by Alma Boykin
A faint sound like a distant storm reached his ears. Crap! Alexi hunted around until he found the length of old, frayed rope. “Right. Magical rope.” He tossed it into the loft above Coyote’s stall and it hung, spreading out until it became a rope ladder. “The guys will never believe this,” he muttered, climbing. He’d pocketed a light stick from his bag and he cracked and shook it. He saw a box with bars on it. Alexi crawled over and pried the latch open.
“What? What’s going on?” a woman asked in Russian.
“Its me, Babushka. Come on.” Alexi backed up and his grandmother crawled toward him. She looked tired, a little thinner, and worn, but her eyes seemed bright and her cloud of white hair and her pink dress were just as he remembered. “This way. We have to hurry.” The storm noise grew louder.
“What? Oh, yes. Tell later. Run now.” She followed him down the rope ladder a little slowly. He remembered to grab the iron brush.
“Run, John Johnson,” Coyote called after them.
His grandmother gave Alexi a strange look. “What’s that?”
“Later. Your car is by the gate.” He looked to the west and saw the mortar and skull lights storming toward them. “Hurry!”
The gate screamed with rage as he opened it. His grandmother got into the driver’s seat and started the engine as he tossed his kit into the backseat and loaded a shotgun. “Where?”
“South. We’re east of Greeley, Babushka.”
His grandmother drove like, well, like a mad Russian taxi driver. Alexi spent half the time scared out of his mind and the rest praying to any saint or angel in the state of Colorado to get the other drivers out of her way. No wonder his father wanted her to give up her car and move to town! He could see Baba Yaga coming closer and heard her cursing them. What to do? Alexi looked down at the iron brush lying on the seat beside him. He rolled the window down and chucked the brush out.
A flash of light blinded him, and a forest appeared where open pastures had been. He heard curses, and the skull lights grew dimmer as the car pulled away.
“That will not stop her, Alexi Nikolai,” his grandmother said, not looking away from the road ahead.
“No but it will slow her.”
He stared out the windshield. Ten minutes later, the skull lights reappeared in the rear view mirror. Babushka swore in Russian, slowed just enough, and swung the big car into a screaming turn. The skull lights overshot the curve, but returned to the chase within moments. What next, and where was Sokolov? He heard panting, and a red glow appeared beside the car.
The mare, now billowing flames, and Coyote paced the car, running as fast as Babushka drove. “I owe you my freedom, John Johnson,” the mare called. “I’ll distract Baba Yaga.” She dropped back and began weaving across the road, throwing red sparks with each stride. Then she darted east and the skull lights followed. Coyote kept pace with the car, tongue lolling, silent.
They’d made it onto the Interstate before Baba Yaga resumed pursuit. Babushka and Coyote wove in and out of traffic, scaring years off Alexi. And they were about to run out of gas. “My turn, John Johnson,” Coyote panted. “Your gods be with you.” He spun around, howled, and ran against traffic toward Baba Yaga, scattering semis as he went.
Alexi covered his eyes. He didn’t want to see the wreck Coyote was about to have. Babushka took the next exit and slowed down, no longer going 120 in a 60. Alexi started breathing again. The car sputtered, wheezed, and Babushka guided it into the parking lot of a cemetery. “You bring gas can?”
“Um, no Babushka. I forgot.”
“You forgot?” She threw up her hands, then unfastened her seatbelt. “Should be one in trunk.”
“I’ll check,” he said. He rested the shotgun on the huge bumper and opened the trunk. You could hide half a cow in the cavernous space. He sighed and started moving blankets, sacks of cat litter, and the spare. A gas can, one of the illegal, good metal kind, appeared when he heaved the tire out of the way. As he reached for it, he heard tires squall behind him. Alexi threw himself backwards, out of the trunk and onto his rump on the still-hot pavement. He grabbed the shotgun as he fell. “Ow, damnit.”
“Mother defeated your friends, and I’ll stop you,” Ms. Sokolov said. He heard feet in high-heels walking toward the black car.
