The officer pulled another, thinner, blade out from a sheath on his left as he strode up to a man who was in his late sixties. The man held his hands up in a defensive gesture, his long white hair flying wildly in the air, and began to plead with the officer as he approached. Without hesitation, the officer lunged forward and slid the long, thin blade up to the handle into the old man’s right eye. The eye punctured with a soft puff and deflated on the blade as the man’s body went rigid and then collapsed to the ground.
The officer marveled at how little blood escaped the man’s wound, as he stepped over the corpse and began to bear down on a woman who had fallen to her knees in the snow. In the recesses of his mind that weren’t filled with the sound of his own heart’s hammering, he began to hear gunfire.
The boy at the end of the line weaved back and forth as he tried to make out what the confusion was and why people were yelling. His mother had turned and was looking in the direction he was, with one hand clamped tightly over her mouth, as if she were about to be sick and could hold it at bay if she pushed hard enough at her face. His father was also staring at the other end of the line, and hadn’t moved a muscle until the gunshots began to cut the air with their short barks of sound. Several people tried to run out of the line, and the soldiers shot them. Their bodies fell in the snow and red began to creep outward through the white in a bright corona.
Fear began to invade the boy’s body, as his legs locked tight and he gripped his mother’s hand. She squeezed back without taking her eyes off the spectacle in front of her.
The officer wove his way down through the line in a blur of motion. His arms pinwheeled crazily at times, and snapped in short strikes at others. Blood flew in arcs and began to coat his dark uniform in splattered gore. As he cut one woman’s face from jaw to opposite eyebrow, he noticed there were many bodies falling not only in the ditch but also to the level ground on which he stood. The soldiers around him were doing well. Only the people who ran or tried to fight were shot, but most were too shocked or frightened to react. He cut these people down like wheat before a scythe.
As the officer approached a man who appeared completely dazed—his slight form hunched over and his eyes staring blankly at the ditch in front of him—the man suddenly turned with a ragged scream and began to flee. His rag-swaddled feet pounded large footprints in the snow as he ran from the pit. A soldier to the officer’s right paused as he watched the emaciated man run away, seemingly entranced by the speed at which the prisoner was escaping.
“Shoot him!” the officer screamed into the young soldier’s ear. The soldier flinched but brought the machine gun to bear on the running man’s back. Bullets sprayed from the barrel of the gun, and the escaped man pitched forward into the snow, with his arm hanging off his body at a strange angle. From where the officer stood, it looked as though only a few inches of meat attached the limb to the starved body that now lay twitching on the ground.
The officer spun in a tight turn and slit the throat of another prisoner who stood a few feet to his left. The blood that flew from the wound sprayed into a fine haze that settled in the chilled air like a mist descending over a cold field. The officer watched the blood spray fall to the ground and paint the snow a faint pink among the deeper reds. It was simply art. There was no other way to describe it. The way the substance ran from the skin when cut. How it soaked into the ground, how it pooled so black. He knew his own veins were pumping the same liquid.