“The guards saw you leave with a backpack.”
“The guards you just shot?”
“Yes.”
“I have no idea what that means, Mikail Mikailivitch. You’d have to ask them.”
“But there was a backpack. It belonged to the man called Clay, the man you were responsible for overseeing before he broke out of prison…”
Vasily tried to keep his voice even. I’m just dumb Vasily, he reminded himself. If it can be said that in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, it is perhaps equally true that in a camp where everyone is trained as a spy, the man who seems least capable is often the least suspect. He remembered what Clay told him when he’d said that no one thought Vasily capable of deception, and how that fact gave him an advantage in a world where deception was second nature. He played the only card he had to play. He told a lie and convinced himself to believe it.
“I don’t know, Mikail. Perhaps they lied in order to lead you off their trail. There is no backpack that I know of. Those two,” he said, indicating to the two nearest body bags, “were more worried about whether I would get them extra blankets than anything else.”
“Vasily, sometimes when you find yourself in a hole, the best way to get out is to stop digging.”
Vasily looked at him, and Mikail looked back, raising an eyebrow at him as if to suggest, for the second time in the space of a couple of hours, that he might soon find himself lying in a grave like those before him. Vasily made a face that suggested he didn’t know what he was expected to say next, and Mikail placed his hand on the young man’s shoulder as if to calm him.
“Listen, comrade, you go home and think about it, will you? It’s late. I worry that you are out of your depth. There is a rising tide in this place and it will drown you if you let it.” Mikail shrugged his shoulders when he said this, almost as if he was powerless in the town. “It’s possible that it will drown you even if you don’t let it, but go and get some sleep. Perhaps the walk will jog your memory. I have other things to think about right now, and Warwick has seen too much bloodshed for one day. But remember, Vasily, I’m somewhat limited in what I can do for you. I have to play the hands as they’re dealt, and, as with Todd, I have to make use of sometimes unpleasant means to serve the greater good. There is a man with a gun named Vladimir who is not as long-suffering as I am. I would hate for him to have to rummage around and find what you cannot.”
Vasily got up to leave, brushing the earth off the seat of his pants, and trying to decide if he should protest his innocence for one beat longer or whether he had already lost that opportunity. He decided to simply drop the whole matter and attempt to relate to Mikail as one human being to another. At that moment, his mind rested on a quote from Solzhenitsyn: “If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?” Vasily decided that, at this moment, the bravest thing for him to do was not to attempt to make a correct calculation about the likelihood of his being believed or not, but, instead, to simply show compassion to this man whom he had come to fear in his heart.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said. “No one deserves to have to live with that burden and to be held accountable for such a cost.”
Mikail seemed genuinely moved by his statement. “Yes, Vasily. Well… we all have our crosses to bear. Yours will be to carry yours for as long as you are able, while mine will be to raise Cain.” He paused. “I hope we are both up to it.”
****
Monday, Early Morning
Vasily walked hurriedly, but with purpose, along the side street to the end of the block, and then turned up the hill toward the house of Aleksei Gopchik. It was 4 a.m., and his mind was tired and his energy level was waning quickly. He’d spent the last couple of hours knocking on the doors of the people closest to him, waking them from their slumber, trying his best to convince them to pack a bag and come with him to an escape.
He hoped with all of the hope that he could muster in his breast that he might convince them that the town was unsafe, but that he, dull little Vasily, would be able to lead them to safety. As he should have expected, he’d been frustrated at every turn by the blank and unbelieving stares of his dearest friends.
The pattern had become painfully consistent. First there would be a sleepy shuffling as the inhabitant groggily made his way to the door, as if to confront a rude interloper. The door would open. Yawning incomprehension was followed by either a blatant display of skepticism or, in some cases, downright hostility. How old is the reluctance to heed the midnight warning? How many prophets have heard the same refrains?
“How can you dare to wake me up at this hour?” each one of them asked. “Do you have any idea how late it is?” He’d heard that last line so often that he’d taken to quoting Solzhenitsyn in response, “Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you—you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”
None of his exhortations mattered. The story was always the same—albeit with different words—at each of the places he’d stopped. He was told that Warwick was indeed in turmoil, but that trouble had been coming for far too long. Volkhov’s lessons on the dialectic came to mind. On whatever side one was on, they were convinced that it was high time the other side learned a lesson.
Volkhov’s speech! From just a few hours before… The wisdom contained there might as well be buried in that body bag along with the old man’s corpse.
While the world chose up sides along false lines outside the fences of Warwick and around the world, the microcosm inside the wire matched it all perfectly. Nothing divides humanity, to its own destruction, quite as effectively as a false choice.
There were those who favored running the thugs at the gymnasium out of town on a rail, and others who favored falling into line with their petite revolution and teaching the old guard (“the powers that be!”) a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget. There was talk of civil and uncivil war, and assumptions that the Spetnaz soldiers, who had parachuted in and who were now protecting the new government at the gym, would go along with whichever side showed up with the largest numbers. The ghosts of St. Petersburg in 1917 were never far from Warwick. Conflicts that had been brewing for a generation in Warwick were finally coming to a head, and his friends were not only unwilling to join in his exodus, they were hoping to get a scalp or two for their troubles.