“Oh go play in the Siberian snow,” Babushka called from the car. “And stuff a pine tree up your . . .” Sergeant Alexander Zolnerovich blushed at his grandmother’s language. “And then you can . . .”
He wanted to put his hands over his ears. Instead he rocked onto his knees, shotgun at the ready. He peered around the rear driver’s side bumper and saw Sokolov with a huge knife in her right hand. Her left hand glowed the same way the skulls did, and she drew back to throw something at the car. It was a skull!
Alexi fired as she launched the magical missile. Blam!
Sokolov staggered, collapsing, her back torn apart by the 12-gauge’s blast. Bright white light shone on her as she fell, knife still in hand. “Freeze!” a new voice called.
Alexi set the gun down, then froze.
“Keep your hands up and nobody move.”
A Highway Patrol officer approached sideways, service pistol and flashlight in hand. “What’s going on?”
Alexi heard Babushka start carrying on in Russian as exhaustion and fear overwhelmed her at last. Her calls to the Lord and saints for help gave Alexi an idea. “No, Grandmother,” he called in English, then Russian. “He’s not KGB! Not KGB!”
She wailed louder and the officer turned to him, pistol still at the ready. “What’s going on?”
“I think she’s having a flashback, Sir,” Alexi said, hands still in the air, trying not to squint at the light in his eyes. “Grandmother and Grandfather got out of Russia with my Dad and three more kids in 1963, just as another crack down started. The neighbor had disappeared that morning.”
“What’s her name?”
“Ekaterina Boroslovna, Sir. I’m Alexander Zolnerovich, her grandson. US Army Reserve.”
“Don’t move, but see if you can calm her down.”
As Alexi reassured Babushka in Russian that they were in the USA and nothing could hurt her, the Highway Patrolman got a look at Marsha Sokolov’s face. He backed up, called for assistance and an ID trace, and then ordered Alexi to put his arms down. “You and your grandmother are two lucky folks, I hope you know. This gal is wanted in connection with three missing-persons investigations.”
An hour later Officer Mitchell helped put five gallons of gas into the big car. “Damn, this has been a bad night and it’s not even the full moon any more. A wrong-way driver on the Interstate, a possible serial killer, and your grandmother having a nervous breakdown. Sergeant, between you and me, I’m going to need a beer when I get off duty.”
“I need one already, Sir, and I still have to get her home. Anyone hurt by the wrong-way?”
“No, but a bunch of cars damaged and drivers scared sober. Be careful, will you?”
“Yes, Sir.”
They got back to the house without further incident. Ivan the Purrable met them at the door, complaining mightily about how terribly Alexi had mistreated him. “Yeah, and why is there no more food in your dish, huh?”
“Oh you poor little thing,” Babushka crooned, picking up the cat and carrying him into the living room, then giving him an entire can of tuna.
“Right. Babushka, I’m going to bed.”
“Good night, dear.”
As he lay down, Alexi thought he heard a coyote calling from the back pasture. Well, he yawned, coyotes were common in the suburbs.
Rested, showered, and shaved, Alexi felt more like a human the next morning. Apparently Babushka’s powers of recovery equaled his, because he followed the smell of food to the kitchen and found a feast waiting. An enormous breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, blintzes with lingonberry preserves, and pickled fish finished restoring him to life.
“Babushka?”
His grandmother sipped her tea. “Yes?�
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“What was Baba Yaga doing in the first place?”
Babushka held the cup with both hands. “She wanted house and property, I don’t know why. When I refused her permission to come onto land, her daughter tricked me into stepping outside house. I don’t remember much after that.”
Alexi was not pleased with the loose ends that left dangling. “That does explain how she ended up with the house keys. But why turn over the icons and cover the mirrors?”
“The saints can’t protect what they don’t see.” Babushka gave him a patient look, as if he ought to know that. “Or so grandfather told me, back in Old Country. The mirrors?” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Alexi had a sudden idea, but kept it to himself.
Babushka wagged a knobby finger at him. “Now, tell me about girlfriend. You do have one, don’t you?”
Alexi cringed. And he still had a week before he could fly home. “Um, no, Babushka, I don’t have one right now. It’s complicated.”
