by James Axler
Her lips pressed to his, and he fought to respond, closing his eyes against the vileness. Her hand caressed him, rousing him. Her mouth tasted of the stolen food that once belonged to the good people of Ozhbarchik.
She reclined, releasing him, fumbling with her leather breeches, dropping them over her pallid, wrinkled thighs. Bizabraznia belched, putting a hand to her mouth in mock politeness.
"Schchi da kasha pishchna nasha," she laughed.
"The only food is cabbage soup and gruel." Somehow the child's verse was a foul obscenity on her chapped lips, and he nearly threw up. Again he restrained himself, knowing that this monstrous harridan would kill him if he didn't please her.
The woman heaved herself up and squatted over his thighs, grinning, trying to bring him to erection. "Not much for you, is there? Not in the way of a man, eh? There's a good… Something's stirring, I swear. Not much of a fucking worm, but better than… ah."
The ultimate nightmare was that she succeeded. Despite everything that had passed, Ivan Ivanovich became more roused than he had for many impotent years. He thrust up against her, grinding his hips against her muscular buttocks. She reached a gasping climax, accompanied by the cheers of the dozen or so bandits that had come in from the bitterly cold night to watch the show.
Bizabraznia heaved herself off him, depriving him of the small pleasure of his own orgasm, sitting down again with a disgusting sucking sound. .
"Please…" he said.
Her eyes narrowed and she slapped him brutally across the face, nearly knocking him unconscious. He could taste his own blood from a cut lip.
"'Please,'" she mocked. "I use you. That's all, you little shit. Honor, for him, isn't it, brothers?" Her appeal brought a chorus of agreement from the men. "If there's time after Uchitel's done with you, grandfather, I might come again and use you some more."
When the leader returned to the hut, the others crept out like beaten curs. Ivan Ivanovich looked up from eyes made puffy with weeping, seeing the great fire from the ruby on Uchitel's silver headband seeming to fill the room. Now that the others were gone, the fear was greater.
"Is there silver in this dung heap, old man?" His voice was courteous, not rough like the rest of the raiders'. "I see you've been hurt." He touched the cuts across Ivan's chest and thighs where the blood had dried. "Tell me about any gold or silver. Or guns. Or more food. Tell me, old man. Come, sing me a song that will make me smile, and you can go free and live."
Ivan's mouth opened and a single word crept out. "Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing."
"I am not a common bandit. I have the art of reading and writing, old man. I have books. Books from before the great winter. I have books that show where the towns stood, with pictures of the clothes that men and women wore. Do you hear me? Open your eyes."
The voice snapped at Ivan Ivanovich. It touched the dark places of his mind with a shudder.
Past and present ebbed and flowed.
It was a dream and soon he'd wake. He'd be warm against the rutting body of the little Yevgenia. Despite the cleft palate and the skin ailment that made her face like the scaly back of a fish, she could come closest to stirring him. The memory of the pain was only a shade of the blackness. He'd wake and it would all be done. Even the man Uchitel who…
"Wake up and look at me. Use your eyes." To Ivan, the words were senseless, as was the laugh that followed them. "I tell you I have books and I can read them. Even a book that tells me how to speak with the Americans across the ice river east of here. Think of that. But I talk and you listen. Now you must talk and Uchitel will listen."
"What?"
"The gold and the silver you have hidden. A book of old times, far before the long winter, tells that peasants—filth like you—hoard riches. You pretend to be poor. But you are not. What of that?"
Ivan Ivanovich was delirious, hardly knowing how he forced out a reply. Everything was blurred and shimmering, like objects seen through the glowing beat above a stove.
"Nothing."
"No?"
"Nyet, nyet, nyet."
Uchitel smiled then and stood up. "You will meet Pechal."
"Sorrow?"
"Yes, sorrow. He is well named, grandfather. He takes his only pleasure from torture. You will speak with him."
"But I swear, I know nothing, sir. Please, my lord. Nothing. By Saint Gregory I swear it."
"Swear by all the saints you want. Only the truth about your secret stores will spare your life."
