by Matt Turner
Look at all these fat toads, Vera thought in a mixture of disgust and excitement as she carefully lit a cigarette. A duke here, a baroness there; even the mayor was present. She took in a deep inhale and smiled. I can wipe out the entire city’s oppressors in one blow.
She forced her features to remain calm and stole another glance at her pocket watch. A half hour still remained before the imperial carriage was due to arrive, just enough time for her to properly scout out her target. She stepped into the small crowd of reporters, carefully holding her carpetbag against her chest, and nearly jumped out of her skin when a hand seized her shoulder.
“Vera!”
She turned to see that Petyr was there. A ragged student from the University of St. Petersburg, his spectacles and disheveled appearance—he hadn’t shaved in at least a week, Vera noted—hid the fact that he was on the Executive Committee of the People’s Will. And he should not have been there.
“What in God’s name are you doing here?” he hissed.
Before she answered, Vera seized him by the collar and none-too-gently dragged him behind a statue of Tsar Alexander I so that they had some relative privacy. “I got a lead,” she said defensively. “The lieutenant—wait a minute.” The pieces in her mind suddenly clicked together. Petyr was the one who had asked her to investigate Lieutenant Krakowsky. Petyr was the one who had told her that the People’s Will needed that information as soon as possible, yet Petyr was here.
“You bastard,” she spat, and gave him a shove. “You sent me on a wild-goose chase just to keep me busy, didn’t you?”
“Vera, please don’t make a scene,” Petyr said impatiently.
“You knew the tsar was coming here all along, asshole. Thought you wouldn’t invite me? That the emotional woman would ruin your little welcoming committee?” The only thing that kept her from striking him across the face was the French reporter suspiciously staring at them from afar. “Maybe I’ll stab you too, you bastard.”
“Stab? Vera, did you kill Lieutenant Krakowsky?” Petyr demanded. One look at her face told him everything he needed to know. “Christ, this is exactly why I didn’t tell you about this! The man could’ve been a valuable informant! What did I just tell you about your damned collateral damage?”
“He’d still be alive if you’d told me about this all along,” Vera snarled. “Besides, he was a necessary sacrifice. He was just another dog of the bourgeoisie. I did the world a favor by ending the fat fuck.”
“He was still a man, damn it.” Petyr sighed. “We only eliminate those we have to, Vera—it’s change we want, not a damn war.” He rubbed his eyes in exasperation.
Quite suddenly, it dawned on Vera how old, how weak, how compromised the revolutionary looked—and he was still nearly a decade younger than her. To think I ever admired you.
“And now the authorities will be looking for you.” Petyr grimaced. “You don’t think they’ll find his body and put the pieces together?”
That was doubtful, Vera thought. She had booby-trapped the lieutenant with enough explosives to bring down the entire tavern and destroy any evidence she had left behind. Telling Petyr that would only make him squawk in indignation and quote meaningless philosophical rhetoric at her, though, so she decided to neglect mentioning that fact.
“… time is running out,” Petyr said.
Vera blinked and realized that her thoughts of explosives and death had made her tune out most of the intellectual’s words.
“Ignaty and Nikolai are already in position. I need to join them.”
“Will you be able to do it?” Vera demanded. “Do you have what it takes?” Lieutenant Krakowsky was not the first man she had killed for the Revolution; she didn’t think that Petyr had even gotten in a bar fight.
Petyr slid a hand into his coat pocket and gripped the revolver that they both knew was there. “I will do what I must for the people,” he grimly said. “Now, Vera, please—go home.”
You won’t succeed, Vera wanted to say. They were three men armed with revolvers, trying to kill the most powerful man in Russia, who was traveling in a train with bulletproof windows, guarded by a small army of Cossacks. Dynamite was the only solution, she had argued and raged time and time again at the secretive meetings of the People’s Will. But Petyr had always overridden her, citing the need to preserve civilian lives. The others always sided with the young student, though whether it was because of her sex or some other misplaced idealism she didn’t know. And now, in their most daring plan yet, they had pushed her out completely, sending her to gather secrets that they already knew.
