by Chris Ward
Manipulation was something Robert understood, because he had employed it on many occasions. Straight out theft though, that was low.
He hurried out of the back gate, looking up and down the alley for Papanov and Franko, angry enough to ring out a thumping drumbeat on their faces, but it was empty. For a moment he just stood there, weighing up his options, whether to attempt to find them or to give up and go back inside.
He was just turning away when something yellow lying in the snow a few feet up the alley caught his eye.
It was a square of cloth with a black stain in the middle. When he bent down to pick it up, he found two more: one green, one red.
The bastards had tricked him. They had taken a chance on Patricia’s favorite colour being a common one and it had paid off. Now they thought they had bought themselves a ride out of town on a lie.
There was no proof then, that Patricia was alive. It was all a set up to exploit him, and he had fallen for it.
They would die for this.
He headed back inside, slamming the door behind him. The clock on the mantel read ten forty.
They had nothing else to wait around for.
‘Isabella, get your bags,’ he shouted up the stairs. ‘We’re leaving for the station.’
She came running out to the landing. ‘You’ve changed your mind? You’re coming with me?’
He hesitated just a moment before he gave a reluctant nod. In all likelihood, Patricia was dead. If he stayed behind, he would join her. There were vehicles up at the mine that might get him a few miles, but the train was their only real chance.
‘Hurry up, now,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much time.’
25
The last train out of hell
Patricia found herself using more energy to kick at trees than for walking. The icy blue sheet of the sky provided the best visibility in days, but all it did was show her how much further she had to go.
It had been a surprise that they had freed her. She had expected at some point to die at the evil one’s hands, the same way her brother had, but she would have drawn as much blood as she could. Her hatred for Victor paled in comparison to the way she despised Kurou. If there was one thing she could do in her life it would be to see him die.
The words he had whispered into her ear would remain with her always.
I saw the light fade from your brother’s eyes, and I laughed at him. One day I will watch the light fade from yours too, princess.
Her brother’s murderer could not be allowed to live.
As soon as she was out of sight, she had doubled back and crept after them, following as they made their way up the rise through the forest, then watching them from a viewing point as they continued down into the valley. She had hoped for a chance to ambush them, but the trees were so far apart she couldn’t get close enough.
Still, she had seen where they went: into a cave down in the valley. She had waited for fifteen minutes or so and seen Victor briefly appear again, only to head back inside. So, they were planning to hide out up here. She guessed that Victor had arranged for some food and heating materials, otherwise it was suicide, but it was obvious they would be staying long enough for her to get help.
Her memory of the days before her capture was hazy. There was a train leaving town sometime—was that today or tomorrow?
She thought it was tomorrow. She had time to find her father, get a group of men together to catch—and if she had her way, kill—Victor and Kurou, and still make the train out of here.
Her brother’s eyes would haunt her, but it was the best she could do.
It was close to noon when she finally made it to the outskirts of town. Her thighs were aching from hiking through the knee-deep snow, and her lungs were burning as if she had run a marathon. The town looked deserted. A few cars were parked along the roadside, but she saw no sign of any people. Brevik was rarely busy, but by now there should be some sign of life, a door slamming, the muffled voice of a woman berating her husband, a gang of children playing in the street.
At first she thought she’d mistaken the day and that the train had already left, but as she got further into the town she heard a low humming sound, like the roar of a distant football match.
She had mistaken the day, but that was not all.
Heart pounding, she broke into the best run her tired legs could manage, heading for the train station that dissected the town nearly in two, running in an east-west arc a couple of streets south of City Hall.
Finally, she began to see signs of people, family groups standing outside their houses, husbands comforting crying wives, men berating each other, groups of children playing in the snow oblivious to what was going on.
The old Soviet-era station was up ahead. Rounding a corner, she came upon a great mass of people, several hundred, crowding around the entrance. People were screaming abuse at others that were out of sight, demanding entrance, demanding access to the train.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked an old man near the back.
‘The bastards have sold out our lives,’ he screamed at her, not turning around. ‘They’re leaving us to die.’
‘Who are?’
‘The lucky ones,’ he shouted back. ‘I worked fifty years in those fucking mines with barely a day off and this is my recompense—to be left behind to die.’
She didn’t have much time. Her father would get her on to the train, but she had to somehow get past the mob and into the station. She started to skirt around the back of the crowd, heading for the left corner of the building, hoping to find some other way inside.
‘Look! There’s Patricia Mortin!’
Patricia turned before she could check herself. A middle-aged man near the back of the crowd was pointing at her, pushing at someone else’s shoulder, trying to get his companion’s attention. She recognised the first man as a money launderer she had met in the bars in the backstreets opposite the station. For a suitable fee she had warmed his bed a couple of times before finding better opportunities elsewhere, but clearly the cost of her body was a fraction of the value of her life.
‘Grab her!’
