by S. M. Reine
He emerged from the other side unmolested, with his fake passport, and twenty minutes until boarding.
“Excellent,” he said as he threaded his belt through the loops again. A blue-haired old lady shot him a sideways look, hugged her shoes under her arm, and hurried to find somewhere else to get dressed. Malcolm glared at her until she was gone. She didn’t look like a likely Union plant, but one could never be too careful.
He hadn’t been able to avail himself of the showering facilities at the Faulkner house before leaving, and it had been weeks since the Union had allowed him to visit the showers (“For your safety,” they had said). Twenty minutes to boarding wasn’t much, but he felt giddy and confident from reaching the airport safely, so he ducked into the bathroom to freshen up.
The sinks were crowded with travelers trying to shave and brush their teeth, so he elbowed his way through.
“Sorry, mates!” he said cheerfully, choosing to ignore the grumbles of protest. Nobody tried to fight him on it. People were all too happy to get out of the way of a man who reeked of weeks-old body odor.
Malcolm grabbed fistfuls of paper towels, wetted them down in the sink, and stepped into the disabled stall for a quick sponge bath.
Humming a tune under his breath, he stripped off his shirt. It took him a minute to realize what he was humming. It was a song from an eighties teen movie, that one with the kids in detention, and he had to laugh at it. Not because it was funny. But because he was safe. There wasn’t much that would make him look forward to seeing Elise Kavanagh, and all the trouble that came with her. Eluding the Union was probably about it.
He hummed louder and wiped down his sweaty chest, his armpits, his crotch. He even took off the bandana and wiped down his eyehole. It felt heavenly.
Malcolm only broke off when he forgot the tune. But the silence that came between verses was a little too heavy.
The bathroom, which had been crowded when he stepped into the stall, had gone quiet.
Probably just a lull, he thought.
He pulled his shirt back on anyway, and then held his breath to listen.
Rubber squelched rhythmically against the floors. It sounded like slow, deliberate footsteps. And it was a sound that he recognized all too well, since Union boots all sounded the same when walking across linoleum.
Shit.
He dropped to a crouch, head spinning with booze and adrenaline, and watched a pair of legs cross the bathroom.
Black slacks. Black shoes.
Malcolm wasn’t drunk enough for this bullshit.
He stepped back against the wall, scanning the stall for a weapon. Everything was bolted down, of course—the toilet, the assistance bar, the toilet paper holder. He grabbed the metal container with the seat covers and jiggled it gently. That was bolted, too.
The footsteps squelched closer.
“Fuck this,” he said.
Malcolm flung the stall door open.
The surprised face of a very young kopis—a kid named Gregory, if he remembered correctly—met him on the other side. “Malcolm?” Gregory asked, blinking. “What are you doing here?”
Malcolm had been braced for a fight, so didn’t have any clue how to respond to friendliness. “Uh…”
“Did you get the special assignment?”
Gregory must not have realized that Malcolm had been removed from command and now topped the Union’s most-wanted list.
Malcolm felt the ridiculous urge to laugh, but suppressed it.
“Yes,” he said. “Special assignment. Top secret.”
Gregory bobbed his head. “Me, too. I’ve been assigned to the tactical team from Italian HQ because of my test scores, which I guess is kind of an honor? They want me there for the Event.” He said “event” with special emphasis, like it should be capitalized.
His use of the word “event” rang a bell somewhere in Malcolm’s alcohol-addled brain. It brought to mind volumes of prophecies sitting on a bookshelf in his apartment, back when he still had command of the Reno territory. As commander, he had been meant to read those prophecies, but he never really got around to it.
But he did remember that Events were incidents of great significance—sometimes apocalyptically so.
What were the odds that this Event might have something to do with Elise Kavanagh?
Malcolm wasn’t in a betting mood.
“So,” he said, picking his words carefully, “you’ve got clearance for this Event, too. That means we can talk business. Right?”
“Probably,” Gregory said. “But this isn’t exactly a secure area.”
