CHAPTER 39
“No!” Brenna cried, scrambling toward Grace.
Soldier-Boy grabbed her shirt and threw her back down. “In here!” he bellowed in Kav?ak. “Come quick!”
Thump.
The rest of the Nationalist squad stormed in. The men broke right, left, swiftly eddying around them. Flashlights flared, sweeping down the hallway like spotlights.
“Bebe! Bebe!” Brenna repeated, her voice lost in the footfalls, the chafing hardware, the deep-voiced shouts.
The hardened steel of the boy’s assault rifle jabbed her chest.
A burst of gunfire shattered the night.
Her chest caved in. The chambers of her heart fell open like wedges of an orange ripped apart by brutal hands. The echo of shots ricocheted off the walls. In the instant of silence that followed it, she heard a small thud.
Mr. Fierce. The only child able to stand up. Hence, the only one who could fall.
Brilliant bolts of lightning ripped the skies apart.
The heavens opened. Swirling thunderheads poured into the chasm, and the Valkyries appeared.
Choosers of the Slain, they charged forth on great black steeds, their manes and tresses whipped by winds, sheaths of silk billowing about their shields and lances.
A soaring, militant chorus demanding its warrior, the goddesses reached down through the battle and chose the boy for Valhalla.
Grief rolled through her. She spiraled into an abyss.
Bleeding from the very cells that comprised her, the toxins poured out, drops formed trickles, trickles formed streams, streams turned into rivers of poison inside her, levels so high in her that she could no longer survive the venom.
A blood-curdling sound erupted from her chest, a single, sustained, high note of primal anguish, a torrent of inchoate, unbearable pain, calling after fates long-disappeared behind closed heavens, not having chosen her.
“Slap her.”
Brenna heard a deep voice issue the command from somewhere off to the side.
She scarcely had time to translate the words into English, before a meaty hand walloped her face.
She felt the impact, the sting, from some detached place, but didn’t care.
It was a mere flick compared to the pain roiling in her chest.
The dark silhouette standing in front of her twisted. Again, his arm swept up in an arc and back-handed her.
You call that pain? She started laughing hysterically.
Nothing short of death would overcome this anguish.
She heard an irritated sigh from off-sides, and another order that her sluggish brain didn’t have time to translate.
She was punched. A hard right, that sent her sprawling further across the floor, toward Grace’s death-still body. She grunted. Stars danced before her eyes, and all she could hear was a ringing sound. No more screaming. Just her own ears, ringing.
Silence enveloped the room, as if the world needed a moment to catch its breath before it went on.
She came to—into the moment, the immediacy of perception. And felt nothing. No emotion. No sadness. No fear. Not even anger. Just a vast, exhausted, void. She lay there, on her side, her face throbbing. Physical pain, at least, was comprehensible.
“Now.” The shadow with the deep voice stepped forward, obliquely illuminated by flashlight.
She looked up. And up. And saw him in silhouette, glimpsing the two Captain’s rosettes on his epaulettes.
He was a huge man, bulky and muscular, Paul Bunyan-esque.
A picture came to her, of him striding over mountains, pushing trees aside with his bare hands, roaring so powerfully that rivers trembled.
He didn’t address her, as she expected.
“Aleksandar,” he told Soldier-Boy. “Lower the rifle.”
The youth looked at him with a mixture of sullenness and defiance, but the muzzle went down.
“Step back.”
Aleksandar cast a shame-faced glance at the men surrounding him.
“All the way. Go to the corner.”
Aleksandar retreated into the shadows until his back touched the wall.
“Set it down,” the Captain said.
She heard the tick of the stock touching the cement floor.
“Now calm yourself.”
Brenna cast a quick glance in Grace’s direction. She was a couple feet away, her body a dim outline. Brenna eased a hand toward her, an imperceptible millimeter at a time.
The Captain lifted his flashlight and pinned Aleksandar’s face in the beam. “Fool,” he said. “My own son. Ignorant fourteen-year-old thinks he knows it all and risks everyone’s lives.”
The boy hung his head, mortified by his father’s cold appraisal.
“For what? To prove your manhood? What good is a man who doesn’t think?”
Brenna inched toward Grace.
“And you—” The Captain whirled his beam on the three men in camouflage standing by the nursery-room door. “I hear babies. What brilliant military tactic have you performed on them?”
The men looked at each other, two with loathing toward the man in the middle, and he at them as if they were animal droppings.
“I see,” said the Captain. “And how many did you kill, Dragoslav, before your brain engaged?”
A flash of light reflected off Dragoslav’s eyes. Hump-shouldered, long-necked, and rough-haired, the nocturnal predator caught feasting on the kill bared his canines.
“Show me your handiwork. Bring the dead out here where we can all see the powerful enemy you vanquished.”
Dragoslav told the Captain to fuck himself.
The hairs on the back of Brenna’s neck rose. Dragoslav’s snarl emanated from hell itself.
The Captain’s back stiffened. “Very well.” He nodded to the two point men in the hallway. “You are free to express your sentiments.”
