by Chris Ward
‘So?’
‘So I was looking for something to take.’
Esel advanced across the kitchen towards him. Even from several feet away Victor could smell the vodka on the boy’s breath.
‘I saw you put something in your pocket. Give it to me, you stealing cunt.’
Victor’s heart was pounding. Esel had violence in his eyes, and from the look of a couple of scuff marks on his jaw he’d already had some tonight.
‘I told you, I just took something for a headache. I was just going back upstairs.’
Esel shoved Victor hard in the shoulder, making him spin towards the door. ‘I don’t know what my whore of a sister sees in you, you worthless prick.’
‘Don’t call your sister a whore.’
‘Stop me.’
Victor wasn’t stupid enough to start a fight. Instead he backed off, trying to slide around Esel towards the door.
‘Come on, robo-boy. Stop me. She’s a whore. How much do you pay? How much?’
The kitchen door was at Victor’s back. He took one step backwards, reaching out for it, then swung it hard forward just as Esel threw a punch at him. The heavy hardwood, designed to keep out the draft in the long Siberian winters, cracked against the boy’s knuckles like a gun going off.
As Esel cried out in pain, Victor pelted for the front door. Of three deadbolts, the drunken teenager had only pulled the top one across, so Victor grabbed it and slid it back, reaching behind him to slip his jacket off a hook on the wall beside the door. The risk was worth it—the cold was far more dangerous than Esel’s fists.
He heard feet in the hallway as he stepped outside and pulled the door shut. He took the steps down to the street three at a time, slipping once to land on his back before getting up and hurrying on. The door swung open and a barrage of insults followed him, but the boy didn’t. Victor was just reaching the other side of the street when he heard the door slam closed again.
Next time he tried to visit Isabella he would likely face a beating, but he would worry about that when the time came.
The temperature had dropped below minus twenty Celsius. Without his jacket with its thick, fur-lined hood, he would be a lump of ice before he made it back to his house. Even with it the cold was like a net sifting through his body to steal away with each molecule of warmth. He ducked his head and buried his hands in his pockets, heading for home.
6
Decisions and discoveries
Brevik’s mayor, Pavel Andrev, shook his hands like two old cloths, a gesture that indicated the very fullest extent of his rage. The soldiers had gone, but their words still hung heavy in the air like laden thunderclouds.
How dare those bastards walk in here and then just leave, telling us to fend for ourselves? What happened to the might of the Russian army?
So, it had come to pass. Moscow was defeated, and the Russian army was in full retreat, heading—well, who knew where? The enemy—whatever it was; Andrev, like most people living out here on the fringes of society, wasn’t quite sure—was coming, rolling on like a giant, crushing wheel, obliterating everything in its path. And the townsfolk had a choice, to pack their bags and head east, following the cringing tail of their retreating army, or stay behind and hope for the best.
He hadn’t planned for things to turn out like this. His own stint in the military had been uneventful, years of sentry duty and occasional skirmishes with insurgents from the states to the south, followed by early retirement and a quaint and prosperous quasi-military post as mayor of this nothing little industrial town hidden among the endless forested hills of Siberia. A single man most of his life, he’d been able to take his pick of widowed miners’ wives, eventually settling on a pretty young blonde called Petra, whom he had so far seeded with four boisterous little babies. Life was easy, life was good.
The men barrelling into his office had been nothing more than messengers. Skin chapped and bloody, uniforms scuffed and torn, their appearance had told more stories than their mouths. Moving in teams, they said, their responsibility was simply to pass on the message to each town they passed, now that radio and email could no longer be trusted.
‘Will we die if we stay?’ he had asked.
It was not a question they had been able to answer. You might. You might not. The risk is yours.
Andrev picked up the phone on his desk and asked his secretary to call for his most senior aide, Lena Patrova. A few minutes later the door opened and Lena walked in. As always when the tall, elegant woman entered, Andrev had to look away to avoid undressing her with his eyes. Petra was cute and her legs opened on request, but she had been a distant second choice. Lena was the apple to every eye that beheld her, a glittering river cutting through the icy streets of this hellhole town.
‘What do we do?’ he said after she had sat down across from him, one perfectly formed leg crossed over another. ‘We can’t put up a defence. That drone took out the one munitions factory in town. Even if we had enough people to arm we’ve got nothing to arm them with.’
Lena opened her mouth, pausing a few seconds before she spoke. ‘We do nothing,’ she said. ‘Panicking the people more than they already are would only make the situation worse. What do we really know? There could be no war out there at all.’
‘Those hacking bastards,’ Andrev spat. ‘I can’t turn on the television news anymore without doubting every single thing I see.’
‘It goes both ways,’ Lena said. ‘They don’t know anything about us, either.’
‘But they have guns, we don’t.’
‘They don’t know that.’ She raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow at him. ‘And we don’t know that either. If they’ve won, will they really need to harm us? We’re not fighting the Nazis, you know.’
‘Those men had pictures and videos of slaughter,’ Andrev said slowly. ‘Whole villages of people lined up and hacked apart like dead trees. Fields of chopped limbs floating in a lake of discarded blood.’
