by Chris Ward
He got back to work, planting seeds as he liked to call it. Seeds of doubt, seeds of misinformation. He knew what they were called on the outside, but Richard thought of his job as one of far more importance than simply hacking into websites and altering their content. Yes, it was outright sabotage, but his team and many others were simply undoing the mess than the rest of humanity had created over the past few decades, stripping it back, reducing its use and its credibility, making it unreliable in order to free people from its terrible hold.
For years, scientists, religious leaders, and other crackpots had predicted the eventual enslavement of humanity, they had just expected it to come from without.
Instead, it had come from within.
The elevator took Alek Politov and his guards to the top floor of the old Gorbachev Hotel, forty floors of bland but functional business suites, several floors of which were now used by his men for their operations. With the tide—as he liked to call it—set to overwhelm them in the coming days, his crews were currently clearing out, packing their things and preparing for the next step in the gradual eastward retreat.
He wouldn’t be going with them. Neither his guards nor those in his command knew it yet, but Politov had reached the end of his own personal crusade. He was far older now than he deserved to be, and the cold would kill him if he tried another overland trek. The war would be lost by summer, but by the time the snow thawed and spring announced itself, it would be too late.
Am I being a coward? He wondered. Is it not that I don’t want to witness the death of my great nation first-hand, that I’d rather remember the good days than witness the coming of the bad?
The penthouse suite had floor-to-ceiling windows in the west-facing wall. Politov allowed the guards to help him to a chair, then they retired to their posts in the corridor outside. The hum of electric heaters comforted him, warming his old bones, as he looked out at the greying, snow-shrouded city towards the hills far to the east.
They would come from there, he knew. Any day now.
He closed his eyes, leaning back in the chair, letting his thoughts drift.
I know you’re out there. I can feel you, always, waiting at the edges of my thoughts, keeping watch on me, not wanting to intrude.
He didn’t know if he expected an answer or not. He was so old that often the thoughts drifting through his mind were unrecognizable. Once, though, things had been different. He had been part of something incredible, and while so many had died, he had managed to come through, one of the few last remnants of something that had changed the world.
Out there in the hills, his soldiers, his ragtag army of leftovers and untrained recruits, were bedded in, hidden in their tunnels, their trenches, behind their gun emplacements, waiting for an enemy more terrible than any they could imagine to stride right in amongst them. More than Politov could count had deserted, joining the refugee trains heading east, trudging to their eventual deaths long before they ever made it as far as Mongolia or the Korean Peninsula.
Those that had stayed could not be regarded as brave, merely resigned to a death that would come one way or the other, and they chose to die in the fight rather than on their knees. Politov respected their decision; it was the one he would have chosen were he young enough to make a difference, but the truth was that this shouldn’t be his fight. He was holding on to a life that didn’t belong to him. For many years he had hoped that things would change, that he could put right the wrongs of the past, but his last chances were gone. Everything he had feared had been set into motion.
He opened his eyes, lifted a pair of binoculars and peered out at the distant hills. At this distance the trees blurred into one another, just an endless expanse of forest dipping and rising like snow-covered waves until it faded into the distance. Would more men make a difference, he wondered? More tanks, more aerial bombardment? They had tried everything, thrown the full might of the Russian army against the enemy, and it had been broken like an old ship on a vicious shore.
Despite everything, Politov found his ancient face breaking into a grim smile. Where armies had fallen and the greatest technology at their disposal had been as effective as blowing bubbles at body armour, reality had taken a backwards step and left in its place room for the incredible, the miraculous, the storybook heroism. There was someone out there, he knew, someone who could find a way to turn the tide.
His smile gave way to a choking sob, and he wiped tears out of his old eyes. The sun was not yet set on Russia, the war was not yet lost. There would be a standard bearer who would step out of the ranks to win the day, there had to be.
Alek Politov just wished he would live long enough to see it.
19
Victor’s Circus
It was impossible in the tiny confined space to pull back her hands to strike properly, but Patricia did her best as she found the shaft above her filled with Kurou’s bone-thin, leathery body. She slammed a fist into his belly, heard him groan as she struck some old war wound, then bony fingers were crushing her windpipe, pinching her tight in a knowing, practiced way. She tried to gasp and pull back, but there was literally nowhere to go but straight down. For a few seconds she thought about relaxing her feet and plummeting to her death, but Esel’s eyes flashed into her mind, bringing with them a message: avenge me.
‘Let her go!’
That was Victor’s voice, the good-for-nothing idiot that her sister claimed to love. Sticking up for her against the monster. She ought to be thankful, but the thought of that idiot’s voice being the last thing she heard left a sour taste in her mouth. Or was that blood? The dim light that had begun to filter in from above as Victor and the monster broke them a way out was starting to fade. The monster was so strong, but if she were able to manoeuvre she might be able to slip his grip and get away. She had spent the long, arduous climb gradually loosening the ropes securing her wrists, but her impatience had got the better of her. She had wanted to fight the monster right now, but she should have waited. It was too late—
‘Kurou! Let go of her!’
