Babayaga

by Toby Barlow

  “It is fascinating,” Jake went on. “Think about how a drug like this could affect the entire topography of war. I could be at one latitude, see, and you could be thousands of miles away, but if we’re dosed at the same time from the same batch, shazam, we’re sharing a single stage together. Like we are now, get it?”

  Will nodded, only vaguely understanding.

  “What this means,” Jake continued, “is that you can fly over one of Ho Chi Minh’s camps in the deepest, thickest jungle and dose them by air, like you’re irrigating crops. At the same time you carefully dose up your own GI force that’s sitting back in, say, West Germany, all gunned up and ready for action. Talk about your goddamn ambush, the Commies will be loony-eyed and drug dreaming, wandering through their ancestral mud-hut homes, when—ka-bam—good ol’ Yankee Joe kicks down the bamboo door and scorches a flamethrower in their faces. Then it’s like ‘Oh, hello’ and ‘Sayonara, buddy!’ all in the same breath.”

  Will shook his head. “Wow, incredible. I never imagined stuff like this was possible.”

  Jake smiled. “Right now Bendix is the only one who can do it, no one else is even close. Mark my word, once the kinks are ironed out and the army labs start cooking up their industrial-sized batches, boy howdy, it is going to be a whole new ball game.”

  “Seems like it works pretty well already. I mean, this bacon tastes really good,” Will said, loading up his fork for his last big bite.

  Jake nodded. “Yeah, well, the clinical tests are almost done. But like I said, we still have some kinks.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, finding proper dosage levels and looking at the long-term impacts on the subjects; these drugs can put quite a strain on the system. I’m pretty sure that’s what took out Boris, his heart exploded. Then there’s the question of how you’re affected in the real world when you’re hit here. We’ve got more bodies buried in the basement than we have answers. Also, what if the effect isn’t lethal, if it’s only a crippling injury, then what? Then we get weird stuff like Ned’s muttering coma.”

  Will stopped scraping his plate and looked up. “Ned? I thought she was working with the Russians.”

  “Ned was working for Ned; every other loyalty she had died back in Spain when the Fascists shot all her friends. Since then, she’s been working with anyone who paid her. She would have betrayed this operation too if she’d had time to figure it out. I’m pretty sure that’s why Bendix gave her a funny dose. His methods are, well, like I said, the guy spooks me, but this is the new frontier, right? There is so much we don’t know. We need more experiments, you understand. Sorry.”

  Wolfing down his food, taking in the surreal atmosphere (out the window a herd of bleating sheared sheep caught his eye meandering up Larned Street), Will had only been half-listening to Jake’s story. It was fascinating, but so was so much at the moment, his world had become a grand orchestra of overstimulating sensations, with every sensory section—horns, strings, percussion—all going at full tilt. However, Jake’s last point did catch Will’s ear, the way a perfectly chimed triangle can cut through a symphony, and at the word “Sorry,” he looked up to find Jake aiming a pistol directly at his head.

  Without thinking, Will ducked and flipped the table up. Jake fired the gun into the ceiling as he tumbled backward with the remaining eggs, butter, bacon, and scalding coffee spilling, yellow and black, all over him. Jake aimed the gun again as Will dashed out the hallway. A shot hit and splintered the doorframe behind him as he dove out to the porch.

  Leaping over the rickety stairs, Will took off down the walkway and ran across the street. Running past a pair of grazing goats, he heard another gunshot as the wig shop window shattered out in front of him. Not waiting for a second shot, he dove in through the revolving doors of the Penobscot Building, scrambled across the lobby with his head low, then ducked into the stairwell by the elevators, slamming the door shut tightly behind him.

  Running up the stairs, Will thought through the weirdness and tried to form a plan. He realized that Jake was already an expert in this field, he had probably been hunting in this hallucinogenic terrain for some time. Jake also had a sizable advantage in that he had figured out how to actually get his hands on a weapon, he had a gun, while Will had only his wits, which at the moment were not nearly as focused as they needed to be.

