There was no approaching the hotel unless you had an artillery battery, and the men had to retreat. They decided to find a secure place in the half-burned apartment house across the street and wait it out. The windows on the first floor were either protected by grilles or made of plastic and were hard to break, especially for two hungry and weakened men. Finally, they chose the civilized way to enter the building and used the entrance lobby. The place seemed to be abandoned and quiet. All the flats were closed, and there was no way to break through the steel doors.
On the eighth floor, they found a flat with an old wooden door. Ramses broke the lock with one good kick. The door was barricaded. They pushed the old furniture away easily and cleared the entrance. An old couple, way in their seventies, had lived here. They had died of starvation and cold. Goran found them in the bedroom. They were huddled under a ton of blankets. Hugging each other. Frozen.
The men went into the kitchen. The fridge was empty. Piles of dirty dishes in the sink. Ramses glanced around looking for a samovar. Didn’t find it anywhere. Not everything was true in those movies about Russians. An open birdcage on the table. No birds in there. Only colorful feathers which had probably used to belong to the parrots in brighter times.
In the living room, there were photos hanging on the wall. Old framed black and white photos from their youth. Yellowed color pictures of their children. And fresher matte photos of their grandchildren. Smiling happy faces.
It was dark in the room. Ramses stepped over and drew the heavy brown drapes aside. A soft sunlight crept into the room through the frozen window. Ramses blew on the glass and wiped it with his hand. He cleared a wide circle in the glass and looked out. The window faced the hotel. A billow of smoke was rising right from the top floor, where the penthouse was.
***
The acrid smell of burning plastic and wood woke Andy up. It was hard to breathe. He saw smoke creeping into the living room. He cleared his throat and coughed to get rid of the stench. The fireplace had been left unattended, and the fire was dying out. But it was not the cause of the fire as the smoke was coming from the window.
It was approximately 7:00 a.m. Everyone was asleep. He walked to the window. It was snowing hard outside. Flecks of black ash were swirling with white snowflakes in a crazy dance.
He opened the window and looked out. An icy wind rushed in. Black plumes of smoke were rising from the fourteenth floor. He coughed and hastened to shut the window. The smell made him feel sick. His face turned pale.
“Hey!” he said. “We’re on fire!”
Ksenia opened her eyes and raised her head. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a fire on the lower floor,” Andy said.
“Sergei is down there,” Marcel said. “He has probably started a fire and fallen asleep.”
“We got to get out of here,” Andy said. “Quick! Wake everyone up!”
But there was no need to wake everyone up. Everyone was already up. They were coughing and trying to catch their breath.
“We can’t go out through the entrance door,” Ksenia said. “There are zomboids out there. What shall we do?”
“To the back door!” Andy said. “There’s a roof door there.”
They didn’t have to get dressed, because for many days now they had been sleeping in their clothes. Andy grabbed his ax and put out the fire in the fireplace, though it was unnecessary. If the fire reached the penthouse, it would burn down anyway. Everyone snatched their few possessions, weapons and half-empty bags and followed Andy into the corridor. Ludmila took her sleepy little son and carried him.
The corridor was filled with smoke. Andy walked slowly, groping his way along the walls, suffocating and cupping his hand over his mouth and nose. He rarely used the roof door. It was mainly made as a fire escape. There was a combination lock on the door as Andy hated carrying heavy bundles of keys around. The sequence of numbers was easy to remember—13. Back when the lock was installed, he had thought that the only occasion, on which he would use it, would be the time when he was in deep shit. It seemed now that time had come.
He entered the combination and unlocked the door. He opened it wide for the people to go through. They ran up the stairs outside. They kept on coughing until their lungs got filled with the fresh air. Ksenia’s eyes were watering with tears. Mimi was trembling with fear, and her father was explaining to her in rapid Chinese what was going on.
Marcel dropped to his knees and buried his face in the snow. Then he rolled on his back and started laughing. Hysterically. For no reason at all.
