by David Bishop
I had settled down to keep watch over the river, content in the knowledge that most of the German forces concentrated around Shlissel'burg had been moved to counteract Russian attempts to break through the blockade nearby. Rumours had swept through our front line about a plan to cross the Neva and establish a bridgehead on its southern banks. But with little progress being made elsewhere to lift the siege, any such ideas were abandoned. Both sides were too well entrenched to hold out much hope of shifting the other without a significant addition to their forces. For now, our generals seemed content to hold position.
As I watched the river rolling past on its way to the largest lake in Europe, I noticed a cloud of vapour slowly forming above the surface of the Neva. It must be some kind of mist, I decided, a quirk of local atmospheric conditions. But the pale white cloud continued to coalesce, growing thicker and more apparent. To my surprise, it slowly drifted north, creeping up the banks of the river towards our front line position. I licked my finger and held it up in the air to test the wind direction from where I was sitting. What little breeze I could detect was drifting from north to south, towards the German lines. But the white mist was moving in the opposite direction, against the prevailing wind. Perhaps the air currents were different down by the river, I told myself. Once the mist reached a certain height, it would get caught in the passing breeze and be blown back again.
But instead the mist kept coming, slowly advancing past our front line trenches and emplacements, covering the ground like a white shroud as it choked the air. Occasionally, wisps of the fog would thicken, forming shapes of their own. I told myself not to be ridiculous. Such characteristics could not be applied to what was, no doubt, a simple atmospheric anomaly. But the notion would not leave, despite all my attempts to reassure myself.
I considered approaching one of the nearby patrols, asking if they were seeing the same thing as me, but knew the soldiers would pour scorn on my fanciful ideas. Besides, being up on a raised slope, I had a unique vantage point for watching the progress of this mysterious and strangely sinister mist. At ground level it would seem like little more than a passing cloud of fog.
Once the front line of the siege had solidified in the final months of 1941, Red Army units had spent the last few weeks of autumn digging underground bunkers, barracks and dormitories. These were deep enough and sufficiently well protected to keep all those within safe from German artillery bombardments, unless the entranceway took a direct hit. Even then, it would only entomb those trapped inside and most barracks kept a back entrance ready for such problems. The doorways to these underground havens were well back from the front line, dotted across the landscape in low-lying depressions, hidden from enemy view. It was towards these entrances that the mist was now creeping.
I watched, both fascinated and transfixed, as the mist gathered outside one of the dormitories. By some quirk of fate it was the barracks where I had slept the last three nights, condemned to a corner without a bunk or a mattress - convicts did not deserve such things, I was brusquely told. Now the fog cloud gathered itself in front of that same doorway, slowly forming into a shape not unlike that of a man. Then it disappeared inside and was gone.
Had I not seen all this with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. I listened intently, all my senses straining to get some hint of what was happening within the barracks. But no sound escaped, no cries for help could be heard, nothing to suggest there was any danger. I watched the entrance for ten minutes before giving up my vigil and turned away. I had been alone for too long, I told myself. I was beginning to imagine things to keep myself from going mad. Not a reassuring sign, I thought, smiling ruefully.
Two hours later a pair of soldiers arrived to relieve me, asking the usual questions to find out what - if anything - I had seen during my watch. I decided against mentioning the curious white fog, thinking that they would find little merit in such an unlikely vision. Instead I gave them a cursory summary and strolled down the slope towards my barracks.
Sleep was difficult enough to find inside the blockade, but with daylight lasting more than twenty hours a day, any chance of rest was grasped with enthusiasm. I marched into the underground bunker and laid my weapon down beside my plashch-palatka which doubled as both shelter cape and bedroll. Wearily dropping my helmet beside it, I remembered my obligation to wake the man sleeping nearest to me for his turn on patrol.
Mikhail Zhivago was the only soldier to have treated me as an equal since I arrived back at the front line. A fair-haired and fair-minded figure, he paid little heed to the fact that I was a convict, shrugging his shoulders and grinning.
"My mother was from the north of Italy. She used to read Bible stories to me when I was a boy. I remember one phrase she was fond of repeating whenever somebody was quick to blame in our family: 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.' We've got plenty of sinners in the Red Army, but they don't hesitate to look down on those who get caught." It was Mikhail who had gotten me a place to sleep in the barracks, even if that was on the floor. He knew of my horror at sleeping out of doors at night, although I had not told him why.
I approached Mikhail and cleared my throat loud enough for him to hear. He was facing away from me and did not respond, so I shook him gently by the shoulder.
"Come on, you lazy zasranec, time to get up," I whispered cheerfully. There was a curious, metallic scent in the air, both familiar and disturbing at the same time. I glanced round, trying to identify its source, but could see no obvious cause.
Mikhail had still not replied, so I rolled him over to face me. His cold, blue eyes stared lifelessly past me and his face was drained of colour. I reached into the collar of his gymnastiorka and felt for a pulse. There was no fluttering of the veins beneath his skin but my fingers did brush across two small weals. I ripped the collar open and saw a pair of puncture marks, perhaps two centimetres apart, close to the line of his jugular. I looked at his face with fresh eyes and realised it was pale and wan, as if... As if he had been drained of blood, a voice replied at the back of my mind. You can deny this reality no longer, it added.
