope nonetheless, and the faintest of smiles pulled at his lips as he nodded his thanks. "The organization I work for will be sending support. Men, materials, money, anything you need to end this. I will make sure of it personally," he vowed solemnly.
Anna smiled back, but it was hollow. The smile of someone who had heard such promises made before and watched them break. "I mean no offense, Mister Bob, but you don't look like someone who can make those kinds of promises."
I snorted out a laugh. "Don't let his looks fool you. Bob here has the ear of the people at the very top of the ... of his organization. If he says it will happen, he will get it done."
Bob flashed me a grateful look.
"Then... thank you." Anna's smile finally reached her eyes. "This makes me very grateful that we didn't shoot you."
"You and me both," I laughed back.
The friendly repartee was interrupted by a muffled crash from the opposite side of the room as Jakob burst in, yanking the attention of all three of us away from the conversation. "We've got company!"
The speed at which everyone acted - not just the three of us, but every resting Partisan and escort alike - was staggering. In only a few seconds, certainly less than ten, every man and weapon in the room had sprinted out of the VIP booth, across the hall it was connected to, and into the offices on the other side to peer out of the windows looking out over the southern view from the Stadium.
A column of vehicles was very clearly coming this way.
"Your friends?" Anna asked me with an accusing look.
Jakob answered before I could. "No, they drove away toward the west, these guys have come from the east. It can't have been our ride."
"Hm, okay." She sounded less than convinced.
It wasn't long before we started being able to hear the convoy approaching. To my ears, at least, they sounded much louder and traveled much slower than I would normally expect. A few moments later, it became clear why.
The BMP-1 was the Russian's answer to the Vietnam-era APC.... or maybe the Vietnam-era APC was an answer to the BMP-1. That argument could go on forever, and at that moment, it wasn't important. What was important was the 73mm tank gun bolted into the turret of the damned thing. It was, for all intends and purposes, a light tank with the capacity to carry a bunch of men inside... and the fucking thing, along with the three trucks escorting it, pulled to a halt almost directly in front of the windows we were looking out of.
I looked to my left. Hans was already preparing the NLAW anti-tank rocket from his pack, and at least one of the partisan fighters was doing the same with an RPG. The rest of us had picked a target and had our weapons trained nervously at them as Russian soldiers started piling out of all four vehicles. There must have been at least 50 of them.
Except only a handful of them were carrying their weapons, most of them were smoking, all of them laughing and joking jovially between themselves as they started congregating around their vehicles.
Three of them walked up to a tree, pulled their dicks out, and started taking a piss.
It clearly wasn't an attack. They had no idea we were there.
But I didn't care. My blood was still up from the horrors I had seen that day, both inside and outside the stadium, and that coiling anger inside me was starting to sense the closeness of a suitable vent for itself. Even the briefest glimpses at Anna and Bob told me that they were thinking the exact same thing.
If Hans and his Partisan counterpart could hit the BMP, we could wipe out half of their number in the time it took them to react. The other half would fall in short order and woe betide the poor soul who managed to survive long enough for me to get my hands on him.
"Hold your fire," Jakob whispered quietly.
My eyes shot to him incredulously.
"But..."
"I know," he said softly, turning to look at me, "But if those rockets miss or otherwise fail to knock out that armored vehicle, its gun will put a hole in this building big enough to kill all of us. Even if we destroy it, we are in Russian territory. One radio call and we will have artillery raining down on us and airstrikes not far behind. We can't take the risk."
Anna almost growled in frustration. A sentiment I wholeheartedly agreed with. "Fuck!" she spat in disgust at the impotence of our position.
My lips curled into a snarl as I looked back down my sights.
Sure, under any other circumstances, Jakob would have probably been right. But other circumstances didn't account for the fact that I was here. I could crush that BMP like an empty beer can with little more than a thought. A single energy blast could obliterate most of the men down there...
My sights settled on one of the men taking a leak barely 100 feet from where his brethren had butchered all those people. My finger started pressing a little harder onto the trigger.
... I was sure Jeeves could silence any radio calls for help from them. These weren't men, they were animals, Anna was right! There wasn't a shred of decency among them!. These men may not have been personally responsible for the acts of inhumanity that had occurred here, but the people hearing about their utter annihilation would have been, and striking the fear of God into those fuckers was right up there close to the top of my priority list. Fuck, I could make the first bullet I fired explode on impact with the force of a small nuclear detonation. I could...
Jakob rested his hand on the top of my rifle's barrel and slowly pushed it down. His soft, calm eyes held mine as they flashed furiously toward him.
"Let them pass," he whispered gently, clearly sharing every single one of the furious emotions bouncing around my head. "Nobody responsible for what happened here will be getting away with it. Their time will come. We let them pass tonight, so tomorrow, we can hunt them down."
The growl that left my lips made Anna's sound almost tame, but I swallowed that ball of burning rage in my chest back down to the pit of my stomach and turned back to watch the men of the convoy finish their cigarettes, put their dicks away, and start clambering back into their vehicles.
Ten minutes after arriving, the loud rumble of an armored vehicle and three military trucks starting the engines shattered the quiet of the night. They pulled back onto the street and drove away. Each and every man in that group, just like the Russians who gave us a ride here, were blissfully ignorant of how close they had just come to death.