Like throwing their token bitch a bone, Vera thought bitterly. But today was her day—it was her time to contribute to the Revolution, Petyr and his ilk be damned.
She evenly met Petyr’s gaze. “I serve the Revolution,” she calmly said.
Petyr’s eyes slid down to the carpetbag and widened in fear. “Vera, is that—”
The shriek of a distant train whistle interrupted him. “Away from the tracks,” one of the guards ordered. The crowd obediently backed away and began to murmur in excitement.
“He’s early.” Vera gave Petyr her best sneer and stubbed her cigarette out against his dirty jacket. “I’m done being your empty symbol of ‘equality,’ Petyr. You should go.”
A vein began to swell in his forehead. “Fine,” he growled. He started to reach for the carpetbag, immediately thought better, and pulled his hand back. “Don’t use it,” he pleaded one last time. With that, he stalked back into the crowd.
“Ah, men,” a female voice said. Vera turned to see a stout middle-aged woman standing there. Her fashion marked her as Western, probably American, but her Russian was flawless. “Is he yours?”
Vera tensed up. How much did she hear? “He seems to think so.”
The foreign woman chuckled. “That seems to be universal, at any rate.” She held out a hand in greeting. “The name’s Almira Lothrop. I’m here with my husband on diplomatic business from the United States.”
“Vera Figner.” Vera shook her hand in greeting. Somewhere in the distance, the faint rumbling on the tracks was growing in volume. Her time was running out, yet this damned woman seemed to have taken a liking to her. She forced a false smile onto her lips. “If you’ll excuse me, I must be going—”
Almira did not let go of her hand. “Just one quick thing,” she cooed. “I am so eager to see the tsar, away from all these nasty crowds. Do you know where I can get the best view of him?”
“If I knew that, don’t you think I’d already be there?” Vera demanded impatiently. Petyr would be in position at the front of the crowd now, she judged. If she could just get in place before the train arrived, she could hurl her dynamite before the others ruined the element of surprise. “Please, Ms. Lothrop, I must go—”
“Well, you don’t have to be so rude about it.” The American sniffed. “You foreigners are always the same, scuttling about and avoiding educated conversation.”
“Is something the matter, dear?” A middle-aged man who bore an alarming resemblance to his wife descended on them from the crowd. He eyed Vera, who Almira still gripped in her viselike hand, suspiciously. “Was this one trying to pickpocket you, Almira?”
“No, but the thing is certainly skinny and hungry-looking enough to do it,” Almira said in the tone of a judge who had sentenced thousands of criminals to death for the same offense. “I’m just giving her a well-deserved lesson in basic etiquette.”
“Turn around and walk away, or you are both going to die,” Vera breathed. She could feel the rumbling in the soles of her feet. The train was nearly seconds away. She was about to lose her chance!
Confusion rippled across Almira’s round face. “What did you just say to me?” she squawked as Vera finally tore away from her powerful grip and plunged into the crowd.
Behind her, horrible recognition dawned in Mr. Lothrop’s eyes. “Wait,” he croaked out. The strange woman, the crowded venue, the monarch on his way, the carpetbag she
had held to her chest so protectively—
“Stop her!” Mr. Lothrop screamed. “Anarchist!”
Just ahead, the gunfire began.
6
Once again, John’s dreams were dark and full of horrors. He had only a glimpse of screaming battlefields, bodies reduced to pulp, a pair of sunken yellow eyes, and Tituba’s burning face before he awoke with a scream. For a moment, he lay there in his sweat-soaked bed, sucking in great lungfuls of the freezing air.
Just a dream, he told himself. The witch was gone; the fires of Hell had long since swallowed her up. But even the familiarity of his surroundings offered no comfort. The nightmares had gotten worse; this one had been so overwhelming that waking life did not feel real compared to it. Like a thin blanket thrown over a madman. John shuddered.
