The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3

by Christopher Cartwright

  “Holy shit!” He turned to his brother. “He’s coming back!”

  Ilya fed the line through the small hole of the tungsten and handed it to him. “Here.”

  “Forget the Mormyshka, just pass me the hook. I’m going to snatch this monster the next time it comes around for another pass!”

  Ilya handed him the fishhook. “Here.”

  Demyan drove the axe as hard as he could against the remaining sheet of ice at the bottom of the hole he’d dug. In his haste, he’d carved a much larger hole in the ice than he’d meant to. It was closer to ten or twelve inches wide by an equal length.

  The fish snapped around, toward the opening. An ancient predator at the top of the food chain inside the confines of the frozen lake, the creature swam to the opening, unable to grasp the risk that it might not be the deadliest beast in existence.

  The predator reached the surface of the opening Demyan had created. Its giant mouth opened, ready to feed on whatever it discovered, and Demyan ran the large fish hook through the side of its body, and pulled.

  The Hucho Taimen weighed more than he expected. At least two hundred pounds. More than he could pull out of the hole without his brother’s help. The problem was that it would place more weight on the precariously thin ice than it could take.

  Demyan racked his brain, trying to come up with a solution before he lost the best catch of his life. Something that might just keep him and his brother from starving to death.

  An instant later, the damned fish turned its head, as though no longer interested in whatever it had found in the outside world, and simply dipped back into the icy water and disappeared.

  Demyan ran his gloved palms across his forehead and cursed loudly. They’d lost the fish, and by the looks of things, it wouldn’t be coming back any time soon.

  He and Ilya glanced down into the opening. Like the previous one he’d made, the ice appeared to reflect a prism of reds, yellows, and blues.

  “What the hell is that?” Demyan asked.

  Ilya carefully stepped closer. “I have no idea.”

  Demyan stared at the clear waters of the freezing world beneath the ice. What stared back up at him, made him instantly forget about the loss of the fish.

  An eerie glow distorted his vision. He blinked and he started to make out a series of shapes and colors he’d never seen before. Something moved from below the ice. It was too big to be a fish. Too fast to be anything human. It glowed with a radiant color of the morning sun, and then it was gone. In its place, the water was clear enough now, that Demyan could make sense of what he was seeing.

  A strange city, filled with refractory metallic structures he’d never seen before, in books or anywhere else – like crystals set at unique angles and fractals, jutting out like a giant city of another world. A world filled with fractals and prismatic crystals.

  Ilya took a deep breath. “What the hell is that?”

  “Beats me.” Demyan remained staring at the strange city, entranced, as though he’d just witnessed the opening of a gateway to another world. He swallowed hard. “But whatever it is, I’m certain we’re not supposed to find out!”

  He took a step back. There was nothing specifically to be frightened of from down beneath the ice – certainly nothing that could swim out of the freezing water and attack him – but he still felt the instinctive need to place some sort of distance between him and the opening. That ancient part of his brain that had developed out of necessity to predict danger, was acutely aware of his entire surroundings.

  His pupils dilated, and his vision widened. His heart pounded and chest burned. Adrenalin surged through his body, giving him the superhuman strength required to fight or run from his predator.

  Ilya kept his feet planted where they were on the edge of the opening in the ice. His eyes fixed on the strange city, and his lips curled in the tight smile of a man who knew he was witnessing the most extraordinary event of his life.

  Demyan took his eyes off the opening and swept their surrounding landscape. The surface of ice remained solid throughout the lake. The edge met an area of at least a hundred feet of snow-covered hills, before a forest of stunted pine and spruce trees blocked his vision. Their environment was silent. He could hear the sound of his heart pounding in his ears, and his breath crystalized in front of him – before everything changed.

  A beam of light shot up through the opening in the ice. It sent a glow hundreds of feet into the gray and somber sky. Simultaneously, an old air-raid siren started to wail.

  His head snapped to the right, where half a mile away, a white military truck came charging out of the ground beyond the tree line.

  Demyan yelled, “Run!”

  *

  Ilya turned and ran.

  Behind him, the siren kept wailing. He kept running. He’d never seen that type of armored truck before, but he’d heard about it and his brother had previously mentioned that the occasional one had been spotted near Boot Lake. The VPK-3927 Volk was legendary in Russia. Designed as a tactical high-mobility multipurpose military armored vehicle, it was renowned as a legend among Russia’s armored division.

  But why was it even here?

  One thing was certain, such a truck was unlikely to have a legitimate purpose for guarding a nuclear power station in the remote wilderness of Oymyakon. And it certainly wasn't approaching them for anything positive.

  They headed toward the frozen bank of Boot Lake. It would be impossible to outpace their pursuers, but if they could reach it they might be able to cut across it.

  It took ten minutes exactly to reach the barbed wire fence along the eastern edge of the Boot Lake. Ilya glanced over his right shoulder. The massive VPK-3927 Volk, rounded the bend and drove straight toward them.

  He hacked at the fence with his axe. It took a few strikes and part of the fence broke apart. He pulled at it with his hands, and the gap opened large enough for him to squeeze through. “Come on! Let’s cross the lake.”