“I’m just wondering if they told you anything about the, ah, woman. The…the Godslayer.”
He shrugged. “All they told me about was the hybrids. I don’t know anything about any women. We’ll get fully briefed once we arrive, though.”
Better and better.
“Yeah,” Malcolm said. “Can’t wait to see hear that briefing. What fun. Hybrids.” He paused, and then asked, “What’s a hybrid?”
A look of suspicion crossed Gregory’s face. “Wait. Didn’t I see an article about you getting arrested or something?”
Malcolm blinked. “Uh, yes?” No, wait, that was a terrible answer. He backtracked. “I mean, no, I didn’t get arrested. Well, I did! But it was a mistake, and they released me. I’m innocent. Free as a bird and assigned to special ops, just like you.”
Ah, shit, he was way too drunk for this.
Apparently, he slurred his words a little too much. Gregory leaned forward and sniffed. “Have you been imbibing on duty?”
“Nope, not me,” Malcolm said.
“But you’re obviously drunk.” Gregory touched his ear, where he was wearing the usual Bluetooth earpiece. Most Union members never took theirs off. The fact that Malcolm’s was missing was probably the most damning of the evidence, aside from his borrowed clothing and drunken sweat. And Gregory noticed.
“Great,” Malcolm said.
He dragged Gregory into the stall and slammed his face into the wall.
Tile shattered. Dust rained onto the floor.
Gregory fought to drag him to the floor, and succeeded. They punched at each other ineffectually. Malcolm somehow ended up on top and hauled Gregory to his feet.
“Sorry,” he said, and then he slammed the young kopis’s head into the toilet—hard enough that Gregory didn’t get up again. There was blood. Maybe dead. Malcolm preferred not to know.
He took Gregory’s earpiece and jogged out of the bathroom, leaving the body in the stall.
Five minutes to boarding.
Malcolm had been considering putting on the earpiece to see if he could get any further intel on this so-called “Event.” A niggling, heroic urge told him that if the Union was dealing with apocalypse, he should probably be there—but that was the kopis instinct talking. Kopides loved plunging headfirst into suicidal fights.
Not Malcolm. He was going to go to Russia, pick up Elise, and pretend that he had never heard a damn thing about an Event. Whatever the Union was up to, it was no longer his business.
A voice over the PA system announced that his flight was boarding early. He dropped Gregory’s earpiece in the trash and got on the plane.
Malcolm couldn’t find a kiosk for car rentals at the Yakutsk airport, but he quickly located someone happy to sell him a vehicle. “Like new,” the seller said. He barely spoke English, and the fragments sounded like they had been pulled straight from commercials. “Great condition.”
“How much?” Malcolm asked.
The price was good. Too good, maybe. But Malcolm didn’t have a lot of room to be picky.
Fortunately, Lucas had been thoughtful enough to send some rubles along with the fake passport, and he could afford to buy the car. The seller happily produced a key, and vanished shortly after they entered the long-term parking area.
Once he saw what he had paid for, Malcolm contemplated walking the hundreds of miles through Russian nothingness.
Anything was
better than a sickly yellow Yugo.
“Like new,” he muttered as he climbed in. “Great condition.”
The engine started. The tank was full, but the heater didn’t seem to work. The blanket helpfully folded in the back seat was probably meant to make up for that.
Malcolm hoped that Elise appeared in Oymyakon with a Lamborghini.
He couldn’t pick up any radio stations in the Yugo, so he had nothing to distract him on the way to Oymyakon. The countryside was entering summer and was probably as warm as it would ever become all year. The wind still slapped him with cool hands when he stopped to piss by the side of the road after a couple of hours.
Empty and boring as it may have been, Malcolm had to give one thing to Russia’s long, mostly-empty highway: there were no black SUVs. Nothing but a lot of pavement and his Yugo.
Which was why he was a little bit worried when he saw the first airplane.
It made the first pass well above Russian air space—high enough that it looked only like a glimmering pinprick of metal.
