He drove near the local school, which was a temporary medical facility now. He saw armed men wearing white biohazard suits loading wooden containers into trucks. A high barbed wire fence ran around the perimeter. The gates were heavily guarded. Ironically, the school used to be poorly financed before the crisis. There used to be gaps in the fence, and anyone could walk straight through the school premises. It was like a public thoroughfare. Now the school boasted even a helicopter pad. The chemistry classroom, which was woefully empty of new equipment, science projects and fun, could compete now with the best biochemical laboratories in the country. But the school principal had not survived to see all this abundance. He had gone missing. Like so many other people in the city.
Litvakov turned the car into a lane leading to the kindergarten and stopped not far from a tram sitting in the middle of the road. It was not functional. The railroad had been cut off by the fences at both ends.
A tram, which was going nowhere.
He found it symbolic. The windows had been smashed by kids who came here to hang out, have a smoke or occasional beer. Pretty soon the beer supply stopped and was replaced by moonshine. One kid from Gerda’s class got blind after a shot of moonshine so Litvakov had to keep an eye on this place.
He honked twice and stuck his head out of the side window. “Hey, Gerda!”
A head clad in an orange hat appeared in the empty window frame. Cornflower-blue eyes and a charming smile. An image of Svetlana.
A half a dozen kids, girls and boys, looked out and then ducked quickly back. He heard giggles. He spotted Nastya among them. She had piercings in her nose, and she was the first girl in their class to have a tattoo. Litvakov liked Gerda’s friends but not this one. This one was a bad seed.
Gerda came out of the tram. Not only was her hat orange. But her jacket, too. She loved the color orange, and everyone in the family called her Apelsinka, Little Orange.
Gerda got into her father’s car and sat in the front.
“Hi, Dad,” she said slamming the door shut. “Is your camp walk-around over?”
“Yes,” he said. “And it’s 4:25 p.m., by the way. Curfew hours soon.”
“Dad, I’m having a sleepover at Nastya’s tonight. I turned fifteen today, remember?”
“No, you stay in the kindergarten tonight. Your Mom may need your help.”
“Come on, Dad, I’m not a baby anymore. And I’m fed up with your bedtime stories. Honestly. Nastya is inviting me to her place.”
“Why not invite her to our place?” Litvakov said. “This is your birthday, after all.”
Gerda looked down at her boots and didn’t answer.
“Gerda,’ he said. “This is not a summer camp. It’s a military facility.”
“But, Dad, it’s my birthday today. Can’t I spend this time with my friends?”
My friends. Litvakov noticed a change in his daughter. She used to be a shy stay-at-home kind of girl. And now she had friends.
Litvakov sighed. “Okay. Who’s he?”
“Who, Dad?”
“The boy you’re dating. Do I know him?”
“Oh, come on, Dad. There’s no boy. Just us, the girls.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah.”
“All right,” she said with a smile. “His name’s Anatoly.”
“That tall sporty fella?”
She blushed. “Yes. That’s him.”
“Gerda, I know I can trust you,” he said. “But please be careful.”
She nodded without saying a word.
Litvakov said, “And now for the birthday present.”
He opened the glove compartment and handed her a shiny box.
Gerda beamed with happiness. “An iPhone!”
She hugged him. “Oh, you’re the best daddy in the world!”
“Have fun, Apelsinka,” he said and kissed her on the cheek.
She went out of the car. Litvakov stuck his head out and said to the hidden tram passengers, “Curfew hours in thirty minutes, guys!”
There was no reply. At least nobody flashed him a middle finger. That in itself was already a progress. He was not popular with her daughter’s friends.
***
He drove the car to a halt in the kindergarten yard and climbed out. He shook hands with the guards, shared his cigarettes with them and went inside.
He heard singing and laughing coming from the playroom. He left his boots and coat in the locker room and walked barefoot along the hallway. It was very warm in the building. The school and the kindergarten were the only places on the premises equipped with power generators, which functioned around the clock. So the heaters in the kindergarten were burning at full blast.
In the apartment houses, people used portable burzhuika ovens to keep themselves warm. They had electricity only for one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening.
“Hi, kids!” he shouted as he entered the playroom.
“Good afternoon, Alexei Ivanovich,” the children said in unison.
Not all of them were kindergarteners. There were big kids, age seven to fourteen. They lived in the kindergarten because they had lost their parents and had nowhere to go.
Little Misha, five years old, came running toward him. “Daddy, give me a spin!”
He grabbed Misha, lifted him up and started spinning him around. “Let’s fly, little man!”
“Like a helicopter!” Misha shouted, laughing happily. “Hooray!”
Litvakov saw Svetlana in the room. She had been a teacher in this kindergarten for ten years now. He put Misha down, and the boy ran away to play with his friends.
“How was the day?” Litvakov asked his wife.
“Not so busy,” she said. “More and more kids leave the camp with their parents every day. They’re going to combine another group with mine tomorrow. And Tatyana is staying in the camp, too. She’s our cook from today on.”
“Good. How is she holding up?”
“She’s getting all right, I guess. She says hard work can defeat the deepest sorrow in the world.”
