Open Fire

by Amber Lough

  “I think so. It’s hard to tell if I was the one who packed it or not. I should have signed them.”

  For a second, I forgot the smell of blood. “I’m not sure that would have helped your quotas.”

  “Have you seen any of your grenades?”

  “They’re not my grenades. But yes.” I waved at the space around us. “That’s what I used to clear out this trench.”

  “What about the gas ones?”

  “Those haven’t made it out to the front yet, it seems. Not here, anyway.” I tapped my gas mask, which I’d affixed to my waistband. It stared up at me, empty-eyed and gruesome as a grasshopper. Maxim started to encroach on my mind, and I pushed him away. “Masha,” I began, then realized I didn’t know what to say. We were deep into the enemy’s trenches, covered in blood. My ears still rang from the grenade and all the rounds I’d spent crossing no man’s land. The back of my mind was drowning in blood and screams, but we were alive. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”

  “I know.” She smiled, then stretched one leg out and let her boot roll outward, relaxed. “Us against the world, right?”

  “Us against the world.”

  Something whistled and we all looked up. There was no time. Our trench was barraged by mortars that sank into the mud before bursting into green clouds.

  “Gas! Gas!” someone screamed.

  Masha and I jumped apart and wrestled with the straps holding our masks to our thighs. My fingers shook, and I kept fumbling. Masha reached over and sliced through my strap with a knife she’d pulled from her boot. I slipped the mask on over my head—no time to even register my surprise. Our caps fell to the ground like leaves blown off trees in a storm.

  We moved mechanically, just as we’d practiced. I twisted the canister on tightly and breathed through it. The air was thick as fog, but tinted green. Poison. I wracked my brain, but I couldn’t remember the name of this gas. I couldn’t remember what it did, or how long it remained in the air. My skin tingled, but it didn’t sting.

  “They’re coming!” someone shouted, but her voice was rubbery. I pulled myself together. If they’d sent us a volley of gas, they’d be on the ground already. I grabbed Masha’s hand and together we made our way to the ladders.

  “Third Platoon, go!” I shouted, but the sound was muffled. I was commanding my troops in a soup, but I didn’t really need to say anything. This was our third time, and we all knew what to do. We crawled up and ran.

  Fighting in a cloud was an entirely different monster. We were creatures crawling out of the sludge. The enemy wore masks, and somehow this made it easier. I couldn’t see their teeth as they grimaced, their eyes hidden behind circles of glass. We fought in a storm of green. It was a nightmare, but real.

  Someone went down beside me, but I didn’t look. I lobbed grenades, one after the other, and kept moving forward. I picked grenades off the fallen and tossed those too. They were German, but they worked as well as mine.

  Out of the green fog, a rifle butt smacked into my head. I fell sideways. A man loomed over me, fumbling with a revolver. His rifle must have been empty. I picked up my rifle, aimed, and shot. He jumped in the air, then fell onto my bayonet. He was a thin man, but the blade didn’t go all the way through. I kicked him off of me and tried to stand, but my head was spinning. I clutched the side of my face and felt at where the buckle of my gas mask cut into my temple. It was wet.

  Wiping at the lenses, I squinted until I could see the scar in the earth that marked the next trench. It cut through before the first line of trees, maybe fifty more meters.

  “Katya!” Masha swooped down and pulled on me. “Don’t stop!”

  I was dizzy. I was going to vomit again, but I couldn’t do that in my mask. And I couldn’t take the mask off. I bit at my tongue and let her drag me along.

  “Not far,” she grunted, then hauled me onto my feet. “Get moving, Pavlova!”

  My father wouldn’t have stayed here. I took a few steps. Pulled the bolt back on my rifle and got it ready.

  There were a series of pops. Machine gun fire. It sent the dirt up in a line like a strip of firecrackers.

  Masha stumbled.

  “Masha!” I screamed. I scanned the trees where the machine fire was coming from, took in the holes scattered across her thighs, and then sent the gunners a gift I packed back in Petrograd. I waited 3.5 seconds, and then everyone within three meters of the machine gun was gone.