His laugh was interrupted by a woman’s cry.
Ludmila was bent over her son’s body. “Dima’s not breathing! Oh God, help me! My boy’s not breathing!”
Dr. Brodde checked the boy’s pulse. “He’s alive.”
He asked for space around him. Ivan spread his jacket on the floor and put the boy on it. The next four minutes were probably most intense in the woman’s life. She sat on the floor, sobbing and hugging her sides.
Dr. Brodde started mouth-to-mouth on the boy. One minute passed. The doctor’s movements were fast and confident, but the boy’s body remained lifeless. His lips were a thin curved line. His eyes were closed. Another minute passed. There was vomit coming out of his mouth. Dr. Brodde switched to mouth-to-nose resuscitation. A third minute passed. Ludmila was trying to get to her son, but Ivan and Marcel kept her away. The fourth minute was long and painful. But it brought the boy back to life. Dima barked a deep cough, his eyes wide open.
Ludmila was too weak to thank the doctor. She crawled to her son and embraced him and did not let him go for a long time.
Zhang Wei hailed Dr. Brodde as a hero. Their relief did not last long. The wind was getting stronger, and it was hard to see in this snowstorm. The temperature of their bodies was dropping with every second. The roof door was on fire now and looked like a portal to hell.
There was a summer café on the roof. It boasted a transparent glass roof. It was Diana’s idea to build the café here. The view was nice—the river and the city. She had told Andy it would be great to have a place where guests could sit at night, sipping coffee and reading evening news, enjoying the night sky above. It sparkled like a crystal the first couple of days. It had been fun for a couple weeks until the local pigeons got to like this place, and it became costly to clean the roof every day. There was a problem with insects too, which were attracted by the bright lights and beat against the windows.
In winter, they could not use it either. The roof was flat, and much snow accumulated on top of it. This January, there had been such a heavy snowfall that the roof had started cracking under the weight of the snow, and the café was not safe to use.
So, Diana had dismissed her creative urges, scheduled the place to be dismantled and concentrated on what she did best—management, personnel training, and improvement of the hotel service.
Andy thought about Diana’s body lying in his bedroom and being devoured by the fire and shuddered.
He had no key to the café with him. He used his fire ax to smash the glass door and went in.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The gas station was small. A counter, a little café in the corner and a storeroom in the back. Litvakov had propped an empty ice cream cabinet against the door. It was quiet outside, so he risked starting a fire using clothes he had found in the storeroom and wooden panels. He half-opened a window to provide ventilation.
He sat behind the cash register, his mittenless hands placed on the shiny metal counter, pale as the fish belly. The mittens were drying near the fire. He had been up all night and was now sleepy and groggy. And frozen, too. He had walked from car to car, siphoning gas. He could siphon enough gas to fill up the tank of their car, but he finally understood there was no way of getting out of here by car as the traffic jam seemed to stretch for miles. So he did two gas cans and quit. He brought them to the station to keep the fire burning.
Gerda was sitting in a plastic chair by the fire, in the reign
of sleep. He checked her every ten minutes to make sure she was breathing. It is easy to freeze to death while sleeping. Nastya was away in the storeroom which they were using as a restroom. Misha was sitting by the window and looking through it at the heavy snowfall outside. Nothing was visible except a continuous white blur. The boy was drawing with his fingers on the frostbitten window. It was still dark outside but far away in the east the horizon line was just starting to get pinkish.
Tatyana sat on a barstool across Litvakov. She asked him a question, but he didn’t seem to notice her. Deep in his thoughts, he was twisting his wedding band around his right ring finger and staring in front of him at the blank screen of the TV set, which was mounted on the wall in the café.
“What are we going to do now?” Tatyana repeated her question.
Litvakov blinked and looked at her. His frozen lips parted, and he said, “We wait till dawn. Then we move on. I’ve found a sled for Gerda in one of the abandoned cars. There’s a shopping mall across the river, half a mile from here. We’ll try to get some food and temporary shelter there, hopefully, medication for Gerda as well. We’ll get by.”
