The Kid from Hell Chapter 1 - Welcome to the War Zone
Chapter 1 hits you like a punch. No slow setup, no worldbuilding lectures. You are dropped straight into mud, smoke, and a young soldier named Gack who has zero patience for the mess he just walked into.
The Swamp Village Nobody Asked For
Gack and his commander Leopard arrive at some forgotten village in the middle of nowhere. Swamp on the left, swamp on the right, round windowless houses on stilts, and a smell that could knock you out. The whole place has been rotting for a thousand years and it shows.
But here’s the problem. This village is now a military position. And the soldiers holding it, the “porkies” (rear-service troops), are a complete disaster. Unshaved, no weapons in hand, wandering around like they’re at a county fair. Gack is disgusted. These are bakers, scribes, and quartermasters thrown together into something that barely qualifies as a fighting unit.
Baron Tregg - The Real Soldier
At a medical station, they meet Baron Tregg, a wounded brigade major. And this guy is the real deal. Scorched by a flamethrower, bandaged head, blood clotting on his face like pitch. But his eyes are furious. He’s been fighting all the way from the pass, burning enemy tanks, retreating through continuous combat.
Tregg tells them his entire unit, the Eighteenth Detached, has been wiped out. He burned about twenty tanks himself, the last two right at the village outskirts. He’s delirious, coughing blood, but still asking for cigarettes and demanding someone report to headquarters.
So here’s what happened that really got me. Leopard leaves his cigarette case and lighter next to the baron’s hand. The baron’s fingers close around it like a lifeline. No words. Just that small gesture. The Strugatskys could pack more emotion into one paragraph than most writers manage in a chapter.
And the thing Gack and Leopard can’t tell him? The relief brigade, Gagrida’s unit, was already destroyed by carpet bombing the night before. They spent hours clearing the road of body parts. All they found of the general was a cap stiff with blood.
Getting Ready for the Storm
Leopard takes over. And I mean takes over. He sends the useless staff major running, gets the porkies digging new positions, sets up defenses. The contrast between Leopard’s quiet efficiency and the chaos around him is something else. He measures a strike across the face of two arguing soldiers like he’s lining up a billiard shot. Cold. Precise.
Gack gets assigned to a rocket launcher position with some porkies as his crew, his “cockroaches.” He slams one in the ear, boots another, and they finally start working “almost like real people.” This kid is brutal and he knows it.
Meanwhile Gack captures four enemy prisoners, “rat-eaters” in their striped uniforms. He marches them off single file. Two of them throw up from fear. He hates prisoners on principle. What kind of person goes to war and ends up captured? That’s his thinking, anyway. He’s young and he sees the world in very simple categories.
The Battle
Then the tanks come. Four columns wide, crawling out of the forest, spitting fire. No warning. Gack gets knocked flat by the first barrage before he even hears a shot. The village burns. His cockroaches pile up in a ditch. The field kitchen overturns and slop oozes out in a steaming brown stream.
The battle scenes come in fragments, which is exactly how real combat feels. One moment Gack is firing his rocket launcher. Next moment he has a knife in his hand and someone is thrashing at his feet. Time jumps forward. He sets a tank on fire. Then there’s a brief lull, porkies gathered around him, someone handing him a canteen.
And then - the flamethrower hits him. Just like Baron Tregg. Liquid fire, smack in the face. Everything burns. The corpses, the ground, the launcher, and Gack himself. He’s looking for a pool of water, remembering the prisoners he put in a puddle earlier. But there’s no pool. The earth itself is burning.
The Mysterious Figure
Right before the final hit, Gack notices something strange. Against the flaming village, about thirty paces away, a black silhouette. Standing while everyone else is lying or sitting. Naked. No uniform, no overcoat. Just a bare dark figure in the middle of a battlefield.
“Rabbit, who is that over there?” Gack asks. “I don’t know, I’m not Rabbit,” someone answers.
That image stays with you. In a chapter full of fire, mud, and death, the Strugatskys slip in this one weird detail that tells you this story is going somewhere unexpected. This is not just a war novel. Something else is happening here.
My Take
Here’s the thing about this chapter. The Strugatskys wrote one of the most visceral first-person war narratives I’ve ever read, and it’s from the perspective of a kid who is basically a child soldier in an elite unit. Gack is violent, loyal, simple-minded about enemies and allies, and completely fearless. He reminds me of those young soldiers from real conflicts who were too young to understand what they were part of.
The worldbuilding is brilliant because it’s invisible. You pick up that this is some other planet, some alien war, through details like “rat-eaters” and “Fighting Cats” and houses on stilts. But the emotions are totally human. Fear, disgust, loyalty, that quiet gesture with the cigarette case.
And that naked black figure at the end? That’s your hook for chapter 2.
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