He did not sleep for the rest of the night. Instead, he lay in his bed, staring up into the darkness of the rafters and listening to his labored breaths. Something scurried along one of the beams above him, and he squinted to make it out. A shaft of moonlight revealed that it was nothing but a rat. The settlement was infested with vermin, especially in the cold of winter.
Still, he found himself oddly fascinated by the repulsive creature and continued to watch it from afar. As though it sensed his gaze, it paused on the beam just above him, allowing him to better make out its features. It was an old, tough rat, covered with the scars of a dozen violent battles, and had clearly been eating well, for its belly swelled out in a way that was grotesque, even for a vermin. A marvel it can even move at all. John smiled.
The creature cocked its head and gazed down at him. Faint moonlight reflected in its hateful, beady eyes. The clouds outside shifted, and quite suddenly the creature cast a shadow on the wall that was both astoundingly large and horribly human. The whiskers became shriveled hair hanging from a burnt frame, the snout became a twisted parody of the human form, and the twitching tail seemed to morph into a shadowy arm that reached out to him.
Tituba. “L-leave me,” he stammered out in a voice weaker than any whisper. “Y-you’re dead.”
The witch’s shadow became darker and more horrifying still. For the brief remainder of his life afterward, John could swear that he saw a very human expression of malice cross the rat’s features, and then the bloated rodent leapt down at his face.
John screamed like a child as the creature slammed into his nose. Razor-tipped paws clawed at his cheeks—one even briefly entered his mouth and tore at his bottom lip. He lurched off the bed, nearly smashed his skull into a table, and blindly scrabbled at the rat. The reek of it brought tears to his eyes and summoned the taste of vomit in the back of his throat. But at last his hand seized something soft and squirming.
He wrenched the rat away from his face, wrapped both hands around it, and throttled the monster. It let out a shrill scream as he squeezed tighter and tighter. “Die, damn you,” John swore. The moon became wreathed in cloud again, shrouding his room in darkness, but there was still just enough light to make out the thrashing ball of fur in his hands.
He squeezed tighter and felt something warm and pulpy explode across his fingers. The rat’s scream immediately died away. For a moment, John lay in the darkness, breathing heavily. “Damned vermin,” he panted. He moved his hands to toss the corpse aside.
It was at that moment that the clouds shifted again, bathing the world in cold moonlight. The darkness of the room was burnt away, and John nearly vomited at the sight of his hands.
The rat had been pregnant. The gaping hole he had burst through its guts revealed half a dozen infants that had burst outward onto his fingers in a dripping mass of blood and mother’s milk. John prayed to God that it was his imagination and the nightmarish lighting that made some of them seem to shift and move. Several more poured from their mother’s corpse and slowly slid down his blood-covered fingers to splat on the floor.
I’m pregnant, the witch had screamed.
He stared in shock at what he had done as an ocean of guilt washed over him. “Oh God.” He groaned. He recoiled from the sight and violently shook his hands, spraying pieces of rat over himself, but still the blood and shreds of guts remained. There was no time to think or plan; instead, he staggered to his door and blindly fled out into the snow. Down one street he raced, then another, then another, past gloomy alleys and shuttered houses, until at last he was running barefoot through a field of snow, sprinting for the dark forest beyond. Within minutes, the oppressive savagery of the New World surrounded him on all sides. Still he ran, until his feet were raw and bleeding and he had to finally collapse at the foot of an oak tree.
“Oh God,” he sobbed again and again. “Oh God, please…” He did not even know what he was pleading for. His guilt stretched endlessly before him, a universe of pain from which there was no escape. “What have I done? What have I done?”
He lurched forward as a fresh round of sobs seized his body and was momentarily surprised to see a rope lying in the snow before him. Did I bring that? he wondered.
John shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he mumbled through the tears. He took the rope in his hands; it was thin and only a few feet long, but it would do. He looked up, and sure enough, there was a branch the perfect height just over his head. It was meant to be.
Did he hear an echo of faint laughter from somewhere deep within the woods? Was there a glimmer of two eyes gazing at him? He chose to ignore it and rose to his feet. Taking a deep breath, Reverend John Hale set about his last task on Earth.
