Chapter 11 #2
“I just killed someone.” Her hands were still shaking as she set the weapon down between her feet in the French military boots.
“You killed an enemy,” Sergei said clearly to bring her back to earth.
“He could have been the one who killed your friends, or my brothers,” he reminded her.
“And he would have killed us if he could. Remember that.” She nodded and didn’t say another word all the way back to Kyiv.
She couldn’t pretend innocence. She had come back to Kyiv to do this.
To kill. It was as though all the values they’d ever had had been suspended and they weren’t the same people anymore.
They spent the afternoon in a classroom, learning about anti-tank missiles, and the instructor congratulated Tatyanna on her first kill and she felt slightly sick.
She had killed someone’s son and it made her a hero.
It made her as bad as they were. But if they didn’t shoot some of them, the others would never go home.
The Russians had done an incredible amount of damage to the country.
Maybe Sergei was right and it had to be done.
“Feeling better?” he asked her quietly at the end of the day. The civilian volunteers were billeted in field tents. There was a mess tent to keep them fed. Their food was rationed too, but they had more to eat than most of the local residents. They needed to keep the troops well fed.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. She wanted to go to the field tent to lie down. She didn’t think she could eat.
“It’s right that you care,” Sergei said to her.
“It will keep you human, but just remember that they’re not.
I have a score to settle with them, other than my brothers,” he admitted.
“I was married. My wife was pregnant. She was one of the women who died in the first maternity hospital they hit. And the baby died with her. The missile they hit the hospital with hit a whole line of rooms. She was in one of them, in labor. She and the baby both died. I’ll never forgive them for it,” he said, looking devastated as he told her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. There was nothing you could say to soothe a pain like that, and it had only been three months.
She remembered when the first maternity hospital had been hit.
Everyone had been shocked, and now it was almost commonplace.
It was so much worse when you knew the person it happened to. “Truly, I’m sorry,” she said gently.
“Thank you, Tatyanna. You did a good job today. Don’t forget it. That’s why we’re here.”
“I’m here to make them leave,” she said clearly. “Not to kill them all.”
“Maybe we can do both,” he said. “See you tomorrow.” She left for the women’s tent the volunteers shared with the army.
She was still shocked by what Sergei had said, and she remembered the look on the Russian soldier’s face when she shot him.
It was a look of surprise. He was already dead before he fell.
The boy she had killed had taken a piece of her with him, and she knew she would never forget.
—
The boy on the tank was the first Russian soldier Tatyanna had shot, but he wasn’t the last one.
It turned out that she was light on her feet and was able to move soundlessly.
She had quick reactions and an unfailing eye.
Her commanding officer sent her on several night missions armed with infrared glasses so she could see in the dark.
She shot two more Russian soldiers the following week.
And that time, one of the soldiers shot her before she killed him.
The bullet only grazed her, but the wound needed to be seen by a doctor.
She went to the army field hospital but they were massively overcrowded after three missile attacks that day, and her superior sent her to a civilian hospital instead.
The arm was painful, and she was shaken again by knowing she had killed a man.
She had to wait an hour at the civilian hospital before someone saw her.
The doctor who examined her was a pretty blonde with a kind face and her hair in a braid down her back. It was Sasha.
“Looks like you had a rough day,” Sasha commented, and told her to lie down.
Tatyanna looked like she was about to faint, but the wound wasn’t too bad.
The soldier had shot her with a pistol, and the bullet had torn through her camouflage jacket and grazed her arm.
“How did that happen?” Sasha asked her. It could have been much worse, Tatyanna thought.
She could have been dead. Instead he was.
“I’m in a civilian volunteer unit,” Tatyanna explained. Sasha knew what that meant, and Tatyanna seemed very young. It was traumatic going to war and killing people. Some people enjoyed it. Tatyanna didn’t. Sasha didn’t ask for more details.
“I’m going to recommend you get some time off,” she said, and Tatyanna nodded.
She didn’t have Sergei’s thirst for vengeance.
But she had lost two friends, not a wife and a baby and two brothers.
That was a lot, and she suspected he would never recover.
The hatred he carried and nurtured would poison him forever.
Sasha talked to Tatyanna for a little while, and she seemed more at peace when she left. Anton came down from the operating room a little while later. The maternity ward was still closed after the bombing. They had moved the pediatric ward to the basement in the shelter.
“This war is so sick,” Sasha said to Anton. “We have teenagers killing people, and our children being killed by Russians, bombs dropped on women giving birth and killing their babies. Everyone is traumatized. This isn’t a war game. It’s real life.”
“I know, I had to section an eighteen-year-old’s whole digestive system today and repair his bladder. It was a seven-hour surgery and then he hemorrhaged and died. It’s a never-ending tidal wave of severely damaged people, in a war no one will win and everyone loses. It never feels worth it to me.”
“Why can’t we just stop it and everyone goes home?” Sasha said mournfully.
“Because you’re dealing with vast egomaniacs who won’t let go until they kill everyone in the process, while they’re sitting in an office in a suit and tie calling the shots, and we’re picking up everyone’s guts off the floor and trying to shove them back in.
” It was a blunt but apt description of what they did every day and had been doing for nearly four months.
And no one was winning yet. How many more people did they have to kill before one side could claim victory?
Sasha was about to go to the cafeteria with Anton when one of the paramedics came to find her, and said that there was a woman down the street in a shelter.
Her sister had just come to ask for help.
“The woman is in labor and the baby is stuck, but all the OBs are in delivery rooms, and so are the midwives. Will you go?” He handed her a slip of paper with the location of the shelter and she looked at Anton.
“Do you want to come with me? It sounds like we have to get her back here for a C-section. I can’t do one there.”