The boat that awaited her would be patrolling the port, the pilot keeping an eye out for her. Unless he was waiting near the shore at exactly the place where she made her appearance though, there was no way she could hold off an entire pack while waiting for the boat to reach her. Time for plan B.
She veered to her right, sprinting through the town square. It was oddly named, she thought, because it was shaped more like half an oval, with one end enclosed by a circular wall with a drive cutting through the center. Here, throngs of people had once dined at the Polesie Restaurant, stayed in its companion hotel and milled through the Pripyat shopping center. Despite her dire circumstances, it still struck her as odd to consider that this ghost town had once teemed with life.
Up ahead, three oborots rounded the corner of the shopping center and came for her. Wondering how they had managed to get in front of her, Queen turned and dashed into Energetik, Pripyat’s so-called palace of culture. This place had once been the city’s center of community life, featuring concert and dance halls, a library, a gymnasium and a swimming pool. She sprinted through the bare hallways, the glow of the full moon through broken windows and holes in the walls providing scant light by which she navigated around and over the scattered books, tiles and debris that choked the floor. She stole a glance back to see the three creatures closing in on her, but the rest of the pack was not in sight. At least, not yet.
She turned a corner and dashed down the wide hallway. The oborots were closing fast. Soon she would be forced to make a fight of it. She could shed her backpack to gain a little more speed, but she needed what it held—and not just the remaining grenades—to make her getaway.
Up ahead, broken doors, hanging askew from twisted hinges welcomed her into a room lined all around with dingy, broken white tiles. The swimming pool lay directly in front of her, the shallow end giving way to a deep diving area on the far end. She circled the pool and sprinted alongside it, the oborots so close she could hear their every breath and the distinctive sound of their hairy footfalls on the hard tile floor.
She reached the far end of the pool, cut a sharp left, took two steps, and leaped. Her stomach turned somersaults as the floor fell out from underneath her. She reached out and grabbed the edge of the diving board. As her momentum swung her forward, the oborots flew past her, falling in a pile to the bottom of the empty diving pool. Queen hauled herself up onto the diving board, drew her pistol, and put a bullet into the skull of each of the writhing beasts.
Her shoulders sagged and she exhaled a long, ragged sigh, but her relief was short-lived. She heard the distant sounds of the pack of oborots and knew that somewhere in the depths of the palace of culture, the others were back on her trail.
She vaulted a rail on the far side of the room and exited through a gaping hole that had once been a plate glass window. She hit the ground in the midst of tangled undergrowth, broken glass and shattered tile. Looming above her, she could see the silhouette of her destination.
Nicknamed “Fujiyama,” the sixteen-story residential building was the tallest in Pripyat, and its presence was the key element of her backup plan. She dashed through the dense wooded area between the abandoned shopping center and the broken hull of the communications center, sprinted across the street and dashed up the steps of Fujiyama.
She paused at the top step and looked back. Her instinct for self-preservation told her to keep going, but she wanted to make sure the oborots followed her inside. She could not, if she could help it, leave this pack of beasts to potentially wreak havoc. Movement in the wooded area behind her told her they were coming. She fired off a shot in their direction to make sure they knew where she was, and then she dashed inside.
The interior was bare from years of looting, and she quickly found the stairs that would lead her up to the roof. She stopped at the doorway and waited for the oborots to appear. When the first one mounted the stairs, she fired off the last remaining shot in her clip and began her ascent.
By the time she reached the third floor landing, she wondered if she had made a mistake. Her legs burned and her breath came in gasps that echoed through the empty stairwell. She soldiered on, reminding herself of all the situations worse than this she’d come through, if not unscathed, then at least with life and limb intact. Over and over again, she picked her feet up and put them down, step after step flowing beneath her. The whole thing felt maddeningly like climbing up a down escalator. It was only the landings at each floor that proved to her that she was, indeed, making progress. She kept count, willing herself to keep moving.
Tenth floor…
Eleventh floor…
Twelfth floor…
As she mounted the steps at the thirteenth floor, the rotting wood gave way, and she went down hard. She could now hear the oborots clearly. They didn’t seem to be gaining as rapidly as she would have expected, and she wondered if they had run into their own share of crumbling stairs. All of them were bigger and probably much heavier than her, so perhaps the stairs that had been strong enough to support her weight had not borne the burden of a pack of oborots so well. Anything that slowed them down was fine with her.
The final haul was sheer agony, every step a supreme effort of will. She found herself grabbing onto the side rail to gain an extra boost. When she finally emerged on the roof, she had to fight off the urge to lie down and let the cool air wash over her.
Almost there, she told herself. One more leg, and then the race is run.
The door lay flat on the ground, so there was no hope of barring it and buying herself a little more time. She ran to the corner of the building, stripped off her pack, and dumped it out. What she needed now was at the bottom, and she hastily donned it before placing all the grenades in a row on the surface of the roof, stepped over the flimsy cable fence that ringed the top of Fujiyama, and turned back to face the doorway where the oborots would soon emerge. In the distance, the moonlight glistened on the surface of the sarcophagus that covered the Chernobyl reactor. In a different set of circumstances, she would find this place hauntingly beautiful, but now it was only a place of death to her.
