Deadeye
DARYA
Darya Nikolaeva had been brought up in the upper-class suburbs of Moscow by a businessman father and a socialite mother, privy to those in the highest echelons of society. At the age of five, she had been worth more than most adults were. She had lived a sheltered life and, for the most part, knew very little about the world outside her doorstep. By fifteen, she had been orphaned -- an organised hit on her father’s car, taking out her mother as collateral damage -- and left with a small fortune and a large, empty house. On her eighteenth birthday, Dayra had watched as the country she held so dear crumbled around her ear as the war in Europe raged on. A few weeks later, she had been swept up by the Red Army, called to serve her country in what was being touted as the worst war the world had ever seen.
However in all of her years of experience, Darya Nikolaeva had never seen a cow.
She gawked in amazement as she watched the creatures from her vantage point in the truck, mesmerised by their huge doe-eyes and wispy eyelashes. There were hundreds of them, all stretched out along the endless grassy knolls that were separated from the road by a spindly fence. The creatures may have been entirely foreign to her, but that seemed to add to the timeless beauty of the landscape that they were travelling through. Darya hadn’t ever imagined such greenery existing in such long, unblemished lines. In Moscow, she was used to buildings stretching away as far as the eye could see, all lined up in uniform grey lines. Here, despite the war that Hitler had brought ravaging back through Germany, the countryside seemed to her as calm as an lake on a summer’s day and for a split-second, Darya began to forget that she had a mammoth task in front of her.
As the truck hit a rut in the road, Darya found herself thrust upward momentarily before gravity brought her crashing back into her original perch with an uncomfortable thud -- thrusting her thought back into reality as well. Resisting the urge to curse aloud -- women may have been called to fight, but they were still expected to uphold certain mannerisms -- she cast a quick look at the men with whom she shared the vehicle with. Darya had made a vague attempt to remember their names before they had left the Polish town of Lubin that they had called home for the past few weeks. In the corner sat Pavlov, gun held tightly in his grip. He had already shown his snipers prowess by taking great pleasure in picking off any stray animals that had dared wander next to their barracks. Beside him, tall and balding, was Petrov -- or Popov, Darya could never remember. Mitsov and Yeltsin sat in uniform silence, as usual. Darya struggled to remember a time in which they had uttered a single word to her -- they had grown up on the same street and talked quietly amongst themselves most of the time. Not that Darya minded, anyway. She had little interest in becoming friends with the men in her unit. She would much rather leave them alone and get on with what they needed to do.
Pavlov stubbed out the cigarette he had been smoking on the edge of their transport. It wasn’t much -- most of the vehicles had been sent to help with the war effort on the big cities such as Berlin and Munich -- and it was incredibly uncomfortable, but it was far better than walking the almost-200 kilometres between Lubin and Dresden. Safer, too -- they would be far faster than any troops that Hitler’s great army had managed to mobilise to protect the German landscape. Not that they expected to run into anybody anyway -- Darya was almost positive that the casualties mounting up on the fronts in Russia and Italy would need replacing with whatever Germany had left.
D’you think we’ll get medals?” Pavlov asked, allowing the last cloud of smoke to leave his barely-parted lips. “I mean, we’re doing a really difficult job here.”
Darya opened her mouth to scoff, but before she could get any words out, Petrov (or Popov, Darya really couldn’t remember) laughed loudly.
“We’re hitting a nation when they’re down,” he said, gesturing behind him as if the countryside gave conviction to his words. “They aren’t fighting back, they let us waltz right into their country. How is that dangerous?”
Pavlov scowled. “They’re wounded. Like injured animals. Unpredictable. It’s the least they can do, to class us as war heroes.”
“The Motherland owes you nothing,” Mitsov said in long, gravelled tones. Darya almost did a double-take. “You, on the other hand, owe the Motherland everything.”
Pavlov feigned shock. “He speaks!”
Mitsov three Pavlov a withering look. The latter stuck his tongue out and crossed his eyes, and Darya found herself having to resist the urge to roll her eyes. Mitsov dropped back into silence, busying himself with inspecting the dirt lodged underneath his fingernails. Pavlov seemed to take this as a victory, and turned his attention to the rest of the truck.
“Nikolaeva, what about you?” he asked, his lips turning upward in the barest semblance of a smirk. “You’re far too pretty to be doing suck dirty work, surely?”
