“Where do we start?” Devon has managed to tear open one filing cabinet drawer. It’s stuffed with papers written in an illegible hand. She leafs through them. “There’s so much.”
I check my watch. The little box showing the date says the 13th. Four days counting today. Except we’ll need one to get back to England. Three. Well, three assuming Malcolm’s exit strategy doesn’t involve hiking the whole way, or wrestling down our own wild horses to ride back to civilization.
“We just start,” I say. “We have to. Pick a point and begin there.”
“Just at random?” Devon looks dubious.
I shrug. “I don’t see anywhere obvious to start.”
“You all so crazy.” Nikolai has found a lump of rebar from somewhere and is holding it defensively, like a club.
“Devon and Malcolm start going through files.” The plan forms in my mind while I speak it. “Aiko, Jasmine, Nikolai, and I will sweep the rest of the floor. Make sure there’s nothing weird here.
“Nothing?” Aiko looks dubious.
“Nothing weird and dangerous,” I modify.
Malcolm is nodding along.
“Once it’s clean we go down. Rinse and repeat. Once down is clear we go up.”
Three days. Three long laborious days. But no one questions me. I clap my hands. Back the way I did when I gave my team a pep talk back at the Oxford Police Station. “Come on people, let’s get to work.”
With darkness falling
We settle in for the night in a room nestled in α-1. It’s large, high-ceilinged. Rusty hulks of degraded electronics outline broad corridors. It reminds me of some post-apocalyptic NASA control room. The floor slopes down to a waterline—a nearby stream was redirected at some point and now flows through the building. It tumbles through the ceiling in a small waterfall. We can hear the sounds of it gurgling down into the deeper basement levels a few rooms away.
Malcolm made a campfire of sorts. There’s enough food in our remaining luggage to pull together a rudimentary meal.
Devon is perusing a foot-high stack of folders we lugged up from the next floor down, β-2. “A little light reading,” she called it. “Time flies when your nose is pressed hard into some profoundly trippy Russian magico-scientific texts.”
Nikolai is still nursing his piece of rebar. “You people all so crazy. Reading files. Talking time travel. What make you…” He looks to the dimness of the ceiling searching for the right English phrase. “…so sick in head?”
Aiko laughs. I join in.
Devon looks up from her folders. “Ex-boyfriend,” she tells Nikolai. Then she looks at the rest of us. “I dare any of you to come up with a worse reason than that.”
“I here because of you,” Nikolai counters.
Devon contemplates that. “OK,” she nods. “You win.”
Aiko, who’s been trying to make a bed out of clothing from the suitcases, finally lies back and says, “I think the government term for it was a low-level zombie event.”
I lift my eyebrows. Zombies have never come up before. She’s not looking at us, toying with her hair. “I was temping at a place. Apparently one guy had recently lost his wife. Tried to summon her ghost, or soul, or something. He had her corpse in his office closet. It was really fucked up. I don’t know what he was doing exactly. But it didn’t go right. I was in the office supplies closet. About the only person who didn’t lose their soul. It’s pretty hard to fend off zombies with office supplies.” She draws a breath that isn’t quite steady.
Jasmine shifts over closer to her, holds her hand.
Personally I am being colored impressed. Binder clips versus a hunger for human gray matter. Not exactly what I’d call fair.
“And they didn’t recruit you to MI37 after that?” I say.
Aiko shrugs. “The conspiracy theory thing. People judge.”
I shake my head. Despite everything, I still have a lot of love and respect for Felicity Shaw, but that was a very, very bad call.
Jasmine looks over at Malcolm. “Can I tell…?”
“No.” Malcolm shakes his head violently. He reaches into an inside pocket and pulls out a small brown vial of pills. He thumbs off the lid.
“I saw something I wasn’t meant to see,” Jasmine says cryptically. “I’d met Malcolm at AA.” My eyebrows give another bounce. Not even old enough to legally drink and she’s already a recovering alcoholic?
