Human++

by Dima Zales

  Joe takes out his knife and repeatedly stabs Anton in the chest.

  The blood coming out of Anton’s mouth garbles his wails and sprays the room like gruesome fire sprinklers as he collapses to the floor.

  Holding in a surge of bile, I check the video view to see if I should shoot Gogi’s opponent, but Gogi is already getting up, having won the fight.

  Something pulls on my waistband from behind, and with a sinking feeling, I realize my father just snatched the guard’s gun I stuck there earlier.

  A shot rings out, and I expect to feel a blast of pain. Instead, I see Gogi grab his left upper arm.

  I spin around to deal with my father, but my mom is already kicking him in the temple. Felix reels back, his head snapping to the side.

  As someone who’s played soccer with her, I know her kick is freakishly strong.

  Felix looks too dazed to shoot again, but I club him on the nose with the butt of my gun for good measure, and I’m rewarded with the crunch of his nose breaking.

  My father goes limp underneath me, finally losing consciousness.

  I take away the gun he stole and slide the magazine out, mentally noting to do this earlier in the future—if the future involves the type of events we’ve experienced today, that is.

  Gogi offers me his uninjured hand, and I let him help me up.

  Though my legs are wobbly, I manage to stand straight.

  “Mishen’ka.” Mom rushes to me, and Gogi moves out of her way.

  I’m caught in a huge mama-bear hug that instantly makes me feel better. In the next moment, however, she begins sobbing, and my fleeting comfort evaporates, replaced by that feeling I’ve known since I was a little kid—the despair of having to hear my mother cry.

  “We have to get out of here,” I tell her forcefully in Russian, pulling back. “Can you run?”

  “I think I can,” Mom says between hiccups and sobs. Her round face is blotchy, and she looks dazed. “I can’t believe you’re here, in Russia. And Joseph. Please tell me my brother isn’t here—”

  “Uncle Abe is in New York,” I answer as I grab Mom by her elbow and unceremoniously usher her to the door. It looks like stress sharpened her memory, or at least her awareness of her surroundings.

  “Take her outside,” Joe tells me. “Gogi and I will go through the window.”

  As I field Mom’s panicked questions, I lead her out of the room toward the stairs.

  In the camera view, I watch as Joe walks over to Nadejda’s body, kneels, and checks her pulse.

  Gogi, who’s in the process of bandaging his arm with his ripped sleeve, approaches them and looks solemnly at Joe. My cousin shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. Gogi’s shoulders droop, and while Joe’s bloodied face is an emotionless mask again, I swear I see sorrow somewhere deep in his icy-blue eyes.

  My grief hits me then. I try not to show it since I don’t want to burden Mom. Even though I didn’t know Nadejda very long, I somehow became fond of the big woman. It just doesn’t seem right that such a courageous, tough-as-nails person is dead, that she died saving my cousin.

  Joe jumps to his feet, walks up to Anton, and rips out the knife he left in the man’s chest with a violent jerk. I mentally zoom in the camera view, trying not to trip on the stairs as I lead my mom down.

  Joe approaches Ivan, the guard, and stabs the knocked-out man in the heart.

  A moment later, he’s looming over Felix’s unconscious form.

  “Wait, Joe, don’t,” I mentally text my cousin.

  He bends over.

  “Please, Joe, stop,” I whisper into the earpiece. “He’s—”

  Joe either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t care. His knife cuts into my father’s neck on the left and slides all the way to his right ear. A pool of blood forms on the floor.

  I’m on the verge of losing the contents of my stomach again, but for Mom’s sake, I breathe in deep, fighting the nausea. My father, whom I just met, is dead, and I have no idea how to process that. What should I feel for a man who shared half of my genes yet was capable of such evil? How should I view a stranger who did such horrible things? The cocktail of emotions boiling in my chest is overwhelming, but I know whatever I’m feeling is just the tip of an enormous iceberg I’ll have to confront at some point, Titanic style.

  “What about Joe?” Mom asks, looking confused. Unlike me, she didn’t watch the murder on the camera. “What did you not want him to do?”