“Sveta, I want to show you something,” he said and took out his cell phone.
He opened the photo gallery and clicked on the latest picture. Alyosha’s dead face stared at them.
“Oh, my God,” she said and bit her lip.
“I found him this afternoon. Finally,” he said.
“She knew this happened, but she still had a hope.”
Litvakov clicked his cell phone off.
“Oh, God,” Svetlana said. “Don’t show it to her, please. She had lost her husband. Now, this.”
“She still has her daughter,” Litvakov said.
“Nastya is her stepdaughter.”
Litvakov sighed and hugged his wife. “Come home soon.”
Svetlana’s face got sad. “I’m not coming tonight. The other teacher went down with the flu. I’m on my own here.”
“Well, almost,” she added. “I hope Tatyana will be of big help around here.”
Litvakov kissed her. “See you in the morning, honey.”
He turned to leave when an avalanche of children’s voices made him stop in his tracks. “Bedtime story!”
“I have to go, guys!” Litvakov said.
“We want a bedtime story! A bedtime story!” the kids kept on reciting. “A bedtime story!”
Their voices were so loud that Svetlana had to plug her ears with fingers.
“All right! All right!” Litvakov put his hands up.
He smiled, put his cell phone on a table, picked a stool and sat on it.
“Tell us a funny one!” a little girl with ponytails said.
“About magic!” a chubby boy said. “And dragons!”
“Well,” Litvakov said, “in a way, it’s a funny story and there’s some magic in it.”
“Tell it!”
The kids gathered around him and sat on the carpet. The teenager kids sighed, plugged their ears with earplugs and turned on their iPhones or went to another room carrying a book.
>
“Misha,” Litvakov said, “bring me the Magic Storyteller’s Hat.”
Misha laughed and ran to get the stuffed Puss-in-the-Boots sitting on a table in the corner. He took the black hat off the cat and brought it to his father.
“If it’s going to be a scary tale, I’ll run away,” the little girl said.
“No, no,” Litvakov said, putting the hat on. It was small and looked funny on his big head. “It won’t be scary. I promise.”
The little girl calmed down. Silence hung in the room.
“So,” Litvakov began. “I heard this story from my Chinese friend. And it goes about this old man. One day he was repairing his house and removed the wooden wall. And he saw a lizard behind the wall. It was alive, but it was nailed to the inner wall and could not move freely.”
“This one’s scary,” the little girl said. She stood up to go.
“Hey, little one,” he said. “Don’t you want to know what happens next to the little lizard?”
“I do,” she said softly.
“Then listen very carefully.”
The girl sat down but her chin was shaking. “Poor lizard.”
Litvakov cleared his throat and went on. “The old man remembered he had used the nails on this part of the house about ten years before. But how did the lizard survive all these years? What do you think, my friends?”
The chubby little boy had been listening so attentively he did not notice a thread of snot dripping out of his nostril. He sniffed and wiped his nose with his shirt sleeve.
“It was a zombie lizard!” an older boy shouted. “Undead lizards never die!”
Svetlana looked at the brat with a frown.
“The old man was at a loss, too,” Litvakov said, paying no attention at the intruder. “And he wanted to find it out. So he decided to wait and sat near the wall. He waited for a long time but his patience was finally rewarded. And he saw another lizard coming out of nowhere and approaching our poor lizard. And guess what? It started feeding the nailed lizard!”
Sounds of bewilderment filled the room. Litvakov looked and saw Tatyana, standing in the doorway, a saucepan in her hands. Her face was pale and expressionless.
Litvakov looked back at the children. “The lizard managed to survive thanks to love, you see? It survived thanks to the love of the lizard’s friend.”
The little girl smiled. She seemed to like the story.
The chubby kid puffed his lips. “There are no dragons in the story.”
“Lizards are today’s dragons,” Litvakov said. “Evolution and stuff.”
“And no magic!” the chubby boy said. His face showed disappointment.
“Kindness is magic,” Litvakov said. “Especially these days.”
He paused and looked around the room.
“So help each other,” he said. “And be good to one another.”
He leaned over and placed his hat on top of the chubby boy’s head.
The boy sprang up and shouted, “Now I’m the Magic Storyteller! Now listen to my story. This time it’s really going to be about magic and dragons!”
***
In the locker room, Litvakov was putting on his boots.
“Daddy,” Misha said. “The biteys won’t come through here, will they?”
Litvakov looked at his son carefully. “No, Misha. See those guards with guns outside? They won’t let it happen. Just keep in mind: if you see a person having red eyes, run away as fast as you can, all right?”
“Daddy,” Misha said cautiously. “But your eyes are red.”
Litvakov looked in the mirror at his exhausted face.
“I just need a good night’s sleep is all,” Litvakov said with a tired smile and ruffled the boy’s hair. “And so are you. Now go to bed and have a good night.”
“Good night, Daddy. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Take care of your Mom, little man.”
Misha ran to the playroom.
Svetlana clapped her hands. “All right, kids! Time to go to bed now.”
