Litvakov crawled behind a stack of impact pads.
The roaring sound of the helicopter blades made the soldiers ceasefire for a second. Two helicopters were heard.
“Damn!” the tallest of the soldiers said. “They’re leaving without us. Hold your fire! Let’s move. Save the ammo. Seems we’re on our own now.”
“Let’s move out, goddammit!” another one said.
They filed out of the room, one by one, quicker than they had come here. Leaving death and destruction behind them.
The thumping of the helicopter rotor blades faded in the distance. Misha was trembling. He was sobbing. The gym was full of groaning and crying. There were piles of corpses lying around, pools of blood accumulating around them. Litvakov looked carefully around to make sure the danger had gone.
“C’mon!” he said. “We can’t stay here.”
Dozens of other people filed out into the corridor and went to the exit door. Litvakov did not follow them. His little group sneaked into the nearby cafeteria. Litvakov’s stomach rumbled at the thought of food. But there was no food here. No one was going to feed them that evening or the next morning. The kitchen was abandoned. Like the rest of the building. Litvakov grabbed the biggest knife he could find in the kitchen. Tatyana and the girls took rolling pins. They gave Misha a small fruit knife. Litvakov took a look around and unscrewed the legs off the chairs. Which he gave to everyone. Not much in the way of weapons, but anything was better than nothing.
“Use them as clubs,” he said.
He glanced through the window at the yard. It was a moonless night. In the dim gloom, two soldiers were speaking in loud voices. The door of the workshop classroom burst open and a man sprinted out into the yard, his arms flailing. Litvakov motioned everyone to duck. The soldiers raised their Kalashnikovs and shouted a warning. The man would not halt. The soldiers fired at him simultaneously. The man fell down in the snow like a bag of sand. One of the soldiers came up to him and double tapped him in the head.
Tatyana looked at this scene, hiding behind the light blue curtains. She cupped her mouth with both hands and backed away.
She sat on the floor. “They’re going to kill all of us.”
A loud explosion outside shattered the night. Nastya shrieked.
“A landmine,” Litvakov whispered. “The infected ones must have broken through. We better hurry up.”
Litvakov looked out. No soldiers around. He opened the window, and they climbed out. They ran bent-over, their boots crunching on the crispy snow. Litvakov understood that going to the military for protection would be a suicide now. No one was protecting anyone anymore. The soldiers were executing the general’s murderous orders. The only chance of survival was to keep away from all human beings. They zigzagged across the stadium. There were lots of killed people lying in the snow. Unmoving. Blank stares. Hands clutched to their throats. Their instant tickets to the heaven had been punched. A Bible lay on the ground.
A military van appeared from around the corner. Litvakov stopped and waved everybody to halt. They froze. Nastya was breathing heavily. She didn’t favor sports and was a smoker. Litvakov pointed at the gray tent with a big golden cross on it. They moved like shadows to the tent and sneaked in.
In the tent, a soldier was raping a young woman. A few candles were lit. An icon had been knocked down on the floor. The soldier’s AK-47 was lying at his feet. The woman saw the newcomers and gave a desperate cry for help. The soldier was about to turn his head, as Litvakov snatched the weapon and struck him across his face with its butt. The soldier groaned and rolled off his victim. He pressed his hands to his smashed face. Litvakov recognized the man. It was Private Ryabtsev. He reeked of alcohol, and his eyes were cloudy.
“Don’t move, you son of a bitch!” Litvakov said in a loud whisper.
Ryabtsev opened his mouth to say something or to yell, but Litvakov gave him another hit in the face. The man’s mouth began bleeding.
“Put your hands up and shut up!” Litvakov said.
Ryabtsev obeyed the order. “Don’t shoot, Comrade Colonel!”
“It’s up to me, you fucking rat!” Litvakov said.
Tatyana helped the woman get off the floor. The woman’s left eye was bruised, looking like a prune. She got up and started getting dressed.
“What’s your name?” Tatyana asked her.
“Maria.”
“Don’t worry, Maria,” Tatyana said. “Now everything’s going to be all right.”
