Zhukov's Dogs

by Amanda Cyr

  “Don’t play coy with me. I make a living off seeing through faces like yours,” Dr. Halliburton sounded insulted that I’d even tried to deny the truth.

  I wasn’t willing to admit anything so easily, especially not with how many people were probably watching the feed from the camera in the corner. “Look, you’ve got it all wrong,” I told her.

  “Have I?”

  “Yes. Val and I were just friends.”

  “Val, come on. Up,” I said, giving the bed a kick as I walked into the room with a cup of coffee in each hand. The lump under the mass of blankets growled and rolled toward me. Of all the things I’d ever assumed about Val, I never guessed he’d be so grumpy in the morning. A hand extended from under the blanket to hang off the side of the bed. I laughed and set one of the mugs in it. Val’s head poked out a second later, blond hair sticking out in all directions. He smiled up at me groggily and made a soft hum I recognized by now as one of appreciation.

  “We had a mutual respect for each other and a strong friendship. It never developed into anything more,” I insisted.

  Shadows slanted over long stretches of scarred, beautifully pale skin slick with sweat. There was a perfect curve to his spine as he arced against me, and my fingers dug bruises into his hips; I’d admire them in the morning. His hands tangled in the sheets while my name was sinfully slurred out on broken breaths.

  My mind indulged in the memories I’d never say out loud, but I didn’t let them trip up my lies. If anything, thinking about the private moments I spent with Val compelled me to be even more cautious.

  The doctor stared at me for a moment. My poker face had fooled people more skilled and persuasive than her. She tilted her had to one side as though studying me from a different angle would make a difference. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Dr. Halliburton hummed a single note and reached for the purse at her feet. She took her phone out, clicked through the screens, and brought it to her ear. A horrible dread nestled in the pit of my stomach and pulled all the muscles in my body taught. Instinct told me something was very wrong.

  “Hello again, Howard,” purred the doctor.

  Every single nerve surged to life, burning with electricity in anticipation of fight-or-flight. I clenched my fists under the table and stared her straight in the eye. She wanted to get a rise out of me, something to confirm her suspicion Val was more than a friend. I was doing a good job of keeping a blank face until she smiled, batted her eyes at me, and said, “Kill him.”

  Something snapped.

  My hands hooked under the table, and I jumped to my feet. The table flipped over with a piercing screech of metal as everything laid on it flew into the air. Dr. Halliburton screamed. Folders and paperwork rained down, but all I saw was the magenta phone slipping from her grip.

  The Grey Man charged toward me. I grabbed the back of the chair I’d been sitting in and swung it up, one of the legs tearing across the giant’s face. He staggered away with a beastly groan. I tossed the chair aside and spun back around. The phone. I needed to get to the doctor’s phone. I spotted it, half hidden by the mess on the floor, and I dove for it with both hands.

  My knees slid through paperwork as my fingers closed around the device. The magenta home screen taunted me. She must have hung up. I jabbed at the display, hands shaking as I tried to call Howard back before it was too late. Christ, what could I even do from here? I couldn’t stop Howard from five floors away, but I had to do something.

  That was when I saw the phone’s call history. Dr. Halliburton hadn’t phoned Howard. It had all been a trick.

  Behind me, the door burst open. Shouts of dogs, clicks of guns, and the quiet tsking of Dr. Halliburton’s tongue were muffled by the pounding in my head. My shoulders were too heavy to keep back. I hunched forward over my knees, head hung and face burning. The phone slipped from my hands right before someone grabbed me by the hair on the back of my head and threw me to the ground. I shut my eyes, resigning myself to whatever happened next.

  Somewhere, time was happening. Probably. I couldn’t tell anymore, and I didn’t care one bit whether or not it left me behind.

  “We’re not through, gentlemen,” Dr. Halliburton said as faceless dogs started to drag me out of the room. They stopped in their tracks and exchanged uncertain murmurs over my head. I opened my eyes and saw the Grey Man setting the table and chairs back in order. The giant didn’t even stop to attend to the bleeding gash on his face; he just cleaned up the room like the doctor told him to.

