Chapter 26

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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.