Zhukov's Dogs

by Amanda Cyr

  Val cast a quick look over his shoulder at me. This time I read the apology in his eyes. I gave a small nod, as if to tell him it was okay. Then Val looked back to Jayne. Almost everyone in the room, even people I’d never seen before today, had stepped forward. Lee and two others I didn’t recognize stayed rooted on the sidelines.

  “You’re out,” Val said.

  Jayne scoffed. “Don’t have to tell me twice. I wouldn’t stick around with you lot of queers if you paid me!”

  “Then leave,” I said. “Now.”

  The sneer which spread over Jayne’s face made me want to shoot him more than ever. “You know,” he said through a lazy drawl, shifting his glare from Val to me, “If these idiots weren’t so blind, they’d see just how toxic you are.”

  Tibbs yanked Jayne’s arms behind his back and shoved him toward the door. “Get out of here!”

  Lee, and the two others who hadn’t joined in our defense, followed Jayne out. To my horror, Marco followed them, too. I should have put a bullet through his skull the second he started for the door. Hell, I should have done it the second I figured out who he was.

  Val stepped in my way, though, and interrupted my plan. I noticed his hand reaching to take mine, but a glance at our audience made him reconsider. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his sweater, instead.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” he mumbled.

  “This is why we should have done it together.”

  “I know, and the only person I told was Anya.” He sighed. “The next thing I know, everyone knows.”

  Val sounded almost as bad as I felt, both of us watching Marco disappear from sight. I needed to keep that yellow-eyed bastard from talking. I needed to make it look like an accident. I needed to keep everything from falling apart.

  Something about scheming made me take a step closer to Val. My subconscious must have been trying to make my situation worse, because suddenly I was putting an arm over his shoulder. Still staring at the doorway, thinking about how to silence Marco, I heard Gemma giggle.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  I looked at her, confused at first as to what she was talking about. Then I felt the rise and fall of Val’s shoulders under my arm as he sighed. I wondered if I should have been embarrassed or something. In my head, coming out of the closet sounded like it would’ve be way scarier than this. It helped that nobody was shouting obscenities or trying to knock my skull in, now that Jayne was gone.

  “Good for you two, but can we talk about the real elephant in the room?” Fritzi asked. It was as close to an “I’m happy for you guys” as one could expect from her. “The city’s going to be crushed?”

  Anya and Benji showed up in time to overhear the question. Val tensed. I squeezed his shoulder and gave a short nod to answer Fritzi. “It’s true. The Oxford pillars are going to blow, and everything’s coming down.”

  “I dislike Jayne as much as everyone else, Nik,” Tibbs began. “But he was right. You’re going to have to give us more than that.”

  I couldn’t tell them the truth. Not the whole truth at least. The real trick was going to be getting it all out without setting off any sort of alarms on Val’s internal lie detector. I bent truths together. “The Bloc has eyes in some of the government’s most secret organizations. A friend of mine, undercover in the S.O.R., called yesterday morning and told me what The Council is planning.”

  Val’s sigh assured me I wasn’t fooling him, but the others seemed to buy into it. There were still a few skeptical faces in the room. Benji was the first to voice his concerns, which surprised me, considering how passive he usually was. “And we’re supposed to take your word on that?”

  “Think about it,” I began. “The article in the paper about Oxford’s re-zoning was published the same day as all the Grey Men showed up. You remember the scene they caused while we were trying to get rations out. They wanted to scare people into leaving, probably so they could start setting up for the explosion without anyone getting in their way.”

  “That makes sense,” Gemma said.

  Fritzi hummed as she mulled it over in her head. “If you found out about this yesterday, then why didn’t you tell us until now?”

  “Because I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  It wasn’t the real reason, but it was the truth nonetheless. Fritzi didn’t press me with any more questions after that, and for a long minute, everyone was silent. The tension in the room made me uneasy. I dragged a thumb along Val’s shoulder, grazing over his neckline and against his cold skin. He inhaled, eliciting a delicate shiver only I could feel. It shouldn’t have been enough to turn every thought in my head perverse, but God it was.