“Jasmine,” Malcolm barks. He is, apparently, not all about the sharing.
“I wasn’t there for me.” Jasmine misses Malcolm’s point with the practiced ease of a teenager. “Just moral support for a guy from the commune.”
Malcolm still glowers. I don’t think he was there to support someone else.
“And, hey,” Jasmine nods at Malcolm, “I just figured, like, Malcolm needed some support too.”
I glance over at Malcolm. He looks a little mollified. “But that wasn’t the start for you?” I prompt him.
“No,” he says, and it’s clear that’s about the most we’re going to get.
Nikolai has wandered away, down by the stream with a pile of discarded 3.5-inch floppy disks that he’s skipping over its gently burbling surface.
“But still,” he shakes his head, “I no understand. Why not turn, run like fuck? Why stay? Why still fight?”
I think about that one. It had seemed to make sense at the time. These days…
“It’s like you say, Nikolai,” Aiko says from her nest of sweaters and jeans, “we’re sick in the head.”
Nikolai shakes his head in disgust. “You people crazy. When I get new plane, I no fly with you no more. We leave here and I walk away. I like that, it very nice.”
God, I can’t help but laugh at that. I really can’t. In the heart of one of the greatest disasters in human history, in the heart of one of the greatest disasters in my personal life, and I’m bloody laughing. I think Nikolai was right about us.
Maybe Nikolai isn’t so bad.
Then the water starts to froth and boil.
“Vl—” Nikolai starts to say something, the first words I think I’ve heard him say in his mother tongue since I’ve met him. And I find I’m oddly curious to find out what they’ll be. Except I never will.
It is massive. It explodes out of the water in front of him. Something impossible. Something my mind tries to deny. A great coagulated blob of catfish. A thousand of them. A thousand mouths ballooning wide. Two thousand sopping mandarin mustaches, flicking him with spray.
It descends on him—a mass of scales and slime. It envelops him, cutting him off, burying that native word. And I don’t understand. I don’t understand what is happening here.
Nikolai is gone even as the event starts to register, as we start to move. There’s just a writhing mass of fish on the floor, retreating back into the water, shrinking down into the depths.
Malcolm grabs a gun off the floor, starts firing. I grab for my shoulder holster, but I’ve taken it off to sleep. The thing is never comfortable at the best of times. It’s lying on the floor next to me. I wrestle with straps and buckles, and then think, fuck it, and just fire through the bottom of the holster. But the fish has gone. It’s too late. Bullets kick up sharp plumes of spray in the water. But there is no blood. No returning of our guide.
“What the fuck? What the fuck?” Aiko has her hands in her hair, is on her feet, pacing towards the water, then retreating back. “What just happened?”
“Get him!” Jasmine yells. “Get him back!”
I stare at the dark water, the flickering reflection of the fire’s light. Black water. And how deep can it be? What else lurks there?
I get up, walk towards the water.
“Don’t.” Malcolm’s voice is definite. “Get away.”
“No!” Jasmine shouts. “No, he has to. One of you has to.”
“So we’re down two?” He stares at her without mercy. And he’s right. He knows he’s right. And when Jasmine knows too she starts to cry.
“Shit,” I s
ay. Plain and simple. “Shit.”
“Does it ever stop?” Devon’s voice is small in the large room. “Does it ever get better? I just think I could deal with this all a little better if I thought one day I won’t be terrified. If I thought one day we might win.”
And I know the answer to that. I know that a few days ago I felt like I saved the world. And now… I get to go another round with a different set of lunatics fresh to the fight.
But when are you OK with trying to stop bad things from happening to people?
So I lie. I stand in the center of a nuclear bomb blast crater and tell her soon everything will be OK. And then we pack like crazy, and we move to a room without water. And I lie down, and I close my eyes again. But I do not go to sleep. Not tonight.
FIFTY-FOUR
Pripyat, Ukraine. October 14th. Three days to go.