  Demyan looked over his shoulder. Their pursuers were driving hard in the snow-covered truck. There were no longer any other options. “All right.”

  Having squeezed through the narrow opening Ilya and his brother started to run across the frozen lake. It was only a little over a mile wide where they were crossing and nearly twenty for the truck to get around the lake following the service trail. If they could reach the opposite side before their pursuers, they could flee into the snow-covered forest, where it would be impossible for the truck to follow – they just had to reach the other side in time.

  About half a mile across, Ilya allowed himself to glance back across the lake. The Volk was traveling fast, making good time around the lake, but there was no way it was going to reach the other side before either of them.

  He grinned. His heart pounded and his chest burned, but he felt amazing. A certain euphoria was rising quickly, as he realized they were going to make it. They’d lost the fish, but they were going to live. Having gained nothing, he was now far better off than he could have ever wanted to be. They would go hungry, but the experience had somehow brought him closer to his brother than he would have ever predicted – they were both tough men, and they would survive.

  Ilya heard the shattering of thin ice, and instantly knew its cause. His euphoria was immediately replaced by fear as a sharp crack echoed away from his feet. Instinctively, he threw himself flat as the ice disintegrated under his weight. Panic gripped him as his hands slipped away from the ice and the icy water took his breath away.

  His head dipped under.

  The bite of the icy water was fleeting. Instead, the pain was replaced by the terror of drowning. Growing up in Oymyakon, neither he or Demyan had ever learned to swim. Controlling his fear, Ilya concentrated on trying to achieve some form of coordinated movements with his arms to pull himself to the surface. He cupped his hands and pulled the water from above downward, as though he was climbing an invisible ladder.

  It was a cumbersome movement. One that produced a disjointe
d and fragmented progress, but eventually his head broached the icy surface.

  His eyes swept the surface. An area of several feet had shattered and he was surrounded by icy water. His head dipped under again, and he fought to pull his mouth above the water again. On the third go, he spotted Demyan at the edge of the ice, lying prone, reaching out with his arm.

  “Grab my hand!” Demyan shouted, his green eyes fixed with terror.

  Ilya didn’t have the breath to respond.

  His head dipped under again, and again. Each time he kicked and fought to reach the surface. It was a painfully slow process, and with each subsequent dip, he sunk deeper and struggled harder to reach the surface, as his heavy clothes gathered weight from soaking through with water.

  Something kept dragging him downward. By the time he realized it was his fur boots that had become heavy weights under the water, he no longer had the strength to do anything about it. He tried, but his hands couldn’t even reach the latches, and instead, he concentrated his remaining efforts on reaching the surface.

  His brother was shouting at him, but he could no longer hear the words and even if he had, his brain was now so starved of oxygen that he would have had trouble interpreting them. He spotted Demyan’s face one last time. The terror seen a few minutes earlier had already been replaced by something different, something entirely more painful – a profound and despondent loss – and dishonorable shame.

  Ilya wanted to tell his brother it was okay. There was nothing he could have done. Neither of them could swim. But he couldn’t seem to get to the surface. And even if he could make it one more time, he’d never have the breath to produce words.

  Fatigue and hypothermia kicked in and fear was replaced with a simple feeling of regret and loss. They say on your deathbed you eventually reach acceptance, but that wasn’t the case for him. Instead, he just felt the harrowing torment that he had never escaped Oymyakon.

  His burning lungs settled, and he no longer felt the urge to take a breath. Everything slowed. His failing heart eased into a progressively slower rate. His vision turned into a strange purple blur. That was unexpected, he thought with surprising curiosity, no one had ever told him about seeing purple before you die. The muscles in his arms and legs jolted, as he vaguely attempted to continue to move them until they simply stopped working.

  Ilya heard the final beats of his heart pounding in his water-soaked ears. He heard the very last one, and waited for another… but it never seemed to come.

  Every muscle in his body went limp.

  Paralyzed, he retreated into the deep subconscious branches of his rapidly deteriorating mind. With the heart stopped and his brain starved of oxygen, he knew it wouldn’t be long now.

  The pains he’d lived with for most of his life had finally ended. They hadn’t been replaced by any sense of euphoria, but the loss of pain was a comfort.

  So, this is death.

  A calm peace and clarity swept his mind, in a way he’d never experienced in life. Fear and loss disappeared and at last there was acceptance.

  This is not too bad…

  A split second later, something gripped his leg and yanked. It pulled him downward with the ferocity of an ancient predator. And Ilya retreated into the final branch of his subconscious, where total darkness finally swept him away.

  *

  Demyan watched bitterly as his brother disappeared into the icy waters below. At the last moment, the water turned a fluorescent purple, and a strange creature – that looked remarkably similar to a merman – took Ilya, and dragged him deep into the lake.

  Unable to grasp what his eyes had seen, the shock stirred some inner desire to survive. There was nothing he could do to save his brother, even if he’d been taken by some mysterious creature from the lake’s icy depths. He turned toward the south and spotted the Volk. It was still far away, but getting closer. There was time, but not a lot of it. He might still just make it into the forest.