Darya’s voice had been unused for most of the journey and grated in her throat as she uttered, “fuck you.”
“Ah, feisty.” Pavlov raised an eyebrow, grinning widely in Darya’s direction. She silently cursed herself for rising to the bait as Pavlov continued. “Anyway, I hope you’ll have our backs out there. Even if you are a girl.”
Yeah, your back will be in my sights the entire time, Darya thought venomously. But instead of uttering it aloud, she forced a fake smile onto her face and nodded along. After all, Stalin had said that everybody in the Soviet Union was cut from the same cloth. Even if she hated Pavlov’s guts, she would have to help him for the greater good.
Pavlov didn’t seem to care about Darya’s brooding mood. Instead, he had chosen to change the conversation entirely, and questions were now coming rapid-fire from his mouth with little chance for anybody to answer in-between. “How much longer until we get there? I can’t wait to start dropping the Nazi scum like the flies they are. Did you know that they force women to have children so they can grow up and help the Nazi war effort? And they send kids to the front, only fourteen and fifteen! I mean obviously you’ve heard of the concentration camps but do you know what they do to the Jews once they’re inside them? Do you think we’ll get to pop Hitler himself? How much longer do you think the war will last? Let’s make a bet -- how many Nazis are you going to down in your first week?”
Darya had never been so relieved than when Petrov-or-Popov loudly instructed Pavlov to shut up.
By the time they reached the crumbling outskirts of Dresden, Darya had never wanted to punch somebody in the face quite half as much as she wanted to punch Alexei Pavlov in the face. When the truck stopped and he finally lapsed into silence, she thanked every god she could think of. Hopping off the truck, she winced as the leg cramp from the seemingly endless journey kicked in and caused all of her muscles to scream out at the one time. The worry about her legs faded quickly, however, as she surveyed the scene in front of her.
Dresden had been entirely decimated. Buildings that had once stood tall and proud were now dusty piles of rubble broken-down on the ground. Those that had survived were dark and ashy, fire having gutted them inside from out. The flakes of ash fell slowly, like the swirling snowflakes of winter. The streets were filled with clumps of wizened metal baked black from the flames, and the rubble from nearby buildings spilled out into the streets, blocking off roads. The few cars on the streets had been gutted by flames and as she took in a breath of air, she nearly retched at the acrid stench of burning flesh from the bodies left in the vehicles, their bodies barbecued and rotting in the early evening sunset. Nearby, Darya could make out the outline of a small hand, dust covering it like a fine blanket. The stench of gasoline still filled the air as topnotes on the breeze and, in the distance, buildings still burned a fiery copper against the sky. Yes, Dresden had been entirely decimated, probably no more recently since they had left Moscow.
Darya felt a sudden ping of sadness in her gut -- the fire-ravaged city reminded her of the photos they had been shown of a still-burning Stalingrad during training, and she remembered the loss of innocent life that had come along with it. Darya wondered how many innocent people had been caught up in the destruction of Dresden, how many people had cowered under tables and beds as the bombs fell.
“We did this?”
Mitsov looked almost as shell-shocked as Darya felt. He was staring towards the commander of their unit, and Darya found herself twisting around to wait on his answer, too.
Denis Churkin was a tall, imposing man and Darya hadn’t ever thought she would see him struggle for words, but the landscape in front of them seemed to have rendered him speechless. Darya had a quick look around the other faces in her unit -- none of them had been selected to fight before and the reality of the war seemed to be hitting most of them head-on.
“I don’t think this was us, no,” Churkin eventually said slowly, glancing beyond the unit and into the ruins beyond. “We don’t have the air support to lend to this kind of assault. The Americans, perhaps, or the British. They have planes and I have heard that the British still hold a grudge for the air assaults carried out on London.”
The group remained silent. Pavlov, for all of his bravado, seemed to have turned a peculiar shade of grey and looked as if he were having a hard time keeping himself from crying. Darya bit her bottom lip, catching a loose flap of torn skin and pulling at it some more. She wasn’t sure what she had expected to come across, but the stark difference between the peacefulness of the countryside and the eerie silence that hung over Dresden like an unexploded bomb had shattered every expectation she had about doing her job. Of course, she hadn’t been expecting an easy ride, but she also hadn’t expected such destruction on such a massive scale.