We say words for Nikolai in the morning. Malcolm leads. He has the whole “ashes to ashes” speech memorized. Which is a little morbid, I think, but this is basically a funeral so it doesn’t seem like the time to point that out.
Jasmine makes a cross from two pieces of scrap metal. “Like they’re from his plane,” she says. Personally I just hope he wasn’t Jewish, or Zoroastrian, or something.
Devon doesn’t say much. She stands at the back, and goes back to her files with a certain vengeance. We’ve uncovered what seems to be about half a forest’s worth of files and we can’t reasonably expect her to go through it all, so Jasmine joins her in the reading. Malcolm stands guard. They pick a room where the water hasn’t permeated and steer clear of the stack of chairs in the corner that is constantly spilling and then reconstructing itself.
Aiko and I head down the stairs and sweep β-2. The time anomalies seem to be getting fewer and further between as we go deeper down, but the increasing gloom counteracts any good feelings that inspires. It’s too easy to populate dark corners with the unfolding flesh of the imagination.
When we’re done, we head upstairs for lunch. Devon looks up from some files. She is gnawing on a strip of jerky. Malcolm seems to have packed a lot of jerky.
“These look like personnel files.” She flips around the folder she’s holding so we can see. The paper is spotted with dots of black mold, but a photo is clearly visible. She holds up another. Another picture. A middle-aged-looking man with a severe haircut and a military uniform. “All sorts of chappies and chappesses. Vladimirs, and Ivans, and Natashas. Charming names the Russians have. Like they all live in ice castles and snowy forests. Instead of horrible industrial poverty. Ah well.”
“Wait,” I say, because she wandered away from an important point there. “Personnel? Staff?”
“Seems like it,” she says. “This looks like dates of employment. Security clearance. Some sort of general description.” She points to spots on the page.
“So,” I smile, “if our boys and girl are from here, they’re in those files, correct?”
“Oh yes.” Devon grins. Then her face falls a little. “But didn’t that…” She considers her word choices. “Didn’t Tabitha,” she says the name as if it leaves a bad taste, “look back at KGB files?”
“How far did she look back?” I ask.
Devon’s face really lights up for the first time since we met Nikolai. “Only ten years,” she says. “That useless little tart!” The insult is uttered with absolute glee. “Oh, I cannot wait to…” Then she trails off. “Oh wait,” she says, “we quit.”
“Has a way of sneaking up on you, that, doesn’t it?” I keep on finding the fact around dark basement corners. Along with questions about what Felicity is doing, what she’s thinking, what her response to my leaving has been. Is she looking here? Does she know about the plane being shot down? Does she think we’re dead? Has she shed a tear?
“You keep harping on that,” Aiko says, “and I’m going to start taking offense.” The edge I’ve managed to avoid in the darkness is back in her voice. I do my best to ignore it.
“We should focus on these personnel files,” I say, wrestling the subject under control. “Find our Russians. Find out everything we can about them. Anything.”
“Already on it,” Devon says, opening folders and discarding them rapid-fire.
“You need my help?” I ask Devon.
She shakes her head. “If you don’t mind, it’d probably be better if you keep exploring. Well, when I say better, it’d be better for me. Because you can bring me the files instead of sending me down into creepsville to find them. I wonder if there is a Creepsville somewhere. Probably is in America. They have all sorts of silly names. Towns called Gavin and all sorts. I saw it on Google Maps once. Mind-blowing. But yes, if you could bring stuff to us, that’d be fabulous.”
Aiko is still eyeing me. “Trying to ditch me, Agent Arthur?” The edge is still there. I’m beginning to think it’s not just dark corners I have to fear.
Creepsville
Considering how much we lost in the plane crash, Malcolm’s packing must have been remarkably thorough. We had enough Maglites left over that both Aiko and I are wielding one, and there’s a spare one up on the ground floor. Malcolm even gave me spare batteries. He even gave me a fanny pack to carry them in.
Aiko is starting to make me wish he hadn’t.