She gasped in a desperate breath of freezing air as the monster’s fingers relaxed. In an instant he was gone, shimmying up the shaft like a dirty, putrid spider, and the rope around her waist jerked hard, almost causing her feet to slip. She stuck out her hands even as she felt an uncontrollable dizziness coming over her, jamming her palms into the sides of the shaft to hold herself steady.
‘Patricia, let go!’ Victor shouted. ‘We’ll pull you up!’
She waited a few seconds before she replied. They had brought her this far, and if they had wanted her dead Kurou’s fingers would have done their work.
She gave the rope a tug as if to confirm her agreement, then slowly relaxed her feet, letting the rope take her weight. For a second she just hung there, waiting for the rope to go slack and her descent back into darkness to begin, then the rope jerked, and she slowly began to rise up towards the light.
Kurou was standing a few feet away, peering around the corner of a building, as Victor hauled her the last few feet up to the opening and helped her through. His pasty, dull face was red with exertion, and his eyes filled with a childlike hope that she might offer some thanks. Instead she told him to fuck himself and then set about wiping the clods of soot off her ruined coat, a task she quickly gave up as a waste of time.
Victor glanced back over his shoulder at Kurou. The monster was muttering under his breath in a language she couldn’t understand, and she thought about making a break for it, before realising that her rope was still attached to his ankle. Perhaps she could find a moment to strangle him with it, wrap it around his scrawny neck and choke the life out of him as he had almost done to her. She wondered where Victor’s loyalties lay, whether it was with his lover’s sister or the monster he had found in the depths of the abandoned dormitory building. Knowing Victor, his lack of spine would go with whichever option offered him the most safety, and he clearly had some kind of symbiotic relationship with this Kurou. Bottom feeders
tended to stick together.
‘Are you all right?’ Victor asked. ‘I’m sorry he tied you up.’
Habit required her to berate him, but she bit her tongue. She tried to reason with herself that he had saved her life twice now, but it was too easy to remember that she had come here because of what he had done to her brother. And what had he wanted to save her for? She had never offered him a kind word in anger. She had seen the way he looked at her when he thought she wouldn’t notice. It was the same way other men did. No doubt he had seen an opportunity. She could imagine his soft, unattractive body grunting as he forced himself upon her. Only God knew what her idiot sister saw in him.
Kurou turned away from the corner and came marching back. He gave her a sour look, then clapped Victor on the shoulder.
‘We’ll soon have company, sire. Won’t that be nice? A company of policemen are fast approaching.’
Their soot-covered clothes and faces stood out against the stark grey-white of the piled snow. Tracking them would be a breeze. All she had to do was alert the police to their presence—
Kurou crossed the space between them faster than she could have thought possible. She managed to get out a half-cry before his hand cracked against the side of the face, knocking her sprawling. She climbed to her hands and knees, splitting out a tooth amid a trail of blood.
‘I’ll kill you—’
He struck her again, on the side of the temple, his hand hard and lumpy like a jumble of bones in an old leather bag. She started to cry out, but a hand closed over her mouth, holding it shut. At Kurou’s shoulder, Victor stood looking down, a helpless, terrified expression on his face, and in that moment she despised him almost as much as the monster himself.
‘I’ll see both of you dead,’ she mumbled beneath his fingers.
‘Silence might be rather appropriate in our current predicament, young lady,’ Kurou said, his voice a birdlike squawk that mirrored his hideous face. ‘It wouldn’t be too difficult to draw a crimson line beneath your pretty little face and watch your poisonous blood create a mural of fading life on the snow around your feet.’ He glanced up at Victor. ‘Bring the rope, sire.’
It terrified her to see the way Kurou snatched the offered rope and sliced through a length with one long fingernail as though it was damp and rotten. She was a toy, his plaything. He could kill her at any time.
He jammed it into her mouth and tied it around the back of her head without any attempt at kindness. It bit into the sides of her mouth, and the only sound she could make was a throaty growl. She thought about making a run for it, but Kurou tied another part of rope back around her wrists and then looped the end around his waist so that he could lead her like a dog on a leash. Victor, she noted, was allowed to walk free.
‘We need cover, sire,’ Kurou said. ‘Is there somewhere we can go? Haste might be a good idea.’
Victor turned in a slow circle, one finger on his chin. ‘We can try my place,’ he said. ‘It’s a risk, but its close. It might be that if anyone was looking for me they’ve already been and gone. Otherwise there’s the old café, but it’s a lot further and there’s no heating. We’ll freeze to death in a few hours.’
The sun was at its zenith. They had a couple more hours before the true cold set in, and the darkness began to descend.
‘It might be worth a try, sire,’ Kurou said. ‘Let’s hurry.’
He moved out from their cover, dragging Patricia behind him. At first she tried to resist, but the effort was too great to maintain, so she let herself be led. Victor voiced what she had been thinking when he said, ‘What happened to the police you saw?’
Kurou grinned. ‘I saw none, sire. I was just testing our young mistress’s reactions.’ He sighed. ‘Predictable, as one … predicted.’