  Abruptly Val cleared his throat, simultaneously getting everyone’s attention and reminding me this was neither the time nor place for what I was thinking. “So, here’s the real question: What are we going to do?”

  Anya responded first with a flourish of her hands. “Well, there’s no way we’re going to let it happen!”

  “Right,” Benji agreed. “We’ll protect our home and—”

  I cut Benji short. “And get killed in the process.”

  “Nik!” Anya gasped. She wasn’t alone in her outrage; Fritzi and Gemma both threw in their two cents on how heartless I was being. It wasn’t that I was heartless by choice. As Val pointed out last night, I was missing those unnecessary emotions which made him and the others care so much.

  “How can you say that?” Gemma smacked my arm with her small hand.

  Fritzi stepped closer and pointed a finger at me, saying, “Of course we’re going to stop this! Nobody can just bury an entire city!”

  I wasn’t the only one to laugh. Val beat me to it and firmly explained what they all seemed ignorant of. “You guys don’t get it. This is The Council we’re talking about. They can do whatever they want, and they’re a hundred times more evil than anything you’ve heard… Now, I’m all for fighting back, but let’s be sensible about this.”

  “Is Granne in on it?” Tibbs asked.

  I shook my head and told him, “Nobody knows. If we play this smart, we should start by evacuating the city.”

  “Evacuate the city? The entire city?” Fritzi scoffed, eyebrows disappearing under her bangs.

  “I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it’s possible,” I said. “Look, more and more Grey Men are going show up over the next few days. We need to get everyone out and head south as fast as we can.”

  Fritzi switched from baffled to bitter. She stepped closer and looked me up and down like she didn’t even know what to make of me anymore. “You are seriously suggesting we run away? Give up on the city we all grew up in?” she asked, jutting her chin out.

  “It’s better than fighting back,” I insisted.

  Fritzi dropped her voice. “It’s cowardly.”

  “Yes, but if that’s what it takes to save thousands of lives, then let’s be cowards.”

  Fritzi went silent, but held my stare. I didn’t look away. Next to Val, Fritzi was the biggest force in the house to be reckoned with. We were all in this together, though, and she needed to know that just because I came across as heartless, it didn’t mean I didn’t care.

  The crease of her brow softened. She nodded, eyes still on mine as she said, “All right… If that’s what it takes.” Resentful as they were, Fritzi’s words carried with them a strange air of respect, which almost coaxed a smile out of me.

  “I’m not leaving,” Gemma spoke up. “This is my home, and I’m going to keep it safe! Even if it means I have to take on The Council myself, I am not leaving!”

  Tibbs stood next to her, clapping her on the shoulder as he said, “You won’t have to take ‘em on by yourself, Gemma. I’m staying, too. Seattle might not be paradise or anything, but it’s my city, and nobody’s gonna destroy it on my watch.”

  “Well, what about those who don’t want to fight? What if we gave people an option? Like, if we told them what was going on, and they could either help us fight o
r we could help them get out of the city,” Anya suggested.

  Everyone jumped in with their own ideas after that, shouting and screaming over each other. The noise was just reaching the point of unbearable when Val stepped out of my grip and whistled to regain control. “All right, let’s settle this now, so we can start making a plan. Show of hands. Who’s for total evacuation and relocation?”

  I raised my hand. Finn’s hand crept up. Benji raised his a fraction, too, then played it off as reaching to scratch his chin.

  “Who’s for partial evacuation and partial enlistment?”

  Every other hand shot up, Val’s included. They wouldn’t leave quietly. I’d hardly expected them to, but I’d held onto a bit of delusional hope until the end. Val looked over at me wearing a small “I told you so” smirk. He might have been pleased with his friends siding with him, but I couldn’t have felt worse about it.

