Chimera PMC

The forest had been so quiet before the shooting started.

That was what Nikolai would think about later. Three days of the unit moving through the eastern treeline with the feeling of being counted. A snapped branch that wasn't theirs. A fire pit found cold. He had said it aloud on the second night, and the Allegiance command channel had told him to proceed.

The first shot came at 02:14, and it took the radio operator.

After that there was no more order, only the muzzle flashes in the darkness. The enemy had been tracking them, and had picked the ground. They took the squad apart one piece at a time.

Dmitry was the second to fall. A round went through his thigh and dropped him in the roots. He went down on his knees with a sound like something tearing loose. He had a spine that had never fully healed since the Kurbanov siege, and he knew how it would end the moment he hit the ground.

"MAXIM!" Dmitry shouted. His voice cracked on the second syllable. "Get down! Stay back, Maxim, stay down!"

Maxim never stayed down in his life.

He came through the brush with his vest hanging off one shoulder, blond hair slick with sweat. He fired twice, dropped one of them, then caught Dmitry under the arm and began to drag him. He got ten feet. Then the knives came out of the dark.

Not bullets. Whoever they were, they wanted to enjoy this. They took Maxim down from behind and he roared, a deep animal sound, and swung back, broke a jaw and a wrist before they buried him. The blades went into his side, his shoulder, his back. Somebody laughed. Somebody else said something in a language Maxim didn't know and stood over him with the knife held almost lazily.

The blade opened his throat.

Maxim didn't stop.

He crawled. Blood poured down his chest in sheets and his fingers clawed at the dirt. Six feet. Five. Dmitry lay in front of him, face turned toward him, eyes wide.

"Maxim," Dmitry whispered. "Брат (Brother). Стоп (Please). Пожалуйста, перестаньте двигаться (Stop moving)."

Maxim didn't. His hand stretched out across the last few feet of ground and stopped just short of his brother's sleeve.

Dmitry watched him die. He couldn't turn his head away. A man crouched beside him, found the old scar low in his back, and set the point of a blade there right on top. Dmitry understood a second before it went in. "No," he breathed. "Not like this. Дерзай, трус (Fight, you coward)! Убей меня как следует (Kill me properly)!"

The knife went in. His legs stopped answering. He stayed awake for all of it, paralyzed, staring at his brother's open eyes, until the cold reached his chest and finally granted him darkness.

Nikolai saw it.

He had been taken early, dragged into a clearing, and pushed face-first into the dirt with a boot between his shoulders. They made sure he could see. A man with a flat voice crouched beside him and said in broken Russian: "Посмотри (Watch). Тебе будет полезно это посмотреть (Is good for you to watch)."

So he watched. He watched them carry Yegor out of the trees and douse him in fuel. He watched the lighter spark, and the flames take the dark combat jacket in a single hungry bloom.

Yegor didn't scream.

It would have been easier if he had. The fire climbed and the skin split and blackened, and his men asked him over and over for Chimera's networks, the contacts, the names, the routes. Yegor stood in the burning with his jaw locked and his pale eyes fixed on nothing. He gave them nothing. Not a word, not a sound. His knees folded, and he stayed on his knees.

"Yegor!" Nikolai tried to get up. The boot ground him back down. "Yegor, you stubborn bastard, just..."

A sound came out of Yegor then, finally. Not a scream. A single word, ragged through the smoke.

"Don't."

Don't give them the satisfaction. Don't break because I'm breaking. Nikolai pressed his forehead into the dirt and shook.

Somewhere in the dark, Nikodim was still alive.

Separated from Yegor in the first seconds, he had run toward the wrong flash and taken a fragmentation charge to the stomach. It hadn't killed him. It was worse than that. He lay in the leaves with his hands pressed to the wet ruin of himself, holding his guts in, staring at the canopy, his body shaking.

"Yegor," he called. Small, cracked, young. "Yegor, I'm here. I'm here, come get me. Please."

Nobody came. He called again, quieter. Then again. His voice thinned into something that was barely air. "Please. It hurts. I can't... I can't find you. Yegor. Yegor, please come get me, I don't want to be here by myself..."

He bled out slowly, alone, saying his name like a prayer until his grip loosened, his innards finally spilling from the open wound.

Krueger's death was almost poetic.

They had caught the sniper, the one who had cost them half a dozen men earlier that day, and they meant to make something of him. They broke his hands first, one finger at a time, bending them backward and listening. Krueger swore at them in German, then in English, then in Russian, each language more inventive and creative than the last. Then he stopped swearing.

They took his eyes next.

He didn't give them the satisfaction of breaking either. Just like Yegor. He gave them a laugh, wet and horrible, and a single sentence. "Ich kann trotzdem noch jeden von euch Scheißkerlen hören (I can still hear every one of you bastards, though)."

