My Immortal The Vampires of Berlin by Lee Rudnicki Page A

sharp object. Unfortunately, the
Katyusha
did my work for me today. Instead, I’ll just have to shoot you.”
    Pig Face nearly passed out. He dropped to his knees and begged for his life. “No, please ... listen to me ... listen...”
    Boris put the pistol against his right temple.
    Pig Face cringed.
    Boris pulled the trigger. Click.
    “Ah, that’s too bad,” he said. “I used all of my bullets on your fat fucking friend. Maybe it’s your lucky day, scratchy-face blind guy.”
    Pig Face smiled nervously. His friends were dead, but he thought that maybe fate had intervened to save him. Maybe he would survive this awful war.
    He couldn’t have been more wrong. Pig Face had no way of knowing it, of course, but Boris had a nickname among his troops,
The Janitor.
Over five years in the Red Army,
The Janitor
had developed his own ultra-vicious methods of street fighting. Since his lack of peripheral vision prevented him from leading the assault once they were inside the building, his
modus operandi
was to send new conscripts through the door first—brave men whom he had given an extra ration of vodka before the battle. After the initial shoot out,
The Janitor
would clean the room of enemy survivors. The caveat to the strategy was that the first men to charge into dark confined spaces where the effects of automatic weapons and grenades were multiplied usually didn’t live long. Luckily, Stalin ensured that Boris had no shortage of cannon fodder to lead the way.
    On that day,
The Janitor
wasn’t about to let a lack of ammo prevent him from doing his job, especially with two of his men dead. He ripped Pig Face’s helmet off and threw it across the room. The blind soldier frantically tried to feel his way to the door, but Boris pushed him down and pinned him underneath his boot.
    The angry Russian bear finalized the dance of death by pounding Pig Face in the head with a rifle, yelling in a rage with each successive hit. After the third blow, pink brain matter squirted out of his cracked skull.
The Janitor
didn’t just kill Germans—he pulverized them; a method of fighting that he adopted after a supposedly unarmed German POW took out his eye one awful winter day. Boris occasionally kept an officer alive for intelligence purposes, but there were rarely survivors when
The Janitor
was done with his work.
    Mikhail, a tall soldier with a dark ruddy complexion, noticed that Wolf was still breathing. He kicked him hard in the kidneys. “This one is still alive!” he shouted. Then he put his rifle to Wolf’s head and prepared to put him out of his misery.
    “Hold your fire,” Boris ordered.
    “You had your fun,” Mikhail said. “Let me kill this German pig.”
    “Stand down, Mikhail. This one is an officer. We’ll get something for him. Maybe some more Czech wine,” Boris replied.
    Wolf groaned as the enemy soldiers debated his fate in a language that he couldn’t understand.
    Finally, Mikhail relented. “
Schnell! Schnell!
Get up, you swine!” he shouted.
    Wolf got up.
So this is how it ends,
he thought. He said a silent prayer and wondered how painful his death at the hands of the Russians was going to be.
    Mikhail’s eyes widened when he saw the Iron Cross. He ripped it from Wolf’s jacket and threw it onto the floor. Then he hit his new prisoner over the head with his rifle.
    Fade to black...

25

The Death of Lyudmila

    The gunfire and screaming in the Hotel Neptune stopped. Lyudmila peered through the scope and smiled when she saw Boris through what had been a window prior to the
Katyusha
strike. The doomed patrol had been avenged.
    Lyudmila got her chance to fight after Stalin threw thousands of poorly trained and pitifully armed men into battle to stem the Nazi invasion and the casualty numbers soared. She learned her craft quickly and became one of the most feared and celebrated snipers in the Soviet Red Army, with over 200 kills to her name. A sniper sheds no tears for her victims, of course, especially