  “Nothing, Mom,” I force myself to say as we clear the turn in the staircase. Swallowing the acid rising in my throat, I lie, “I was asking him if I could sit next to you in the car.”

  “Of course you’re sitting next to me,” Mom says, frowning. “Why would he mind?”

  “Safety,” I say as we get to the first floor and head for the exit. “But don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”

  Through Gogi’s camera, I see him slide down the rope like a fireman and run for the second car while Joe gets behind the wheel of the minibus.

  My jaw drops as I watch Gogi take explosives out of one of the bags he’s had with him since the HALO jump. I mistakenly thought all the explosives were in Muhomor’s possession, but it seems like Gogi kept some for himself.

  I belatedly shudder at what we risked during the jump. If Gogi’s parachute hadn’t opened, our deaths would’ve been violent on a much larger scale than I thought.

  When Mom and I are halfway through the first floor, Gogi sets up the explosives around the doomed car, shoulders the bag with the leftover explosives, and puts the car into neutral. He then exits the car and pushes it closer to the facility wall.

  Making sure his guns are on him, he runs for the minibus.

  As Mom and I approach the building exit, Gogi jumps into the car, and I glimpse the rest of the terrified hostages already inside.

  “Mr. Shafer came through,” I mentally type into the chat.

  Before my friends can respond, gunshots ring out outside.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  “Stay behind me,” I tell Mom in a hopefully commanding voice.

  Mom listens, proving this ordeal must’ve had an impact on her usual “eggs don’t teach the chicken” philosophy. Normally, she never would’ve let me risk my life on her behalf—not that we’ve ever been in a situation like this before.

  I open the door a sliver to see where the shots are coming from. Two guards are running toward us from the east.

  Fortunately, they’re shooting at something that isn’t me.

  I raise the Glock and aim the assist line at the rightmost man’s leg. Suddenly, the minibus crashes into my target, causing him and his buddy to fly in opposite directions and sparing me a bullet.

  The minibus violently turns in our direction, grass and dirt spraying from under its tires.

  I pull Mom through the exit.

  Joe stops the van, and Gogi opens the door.

  I help Mom inside, and she scoots toward the middle. I jump in after her and sit by the window, behind Joe.

  The hostages look shell-shocked, but they’re not screaming or panicking.

  Our tires spin in place, spitting grass; then we rocket forward.

  I hear shouting and engines revving somewhere nearby.

  The guards are almost here.

  “Muhomor, the plan has changed,” Gogi says into the earpiece. “I want you to blow half the distraction. Just make sure the exit point isn’t part of that.” At the same time, Gogi presses the detonator in his hands and carefully puts it into his bag.

  The ground, along with the minibus, shakes violently as the car next to the facility explodes.

  The view from the security camera in the room goes static and dies, so I dismiss that AROS window. I’m guessing about half the facility is now in ruins.

  About a dozen more explosions ring out in the distance, and Muhomor says, “That’s round one, as requested.”

  We were originally going to detonate the explosives all at once to create a distraction as we escaped the compound. Muh
omor and Lyuba snuck around and placed the explosives around the compound’s walls. Of course, in that original plan, we were supposed to be next to our exit point when the explosions went off. Now we can only hope the havoc this batch of bombs created is enough to minimize the number of guards about to swoop down on us.

  “I’m also trying to mess with their comms,” Muhomor says into our earpieces. “Oh, and you guys might appreciate this—it wasn’t part of the original plan, but I was able to improvise.”

  Loud alarms go off from every direction. Muhomor must’ve hacked into the alarm system. He’s clearly trying his hardest to make up for the lights debacle.

  “Keep this up, and Joe might not kill you after all,” I text him reassuringly, and he mutters a bunch of choice Russian curses into my earpiece in reply.

  The literal and figurative ear assault continues as we move from grass onto asphalt.

  A pair of confused guards shows up in our way. Joe’s hands tighten on the wheel, and he floors the gas pedal. The guards’ bodies thump against the front of the minibus, and I swallow thickly as we leave them broken behind us.