  I shook my head. “Forget it.”

  “Should I place a call to Howard for real, then?” She picked up her phone and held it out to me. “Maybe hearing him scream again will change your mind about cooperating.”

  Thinking about the pain Dr. Halliburton could cause Val, and how callously she held it over my head, made me furious. All at once, the depression weighing me down gave way to a gut wrenching rage. “I’ve been telling you everything!” I shouted.

  She stepped closer, closing all her fingers around the phone except for one, which she pointed less than an inch from my face. Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “Then tell me this, and tell me truthfully, or I will make you listen to him die! What is Val Grey to you, Zhukov?”

  I didn’t take kindly to threats. I especially didn’t take kindly to threats involving people I cared about. Bound, injured, and greatly outnumbered, though, there wasn’t much I could do other than give the doctor my most honest answer.

  “He’s the person I’m going to kill all of you to get to.”

  Dr. Halliburton’s face fell. One of the dogs holding me back faltered, and the other tensed up. Bound, injured, and greatly outnumbered, I was still a force to be reckoned with. Traitor or not, my reputation was a promise that nobody in the room would be able to keep Val from me.

  My lips drew back into a smile befitting someone gone mad. The pain in my fractured ribs seemed suspended far away by the adrenaline coursing through my veins. I lunged at the doctor. She gasped and took a quick half step away. The dogs holding me back tightened their restraints.

  “Take him to solitary and have him sedated,” Dr. Halliburton ordered one of the dogs behind me, a small hitch in her breath. “Let him cool down for a few hours before we try this again.”

  257 Second Avenue East—Seattle, WA

  Wednesday, November 11th, 2076—2:42 a.m.

  wasted no time in the shower when Val and I made it to base. The water was lukewarm for less than a minute before turning cold. I scrubbed off the smell of the canal and hopped out quickly. I dressed in the spare clothes I’d packed, a striped, blue-and-white sweater and jeans, and wrung as much water out of my hair as I could.

  When I got back to my room, I found Tibbs snoring loudly. There weren’t enough bedrooms in the house for all the revolutionaries to have their own, and he had been the first to offer to share. I grabbed the phone off my bed and ducked out into the hall.

  This late at night, no one was awake to catch me as I snuck into the war room. I shut the door behind me, turned on the light, and switched out the memory card in the back of my phone. It beeped back to life with all the old contacts and data in place again. I clicked through into a camera program specially designed by the Y.I.D. to take pictures, transfer them to a secure folder on my computer in D.C., and then wipe any trace of them from my phone afterwards. It was every dog’s best friend on missions like this one.

  Quickly, I took pictures of the table from different angles, of the shot glasses labeling base locations, and of the red x’s with dates and numbers by them. I searched through the drawers under the table for some sort of key to make sense of the x’s. Nothing. If I was going to figure out their meaning, I’d have to ask one of the revolutionaries.

  I prowled through the bookshelves, checked behind the framed posters of the solar system, and even tapped the walls in search of dummy compartments. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the room, though, not even a creaky floorboard. Honestly, I wa
s a bit disappointed there was nothing exciting. I made sure to put everything back as it was before shutting off the light and letting myself out.

  The hall was still empty and quiet like I’d left it, but there was something different about it. The faint smell of nicotine. I sniffed the air and followed the scent to an open window at the end of the hall. I stuck my head out and saw Val sitting on the porch steps in front of the house, the cherry of his cigarette gleaming brightly as he took a drag from it.

  What was Val doing up at almost three in the morning? As tired as I was, I couldn’t pass up the chance to learn more about him and his team of troublemakers. I swapped the memory card again in my phone as I made my way downstairs. By the time I stepped onto the front porch, my phone was safely tucked into my pocket, and I was trustworthy Nik Maslow again.

  “You’re still up?”