7
“Get back!” a soldier screeched over the bursts of gunfire and the screaming wail of the approaching steam engine. “Get back, get back!” One of Petyr’s bullets struck him in the chest and he crumpled to the ground in a bloody heap. The crowd screamed in terror and reeled back as the other soldiers blindly opened fire.
The crazed mass of confusion was too much for Vera to handle; a body slammed into her so hard that she lost her balance and the carpetbag of death she carried sailed out of her hands. She hit the pavement with enough force that she could taste blood in her mouth. Her cigarettes slipped from her pockets, rolling every which way across the bloody floor. Some foolish instinct made her scrabble for them, heedless of the gunfire.
There was a sickening thud somewhere nearby and Mr. Lothrop collapsed in front of her. For a moment, his bulging eyes gaped at her in recognition, and then she clambered over him, desperately searching for her carpetbag. The barrage of gunfire over her increased in volume, lancing over her head and cutting through the crowd like a great scythe. Blood and bodies seemed to tumble down from every direction, nearly blinding her—and then she finally saw her carpetbag, lying just behind a statue of Catherine the Great that a small group of reporters were cowering behind.
“What the hell is going on?” one of them shrieked at Vera as she crawled over to him. It was difficult to make out his words over the whine of bullets and the deafening whistle of the train.
Vera grabbed the carpetbag and had to stop herself from reflexively saying a prayer of thanks that it had not yet detonated. “Revolution, comrade,” she said.
She dared to take a peek around the edge of the statue’s base to assess the situation. Just ahead, most of the old crowd of reporters and bourgeoise had either fled or were dead; over a dozen bodies littered both sides of the tracks. Ignaty and Nikolai were both dead. Petyr seemed to still be breathing; he was crouched behind a column, revolver in hand, but the soldiers who swarmed about the station outnumbered him twenty to one. Idiot.
And still the train charged forward. It showed no sign of slowing down now; the conductor was clearly planning to blast through the station as quickly as possible. Even as she watched, a slot in the forward compartment slid open and a barrel pointed out—
Shit. She ducked her head back just as the Maxim spat out a barrage of death at unimaginable speed, raking nearly fifty meters of train station with a storm of bullets. The bastards were expecting dynamite, then. There was no way she could possibly get
close enough to deliver her gift for the tsar. Fucking Petyr, she cursed. If he hadn’t been so blinded by his goddamn morals…
“Oh Christ, don’t let me die!” The reporter wept. A bullet smashed into Catherine the Great’s head, knocking her frowning face at his feet. He yelped and was very nearly brained by a bullet that tore through the brim of his hat.
“Give me a light,” Vera snapped at him. She seized one of her cigarettes from the floor and shoved it in the reporter’s face. With a glazed-over look born of pure habit, he struck it alight with his lighter.
Vera placed the carpetbag in his lap. “Hold this.” Without waiting for his response, she reached inside and withdrew a single stick of dynamite. It had a twenty-second fuse, so she looped it in half and pressed the tip of the cigarette against it.
“Is that dynamite?” the reporter asked in shock.
“My name is Vera Figner,” she said as the fuse sputtered and sparked. “And today I’m going to kill the tsar. There’s your story.”
She hurled the lit stick of death around the statue and grinned in triumph when it landed against one of the central pillars. “And now I’ll take this—” She pried the carpetbag from the reporter’s nervous grip.
He stared at her in confusion. “Wait, what?”
The deafening explosion ripped through the station with the force of a small avalanche, demolishing pillars, warping the very floor from its foundation, and overwhelming Vera’s senses so that for a moment she was unable to even breathe. A cloud of smoke and dust wrapped around her, so thick that she was unable to even see the screaming reporter who clutched at her. She shoved him aside and staggered to her feet. The world swam around her; bits of glass crumbled down from the shattered ceiling, casting hypnotizing flashes of reflected light through the fog. Am I dead? As if in response, a solitary beam of light cut through the haze in front of her, coming to rest on one of the limp bodies scattered about.