***
It was quiet in the kindergarten. It was well after midnight, and everyone was asleep. Tatyana was in the kitchen, preparing meals for tomorrow morning. Her long dark hair was covered with a white kerchief. But she was not cooking. She was looking at her son’s distorted face on the screen of the smartphone which Alexei Litvakov had left on the table. She was looking at Alyosha silently. Her face expressed nothing. Then the battery died, and she put the phone on the kitchen table.
She took out a wrapped package from under the table and opened it. There was a human hand inside. Judging by the red nail varnish left on the nails, it used to belong to a woman. Yesterday, Tatyana was taking out the garbage as she saw the hand falling down from the sky. A crow had flown above the kindergarten and dropped it. And Tatyana picked it up and kept it.
Tatyana put on her kitchen gloves and took the hand out of the package. She put it on the cutting board and chopped every digit apart with a big kitchen knife. Then she sliced the palm in small parts.
She took one finger and placed it into the mechanical meat grinder. She started rotating the handle. The hand was not frozen, but the bones were hard to crush. But Tatyana was a strong woman, and soon grayish red matter began oozing out onto the bowl.
The children will have a fine breakfast tomorrow morning, she thought. The children will have a fine breakfast tomorrow morning.
Her face was expressionless. Only this thought was rolling in her head.
The children will have a fine breakfast tomorrow morning.
She was a diligent worker. She didn’t go to bed until the food was ready. As she went under the covers her face expression changed for the first time in many days.
Hard work can defeat the deepest sorrow in the world.
She smiled and closed her eyes.
TWENTY-NINE
Andy opened his eyes. The alarm in his Piaget watch was beeping. The first thing he did was to make sure that his gun was on the coffee table next to the couch in the living room. Then he turned the alarm off and checked the time. 5:00 a.m. sharp. The moonlight shone through the window. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. He had slept only two or three hours, and his head was heavy. He found his way from under the four blankets he had been covering himself with and swung his legs over the side of the couch. The fire in the fireplace had died, and it was murderously cold. He didn’t have to get dressed as he had been sleeping in his clothes.
He snatched a torch from the coffee table and staggered to the bathroom where he was immediately met by the stale stench of urine coming from the toilet. He took the bottle of Floris Elite from the glass shelf and sprayed it in the bathroom, trying to kill the terrible smell with the perfume. He pissed in the bowl, zipped up and did not bother to flush. The toilet had not been functioning for a week now.
He washed his hands and face with the cold water collected on the bottom of the shower stall and wiped his hands dry with a fresh towel. He sneezed and looked at himself in the mirror. His nose was running. He had probably caught the flu, too. He blew his nose and spat into the basin.
He walked out running his fingers through his dirty hair and stopped in front of the bedroom door. He paused and lingered for a moment at the bedroom door. He reached out for the doorknob and thought about opening it. But then he held back and walked away. He grabbed his fire ax leaning next to the front door and went out.
He tried to focus on his plans for today. His usual daily routine was ruined more than a week ago. Each day, each hour and even each minute carried a surprise for which he just couldn’t be prepared. He had lost about two hundred people in one week. He knew now what generals felt when they lost their soldiers. His people had turned into zombies and were staggering along the corridors now, moaning. In a hungry search for food.
He was starting to hate this place. A part of him had died together with Diana. He wanted to go back to his penthouse apartment, lock the door and crawl under the covers. Maybe drink a couple of shots of
whiskey from his liquor cabinet. To feel the false warmth spread over his body and to zonk out for a couple hours.
But he could not. Like always, he was responsible for these people.
It was terribly cold in the corridor, and he regretted he had not heated up coffee. He decided he would do it after the brief tour check.
He met Ivan, Ingvar and Zhang Wei, carrying two empty buckets each.
“Running out of water,” Ivan said. “Your swimming pool is the only source now. All the bathtubs are empty.”
“Yeah, sure,” Andy said.
He dived into his pocket, brought out a bundle of keys, separated a key from it and handed it to Ivan.
His check tour of the hotel was just one floor. The central staircase, the widest one, was blocked with furniture. Hands of the walking dead were groping through the gaps between the piled chairs, couches and billiard tables.
Marcel shoved a pool cue through the gap in the furniture and stabbed a ghoul in the eye. He pulled the cue out with a sucking sound. A body thumped down heavily behind the barricade, and Marcel drove the cue into the throat of his next target.
Valera was busy making stakes out of table and chair legs with his knife. All this looked like vampire hunting to Andy.
“Here,” Valera said, giving a stake to a young red-haired man. “You drive right into his eye socket. If you hit the brain, you’ll stop the bastard with no problems.”
Andy gave a quick nod of approval and moved on.
In the ballroom, people lived like in a campsite. One of the biggest problems was that they were running out of food. Most of their food supplies were left on the second floor. There was no going back there without becoming a food supply for the zombies.
Dr. Brodde was not asleep. He was sitting on a stool, looking into the fireplace.
“Any news?” Andy asked him.
“That frau who suffered from diabetes …,” Brodde paused and sighed. “She passed away. An hour ago. She didn’t get her insulin in time, you see. It’s the first time in my career I just can’t do anything to help people. Even in Afghanistan things were much, much better.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Andy said. “Did she have any relatives in the hotel?”
The Living & The Dead (Book 1): Zombiegrad Page 27