When the oborots burst through the doorway, she started pulling pins and pitching grenades as fast as she could, careful to count down to the first detonation. The oborots did not spot her at first, but by the time she’d tossed the sixth grenade, an incendiary, they were coming for her. She pitched three more grenades, and as the first oborot leapt, she turned and hurled herself out into space.
The oborot shot past her, clawing the space she had occupied an instant before. The other oborots halted at the roof’s edge, looked at her in confusion, and then the world exploded.
Chapter 14
When she’d picked up her equipment from Deep Blue’s contact, Queen’s gut had told her to grab the wing suit, or “flying squirrel suit,” on the remote chance that she found her way to the harbor barred. At the time, she had imagined it would be Manifold agents barring her way, not a pack of werewolf-like lab experiments gone wrong, but it had been a good call.
She spread her arms and sailed through the night, feeling the pressure of the air on the ‘wings’ below her arms and the ‘tail’ between her legs as she flew. Down below, the burning building behind her cast the city in a gold-tinged orange glow.
The suit wouldn’t get her all the way to the harbor, but that didn’t matter. It had gotten her away from the oborots and rendered pursuit impossible. She hoped her deadly mix of fragmentation and incendiary grenades had managed to get rid of the entire pack. Maybe the human beings they had once been did not deserve such a fate, but they were beyond redemption. At least they were no longer a threat to her or anyone else.
In the distance, the moon danced on the waters of the harbor as she glided past the town square. She kept her eyes peeled for the boat that would meet her, though she knew it would be running without lights. She hoped the fire atop Fujiyama would serve as a beacon drawing the craft closer to her.
The cool rush of air on her face i
nvigorated her and renewed her sense of determination. She would report in to Deep Blue and then begin her search for Rook. And if Deep Blue had more orders for her, she’d use a Rookism and tell him to take a long walk on a short pier, though Rook would probably include a body part, rude gesture or something about farm animals.
As she neared the ground, she braced herself for a hard landing. Aiming for a thick stand of bushes, she released the parachute in her suit and felt the familiar yank as it slowed her descent. Her landing zone of choice softened the impact, but she still felt the jolt from toes to teeth. She crawled out of the brush to find herself in front of the Cinema Prometei, or the Prometheus Cinema. Years ago, a bronze statue of the Greek Titan had stood here until its removal in the late 1980’s. Stripping out of her wing suit, she took one last look back at the city. Fire still glowed at the top of Fujiyama, a fitting backdrop for thoughts of the Titan who stole fire from Zeus.
The sound of a distant engine drew her attention back to the harbor. The silhouette of a small fishing boat appeared in the moonlight. Seeing her, the pilot brought the craft close to shore, and she waded out to meet it, aiming her pistol at his forehead, just in case.
“Who are you?” she demanded in Russian.
“Vladimir… I mean,” the man cleared his throat, “I was told to say my name is Pawn.”
“Who told you to say that?” She kept her weapon trained on him. He was an old man, his leathery skin deeply lined. His callused hands trembled as he held them above his head.
His eyes said two fears were doing battle inside of him: fear of Queen, and fear of what might happen to him if he answered her question truthfully. “You know I cannot tell you that.”
“Good enough. Just don’t try anything stupid and we’ll be all right.” She accepted his proffered hand, noting his strong grip, and let him haul her into the boat.
“Here are the things you asked for.” He tossed her a canvas bag. Inside she found a change of clothes, along with boots, belt, another Mark 23 and holster, a knife and sheath, a bottle of water and some jerky.
“All right, Pawn, get us out of here, and no peeking while I change. I’ve gelded bigger men than you.” She slid her KA-BAR from its sheath and stabbed it into the rail where she sat. The man gaped at it, and nodded his agreement. Queen grinned inwardly. She was not particularly modest, but she saw no harm in putting the fear of God, or rather, the fear of Queen, in his heart.
She stripped out of her clothing and tossed everything she’d worn into the water. The KA-BAR and Mark 23 she had used in the city followed. Spending a few hours in Pripyat would not expose one to a lethal dose of radiation, but prolonged exposure to contaminants that were stuck to clothing or weaponry was more dangerous.
When she was once again clothed, she sat staring out at the night sky as Vladimir guided their craft out into the Pripyat River. The first hint of dawn was on the horizon, and she picked up a photograph of a big man with intense blue eyes, dirty blonde hair, a long goatee and a mischievous smile. She’d held on to the picture when she ditched her clothes. She had brought it to show people as she conducted her search. At least, that’s what she told herself. Now that she’d carried it into Pripyat, though, she’d have to toss it—after one last look.
“Is he a friend of yours?” Vladimir’s voice interrupted her thoughts, and she turned angry eyes upon him. “I do not mean to intrude. I was just surprised because I saw that man not long ago.”
In a flash, she had him by the collar and pulled him down so that they stood nose-to-nose. “What did you say?” She enunciated each word.
“I saw that man not long ago.” Vladimir hurried on with his explanation. “I was visiting some old friends, men I served with in the Military Maritime Fleet, and I saw him talking to a ship captain.”