It could have been anything. An ambitious helicopter, a military plane, a UFO.
But the second pass was lower, and so was the third.
Malcolm kept an eye on it out the window. On the fourth pass, his heart beat wildly in his throat. It didn’t look like it was the shape of one of the Union’s airplanes that he had seen during his time as commander, but it was impossible to tell at that distance. He thought that it might have been black.
“Lots of airplanes are black,” he muttered aloud to comfort himself.
It didn’t work.
He refilled the Yugo with gas cans from the backseat and drove through the night. He had slept on the plane and his internal clock was still on Colorado time, so it wasn’t too hard. The abject panic helped, too.
This time of year, and this far north, night was brief—barely four hours long. But he made the most of the darkness to speed down the highway.
In the darkness of night, there were no airplanes that he could see. But that didn’t settle his nerves. Instead, he imagined a sky filled with silent black airplanes flying low overhead.
The headlights appeared about an hour before dawn.
Malcolm watched the rearview mirror much more closely than he should have, given how twisty and narrow the road was becoming. The headlights remained a fixed point behind him: two white pinpricks that never came close enough for him to see the vehicle itself, yet they never disappeared, either.
What were the chances that someone else was driving the desolate road out to Oymyakon at the exact same time he was, going the same speed, and driving through the night?
“No reason to think it’s the Union,” he muttered as he pulled off the side of the road. The Yugo couldn’t get far enough among the rocks to hide. “Gregory hadn’t even been looking for me. He’s probably dead, too. They don’t know I’m coming.”
But Gregory had spotted him, and if he woke up, he would have reported the sighting. Surely the Union would be too distracted to be looking for him, though.
Malcolm popped the trunk, grabbed a tire iron, and jumped into a ditch on the opposite side of the road.
Just in case.
He waited for the headlights to get nearer, fist tight on the iron bar, knuckles white. It was too cold to be belly-down in the dirt, but fear kept him warm.
The car pulled up alongside him. It was a black SUV with an iron cowcatcher on the front, hood-mounted machine guns, and spotlights. The white “UKA” logo with an arrow slashing a circle marked the door.
“Balls,” he whispered.
The people that stepped out wore the much finer uniforms of the Italian HQ’s operations.
One of them went to investigate the Yugo with his AK-47 aimed, and the other made a beeline right for the ditch that Malcolm was hiding in.
These weren’t the half-trained kopides that had been strong-armed into enlisting. These were mercenaries.
And all Malcolm had was a tire iron.
He wedged himself between a couple of rocks, which would hide him from the kopis for just a few more steps—enough time to prepare. As he listened to the crunching of feet on gravel, his fear ebbed away, replaced by the roaring calm of a kopis’s focus.
They’re going to have to die, Malcolm decided.
It wasn’t a pretty decision. He never liked it when things reached a fatal point. Given the choice, Malcolm would always choose a happy ending, with everyone going to the bar afterward to get properly drunk, sing songs, and shout at football matches.
But if he had made certain to kill Gregory in the first place, then maybe he wouldn’t have been facing this unit now. Maybe the deaths would have ended there.
He wasn’t going to make the mistake of leaving witnesses again.
The man that had been checking the Yugo spoke in Russian. “The car is empty.”
“Check the trees,” said the second man. He was almost within arm’s reach of Malcolm now.
Malcolm peered over the side of the ditch. The nearest man—a witch, not a kopis, judging by the logo on the breast of his jacket—was a few feet to the left, turned just a few degrees away, so that he wouldn’t see Malcolm coming. The other had his back turned.
They were coldly efficient Union mercenaries. None of them had ever served under Malcolm. As soon as they saw him, they would try to kill him, or worse—haul him back to HQ to be tortured and then killed.
It was survival of the fittest. He could kill them. He liked being alive too much not to.
Before Malcolm could talk himself out of it, he leaped out of the ditch and brought the tire iron down on the witch’s head.