Litvakov aimed the gun at Ryabtsev. “Now talk to me. What’s going on here?”
“We got an order,” the soldier said.
“What fucking order? To rape women?”
“We have an order,” Ryabtsev said again, “to shoot every civilian in the camp.”
Litvakov’s finger trembled on the trigger. “Why?!”
“To eliminate the chance of spreading the infection.”
“But they were going to nuke this city in three days,” Litvakov said. “We would all die anyway.”
Tatyana glanced at him. “Oh, my God.”
“Why not just let us all go?” Litvakov said.
“To restrain the possibility of spreading the virus farther, across the city borders,” Ryabtsev said.
Litvakov nodded. They had more than five thousand people in the camp. Should the zombies break through the line of defense, the risk of contamination would be inevitable. If the people here were kept alive, there would be five thousand potential walking virus containers, ready to be spilled across the city borders to the nearby settlements and villages and then farther to other big cities. Then it would be next to impossible to contain the plague. The military had to do it now, without delay: pass the order to the officers who would make sure the order was executed. Break into the apartments with people hugging their children or wives in their sleep and pierce them with holes or throw in hand grenades.
“Fucking fascists,” Litvakov muttered. He felt the anger rising in him. “Thank God I’m not part of it.”
“What are you going to do?” Ryabtsev said. “You won’t go away far anyway. There’s an outer cordon over there thrown around the city. No one comes in. No one goes out. This city is dead.”
“Like you are,” said Maria and slashed the soldier’s throat with the fruit knife she had taken from Misha.
The soldier blinked his eyes and coughed as if he choked on a cherry stone. He collapsed on the tent floor, his hands pressed to his throat. The blood looked black in the semidark like blackberry juice.
Maria dropped the knife on the floor. The kids were looking at the scene in horror.
“Thank you,” Maria said in a shaking voice.
“Don’t thank us,” Litvakov said. “Now leave the camp as soon as possible.”
“Can I go with you?” Maria said.
“No,” Litvakov replied. He averted his eyes. “Sorry.”
“You can keep my knife,” Misha said.
Maria picked the knife up silently.
Litvakov took off the soldier’s coat and put it on. He didn’t see a hat anywhere, so he kept his black ski cap on. He stepped out of the tent holding the Kalashnikov in front of him. The wind threw a handful of snow in his face. It felt like a razor. He motioned Tatyana and the kids to follow him.
There was a baby scream. A single gunshot silenced it. Litvakov kept on going. There was no time to waste. Being a good Samaritan could cost them their lives.
They walked as far as the sentry’s hut at the gates. Litvakov had told everyone to keep their hands above their heads as if they had been arrested by him. He drew the cap over his eyes.
A guard with a rifle stepped out of the sentry’s hut.
“Halt! Who the fuck goes there?” A drunken voice. Which belonged to Stepanych.
“An order to shoot them all,” Litvakov said in a deep voice, deeper than usual, altering it not to be recognized. “Might be infected.”
The guard nodded, saluted him and let them through. He sauntered drunkenly towar
d the hut.
They walked out of the gates and reached the minefield where a lone biter was roaming. It stepped on the place marked with a red flag, and the earth under its feet erupted in an explosion.
Litvakov heard the engine of the van and then a searchlight beam hit them in the back. They ran across the field. Shooting started, and Litvakov understood they were the targets now as a bullet scraped his shoulder. He checked his shoulder. No wound. Just a large a piece of cotton exposed.
Everyone followed his lead. To avoid the mines was quite easy as their locations were marked by the red flags. More guns began talking. Little fountains of snow spurted up in front of them and behind them.
Litvakov ran to the unpatched hole in the chain-link fence. A little crowd of the undead had gathered behind the fence. The hole was not big enough for all of them to crawl in. Apparently, only the short ones had gotten through and the zombies were not smart enough to make the hole bigger. Litvakov emptied the mag into them, one shot, one kill, and squatted down by the hole. He clamped the wired net with his bare hands and tore it aside, making the hole wider. It turned out to be a good thing after all that Stepanych had been negligent by ignoring his order and hadn’t patched it. Now not only a small dog could crawl under it, but a big dog or a child. He tore some more until it was wide enough for an adult.
