by Chad Huskins
“This one…this is the one that gives her strength.” There it was again, that voice. For the last half hour, Shannon had thought she heard whispers from the kids up front, some of them directed at her. But those whispers had all been vague and distant. Now, she could clearly make out most of the words. “It’s her, it’s her…destroy this one, and you break the other…”
Kaley felt something nudge her left heel. She reached down to swat at it, but there was nothing there. She looked all around her desk, then focused on her work again. Slowly but surely, the words began to make sense again, and Shan became reacquainted with her vocabulary.
The deed was done. Shcherbakov gathered up his bag of tools, zipped it, flung it over his shoulder and headed for the door. He’d worn gloves while walking in, so no need to wipe anything down for prints. He gave the apartment another once-over, just to be absolutely certain he hadn’t missed anything or anyone—perhaps a visiting niece hiding in a closet somewhere, a tiny nephew hiding in the washing machine. He’d made the mistake of not double-checking once at the start of his career, and that had almost been the end of it.
The Grey Wolf paused at the door, his hand on the doorknob, just going through another mental checklist. He looked at Ms. Rubashkin, the large pool of blood still jetting out of her south end. The muffled snarls of the rats inside her fighting against each other for a way out was the only noise to fill the apartment. Ultimately, and predictably, she’d died struggling to get free, choking herself to death while her lower body hemorrhaged blood. By the time forensics arrived, this scene would be a lot worse. The rats would have gnawed their way out well before then, made meals out of other parts of her, and perhaps taken up residence in the chest cavity. Message sent, he thought.
He opened the door, and stepped out into the cold. Checking over his shoulder and across the parking lot, Shcherbakov tossed his things into the trunk of his Priora, and then hopped into the front seat. He sent a text message:Он закончил. Translation: It is finished.
One last time, Shcherbakov went over a mental checklist to make sure he’d forgotten nothing. Then, he thought about his second target, and wondered if she had arrived at her hotel room yet. He might call and check.
He cranked the car, backed out, and was starting out towards the apartment’s front gate when his cell phone twittered. He looked at it. A reply:Это хорошо, но как далеко вы от края города? Translation: That is good, but how far are you from the edge of the city? Shcherbakov winced. What did that have to do with anything?
He sent a text back saying that he was on Zvillinga Ulitsa. A few seconds later, he got another text: Нам нужно, чтобы вы пойти в дом Захара. Мы послали людей там, и теперь никто не отвечает. Translation: We need you to check out Zakhar’s house. We sent people there, and now no one’s responding.
The Grey Wolf sighed, and sent a text back:Я буду проверять в ней. I’ll look into it.
The gates automatically opened as he approached them. A city transit bus sloshed by, followed quickly by a small train of salt trucks, with a snow plow bringing up the rear. Shcherbakov let them pass, flashed his signal and merged onto Tvelli Ulitsa, headed east towards the bridge, and outside the city.
6
The boy stared at her with wild eyes. He was underneath the bed, and had pushed himself all the way to the far end, up against the wall. She waved at him, beckoning, and he clenched his eyes shut and began sucking his thumb. Feeling the fear emanating off of him, and sticking to her like spilled BP oil on a gull’s feathers, potentially never coming off, Kaley figured a lot of her work in the basement had been undone. A lot, but not all. Just being close to him seemed to give him some hope, but he was still rattled by all the gunfire that had ripped through the house, shattering windows and splintering wood.
“Hey,” she whispered. “It’s okay. You can come out now. It’s all over.” The boy’s emotions came in waves, and she translated the mistrust as That’s what you said in the basement, when you were taking me out of here. “They’re all…dead,” she said, not knowing whether that would terrify or mollify him.
Kaley wanted to reach out to him, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t be able to touch him this time. On her hands and knees, the floor felt slippery, yet it had substance enough that she couldn’t just pass through without pushing herself through it. “Come on, now,” she whispered gently. “We’re getting out of here, right this instant. Let’s go.” She kept her voice down. At school, she was navigating the halls, her backpack slung over one shoulder, sliding around the student hall monitor Jon Goecks. “Come on,” she urged. Then, out of sheer frustration, “Come on!”