  He glanced at the now dark water below, where he’d lost his brother and cursed Oymyakon and the wretched world that took his mother and brother in the same week. Fear finally broke through the shock and despair as he forced himself to run toward the western edge of the forest.

  On the western bank of Boot Lake, he hacked at the fence – cutting through with the third hit – and kept running up the steep slope into the dense forest of spruce.

  Behind him, he heard the Volk’s massive engine whine as it tried to follow his trail up the slope, followed by the sound of soldiers climbing out and running after him. Demyan was big and at the age of fourteen, was already larger than most adult men in his village. A life of hardship had sharpened his body with the endurance of a professional athlete. Adrenalin surged through his veins and he kept running.

  Soon the distant sounds of his pursuers, unused to and ill-prepared for the inhospitable environment, quietened and eventually disappeared.

  It didn’t slow him down. Instead, he continued running all the way back to his family home. As it became apparent the soldiers were no longer following him, Demyan’s mind returned to the loss of his brother and the mysterious purple creature that took him to his death. Fleeting thoughts of despair and wonder distracted him from his burning thighs and slowly numbing toes.

  Guilt tore at his soul, and he wondered how he could possibly face his father. He even considered grabbing whatever possessions he could carry and leaving Oymyakon before his dad came home from the mines. That was a coward’s path, but he couldn’t see any other way out of it.

  Demyan never stopped to look over his shoulder. He didn’t have to. If they had kept up with him, and followed him, there was nowhere else for him to go. It was early evening by the time he ran down the main road of his village, and stopped just short of his house.

  There, someone was waiting for him.

  An older man, in a thick fur coat, standing in front of the wooden cottage glanced at him expectantly. Demyan swallowed hard. Surely, they didn’t know where he lived? His face had been mostly covered the entire time. His eyes swept the rest of the Oymyakon village, deciding whether he still had time to make a run for it – head back into the forest and disappear into the Siberian wilderness where few people could survive more than a few hours in winter.

  No. He simply didn’t have the strength to run anymore. Demyan decided to face his consequences and be damned.

  He stepped forward toward his home.

  The man’s cold, hard eyes fixed on his. “Would you be Demyan Yezhov?”

  It was a relief to give in and stop running. “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr. Yezhov, but there was an accident at the Yakutsk diamond mine today. Your father was down below at the time. He didn’t make it to the surface. I’m really sorry.”

  It took Demyan a moment to contemplate the news. His father was dead. He was now entirely on his own in the world. A week ago, his family consisted of a proud and violent father, a younger brother who often had a right to hate him, and a mother who he hated for not getting them out of their wretched world. It wasn’t a lot, but it was his family, and now he’d lost them all.

  He knew he should have felt nothing but grief and loneliness, but as the words sunk in, he felt a different emotion rise vigorously to the surface. There should have been guilt, too – why did he survive when his entire family didn’t? – but there wasn’t.

  Instead, he felt relief. Now he didn’t have to face his father and tell him that Ilya had drowned and there was nothing he could do to help him. With time he would feel remorse, but for now, all he could feel was the rush of survival.

  Demyan looked at the stranger’s face. “Do you want to come in for a tea?”

  “Sure,” the stranger acknowledged.

  Demyan lit the oil heater and poured a glass of Russki chai – AKA, straight vodka.

  The stranger accepted the glass and said, “To your father.”

  Demyan looked at his glass. “To my father.”

  And both men
drank the entire contents of the glass in one gulp.

  “I’m so very sorry. It was a terrible accident. But your father did work down the mines.”

  Demyan nodded. “I know. It was always dangerous.”

  The stranger held out his hand. “My name’s Leo Botkin.”

  Demyan took it. “My father’s mentioned you before. You own the mine, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing here, Mr. Botkin?”

  “I knew your father well.” Botkin shrugged, as though he personally handled the visits to all the families of his mine when someone died. “He was a good man. Hard, but fair. He did a lot of good for the company. He will be missed.”

  “Thank you,” Demyan said, and he meant it. “It’s more than I expected, and I’m sure my father would have appreciated it.”

  “There’s another reason I wanted to come in person, too.”

  “Yes?”

  “Your father told me of your recent loss of your mother. He was a conscientious man, and has been paying into a company insurance fund for years. It’s not a lot but it should help you and your brother out, until you’re old enough to find jobs. I wanted to deliver it to you, personally.”

  “My father left money for my brother and I?” Demyan asked, without admitting that he’d lost his brother today, too.

  “Yes.” Botkin handed him a receipt. “This has been deposited into the Yakutsk branch of the Bank of Russia, under your name. You’re to use it wisely to better the lives of you and your brother. If your family needs anything else, I have left you with a contact number for me, personally.”

  “That’s very kind of you, sir.”

  Demyan unfolded the receipt. There in front of him was the deposit receipt to an account in his name, for five million rubles – the equivalent of a hundred thousand U.S. dollars.

  He looked at Botkin. “Is this for real?”

  “Yes. Your father worked hard to ensure that you and your brother would have a good life.”