The Last Romanov (Under Editing)

The Fall of St. Petersburg

Sasha Kozlov was going to die.

That was a realization the young sergeant came to realize as he sat in his trench in the freezing cold, his ears ringing from the artillery barrage. The Czech army had arrived a few days before, and they'd been laying siege on St. Petersburg ever since. They weren't prepared for it, even though the Romanov princess and her little band of Czechs had been invading the country for a month at that point. They'd started to really ration out the food that morning in the trench: all he had to eat for the day was a small loaf of bread, the one he held in his numb, frozen fingers. He probably should've died of the cold at that point, but there he still was, listening to the Czechs get closer and closer to their position, just waiting for them to run into the trenches and kill them all. Needless to say, it wasn't a good feeling; it wasn't a good feeling at all.

He held his rationed bread and his rifle close to his chest and let out a shaky breath, condensation drifting out like cigarette smoke. He should've held his hand out for target practice a long time ago; maybe he'd be in a field hospital somewhere instead of stuck here if he had.

And as awful as those places were, it sure as hell beat sitting in a trench, going deaf from artillery, waiting to die.

"What's going to happen to us if we surrender?" one of the men sitting in the trench with him asked. Well, man probably wasn't the right word for it: the kid was eighteen, tops. He didn't even look old enough to be shaving for God's sake, and he was probably going to get killed out here. He hoped that the Czechs were merciful enough to send his mother his corpse when they were done with him. "A-are they going to kill us all?"

"What the hell do you think, Yuri?" One of the other men snorted. It was a corporal that Sasha didn't really know that well. Whoever he was, this definitely wasn't his first fight: at least half of his body was cyborg parts, and the half that was human was pockmarked and scarred to hell. He didn't know what this bastard did to get drafted into the army, but whatever it was, it had to have been pretty terrible. "Do you really think that our precious Czarina over in those other trenches is going to see this sorry lot of bastards and have mercy? I think we ought to pray that they'll end it quickly."

Sasha slugged him in the shoulder in an attempt to get him to shut the hell up. Thank goodness, it worked: if it hadn't, he was pretty sure that poor Yuri over there would burst into tears.

"Don't listen to him," he said encouragingly. "We're going to be alright: I'd think that she'd want to show a little mercy, show us that she isn't going to make the same mistakes her father did. Sure, there'll be a punishment for going with the Bolsheviks when all is said and done, but I'm sure they'll send us all back home when they're done."

He hoped that this new Romanov would prove him more correct than the last one-

Something landed in the trench and exploded.

Sasha grunted as he was thrown against the side of the trench, his vision going white for a moment. He thought he heard someone shouting past the ringing in his ears, but he couldn't understand what they were saying. The only thing he really noticed was the way everything suddenly burned.

Suddenly, everything made sense, and it sure as hell wasn't the good time.

"Gas attack!" Sasha yelled as loud as he could as the chlorine gas filled the trench around him.

That was all he could get out. Everything began to burn: his skin, his eyes; and, especially, his lungs.

Frantically, he yanked on his gasmask, gasping for air that wasn't filled with chlorine. He could hardly breathe; he hadn't breathed in that much gas, and already, he found himself gagging and choking on air. He found himself stumbling around in the trench, his eyes watering from the exposure as he tried to get his bearings, again. Yuri and the other man were both crawling along the bottom of the trench gasping, vomiting; they didn't have much longer if they didn't hurry and get their gasmasks on.