“These are for the patients’ lunch and dinner,” I said. “You have to leave us enough to feed them today until we can get more food.”
“You’ll have to find another way to manage, or they can go without.” He grabbed the basket of eggs out of my hand but it tipped. One fell out and broke, spattering both of us. I wished I could throw the rest at him.
I heard a sharp, loud sound from the front of the building, and then another and another from the square. Blok’s face went pale. He dropped the basket and ran toward the front of the building. More sounds, a clattering type of noise, and I realized it was gunfire. My mouth went dry. Tanya wailed. “In here,” I said, grabbing her and shoving her into the pantry. “Stay here where it’s safe.”
I ran to the front to find the nurses crowded around the windows, clutching one another. Blok was at a window by himself. I moved so I could see people running in all directions. I took hold of Galina’s hand. “What’s happening?” I whispered. She didn’t answer.
The sound of gunfire continued and then the screaming started. As more people left the square, a grim sight emerged. Several bodies lay in the snow: men, women, and even children.
No one said a word. The horror of it turned to a numb feeling inside me. I knew it was real, but my mind wanted it not to be. I closed my eyes but couldn’t get rid of the scene. I didn’t realize I was crushing Galina’s hand until she made a whimpering sound.
“Look!” One of the nurses pointed at a building across the square. “There’s the gun.”
I opened my eyes to see two policemen crouched on the roof of the building and aiming a machine gun down at the square. It looked like they were trying to put more ammunition in, but as they worked on it, a group of men burst out of a door onto the roof and ran toward the gunners. The men all had red armbands on and were dressed as ordinary workmen. The gunner tried to swing the weapon around to aim at them, but the other men were too fast for him.
Some of them ripped the gun off its stand and then surrounded the two. I thought they were going to drag them off, but then the men picked up both policemen and carried them over to the edge of the building. The policemen struggled.
“No!” someone gasped.
The men threw the policemen over. They screamed all the way down.
I turned away, bile rising in my throat.
“Get out of my way.” I heard Blok’s voice. It had gone high and shaky. He was trying to get around the nurses to go back toward the kitchen.
“Coward!” I yelled. “Why are you sneaking out the back? The front door is right there. Let’s see you go out it. Be a brave man and walk around the bodies of children. Let the revolutionaries see you.”
He rushed over toward me and raised his hand as if he was going to slap me.
Galina stepped in front of him. “Go,” she ordered, grabbing hold of his wrist.
He shoved her out of the way and ran toward the kitchen.
“He won’t be back,” one of the other nurses said. “Now that a revolution has started, the police will pay for what they’ve done.”
“Look!” someone cried.
We went back to the windows. Black smoke billowed from the building across the square as the group of men who had been on the roof emerged from the door. The people who had run away when the shooting began flooded back into the square, cheering the men on.
“They want to make sure the police don’t regroup there,” Galina said. “But that’s not going to be enough.” She pointed to one of the streets that led to the square. Policemen were pulling another machine gun mounted on a wagon toward it. Other policemen were running into the square from all directions, their weapons drawn.
I spotted Carter and the photographer on the opposite side of the square. Carter stood in plain view, writing in his notebook as if there weren’t bullets flying around. He made a perfect target with his height and his hat. The photographer had had the sense to plant himself behind a parked automobile, though he was still visible as he leaned on the hood. I couldn’t understand why they wanted to be in the middle of such violence. I prayed both men would survive the day.
More shots sounded, and then we heard sharp thuds against the building. Bits of stone shot in all directions away from us.
“Get away from the windows!” Galina yelled, grabbing a nurse’s arm and pulling her back.
“Why are they shooting at us?” someone cried.
“They’re just shooting in all directions to get people out of the square,” I said, though I didn’t know if that was true. Everything was happening too fast.
When the crowd scattered again, we saw the people who had been hit. The injured tried to crawl away. The dead lay still, but the gunfire continued.
“There’s someone trying to get inside.” A nurse pointed out the window to the right. I looked out to see a woman dragging herself across the snow toward the hospital, blood staining the snow behind her.
Galina and I both headed toward the door.
I hadn’t realized Tanya had come in from the pantry until I heard her voice. “Galina, no! You can’t go out there,” she cried. “You’ll be cut down too. They don’t care who you are.”
“It’s only a few feet,” Galina said. “Lottie and I are quick. We can get out and get her back inside fast as can be.” She went over to the armoire where we kept some of the coats and grabbed two, tossing one to me. “Put this on and stay low.”
The woman was unconscious by the time we reached her. We tried dragging her by her arms but she was too heavy. “Help!” Galina yelled as two men ran by us. They ignored her. The gunfire continued. I tried to shut out the noise.
“Get her feet!” I shouted. “Maybe it will be easier to move her that way.”
“I can help,” a voice said. It sounded like Dmitri, but I didn’t understand why he’d be here. I looked up and saw it was really him.
Between the three of us we managed to get her inside, and once we had the door shut behind us, the other nurses took over.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Dmitri. The expression on his face was so grim, I felt sick. Something had to be very wrong. “Is my stepfather ill?”
He motioned for me to move away from the others. “It’s not the general. It’s Stepan. He’s missing. He was very upset because he overheard Archer talking about how we were all going to be slaughtered by the end of the day. I tried to convince him it wasn’t true, but he wanted to go out and see what was really happening.”
“How could you let him leave?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I ran to get my own coat.
Dmitri followed me. “Wait, Charlotte. I didn’t know he was going to leave. He said he wanted to go to his room. It was only later when Hap went looking for him that we realized he was gone.”
“What did Osip say? Surely he wouldn’t let him leave.”
“Osip didn’t see him, but Hap said his coat is gone too. No one saw him leave.”
I felt like my breath was being squeezed out of me. Stepan was too young to be out on the streets in all the chaos.
“I came here because I thought you might know where he would go,” Dmitri said.
I heard gunfire again, and then one of the windows shattered, bits of glass flying everywhere. Dmitri reached for me but I was already on the floor. More bullets hit the outside of the building.