Yeltsin cleared his throat loudly, voice hoarse as he spoke. “So, what do we do now?”
Churkin sat on the edge of the truck, shrugging. “We wait for new orders. We cannot clear the city if the city has been levelled. So we wait.”
Darya didn’t want to think about what their next orders would entail.
However in all of her years of experience, Darya Nikolaeva had never seen a cow.
She gawked in amazement as she watched the creatures from her vantage point in the truck, mesmerised by their huge doe-eyes and wispy eyelashes. There were hundreds of them, all stretched out along the endless grassy knolls that were separated from the road by a spindly fence. The creatures may have been entirely foreign to her, but that seemed to add to the timeless beauty of the landscape that they were travelling through. Darya hadn’t ever imagined such greenery existing in such long, unblemished lines. In Moscow, she was used to buildings stretching away as far as the eye could see, all lined up in uniform grey lines. Here, despite the war that Hitler had brought ravaging back through Germany, the countryside seemed to her as calm as an lake on a summer’s day and for a split-second, Darya began to forget that she had a mammoth task in front of her.
As the truck hit a rut in the road, Darya found herself thrust upward momentarily before gravity brought her crashing back into her original perch with an uncomfortable thud -- thrusting her thought back into reality as well. Resisting the urge to curse aloud -- women may have been called to fight, but they were still expected to uphold certain mannerisms -- she cast a quick look at the men with whom she shared the vehicle with. Darya had made a vague attempt to remember their names before they had left the Polish town of Lubin that they had called home for the past few weeks. In the corner sat Pavlov, gun held tightly in his grip. He had already shown his snipers prowess by taking great pleasure in picking off any stray animals that had dared wander next to their barracks. Beside him, tall and balding, was Petrov -- or Popov, Darya could never remember. Mitsov and Yeltsin sat in uniform silence, as usual. Darya struggled to remember a time in which they had uttered a single word to her -- they had grown up on the same street and talked quietly amongst themselves most of the time. Not that Darya minded, anyway. She had little interest in becoming friends with the men in her unit. She would much rather leave them alone and get on with what they needed to do.
Pavlov stubbed out the cigarette he had been smoking on the edge of their transport. It wasn’t much -- most of the vehicles had been sent to help with the war effort on the big cities such as Berlin and Munich -- and it was incredibly uncomfortable, but it was far better than walking the almost-200 kilometres between Lubin and Dresden. Safer, too -- they would be far faster than any troops that Hitler’s great army had managed to mobilise to protect the German landscape. Not that they expected to run into anybody anyway -- Darya was almost positive that the casualties mounting up on the fronts in Russia and Italy would need replacing with whatever Germany had left.
D’you think we’ll get medals?” Pavlov asked, allowing the last cloud of smoke to leave his barely-parted lips. “I mean, we’re doing a really difficult job here.”
Darya opened her mouth to scoff, but before she could get any words out, Petrov (or Popov, Darya really couldn’t remember) laughed loudly.
“We’re hitting a nation when they’re down,” he said, gesturing behind him as if the countryside gave conviction to his words. “They aren’t fighting back, they let us waltz right into their country. How is that dangerous?”
Pavlov scowled. “They’re wounded. Like injured animals. Unpredictable. It’s the least they can do, to class us as war heroes.”
“The Motherland owes you nothing,” Mitsov said in long, gravelled tones. Darya almost did a double-take. “You, on the other hand, owe the Motherland everything.”
Pavlov feigned shock. “He speaks!”
Mitsov three Pavlov a withering look. The latter stuck his tongue out and crossed his eyes, and Darya found herself having to resist the urge to roll her eyes. Mitsov dropped back into silence, busying himself with inspecting the dirt lodged underneath his fingernails. Pavlov seemed to take this as a victory, and turned his attention to the rest of the truck.
“Nikolaeva, what about you?” he asked, his lips turning upward in the barest semblance of a smirk. “You’re far too pretty to be doing suck dirty work, surely?”
Darya’s voice had been unused for most of the journey and grated in her throat as she uttered, “fuck you.”
“Ah, feisty.” Pavlov raised an eyebrow, grinning widely in Darya’s direction. She silently cursed herself for rising to the bait as Pavlov continued. “Anyway, I hope you’ll have our backs out there. Even if you are a girl.”