Uchitel didn't truly believe that such a stinking hamlet as Ozhbarchik could possibly have anything worth hiding. But his men liked to dream. Sometimes they had actually discovered little caches of arms or a few antique coins of worthless copper.
The voice at Ivan's elbow was gentle, like the voice of a clerk politely requesting information. "Shall I ask him for his secrets, Uchitel?"
"Yes, Pechal. I'll wait and watch."
Pechal's appearance fitted his voice. He wore gray furs, with matching gauntlets and hood. Most of the band were bearded; he was as clean shaven as Uchitel himself. Pechal, the Sorrow, had pale soft cheeks and a rosebud of a mouth that was permanently pursed in disapproval of the world and its evil. He resembled a priest who had spent all his life in a closed seminary, speaking only of good works and following the pathways of the Lord.
Ivan stared up at him, seeing all of this. Pechal leaned over him, and the old man saw the eyes.
They were like chips of wind-washed agate frozen in the eternal ice of the farthest north.
"Tell me now and all will be well."
"Nyet. There is nothing. Please. On my wife's grave, I swear, nothing."
It began.
Gradually Ivan Ivanovich disappeared within the pain of the probing and cutting and rending of his body.
Pechal crooned to him constantly, like a father keeping a baby amused while he bathed it in warm water. At first Ivan's pain had been a light, fluttering thing, like touching a hot iron momentarily or feeling the prick of a needle that hurt a moment, then ceased.
"Tell Pechal of your hoard, grandfather. This is nothing to you. Ah, that made you start, didn't it?"
With a slow delicacy, Pechal forced the point of a knife down beneath a toenail, down to the quick, slowly thrusting and scraping until it seemed to Ivan Ivanovich that the marrow of his bones was being rubbed raw.
"You have your hearing, your sight, your voice. Even this."' He touched Ivan's limp penis with the cold edge of a dagger. "You can keep them all, old man. Tell Pechal everything and live."
Nothing.
Pechal lit a tallow candle with a match. Then Ivan felt scorching heat on the inside of his elbows, then behind his knees in the soft crinkled flesh. Ivan smelled his own flesh burning. His body tensing upward, he pulled at the cords so hard that they cut into his bloodied, swollen skin.
From, outside came the smell of roasting meat and loud, bellowing laughter. Pechal stopped for a moment and stood, stretching his arms. "It is tiring, this asking of questions, is it not?" he asked the old man, "Spare us both and answer me."
Uchitel was drinking from an earthenware mug of ryabinovka, a fiery vodka flavored with ashberries. Muttering something to Pechal, he rose and walked out, leaving the door open so that light from the fires outside the hut capered across the walls.
"I believe you, grandfather," whispered the torturer. "But if I relent, then Uchitel will flay the skin from my living body. I have seen him do it."
Ivan Ivanovich slipped painfully into madness. The agony deepened until he lost touch with it. Pechal pressed hard against Ivan's eyes with the balls of his thumbs, making the old man scream.
"Your eyes pain you. I can stop them hurting. Here."
From a shelf on the far side of the stove, he took a carved box of black powder that Ivanovich used for his ancient musket. Holding the lids open, he piled a neat little heap on each eye. The powder felt gritty, like having specks of sand in his eyes.
"Now?"
"Mercy," sobbed Iv
an Ivanovich. He might as well have begged the north wind or the layers of ice that were forming over the corpses of his friends.
He heard, actually heard the sizzle of his own eyes burning when the guerrilla touched the candle flame to the black powder. His nostrils were filled with the stench.
When Pechal burst his eardrums, Ivan felt only the stabbing pain. The lack of sound was somehow a relief, as though it was the start of a complete sensory withdrawal from the pain. Cutting the tendons in his jaw, burning his nipples, slicing his genitals from his body, leaving only the weeping, raw wound—none of that registered with the poor creature that had been Ivan Ivanovich. Day and night, hot and cold were gone. After that, it was over.