It was the last thing he said before they decided how long to make it last.

Nikolai was last.

They let him stand up. He stood in the clearing among the bodies of the men he had brought here, swaying, hands bound, and tried to say all of their names out loud. He got to the third one. Then the man behind him lifted a pistol and fired three times into his back.

The lungs went first. Nikolai dropped to the earth and tasted copper. He lay there drowning, slowly, in the dark, listening to the enemy's boots walk away through the trees. He thought about every order he had given.

He thought: I brought them here. The thought followed him all the way down.

The forest took them in.

Years passed.

No one found the bodies. Nobody came looking. The Allegiance wrote six names on a casualty list and closed the file, and the trees grew over what was left.

But the dead did not stay in the ground.

They rose in the same patch of woods where they had died, and when they tried to leave, they couldn't. The treeline held them in. What they could do was hunt. And over time they learned what the forest wanted from them, and how to give it.

Now the locals took the long way around. They left salt at the edge of the road and told no one why.

The first came in late autumn. A man, mid-forties, expensive boots, carrying a rifle he had no license for. He had cut a poacher's trail through the forest and left traps on it. Snares, the kind that kill slowly. Three dead foxes already hung from his belt.

The fawn found him at dusk.

It was crying somewhere in the underbrush, a thin broken sound, and the man stopped. He knew better, but the sound was so small and so hurt. He followed it off the trail, hunting boots crunching, until he saw it: a young deer, too thin, one leg dragged behind it in the leaves.

"Easy," he muttered, raising the rifle. "Easy, little one."

A young man stood where the deer had been. Barefoot, uniform hanging off his shoulders, one sleeve gone, stomach torn open. He was shaking.

"Please," he said. "I lost my squad. I can't find them. Can you help me? Please? It hurts."

The man took a step back and aimed the rifle at the boy's chest. "Stay where you are!"

Nikodim's face crumpled. "Why would you do that? I only asked for help."

Behind the man a branch cracked. Something huge shifted in the dark, and something else, high up in the canopy, turned its head with a soft rustle of feathers.

Nikodim's voice dropped, the pleading drained out of it. "You hang animals from your belt, sir."

The forest went dark around the man. When it lit again, it was burning.

He felt it. Fire on his skin, on his face, in his lungs. He felt himself go down to his knees in it, and he screamed. He screamed until his throat tore, and nothing answered him. Somewhere beyond the flames stood a lean figure with pale eyes and a ruined chest, watching him with no expression at all.

His heart stopped on the fourth minute. The man fell onto his side in the leaves without a mark on him.

Yegor didn't look away until it was over.

"That one," he said quietly. "That one was easy."

Nikodim was already walking back toward the trees, hugging himself, dragging a boot that wasn't his. "He had a gun on me."

"I know." Yegor's voice gentled by a fraction, and only for him. "Go find your boots."

Another came in winter. A woman in her thirties, in a good coat, lost and stubborn and not yet afraid. Her car had died on the old logging road. She had decided to walk, and she'd chosen wrong.

Nikolai watched her for a very long time.

The raven sat on a snapped branch above her for most of an hour, feathers puffed against the cold, one wing ragged where the feathers had gone. She talked to herself as she walked. She apologized to a rotten log she'd tripped on. She stopped to tie a stranger's discarded scarf around a branch to mark the trail.

When she reached the treeline of the clearing, she stopped.

Nikolai took his human shape slowly, a tall man in a ruined compression shirt, cracked aviators hanging from his collar, a gold chain gone black with age. He stepped out of the trees with his hands visible.

"You're a long way from the road," he said.

She flinched, then straightened her shoulders. "I know. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to trespass. I just need to get back to the main road. My phone is dead."

He looked at her for a long moment. "Do you have anything to hide?"

She frowned. "What?"

"People who come here usually do." His voice was soft, almost kind, with a thread of something else under it. "Look at me. Answer honestly."

She did. She told him what she was running from, a marriage that had ended badly and a house she couldn't afford. She told him she'd been the one who left, and that she wasn't sure that made her good. She told him she was tired.

It was an honest answer. It wasn't a clean one.

Nikolai listened. Behind him in the dark, the others waited.

"She's lying," a flat voice said from the trees. Yegor didn't step out. "No one tells the truth that easily."

"She's not lying," Nikolai said without turning.

"Everyone lies."

"Not her."

A pause, then the slow rustle of something heavy settling in the dark. A black bear shifted at the edge of the clearing, limping a little on its hind leg. It watched her.

Nikolai turned back to the woman. "There's a path past the white birch. Follow the stream until it forks, then go left. It will take you to the road in two hours." He paused. "Don't come back."