“Dad, are we going to die?” Misha asked his father.
“No, Misha,” Litvakov said. “Don’t say that. Who put this idea into your head?”
“Nastya,” the boy said. “She says we’re all going to die.”
Litvakov didn’t answer. He glanced at Tatyana. She was silent.
“Dad, I’m scared,” Misha said. “And I’m hungry.”
Litvakov went from behind the counter and walked to his son. He hugged him.
“And I want my Mommy,” Misha said. “Why didn’t she come with us? Why wasn’t she in the school with us?”
There was quiet for a moment. Litvakov took Misha by the index finger, blew on it and pressed it to the window glass. He started moving his son’s finger across the window, and they drew a circle together. Then they drew spikes coming from the circle. The sun, for which they all were waiting.
“Isn’t it true?” came Nastya’s voice. She had come out of the storeroom. “People are dying all around the city. And we’ll be dead, too.”
Litvakov felt a surge of anger sweeping over him. He clenched his fist. Then unclenched it. No need to lose it. They were all under enormous stress and pressure. He took a gas can and splashed the rest of the gas in the fire. A whirl of sparks reeled up to the ceiling.
“Time to move on,” he said.
“I don’t want to go uptown,” Nastya said. “I want to leave the city.”
“Leaving is not safe,” Litvakov said. “We’ll freeze and starve to death before we even reach the city limits. We have to get to that underground system.”
“And what next?” Nastya said. “Live in that bunker like fucking rats for the rest of our lives?”
“Nastya, he said we have no other option,” Tatyana said.
“He’s nobody to me to give me orders!” Nastya said.
“Don’t talk like this!” Tatyana said.
“I’m going alone then,” she said. “You can go with him if you want. You’ve always panted for him, even when Dad was alive. You can go and as well fuck him if you like!”
Tatyana’s face was deformed with rage. She came up to Nastya and gave her a hard slap across her face. “How dare you, you filthy pig! You fucking whore!”
Nastya pressed her hand to her face. “I hate you!”
“I regret that day I married your father!” Tatyana said.
Litvakov hit the counter with his fist, leaving a dent in it. “Enough! Let her go then.”
Misha was drawing a fir tree forest underneath the sun, trying not to pay attention to them. Tears were running down his frozen cheeks.
The noise woke Gerda up. She started and looked frantically around. Then she looked at the window and started again. She rose painfully to her feet and peered through the window. She was sure she saw a shape outside. Or maybe it was just a play of her imagination.
“Misha, get away from the window,” she said. “I think I saw something.”
“It’s your death right out there,” Nastya said. “Coming for you.”
Litvakov stepped over to the window and swung it open. He turned on his flashlight. There was a dog outside. A black Labrador retriever. Five years ago, he had given Gerda one as a birthday present. Gerda called the puppy Marquis. He had grown to be a big and obedient dog with good manners until he was run over by a car last year. For a moment, Litvakov thought it was their Marquis outside the window.
“Just a dog, honey,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”
The dog leaned to something on the ground. That something was the dead gas station attendant. It bit the corpse in the throat and started eating. Another dog appeared, a three-colored mongrel cur. It joined the feast. There was howling and growling, and in a minute there was a pack of dogs outside. About two dozens. Maybe more. They were ripping the corpse to pieces, fighting with each other over morsels of frozen meat. The people inside the gas station were watching the scene with silent horror.
Gerda reached to close the window, as a big black shadow jumped up from the ground and got caught between the window and the window frame. It was the snarling muzzle of a German shepherd dog. The beast was massive. There was froth working around its mouth. Its paws were scratching against the plastic windowsill, leaving long streaks on its surface. Misha cried and fell to the floor. The dog snarled at Gerda and tried to squeeze inside, but she kept pushing the window to shut it. The monster yelped and made a quick jerky movement with its jaws. Gerda screamed in pain and backed away. Dark blood was dripping from the torn sleeve of her jacket.