Several other men had taken notice of the money launderer’s words. After a few seconds of confusion, a group broke out of the crowd and began to give chase.
Patricia stared in dismay. Perhaps they thought to use her to bribe their way on to the train, or maybe they thought she was in possession of some golden train ticket that they could steal, but Patricia had had enough of being someone’s prisoner. She turned and bolted for the nearest side street.
The backstreets around the station had been her haunt since she was old enough to understand how easy it was to manipulate and exploit the kind of men who frequented the bars. She knew every nook and cranny, every blind alley, every fire escape that offered a shortcut on to an adjacent street. Within a couple of minutes she had lost her pursuers, but as she slowed again to a walk she knew that she had missed her chance.
The train was about to leave, taking her father and sister away with it.
She was alone.
‘Were you going to tell me? Goddamn it, were you?’
Kurou just cocked his head. ‘Tell you what, sire?’
‘About the drone strike on the train!’
‘What matter is it to you, sire?’
‘All those people will die!’
Kurou shrugged. ‘So?’
‘What do you mean, so?’
Kurou put a hand on Victor’s shoulder and leaned close. Victor tried to stare into the man’s single working eye rather than let his gaze drift over Kurou’s misshapen face.
‘You know as well as I that there’s no one on that train worth saving.’
‘My girlfriend will be on it!’
Kurou shrugged again. ‘Replaceable.’ With a smirk he added, ‘She’ll need to be, because those drones don’t tend to miss.’
‘We have to stop the train!’
Kurou started laughing. ‘In my younger days I shared your
invincibility, sire. I thought I was unstoppable, that there was nothing I couldn’t control.’ He spread his hands. ‘And look what happened to me.’
‘There must be something we can do.’
Kurou shook his head. ‘Sometimes the only thing we can do is watch.’
Victor jumped up. He looked around him at the rows of ancient machines, all silent and cold. There had to be another exit to this place, somewhere the machines could leave. They couldn’t have been constructed down here. If one of them worked….
He ran over to the nearest vehicle, a huge people carrier with wheels as high as his waist. He climbed up on to a foot step and yanked at the door to the cab.
Nothing happened except a shudder of pain ran through his shoulders. It was either locked or rusted solid.
He jumped back down, rubbing at his shoulder. Kurou had sat down on the floor and was watching him like a school kid at a pantomime, hands propping up his tilted face. When Victor glared at him Kurou just shrugged.
This was no use. If these machines could be used for anything it might take days to get them operational. There was no telling how long they had sat here in this freezing subterranean chamber.
Victor did a couple of calculations in his head. After it left the town, the train line angled north for a while before it cut back towards the southeast and the Trans-Siberian mainline two hundred miles distant. For a mile or so it ran alongside the northern highway. The nearest of the mining operations was a short distance north of here. There was bound to be an access road running alongside the train line somewhere. If Victor could steal a vehicle big enough to block the train line—
‘I have to go.’
Kurou raised an eyebrow. ‘Where?’
‘I have to help them. I don’t expect you to care, but I can’t just stand by and do nothing.’
Kurou shrugged again. ‘Godspeed, sire. I’ll see if I can’t poach us a few forest creatures for a little barbeque upon your safe return.’
Victor had no patience for Kurou’s eccentricities. He shot the professor a sour look then raced for the stairs, taking them three at a time.
Outside, the beaming midday sun seemed to be mocking him. It would take him at least an hour to retrace his steps, by which time it would likely be all over. He’d be picking through the burnt out remains, looking for pieces of Isabella.
Then he noticed a gully a short way north of the cave entrance. It angled up the hillside, then fed into what looked like a series of switchbacks that headed up the hill and disappeared into the trees on the crest.
Perhaps it was a hiking trail. The hill faced away from the wind on that side, so the snow cover was lighter. It was probably still a couple of feet, but it would save him time.
Taking a deep breath, Victor started running as quickly as he could for the foot of the gully.
He was right. Less than twenty minutes later he reached the top of the rise, squatted down in exhaustion, and turned to look back at the valley below. From here the overhanging rock was invisible, blending in with the valley floor. Although buried in snow, the trail he had climbed up had felt manmade under his feet, crude steps hewn out of the hillside.
A few minutes later he waded out of the trees on to the road. He was close to the end of his strength, but finding the snow cover much lighter underfoot spurred him on, and he broke into a staggering jog as he headed for the nearest of the mining fields. Massive billboards began to appear beside the road, advertising the copper and zinc mines in the area. To the naked eye Siberia might have appeared to be a wild, snow-covered wilderness, but beneath the ground were riches beyond compare.
When he reached the mining operation he headed straight for the nearest line of loading trucks, but found that the transmission lines had been cut on all of them, as if the departing mining crews had wanted to leave them unusable by the invading armies.