  Val jumped, nearly dropping his cigarette. I laughed and apologized for sneaking up on him. He waved the apology off as he settled back in against the banister. “Yeah, well, insomnia is a side effect of stress.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that. I’m sort of the president of insomnia-ville,” I said, sitting down on the stairs across from him.

  “Insomnia-ville, huh? Sounds like a nice place.” Val chuckled. “Don’t get much sleep working for the Bloc?”

  I shook my head. “If I’m not helping organize a riot, I’m busy with a hundred papers for school.”

  Val brought the cigarette back to his mouth. He took a long pull from it before tapping the ashes off its end. A small pile had accumulated on the step below, along with two, ground-out cigarette butts.

  “Something on your mind?” I asked.

  “My fingers aren’t tapping,” Val replied, holding up all ten where I could see them. I gave a pointed look at the cigarette butts. Val sighed and tilted his gaze up toward the sky-like ceiling.

  For the next few minutes, we just sat there, silently watching the galaxies created by the city’s flickering lights swirl overhead. Val took another drag of smoke. I waited patiently. When he finished and ground the cigarette out next to the others, I asked, “Want to talk about it?”

  “I’m just… I don’t know, Nik. A lot on my mind,” Val said, shoulders sagging forward as he wrung his hands over them. His eyes slid out of focus on the cigarette butts between his feet, his toes curled against the concrete. This was a drastically different person from the bratty revolutionary leader I’d met before.

  “Tristan?”

  Val gave a single nod. I tried to wrap my mind around the situation, understand it enough to offer up some kind of comforting advice. He spoke before I could. “It’s just hard, you know. Finding someone.”

  “There are other guys out there. You can do better than that douchebag.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You’re new here. Seattle’s not too big on the whole gay thing, Nik. It’s one of those good ‘ol wholesome, narrow-minded communities.” Val scowled. To call the words bitter would be the greatest of understatements. He reached for the pack of cigarettes at his side and tried to shake one out into his hand. The pack was empty, though, and he ended up tossing it over his shoulder onto the porch with a frustrated huff.

  “Being gay can’t be that—”

  Val raised a finger to interrupt me. “No offense, Nik, but unless you plan on taking me to bed, I really don’t want to hear what you have to say about it.”

  The forwardness didn’t trip me up one bit. I leaned toward him with a smile, my voice low and as serious as I could make it as I said, “I thought you said I wasn’t your type.”

  Val threw his head back, and we both laughed out loud. “Wait, shh! People are sleeping. We can’t laugh,” he said between snickers. It took us several seconds to calm down. Val shook his head, still grinning even as he said, “You’re kind of a jerk.”

  “Only kind of,” I said in my defense.

  Val shook his head once more and pulled his knees near his chest. He drummed his thumbs together on his stomach to a rhythm only he could place, his eyes soft and a tired smile on his face. “You’re going to be more trouble than you’re worth with that kind of attitude.”

  He didn’t even know the half of it. “Don’t worry. You won’t even notice I’m here.”

  “Too late for that.”

  Val might’ve slipped the unexpected words out like a sigh, but I heard them and their meaning loud and clear. I was getting hit on by a guy. It was definitely a new one for me. Part of me was flattered to know I could attract both men and women. The other part cringed when I thought about what others would think.

  I was just getting over the shock when Val, wearing the same lazy smile, said, “We should try and sleep. Busy day tomorrow and all.”

  The sudden turns our conversation kept taking made my head hurt. Once my mind wrapped around it all three more times I chuckled and reached up to rub my brow. “You’re just going to drop the ‘I think you’re cute’ line and then change the subject to sleeping?”

  “I’m kind of a jerk, too,” Val tossed back as he got to his feet and stretched his arms up to relieve the tension in his shoulders. Without another word, he headed into the house, leaving me on the porch, grinning like a fool by myself. A warm, vaguely familiar, heaviness was building in my chest.

  How long had it been since I’d allowed myself to indulge in advances like that? Longer than I cared to admit, but not nearly as long as some of the dogs I knew. There was something strange about the brief exchange with Val, though. It lasted less than ten seconds; it should not have been so exhilarating.

