Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Then, however, she saw Blumer rising up and darting into the field, diving quickly behind the remains of a half-track before a shot whizzed harmlessly past him. The guard had a potato-masher grenade on his belt and he reached for it, signaling to someone-another guard, she assumed, probably Kogel-to cover him as he scuttled closer still to the horses and the wagon and the faceless shooter.

Beside her there was a prisoner on her hands and knees whose name Cecile thought was Vivienne, but that was little more than a guess based on something she may or may not have overheard, and the fact the girl usually spoke French. Vivienne was younger than she was and had arrived at the factory in February from another camp. “Cecile, I'm leaving!” she whispered urgently. “Come with me-now!”

“Just run away?”

“Yes! Into the woods! Come with me, you've nothing to lose!”

She saw in her mind that awful moment when Kogel had executed Jeanne-there he was again, his arm straight with his pistol at the end, an extension of his hand-shooting her friend in the back of the head as Leah fled into the dark of the forest. She was just starting to wonder where Leah was-an image formed in her mind of the girl in a farmhouse somewhere, perhaps sitting before a fire in a wide brick hearth, a bowl of soup and an actual spoon in her fingers-when there was another gunshot in the field. She turned toward it, reflexively putting one of her hands over her eyes like a visor. There was Blumer, within a stone's throw of the wagon and the horses, shielded from it by the charred remains of a tank.

“Cecile, this is it,” Vivienne was saying, “I'm going.” And then the girl was gone, crabwalking carefully toward the woods, scuttling on her fingers and feet, her eyes darting back but one time.

Kogel spotted her almost instantly. “You, stop!” he shouted, but instead Vivienne stood up and started to run in her clogs, her legs stretching out one last time, the wind just starting, perhaps, to whistle in her ears, before the guard shot her with his rifle and she collapsed in the brush at the edge of the trees. Then he turned and aimed a second shot at one of the horses across the meadow, firing, apparently, for no other reason than anger and frustration and spite. The animal whinnied, reared up on its rear legs, and then sunk into the ground in its harness. Briefly it tried to reach the hole in its side with its nose, to nuzzle it, examine what had occurred there and would cause it to die, but then the horse's long, great head rolled around as if it were dangling on the head of a stick, and the animal expired. Kogel pulled his rifle down and surveyed the field. He seemed oddly satisfied.

She glanced back and forth between the body of the prisoner at the edge of the forest-a young woman whose forehead may once have been stroked by parents as they softly cooed her name-and the Hungarian guard, who was continuing to wriggle and moan and was now slapping at her side with the open palm of one of her hands. At least Vivienne had been granted a quick death, Cecile thought, and decided that she might as well try to scurry into the woods, too. Probably she would be shot, and that would be fine. There were no liberators here, no army about to rescue them. There was one idiot somewhere across that field with a gun. That was all.

And so she was about to stand when she noticed that Blumer was rising up from his crouch behind the tank to hurl the grenade at the wagon, blow it up and kill anyone behind or beside it-those lumps of clothing she had seen briefly falling to the ground-including the one horse that remained alive. She watched, hypnotized, sad for the horse that was about to die in a way that she wasn't for whatever people were near the wagon. He had pulled the pin and his arm was rearing back, when there were shots-two, maybe three, she wasn't sure, because it happened so fast-and Blumer with his one eye and mutilated ear was doubling over, the grenade beside him, kicking out his leg to try to push it away. But it was too late, far too late, and the grenade was exploding, the flash sending a cloud of dirt and fabric and flesh and metal from the tank high into the air, the plume darkening one vertical swath of sky and instantly making the world smell like sulfur and smoke. She wasn't quite sure what happened next because she had ducked into a ball, her arms across her face and her head, her eyes closed. When she opened them, she saw there was a gaping hole in the ground where a moment earlier Blumer had been kneeling. Kogel was on his back, dead-shot, she assumed, because the grenade couldn't possibly have done him in-and there was a large man with red hair and a smaller one in, of all things, a German uniform running across the meadow toward them and then disappearing behind the metal carcass of a half-track. She looked around and realized that the pair hadn't needed to dive behind the vehicle for cover. Pusch and Blumer and Kogel were dead. The Hungarian was dying. The other guards-three other men and two other women-had seen this skirmish as a reason to flee. To escape themselves before they were held accountable for all they had done. Around her the prisoners were starting to rise, to mill about, and so she did, too. She stumbled over to Vivienne, and much to her surprise she found that the girl was still breathing. Her eyes were small slits in the hollows of her skull and the front of her worn shift was soaked with her blood, but she looked up at Cecile and murmured, “In my pocket, there's a photo. Take it.”

She carefully lifted the girl's head and rested it on her own bony thighs. Then she saw the slit in the tattered dress and reached in. She found the picture instantly, an image of five children and two parents. The father was wearing a white V-necked sweater, and his eyes and his cheekbones were striking. He could have been a movie star. The mother was lovely, too, though there was something vacant about her eyes-as if, perhaps, she were blind. The children looked as young as three or four and as old as fifteen or sixteen. The family was on the deck of a cruise ship, and Cecile had the sense that the small, rocky islands in the background were Greece. The children were in tidy shorts or sleeveless summer dresses, their mother in an elegant skirt and a blouse. She was wearing pearls. All of their faces were windblown and their hair in vacation-like disarray.

“On the back,” Vivienne sputtered.

She turned it over and saw five names, including, yes, Vivienne, and the words father and mother in French.

“Where are you from?” Cecile asked.

“Limoges.”

She nodded, recalled a visit there once with her parents when she'd been a little girl, and stroked Vivienne's forehead with her fingers. Then gently she dabbed at the spittle that was forming on the prisoner's lips.

“Cecile?”

“I'm here,” she murmured.

“Tell them what happened. Please.”

“Your family…”

“Yes.”

“I will.”

“I never gave up. That's what I want them to know. My parents. My brothers and sisters. I know they can't all have died.”

“No,” she answered, “of course not,” but she didn't see any reason why it wasn't possible that this whole family had been machine-gunned or gassed or simply worked till they collapsed in a quarry or a brick factory somewhere. Certainly the woman's younger siblings were dead. “Someday,” she added, “you'll tell them yourself.”

“No.” The word was barely the tiniest puff of air, a syllable spoken without even moving her lips.

“What is your name?”

“Viv…” she answered, too weak now to link together more than a syllable at a time.

“I know that, silly,” she said. “Your whole name. Your surname.”

The girl started to nod, to answer. But this time when she tried to breathe she discovered that she couldn't, and she grimaced with the pain of the effort, her eyes and mouth becoming parallel lines below a series of deep creases upon her forehead. Her eyes opened one last time, the panic and fear and desperation apparent, and Cecile willed herself to smile down at this scared dying girl, to keep her own tears from her eyes. And then Vivienne-like the litany of others who had died near Cecile, beside Cecile, or in her very arms-died, too.