Ambush

We wait for our prey. Out of the light, deep in the rubble of someone's home now forgotten. We wait in the dust. See it fall and dance in the still air with snowflakes and flecks of ash. Someone lights a cigarette. I tell them to stub it out. We cannot give ourselves away.

We hide for 19 hours. It is easy to hide at first. The adrenaline warps time. But then it fades. At five hours in, my comrades question our position, our tactics, our purpose being so far out. We are missing the battle, they say. We are letting them take Kyiv, they say. My mother is dying in a hospital and we should move there, they say. 

At 11 hours in, some of the men crawl through broken glass and rubble to relieve themselves. I tell them to lay sideways. Let the piss pool, not trickle down and make noise. They say I’m being paranoid. I tell them the world is watching them when they piss. Don’t make a noise. 

At 15 hours in, we heard a drone. Had anyone been talking, we would have missed it. The mechanical whirring is gentle. It is the beating of giant hummingbird wings. We hear the drone fly by, pausing in the town. We don’t move. We dare not move. The drone descends to our sightline. Some of us bury our faces in the floor. The drone moves on. 

Drones continue flying overhead. They buzz through our kill zone for hours. But they don’t know it’s a kill zone. They see rubble. They see death. They see desertion of a town that once smelled of buttered pastries and colored by the children’s laughter. They don’t see us.

At 19 hours of lying in wait, the rubble around us vibrates. The column approaches. We look down the street. APCs, T-80s, rocket artillery, a few trucks. We signal to the others across the street with a reflective mirror. It is the first time we have acknowledged their existence since we arrived. A glare from the darkness shines back at us. We are ready.