Red drops his axe and allows himself a moment to sag in exhaustion before he starts triaging. Magda’s injury is clearly the worst – a deep, ragged wound that’s pulsing blood from a nick in her brachial artery. The physician gently takes the empty P7 from her good hand and starts tourniqueting.
Leks organizes some help and manages to get Minka back on her feet. She’s hobbling on a crushed foot, but it’s not life-threatening. She checks Alexei as he stirs and moans. The East German has a few broken ribs, but he, too, appears likely to live.
Minka looks around. Red seems to have the Magda situation in hand. Her eyes fix on Miko as he saunters up, wiping blood off his recently-acquired szabla. “Miko. Help me over there.” She points.
Miko looks at Minka. Looks where she’s pointing. Looks back at her. “Are you sure you want to get close to that?”
Minka grabs his collar and pulls him in. “He’s. Still. My. Horse,” she snarls.
Wiegel is down with hideous wounds from the other horse eaters’ claws and teeth, but he’s still twitching. As Minka approaches with Miko’s support, one eye rolls open and fixes on her. Minka slumps down next to him and the great fanged face swings over to rest in her lap. There’s an audible crackle as his broken foreleg shifts. Minka looks up expressionlessly at Arkadi, who’s come over to watch and is very carefully keeping his hands away from his slung carbine. “He’s burning up.”
Arkadi watches structures rearrange themselves under Wiegel’s skin and tries not to think about conversations he’s overheard regarding the things Red says are in his own bloodstream now. “If he’s like us… he’s burning a lot of calories to heal now.”
Wiegel grunts and rolls away from Minka. The maneuver puts him in reach of one of the other horse eater carcasses. He stretches his neck and tears a bite out of the other animal’s flesh. Chewing noisily and messily, he nuzzles his human.
Red is having a much harder time keeping Magda alive. Despite his best efforts, the bleeding won’t stop. It’s as if every suture opens another tiny wound somewhere else. What should have been a relatively quick procedure stretches nearly twelve hours, even with assistance from Minka and anyone else with a free hand and a spare moment.
[Red’s player rolled three or four sets of double 1s over the course of this session. The final one was on his first Medical Aid roll to stabilize Magda’s crit from a shift. The team has enough luck and medical support that they don’t often have to make Stamina rolls to avoid bleeding out, but this was one of those nights.]
“Miko.” Leks shifts painfully from his seat in the handcart. He’s broken down the MG3, heavily abused during the fight, and is critically examining its innards. His Saiga, reloaded, is propped up beside him with a fresh magazine locked into the well, ready in case anything else starts moving again. “Start gathering fuel.” His suspicious frown at the scattered bodies is a reliable indicator of his plans.
The teenager nods. “Yeah. Just as soon as I check for anything lootable.”
Red doesn’t look up from Magda’s arm. “Nerve. Agent.”
“… right. I’ll just start collecting wood.”
Alexei pushes himself to his feet. “Um. Decapitate before we burn,” he suggests, looking a bit greenish at the suggestion. “And find salt.”
Arkadi pulls a thermite grenade from his web gear and waggles it suggestively.
At the end of the fight, the team’s medical status was:
- Red: 3/4 health remaining, 6/6 stress remaining
- Alexei: 2/5 hits (was incapacitated), 2/5 stress, broken ribs crit
- Arkadi: 6/6 hits, 4/4 stress
- Leks: 3/5 hits, 5/5 stress, shattered knee crit
- Magda: 2/5 hits, 2/5 stress, arterial bleeding arm crit
- Miko: 3/5 hits, 4/5 stress
- Minka: 1/5 hits (was incapacitated), 1/5 stress, crushed toes crit
- Zenobia: 5/5 hits, 4/5 stress
The Ponikla crew is not as heavy on combat capability as the expedition team is. Leks, Arkadi, and Miko are the heavy hitters for this group, and Leks being turned into a turret with that knee crit had the potential to be very disruptive. I warned the players at the beginning of the assault on Horse Eater Hill that this was a high-risk session. This may be the worst beating the PCs have taken to date.
With Leks and Minka immobilized and Red tied up keeping Magda alive, it falls to Miko, Arkadi, Zenobia, and the Jablonski cousins to make sure the area is secure and all their opponents are truly down. Alexei helps where he can, but his broken ribs reduce him to light duty, so Leks points out a good sentry position. “Sit your ass there and shoot anything that comes at us.”
The scope of the task quickly becomes apparent. “Burn the bodies” is a solid concept, but arranging that for eleven horse carcasses, eight or nine dog cadavers, and seven or eight dead Russians is a task that will require more strong, healthy backs. Leks reluctantly rallies the Jablonskis and endures the teeth-gritting trip back down the hill to where Captain Majewski and the Rawa Mazowiecka militia are laagered with both groups’ vehicles.
The Jablonskis’ report to their CO is a bit incoherent, in the usual manner of people who’ve recently emerged from the mind-fog to confront one of the things that’s gone profoundly wrong with the world. Majewski skeptically cross-checks their stories with Leks (and, Leks notes with some amusement, cross-checks his story with that of the Jablonskis). His men appear physically unharmed, though, and Leks is clearly injured, so he has little reason to believe this is some sort of convoluted ruse or ambush. He issues orders to the other sergeant who’s along for the ride, gathers a rifle squad and his two aides for backup, and heads up the hill to see for himself.
Zenobia is all too happy to give the captain a tour of the battlefield, complete with color commentary. Majewski spends a minute vomiting, another few minutes swearing, then gets down to business. He’s entirely on board with the team’s plan to delete the village with fire. Would they like some help with that? Yes. Yes, they would. He detaches half his rifle squad to take a message back down the hill for a motorcycle courier. He’s calling in his wife (remember, she’s the head of the Rawa Mazowiecka town council), the rest of the council, and about half the remaining militia manpower. And he’s asking them to bring shovels, axes, road flares, and all the alcohol fuel the community can spare.
Arkadi clears his throat at that. “I have a suggestion…”