Free Fall by Nicolai Lilin Read Free Book Online Page A

gutted and burned. The wheels didn’t have tyres anymore, the back doors were slightly ajar and you could see a leg dangling out and an army boot. It was strange, like looking at a painting. I had the impression that I was entering a dimension where time had stopped: everything was dead, nothing living could pass there.
    I took a few steps in the direction my new comrade had pointed and I saw a corpse in a ditch near the main road that led to the centre of the town. It was striking, because it didn’t resemble any corpse I’d ever seen before – and I’ve seen quite a few dead people in my day. The ones I’d found the most revolting had been the bodies of the drowned that I’d pulled out of the river – unfortunately, some of them had even been friends – and the thing that had struck me most was the smell. When they were still in the water youdidn’t notice at all, but once they were brought to shore they started to stink so badly just being near them made you want to vomit. The bodies of the drowned get terribly deformed; they swell up, full of rotting parts and leaking fluids, until they look like a big ball of gelatin. When I was a boy, in the summer of 1992, after the war between Transnistria and Moldavia, I saw many war corpses in the streets, but I’d been almost indifferent to those bodies. I was too occupied with trying to find the weapons and ammunition, and I hadn’t given the dead much thought.
    My first body in Chechnya, however, made a different impression on me. I felt pity, because it seemed like he’d been taken by surprise, at a moment when he hadn’t expected anything bad to happen. He lay straight, his legs extended, his hands joined over his heart, as though before dying he had tried to keep his soul from coming out. His face was completely white; his skin looked like marble, all taut over his bones, but the veins on his neck and temples were black. His eyes were wide open, so dark you couldn’t tell their colour. His mouth was slightly open and you could see his teeth, stained with blood.
    I studied his body for a moment and then I grabbed him by his bulletproof vest near his neck, and tried to pull him to the road. At first glance he had seemed hefty, but when I pulled him up out of the ditch I was shocked. He weighed almost nothing; it was like moving a wet rag. I carefully examined his uniform, which in certain spots was paper thin, as if beneath it there were no longer a body but only the impression of a human being, the depth of a piece of cardboard. Standing there, motionless, withthat poor man in my arms, I felt a sudden hard, violent tug coming from inside his body. Terrified, I instinctively slackened my grip.
    The body dropped, and from the vest – where, a second before, my hand had been – came a giant sewer rat. His tail was greasy and disgustingly hairless, the skin glistening. As he came into the light of day, the rat gave me a look full of hatred, and then slowly crept back down into the ditch. Frozen, I tried to comprehend what I had just seen. Behind me, I heard the voice of someone else on the clean-up crew:
    â€˜Never grab them by the vest, they’re full of rats. They’re dangerous, those beasts – they eat human flesh, so they’re strong and aggressive. Last year a rat almost tore three fingers off one guy in a single bite. Follow my advice; just grab the bodies by the legs and before you tie them, tap them with your foot a couple times, and those pests will run away.’
    I couldn’t tell whether the man was messing with me or telling the truth. Either way, from that day on I did as he said.
    When the truck was full, we climbed in and sat on the benches at the sides. The corpses were piled on top of one another in front of us. They made us eat in front of the bodies so we would get used to their presence. Sometimes, when the truck went around a corner on the trip back, the corpses fell on top