Author's Notes: This drabble was written a while ago but never posted here. It's a brief look into Stephen Saunders time with the Serbs. Mentions of Omarska and Prijedor are taken from actual events. Srecko Milankovic is a fictional character based on Zoran Zigic.

Seelenbelastung is a German phrase meaning "burdening of the soul". Used by the Germans during the Holocaust about the psychological toll killing by gun took on SS officers and the need for something less taxing.

Non-Fatal Wounds

The feeling of someone's breath against his neck was like a jolt.

Stephen snapped his head back, instinctively looking around, even though the hood over his head made it impossible to see. There was a snort of laughter at this, from his left, and the sound of heavy boots on the cement floor. His first thought was that it was Milanković and months ago this realization would have brought with it fear, anger, horror. Today it was just resignation.

Srečko Milanković had been famous for his cruelty as a guard at the Omarska, a camp where most guards prided themselves on their savgery. For the few moments it had made the news the camp had been compared to Auschwitz. The pictures of skeletal survivors, their sunken eyes starring beyond barbed wire fences into nothing seemed like remnant of an earlier time. But unlike Germans, the Serbians had little order and no need for efficency in their murder. They didn't worry about Seelenbelastung that could demoralize their men. Instead the guards delighted in the violence, preferring knives to guns, some petrol and a match to gas chambers. They seemed to feed off their victim's suffering, finding some sort of release in the blood and gore.

And Milanković, was the worst of them. Slaughtering his way through Prijedor, he was rumored to have killed hundreds of children. At Omarska, he specialized in keeping prisoners alive for weeks, beating their bruised and battered bodies and then keeping them alive because, "bullets were too good for them". If they didn't die from their wounds, they could die from starvation.

He felt rough hands on his shoulders, pushing him down to kneeling position and Stephen clenched his jaw as he sunk to the ground. They had questioned him a while ago, he wasn't sure of the day, asking him the same questions even though he told them everything, everything he knew. It had been three months since he broke, three months since he read his own obituarary in the newspaper and realized that he was dead to the world. There would be no one coming for him, they'd washed their hands of him.

Kneeling at an angle, he tried to keep his weight off his left leg. They had shattered his kneecap with a hammer last time. Stephen had thought that if nothing else, his screaming would annoy them enough that they'd waste the bullet on him. Wishful thinking. He never imagined he could crave death the way he did now, he had almost convinced himself ealier that they were going to kill him tonight. Rather, it was another move, keeping ahead of any Yugoslavian troops that might still be looking for them.

No, tonight it was another interrogation.

"Who do work for?"

Stephen barely recognized his own voice as he answered, "I've already told you everything I know." Just kill me already.

"I do not think so," Milanković said, an almost taunting tone to his voice. This reply was followed a burning pain between his shoulder blades as Milanković struck him with a braided cable that was designed to rip the skin with each strike.

Stephen's entire body teetered from the force of the blow, a relatively mild one compared to the ones that would follow. He trembled, gasping at the pain and willing to scream or beg or lie if it would just end.

"Who do you work for?"

But there's another thought somewhere in the back of his mind. One he doesn't dwell on because it's too much like hope for him but still remains. If he could survive this, if he could escape this and find these guards who who kept alive for their own amusement...

Another strike and he had to stable himself on both knees, the warm feeling of blood down his back and the hood almost suffocating as he panted from the pain. "Answer me!"

Don't wound what you can't kill.