Dog Blood

collapsed wall. Paul doesn’t wait, deciding quickly to head up and work his way around whatever damage he finds up there. I follow him through more doors, then along another, much shorter corridor, which ends with a sharp right-hand turn. We instinctively slow down when we enter a ward filled with corpses. I start to wonder whether these well-decayed people were just abandoned and forgotten when the war began, but a closer look at their injuries quickly tells me that wasn’t the case. A skeletal woman has been skewered with the metal support that once held her intravenous drip, the stained and tattered threads of her flapping nightgown still wrapped around her shoulders. Sitting on the floor to my left, the withered husk of an old man is slumped with his legs apart. There’s a vertical scar in the middle of his badly discolored chest, running in almost a straight line down from just below the level of his sagging nipples. At the bottom of the scar, right where his navel would have been, the wound has been forced open and his innards pulled out. This guy’s been disemboweled by someone with their bare hands. The ingenuity and brutality of whoever did this is breathtaking. These bodies are old, though. Why are people still fighting here today?
    A huge hole in the ceiling and a corresponding hole in the floor farther down the ward force me to concentrate again. I follow Paul as he edges cautiously around the narrow ledge that remains around the dark chasm. I glance down and see a mass of rubble, beds, and bodies directly below, then look up. There are more holes in each floor above us all the way up to what’s left of the roof.
    At the end of the ward we reach another staircase. I look down through a large safety-glass window over a vast crowd of people battling outside. Our fighters are swarming around a collection of outbuildings right out on the farthest edge of the site. Standing separate from the main hospital campus, they look like they might have been storerooms or boiler rooms. There are enemy soldiers in every visible window and doorway and more on the roof, all of them now firing relentlessly and indiscriminately into the surging crowd. On the other side of the wrought-iron railings that surround the hospital grounds are their vehicles, ready for them to beat a hasty retreat if we get too close.
    Paul’s halfway down the stairs, but I stay standing at the window. Something’s not right here.
    “Come on!” he shouts.
    “Wait…”
    I watch as another surge comes from deep within the crowd of fighters. People are jostling for position, trying to get closer to the enemy, using each other as human shields by default. A pair of Brutes almost get close enough to strike before they’re driven back and brought down by another hail of bullets. Other fighters immediately clamor to take their places, trampling their fallen bodies. Apart from those few brave attempts, the enemy seems to be managing to keep the bulk of the crowd at bay.
    “You fucking idiot!” Paul yells at me. “They’ll all be dead by the time you get down there.”
    He disappears, but I don’t move. On the face of it this looks like any one of a hundred battles I’ve witnessed or been a part of before, but there’s a subtle difference, and alarm bells are ringing. I sprint after Paul to try to stop him.
    “Paul,” I yell, just managing to catch sight of the back of his head before he disappears out through an open door. “Wait!”
    “We’ll tear them apart,” he shouts, glancing back at me. “They’re sitting ducks.”
    “No they’re not.”
    “What?”
    “They could get out of here at any time. I saw it from up there. They’re tight up against the perimeter, and they’ve got vehicles on the other side waiting to take them out. They’re playing us.”
    “What?” he shouts again.
    “It’s a fucking setup! Think about it… Their secure area’s just a mile or so from here, there’s no way they’ve been cut off from the others, and they don’t look like they’re out here for supplies…”
    “I don’t care,” he says, thinking more about the kill than anything else, acting like a drug-starved junkie who’s desperate for a hit.
    “They’re not waiting here to be evacuated,” I tell him. “They’re here to draw us out into the open.”
    Paul shakes his head, then turns and runs, charging deep into the sprawling, ever-growing crowd of fighters, which now almost completely fills the entire space between the