Invisible Traces · A Horror Story No. 22
Shadow of the Forest
Alex Moonn
The silence after a battle carries a different weight than any other silence.
Aleksei Vronov was a soldier for twelve years. That explains part of what he is. The rest, what he became and what he did with his hands, he writes down because someone needs to know. In the last battle he remembers, eight men became three, and the three scattered. Aleksei ran toward the only place left: the forest.
English edition, available on Amazon.
Read an excerpt
There were eight of us when the day started. By the time the sun fell in the east, there were three. I lost Dmitri first — twenty-two years old, his fiancée's photo folded in his breast pocket like an amulet he'd stopped believing in but couldn't throw away — and then Grishka, who carried no photo at all because he said photos were an invitation to bad luck. Grishka was right about everything, and died anyway.
That left me. And Semyon, who'd lost two fingers on his left hand but was still shouting orders nobody was left to hear — the voice of a man who hadn't registered yet that his army had shrunk down to one. And Borya, who hadn't said a single word since dawn, his eyes carrying that transparency certain men get when the horror goes deep enough and something inside decides to switch off. I knew that look. I'd learned not to stay close to anyone who had it.
We scattered when the enemy pushed forward for the third time. Semyon went right, still shouting. Borya disappeared into a mortar crater that had split the earth open like a pomegranate. I ran toward the only place left.
The forest.
English edition, available on Amazon.