It came out in a loud growl, and a smidgen of rage escaped her. It wasn’t what she intended, and she was sorry for it an instant later. However, the boy responded at once. As if suddenly scolded by a parent, his thumb popped out of his mouth and he came scrambling to her. Kaley backed away, so that he wouldn’t reach out for her and try to hug. “Move it,” she said, following these motherly instincts. “I don’t have time for games anymore. Move you’re little behind.” Now that was Jovita Dupré, and for Kaley it was almost as unsettling to hear her mother’s voice coming out of her as it was to hear Spencer’s voice inside her head.
It didn’t feel right to see the boy obeying out of fear, not after all he’d been through, but Kaley was beginning to see the usefulness in other emotions, not just the ones that allayed fears and mollified doubts. Sometimes, a person needed fear and doubt as an impetus, perhaps a child most of all.
Kaley pointed towards the stairs and the boy went obediently down them. She was right behind him, and at the same time walking down a set of steps at CMS. Probably best to make a pit stop by my locker, switch out some books. Once more, part of her brain was still on automatic pilot, still trying to make a normal day of it.
Somewhere behind her were those chattering voices, the leader’s standing out in that same great fugue, those whispers and screams from that Dark Place, from the Deep. The water…it had risen a bit higher, if she wasn’t mistaken. The walls of CMS were pouring out more of it, like hemorrhaging wounds. A banner that someone had made saying THE MORE WE READ, THE MORE WE LEARN ABOUT OURSELVES hung halfheartedly from the ceiling, some of the strings losing tension, the right end sagging, and it looked as though the murky waters leaking from the ceiling were pulling it down. On each flanking wall there were the names of books that students had suggested, along with blurbs saying why they had selected those books.
Kaley read a few as she passed. Glenda LeBlanc had recommended The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because it was, quote, “Really, really funny!” Madison Zaubi really enjoyed The Hunger Games because “I think Katniss is a really great character and it’s cool to see girls be tough! Raaarrr!” Terrance Stanley liked Wool because “It was the first book I got on my new Kindle that I got for Christmas and post-apocalyptic stories rock!!!”
These things never really registered with Kaley. That is, she understood that some people liked to read, and others were just forced to because they had to write book reports for teachers, and she knew that some girls in her class were excited about The Hunger Games movies and stuff like that, but none of that resonated with her. She was apart from it, separated by a divider established between worlds—the world of video games, new movie releases, and shopping for new clothes; and then her world of the charm, and fears, and psychopaths, and the Connection, and monsters in the Deep. But that wall of separation could be flimsy, she was finding out. As flimsy as the fabric this water represented. Worlds could be kept apart, but perhaps not separated forever. The barriers might be huge, but in a way, they were quite fragile. Others were grinding against those barriers, and slowly, down through the ages and one molecule at a time, things were just plum warn down.
“Hey, Colin!” some kid wearing a Weezer shirt called out. “Did you see that chick I was talking about last w
eek?”
“Which one?” another guy called out.
“Dude, you were standing right next to her at Alex’s birthday party! Remember?” he urged. “Outside near the pool. Dude, she was right next to you!” he laughed.
Some girl hanging around Colin tittered. “Boy’s are so stupid!”
Someone else beside her said, “Eck, man! I’m tired of sharing a locker with that kid Andre! That dude’s disgusting, always leaving his shit in here. Just look at this stuff, dude. Frickin’ B.S.”
Parties. Chicks. Book reports. Boys being silly. Drama with locker partners. These were the most difficult things facing the kids around her. She walked among them, carrying about the same tasks they were, but her mind(s) was (were) on farther things than parties and the dilemmas of locker partners.
Mrs. Cartwright.
Farther down the hall, Kaley thought she saw other shapes, other images bleeding over into her reality. This wasn’t the same as the “overlapping” worlds of CMS and Siberia, no. These were…things, flitting here and there, swimming in the air just above the students heads, almost like the image on the other side of a piece of paper coming through once it’s been soaked. This illusion only convinced from afar, though, and as Kaley approached them, these images evaporated.