  Will reached the third floor and flung open the stairwell door only to find himself facing a rolling green pasture with a picturesque cardinal red barn standing on a knoll off in the distance. There was a creek, and a few yards beyond that a stand of ash trees. With no real notion except an instinct to keep moving, Will ran toward the grove, but the soil was boggy and his shoes quickly got stuck in the mud. Panicked and fumbling, he tried to correct his footing, but he stumbled and fell, slipping sideways on the ground. He started to right himself, but before he could get up, he felt the hard pressure of steel being pressed against his head. Slowly, he sank back down onto his knees.

  “Well, pal,” smirked Jake, “you can’t say we didn’t give you a nice last meal.”

  “Okay. But give me one minute more, just one minute, please.” Will shut his eyes and tried to prepare himself for what was coming next. He quickly thought of all the beautiful things he had known in his life: his parents, his mother’s two cats sleeping in the sun, Doris Day singing “Shanghai,” a glass of whiskey on a winter’s night, and the taste of the warm crêpe he had eaten the first day he was in France. Then, finally, Zoya, her eyes, her cheekbones, the nape of her neck, and the way her breasts and bare torso looked as she lay half uncovered on the bed, breathing heavily, exhausted from his kisses.

  Will heard the click of the pistol. He opened his eyes and noticed that one of the Paris metro’s Art Nouveau entrances had risen out of the meadow. “At least I get to see some of Paris before I go.”

  “What?”

  Will pointed at the metro entrance.

  “Oh damn—” Jake started to speak but his words were interrupted by a big, strange crashing and small yelping sound, as if an oak tree had fallen over a dog. Then there was silence. Will stayed on his knees, uncertain of what he should do next. Finally he looked up over his shoulder and found a stranger standing above him, awkwardly wielding a heavy branch in his hands. At the man’s feet lay Jake, crumpled up on the wet field, his suit splattered with mud, his skull neatly caved in.

  “Is he dead?”

  The man nodded, with a shrug.

  “Gee, thanks,” said Will, slowly picking himself up off the ground. He put out his hand. “My name’s Will. Are you French or American? Français ou américain?”

  The man shook his hand and seemed about to answer when an enormous blinding white light flashed out and exploded across the landscape, engulfing all their surroundings. The man, the broad field, the distant trees, the whole world, completely vanished. Will tried shutting his eyes to block out the blinding, burning glare, but he had no way to stop the fierce light; his nerves felt scalded and raw as his panicked consciousness was shocked to a bright expansion point from which he was sure he would never return. The only bleak reassurance he had was that he absolutely knew what this was, the moment he had feared for years now, the great A-bomb annihilation. Someone had done it, the button had been pushed, an arrogant prime minister, a prideful president, a crazed stupid admiral or a lethally offended premier, it did not matter, some arrogant son of a bitch had launched the ballistic missiles, from Washington, Moscow, 10 Downing, or out from the bowels of one of the new nuclear submarines, it did not matter; the preemptive solution to every global conflict had landed, and all the wars being waged on the planet, every battle, every argument over justice or injustice, from the greatest of moral struggles to the most petty kitchen debates, conflagrations over the borders of oil nations to ornery grandmothers haggling over the price of thimbles, none of it mattered now, like the sun-scorched scorpions on the shores of some distant Bikini atoll, which had all been irradiated into an iridescent nothingness, it was over
. Talk about the meek inheriting the earth, this once proud species, who had risen out of the jungle mud to overcome the mythical dragons of fire, serpent, fang, and talon, who had built spired cities, cleared continents, and were poised to conquer space itself, had been defeated, ultimately, by the fractional split of the tiny atom. All this flashed across Will’s tumbling mind as he spun deep into the shrill, screaming abyss. An inexorable vacuum pulled at him, swallowing and sucking him down toward a nodal nothingness. And then it was over.

  VII

  Witches’ Song Nine

  Yes, feel this atomic weight bearing down on your dreams,

  threatening like some swollen pink organ,

  cystic, fevered, prime to burst

  whenever a flashbulb pops.

  Look how you have forged

  your own haunting.