Lena rolled her eyes. ‘And you trusted their authenticity?’
With a sweep of his hand Andrev knocked a pile of papers to the floor. They spread out around his feet in a fan of grey and white. ‘I trust them enough to know that it would be our folly to ignore the threat.’
‘Of course it would. But before we do anything perhaps we need to see for ourselves what’s going on. Who do you trust most in your offices? Who is the one person you rely on?’
Rumour had it that Lena was ex-secret police. Of course, no one mentioned it out loud.
He gave a slow nod. ‘How will you do it?’
‘Give me an all-terrain vehicle and two aides. I’ll also need supplies and a secure radio linked only to one you hold yourself. I’ll go west, only as far as I need to go to see what the stories are in towns closer to the conflict.’
Andrev sighed. He had no way to tell whether she would just break and run with the best resources he had available. Then again, she could have boarded the last train heading east. He had no real choice but to trust her.
‘Done,’ he said.
Kurou woke to a chill that was almost paralysing. He pulled back the heap of filthy blankets and massaged his one remaining eye until the lid felt supple enough to open. A square of cold sunlight illuminated the ashes of a fire in the grate. For any sunlight at all to get down through the shaft, the wind must have been harsher than usual last night, the ice that usually piled up on the chimney top stripped away.
He rolled over and tried to get up, but a wave of nausea overcame him and he slumped back to the floor, his hands clawing through a patch of freezing stone stained brown with his blood after he had tried to sew up the knife wound. He felt it now, the only part of his body that was warm, burning with a feverish heat.
His fingers closed over a radio receiver. He depressed a button and waited until a hiss of static had cleared.
‘Has he come back yet?’
The robot he had repaired, in hiding not far from the abandoned café, replied in a series of binary numbe
rs which Kurou took a few seconds to decipher into words: Negative. Still waiting. Systems cold. Request a reduction of primary power battery.
Kurou sighed. The machine was primitive, but he would die in the snow if he attempted to reach the café himself. ‘Request granted. Maintain visual and audio link at all times.’
The machine replied with another series that roughly translated as: Thanks, master, nice one. Even with the agonising pain in his side, Kurou felt a brief flash of the old humour. In different days and different circumstances, he might have got on with the machine’s inventor pretty well.
Now though, he depended on him for survival.
Where are you?
He dragged himself across to the old fireplace and managed to spark up the embers. He still had some food, and he pulled a blanket around himself and lay down, chewing on the dried human meat while letting the small fire project its meagre warmth on to him.
He estimated that he had a couple of days at most before the infection became too strong for his ailing body and he slipped into a delirium which would likely be followed by hypothermia. A slow, degrading death caused by one moment of cockiness that his failings really should have ironed out of him by now.
I am the ender of worlds, he thought, as he began to doze off into feverish dreams. I am the creator of great monsters and the bringer of revolutions. And here I lie, broken and dying, alone and penniless, forgotten by the world that should have fallen at my feet.
Victor left as early as he could. The snowstorm broke midmorning, leaving the town blanketed in twenty centimetres of fresh snow. As he made his way through the streets, he found himself alone except for a few lethargic snow-clearing machines pushing the stuff into piles on street corners already overloaded with huge mounds of dirty snow and ice. The town carried an eerie stillness reflected by the absence of broadcasts on his radio this morning and the accompanying television blackout. Such things happened from time to time, but in light of yesterday’s rumours a glacial feeling of foreboding was beginning to bear down on him.
Change was afoot, and someone high up didn’t want the commoners to know about it.
He thought of the secret place, wondering whether he should risk a hike up to the viewing point this afternoon to check that it was undisturbed. The extra snow would make the journey even more difficult, but his afternoon’s employer had cancelled, leaving him free. He wouldn’t have time during daylight hours again until the weekend, so it might be his best chance.
Over his shoulder he carried a waterproof canvas bag containing the stolen antibiotics, as much food as he could spare, and a few extra bits and pieces that he thought the stranger might need. It wasn’t much, but the mention of medicines scared him. This stranger had already done more for him than he could believe, yet what if he was sick? What if he was dying?
The road out to the abandoned café was an untouched blanket of snow. Out here in the open, away from the hills that sheltered the town, the snow had fallen heavier, and it looked like the southern highway was blocked. In this region, each town or city was responsible for its own snow clearing, but outside the city limits there was an unhealthy reliance on the occasional government snow plough that rumbled through. If the highway was blocked, it meant the ploughs hadn’t come, and if the ploughs hadn’t come, it meant…
War?
Victor pressed on, trying not to dwell on it. When he reached the café, snow had drifted up against the door, and he had to put down his bag for a while to clear a way inside.
There were no more notes. The table was empty. As he reached it, something crunched underfoot, and he looked down to see lumps of ice below the table with strange patterns impressed in them. Something had been inside since his last visit, leaving its tracks behind.
Victor lifted a piece of the ice in his hands.
The impressions weren’t from shoes or boots. They looked like tiny tyre treads, or the symmetrical lines of a miniature caterpillar track.