PART THREE. DAYS OF SORROW
THIRTY-NINE
The sky above the town of Timiryazevski was gray. The snow was sheeting down in a blizzard. General Petrov had been up all night, sorting through documents in his filing cabinet. Some of them went into his briefcase, some were sent to the shredder operated by Lieutenant Andrei Skoptsov, his new aide. The general liked the new guy. He was energetic and smart and reminded him of himself when he was twenty-six years old.
An order coming straight from the Kremlin had been issued to eliminate all the evidence of the military presence in this little town. Both documented and physical. The locals had been made to sign a pledge of secrecy. The people were really terrified, so these gagging orders were an effective measure to keep their mouths shut.
There was a soft knock on the door.
The general turned around in irritation. “What now? Didn’t I tell that dumbass of a guard that I’m not available? And it’s six in the morning, for God’s sake!”
The aide ran his fingers through his hair and went to the door. He opened it and saw something behind it which made him raise his hands above his head and take a step back into the office. A gun was pointed at his worried face. The aide made another step back, and the gun inched closer to his head. In a moment the general saw who was holding the weapon. It was Dr. Obukhova. She was in her white lab coat.
“Obukhova?” the general said. “What the hell do you want here? What are you up to?”
“I want answers to my questions,” she said.
The woman nudged the aide with the gun muzzle and walked in. The general glanced at his desk. He kept his gun in the right upper drawer.
“Don’t even think about it,” she said. She trained her gun on the general and motioned him to the couch, which was in the far corner of the room. “Will you have a seat, General? We need to talk.”
The general hesitated but obeyed and sat on the edge of the couch. “Oh, thanks. I’ve been working all night. I could use some rest.”
The aide wanted to sit, too, but the woman ordered him to turn around with his back to her and stand still.
“Where’s the guard?” the general said. “You killed him?”
“No,” Dr. Obukhova said. “I told him there was a round of vaccination going on in this facility. I put him to rest. He’s deep asleep. I’ve
never been the murderous type. Like you are.”
“You won’t get away with this,” the general said. “You will be caught, arrested and court-martialed. But I would rather kill you instead. The report would say there was an accident.”
He thought a moment and slapped his forehead with his hand. “What am I talking about? The report, huh! I have received orders from the Commander-in-Chief himself to destroy all the evidence of our presence here. Including your files. Including yourself, if need be. We’re in a war situation.”
Dr. Obukhova drew a syringe out of her pocket and held it up. Removed the cap. The clear liquid glittered inside the glass barrel. She stepped to the aide and placed the needle close to his neck.
“This is human cerebrospinal fluid,” she said. “Infected. One shot, and you’ll be granted eternal immortality. Until you rot away. So don’t move.”
The young man’s eyes widened with fear. His face turned lobster-red, and he began to sweat. “You’re making a big mistake, Dr. Obukhova.”
The general put his hands on his lap and looked up at the woman. “All right. Let’s hear what you want to say.”
“It’s been nearly two weeks,” she said, “and I still haven’t got even half of the equipment I need for research. We haven’t even started working on the vaccine. We’re losing precious time.”
“Do you expect to speed up things this way, Doctor?” he said. “Besides, we’re closing this facility by the end of the month.”
She seemed surprised, shocked even. “You mean this month?”
General Petrov nodded. “Exactly. Tomorrow, to be more exact. All the materials will be classified. Some of them will be destroyed. But don’t worry. You’ll get your payment in full.”
“Does it mean you’re going to stop the research?” she said.
“This is classified information,” the aide said.
Dr. Obukhova pressed the needle to the young man’s skin. “I didn’t ask you to say anything. Open your mouth again, you’re a dead man.”
The Living & The Dead (Book 1): Zombiegrad Page 36