Victor led them back through the streets around St Peter’s Place, away from the collapsed remains of the dormitory building, into a lower-middle-class district which was still poor enough to make Patricia turn up her nose. They were near to where her brother had died, and she knew that Esel liked to come down here for his entertainment, beating up and mugging low wage workers as they headed wearily for their beds, more for his own amusement than for any material gain. It wasn’t her thing to come down here; she preferred the area around the station, where true wealth tended to be found.
After a few minutes of walking they reached a small street and Victor bade them stop. He pointed a few doors down to a nondescript terraced house, the kind of place that the government used to allocate to its lower class party loyalists, nothing to be proud of but a home nonetheless. It was a fraction of the size of her own family’s home, and it was clear why Isabella always invited Victor over. Love or not, her sister wouldn’t be seen dead in such a scraggly little hovel.
‘That’s it,’ Victor said. ‘I can’t see anyone—’
‘I can,’ Kurou interjected. ‘Street opposite. Two doors down, second floor. The curtain moved a fraction, sire. I’d suggest that going back to your little abode might not be the best idea.’
Victor turned to stare at him. ‘How can you see that? I can barely see that house, let alone anything happening in the upstairs window.’
Kurou tapped the side of his beak, a hideous gesture that made Patricia’s stomach crawl. ‘Not just a pretty face, sire. One eye might have expired, but the other still works rather well.’
‘Are you sure you saw someone?’
‘As plain as the overlarge nose on my face, sire. By the inclination of our little snooper’s eyes, I’d say it was at least nearly almost certain that he is waiting for your sweet return.’
Victor shrugged. ‘We can’t go to the café, it’s too far. ‘I have another place, a small workshop I rent, but it’s not very comfortable. I’ve never planned to stay there more than a few hours at a time, so there’s nothing we can sleep on.’
‘Is it far?’
‘A couple of streets.’
Kurou nodded. ‘It might give us time to consider our next move, sire. A workshop, you say?’
Victor gave a goofball smile that Patricia ached to punch off his face. ‘Just where I do a little tinkering.’
The clouds were closing in, latent with the threat of yet more snow. Kurou seemed to welcome it, as the gloom gave them more cover, but all Patricia could think about was getting free, killing these two fools and then catching the last train out of here with her father and sister. By her estimation it was set to leave tomorrow.
There was still time, and she had learned her lesson about patience. Next time she would be more careful.
After a few minutes walking through the snow, Victor led them down a dark, claustrophobic alleyway and came to a halt outside a corrugated iron sliding door which was secured by a heavy padlock crusted with ice. Victor squatted down and started digging away in the snow. Patricia was beginning to wonder what he was doing when he turned and held up a fat key.
It took him a few long minutes to pick away the ice around the lock to get the door open. Kurou pushed her inside, into a dark room which felt colder than the air outside, so cold in fact that she found herself gasping for air as her hands trembled. Kurou slapped her across the face, dropping her to her knees, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing her cry out. She glared up at his ugly face, holding his gaze, as Victor shut the door and locked it.
‘Wait a moment,’ he said, then flicked a switch, casting a welcome orange glow over the room’s contents. There was an old stove heater in the middle of the room, and he quickly set to getting it working as Patricia cast her condescending gaze over a number of workbenches and metal shelving units, some holding half-finished contraptions, the like of which she sometimes saw around her father’s mining operations. Over near the window was a cleaning robot missing a head; behind the door was a strange thing that was even more spindly than Kurou which she knew was designed for scaling pylons to make repairs during high winds. Victor must have pilfered it from a dump somewhere, as it was missing a leg from the knee down.<
br />
Patricia quickly dismissed the room as an amateur inventor’s junk closet and squatted down close to the stove to get some warmth on her hands, but Kurou was staring at the broken-down robots as if he’d fallen asleep and woken up in heaven.
‘What is this place?’ He reached out and ran a hand down the side of a robot’s dented, rusty face as if caressing a beautiful lady.
Victor sat down on an upturned metal bucket and sighed. ‘Oh, nothing really. It was just part of my dream.’
Kurou steepled his elongated fingers into a shape that resembled a fish skeleton. ‘Oh, do tell.’
‘I always wanted to be an inventor,’ Victor said. ‘Not just a handyman with a knack for electronics. I wanted to create something grand and elaborate, something that would cause awe and inspiration, and that would get me out of this town. I had this idea to create a kind of travelling circus, but instead of having men and women being the performers, I would have robots.’ He gave a wistful smile and spread his hands. ‘It was to be called the Circus of Machines.’
Patricia scoffed, but at a glare from Kurou she stifled it. ‘And this is what you’ve built so far?’ Kurou asked. ‘A solid collection, I’ll say, sire, albeit one a little basic.’
Victor was shaking his head. ‘Oh, no. This is nothing.’ The eagerness in his eyes betrayed a need to tell someone his secret.
‘What is it, sire?’
‘There’s a place in the hills a few miles north of here. I discovered it last summer. I can’t carry anything big, but it’s where I found my tools. I know it’s stealing, but it’s just left there, abandoned—’
Patricia glared at him. Esel had always considered him a thief, and now she had proof. She wanted to tell him what she thought about him, but the rope was too tight in her mouth to form any sound. All she could do was scowl at him and hope he could read her thoughts.
‘What did you find, sire?’