  Pioneer Square—Seattle, WA

  Friday, November 20th, 2076—6:13 p.m.

  eated along the ledge of the statue of former Senator Murray, I studied the small crowd that gathered to listen to Val announce the fall. It was our seventh rally of the day, and I was amazed by the fact that nobody had questioned the words out of his mouth; they trusted him completely. Val and his friends had a better reputation with the city than I thought.

  Suddenly, gunfire rang through the square. I grabbed Val’s wrist and yanked him off the ledge. We fled through the screaming crowd, hand-in-hand, keeping our heads low while Grey Men struggled to maintain order in the only way they knew how. This was the seventh time we’d started a rally today, and the fourth time they’d shown up to snub it out. Even though we were doing everything we could to keep things low-key, somehow they still managed to find us.

  With a dozen pairs of revolutionaries throughout the underground, coordinating evacuations and spreading the word that the city was coming down, it was safe to assume the Grey Men had their hands full. It was also safe to assume that by the end of the day, everyone in city would know the truth.

  “Here! In here!” Val pulled me after him into an alley off the road. It was a tight fit, nothing a Grey Man would be able to squeeze into, and we had to continue single file.

  “Let’s go back to the house,” I suggested. “Word’s out now, so let’s lie low for a while.”

  “What? No, let’s keep going.”

  I sighed. Val misinterpreted the noise as one of exhaustion rather than frustration. He stopped running and turned around. Between shouting at rallies and running for our lives, he was short of breath.

  “Are you tired?” he asked. “Is it your wound?”

  My body did have a dull ache to it, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. “No, I just know Grey Men. They’re dumb, but they’re going to start recognizing us if we keep going nonstop like this.”

  Val didn’t want to stop. He wanted to rap on every door in Seattle and warn the people who lived there. The problem was, if we wanted to live long enough to make a real difference in a city swarming with Grey Men, we had to be careful.

  “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” He coughed and slumped against the wall to catch his breath. I could hear a faint rasping in his throat every time he inhaled and suspected he was losing his voice.

  Val brought an unlit cigarette to his lips when a particularly violent coughing fit took hold. I patted him on the back until he calmed. Undeterred, Val put the cigarette between his lips and pulled his lighter from his pocket. I snatched the lighter out of his hands. Val tried to grab it from me, but I held it out of his reach.

  “Give it back,” Val said, the cigarette falling to the ground as he struggled.

  “You almost coughed out your lungs, and now you want to light up? I don’t think so.”

  “Nik, come on! Give it!”

  “Nope.”

  Val jumped at me and latched his arms around my neck. He toppled me into the brick wall, still holding tight as his lips pressed to mine. I kept the lighter behind my back with one hand and wrapped the other around his waist. In one quick movement, I turned him around and pinned him against the wall.

  Val laughed against my lips. His hands grabbed at the back of my shirt as they tried to snag the lighter just out of his reach. He leaned away a little, breaking the kiss and wearing a look which warned me he was up to no good.

  “How about a deal?”

  “A deal?” I asked.

  “You tell me what you do, what you really do, and I promise to quit smoking.”

  From the way he grinned, I knew he expected me to hand over the lighter. I was about to, but at the last second, I reconsidered. Val was going to find out about my involvement with the Y.I.D. eventually. It was better if he heard it from me than from someone else, so maybe it would be good to get it out of the way now.

  “Okay. Hand ‘em over first,” I said.

  Val’s grin vanished. I lifted the hand that held the lighter, palm open so he could snatch it back if he wanted to. Val stared for a second, probably waiting for me to laugh and tell him I was kidding. When he realized I was being serious, he reached a hand inside his jacket and pulled out the packet of cigarettes. He pushed it into my open hand, and my fingers closed around it.

  The packet felt much heavier than it was. It was more than a flimsy cardboard box filled with cigarettes; it was a surrender. Val was willing to give up his addiction, but only if I met him halfway.

  I wanted to tell him the truth; I really did. And for a second, I thought I was ready to. I wasn’t, though. My mind put together worst-case scenarios I couldn’t handle—Val being furious, calling me a lying bastard and declaring his hatred for me; things which would end bad for one of us if he pulled a gun on me. I’d tell him when the time was right.

