Garrett Cook here. Jonathan Gensler impresses the hell out of me. Everything from his in your face performance style to the meticulous intensity of his prose show that he’s going places. He’s doing great stuff for the Bizarro community and I think you’ll dig the work .
Tattoorovka by Jonathan Gensler
Out in the trenches east of Mariupol, remember: a couple millimeters of the right kind of leather can protect you.
Make it fresh from the kill with your own knife.
Don’t forget the critical step: you must sew it directly to your skin.
That’s what Misha told me before I crossed the bridge to find Natasha. Don’t make the same mistakes he’d made. Listen to what the crone had said.
The other volunteers thought it was a load of rotten sobachatina, but Misha swears he met this one psycho whose torso was covered with little patches stitched into his chest and shoulders, around his neck, even over his cheekbones—Van Dam. Black thread holding drying patches of skinflesh in place, each shkiri a specific marking stripped from the invaders: parachutist and rifleman badges, unit numbers, death’s heads, the usual soldati ink, meant to stiffen their spines alone in a foxhole, the scent of rot and laino and cordite stinging their eyes, ears ringing if they are lucky enough to have eardrums that still worked. Tattoos to mark their own so survivors could quickly get their dead off the battlefield and back home to sobbing mothers and sisters and babushkas, and to their weary, cowardly brothers.
Van Dam must be the guy I needed to find. The one in the picture my sister sent, holding the empty bottle over his head, pierced tongue out of his mouth, licking her cheek.
Misha pulled down his ratty, discolored tee and showed me his chest: a palm-sized oval of rough stitching encompassing a childish blue-black skull, the letter Zed on its forehead, all inked into a wrinkled and decaying mess of yellowish-gray.
It works, he said.
Maybe I was a coward; I’d certainly been called one before. But I knew I needed to get my sister away from the front.
Two days later, I was jumping into a half-destroyed command post, sandbagged walls dug deep into the ground on the south side of what could have been a burning garbage dump, a forsworn city park, or a well-guarded entrance to peklo itself.
The government hadn’t taken over the front yet, and we weren’t sure if they ever would. But we were beyond their arbitrary lines now, wreaking havoc in what used to be our hometowns, lighting new fires in the burned-out husks of our previous existence, knowing that the only way back home was straight through to the other side. And through it all, my every thought was of Natasha, out there in the beyond.
We didn’t have what you’d call a commander, even though my handlers and guides along the way said this was the command post. The name was just another ruse to confuse the always-listening enemy. We weren’t an army. Weren’t even trying to be one. We just wanted to fight. Attaching meaning to any of these shambling buildings made them a target, drawing fire away from everything more important.
That’s what we had become, as well. Targets.
Empty shells drawing fire away from the west, wearing the skin of people who once lived and breathed and loved and sang and ate and fucked. Now they are simply dead; now we simply fight.
That’s where I would find her.
And him.
Van Dam had been out there since the occupation in ‘14. Before they split ways, Misha’d counted 119 different patches, all taken personally by Van Dam from enemy corpses, field-dressed in natron, and sewn on with thread from his medkit.
Angel, you wouldn’t believe it unless you’d seen it, but three of those patches had bullets embedded in them, the skin cracked and folded but holding on, the slugs warped and melted just like you’d see in ballistic armor. The crone told him how to do it back in his mistechko before it was firebombed to oblivion.
By the time I made it to the front, that number must have doubled, maybe tripled. When I found him, he knew who I was right away. Probably from the recognition in my eyes, the lack of fear when he appeared in his mask. Every inch of his face was now covered in a stitched agglomeration of madness, many of the black cross-hatches still weeping crimson from the minuscule gaps between patches of tattooed skin. Every addition a new form of a skull, some colored in, one on his left cheek even doused in orange and red flames winding up and over his head.
The largest of all was stitched in place over his mouth, a wide-open boney maw on stretched, yellowing leather, hash marks crossed off, impossibly large, between the ink black teeth of the skull.
I collapsed to my knees, the life knocked out of me. It couldn’t be.
Where is she? I wanted to scream.
Everything about my voice wavered, desperate and afraid.
Of course, he couldn’t talk, his mouth covered by what had been Natasha’s left shoulder blade. He only motioned out to the smoky haze of the pit beyond the walls. He walked up and put his hand on my shoulder.
What did you do to her?
He stared at me with those empty eyes. Holding his Kalashnikov to his side, he raised his empty hand to his temple and pulled a mock trigger. He stretched his jaw and ripped the stitching around his mouth. Some of us are… weak.
Weak.
The word echoed in my head. My syestra was not weak. Our blood was not weak.
Weak.
Blood.
I stared at the jagged scars covering his face, his neck, every spot protected but one.
If it bleeds…
Before he could react, I stabbed my knife upward into the single soft spot under his chin.
Two hours later, that skin was scraped of fat, oil, and hair, a new piece of armor to wear out and find my sister’s corpse.
Van Dam’s medkit needle bit into my skin. The pain was everything I needed, and the blood welling up the only color left in the world.
Jonathan Gensler (he/him) grew up in a haunted house in West Virginia. He has stories in Cosmic Horror Monthly, OnSpec Magazine, and Creepy Pod, among other venues. An Army combat veteran and recovering entrepreneur, he now lives in the Rocky Mountains with his wife and three children. You can connect with him online at jonathangensler.com.
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