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Ice
Date: 12/22/2015, Categories: Love Stories, Author: sprite, Rating: 71, Source: LushStories
Stalingrad, December 25, 1942. Winter blankets everything, turning the landscape bizarrely beautiful. If you look carefully, you can make out shapes under the hoarfrost and snow. Burned out tanks and piles of brick and steel that were once buildings litter the frozen battlefield that was once home to over 400,000 Russian men, women, and children. Now the corpses outnumber the living. You can see them as well, frozen limbs reaching out from under the serenity of freshly fallen snowflakes. Ice clings to them, turning them into a landscape of crystalline beauty that is all the more horrible for it. All this I see through the scope of my rifle as I scan the wreckage for signs of life so that I may snuff it out as well, adding to the body count. To date I have recorded twenty-one confirmed and unaided kills. Today I hope for my twenty-second. It must be soon. I can feel the cold seeping into my uniform and gloves, a sure sign that my rifle is also beginning to feel the effects. Soon it will become unreliable and I will be forced to retire for the day. I spot movement. Finally. My eye to the rifle’s scope, I zero in upon what used to be a bakery, patiently waiting to see if it was more than a stray flap of cloth flirting with the wind. Again. I smile coldly, my instincts telling me that there is a beating heart hidden somewhere in the scatter of rubble that marks the building. Sure enough, I make out a shape, well camouflaged in white and grey. A Russian soldier. With a practiced ...