  As we approach an intersection, a Humvee, or its Russian equivalent, appears on the road perpendicular to us.

  Joe speeds up.

  The car does the same.

  The driver must be truly insane to play a game of chicken with Joe of all people.

  Joe grips the wheel firmly.

  The Humvee doesn’t slow down.

  In a chorus of voices, Gogi, my mom, and the rest of the study participants beg Joe to stop or turn or do something to avoid the inevitable crash.

  “Joe,” I scream over everyone, my voice going hoarse, “even if we T-bone him, which is the best case scenario in this madness, we’ll all break our bones or worse. We have older people in the car, including your aunt—”

  Without any sign that he heard us, Joe rolls the window down further, draws his gun, turns the wheel, and slams on the brakes.

  Maybe it’s a trick from the brain boost, but I suddenly understand Joe’s plan. In case I’m right, I take out my gun and prepare to assist him.

  Victim to the laws of physics, the minibus spins almost ninety degrees and skids to a stop parallel to the Humvee’s direction a few feet from the intersection.

  As the Humvee passes us, Joe sprays it with a torrent of bullets.

  Doing my part, I use the aiming app to shoot the Humvee’s front tire.

  In a fierce jerk, the Humvee veers off the road. Either Joe hit the driver, or I got the tire—or we both succeeded.

  When the big vehicle hits the bushes, it flips over and rolls into the ditch.

  Joe turns the wheel all the way to the left and floors the gas pedal.

  As we get back onto the road, I notice another car far behind us.

  Joe drives like a rabid maniac, and at last, I see the wall looming in the distance. Our target shouldn’t be far off.

  Mom gasps, and I follow her gaze. Several cars are blocking the road in front of us. We’ll never get through them.

  I guess Joe wasn’t planning on driving in a straight line anyway. With a sudden jerk that makes at least eight of our passengers squeal, the minibus veers off the road and heads straight for the part of the wall we originally planned to escape from.

  The wall grows bigger and bigger, the moonlight illuminating the rusty barbed wire across the very top.

  Driving on dirt is an art Joe hasn’t mastered. A big rock causes me to literally bite my tongue, and I taste blood for the umpteenth time today, while the miniature hill we drive over causes me to hit my head on the minibus roof.

  Only a dozen seconds pass before someone in the back throws up, and a sour smell permeates the air, which, combined with the sound of someone heaving, initiates a horrible chain reaction. It takes all my willpower not to join the puke circle, and I can tell by Mom’s green face that she’s in the same boat.

  The car that was behind us and a couple of swifter cars from the blockade aren’t just following us; they’re closing the distance. They must be better equipped for off-road driving than our piece of junk van.

  Our destination, the wall, gets ever closer, but it might as well be miles away, because someone starts firing at us from behind.

  Gogi opens his bomb bag and fiddles with something inside.

  The first bullet shatters the right-side mirror. The second hits the back window, and someone moans in pain.

  My heart skips a beat, but then I see my mom is unharmed. I feel a wave of relief mixed with a hint of guilt, partly because I’m glad for someone else’s misfortune, but also because of what I prophetically told Joe earlier—that the participants we saved could be used as a buffer if we got shot at.

  Gogi finishes whatever he was doing with the explosives. Rolling down his window, he throws the bag out.

  I block my ears, expecting to hear an explosion upon impact, but nothing happens when the bag hits the ground.

  Another bullet strikes the back window, but the screams that follow don’t sound like cries of pain.

  His hand clutching the detonator, Gogi looks intently behind us.

  “Phase Two, on my order,” he barks, his finger on his earpiece.

  “Got it,” Muhomor replies.

  Gogi’s jaw muscles tense.

  I look behind us and see our pursuers almost level with the bag.

  Unfortunately, we’re less than a minute from hitting the brick wall.

  “Now,” Gogi says and squeezes the detonator.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The bag explodes in a blinding flash of fire, and the pursuing cars blow up with it, metal shards and glass flying everywhere.

  At the same time, a sequence of explosions goes off in the distance.