  Lyda and I, we had a lover,

  the naked professor, who, wrapped up in our blankets,

  drew his hieroglyph riddles

  across the whitewashed walls

  and out onto the broad planked floors,

  his nervous enthusiasm cracking his chalk,

  and we would stare, wondering,

  Where is this going?

  Yes, yes, truth is vitality,

  knowledge is power,

  and we have our own lexicon, seared to mind,

  of root and sinew, berry and boil.

  Our cause is clear and yet our impact slight,

  but you, well, where are you going?

  Your scientists dig for answers.

  The way pigtails play with matryoshka dolls,

  one riddle tucked inside the last,

  following it down, winding deeper

  into endless, spiraling mysteries

  while behind you, the hot winds blow

  and the desert sands slip in

  under sunny doorsills.

  Enough of this, it makes me anxious,

  let us instead set our eyes back

  to the city of the fool and the crone.

  Now there is a pair too, so very like you,

  who never doubt their path.

  VIII

  “Hullo,” said Oliver.

  Will blinked and looked around. He was back in the pharmacy lab.

  Oliver was beaming proud. “Surprised to be here? Well, yes, I always say, never underestimate the possibilities of pure adrenaline,” he said, holding up an empty syringe. “Had to dig through the cabinets to find it. I thought it was worth a shot, so to speak. Wonderful stuff. Simply wonderful.”

  Behind Oliver stood two of the jazzmen, Kelly and Red, wearing their matching blue suits. Both the men were mud-stained and sweaty and both were breathing hard. They each held a smoking Thompson submachine gun pointed down at two giants, who each lay stretched out on the floor, pistols still in their hands and sizable chunks missing from their heads. Blood covered the walls and oozed out from their bodies, pooling across the concrete floor. Flats stood by the closed door, watching out the window with a Johnson rifle in his hands. Bendix himself was nowhere to be seen.

  Then Will saw her, she had been standing in the shadows by the staircase, watching the scene shyly with her arms crossed. She stepped forward with a small smile and a look of relief on her face. Moving slowly, depleted of strength, he pushed himself up out of the chair and took her in his arms. He held her for a long time without saying a word.

  Twenty minutes later, he watched as the jazzmen stowed the guns and stuffed the shovels into the back of their impossibly small car.

  “You have quite a woman there,” Red told him, nodding to Zoya, who stayed on Will’s arm.

  “If you’ve got any issue coming up with the cash you owe us, I know some Berbers who will take those Thompsons off our hands, along with the rest of the stuff,” Flats told Oliver.

  Oliver nodded. “No need to bring in the Berbers, Flats, I’m good for the cash. Hold on to the guns till you hear from me.”

  “Okay, just trying to be accommodating.” With that, the jazz boys rumbled off in their car and were gone.

  Now Will was riding shotgun with Oliver behind the wheel. Zoya rested in the back. They were driving fast through the night, heading out of town, toward a friend of Zoya’s who she said might help them. Oliver filled Will in as they drove: “The whole adventure was torn right from the pages of Poe. Did you ever read “The Cask of Amontillado”? It was like that, only, thankfully, without the fatal immurement. The map turned out to be accurate, you see, the guns were stashed in the sealed-off catacombs over in Montparnasse, right beneath the cemetery. It makes sense, it’s close to the station, so I suppose my soldier cached it all away before he caught the westbound train. The catacombs down there are littered with piles upon piles of skeletons.”

  “I know about the catacombs, Oliver.”

  “Oh, sorry, of course, I always forget you’re not a tourist. In any case, there’s a hidden street entrance to the lower levels, and once we got in it was merely a matter of identifying the right crypt. Luckily the map was very good, that fellow must have been well trained by the OSS, because we found the spot in no time. I’ll say, though, it was rather amusing watching the jazz boys dig through the ossuary, throwing those ribs, shinbones, and skulls about like mad dogs. At one point I tried doing the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ bit but no one was amused.”

  “Where was she?” Will asked, gesturing toward Zoya, asleep in the backseat of the car.

