Attrition
Ukraine
It has been walking for thirty-one days.
It does not know this. It knows the pull, westward, and the hunger beneath the pull. Time is the crust of dried mud flaking off its boots, the grey-green rot creeping up under the collar of its fatigues, the way its left thumbnail sloughed off somewhere around Voronezh and never grew back. Time is distance, and distance is the small hot pressure at the front of its skull that says there, there, closer now.
The rifle across its back has not been fired. It cannot remember how. It cannot remember that it ever could. The strap has worn a permanent groove into the tunic, and the tunic has worn a permanent groove into the flesh beneath, and the flesh beneath is the colour of an old bruise. The rifle is decoration on a thing that no longer needs weapons. Its hands are enough. Its teeth are enough.
It stumbles. A BMP, or what used to be one, lies on its side in the ditch, turret blown off, hull scorched to a papery black. The zombie’s boot catches on the track and it goes down onto one knee in the mud. It does not feel the impact. It pushes itself up with a wet sound and shambles on. There are more husks past this one, a whole line of them stretching toward the horizon, tanks and trucks and APCs and the rusted ribs of something that might have been a self-propelled gun. The machines ran out years ago. This is why the flesh walks now.
Ahead, beyond a treeline, the pressure in its skull sharpens. Prey. Warm things. Close.
It walks on.
“Want another?”
“Please.”
Kostya pours from the thermos. The tea is over-steeped and lukewarm but it is tea, and in the dugout eight meters underground with the generator humming and six monitors washing the concrete in blue light, tea is the main thing. He passes the cup to Yura without looking away from his screen.
Yura is watching twelve drone feeds stacked in a grid, each one a small square of cratered earth seen from two hundred meters up. The Drone Wall. Thousands of FPVs orbiting the line in lazy overlapping patterns, every one of them fed by a team like this one in a dugout like this one, all the way from Sumy to Zaporizhzhia. The feeds are boring most of the time. That is the job. You watch boring until boring stops.
The radio crackles. “Echo-Four, Echo-Four, grid seven-two-bravo, single walker, take it.”
Kostya sets down his cup. Yura is already pulling on the goggles.
“Got him,” Yura says. “Treeline, moving west. Slow.”
“They’re all slow.”
“This one’s really slow. Missing part of his face.”
Kostya arms the drone. The launch rack outside thumps once and the feed in his own goggles lurches upward, sky tilting, the horizon dropping away. He banks east. The cratered hellscape unrolls beneath him, grey and brown and grey, pocked like the surface of some diseased moon, strewn with the burnt bones of a mechanized army that does not exist anymore.
“Two clicks out,” Yura says, reading the telemetry. “Wind’s fine. Fiber’s paying out clean.”
“Copy.”
Kostya descends. The altimeter ticks down, three-twenty, two-eighty, two-forty. He can see the treeline now, and the small stumbling shape at its edge, dark against the churned mud. The shape does not look up. The shape does not do anything. It just walks, one foot and then the other, toward the line.
“He’s not taking cover.”
“They never do.”
“I keep thinking one of them will.”
Yura shrugs without taking his eyes off the screen. “Maybe tomorrow.”
Kostya thumbs the throttle forward. The shape grows in the goggles, resolves from a shape into a figure, from a figure into a man, from a man into whatever this is. He can see the groove the rifle strap has worn into the shoulder. He can see the mud on the knee where it fell. A hundred meters. Eighty. The drone’s little camera shakes with the vibration of the motors and Kostya steadies his thumbs on the sticks, the way he has steadied his thumbs on the sticks four hundred and eleven times before, the way he will steady them thousands of times more.
It hears something. A thin whine, high up, small as a mosquito and growing.
It does not look up. It does not know what the sound is. The pressure in its skull is louder than the sound, and the pressure says forward, and forward is all there is. Its boot lifts. Its boot falls. The mud sucks. The rifle sways against its back.
The buzzing grows closer.
It shambles on.