I looked at the other soldiers in the barracks, nearly fifty of them, all apparently asleep on bunks lining either wall of the long, narrow chamber. "Is anyone awake in here?" I asked, my voice unnaturally high and fearful, but nobody replied. I tried shouting, bellowing my question. I might get an earful of abuse but it was better than getting no reply at all. Still none of the others answered. A prickling feeling ran up the back of my neck as realisation dawned upon me. The scent I had noticed when I came in, it was the same smell I remembered from the moments before I passed out from being stabbed by the butcher woman. It was the smell of blood.
I decided that I would have to check the others. I moved from Mikhail's bunk to the next, then on to the next and then to another. All of them were the same: lifeless eyes, pale faces, not a movement from anyone. The entire barracks had died in the night, their bodies apparently sucked dry of blood. But how had the vampyr gotten to them? How had the undead crept past our defences and then murdered four dozen men without one of them raising the alarm or fighting back?
I remembered the white mist creeping across the ground and into the barracks, the barracks where I, too, would have spent the previous night if I hadn't been on patrol. The thought of what I had so narrowly avoided sent a cold dagger of fear down my spine, chilling me to the bone. I stumbled backwards, desperate to get away from this tomb full of corpses, turning to run outside. I tripped as I burst from the doorway and went sprawling to the ground, but kept crawling and scrambling in my haste to escape that room filled with death.
"What do we have here?" a familiar voice asked. I looked up and saw Yatsko looming over me with three sharpened wooden stakes clutched in one hand and a blacksmith's hammer in the other. Behind him stood the sneering figure of Strelnikov and the silent Uralsky, both armed and ready for battle.
"I-Inside..." I gasped. "All the men inside... they're dead!"
I realised that Uralsky was talking to me. "An hour or two at the most," I said. "I saw a mist rising from the Neva during the night. It crept across the ground-"
"And went down into the barracks?" Yatsko asked.
"Yes. How did you...?"
"We've seen this before," Strelnikov replied, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his gymnastiorka. "It's a new tactic the Rumanians are using along the front line."
"Burn them out," Yatsko commanded. Strelnikov and Uralsky both produced bottles of purple liquid from their knapsacks, sealed with rags stuffed into the neck. Both men lit the ends of the fabric and then advanced on the doorway to the barracks, preparing to throw their crude incendiary devices inside.
"Wait! What are you doing?" I demanded, getting to my feet. "Those men in there, I didn't check all of them. Some might still be alive!"
"Then this will be a mercy killing," Yatsko spat. "Do it!"
The other two tossed their burning bottles inside. I heard the glass shatter and the roar of fire rapidly spreading through the barracks. Within a few seconds black smoke was billowing from inside the bunker, the air around me thickening with the smell of burning wood and flesh and cloth. I moved angrily to Yatsko, demanding to know why he had burned all the bodies.
"Captain Eisenstein believes it is only a matter of time before the vampyr start resurrecting their victims, using them as cannon fodder against us. Destroy the bodies by burning or decapitation, and you prevent that from happening. There's no point in giving the enemy fresh recruits for his army."
"But we could have used what happened to those men as proof there are vampyr working with the Germans," I protested. "Now there's no evidence, nothing to show what we know is true."
Uralsky and Strelnikov joined us. "You think our generals don't already know about the Rumanians?" the rapist asked bitterly. "Of course they know, they've known for months. But they are too afraid to admit it publicly; to tell the troops on the front line what we are facing. So those in charge have given us a new assignment: to destroy all evidence of vampyr involvement in this war."
"But why hide the truth?"
"The Great Patriotic War is on a knife edge," Uralsky said. "For our troops to keep fighting, they must never know the true nature of our enemy." I looked at him, amazed at what he was saying and by the fact I had never heard him say so much at one time before.
"So all we do is cover up for the vampyr?"
"Not exactly," Eisenstein interjected. He was walking towards us from the east, flanked by Antonov, Borodin and Sophia. The quartet was much as I remembered it, but now Eisenstein was wearing the insignia of a captain, a single rectangle visible on the collar of his gymnastiorka. Beyond them I could see black smoke spilling from the entrance of another underground barracks. The murderous mist had claimed more than one bunker of soldiers in the brief dark of night.
"The generals have offered us a deal. If we can hunt down and eliminate Constanta and his disciples, our convictions will be overturned, our records expunged and our ranks returned to each of us."
"Da, they have even given our company a new name," Antonov added. "As far as the rest of the Red Army is concerned, we are still called shtrafroty, but at command level we are now part of a new initiative known as Smert Krofpeet.
"Death to Blood-Drinkers," I said. "How appropriate."
"Leningrad isn't the only part of the front line with a vampyr problem," Borodin added. "There are other Smert Krofpeet units being formed elsewhere."
"All from shtrafroty, of course," Sophia grimaced. "We're expendable."
"But doesn't setting fire to barracks attract attention from other soldiers?"
Eisenstein shook his head. "Red Army riflemen do what they're told and know better than to ask awkward questions. Those that don't end up dead, or in units like this one. Welcome back, Zunetov."
