Escape by Varian Krylov Read Free Book Online

anybody who's going to get you killed,
    no matter which side he's on.
    Joseph Heller
     
     
    With the first tentative glance caught and mirrored back by green eyes, Luka was unmoored, adrift in the turbulent jostle of unfamiliar faces and routines, in a labyrinth of identical temporary structures, and a chaos of testosterone-fuelled voices. Then the screech and boom of bombs, the staccato stutter of machine guns ruptured their fragile, hungry peace; the blue and white tent village collapsed, buses swallowed up the old, the sick, the injured, while Luka and the rest slung their packs over their shoulders to trudge the thirty kilometers further north to the new refugee camp site, where everyone was forced to surrender their clothes to the pyre, and accept shirts and pants that looked like pajamas and felt almost like paper, because there'd been an outbreak of lice in one of the wards.
    A smile Luka chased again and again, through memory and fantasy, plunging into unfamiliar depths of hope and trepidation. A few casual words, “Are you surviving? If the rations don't get better, maybe we should surrender to the enemy and see if the accommodations in the prison camps are better. What do you say?” Words heavy as ten bars of gold, because they were spoken with that impish smile while those green eyes were fixed on him. The terrible weight of Josip's presence each mealtime, an almost overwhelming burden, which Luka never wanted relief from.
    Alarm, half fear, half hope, minutes before curfew, Josip coming close and whispering, “Come on.” Sneaking away from the sleeping tents, past the supply tents, into a corridor between stacked supply crates. Josip's mischievous grin as he unveiled one pristine, machine-rolled cigarette and confessed to snatching it from a guard's pack while his back was turned.
    The bliss of seeing Josip's soft, full lips part, then pucker slightly around the filter, the subtle flex of his mouth as he inhaled to light it, the pungent scent of tobacco suddenly seductive. Reluctantly refusing when Josip held the cigarette out to him, between long, slender fingers, because the pleasure of watching Josip enjoy drawing the smoke into his mouth, down his throat, then blowing the curling tendrils of diaphanous white up into the hard cast of the camp light was bigger than his fear of seeming too straight-laced.
    “Don't like to smoke?”
    Luka shrugged. “I've never done it.”
    “Never?”
    Luka shook his head.
    “You should at least see how it tastes, before you decide.” Josip held the cigarette between them, and when Luka leaned in to take it between his lips, Josip took his hand away, and leaned in, too, so their lips were barely a centimeter apart.
    The delicious terror of breathing in the scent of Josip's skin, his breath laced with tobacco.
    Tasting it on his lips.
    The wild, transcendent thrill of Josip's touch.
    Then the sudden, cold terror of the encircling net of other voices, other hands. Somewhere, out of sight behind a wall of other bodies, Josip's fear-cracked voice feigning anger. “I just wanted to sneak a smoke. I didn't know he was going to pull that shit.”
     
    Blind, drowning in panic under the hood or shirt they'd fastened over his head, Luka flinched against the anticipation of a barrage of kicks and punches, but the swarm of hands tugged and tore at his clothes. Flailing, screaming until someone hit him hard in the face, panic ripped at Luka's heart until they started roughly maneuvering his limbs, dressing him again. Bewildered, sure he was about to die, Luka thrashed as a dozen hands hoisted him up and bundled him into the cold hard bed of a truck.
    Plastic cable ties cutting into the flesh of his wrists.
    Metal ridges in the truck bed banging and bruising his hip, his shoulder.
    Suffocating in the damp dark of whatever they'd pulled down over his head.
    God, oh God, they're going to kill me.
    The kicking and punching came after an hour of jostling over the unpaved road. Then