His flashlight beam hit the floor at the same moment that the first fist plowed into Dragoslav’s gut. Wrath, dark and dangerous, unleashed the men.
The flanksmen by the front entrance turned their lights on the fight and cheered.
Brenna scooted forward, using the diversion for cover, and reached for Grace.
A boot pinned her wrist.
A brilliant slash of light cut her eyes. She turned her head away as if she had been struck again. She heard the Captain’s knees creak, and sensed him crouch near her. He smelled of cigarettes, cold night air, and dirty wool.
The intensity of the light striking her closed eyelids subsided.
“I work with imbeciles,” he said in English, at her ear level. “Easily-distracted morons who underestimate you.”
She opened her eyes, lifted her face to him, and saw him fully for the first time.
His face was dark, his eyes deep beneath the ridge of his brows, his nose such a sharp blade it might have slashed the hard thin mouth beneath it.
The crater-shaped scar on his forehead, she guessed, was an old shrapnel wound.
She lowered her eyes and saw a pistol handle protruding from the front of his belt.
“But you—” he spoke softly, voice carrying beneath the dull thud of fists, the grunts, and the brutal scuffling men in the hallway. “You are as intelligent and courageous as I suspected.”
The men encircling her, who were supposed to have been guarding her, abruptly realized they’d been diverted from their task by the beating in the hallway.
One by one, they lowered their lights and repositioned their rifles, leaving her and the Captain in a single pool of light surrounded by darkness.
She lifted herself on a trembling elbow and looked for Grace. She didn’t care if a Nationalist thought she was smart.
The Captain tipped his head in Grace’s direction. “She’s alive.”
Her stomach buckled onto itself like a stack of blocks when one was quickly knocked out. She caught her belly and bent forward, stifling a cry.
“No!” the Captain ordered, his cold equanimity momentarily abandoning him. “No crying. I can’t stand the sound.”
“Captain Mari??” the smallest of the three men from the hallway interrupted. His lip was puffed out, his eye bloodied and nearly closed. “Dragoslav is ready to follow your orders now.”
The Captain stood up, still looking down at Brenna, held his hand out to his men, and wiggled his fingers.
She sat up and turned toward the hallway. She didn’t want to see. She pressed her hands to her face, the horror welling up inside her. She felt a wildness, an hysteria rising in her chest.
And despite that, she dropped her hands and looked up.
Dragoslav shuffled into the light, his jacket and shirt ripped open, his face grotesquely disfigured.
He turned to the light and lifted his arm, holding his trophy, Mr. Fierce dangling sideways by an ankle.
A single gleaming baby tooth caught the light, Mr. Fierce’s one forlorn defense mechanism.
She gasped, staggered by the evil tableau.
What was Dragoslav going to do, holding the baby like that?
Drape him over a tree limb, and eat him later?
“Silence.”
Mari? stepped closer to Dragoslav. “Where’s the rifle?” he asked, in Kav?ak.
Dragoslav stared at him, uncomprehending. “The what?”
“The rifle. The bayonet. The hand grenade. What weapon did this boy raise against you? I want to see it.”
Dragoslav shifted his glance around the room to the other men and found no sympathy.
Blood seeped out of Mr. Fierce’s chest wound. Brenna watched a trickle slide downward, heard the soft tick as a drop hit the floor.
“Who else was in the room?” Mari? continued bloodlessly. “Because I hear voices.”
“Babies,” Dragoslav finally mumbled.
“Did they have guns?”
“No.”
“And when you entered this apartment—” Mari? pointed at Brenna, his cross-examination not yet finished, “—was this woman in the room?”
Dragoslav nodded, wary as a fox sensing a trap.
“What was she saying, over and over, in Kav?ak—your native tongue?”
Dragoslav shifted uncomfortably. Mr. Fierce was getting heavy.
Mari? wiggled his fingers at the two other soldiers in the hallway.
“Bebe,” they said in unison.
“Hmm.”
The Captain closed in on his subordinate. “Hold that child properly,” he ordered.
Dragoslav swung Mr. Fierce in a half circle, and caught him roughly with his free hand.
“Cradle him.”
Dragoslav jerked Mr. Fierce into position, glaring at the commander.
Mari? paced briefly, then stopped in front of him. “I don’t suppose it has occurred to you that this boy could be your son.”
Dragoslav snorted incredulously.
Mari? nodded. “With all those rapes you boast about? Certainly. Where do you think these children come from?”
He turned his back on Dragoslav, took three steps in Brenna’s direction, and stopped, his hand closing in on his belt.
Brenna read his intention. Her stomach flipped over.
Mari? spun back to Dragoslav. In a single fluid motion, he raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger.
One dark hole marked the center of Dragoslav’s forehead. He crumpled. Mr. Fierce rolled from his grasp.
Mari? retraced his few steps, prodded Dragoslav with his boot. “There,” he said, re-holstering his pistol. “War crimes tribunal. Case concluded.”
The execution had been cold, ruthless, brutal.
And maybe even moral.