Giggles. Giggles from a pack of roving girls, one of which was in her cheerleader’s outfit, the alpha female of the group. The laughter, so incongruous with the dire situation at the cabin, nevertheless echoed across worlds, throughout space and time.
“…find her…find her again…” Voices amid the fugue, down in the Deep. And the leader of the Others, the Prisoner, his was the most prominent of all. “She can’t have gone far! Find her! Find her!” Something slithered along the ceiling, threatening to pop out of the river of murky water that clung impossibly to the ceiling tiles and branched off in every direction.
Back at the lodge, at the base of the stairs, Kaley stepped up behind the boy, who was now shivering and moving about in a great daze. “Come over here,” she said, indicating the bedroom. “We’ll find something warm for you to wear.” It had occurred to her before to garb the child, but then had come the Russian thugs (hitters as Spencer thought of them), and nothing else had mattered but surviving.
In the back of the house, they came across broken glass on the floor. “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t want to cut yourself.” Kaley moved slowly, even though she was in no danger of cutting her feet, because she wanted to demonstrate how very careful the boy must be. Over the next few minutes, they found no shoes that could fit him, but there were plenty of thick wool socks, warm long johns that were overly big but that was fine, and gloves and jackets and Russian fur caps. Kaley pointed, told the boy to clothe himself. So far, she hadn’t explained that she was more or less a spirit at the moment.
Screaming from outside. The boy paused, looked over at her with wide eyes. “It’s okay,” she said. “Keep going, get yourself wrapped up. You’re gonna need it.” Another scream. Kaley looked at the shattered window over the headboard of the bed. The monster, she thought savagely. Can’t he do anything quietly? She tried to maintain composure. “Uncle Spencer’s just…uh…he…” There were more screams of agony. “Just get yourself ready to go.”
Spencer hooked two of his fingers through Erik’s facehole and lifted him off the ground. The man screamed as the flesh tore away from his face, and Spencer led him over to the porch like a child by the ear. So far, the fucker hadn’t answered any of Spencer’s questions, he just sat there crying and gurgling and shouting out inarticulate Russian curses.
“Your whole crew’s dead, Erik!” he said, flinging him by his face onto the porch and kicking him in his side. Erik slipped on the icy steps, stumbled, and then fell, catching himself by his elbows before slipping again and smashing his head against the ground. “I ended them. Got that? I said, ‘You got that?’ ” Erik pushed himself up to his knees, tried to say something, but merely spit out a glob of blood onto the porch, along with a piece of his tongue. Spencer put a foot up on the second porch step and propped his arms on his knee. “Cut this, Jack. You’re in the middle o’ fuckin’ nowhere, the ass end o’ Siberia without anybody comin’ to help. Savvy that? You see what I did to everyone else? Think I’ll hesitate one nanosecond with your scrawny, bleeding ass?” More gurgling. “You better come up with something useful to tell me. Now, I don’t care if you say it while gargling, use sign language or write it on the porch in your own fucking blood, but I wanna know who gave you the order to come out here. Who sent you to check on Zakhar? What’s his name? It’s always a he, isn’t it?”
Erik rolled over, and tried to say something. His mouth was a ruin. The bullet had ripped straight through, causing more damage exiting than it had entered. Strips of flesh clung feebly to the muscle moving inside his face. The back teeth were gone, their roots exposed through the maw. The jaw moved up and down, but all that came out were liquid syllables. He put one ineffectual hand to his face, as if trying to collect all the pieces and delicately hold them together, and the other hand he held up as a ward against Spencer.
Spencer sighed, and checked his watch: 6:29 PM. Then he checked his right leg, the lower portion of which had suffered the most from the fire. The pant leg had blackened, but was otherwise intact. “I need a name,” he said. “That’s all I need. I can get started with that. But if you ain’t got a name, well then, comrade, you ain’t much use to me.”
“Zzzffeffevvv,” he gargled out, and spat another massive wad of blood onto the porch.