  My ears roared. I lifted Masha onto my back, barely registering the hard shape of her rifle digging into my spine, and ran. I couldn’t shoot, but I didn’t care. I carried her forward, pausing for a moment to throw another grenade into the trench, and when the air cleared, I set her onto the edge. I crawled down, then paused halfway down the ladder to pull her into my arms, and together we fell.

  There was too much blood. When I pulled off my mask, I saw it. I knew it, but I couldn’t accept it.

  “Oh, Masha,” I choked, pulling her overcoat off her shoulder and pressing it against the bullet holes. There were too many. Her legs were a sieve and she was draining right through them. I tugged off her mask and threw it to the side. “Someone! I need a tourniquet!”

  Alsu placed her hand on my shoulder, shaking her head. It wouldn’t help.

  “I wasn’t afraid,” she whispered. “Still not.” Her hand flapped in the air and I took it, squeezing her palm in mine.

  The shooting stopped but the nightmare continued.

  She closed her eyes, and I wanted to pull them open, to see her seeing me. “Masha! Wake up!” I shook her, but her neck was weak and her head hit the ground. “You can’t die, Masha. You can’t!” I cried into her face, filling the hollow space at the corner of her mouth with my tears. “No! No. No.”

  There was a sudden chill, like someone had opened a window in winter and all the warm air rushed out of the crack, and that was how I knew she’d gone.

  Someone pulled on my arm, but I shook her off and clung to Masha’s body. Then I sobbed, because it wasn’t Masha anymore.

  “Get up, Pavlova.” Bochkareva yanked me up off the ground. I turned to yell at her, but she was crying too, and the shock of seeing tears on her face stopped me. “We have to move.”

  “We can’t leave her here!”

  “She’s dead. I’m sorry, but she’s dead and we are still alive. We have to clear our position. You’re a platoon leader, Pavlova! You can’t sit here by your dead friend. There will be time later to grieve.”

  I pulled out of Bochkareva’s sizable arms and knelt back down beside Masha. She was gone, but I whispered the words anyway. “I won’t be afraid, Masha. I’ll be fierce. Forever.”

  Then I got back on my feet and wiped my face with the back of my hands.

  “Good girl,” Bochkareva said. “Get your women accounted for and clear the western portion. We’ll wait here until reinforcements come.”

  I struggled to think through what she’d just said. “Reinforcements?”

  She shot me an impatient look and spoke with more emphasis. “I’m sending a report and asking for reinforcements. We’ve almost got this area taken, per orders. Surely the men will come now that we’ve done all the hard work.”

  If the men had been with us, things might have been different. I faced my troops and relayed Bochkareva’s orders. When I turned back, our leader was gone but there was a crisp, clean handkerchief spread over Masha’s face. How many of these had she brought with her, I wondered?

  I sat beside Masha’s body while I waited for the numbers to come in, my mind poring over the last few minutes. It had all happened so quickly. I was hit in the head, Masha was there to get me off the ground, she was shot, and then . . . and then she left me. Too quickly. A few minutes, at most.

  I swallowed away the stinging in my throat and took out the icon of Saint Olga. I didn’t care if it would keep me alive. Slowly, I slid it between the buttons halfway down Masha’s tunic and pressed it against her heart. Only then did I listen to the numbers, only t
hen did I pull myself together.

  Pulling yourself together when half of you is dead on the ground doesn’t take very long.

  18

  Now that we’d cleared the way, the men scrambled across no man’s land. They moved in a wave, filling in the first two trenches. They carried their rifles on their shoulders and left their masks behind. For these men, the path was safe.

  I was watching a man kick a German helmet to another man, who kicked it back, when one of the women from Avilova’s platoon cried out in dismay.

  “Vodka!” she shouted. I rolled around to look at her. She was crouched before a wooden crate and holding a crowbar up like a flyswatter. “I think this is vodka!”

  There was one crate already open, but there were at least twenty more. The Germans had left twenty crates of vodka sitting out in the open.

  The men were on their way.