  A vibrating in my pocket ripped me from my cozy daze. Like a switch had flipped in my mind, I was in work mode again. I pulled my phone out and saw the text from Aiden. It was a coded message which translated to confirmation of receiving the pictures. It was also a reminder I still had work to do.

  I considered ignoring everything until morning. It was late and, given I was still on east coast time, I’d been up for just over twenty-four hours. As I shut my phone and started to get up, though, I spotted the cigarette butts ground out on the porch steps. I replayed the last few minutes with Val again. Suddenly, taking the time to write up some notes seemed like a good idea, if only to help keep my mind off the way Val’s eyes softened and his smile curled up wryly.

  I managed to type out details I’d learned about the revolutionaries for fifteen minutes before my vision teetered out of focus. It was nearing four in the morning when I sent the notes to D.C. I swapped my memory cards again as I stumbled into the house, up the stairs, and into bed. The mattress groaned under my weight as I collapsed onto it.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, I dragged my hands through my hair and down my face. I laughed quietly into them when I thought about the hellish, long day I’d had. There was nothing funny about it, really. This mission was supposed to be simple, and yet somehow, it was already shaping up to be one of the more stressful ones of the year.

  And what about Val? Was he just kidding around, or was he actually interested in me? If he was, what was I supposed to do? Since I’d never been attracted to another boy, let alone anyone lately with how busy I’d been, I found myself struggling to make sense of it all.

  It’s just harmless fun, I told myself while shedding my jeans and sweater. I was too tired to stay up all night, wasting energy on silly things like relationships. I crawled under the blankets and pulled them up to my chin to block out the chill in the room. I slipped into a dreamless sleep almost the instant my head hit the pillow.

  In the days that followed the mission at Governor Granne’s home, I learned a lot from, and about, the revolutionaries of Seattle. As indicated by the shot glasses on the war map, there were four different bases. 257 Second Avenue East acted as the main headquarters, and Val kept it running like a well-oiled machine. He also seemed determined not to mention anything about our late night conversation on the porch or make another pass at me.

  I was perfectly fine with that. The last thing I needed was a dis
traction. Every second of my days were spent studying and building a profile for each of the revolutionaries I met. There were only seven of us living in the base on Second Avenue, not including the three children. I’d been told the other bases each housed anywhere from six to ten people.

  The eldest in the house was a twenty-two-year-old bald man whose nose I’d nearly broken during an impromptu wrestling tournament hosted by the children. Benjamin Jaros, known to others as Benji, was a peaceful man, responsible for all the detailed maps and blueprints of the city.

  “How’d you get access to these places, Benji?” I asked one afternoon while Fritzi and I helped him go through the ones archived in the library.

  Benji adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses with a smile. “I’ve got a way of winning people over.”

  I looked him up and down, wondering how a nerdy guy like him managed to intimidate anyone. Benji read the confusion in my face and laughed. “Oh, I don’t beat them up or anything,” he said. “I’ve got other tricks.”

  “Like blackmail?”

  He laughed harder and dusted his hands off in front of him. On the third clap, a poof of black smoke rose from between them. I was convinced my eyes were playing tricks on me until Benji waved a hand through the smoke and pulled a dried rose out of thin air.

  I gave him a small round of applause, and Benji bowed like he’d just performed for an actual audience. I chuckled at the dramatic flourish he put into it. “So, you’re a magician?”

  “I might have dabbled in the circus for a few years,” Benji said with a nostalgic sounding sense of vagueness.

  “Nice one, Houdini. Now, how about you stop showing off and actually help us,” Fritzi said from across the room. She was elbow-deep in a trunk of maps, and her arms were covered in dust from them.

  “Christ!” She scowled, slamming her hand against the side of the trunk. “Why aren’t these organized better? If someone just bothered to put them in some kind of order, we’d be able to find things when we need them.” She cut her eyes up at Benji, who actually seemed to shrink in on himself.