She glared at him from under white eyebrows, pinning him to the chair. “Really.”
“Er, ah, well, it’s like this, Babushka . . .”
Tale the Second: The Sweeper and the Storm
“Very funny, Babushka,” Sergeant Alexander Zolnerovich muttered under his breath, removing the framed photograph from the shipping box. The little tag on the back read, “From one warrior to another.”
“What’s that, Z?” his office mate asked, peering over his shoulder.
Alexi had no idea how to explain and he really didn’t want to. Marty would probably call the psych-eval guys if Alexi even tried. Instead he sighed, “My grandmother’s idea of funny.” He unfolded the easel back of the silver frame and stood the picture up on his otherwise empty desk.
Martin ‘Marty’ Krehbiel shook his head. “A photo of her cat? With an inked-on paw print?”
“Yeah. It’s a paw-tograph’d picture of Ivan the Purrable.”
“Uugh, that’s terrible.” Marty looked into the box, saw nothing edible, and returned to his own cluttered, oil-spattered desk. Marty’s desk originally came from the chief tech sergeant’s office. Oil and hydraulic and brake fluid had probably been soaking into it since the start of the Second World War. Alexi wrinkled his nose and dug deeper into the box.
Still no cookies or other edible treats, but more importantly, at least to Alexi, were the three books of Russian folk tales and a very small, freshly blessed icon of St. George. The books came from the Old Country and threatened to fall apart in his hands. These weren’t the folk tales in the children’s books he’d read as a child, oh no. These were the real, hair-curling accounts of people who had crossed paths with things like rusalkas and the Sweeper. Alexi still couldn’t bring himself to use Baba Yaga’s real name, even here, by daylight inside Ft. Owen, hundreds of miles from where they’d last parted company. In the prettied-up stories, the Sweeper never came back to haunt those who defeated her. Alexi didn’t trust those stories.
“Your grandmother must really like that cat,” Marty observed after several minutes.
“Yeah. Ivan’s kind of unusual as cats go.” Which was like saying that a Bradley could be a bit noisy inside when an IED went off under it. The more he read about Russian folk lore, the more Alexi wondered if Ivan was really a cat at all. Not that he, Alexi, was going to ask Ivan outright the next time he video-chatted with his Babushka.
Alexi returned to what he was supposed to be doing, which was studying the plans for a civil defense maneuver out in the back-of-beyond that was western Kansas. In theory, tornado season ended in September. In theory, once you got west of Hays, hail replaced tornadoes as Mother Nature’s way of saying, “eff you and the horse you rode in on.” Kansas never had been a state for theories, and the way Alexi’s year was going, the exercise would probably turn into the regiment’s first ever tornado response disaster drill conducted during a blizzard. No, he decided as he turned the page, locust plague. Blizzards were too prosaic.
Two hours later, his electronic in-box pinged. Alexi logged in, read the notice, and decided he needed to go to the NCO club and get stinking, shit-faced drunk. “Base security has reported multiple sightings of a grey miniature horse outside the north fence. No missing livestock has been reported to the sheriff’s office, but if you encounter a loose horse with a humped back, or with a large pack on its back, or a miniature mule, report the sighting to the shift supervisor at extension 5432.” Why me, he whimpered silently? What did I do to piss you off so badly, oh Holy Lord God? He added a heart-felt “Please don’t answer that, Sir,” and deleted the message.
Because where the Little Humpbacked Horse went, Baba Yaga was probably close behind.
That evening Alexi set the photo of Ivan the blue-eyed black cat up on his apartment’s fireplace mantle. It looked a lot better there than his now ex-girlfriend’s picture had. He hung the icon beside one of St. Niketas the Goth that his father had given him when he joined the Army. On the end table below them sat an 8X10 art photo of a coyote. Alexi figured he had enough military gear in the apartment that he didn’t need a picture of a flaming red horse, thank you. That was, assuming the red horse he’d rescued from the Sweeper had been that Red Horse. Maybe there were several, like there were Coyotes. “I need a beer.”