He still breathed. His heart still pounded desperately. But his mind was dead. His head rocked from side to side and a toneless, faint whimpering sound was all that came from his peeled lips. Uchitel returned and stood alongside Pechal, looking down emotionlessly at the old man's naked, ravaged body. His cold yellow eyes registered the blood, the raised blisters, the scorched eye sockets, the dreadful mute evidence of the castration.
"You have taken him too far, too fast, Pechal," he said, quietly. "Now he will tell us nothing."
"Da, I fear that's true."
Uchitel shook his head. "The meat is nearly cooked, and all the animals are butchered and jointed. We can sleep here tonight and move on in the morning."
"Why not stay here for a week or so? The snows are passing. Every time we move, it is farther north, farther east. Soon we shall be at the sea."
"Yes, Pechal. Soon we shall be at the sea. If your whining continues, then I shall pin you out on the ice for the white bears to feed on."
"But…"
The tall, lean man shook his head. "You should learn to hold your tongue, my brother Sorrow, or I will rip it from its roots. You know why we move on."
"What the merchant told you?"
"Yes. Now, take this offal out and slit its throat. I am tired, Pechal."
"Did…?"
"What? You are making me weary, brother."
Despite the chilling note of warning, the other man continued. "Did he say where they were? Or how far behind us?"
For a moment, Uchitel stared at him in silence, oblivious of the dying man on the bed behind him.
"Pechal… the merchant said he had heard that there was a band of militia hunting us down."
"But did he say where?"
"They were bastard whores' sons, spawned in middens, from the port of Magadan, where, they say, there are houses and many stores and mongrel codsuckers who sit with their thumbs buried in their own asses while they send their puppies on horseback to hunt down men such as you and I, my brother. He said that they had heard we robbed and plundered and raped and burned and slaughtered. His very words, from what I recall of his blubbering. This so-called government that believes in some party…"
He spat out the two words as if they soiled his lips. Pechal nodded. "And they will chase us down. Then we shall kill them." He clenched his hand, soft as a woman's, yet with long, curved nails of horn. "Fool."
"What?"
"You are a fool. These will not be puking peasants like this old shit here on the bed. They will have good guns. No. It is best that we run."
Bizabraznia came staggering in, beer running down her chins, over her open blouse, trickling across her huge, veined breasts. In one hand she held a great smoking haunch of meat, the outside charred and black, blood leaking from its center.
She sniggered at Ivan Ivanovich. "Can I have some sport with him?"
"No. Pechal will cut his neck open outside, and then I can get some sleep. We must all sleep. We have a dawn start tomorrow."
"Then we run from these militia boys, eh?" Uchitel nodded. "Aye. Lead them far enough, and they'll give up the chase. Then we can return to our hunting grounds once more."
"Where do we run?" asked Urach, standing in the doorway.
"That way," replied Uchitel, pointing east.
"There is nothing there but the frozen sea."
He smiled. "We shall cross it where the strait is narrowest, no more than ninety kilometers wide."
"To the other side?" said Urach, wonderingly.
"Yes, brother. On the morrow we head for America."
Chapter Five
"COULD FUCKIN' STAY HERE forever," said Hunaker on their third day in the huge redoubt.
It was more than just a redoubt. J. B. Dix and Ryan Cawdor had twice revisited the gateway, making sure of the route in case they needed it. They had also drawn a plan of the labyrinthine, rambling corridors, readying themselves for any eventuality. Near the gateway, high on a wall, they'd seen a small notice like the one they'd seen in the redoubt in the Darks: Entry Absolutely Forbidden To All But B12 Cleared Personnel. Mat-Trans.
The red paint was as bright as if it had only been lettered a day ago.
The place, with its incorporated stockpile, was the biggest building that Ryan Cawdor had ever laid eyes on. It was bigger by far than any ville he'd seen, vastly more imposing than any barony out East. The stockpile alone was more than a mile in length and a quarter-mile in breadth, with a maze of interconnecting passages and storerooms, reminding him of pictures he'd once seen in some old, crumbling mags from before the Chill.
It reminded him of what had once been called a "shopping mall."
During the three days, Ryan ordered his party to station themselves anywhere they could in the redoubt. Quint and his wives, Rachel and Lori, kept mainly to themselves, eating in their own quarters.