That was how I came to be reunited with my comrades. I had many, many questions for them, but these would have to wait until we had finished checking the other barracks nearby for more victims. Eisenstein sent me with Borodin and Sophia to finish cleansing the area of the vampyr taint. Fortunately, the Rumanians had only infiltrated the two bunkers already on fire. Once the rest of the barracks had been checked, Borodin and Sophia took me along the old railway line to meet the others a kilometers north of the front line. As we walked, I told them all that had happened to me since fighting the cannibals of Kolpino. Borodin was shocked by my tales of life inside the evacuation hospital at Leningrad, but it was old news to Sophia, who had seen such conditions for herself before joining the shtrafroty.
"I'm surprised to see you're still with the unit," I told her. "Before I got wounded, it didn't look like you'd be around for more than a day."
"Captain Brodsky made such a nuisance of himself trying to get rid of me, headquarters decided he should lead us on our next mission personally," Sophia said. "We went behind German lines, scouting for an attack on Ivanovskoe, but they knew we were coming." She fell silent and Borodin took up the story.
"Eisenstein and Yatsko got us out of there somehow, but in the confusion Brodsky must have been wounded or left behind. By the time we realised, it was too late to go back. Eisenstein was given a field promotion until Brodsky returns."
"When was that?"
"More than three weeks ago," Sophia said quietly. It was obvious she felt responsible for what had happened to him. I tried to think of some words that might persuade her otherwise, but drew a blank. I had long since given up feeling guilty for what happened in this war. Survival was my goal now.
Chapter Eight
During June and July we continued our patrols on the blockade's southern front line, intervening whenever reports reached us of a vampyr incursion, always searching for more information about our true enemy. The long summer days were restricting their activities to a few fleeting hours a night, but we knew all too well the coming winter would transform the siege into a killing ground for Constanta and his kind once more.
In truth, we did not know if the hauptmann was still on the other side of no-man's-land. What limited intelligence we could glean from those few men and women who survived encounters with the undead never included names or detailed descriptions. Staring eyes, mesmeric voices, terrifying fangs: those were the most commonly quoted attributes of the vampyr. The ability to take control of their victims' thoughts also had the effect of blurring the memory of any who got away from them. I was apparently immune to that effect and could recall every terrifying instant of my first brush with Constanta.
When we were not hunting the undead, Eisenstein kept us busy repulsing the rare thrusts against our front line positions by the Germans. These were usually signalled by a dramatic increase in artillery bombardment, driving our troops into bunkers and hiding places. The enemy would charge forward, throwing stick grenades ahead of themselves to clear a path, following up with flame-throwers and soldiers with machine guns. Eisenstein was a driven man in such situations, urging us forward to beat back the advancing Germans.
Across the distance of time, I cannot honestly recall how much we knew then about the Nazi programme of extermination for the Jews. The horrific details of the Holocaust are now so well known, so imprinted upon the memory of all those who survived the dark days of the Great Patriotic War, it is hard to recall a time when we did not recoil in shame and disbelief at what Hitler's men did.
When I was a political officer I had heard about the systematic deportation of Jews from the territories conquered by the Wehrmacht, and rumours were rife in Moscow about the organised disappearance of so many people. Did Eisenstein know what the Germans would do to the tens of thousands of Jews still within the blockade? I've no doubt that any such knowledge would have fired his efforts to defeat the Nazis, to avenge what was done by them in the ghettos of Poland and s
o many other places en route to Russia. As I later discovered, Eisenstein's faith meant a great deal to him. It would be his salvation and his damnation, in a strange way. But that was still to come, still in the future for both of us.
Those two summer months were a happy interlude in the life of the Smert Krofpeet, though I did not appreciate it at the time. Without Brodsky's brooding, bitter command, we were free to take our fight to the Germans as we wanted. Eisenstein had the gift of a natural leader to bind us together, so past differences were forgotten in pursuit of a common goal.
Something else happened during those two balmy months: Eisenstein and Sophia became lovers. They hid their physical relationship from the rest of us until the end of July, but eventually it became obvious. Strelnikov started making snide remarks out of the side of his mouth whenever one of them emerged from Eisenstein's tent, and Yatsko's embitterment at having to take orders from Eisenstein soon resurfaced. He challenged the captain's authority in little ways, seeing how far he could push his luck. We knew that eventually one of them would snap, and the effects would be catastrophic for all of us.
By the first week of August, as the situation was approaching breaking point, a dramatic change occurred. We were stationed near Ivanovskoe, about twenty-five kilometres south-east of Leningrad. The long planned Red Army thrust to retake the settlement was thought to be less than a fortnight away, with troops and equipment being mustered for the attack. But there were also whispers of renewed vampyr activity nearby and our commanders had no wish to send a fighting force into such circumstances.
The undead enemy was still little more than a rumour along the front line, but it represented a significant threat to the attack's success. Eisenstein was summoned to a field HQ for fresh orders and returned with a surprise for all of us. Brodsky had escaped from behind enemy lines and was resuming his position as our captain, stripping Eisenstein of his field promotion.