It cracked satisfyingly into his skull, like smashing a coconut into a rock. The witch dropped.
The kopis behind him reacted instantly, spinning and opening fire. Malcolm rolled under the spray, grabbing the witch’s dropped firearm.
He didn’t hesitate to shoot—and his aim was much better.
The kopis’s chest exploded in a bloody mist.
There was movement inside the vehicle. A third person from the Union was still in the backseat. Malcolm realized it only an instant before they fired on him, too.
Bullets punched through the rear hatch of the SUV, just inches from Malcolm’s head.
He shouted and threw himself between its huge tires, underneath the bumper. He had to drop the gun to get under cover.
“Fuck me,” he muttered, elbow-crawling farther underneath the vehicle.
A door on the side of the SUV opened and feet dropped out. Malcolm squirmed out on the opposite side of the vehicle and sprinted for the other kopis’s gun.
The third Union soldier fired before he reached it.
It felt like a tiny animal with razor fangs bit into his calf, ripping the muscle free. He stumbled and fell.
Can’t stop.
He crawled forward as quickly as he could, grabbed the remaining AK-47, and fired as he turned.
Bullets chewed through his attacker before Malcolm realized that it was a woman—another witch, petite and cute.
She was short. He shot higher than he intended and took her face off.
Malcolm stared at the place where she had been standing, chest heaving with panicked breaths. His eyes were wide. He saw everything without really registering it.
His determined calm faded, and the panic returned.
Gin. He desperately needed gin.
Malcolm limped over to the body of the third person he had killed and stood over her, wiping sweat off of his forehead. “Ah, shit,” he said. Malcolm didn’t like killing anyone, especially not women.
There would be time for regrets later—plenty of time, unfortunately.
Hopefully, Oymyakon was well stocked with alcohol.
Malcolm hadn’t exactly been dawdling on his way to Oymyakon—wandering through Russia wasn’t on top of his list of “fun ways to waste a few days”—but he floored it now, tearing down dirt roads that were little more than parallel ruts split by long gras
s.
He didn’t stop to enjoy the rolling hills, snow-peaked mountains, or summer breezes. In fact, he didn’t stop at all until he reached the dot on the map indicating Oymyakon, and he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror the entire time.
Nobody followed him.
The Yugo stopped working a few kilometers away from his destination. The gas gauge had been getting dangerously close to the empty line, so Malcolm assumed he had just run out prematurely; he jumped out to refill the tank with the canisters in the back, and found that they had all been punctured in the firefight. He had been trailing gasoline for an hour.
He swore and kicked the tire. His calf, which had been grazed by a bullet and was now caked with blood, cramped in protest.
Malcolm limped the rest of the way to Oymyakon, chased by the ghosts of the Union team members that he had killed. At any moment, he expected an SUV to come bearing down upon him.
But he managed to arrive in the village at midday without any other incidents. Small mercy.
It was a tiny town with only one real street, and a lot of aging buildings that looked like they hadn’t been updated since the Soviet era. He might have driven right past it if he had still been in the Yugo, slow as it was.
“This is Oymyakon?” he muttered under his breath.
A farmer stood at the end of the road, watching him uneasily; a pair of black-haired women whispered to each other near the house. They were all dark-skinned, kind of Turkic-looking.
“Hello!” Malcolm called to them in Russian. It had been years since he’d hung out with his friend, Piotr, who had taught him the language over the course of many months of heavy drinking, but it still came to his lips as easily as though only days had passed. “I’m looking for somewhere to stay, and I was told there’s an old grandmother who might be expecting me.”
The farmer backed away, disappearing into a house, and the women only continued to whisper.
“Small town hospitality at its finest,” Malcolm said.
God, he could use some gin.
Considering that there were no hotels for hundreds of miles, he was not looking forward to having to sleep in his car until Elise materialized. But the women were still whispering, the town was otherwise empty, and he somehow doubted the farmer would be keen on letting him visit for a sleepover. At least it was warm out. He wouldn’t freeze overnight.