  I look through the front window. The wall is so close and we’re driving so fast that I picture us turning into a human/car pancake.

  Suddenly, a chunk of wall in our way explodes in a fireball that makes the bag explosion look like a cheap Fourth of July firecracker.

  Once my vision clears, I see a jagged, charred gap where the wall once stood, and we fly through the blaze still covering the edges of the hole. The smell of smoke is acrid in my nostrils, and I feel the heat on my face.

  We speed up, and the open windows clear the stench of fire, as well as the nauseating fumes of stomach juices from the motion sickness disaster.

  Gulping in fresh air, I enjoy the breeze on my face as we drive in silence for a while. Even the wounded person stopped wailing.

  We’re probably all thinking of the same questions. Will they continue chasing after us now that we’re outside the compound? Did Gogi get all the cars? Was the commotion Muhomor created enough to throw them off our track?

  Holding my breath, I look back.

  Two bright lights hit my eyes, and my heart sinks.

  There’s at least one car behind us.

  “Wasn’t that awesome?” Muhomor says into all our earpieces. “If I had more explosives planted, I’d blow them up right now.”

  “I assume it’s you and Lyuba driving behind us,” Gogi says grumpily.

  “Of course it’s us,” Muhomor answers to my utter relief. “Who did you expect it to be?”

  As Gogi curses Muhomor in his native Georgian language, I hear a man in the back moan, “My shoulder… I’ve been shot. Oh God, I’m going to die…”

  I recognize the voice.

  “You’ll be fine, Mr. Shafer,” I reassure him. “Here.” I rip the sleeve off my shirt and pass it behind me. “Someone use that to bind his wound.”

  I use a mental search to learn as much as I can about impromptu bandages like this and walk Mrs. Stevens—Mr. Shafer’s closest seat neighbor—through the process of bandaging him as best I can.

  “No one is following us,” Muhomor says, precluding a question I was about to ask. “I’m looking through the cameras, and they’re running from one explosion site to another like ants in a squashed anthill.”

  “Good,” I text Muho
mor. “Mitya,” I mentally type into the chat. “Do the flight attendants have any first aid training?”

  “More than that,” Mitya replies with unusual seriousness. “Natalia is a registered nurse, and my plane has a fully stocked first aid kit. I already told her to prepare.”

  “Thank you,” I type. “I don’t know how I’ll ever pay you back.”

  “Brainocytes are a gift beyond my wildest dreams,” Mitya says with the same unusual seriousness. “Even after all this, I feel like I owe you guys.”

  “If all this madness is over, I think I’ll go change my pants,” Ada says. “That was some crazy driving, and the fighting before it—” Her voice breaks. “I thought you were a goner, Mike.”

  I’m in the process of coming up with something suitable to tell Ada, when Mom gently grabs my chin and tilts my head toward her. She says, “Okay, now that no one’s tried to kill us for a whole minute, you better tell me what happened to your face. You already had those horrible bruises when I first saw you today.”

  “Oh, I got those at the hospital,” I say in Russian, in part to make sure our conversation remains understandable only to Joe and Gogi. I proceed to tell Mom the whole story, minimizing the danger I was in when I can get away with it, and I don’t go into too much detail when it comes to some of Joe’s actions, since he’s listening and might not appreciate it. I particularly avoid telling her about my father’s fate. Thinking of him, I again feel that confusing mixture of emotions: sorrow, rage, bitterness, and resentment. How could my father—a man I only heard stories about—be behind all this?

  “Mom,” I say tentatively, realizing I have to ask some very unpleasant questions.

  She looks at me intently.

  Unsure how to proceed, I blurt out, “About Felix. He didn’t hurt you before this evening, did he? I mean, do you remember him doing anything—”

  “No.” Mom’s face simultaneously darkens and turns red. “I remember everything, and we just talked, or more like, he talked about himself the whole time.”

  “So you didn’t get—”

  “No,” Mom interrupts. “Felix is the same as he was all those years ago—an asshole, but not a monster when sober. It’s just that he drank vodka today, and he becomes an absolute fucktard as soon as any alcohol enters his system.”