She stared at him. "Who are you?"

"No one," he said. "Go."

She went. She didn't look back until she reached the birch. By then the clearing was empty, and a raven was circling above her, watching the whole way to the road.

Behind her in the trees, someone said in a voice like gravel: "That was soft of you, Nikolai."

"She was honest," Nikolai replied.

"Hm." Yegor sounded unconvinced. "Next one won't be."

The next was a man named Pavel, and the six of them couldn't agree on him at all.

He was a logger. He owned a small crew and an old truck, and he had come into the forest alone, looking for a stray dog that belonged to a neighbor. He had hit his dog once, years ago. He had also taken a bribe to look the other way on illegal timber. He drank. He had once let a friend take the blame for a fire he'd started himself.

He had also spent three days searching for a dog that wasn't his.

They watched him from the branches and from the roots, and for once they couldn't decide.

"He hit the dog," Yegor said flatly. "That's enough."

"He's looking for the dog now," Nikodim argued, from the bracken. "Doesn't that count for something?"

"Does it?" Krueger's voice drifted down from the canopy, thin and amused. "He hit it. He looks for it. Which is he?"

Maxim shifted at the edge of the trees. The wolf's ribs showed through its mangy coat, and one milky eye caught the moon.

He took his human shape without a sound and came to stand beside Nikolai. His throat was open, unhidden, the wound black in the dark. He spoke low, a rumble that wasn't quite a voice.

"He's not clean," Maxim said. "But I don't think he's dirty enough."

"Not for you." Yegor's pale eyes didn't leave the logger. "You were always soft."

Maxim bared his teeth. It wasn't a smile. "I had four children, Yegor. I know the difference between a man who's bad and a man who's weak."

"Do you?" Krueger murmured. "Because I'd say they look rather alike from up here."

Dmitry had come up silently behind them. He stood listing slightly to one side, colorless eyes on the logger. "Enough," he said. "We're not deciding this by shouting."

In the end they didn't decide. The logger found the dog on his own, curled shivering under a fallen spruce, and carried it out through the dark with the animal's head tucked under his chin. He never knew how close he'd come. The wolf walked beside him to the edge of the trees, and then let him go.

The others argued about it for a week.

Yegor and Krueger were different from the others.

The others had mercy in them, buried under the grief. Not these two. Where Nikolai weighed a person and Maxim savored the hunt and Nikodim begged for kindness, Yegor and Krueger simply decided, and the deciding was almost always cruel.

Yegor made people feel the fire. He would run them down as the hound, heat shimmering off scarred flanks, and drive them toward a clearing. Then he'd take his human shape, step out of the smoke, and let them see his chest, the burns that had never closed, the Trident inked above a heart that was gone. He would look at them with those pale blind eyes and say, in a voice like gravel in ash:

"You know what this is? This is what it feels like."

Then the flames came, and the person burned for what felt like hours, until the heart finally gave out. He never smiled. He didn't enjoy it. It was just owed.

Krueger was worse in a different way.

He never touched anyone right away. He just let them hear him. The great owl would settle in the branches above, silent wings, empty eye sockets staring at them. A person walking alone would feel something watching and hear a soft click overhead. Their world would turned dark as they ran, stumbling over roots and underbrush as they tried to flee the oppressive darkness that had settled over them.

By the time he dropped from the branches, the person was usually on their knees, crying. Krueger would crouch in front of them, veil stiff with old blood, fingers crooked and healed wrong, and tilt his head.

"Hörst du mich (You hear me)?" he'd ask, almost gently. "I can hear you. Your heart is very loud. Do you know what it's like to be unable to see the thing coming for you? To only listen to your bones break?" A soft laugh. "Oh, you will."

And they would feel their eyes go, their hands break, their bones shattering and hear their own heartbeat pounding in the dark until it stopped.

Even the others kept their distance from those two at those nights. Maxim called it what it was, once, to Nikolai, in the quiet before dawn:

"They're not wrong to hate. But they've forgotten how to stop."

Nikolai looked up at the pale sky through the branches. "I know," he said. "I don't know how to make them."

Not everything in the forest was punished by fire or darkness however.

There was a poacher who came in the spring, a thick-necked man with a canvas bag and a roll of wire snares. He worked the deer paths along the creek. He didn't check the snares every day. He didn't care to. Twice the six of them had found what he left behind: a doe strangled halfway through a struggle, a young fox still alive, its leg chewed raw to the bone, looking up at them with its mouth open and no sound left in it.

Nikodim had sat beside the fox until it stopped breathing. He hadn't said anything. He'd only held its head in his lap and stroked the fur between its ears with fingers that shook.

"I'll take this one," he said.

Yegor, standing in the smoke at the edge of the clearing, looked at him for a long moment. "You?"