  “At the top of the stairs, keeping watch. We were in and out in half the time I thought it’d take. Then it was simply a matter of dashing back to the pharmacy and coordinating a successful attack.”

  “How’d you pull it off?”

  “Oh, well. I had a rather elaborate charade cooked up involving dressing the boys in overalls and pretending to be EDF electricians, but then Red suggested we simply kick in the front door and start firing. We had them out-armed and we possessed the element of surprise, so his plan made sense. Besides, I don’t know where we would have gotten the overalls.”

  “So, you kicked in the door and started shooting? With me just sitting there?”

  “Well, there was a bit of reconnaissance, but I know what you mean. As I said, I would have preferred some intrigue involving handlebar-mustache disguises and whatnot.” He smiled. “But it all worked out. The jazz boys are crack shots, you know, they were all front-line infantry during the war. It was a fortuitous team to have on hand for the job. I must say, you are a lucky man.”

  Will rolled down the window a crack and leaned his head against it. The fresh night air cleared his thoughts a bit, but not enough to make sense of things. He reached his arm over the seat and wrapped his hand around the sleeping Zoya’s ankle. That helped.

  IX

  The guard came for Elga early. She acted as though she were fast asleep when he rousted her, though she was already well prepared. Slowly, she stepped over the sleeping whores and out of the cell, trudging ahead of the officer. She waited as he unlocked the heavily secured doors and took her up the narrow stairs. The main rooms of the station house were mostly empty at that hour; only two officers were in sight, one yawning, one picking at a roll and sipping coffee as he read the morning edition of La Croix.

  The guard walked her down the hall and around the corner, where they came across three men standing around a desk. Her guard interrupted the conversation.

  “I have Elga Sossoka here,” the guard said to the man Elga guessed was his superior, a police captain perhaps. “Which room do you want her in?”

  “Put her in two,” said the captain. Elga noticed that when the guard had said her name, one of the other men in the group, a tall fellow with a bruised cheek who was wearing a rumpled gray suit, reacted almost as if he had been lightly slapped. It was a small and slightly suppressed expression, no one else seemed to notice it. But he eyed her now with a curious interest that Elga did not like. She looked down at her feet and tried to look stupid.

  The guard took her arm and they continued down the hall.
The exchange had bristled her nerves. She wondered if she was merely being paranoid, but as they came to the door marked “Room 2,” she looked over her shoulder and saw that the tall man was ignoring his companions and focusing all his attention on her. She knew this wasn’t good; she would have to work fast.

  Room 2 was empty except for two chairs and a metal desk. A notebook and a pair of pencils lay on the desk. The guard seated her in the chair by the wall and then departed, locking the door behind him. Sitting alone, she collected her thoughts. She guessed that the man’s having noticed her had set off the old impatient celestial clock’s ticking, and she knew she would have to act fast to escape the fate it was running toward. She took a deep breath; even pondering the effort ahead wearied her. She had seen too much excitement in the past few days. She remembered back to when she lived by herself in the forest: countless seasons would pass without the need for a major spell; small ones, yes, to lure in squirrels, moles, and tasty field mice, or to catch pheasants and quail, but other than that she had enjoyed the long silence of those years. Of course, that could not have lasted, once the steady industry of man found its fuel and it began burning and digging and wrenching everything in its omnivorous fashion; it was only a matter of time before it burned down her door. Now the world had no silence, it was full of tin radio sounds and fat Victrola tunes and constantly ringing telephones, the voices on the other end of the line always busily killing and clearing for what was to come next. Even the village church bells that once taunted her hourly with their misguided faith were now drowned out by bleating horns and sputtering engines, and she was sure that densely tangled tranquility of forest she had lived in had long ago been cleared for corrugated wheat fields and the hungry harvest threshers that went with them. One had to move fast now to dodge the massive crush of the machinery, the gears gnashing with their atonal screech and grind, as if a thousand grand pianos were constantly falling from the sky and crashing down on the pavement all around her. It was no wonder that she had a hard time concentrating. Alone in the room, she spat on the floor.