“You are sure you saw this man?” Queen thrust the picture in his face. “If you are the least bit uncertain, tell me now.”
Vladimir took the picture in unsteady hands and stared at it for the span of five heartbeats before he nodded. He looked her square in the eye, his body trembling but his voice steady. “It was the same man. I am certain.” Queen arched an eyebrow. “You do not forget a man like this. He is not, how do you say, a common specimen.”
Queen snatched the picture away from him and tucked it into her pocket. She wanted desperately to believe Vladimir, but what if it was a mistake or a lie? “How is it that you overheard their conversation? My friend is very private about his business.”
A moment of suspicion cross the sailor’s face, but a quick reassessment of the situation told him he better tell Queen what he knew. “My friends work at the docks. I was wandering, waiting for them to finish some business. Your friend was speaking to a the captain, who I recognized as a competitor of my friends. Information can be a valuable commodity, one my friends sometimes pay for, so I wandered closer, hoping to overhear their conversation.” He shrugged. “I managed to hear only a little bit before I sensed your friend watching me and decided to slip away.”
“Tell me everything you heard.” Queen’s heart was racing. Finally, after the events of this horrific night, things just might be turning in her favor. Nothing like a little dumb luck. Vladimir told her all he could recall. It was not much. An injured Rook had been rescued and tended to by the sister of the sailor from whom he sought passage out of Russia. But Vladimir didn’t know where they went.
“Tell you what, Vladimir, if your lead pans out, I’ll see to it that you’re rewarded. Now, tell me who this captain is and where I can find him.”
The man’s features relaxed. Clearly he had feared her reaction should she not believe him. “In Severodvinsk, in Russia. The ship is the Songbird, and the sailor’s name is Maksim Dashkov.”
Smiling a genuine smile for the first time in…she didn’t know how long, Queen stretched out in the bottom of the boat and breathed deeply of the cool morning air. Exhausted as she was from her ordeal, her mind was racing. She was going to find Rook. She knew it.
Epilogue
Darius rolled over and groaned. He put his hand to the side of his head and felt a ragged hole where his ear had been. He snatched his hand away, his fingers coming back bloody.
“Who the hell does that bitch think she is? Mike Tyson?” The words came out in wheezy rasp, and he rubbed his aching throat. She had almost been the death of him. He wondered why she had not taken the time to kill him. That was a big mistake on her part.
He hauled himself to his feet, feeling every bump and bruise he had sustained during the fight with the little, blonde Tasmanian devil. His eyes burned from the smoke and dust that hung in the air. He rubbed them with the back of his arm, but that only made it worse.
He took a deep breath and gagged on the acrid smoke that hung in the air. He would make an inspection, but he already knew what he’d find.
Five minutes later he was climbing out the emergency exit, his head wrapped in a blood-soaked bandage. He carried nothing with him. The girl had done a number on his facility, blowing up or burning all the offices and the laboratory. Nothing remained that was worth saving. He’d found all the holding pens empty, their doors wide open. He wondered why she had released them, and hoped they’d torn her to bits for her trouble.
Outside, dawn was breaking. Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance, warning him that his time was short. He turned to make for the river when a bright light caught his eye. He looked up to see that Fujiyama was on fire. He couldn’t begin to fathom how or why she had done that.
He took off at a steady run, each step sending jolts of pain through his battered body. While he occasionally entertained thoughts of avenging his defeat at the hands of that…woman, she had unknowingly given him the keys to the magic kingdom. If Richard Ridley was dead, the throne could be claimed by its rightful heir, and there was only one man on the planet who could make such a claim:
Darius Ridley.
###
From the Authors
We hope you enjoyed reading Callsign:
Queen as much as we enjoyed writing it. Pripyat is a real and fascinating place, and the locations about which we have written are real. We did make one change for the sake of the story—Fujiyama is not located next to the town square. It’s actually located on the western edge of town, and a different, not so well-known building stands in the spot where we’ve placed Fujiyama. Fujiyama is a well-known site in Pripyat and it would have been a shame to leave it out. Thanks for reading!
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JEREMY ROBINSON is the author of eleven novels including PULSE, INSTINCT, and THRESHOLD the first three books in his exciting Jack Sigler series. His novels have been translated into nine languages. He is also the director of New Hampshire AuthorFest, a non-profit organization promoting literacy. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and three children.
Click here for a sample of Robinson’s novel, THE LAST HUNTER
Visit him on the web, here: www.jeremyrobinsononline.com
DAVID WOOD was corrupted early in life by Indiana Jones movies and pulp adventure novels. He is a fan of all things historical, archaeological, mythological, and cryptozoological, and his writing blends all of these passions. When it's vacation time, he passes on the exotic locales, preferring ruins, caves, Indian mounds, mountains, and sites of historical interest. David is the author of the Dane Maddock Adventures series, the historical adventure Into the Woods, and the young adult thriller The Zombie-Driven Life. Writing as David Debord, he is the author of the Absent Gods fantasy series. When not writing, David co-hosts ThrillerCast, a podcast dedicated to books and writing in the thriller genre.
Callsign: Queen - Book I (A Zelda Baker - Chess Team Novella) Page 9