After supper and the long promised beer, Alexi read a chapter or two in one of the Russian legend books. He didn’t read much more than that because he didn’t want nightmares. “No wonder my ancestors left that god forsaken country,” he said, closing the cover an hour and a bit later. “Except it had too many things that thought they were gods, and that includes the Tsar.” The little house and garden spirits Alexi could understand, because it seemed like every culture around the world had something similar. Ditto the forest and river spirits, because bad things could happen there. But the swamp and lake demons sounded especially mean, and that was before you tossed in baddies like Baba Yaga, Chernobog, and a couple of other charmers. “So instead of swamp monsters we get tornados, blizzards, floods, and more blizzards. And drought in any year that starts on January first.” All in all, his ancestors had made a decent swap, at least in Alexi’s opinion. Too bad the Sweeper hadn’t stayed in the Old Country with the other nasties.
“Bbbbrrrrrapppp, bbbbrrrrrrrapppp,” the sound of an A-10’s chain gun emerged from the cushion beside him. Alexi glanced down and confirmed that he’d turned the volume on his voice mail off. “I’m not talking to you, I’m not answering your e-mails,” he told his ex girlfriend once more as he turned the page. She just would not take “No!” for an answer.
A few minutes later, as he finished a chaser of iced tea and snorted at the latest overly enthusiastic predictions of the Chiefs’ second-string quarterback’s return from the injured list, the opening bars of the “1812 Overture” sounded from his phone. “Hi Dad.”
After a few minutes of chatting over family and business matters, Nicholas Ivanovich Zolnerovich said, “And we’re taking a restraining order out against Stacie Nichols.”
Alexi covered his eyes with his free hand and tried to remember what terrible sin he’d committed to have this land in his lap. “What’s she done now, Dad?”
“She called us fifty times last week, and showed up at the house three times, looking for you. Even though she knows very well where you live.” His father switched to Russian and used some very choice words to describe Alexi’s ex. So much for not swearing in front of the children, Alexi thought.
“That’s because she knows Agnes Kareninova shoot first, ask later,” he reminded his father. Mrs. Chang, who possessed all the emotional warmth and charm of Karenin from the Tolstoy novel, had zero tolerance for weepy women, obsessed ex-girlfriends, and political candidates. And she understood that Army and Guard soldiers sometimes needed an extra day or two to pay the rent, which was why he’d gotten an apartment from her.
“Well, she’d better find someone else to harass, or police harass her. And your grandmother’s cat has e-mail account.”
His father laughed. “Is better than president goldfish blog.”
“Point.” Although, the First Fish’s adventures were much more entertaining than most news from DC.
“Don’t forget to e-chat your grandmother. She worries.”
“Yes, sir.”
The face in the bathroom mirror that night looked older than it had a month and a half before. Alexi came from solid Russian peasant stock, with an emphasis on solid. His troopers joked that Sergeant Z had no neck, or had joked until he’d renewed his claim to holding the Regiment and Division’s clean-and-jerk and deadlift weight records. Bland blue eyes, medium brown hair, fair skin, and a squarish face that looked like every farmer between Kiev and the Urals looked back at him. Stacie had loved his “clean looks,” whatever that meant. Too bad she’d tried to own him after her interest shifted into an obsession. He’d been so lucky to catch on and escape. Well, it was a face, and it needed a shave so he wouldn’t have to muck with it in the morning, he decided.
That Friday Alexi decided to track down the Little Humpbacked Horse. It would be the harvest moon, providing enough light to see tracks, and also the night of the monthly Owl Prowl at the nature center adjoining Ft. Owen. Since the mystery horse had been seen in that area, it seemed logical for Alexi to start there. “If logic has anything to do with mythological creatures showing up in Kansas.” Alexi waited until a large, dark green SUV pulled into the nature center parking area before turning in. The driver had not bothered to signal her turn, although, watching the ten kids debouching from the SUV, Alexi decided that she had a reason to be a little distracted. He parked his old white pick-up well away from the chaos, applied a little more bug repellent, and joined the group milling around the gate into the wetland woodland park.