A group of soldiers appeared on the top of the hill. Litvakov went into the hole first. More cotton was exposed at his back, as the edges of the hole tore his coat. Misha got on his fours and squeezed through the hole like it was his daily routine. Gerda took more time.
“Come on,” Litvakov said through his clenched teeth. Another batch of the ghouls was coming toward the fence.
Nastya followed after Gerda. Tatyana was the last one to go. Litvakov held the wire wide for her, but she stuck. Her coat was too big and too heavy. A bullet twanged against the net and Tatyana ducked. Another shot hit Gerda’s leg, and she went down with a cry. A ghoul was approaching her, its hands raised. Litvakov let go of the wire and struck the monster with the butt of the gun.
Tatyana unbuttoned her coat and wriggled out of it. The coat was left stuck in the hole. Litvakov took off his coat and gave it to Tatyana. Then he picked Gerda up and carried her away to the road. Tatyana took the gun. Misha picked up Gerda’s rolling pin.
The shooting stopped. No one followed them. In five minutes, Litvakov stopped to take a look at Gerda’s wound. He could barely see it in the dark. The leg was swollen, but the bleeding had almost stopped. She had the same blood clotting ability like her father. Which was good. But she couldn’t step on her leg, and it was a sign of a fractured bone. Which was bad. He tore a piece of fabric from the back of her jacket and made a wound dressing. Then he took her on his back again and started walking. Gerda was whining softly, tears frozen on her cheeks.
“Just hold on, Apelsinka,” he said. “We’re going to make it.”
Tatyana shouldered the empty Kalashnikov and looked back at where the rescue station was. The encampment was set on fire. The school building was up in flames, which stretched to the starless sky. They walked on. In a quarter of an hour, the fire was lost to sight.
They came to a bridge. It was jammed with abandoned vehicles of all types. Rows and rows and rows of useless junk sitting on the road. There was a car in the middle of it. A black Volkswagen, which looked vaguely familiar. They walked toward it.
As they walked up closer, Misha said, “Dad, that’s your car.”
And so it was. Litvakov couldn’t believe his little stroke of luck. He put Gerda on the ground and reached the door handle. The driver’s door was unlocked, and he swung it open. The front seat was taken by a person. A man. Litvakov touched his shoulder, ready to jump aside in case he was infected and would attack him. The man did not move. He didn’t react in any way. Litvakov fumbled in the darkness. The car key was in the ignition. Litvakov turned the key and started the engine and the light in the car lit. The driver was Fyodor Lesnov, the Commandant of their camp. The man’s eyes were wide open, horror frozen on his face. A thin thread of blood had left a trail coming from the man’s right temple down the right cheek. The collar of his white shirt was spattered with blood. The skin surrounding the wound was stained with powder. His graying hair at the temple was singed. There was a strong smell of blood and the voided bladder. Litvakov screwed up his face in disgust. He found the gun in the foot space. He picked it up, pinching his nose against the stench. A Makarov PM. The seven bullets out of eight were in the magazine. He assumed the eighth one had been lodged deep in the Commandant’s brain.
He slipped the safety catch on and put it in his coat pocket. He unbuckled the dead body and dragged it out of the car. Tatyana opened the back doors for the kids to sit in the back. Then she sat in the front passenger seat. Litvakov looked at the fuel gauge. As for the fuel, he was not so lucky. It was almost at zero.
“What are we going to do now?” Tatyana said.
“We rest a while and warm ourselves,” Litvakov said. “We’ll have fuel enough only for that. Then we walk. Far from here. The way out of the city is blocked, as you can see. So we’re going back to the city.”
He took the first-aid kit and checked Gerda’s leg once again. There was no bullet exit hole, which worried him. She needed urgent surgical treatment. He saw his daughter was in great pain but all he could do was to treat the wound with iodine and apply a proper bandage instead of a piece of torn cloth.
