Free Devil's Thumb by S. M. Schmitz Page A

to erupt into explosive chaos. Like every other city they’d been to in Bosnia, Srebrenica was teeming with demons, but they had no idea yet how bad it would get.
    It was early July now, and the hot humid weather was doing nothing to help the starving and sickly inhabitants of this city. Anna and Colin had come to save souls, but found themselves trying desperately to save bodies instead. In one of the few miracles they would ever experience and would only ever talk about one time since those traumatic days in Bosnia, they walked the streets of Srebrenica with a single bottle of water that never emptied and a single backpack with several MREs that were always there, no matter how many people they handed them to. Anna and Colin would never know how many of those people survived the next few weeks anyway.
    They had just stopped to help a woman and her child when they heard the shelling in the southern part of the city. Everyone froze and stared at the sky like it would promise them it had only been in their imaginations. But the next barrage assured them it was real.
    Neither Anna nor Colin could speak Bosnian. They’d picked up a few words while hunting here so Colin used one of the only words he knew and told the woman, “Hurry!” and gestured toward a flat squat building with a deep basement where others were running to try to find someplace safe. The child had started to cry.
    Colin and Anna weren’t worried about mortar attacks. As thousands of people pushed their way toward the center of the city, away from the southern barrages, Colin and Anna fought against the swarm of bodies and headed south. They had no real purpose in heading toward the Serbs; they couldn’t stop them, they couldn’t stop this war, they were powerless. But they were furious and there was only one way to take out their anger: by finding as many demons as they could and killing them.
    They spent several exhausting days fighting almost non-stop. But on the fourth day, everything changed. The small Muslim force that had been defending the city was defeated and the road to Srebrenica lay open: the Serbian army advanced into the heart of the Bosnian refugee town and began separating the men from the women and children. Anna and Colin could do nothing but watch with a sickening dreadful premonition of what was to come.
    Thousands of men were led out of Srebrenica on a march many wouldn’t survive, but thousands of others stayed in the city while the women and children were put on buses and sent away. Anna and Colin didn’t know where they were being sent. For the most part, the O’Conners were left alone by the Serbian army because they assured them they weren’t journalists and had simply gotten trapped here when the war started. It wasn’t a very convincing lie, but the soldiers had more pressing matters on their minds than a couple of western Europeans who didn’t seem to be causing any trouble.
    Over the next week, Colin and Anna learned the intended fates of those Muslim men, or some of them just boys, who had been separated from their wives and children, their mothers and sisters. And it was then that Srebrenica became a Hell on Earth.
    Anna and Colin had never been so frightened. Demons oozed from every orifice in the city, every window and doorway and every drain on the street. They clung to the broken street lamps and telephone poles, dangled from signs and metal support beams jutting from gutted buildings. These weren’t like stray cats picking through the litter on the streets now; they overran the city, crowding the roads and sidewalks and communicating in some shrieking warbling cacophony that sent chills through both Colin and Anna.
    They had backed inside a building to hide from the onslaught of demons invading the city. While most of the humans here were either hiding from the Serbian army or were part of the army rounding up civilians to either pack them onto buses or massacre them, Colin and Anna held each other’s hands and