Yeah, your back will be in my sights the entire time, Darya thought venomously. But instead of uttering it aloud, she forced a fake smile onto her face and nodded along. After all, Stalin had said that everybody in the Soviet Union was cut from the same cloth. Even if she hated Pavlov’s guts, she would have to help him for the greater good.
Pavlov didn’t seem to care about Darya’s brooding mood. Instead, he had chosen to change the conversation entirely, and questions were now coming rapid-fire from his mouth with little chance for anybody to answer in-between. “How much longer until we get there? I can’t wait to start dropping the Nazi scum like the flies they are. Did you know that they force women to have children so they can grow up and help the Nazi war effort? And they send kids to the front, only fourteen and fifteen! I mean obviously you’ve heard of the concentration camps but do you know what they do to the Jews once they’re inside them? Do you think we’ll get to pop Hitler himself? How much longer do you think the war will last? Let’s make a bet -- how many Nazis are you going to down in your first week?”
Darya had never been so relieved than when Petrov-or-Popov loudly instructed Pavlov to shut up.
---
By the time they reached the crumbling outskirts of Dresden, Darya had never wanted to punch somebody in the face quite half as much as she wanted to punch Alexei Pavlov in the face. When the truck stopped and he finally lapsed into silence, she thanked every god she could think of. Hopping off the truck, she winced as the leg cramp from the seemingly endless journey kicked in and caused all of her muscles to scream out at the one time. The worry about her legs faded quickly, however, as she surveyed the scene in front of her.
Dresden had been entirely decimated. Buildings that had once stood tall and proud were now dusty piles of rubble broken-down on the ground. Those that had survived were dark and ashy, fire having gutted them inside from out. The flakes of ash fell slowly, like the swirling snowflakes of winter. The streets were filled with clumps of wizened metal baked black from the flames, and the rubble from nearby buildings spilled out into the streets, blocking off roads. The few cars on the streets had been gutted by flames and as she took in a breath of air, she nearly retched at the acrid stench of burning flesh from the bodies left in the vehicles, their bodies barbecued and rotting in the early evening sunset. Nearby, Darya could make out the outline of a small hand, dust covering it like a fine blanket. The stench of gasoline still filled the air as topnotes on the breeze and, in the distance, buildings still burned a fiery copper against the sky. Yes, Dresden had been entirely decimated, probably no more recently since they had left Moscow.
Darya felt a sudden ping of sadness in her gut -- the fire-ravaged city reminded her of the photos they had been shown of a still-burning Stalingrad during training, and she remembered the loss of innocent life that had come along with it. Darya wondered how many innocent people had been caught up in the destruction of Dresden, how many people had cowered under tables and beds as the bombs fell.
“We did this?”
Mitsov looked almost as shell-shocked as Darya felt. He was staring towards the commander of their unit, and Darya found herself twisting around to wait on his answer, too.
Denis Churkin was a tall, imposing man and Darya hadn’t ever thought she would see him struggle for words, but the landscape in front of them seemed to have rendered him speechless. Darya had a quick look around the other faces in her unit -- none of them had been selected to fight before and the reality of the war seemed to be hitting most of them head-on.
“I don’t think this was us, no,” Churkin eventually said slowly, glancing beyond the unit and into the ruins beyond. “We don’t have the air support to lend to this kind of assault. The Americans, perhaps, or the British. They have planes and I have heard that the British still hold a grudge for the air assaults carried out on London.”
The group remained silent. Pavlov, for all of his bravado, seemed to have turned a peculiar shade of grey and looked as if he were having a hard time keeping himself from crying. Darya bit her bottom lip, catching a loose flap of torn skin and pulling at it some more. She wasn’t sure what she had expected to come across, but the stark difference between the peacefulness of the countryside and the eerie silence that hung over Dresden like an unexploded bomb had shattered every expectation she had about doing her job. Of course, she hadn’t been expecting an easy ride, but she also hadn’t expected such destruction on such a massive scale.
Yeltsin cleared his throat loudly, voice hoarse as he spoke. “So, what do we do now?”
Churkin sat on the edge of the truck, shrugging. “We wait for new orders. We cannot clear the city if the city has been levelled. So we wait.”
Darya didn’t want to think about what their next orders would entail.