"Me."

Nikolai didn't object. Neither did Dmitry. Maxim only grunted and turned his head away, the way a father does when he knows he shouldn't watch.

The poacher heard it at dusk.

A small, broken sound from the bracken along the creek. He crouched, listening, bag swinging at his hip. Then he grinned.

A fawn lay in the ferns. It was far too thin, ribs showing under spotted fur, one back leg dragged crooked behind it. Its eyes were huge and when it saw him it made that sound again, thin and trembling, a sound that said please.

"Well, look at you," the poacher murmured. He set down the bag and pulled a length of wire from his belt, already forming the loop. "Bit small, aren't you. Never mind. Little ones are tender."

The fawn didn't run. It lay in the ferns and watched him come.

He crouched. He reached out. The fawn licked his fingers.

It was warm, and strangely soft. For a moment the poacher almost felt something. Then he laughed at himself and lifted the wire.

"Does it hurt?" the fawn said.

The voice was soft. Young, a little hoarse, with an accent the poacher couldn't place. It came from the small black mouth, and the mouth did not move right when it spoke.

The poacher's hand stopped.

"The fox," the fawn went on, head tilted, ears forward. "The one by the big rock. Did you hear her? She cried for a long time. Longer than me." A pause. "I cried a long time too."

The poacher scrambled backward. The wire dropped from his hand. He got three steps before the ferns around him were full of eyes. Not the fawn's. Wolf-yellow, raven-black, orange as embers, a great pale pair that didn't blink. He turned, and the fawn was gone.

Nikodim stood where the fawn had been. Barefoot, uniform hanging off him, stomach open and glistening, cerulean eyes wide and young. He was smiling.

"Please don't run," he said. "I'm so hungry."

He opened his mouth wider than a mouth should open.

The poacher felt the first bite before he understood what it was. It tore into his thigh, and the pain was sickening. He screamed and kicked, going down in the mud with something on his chest, tearing. He saw teeth. He saw his own blood in a bright arc across the ferns. He felt hands, delicate hands, gripping his ribs, and prying them apart inside his chest.

"Does it hurt?" Nikodim asked again, cheek pressed against the man's open chest, voice muffled and tender. "I want you to say it. Does it hurt? Did she hurt? Say it."

The poacher couldn't. He had no breath left. His heart hammered wetly in the open air, faster and faster, trying to outrun the thing that was eating him. Somewhere above, a raven watched. Somewhere in the trees, an owl turned its blind face toward the sound.

It took four minutes.

When it was over, Nikodim sat back on his heels in the ferns. His mouth was red to the chin. He wiped it slowly with the back of one hand, and looked down at the poacher's face, frozen in its last scream.

Nikodim's smile faded.

"She wouldn't have cried if you'd checked," he said quietly.

Behind him, a bear's slow tread. A hand, enormous and scarred, settled on his shoulder. Dmitry stood there, listing a little to the side, while Nikodim leaned into him and shook.

Yegor watched from the smoke, and for once he didn't say a word.

Nikodim stood up after a while. He picked up the poacher's snares one by one and carried them to the creek, and he dropped them into the deep part, where the water ran black.

"He didn't taste nearly as good as he screamed," he said, in a small, ordinary voice.

Krueger's laugh drifted down from the branches, soft and delighted. "Unser kleines Rehlein (Our little deer)," he murmured. "We never gave you enough credit."

Winter came back around.

The forest lay under thin snow and the six of them gathered at the edge of the clearing where it had all begun. Nikolai sat on a fallen log with his cracked aviators dangling from one finger. Maxim stood with his arms folded, the wound at his throat steaming faintly in the cold. Dmitry leaned against a birch. Nikodim was curled in the roots with his head on his knees, and Yegor stood apart, smoke curling off his shoulders. Krueger perched on a low branch above, head tilted, listening.

And then they all heard it at once.

Footsteps.

Somebody was walking into the forest, picking a line through the trees, stepping around the snares and over the roots.

Krueger's head turned toward the sound. "Well," he said softly. "There comes the evenings entertainment."

Yegor's eyes narrowed. The hound's glow flickered in them, faint and orange. "They're not afraid."

"Or they don't know they should be," Nikodim whispered.

Nikolai rose from the log. He studied the dark between the trees for a long moment, then looked at each of them in turn.

"Let's see what they are," he said. "Maxim. Take the treeline. Nikodim, the path. Krueger..." he paused "...circle them. Don't touch. Yegor, you stay back."

The raven took to the air first. Then the wolf slipped between the trunks, and the owl lifted from its branch without a sound. A young deer limped into the underbrush, crying thinly. A black hound ran low through the shadows, and somewhere in the dark a heavy bear began to move.

In the clearing, the snow was still.