A robot.
His robot.
With a lump in his throat, Victor stepped backwards. The man was too hurt to come here. He was using Victor’s robot to deliver the letters.
Victor went to the door and peered out at the snowy road. If the robot had come here recently, there should be tracks, but the overnight snow had covered them.
He decided to hide out for a while, but after an hour there was still no sign, and the temperatures had already begun to drop again as clouds came in to cover the sun. It looked like more snow was coming, and with no way to stay warm he would end up freezing to death. As he left the bag and headed back out into the snow he resolved to come better prepared next time, in case there was a chance he could follow the robot back to where the stranger was hiding.
He still had a little time though, so instead of going straight home, he skirted the edge of the town to the east, taking a forest track that was easy to follow from the line of the trees, until he came to one of the access roads for the mines to the north. Here, he found the roads had been ploughed, so he pushed on, heading up into the hills as the afternoon drew on. A strange feeling of determination had taken over him, and he walked hard despite the chill starting to seep into his boots and the cold sweat that stuck his shirt to his back.
At last he reached the craggy tree with the V-shaped trunk that looked like a giant gnarled arrowhead protruding from the side of the road. Other than its shape, there was nothing to mark it as special from the other pines that stood in rows along the edge of the mining access road.
Looking back, he could see Brevik laid out in functional grid lines in the valley below. Some lights had come on and it almost looked pretty. Further ahead, the road wound on up and over the hill, dropping down into another valley where the copper mines were located.
Brevik had grown up around the miners’ dormitories when the rich seams of ore had first been discovered more than a hundred years ago. The town had begun with the workers’ essentials—brothels, bars, and gambling dens—before eventually expanding out into shops, banks and even a squat, ugly church. From a distance, surrounded on all sides by undulating hills covered with pine forests, all draped with a blanket of snow, it looked pure and innocent, one giant Christmas tree away from a Coca Cola commercial. Only up close did the degeneration begin to reveal itself.
Highways flanked it to the north and south, while a railway snaked its way through the hills between the two. The southern highway was in disrepair, but the northern was the main trunk route for most of the mining traffic, and was therefore better maintained. The railway served to bring supplies into the town, and take the people out.
Victor turned back towards the tree. Split many years ago, perhaps by lightning, or left by some subtle planter as a sign of something hidden beyond, it served the purpose well. Aware he was leaving tracks in the snow that would take wind or fresh fall to cover, Victor continued up the road some way before climbing up the snowbank into the trees and doubling back to reach the v-shaped tree from behind.
Once he located it, he headed into the forest, walking with the tree to his back, checking over his shoulder every few steps to make sure he wasn’t veering off course. Beneath the snow-laden trees the standing air temperature was cooler, but he was sheltered from the snapping wind.
He estimated he had two hours at most. The snow had held off, so as long as he made it back to the ploughed mining road and in sight of the town lights before dark he would get back all right.
A few metres further on, he came to an opening of sorts, where a thinner line of trees stood straight and sentry-like between two taller rows of pines. It was this strange natural phenomenon that had first allowed him to find the secret place. Enough trees had fallen or been felled to turn away the eye of the unobservant, but when you lined yourself up against any one of the trunks, closed one eye and peered out just far enough for the next tree in the line to become visible, a regular arc of trees would appear, slanting off uphill and to the left.
During the previous summer,
a bit of digging in the earth around the trees had revealed the remains of laid aggregate, and Victor knew he was looking at an old access road that had been dug up and obscured by a line of trees planted up its centre.
And of course, as a hobby inventor, the need to discover where it went had briefly overtaken all other needs.
He began to hike up through the snow, following the line of the smaller trees. They wound up into the hills, cutting back around a protruding cliff, through a cutting in the hill, and then dropped sharply into a valley.
This was the point where Victor had initially lost the trail. Sure by now that he was following an old road, it had taken him some days to realise that he had reached an old lookout point, and that it was necessary to backtrack a few hundred metres and then follow another branch that swept down and around the base of the hill, before straightening out at the bottom of the valley.
At first he had been sure he was following the route to an old mine, but the diligence with which the trees had been planted made it obvious someone was hiding something.
Now, as he stood looking down on the concealed valley and the stand of trees that hid the entrance to the secret place, he breathed a sigh of relief. After the warnings from the day before and the visit by the bedraggled military vehicles, Victor had half expected to see activity down there, vehicles moving about in the trees, the lights of torches and spotlights, but it was as he had hoped, undisturbed.
Again, he had left it too late to get down there today and get back to the town safely, but it was relief enough to know it was—
He blinked, unsure if his eyes were just tired or if he had really seen it.
‘No…’
There it came again.
A single light, blinking on and off.
7
Reluctance, relief, and anticipation
Pavel Andrev tapped the switch that had failed to turn his office light on, but it made no difference. The room remained dark. With a sigh, he fumbled his way across the room and pulled a chord to ignite an old standing gas lamp in one corner. The dim, flickering glow made his drab office with its desk piled high with papers look almost sultry.