“No,” she says, “it’s a good look on you. You should wear it more often.”
“It’s not a fashion statement. It’s practical.” This is the sort of defense my father would mount.
She nods. “It’s stating how practical you are.” She pauses. “Among other things.” She fails to stifle her smile.
“I am fully aware that it looks stupid.” I am not going to get flustered about this. I am not. That would help no one.
“I never said you look stupid.”
“Not explicitly, no.”
“You want me to be explicit?”
It is getting harder and harder for me to deny that this is flirting.
Not that there should be anything wrong with that. I threw my badge at Felicity. We’re done. Except every time I think about how much I’m enjoying the verbal sparring, I find myself thinking about Felicity cutting off parts of my anatomy I’d prefer stay attached.
There’s a free-spiritedness to Aiko that’s been absent from every other girl I’ve managed to date. They’ve tended to be serious, sensible women. Something about being a policeman seemed to scare off the girls less concerned about social norms.
But Aiko… well, she’s insane of course. She believes in Zurich-based finance gnomes, and assassination conspiracies, and television studios with sets of the moon built inside them. And she spends her weekends putting her life, and quite possibly the lives of others, in danger. It’s as if she’s in an actual fight with all that is sensible and smart.
And that’s tempting in a way that it’s never been before.
“We should focus,” I say, more to myself than to her, truth be told. “There could be very bad things down here.”
“You mean aside from your fanny pack.”
“I’m beginning to think,” I say, mounting what defense I can. “That you’re just jealous. All this obsessing over the fanny pack. You just wish Malcolm gave it to you.”
She tries to stifle a laugh and fails. It’s an infectious sound.
We are standing, I realize, closer than the width of the corridor or the pool of light cast by our flashlights really requires. I flick my eyes down at her hand, and hope she doesn’t notice. It is very close to mine.
I swallow several times. Felicity flashes through my mind again. Her hands. And what would they do if I took other hands? Do I even want to take someone else’s hands?
I…
I step away from Aiko, maybe more quickly than is necessary. I push on a door handle.
“Let’s try this one.” I know I sound flustered even though I’m trying not to.
“What’s the matter?” Aiko asks. I can still hear the smile in her voice. “Worried I’m going to try and grab that pack off you?”
<
br /> Her hand touches my shoulder as I open the door and take a sharp step into the room, sweep my flashlight in a swift arc around the room.
“Arthur?” Aiko’s hand is still in place.
“Holy…” I sweep the flashlight around the room a second time.
“Arthur?” The humor is draining out of Aiko’s voice.
“Do you see this?”
“You’re standing in my way.” The humor has gone now, but I’m paying far more attention to the room than I am to that.
I step further in. The closest analogue I can think of is Ogden Beauvielle’s storage room in the basement of the MI6 building. His collection of artifacts from the world’s secret history.
There are vases, and golden plates, and broken crates spilling straw and crockery. But there is more than simple riches. There are bell jars of fluid, mysterious anatomies floating in them, twisted things that don’t seem entirely like plants but can’t be described as anything else. There are half-unfurled maps of continents I don’t recognize. There is a row of tiny shrunken heads, all grinning at me.
“Holy…” Aiko echoes me. Whatever was on the cusp of happening between us is gone now. And if I wasn’t so distracted I’d have to decide if I was happy or sad about that, but fortunately I can just let it slide.
We move slowly through the room, lifting the lids from crates, peering into narrow spaces on shelves, beneath dust-crusted tarpaulins. Each new discovery draws a gasp, an expletive. There is a stuffed frog as big as a recliner, a whole crate of jeweled skulls. And then hanging on one wall… I stop.
“Oh that’s cool.”
“What is it?” Aiko spins around, brings her flashlight’s beam to bear on the wall in front of me.
I pull the sword off the wall. The handle is wrapped in worn tan leather straps, a dirty bronze ball marking its end. The hilt is unremarkable and plain. The scabbard though—that is something else entirely.
Yesterday's Hero Page 24