Time was running out. Becoming desperate, he circled around the back of several squat, temporary offices, looking for personal vehicles.
Several old four-wheel-drive cars were parked up against the edge of an old slag heap. Victor ran over and tugged on doors, trying to find one that was open. He was near the end of the line before his frustration got the better of him and he used a rock to smash the window of an old Ford pick-up truck.
Most of the newer cars were thief-proof, designed to lock down their systems if an improper starting method was employed. Victor didn’t have the skills to hotwire one, so the old pickup, with its cracked windscreen and rusty wheel rims, was his only hope.
He had just climbed in and got the engine started when some sixth sense caused him to look up.
Far above him, three black specks were moving across the clear blue sky.
Pavel had organized a small militia, but as the crowd locked outside the train station bayed for the head councillor’s blood, he wished he’d hired a few more.
Most of those authorised with passes had already arrived and boarded: three hundred members of the city’s elite and those others rich enough to fill Pavel’s palms with enough favour to buy their way on. The word had been passed around to arrive at a certain place and time, and Pavel’s hired guns had ensured that the station was open long enough for them to enter. Now, with the doors closed and barricaded, he was waiting on a last few engine checks before they could depart.
Gunshots had already sounded from the east. Hired mercenaries were protecting the line from potential saboteurs. He had promised them a ride; they would find out too late about a politician’s promises.
Even up front in the arbitrary first class carriage, the seats were full and the aisles were packed. Pavel had to push and shove just to make it up to the driver’s cab. Outside on the platform, a fight had broken out among a group of people struggling to get on.
The door to the carriage opened suddenly and a thin-faced, overdressed girl climbed on, followed by a thickset man in his early fifties with short cropped hair and a chiselled chin. The cold grey of his eyes marked him as a Siberian man born and bred, hard and uncompromising like the landscape which had brought him kicking and screaming into the world. For a transferred Moscovite like Pavel, he felt the automatic need to take a step back and give this man space.
Unfortunately, there was nowhere to go.
Robert Mortin took one look at him and unleashed a punch that Pavel didn’t even see coming. As he slumped to his knees, his vision blurring, his skull reverberating from the blow, he waited for Mortin to speak, but no words came. They didn’t need to. He had felt the town’s satisfaction in Mortin’s fist.
As the mining foreman and his daughter pushed past him to look for seats, Pavel climbed to his feet and knocked hard on the door to the cab.
‘It’s time,’ he shouted, his jaw throbbing, possibly broken.
It was going to be a long journey, he thought. In more ways than one.
The seats her father had reserved were at the back of the first class carriage. Three people were sitting in their berths, but after her father had knocked the town mayor to his knees, they got up and moved without a word.
‘Take the window seat,’ her father said, guiding her with his hand on her shoulder. ‘I have to talk to some people. If anyone tries to take your seat, shoot them.’
Her eyes widened as he pushed a small pistol into her hand. It was barely long enough to extend beyond her palm, the kind of weapon that while deadly over a few feet was useless at any kind of range.
She didn’t like the idea of killing someone, but as her father headed off down the aisle, the other passengers nearby made a point of keeping their distance, their eyes down, not looking at her.
Hopefully her father would be back soon.
She tried to look out of the window to take her eyes off things, but the platform was a melee of pushing, shoving people, some with tickets, others who had managed to sneak in and were trying to bribe their way on. Men with assault rifles walked up and down the platform, but many looked uncertain, untrained, as if the position of guarding the
train had been thrust on them at short notice. Everything seemed on the verge of a meltdown, a rope twisted so far it was set to fray and break.
If only Victor was here, she thought. He had always been such a calming influence on her.
As she thought about his kind eyes and the way he had always treated her with care and respect, tears sprang to her eyes. She had never been nice to him, always expecting him to compromise his nature to put up with her tantrums and moods.
She promised herself that if she ever saw him again, she would tell him how much she loved him.
Outside, the men walking past on the platform appeared to be sliding, caught on a freeze frame that was shifting out of view, and she realised the train had begun to move. Where was her father? She had promised to stay in her seat, even though her gut instinct was telling her to get up and go and find him.
Instead, she pressed her face to the window and watched the town and everything she had ever known slowly slipping away.
In an empty room not far from the main entrance, Kurou found something that made his heart thunder with excitement. A bank of machines, coin operated, all offering pre-packaged culinary delights the like of which he hadn’t tasted in half a decade. Chicken fried rice, spaghetti with meatballs, pork curry, beef goulash … the list was endless.
For a while he forgot all about young Victor with his hotheaded dreams of heroism as he headed down into the bowels of the research facility, looking for a way to turn the water back on and transform the packets of dried nothingness into actual real food.
With the machines finally operational, he busted open the coin banks and scrapped the rust off the few coins he found left behind. The mechanisms were gummed up and lethargic with age, but after a few false starts he got one of the machines to work.
