Article 5: Field notes of Dr. Boris Gannibal

April 24th, 1970

Massive amounts of gunfire last night, more than any night before. It was maybe 2330, maybe 2345. All of a sudden, massive gunfire. Machine guns, rifles, shotguns. Then maybe ten, twenty seconds after it started, it started to falter, like an orchestra when the musicians finish tuning their instruments. Finally a flare lit up the sky, bright red, and after that came the mortars. They hammered the woods north of town, a heavy bombardment. I asked the soldiers what happened, but they just said it was a regular training exercise. I didn’t believe them, so I bribed one about 80 rubles. It seems that’s the going price for insubordination, because he had no trouble showing me where it happened. Once he did he hurried back, but wouldn’t say why. As I approached I saw the bombed out husks of a UAZ-469 truck and a halftrack, both surrounded by charred corpses. Spent casings and magazines everywhere, along with the corpses. All of the bodies around the vehicles, what I assume was the infantry support, were torn limb from limb. At first I thought they were blown apart in the bombardment, but on examining them it appears they were dismembered before the mortars fell. The corpses had ragged lacerations and scratches on their flesh and bones, like they were attacked by some wild animal. There were charred bones scattered about, which I originally thought were from the soldiers, as they were far too twisted to come from any natural body. Some of the skeletons seemed animal, some humanoid. Not human, there was no way they could be human, but humanoid. It was if you melted bones until they were soft, then handed them to a toddler who pulled and twisted them until they looked like something that looks like a creature. There seemed to be two types, one both ursine and lupine in form, the other humanoid, hunchbacked, with long claws and fangs. Nothing remained of them but charred bones, almost as if their flesh burned with greater intensity than that of a human. Even their bones crumbled into powder when I brushed against them trying to examine the truck. The top half of rear machine gunner slumped against the interior of the bed. A second soldier lay inside, and I’m still not sure which body was in worse condition. The driver had been pulled through the shattered, blood splattered windscreen. A machine pistol was clutched in his one remaining hand, not that it seemed to do him any good. The crew of the halftrack didn’t make it either. It’s armor was covered in claw marks, deep scratches in the steel underneath the soot. Still, I held out hope that the driver was still alive. The cabin seemed intact aside from a large dark bloodstain on the right door, an umber teardrop that pointed to a severed arm on the ground, still in the sleeve of it’s uniform, flesh and cloth both charred. The hand was missing two fingers, the remaining digits wrapped tight around a spent flare gun. That confirmed my suspicions. But why would they shell their own convoy? Was it a last-ditch effort against being completely surrounded and overrun? I hammered on the door, but no response. There were no windows, just slits in the armor for me to peer through. The passenger, apparently the radioman, was slumped over. It looked like he bled out from his severed arm. The driver was laid over the wheel, the back of his head blown out. Self-inflicted. It was then that I heard shuffling behind me. There was a figure coming towards me from the forest, maybe thirty meters away. At first I saw it’s tattered shirt, vest, and trousers and mistook it for a gypsy. Then I saw the black, diseased flesh tearing through the cloth, the claws at the ends of dangling arms, much too long for it’s body, the misshapen skull with two black eyes above a jaw that was unhinged like a snake. It--and I’m certain it was an ‘it’, that thing wasn’t human--let out a rattling cry, like the last breath of a dying man, and charged. I shot it five times in the chest with my pistol, but that didn’t faze it at all. It just kept coming. My sixth went wide, filling the air with splinters where it hit a tree. The seventh hit it in the neck, inky blood spraying out. The eighth impacted at the base of its right eye socket, taking bone and brain matter with it as the slide locked back empty. The creature took a few staggering, drunken steps and collapsed, onyx ichor pooling beneath it. I reloaded, of course, but it seemed that whatever it was, it was alone. I took a quick look at it, the body was heavily diseased, mutated even. The eye was black, the pupil spilling over, engulfing everything.