  “Smash it!” I shouted. I ran over to her, took the crowbar, and started prying open one of the other crates. The wood strained, then the lid popped open. It, too, was full of vodka. The letters were in Latin letters, but the words looked Polish. “We have to break all the bottles!”

  “But why?”

  “Because if it’s still here when the men get here, they’ll drink it.”

  The girl’s eyes widened, and she pulled a bottle out of the crate, smashing it against the nearest post. It shattered, catching the attention of all the other women in the trench. Lieutenant Ornilov emerged from behind a corner. His sleeve was ripped, and the skin beneath was oozing blood, but he seemed otherwise intact. I was relieved to see him still with us.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “She told us to destroy the vodka,” said the first woman.

  He took one look at the crates and then another at the men approaching us from the field, and his back straightened. “Do it quickly.”

  He took the crowbar from me and expertly ripped open several crates in the time it had taken me to do one. I smashed the bottles one by one.

  “It’d be quicker if we just threw a grenade at them,” I muttered.

  Lieutenant Ornilov snorted and shook his head. “Someone will get hurt.”

  “But this is taking too long.”

  A moment later the trench was full of men, shoving us aside. Lieutenant Ornilov yelled at them to leave the vodka alone, but no one listened and there were too many for him to overcome, even with his pistol.

  He joined me against the wall with the other woman. “This was planned,” he said grimly. “The Germans left the alcohol behind just for this purpose.”

  The men had come at last, but they weren’t enough to help keep our position, and it wasn’t long before many of them were drunk.

  —

  Dismayed, we moved back to the rest of the women, and somehow, I collected my platoon. As we waited to make our next move, all I managed to accomplish was checking to see that my rifle was loaded and my bag full of grenades. The rest of the time, I sat by Masha. My fingers itched to take the icon back, but a hollow voice in the back of my mind told me it was worthless. A saint would be no help to me here.

  A blast from the forest shook us in the trench. No one was hurt, but the impact pushed me against Masha’s body and something poked into my thigh. I gasped from the sudden sharp pain and then pulled back to inspect the area. I didn’t want to touch her because the chill of her skin made me shiver, but I did it anyway. It was traitorous to avoid her, even now, I told myself. I pulled at her waistband and lifted her up to see if there were any shards of glass beneath her, but I found nothing. Then, when I straightened her legs out again, something protruded from her empty grenade bag. It was her grandmother’s hairpin.

  In a trench devoid of any color but olive green, dark earth, and the whole spectrum of blood from fresh to dried, the azure glass tip shone in outright defiance. I held it close and felt myself falling into its depths, diving into a sea so blue, so clear, so quiet.

  Someone shook my shoulder and I blinked. “Pavlova, wake up.” It was Bochkareva. She frowned at the hairpin and I quickly stuck it into the weave of my tunic, right above my belt. “Take your platoon and clear out the woods. If you see any of the enemy, take them prisoner.”

  Entering the woods meant emerging from the trench, and as much as I hated it here, the thought of going up above felt like leaping off a cliff.

  “Did you get hit in the head?” she snapped. My ears were still ringing from the grenades, but I could hear her so I shook my head. “Then go! We can’t give the enemy a chance to recover. We must keep moving forward.”

  “How long do we stay in the woods?”

  She looked at me like I’d turned into a songbird. “You stay until I give you new orders. At least until dawn. As soon as I can arrange it, I’ll join you.” She ducked her head closer to mine and said, almost too low for me to hear it, “I have to get word back to the Tenth Army. We need at least a hundred more men.”

  “Why?”

  She kicked at one of the broken vodka bottles. “Because there will be a counterattack. Soon. But if you clear out the nearby woods, it will delay them.”

  I gathered my soldiers. We double-checked our magazines of ammunition, checked one another’s masks, and whispered quick prayers. A few of the women looked like rabbits preparing to leap out into a field shadowed by hawks. I smacked them on the back like Bochkareva would, hoping to steady their nerves. I didn’t let my face contort to show my fear, and then I climbed up the ladder.