  Soon, I told myself as I opened my hand back up.

  The message was as obvious as Val’s disappointment. He frowned, arms dropping from my shoulders. Without a word, he took the items from my hand, and the silence itself was worse than anything he could have said. I watched as he put a cigarette between his lips and lit it mere inches from my face.

  “I’m sorry.” I sighed.

  Val shrugged and took a step back so the arm I had around his waist fell. He took a long drag from his cigarette, held it in his lungs for a moment, then exhaled skyward. “It’s fine. I just think it’s funny you ask me to trust you, yet you won’t do me the courtesy of trusting me back.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “I trust you, Val. It’s just not easy to say.”

  “See? You keep saying things like that, but do you wanna know something? I’ve run through all the horrible occupations out there—even the really, really nasty ones—and I don’t think there’s anything that could change my mind about you.”

  I wished I was one of those things he imagined. Anything would be better than being the government’s dog, sent to spy on him and his friends. I was a hundred times worse than Tristan, and I knew how much Val hated him. He’d hate me too if I wasn’t careful about how I told him.

  Val took another pull from his cigarette. I watched the smoke circle over his head, feeling like a jerk. I wanted to say something to smooth the situation. I wanted to go back to when I’d pinned him to the bricks, caught up in a kiss sweet enough to make me forget about the life I’d left behind.

  “Let’s get back to base and see how the others are doing,” Val said.

  Translation: Conversation over.

  We made it most of the way home without so much as a sidelong glance at each other. As we were crossing the bridge, though, a pair of Grey Men stepped out from behind a building. They pointed right at us, shouting for backup and raising their weapons. I grabbed Val’s hand, and we bolted the rest of the way across the bridge. Down a residential side street and through a schoolyard full of children, we reemerged behind a distillery. No Grey Men in sight. Val continued to hold my hand long after we were safe. I didn’t mention it.

  By the time we reached Second Avenue, we still hadn’t exchanged a single
word. The occasional graze of a thumb or squeeze from the hand still in mine assured me that, despite the silence, everything was okay.

  Gemma was sitting on the porch and greeted us with a cheery, “Hiya boys!”

  “Hey. How’d it go uptown?” I asked. Val let go of my hand and went inside, already dialing a number on his phone. I tried not to think about what the silence between us meant.

  “Good,” Gemma said. “Fritz and I made our rounds with the families and then swung by a couple of mills up that way to talk to the workers. We got like fifty big guys to agree to help us fight. What about you two?”

  “Held a few rallies in the denser population areas. Grey Men kept stopping by to break things up, though, so it looks like low-key isn’t going to play out well.” I shrugged.

  “Boo.” Gemma sighed and put her hands behind her head. A second later, her eyes flashed with renewed spirit. “Oh! Guess what? Benji coordinated the first evacuation for tonight. The engineers over at the station are being super awesome about working with us, he says.”

  “That’s great. Wow, it’s nice to hear some good news for a change.” I chuckled.

  Gemma laughed, nodding in agreement. She opened her mouth to say something when Val suddenly began cursing. We rushed into the house, veering into the parlor, right as Val dropped to the sofa. One hand held the phone to his ear while the other tugged at a fistful of hair.

  I ran to his side and sat on the edge of the coffee table in front of him. He flicked his eyes up at me then straight back to the floor. Gemma sprung onto the sofa next to him, running a hand up and down his back as she mouthed the question: “What’s wrong?”

  Val ignored us, eyes still downcast as he spoke to the person on the other end of the line. “This is… Christ, God damn it! Are you absolutely sure? … Okay. Okay, stop crying. Just… Just come over here. We’ll figure it out, so please stop crying… I’ll see you soon. Be careful.”

  He hung up and dropped the phone on the sofa, his newly-freed hand tugging at his hair like the other. Gemma continued to rub his back. She looked up at me, shaking her head to warn me she didn’t know what to do. I leaned forward and rested a hand on Val’s knee.