“But don’t you see that this is no way to live?” Vasily had asked them.
They simply shook their heads in stubbornness and sorrow, for they couldn’t imagine any other way. “It has been coming to this, and they will get what they deserve,” they’d each said in their turn and in their own words. He’d heard that phrase so often, and with the definition of who “they” were changing to fit the exigencies of shifting opinion, that Vasily had simply come to expect its antipathy.
“But we don’t have to choose between two tyrants! We can go outside the wire and be free!” He’d sung, like a free bird singing to the masses in their chains.
“You can die just as easily out there as you can in here, Vasily.”
“Yes, I might die out there, but if I do, I will die on my own terms. At least I will have sought something higher and better than the false choices given to me by liars, by those who seek the power to coerce others. And look at the way we’re living now! The food will not keep coming from outside. This system is unsustainable. It is already interrupted. We don’t produce enough stuff in Warwick to feed and clothe ourselves. However our supplies got here before this trouble, they will eventually stop.”
“Dull, dull Vasily. Don’t be such an alarmist! We don’t need conspiracy theories when we have an enemy closer to hand. We’ll deal with them first, and then everything will get back to normal.” And one by one they had closed the door on him and gone back to bed until morning. As Volkhov had often said, “anything that one does not want to believe can easily be dismissed as a conspiracy theory.”
Vasily ha
d become desperate. He’d decided within himself that he would not give up until he found at least one other person to come along with him. He had to do it. There was that conviction, that destiny, again. He had to do it if only to restore his faith in the power of reason. He was sensing that the world had gone mad, and he was growing angrier in response to that madness surrounding him. “How can they not see this?” he wondered. “How can they not understand that Mikail will kill them all before he is done?” And then, he thought, if Mikail does not do it, then time and the crushing weight of facts will finish them off in due time. This is the way it always is—one might choose to live in delusion, but reality is stubbornly persistent, and will assert itself at the most inopportune times.
After all of that, he now walked up the hill to Alyoshka’s house in the hopes that, at long last, he might find a reasonable man.
As he approached the house, he heard a voice behind him. “Why so grave, mate?” Vasily stopped in the street and turned around to find Kolya walking a few feet behind along the darkened path. “Don’t worry,” Kolya said, “it’s only me, your most holy digging friend. And, I might add, that it was very unfriendly of you to leave me to bury that old man by myself. When we returned to the site, everyone else had a partner but poor Kolya. He had to do all the work himself.”
Vasily hesitated, not knowing what to say. So he said what one always does in such cases. “I’m sorry, Kolya. I didn’t mean to. It was beyond my control.”
“That’s ok. I figured as much. When I saw that bulldog pull you to the side, I figured you would not have an easy time of it. In fact, I halfway expected we’d have to dig another hole when we returned from our little adventure with Vladimir.”
“Yes,” Vasily said, rubbing his hands together for warmth. “What was that about, anyway?”
“Oh, just some punk kids fighting over something the grandfathers of their grandfathers once said. Shockingly inconsiderate the ancestors of our ancestors were, leaving us with so much unfinished business. You may not have heard, but our little town is headed for a civil war.”
Vasily relaxed. Something in Kolya’s jovial indifference made him feel that he was safe talking to him. He laughed a little to himself. If the man were not indifferent, I wouldn’t trust him. In a land seething with dialectically opposed agendas, the safest man turns out to be the man without one.
“Yes, I’ve heard. In fact, I am trying to get people to opt out.”
“What do you mean? Not fight? But how can they avoid such a fight when the grandfathers of their grandfathers once said thus and so?” Kolya took off his glasses and winked at Vasily. “But, seriously. What do you mean?”
“I have a way out. I mean literally, an escape route. I am leaving today with a friend, and I’m trying to persuade people to follow… a thankless and fruitless task. Perhaps it’s the hour, or maybe I’m not as persuasive as I would like to be, but so far I have been thoroughly unconvincing.”
Kolya cocked his head to look at Vasily in that way one does to see if someone is pulling his leg. “You say ‘literally’ and, unhappily that word is often used today when ‘figuratively’ is actually intended. An escape route? Do you mean to say that you have a real live escape route, one that leads outside of these fences? Or… are you being metaphorical? I don’t see you as a politician, Vasily, or at least not as a very good one. I may be the only one in this town that likes you.”
Vasily smiled. “That is not only what I mean to say. It is what I am saying,” he replied, then watched as the young man straightened his head and carefully cleaned his glasses and then slowly put them back onto his face. He smiled through his rounded features, and Vasily suddenly became aware of him rubbing the blisters on his hands. He dropped his hand to his side.
The world spun on as sleepers slept in their beds, but in the street in front of Alyoshka’s house, there was suddenly an undeniable awareness by two men who in that singular moment were fully awake. Vasily had found his twin, his brother at arms. Kolya looked down and glanced at the earth still caked to his boots and shook it off, sending its tiny granules shushing across the lane’s hard-packed snow.
“Can I bring my sister?”