“Zaffeffev?” he chortled. “Can you spell that, please?” Erik tried to speak, choked on his blood again, then hacked and coughed and wheezed and finally wept. “Shoot me straight here, Erik. Because I’m gonna have you dial the number for this person, and if they don’t answer…”
“Ffffiifftally…zzzzefferrefffvvv…”
“I’m hearing Vitaly? Is that it?” It was a common enough name in Russia, Spencer had learned. Erik nodded. He sat on his ass, and with his feet pushed himself across the porch until his back was against the wall. His right hand was still up, still warding Spencer off. “Vitaly what? Somethin’ with a Z?” Another nod. “Zeveref? Am I close?” Another nod. Spencer reached into his pocket and extracted one of the many cell phones he’d taken off the corpses. All of it was in Russian, but he’d learned enough during his time here to alter the language settings, and after a minute the phone was switched to English. “Vitaly,” he said, scanning, “and then something with a Z.” A bit more scanning. “All right, I’ve got two Vitalys on here with a last name starting with Z. Is it Zuyev?” A hard shake of the head. “No? How about Zverev?” Vehement nodding. “Ahhhh, Vitaly Zverev.” Spencer checked the other cell phones for the same name, found it consistent, and also found several recent calls to each of the phones. A man in charge. “What’s he look like?” No answer, only agonized whimpering. “C’mon! Vitaly Zverev, what’s he look like? Blonde? Brunette? Short? Tall? Skinny? Fat like yer mom?”
“B-b-bald…n-no h-h-hhaaaiirrr…” He spat out more blood. “T-t-tall…fffeberrrfff…” He shut his eyes, and screamed against the pain.
Spencer sighed. “Got it. Thanks.” He turned the Makarov on Erik and squeezed the trigger. The back of the head exploded and that was that. The body sagged, looked around in mild suprirse, and went still. A quick search of the body revealed a pack of Sobranies, a popular Russian brand of cigarettes, as well as a cheap plastic lighter. He put one of the sticks in his mouth but didn’t light it yet.
Spencer sighed, and took a moment to enjoy the view before stepping over Erik. The Russian wouldn’t have been much further use to him, not since he couldn’t speak. Besides, Spencer knew he was telling the truth about Zverev. He’d seen it in the man’s eyes, and he was never wrong about people.
“Little girl!” he called, taking the unlit cig Sobranie out of his mouth. “You about ready to g—” Something slithered past his leg. He jerked to one side of the doorway and aimed his pistol down,
but there was nothing there. The whispers had retreated, but he had a feeling in his bones that they weren’t gone. For a moment, there was the sound of trickling water, and as Spencer stood there puzzling over this, Kaley Dupré came down the hall, the boy peeking just around the corner. He had on clothes that were comically too big, and Spencer snorted. “You two ready?”
The girl, once more an apparition unless something had changed again, nodded slowly. “We don’t have to hurry anymore. I don’t…feel anybody else coming.”
“Yeah, well, they may not be close, but it won’t be long before someone else shows,” he said, walking across the ruined living room, now covered in splinters, stuffing ripped from cushions, and shards of glass. “You can bet your little ass on that. Zakhar didn’t answer his phone, and now these boys aren’t answering theirs.” Just as he said that, one of the phones inside his jacket buzzed. He took it out, looked at it: VITALY CALLING…
Kaley stepped over to Spencer, looked up at him, and whispered, “We need to talk.”
“We’ll talk in the car.”
“We need to talk now. It’s important. Someone’s coming.”
“I thought ya just ya couldn’t feel anybody comin’.”
“Not them. Someone else.” She gave him a meaningful look, and added, “And I think you know.”
Spencer put the unlit Sobranie between his lips again. He did know, of course. It wasn’t just the wind, or the tricks it played by whispering through the curtains or howling through the open doorways. It wasn’t the mere sounds of the house creaking and settling in the wake of the wind. No, there were other things afoot, both all around them and inside of them. Many things were fighting to get through, hands great and small prodding at the crevices along the floorboards, testing the consistency of air and words, some were puny and nettlesome, others were dangerous and monumental. They were either lost or trapped in another plane, had been fighting for untold eons to get through. That, or they were merely projections of Kaley Dupré’s greatest nightmares.
