The valley seemed to be used as a gathering ground.
We ran into a crowd. On Vera’s orders we turned off and started climbing the slope. We scrambled up and forward without straining, but steadily. We came out onto a traverse after our first bout of shortness of breath and a smoke break.
After covering a couple hundred meters, we found an empty patch of ground. To the right, three riflemen with three slaves; to the left, a lone figure who might have been a sniper or a grenadier. Above the patch sat a mighty woman with enormous breasts, perched over a heavy machine gun. The barrel pointed skyward. The gunner radiated goodwill. She winked and gave a wave of greeting. I didn’t manage to wave back in time. They yanked my collar and sat me down on the ground.
We looked around.
What Vera and Anton were scanning for, I had no idea. What interested me were the friendly woman and her breasts. To my great regret, the collar wouldn’t let me turn my head — the metal dug into my chin the moment my head started to swivel. So I studied whatever was available to look at.
We were sitting about forty or fifty meters from a field, a hundred by three hundred meters, ringed by a low stone wall about half a man’s height.
Beyond the wall, there was no one. On our side of it sat the crowd, clapping and whistling. It dawned on me: we’d come to something between a football stadium and a circus.
Exactly.
We were spectators, waiting for the show to begin.
The closer to the arena, the heavier the crowd and the more imposing the weaponry. In the front row sat hulks weighing a hundred and fifty to two hundred kilos, hung with rocket launchers, machine guns, and the rest. All the while they never stopped eating. They’d pull food out from under themselves and chew, chew, chew. They flung the scraps backward. The people in the second and third rows fought over whatever landed. The winner finished off what had been thrown from the first row. Whatever they couldn’t or wouldn’t eat, they tossed further back, into the fifth, tenth rows. There a war would break out over the chance to gnaw down what was left. The scraps never made it as far as us.
In our rows sat lean fighters with a rifle or a machine gun. I couldn’t see the rows behind us. Every two or three minutes some ragged figure would dash out, hurl a grenade forward, and charge the front rows. The raid always came to nothing. Return fire shredded the daredevil to pieces.
Those in the front row kept right on eating, as if nothing had happened. The second and third rows fired back, defending their providers.
Watching the churning mass of the front rows more closely, I noticed a pattern.
The front row not only ate but also relieved itself without leaving its seats: they’d turn their backs to the field and urinate on the rows behind. Those rows dodged the streams and never missed a chance to shoot a neighbor. A shot man’s corpse got tossed into the stands, and two or three people from the row behind moved up to claim the empty seat. Some endless, filthy churning-bubbling-mocking chaos was going on down in the front rows.
What was this?
A guy with a knife raced past. Dodging bullets, he covered a dozen leaps and reached the front row, driving the knife into a fat man’s throat with a full swing. Blood sprayed out in a fountain; the daredevil yanked the limp carcass out of the front row in one motion, dumped it onto the people sitting in the second, and took the freed spot. He fussed for a moment, hanging the dead man’s weapons on himself, and then — there! — started eating, greedily, smacking his lips, choking and chewing, swallowing chunks of food fished out from under his feet, from under the chair…