Ryan's group had their own dormitory: a long room with forty beds, each with a locker. There were showers and latrine facilities, a dining room and a kitchen, with all the plates and pots and cutlery they could need. It was obvious that the place had been designed as a post-holocaust living-space for a couple of hundred people. The air-conditioning kept everything free from dust and dirt.
Most of the complex was open to them, though Quint warned them against trying to force open any locked doors.
"Keeper wouldn't like that," he'd quavered.
Their relationship was odd. Quint and his women, who went everywhere with their Heckler & Koch sub-MGs, made no objection when Ryan and his party retrieved their weapons. If they'd wanted, they could have iced the Keeper and both his wives. Okie and Finnegan wanted to do this, but Ryan and J.B. opposed them.
"No reason. They don't seem a threat. Watch 'em carefully. Could be useful." As ever, the Armorer was brief and to the point.
As far as they could determine, there were only two entrances to the redoubt. One was a huge vanadium-steel doorway like the one back in the Darks, but without a manual control on the inside. Ryan believed it had never been opened since the long winter. It possessed no windows or ob slits anywhere.
One important thing happened during those three days.
J. B. Dix managed to find out where the redoubt was. After what Doc had said to them about complexes containing both a stockpile and a redoubt having been built in strategic locations, it wasn't too much of a surprise.
Near a small exit was a room that held some charts. Conn, the navigator whom they'd left in charge of War Wag One, would have given his right arm for them. They were the best-preserved maps that any of them had ever seen. Though they were frail and tended to crack when they were unfolded, their colors were unfaded. Since Quint wasn't around, J.B. took several and stuffed them in his pack.
One map, which was pinned to a corkboard, showed the area around the redoubt in considerable detail, and Ryan and J.B. studied it with interest.
"Alaska," said the Armorer.
"Yeah," agreed Ryan. "That's where Fairbanks was. And Anchorage. That's the strait. Heard some talk years ago that it was all frozen over here. The winter never moved after the Chill. And there, on the left side, a few miles west…"
"Russia," said J.B., nodding.
"Close," said Ryan.
MEMBERS OF THE GROUP spent time in ways that interested them, someti
mes alone, sometimes in pairs or threes.
Ryan was with J.B. a lot, and with Krysty Wroth the rest of the time. In the hectic days since they'd first made love, it seemed as if an eternity had come and gone. Now, at last, they found some hours to be alone together.
There was a whole suite of rooms filled with weights, rowing equipment, a small swimming pool, exercise cycles and a whirlpool bath with the name Jacuzzi on it. Green metal lockers held clothes, towels, leotards, trunks and wraps. Krysty peeled off her stained overalls and pulled on a tight red leotard with white flashes down the arms. Ryan smiled at her enthusiasm.
"Get stripped for action," she called, sitting astride the white saddle of a stationary bike, tucking her bare feet under the straps and beginning to pedal.
The temperature throughout the redoubt and stockpile was sixty degrees. Monitors on a small console in the living quarters showed that outside it was an average of minus forty during the day and minus ninety during the night. A driving northerly wind that sometimes exceeded a hundred miles an hour made it likely that an unprotected human would freeze to death within minutes. Even with the best thermals on, at night or when the wind rose, life would be precarious after more than a couple of hours in the open.
Ryan peeled off his favorite long coat, with its white fur trim, and put it carefully on the padded floor. The SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm and the three spare ammo packs followed; then the LAPA 5.56 mm and the heavy steel panga, its eighteen-inch blade sheathed in soft, oiled leather. Finally he took his white scarf of fine silk from around his neck and put it neatly by the weapons. It made a soft clunking sound. Hearing the noise, Krysty looked curiously at him.
"What's in that, Ryan?"
"In the scarf?"
"Yeah."
"Couple of bits of lead."
She paused in her frantic pedaling. "What's that for, Ryan?"
He shook his head. "Mebbe one day I'll tell you. Mebbe one day I'll show you."
He peeled his coveralls and his thermal vest and pants, laying them by the weapons. Stripped, he was aware of his own stink.
