Budapest » [Clintasha]

Chapter Eleven: Resistance

Do you know what blood looks like in vast quantities? I do. Do you know that blood has a smell when there's enough of it? I do. Do you know how long it takes for blood to congeal? I do. 

I know the heat of it as it's siphoned fresh from the body. I know the gloopy texture as it drizzles through my fingers. I know the viscosity, the speed that the slick mixture moves at. 

I know the coppery stench that gases you if you bathe in it. I know how long it has to be exposed to the air before it clumps up and turns brown. I know how long it clings to you, staining your fingertips until they're soggy and wrinkled and how it clots under your nails. 

I can tell you the angle of an attack from the spray pattern. I can tell you the weapon used from the amount of blood. I can tell you how long a body has been there from the state of the blood. 

Even when you wash it off your body, it never truly fades. You've soaked up the violence, added more lines to your tally and your morals have degraded even further. It changes the colour of your world. 

I dream of the blood; how it feels on the five senses. Sometimes I drown in it, the hands of my victims snagging me by the ankles and dragging me down to hell. It's a veritable red sea, with nothing but darkness beyond. It ripples as I thrash around, glugs like blood in veins and splashes like a churning river. 

I know what it's like to see the lights leave someone's eyes. And know it's my fault. To see one moment they are present in their own mind, then that consciousness dies. I see the vacancy in their staring white eyes as the life trickles from them with their blood. How their joints twitch, clenching and jerking as rigour mortis sets in. I've seen how their features become lax, how fear and pain departs from them like a late train, resignation never sets in, apathy never claims them, death whisks them away from the battle ground, preventing them clinging to this measly earth any longer. 

I can never look. Not out of disrespect, like so many of the other girls; they just turn away and move onto their next victim. I can't bare to see them depart. I can't watch them take their last breath, I can't watch their bodies flop, I can't watch the consciousness die away from the eyes. But I always return, shut their eyes, preserve their dignity. I'm the only one whose going to be there to attend to their abandoned corpse. 

It pains me to think about those left behind. Like my mother and father left me. Ivan, who left me. The people I kill, they had a life, a family: a home, a job, a meaning; dreams and ambitions. And I cruelly cut that short. 

But I had no choice. Karpov kept his eagle eyes on me, those black pebbles situated in those sagging pockets for eye sockets. So did Yelena, every second glance was spared to me, making sure I played my part in the murderous charade. It slayed me to do it; but it was them or me.

After every mission I felt dirtied. I felt like my reputation was degraded. I felt like my morals were decaying. I felt like I was ruined. Guilt stalked me like a bad smell and I was the garbage it radiated from. I couldn’t understand how the rest of the girls abided by it. Could you do it? Do you really think you could kill someone? I never thought I could. Then the red room happened.

But in a stinking blood-splashed world, there was one purer being; my guardian angel.

I was strolling back to the bunk room, head drooping like the bud of a dying flower, my filthy locks dangling around my face like wilting petals and my face blackened like rotten natural waste. My eyes didn’t stray from the waterlogged grates that they passed off as floors; the walls were no more fascinating. The only thing that served as a source of interest was when they pasted up new propaganda posters; perhaps with a catchier tagline or a more intricate image: but always the red, black and gold.