****
The spark of the match punctuated the still black night, and a flame shot up and along the stick and illuminated Pyotr’s fingers as he placed the tip of the flame against the wick of the candle. He opened the door and breathed a sigh of relief as he quickly ushered Vasily into the hallway and then closed the door and the curtains behind them.
“I had almost decided you were dead.”
“I might still be,” Vasily said. “But it seems that at the moment we’re free to go about our business.”
“Good, and what did you find out?”
“The town is in turmoil. It’s madness. We may have a civil war on our hands when we wake up to have our breakfast. People are choosing up sides.” Vasily exhaled deeply and shook his head at the waste and futility of it all.
“Four guards were executed and… your uncle… ” Vasily caught himself. There was no need to relay such news without compassion. “I’m sorry, Pyotr. He’s dead. It’s sure now. I just left off talking to the man who helped me dig his grave.”
“Wait, they had you digging graves?” Pyotr asked, narrowing his eyes and leaning his head to one side.
“Yes,” Vasily nodded, “Mikail is out of control, and Vladimir may even be worse. They’re now the little Lenin and Stalin of Warwick. They commandeered a group of us and made us bury the murdered men. They threatened my life several times. It’s just entirely unsafe to stay around here much longer.”
Vasily rubbed his hands together to warm them, and in doing so he recalled the weight of the shovel and the full night knocking on doors. “I’ve spent the last several hours trying to find someone, anyone, to come along with us,” he stopped, shaking his head. “The young man who lives on Gagarin Avenue named Kolya is the only one who agreed. He and his sister, Natasha, are going to come over at dawn and help us pack so we can leave.”
“Fine. Best to travel with a small group anyway, and we’ll have work to do before we can set out. Did anyone ask about me?”
“No, not yet. They did wonder about the backpack, and I’m certain they’ll eventually figure out where I’m staying since I didn’t sleep overnight in the gym. They know that you’re Lev’s nephew, or at least they should, and they just haven’t thought about it all yet. It’ll all come together for them at some point. I also visited enough houses since I left to fill a small phone book so, while I didn’t mention any specific names, it’s only a matter of time, as you said, before we’re found out.” Vasily exhaled deeply, looking at Pyotr to see how he was receiving the news. Pyotr looked back, calmly, and did not interrupt.
“Everyone I told was disinterested in our plans, Pyotr. They didn’t care to leave. They all prefer to join this senseless conflict that’s in the air…” Vasily dropped his hands, as if in defeat, “…rather than take a moment—just a moment—to face the bare facts of their unsustainable existence. Still, I talked to a lot of people on both sides, and once those people begin to talk to one another, our plan will become public knowledge.”
“Yes,” Pyotr said, nodding, “most likely. When they do, they will certainly come here, but we will be long gone by then, Vasily. I have most of our provisions already packed. If things go as Volkhov said they should, the EMP could hit tomorrow.”
Vasily’s face dropped. He’d certainly felt the urgency to escape, and to save as many of his friends and neighbors as possible, but he’d forgotten about the electromagnetic pulse that Volkhov predicted would likely come on America’s election day. Was that tomorrow? Tuesday? He flashed back to the lessons sitting in Volkhov’s study, the time he’d spent with the old man in prison just before death. The imminence of the catastrophe that was about to strike braced him.
Volkhov had explained that an electromagnetic pulse (usually abbreviated as an EMP) is a destructive burst of electromagnetic radia
tion. An EMP could happen willfully and purposefully from the high-altitude explosion of a nuclear device, or it could come from any number of other, less diabolical sources, including as a blast of solar radiation emitted from the sun. It was hard to tell how Volkhov’s predicted EMP might be triggered, since most of the militaries of the world had done extensive research into EMP weapons, and he was unclear as to who the various forces were behind the scenes that might desire such an end.
An EMP of sufficient strength could destroy most sensitive computer parts and equipment, melt down power lines, blow up transformers, and destroy just about anything that ran on electricity that wasn’t shielded from such an attack.
The memory of Volkhov’s warnings, and the minute and scary details the old man had given about what could happen to any technologically advanced society if an EMP of significant strength were to hit, rushed over Vasily in a cold wave. Absolute Destruction. And the EMP wasn’t even the war.
“The EMP is just the trigger,” Volkhov had said, “what follows will shock even the wildest imagination.” Vasily looked over at the candle on the table, and at the shadow of the man on the wall, and thought of what the implications of an EMP going off in an America already spiraling into chaos might be.
Pyotr looked at Vasily, his face ashen and drawn, and then suddenly realized how harrowing the last several hours must have been for him, and how remarkably brave he’d been in standing up to the experience. He turned and walked Vasily down the hallway and into a small room with a mattress on the floor and a wash basin near a chair. He told him to get some rest and that he would wake him in a few hours. Then he pulled the door shut behind him, before thinking better of it and opening it up again to catch the younger man’s eye in the shadows and the dark.
“My uncle knew that you were going to be a great man, Vasily Romanovich.”
“That’s funny, because I am not even sure of that myself. But there is one thing of which I am certain, Pyotr. It is that I will die before I stop trying to be.”
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