On the third day a warm wind blew through the hole in the roof of the attic, carrying with it the smell of sulfur and charred meat. Cohen was perturbed by the fact that he could identify the meat smell by name. That one was Jackson, with a hint of Carlisle, and this whiff over here carried Lieutenant Overly’s unmistakable body odor. He could rationalize his horror by telling himself that body burning was much more efficient than a mass grave, but he couldn’t rationalize the fact that to him it smelled delicious. In the entire three days following their hellish defeat, he and Goodspeed had only found two rats to eat.
The tanks had left some time the night before, along with most of the cleanup crew. He could still hear some smaller patrols muttering to each other in German. He waited, crouched near the window, for the voices to get as far away as he knew their patrols would take them.
He turned, and whispered, “Goodspeed,”
“Please; Lester,” the prone figure gasped. He was in a bad way, and he lay on the cold blistered wood with one pant leg cut up, revealing a badly disfigured leg. Seeing him like that, it was understandable that he wanted to be called by his first name.
“Listen, this is our chance,” Cohen said, jogging in a crouch to his side.
“Fuck,” he said, letting his head drop. They both slid off their belts.
Cohen situated himself next to the leg, tracing the sings of infection from the mottled, rotting mouth of the wound to a place below the knee. He fixed the bayonet to his rifle and turned to flip over the knife on the hot coals. To chase away his nerves he began to make small talk.
“So what did you do back home?”
Lester laughed and coughed at the same time. “I was a pediatrician.”
“So you go back and forth between fixing kids and breaking adults?”
“Don’t tell me about it,” he said. “And besides, I’ve killed plenty of kids over here. Most the soldiers on both sides are damn kids.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-five.”
Cohen whistled. He wrapped his belt around Lester’s thigh and tightened it. He grunted like a bear.
“Good?”
Lester shook his head. He tightened it two more notches and Lester shuddered violently, this time not making a noise.
“You still got a clip,” he said, pointing listlessly to Cohen’s gun.
Cohen turned a shade of pink, and seemed to clam up. He was obviously ashamed of the fact. “Go over it again,” he said. “I got nerves.”
“Straight down, straight up, hard and fast, and don’t stop. It should be like a sewing machine. What’s your target?”
He grimaced, “Bone.”
Lester folded his belt over four times and clamped it between his teeth. He nodded.
Taking up his rifle and positioning it over the doomed leg, Cohen tried to take several stabilizing breaths. He couldn’t close his eyes because precision was critical. This was one thing he couldn’t run from. Puffing out his chest he drove the blade hard and fast into the leg.
It struck bone, and stuck.
Les muffled his screams by burying his face in his armpit and he thrashed about as Cohen tried uselessly to dislodge the bayonet. Every time he failed it caused Lester more pain; they lost more time; he lost more blood. His mind ran in circles and gibbered as he tugged and tugged and Lester howled. Finally, stepping on the leg for leverage, he pulled the blade lose, carrying with it a small fountain of dark fluids.
Lester, still moaning in agony gave Cohen a look that seemed to say, “Don’t fuck this up Jew boy.” Well, maybe he wasn’t thinking that, but normally when he got that look those were the words accompanying it. He resolved to give Lester a look back that meant “Don’t worry; I’m ready to prove my mettle.” Surprisingly, Lester seemed to relax after seeing it. Perhaps there was meaning behind the look after all. There was only one way to find out.
He mustered all of the warrior spirit he could find in himself and a sort of blind, animal determination overcame him. As he drove the blade in this time, it was he who was screaming. The next few moments passed in a surreal and chaotic blur. Cohen was screaming and stabbing quickly, forcefully, up and down—like a sewing machine—and every time he pulled up, his shirt collected more and more of the stuff of Lester’s leg. Lester was going into shock by the time the leg was hanging by a thread of skin and tendon. He couldn’t perceive the savage triumph in Cohen’s eyes as he threw his gun to the ground and grabbed the leg in both arms, twisting and ripping it from its person.
As his clarity began to return to him, Cohen found himself standing and huffing, holding a severed human leg. He immediately dropped it and fell to his knees in the pool of blood gathering around Les. From the coals he picked up the knife, which now had a healthy orange glow to both sides of it. He pressed it against the meat mess that completed Les’s thigh. He bolted upright, spitting out the belt and gasped like a fish out of water. His head fell back to ground with a thud, and for the moment he was blessedly unconscious.
After effectively cauterizing the wound, Cohen sat back on his hands and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He looked at his hand. It was covered in blood, which meant that now so was his forehead. He was taking his first calm breath when he heard to footsteps—boots—rushing up the stairs. He had seconds to react.
Quietly he fell prone and rolled to a blind spot behind the stairs. He cursed himself
for not having time to grab his gun. A German soldier appeared over the threshold, and was staring down the barrel of his rifle at helpless, unconscious Les. He stepped cautiously toward him and began barking orders in German. Les opened his eyes and the German raised his rifle higher, bringing it tighter to his shoulder. Cohen knew the implications of the slight move, and knew he should act fast. He slid off his jacket and crept as silently as he could at the soldier’s back. When the German was mere feet from Les, Cohen made his move.
He leapt with his knees forward, digging them into the soldier’s back as he wrapped the jacket around his face. They both fell to the ground with Cohen on top, and he tightened the jacket so that the German’s open mouthed face could be seen in outline through the fabric. He twisted the ends of the jacket for a tighter grip and, his heart pounding, he began to slam the man’s face into the ground. He held back his battle cries this time, merely slitting his eyes, grunting, and putting his back into the work. Finally the German soldier stopped struggling. The face beneath the jacket was moist, and ill defined. He had killed his first German.
He stood up, grinning like a wolf. “We won Les,” he said.
Lester stirred. Feverishly, he asked, “One less what?”
Cohen turned and looked at his prostrate figure. He was wiggling his stump. At that point an absurd response entered his head: Why, one less leg, Les. He was still grinning when the repulsiveness of the thought struck him. He felt it on his face like a disgusting thing. He thought to himself, is this what blood lust is like?
“It feels like it’s still there,” Lester was saying. He closed his eyes, and didn’t open them again for some time.
He awoke to see Cohen crouching over the dead German soldier, scraping at him with his knife.
“What…? What?”
Cohen looked up. “Oh, you’re up.” He set down the knife and brushed his hand on his pants nervously. “I’ve decided to call him Fubar, because, well,” he slid the jacket from the soldier’s face, revealing something much unlike a face.
“What are you doing?”
“You have to keep your strength up,” he said, somewhat apologetically.
Les began to get the idea. “No, I’d rather starve.”
“How are you holding up?”
“I’m not.”
“You have to eat.”
“I’d rather starve.”
Cohen sighed and stood up. “I’ll look for rats.” He started walking, then turned and said with a smirk, “You’re right anyhow, we can’t eat him because we already named him.” He walked off out of Lester’s sight, into the small, mostly collapsed chamber he’d found. He’d already looked for hours, he knew there were no more rats.
Don’t fuck this up Jew boy, the words reverberated through his head, spurring him on. Lester the pediatrician would be made to keep up his strength. He would eat and get well enough to limp out of there. The patrols outside were rapidly thinning off. If it was the last thing he did, he would make sure Lester got home to fix kids again.
He looked in a pile of debris for the thing he’d stashed when Lester was sleeping. It was where he’d left it. He picked it up with a bit of disgust. It was starting to rot, but a little fire would fix that. He began to cut it into rat sized servings. He hoped Lester would not find the taste too… familiar.
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