Anton shivered and turned away from the mess as the gunmen began cleaning up. His modest moustache twitched as his nostrils caught a whiff of residual gunsmoke in the air. The gunmen commenced loading the corpses onto wheelbarrows and carts, to roll them off toward the woods, one by one.
“What a waste,” Anton murmured, watching a lush beard hanging over the side of a wheelbarrow, swaying in the wind. Pavel smiled faintly at him.
“It is a waste,” Anton insisted. He put his hand to the thick curls of hair curving back from his forehead, and frowned. “We do not have enough workers to spare that we can afford to shoot every last person who goes to church. The revolution needs live bodies, not dead ones.”
Pavel’s tilted his head away from his friend to survey the carnage. His comely, elfin-delicate face contorted as he spat, a fleck of the spittle sailing through the air to land next to a cloudy-blot of crimson on the shirt of one of the corpses.”
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