“There’s a gas station in a couple of miles from here,” Nastya said.
Litvakov nodded. “We’ll try that option first, I guess.”
As it got warm in the car Gerda fell asleep. Litvakov put his head on the steering wheel. He had never been so exhausted in his life.
“Have you got a particular plan in your head?” Nastya asked him.
Litvakov looked at her in the rearview mirror and rubbed his eyes. “You probably know about that unfinished subway system in the center of the city.”
Tatyana nodded. “Which is taking them dozens of years to complete? Yes, we watched the news on TV. The project has been frozen.”
“This is where we’re heading,” he said. “It would make a perfect bomb shelter.”
“Oh God,” Nastya said. “Do you really think they’re going to drop an atom bomb on the city?”
Strike the city with a nuclear missile to be more precise.
He didn’t wish to go technical and correct her. And he was tired. He said instead, “I do. They’ll nuke us. That’s what they said. In two days, this city is going to be a graveyard.”
“But can’t they do something about the situation?” Tatyana asked him. “Bring more soldiers? Establish more emergency centers?”
“The number of the living dead can be depleted by firepower for sure,” he said. “But I don’t believe the infection can be won over this way. Look around. Torn pieces of human bodies all around. Half-buried in the snow. Even if the order were restored, the infection would pop up here and there. A dog digs out a bone when the snow melts in spring, a kid on the playground cuts his hand against barbed wire and bam! It will start all over again. The whole city would have to be quarantined for a very long period of time. Maybe for good.”
Tatyana leaned closer to him and touched him on the shoulder. “I still hope everything’s going to be all right. With you around.”
He didn’t put her hand away, but he felt awkward.
Nastya began whimpering, “I don’t want to die. I want out of here.”
“Shut up, Nastya!” Tatyana said.
It was their first time outside the safety of the emergency camp. Stress and fear would freak anyone out.
“Nobody’s going to die,” Litvakov said.
As they ran out of gas, the heater stopped functioning. It became cold again in the car, and they got out to move on. Litvakov helped his daughter walk. Tatyana carried the weapons. The harsh wind hammered their faces, and their eyes watered with tears. Two miles to the gas station, which was the nearest
outpost of civilization in this part of the city. They would normally cover that distance in half an hour, but they were slowed down by the uncleared highway, his wounded daughter, their exhaustion and the wind, which still had its way. They made frequent stops to scavenge the abandoned cars. In the glove compartment of one car, they found a chewing gum pellet and a pile of musty orange peels.
Litvakov broke the pellet in half. He gave one half to Misha, the other one to Gerda.
“It’s bad for your stomach to have it when you’re hungry,” he said, “but not having anything to eat at all is worse. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Misha put the gum in his mouth immediately and started chewing.
“Watermelon,” the boy said.
Gerda put the other half in her mouth. Litvakov offered Tatyana and Nastya the orange peels. They just looked at them and said nothing.
Litvakov placed the peels in his pants pocket. “We’ll take these. Could help against scurvy.”
“What’s scurvy, Daddy?” Misha asked.
“It’s when your teeth will start falling out, stupid,” Gerda said.
There’s still some energy in my little girl, he thought. Good. Please God, let us all pull through.
There was a long line of stranded cars in front of the gas station. Gas pistols left sitting on the ground. Litvakov went inside the station. There was literal chaos there: trash, merchandise scattered on the floor, spent cartridge cases all around, a decapitated body of a man. But it was warmer inside than in the severe winter wind. Litvakov motioned with his hand to come over, and his companions went inside.
“We’ll spend the rest of the night here,” he said.
He grabbed the headless corpse by the feet and made an effort to pull it off the floor as its back had frozen to it. He dragged it outside. Then he went inside and cut off the wind with the closed door.
THIRTY-SEVEN
When morning came, Ramses and Goran got out of the basement and moved on. It took them half an hour to get to the Arkaim Hotel. The area around it was squirming with the walking corpses. It had been snowing all night, and the snowbanks were deep but the zombies had trampled the new snow down.
The Living & The Dead (Book 1): Zombiegrad Page 35