  All fifty-two of us made it to the trees. No shots, no rattling of machine guns, not even a shout of warning. The tree trunks were riddled with bullet holes. I pressed my palm against a birch where the bark has been torn completely off, and for a split second, imagined that I knew just how the tree was feeling.

  “Pavlova!” The shout came from ten meters away to my left, and I ran toward it. Korlova and Yablokova were pointing their rifles into a thicket, the bayonets parting the thin brambles.

  Yablokova didn’t waver when she spoke. “There’s a man in there. Alive.”

  “Toss your weapons to the side!” I shouted into the thicket. There was a rustling sound, but nothing else happened.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know Russian,” Korlova said.

  “No, but he’ll understand this.” I stepped forward and stabbed at the thicket.

  A man crawled back on his hands and legs like a crab, but I still couldn’t see him clearly through the branches and leaves. “Get. Up.”

  He said something in German, a sound like eggs cracking against pavement. A rifle skidded out of the thicket across the dirt, and then he raised both hands. I motioned to the others to go to him, and they each skirted the thicket, keeping their rifles trained on his chest.

  Slowly, he stood, ducking his head like a penitent child. All three of us knew the instant he realized he’d been captured by women. His eyes widened, followed by a snap-quick flush of red to his cheeks as he stared at my chest. I hoisted my rifle higher.

  Judging by his lack of any beard at all, he was young, but his eyes had the same haunting look Maxim’s had, so he wasn’t new to the horrors of this war. He said something in German again—trying to tell me his name, I realized.

  “Shut it!” I didn’t want to learn his name. I spat at his feet.

  Korlova tied his wrists together and we brought him to a small clearing not far from the battlefield. I had them set him down by a tree stump, and then had Korlova guard him.

  We captured two more of the enemy in similar fashion. I couldn’t tell if they had hidden themselves during the fight and were outright cowardly pigs, or if they’d been left behind on purpose, like the vodka.

  The rest of the afternoon was spent gathering all ammunition the Germans had left behind and looking for food. We managed to find a few sausages wrapped in greasy linen, and we didn’t share any of it with the prisoners, despite their obvious protestations.

  As night was falling and I was assigning watch, Bochkareva and the First Platoon arrived. Av
ilova’s arm was in a sling, but she was fit enough to keep going. When I showed Bochkareva our prisoners, she almost smiled. After a day of death, the sight of her twinkling eyes in the dusk was better than extravagant praise. I shifted on my feet.

  “You didn’t think we’d be able to catch them?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think you’d be able to keep yourself from killing them.”

  They were fortunate at that, now that I thought about it. “Did you reach the Colonel? Is he sending reinforcements?”

  “We are on our own.”

  Neither of us said anything for a minute. The reality that we’d been abandoned hung between us like a raven, poking at our nerves with its long beak, slashing at all veins of hope.

  I needed to pull myself together. I knew I should check on my platoon, make sure everyone who’d been wounded was being treated, hand out words of encouragement to get us through the night, but all I could think about was Masha. Her warm, long fingers grown calloused, and how she was so proud of it. It marked her as one of the brave. I thought about her parents, and how whenever I’d eaten with them they’d brought me into their ongoing discussion about Russian poetry versus French, and how Masha always argued against me, even if she secretly agreed. I thought of the peony hat she bought in April, so proud to have something beautiful to wear with her grandmother’s pin.

  The loss of her was like acid, going down my throat one drop at a time till my whole chest burned and my lungs were too tight to inflate. When I tried to breathe, it was ragged and choking, so I gave up and let the air come into me on its own. My lungs tugged at my ribs, and somehow, I was still alive.

  That was what I didn’t understand. My platoon ran across no man’s land. We attacked the Germans. We donned gas masks and ran through poison. We stabbed, sliced, and shot our way into these three trenches and somehow only three of us were dead. Three. And as difficult as it was to understand that Masha had fallen, it was unbelievable that I had not. I was right beside her when she was shot and yet I hadn’t been hit by a single bullet.

  I was scraped and bruised, and my skin itched where it came into contact with the gas. My army tunic was stained with blood—no way to tell if it was German or Russian. But I was otherwise unharmed. On the outside.