Red Equinox

by James Axler

  "One of the things I guess you don't know about me is my college career. I majored in electrophysics, specializing in circuit miniaturization and genetic computer coding."

  "And?" Krysty prompted.

  "And I took a minor in Russian. Did some basic lan­guage and a bit of history. Nothing too deep. Enough to be able to ask the way to the American Embassy and kind of skating over Ivan the Terrible and Rasputin. I guess I've forgotten most of it. But when Doc mentioned that name, Peredelkino…"

  "Something to do with Stalin, was it not?" the old man asked.

  "Right on, Doc. Twenty miles southwest of Moscow it­self. Originally it was some kind of commune for the ac­ceptable writers and artists who toed the Stalinist line. Collection of very nice dachas, set among woods and lakes. Rural idyll. Kind of a pat on the back for being a good guy. Or a good gal."

  "A dacha's a kind of house, like this?" Ryan asked.

  "Yes, yes, of course!" Doc exclaimed, rapping on the worn boards with the ferrule of his swordstick. "During glasnost, was it not? A gesture of brotherly affection from Mother Russia to Uncle Sam. We were given our very own dacha."

  "And this is it," Ryan concluded.

  "Well, I guess it could be. But to believe that the gate­way could possibly have survived in working order for a hundred years! It's bullshit! Come on guys, come on!" Rick leaned his hand against the dull plaster of the wall and shook his head sadly.

  "J.B.? You sure about the reading? If we're stuck in Russia and the gateway's fucked for us to get out, then we're in the deepest shit."

  The Armorer rubbed his hands together, eyes invisible behind his glasses. He looked away from Ryan, along the shadowed corridor, hesitating before he replied. "No way around it. Machine can't lie, Ryan. Even friends can, but not a machine. What Doc and the freezie said makes a kind of sense. That stair was real well hid. After the nukes dropped over here, there can't have been many of the Commies eager to search out anything that well concealed. No, I guess this old house could once have been a little part of America."

  It was an uncharacteristically long speech for J. B. Dix.

  "Food," Jak said. "Fucking hungry. This place dust-dead."

  It didn't look all that promising.

  The house had no furniture, no carpets, no drapes to cover the broken windows. The floorboards were warped and cracked, and fine dust hung in the cold morning air, dancing in the bright spears of sunlight. On either side of the passage, doors opened onto totally empty rooms. In fact, most of the doors were actually missing.

  "Surprised the whole place hasn't been burned down," Krysty said, walking cautiously into one of the rooms.

  "Look." Ryan pointed up to a corner where a small metal bracket remained. "Sec vids were there. Seen them in the corridor."

  "In here," Doc called.

  "What?" Ryan replied, following the sound of the old man's voice. He found him in another room, looking at a faded drawing on one of the walls. It was a sketch of some balloons, held in the white, gloved hand of a circus clown. Beneath it was a line of neat lettering: Hi, from your friend Penny wise.

  All six of the group stood and looked silently at this cryptic message from the long-dead past. Ryan broke the stillness.

  "Anyone understand it?"

  Nobody replied.

  Doc coughed. "Private joke of some sort, I guess."

  "Rick?" Ryan asked.

  "Pennywise the clown? Sorry, brothers and sister. No. Doesn't mean a thing."

  "Let's go down," Jak suggested, leading the way out of the ravaged room, along the corridor, to the top of the main staircase that led down to the first floor of the house.

  THE DEVASTATION WAS at its worst at ground level. Every door and window had been smashed, and a cold wind blew in from every direction. Fine snow was piled softly in the corners, drifted in. The floorboards were largely rotted, making walking dangerous. Ceilings had fallen, and the walls bore the marks of sledgehammers and the dark scars of fires. It was amazing that the structure was standing.

  "There's not going to be any food at all around here, lover," Krysty said quietly.

  Ryan nodded. "I know it."

  "So?"

  "So we'll have to go out and find us some. If this is Russia, and not the Shens in a cold-out, then we have to get the gateway working."

  The woman glanced behind them at the man leaning heavily on his walking cane. His face was pale, his eyes sunk cavernously dark.

  "You mean Rick has to get it working?"

  "Yeah. Not going to be easy. Then again, lover, nobody ever said it would be easy."

  THERE WERE DAUBS of heavy, tarlike black paint in the largest room at the front of the house, strange signs that were like recognizable letters, yet oddly different. They partly covered another piece of graffiti, which was diffi­cult to read in the gloom.

  "Shall I open the doors?" Rick asked, moving un­steadily into the wide, echoing hall.

  "Careful," Ryan warned. "When we were up on the roof anyone could've seen us from miles off."

  J.B. coughed. "We have to make a fast decision, Ryan. No food here. Mebbe a ville near. But if the Russkies know we're Americans…" He allowed the sentence to drift away into the bitterly cold silence.

  Ryan sniffed. "Yeah, but the gateway's well fucked. Gotta look around some. We don't find anything in a day's march, then we have a problem. Keep looking and mebbe starve. Come on back here to the gateway…"

  "And mebbe starve," Krysty concluded quietly.

  "My view, for what little it may be worth, is that we should hazard a trip into the great outdoors," Doc said. "Better to try and fail than not to try at all."

  "Nobody this side," Jak reported from near the broken windows on the eastern flank of the large room. "Just lotta snow."

  Doc was still trying to read the daubed-over lettering. "I just can't make it out. It's so fearfully faded."

  "I'll open this door," Rick called, heaving at the han­dle. He put his frail weight against the rusted hinges, mak­ing them squeal angrily in protest. But the door opened, letting in a dazzling shaft of morning light.

  "Uncle Vanya Sucks!" Krysty read.

  "What's it mean?" J.B. asked. "Sounds like a Russkie name."

  "My memory is not what it was, but I believe it was the nickname for the Communist leader Stalin," Doc offered.

  Rick laughed. "No, it's a play. Chekhov. It's the name of—"

  The bullet smashed into the door beside Rick Ginsberg, and he toppled into the hall, flat on his back.

  Chapter Six

  "I TRUST that the behavior of my manservant has not inconvenienced you unduly."

  The man shook his head and whistled through his teeth. It made damnably little sense to him. He kept his thumb on the page and slowly read the phrase out again.

  "I trust that the behavior of my manservant has not inconvenienced you unduly."

  He closed the book and laid it on the scarred top of his desk. The cover was torn, but the title could still be read: The English Tongue for the Benefit of the Russian Gentleman Abroad.

  It would have been nice if he could have found a phrase book that had been published a little nearer to the time that was called, in his country, "the long grayness." In the frontispiece was the date 1911. That was almost two hundred years ago, but it was still better than nothing.

  He heard someone walking along the corridor outside his office and he quickly slid the frail book into the center drawer of his desk and locked it. Though he could prob­ably have formulated a defense for possessing it, he pre­ferred to keep his arcane knowledge as secret as possible.

  The feet paused and there was a cautious knock on the door.

  "Enter."

  The blond, cropped head of Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna appeared around the wood-painted frame.

  "Forgive me, Major-Commissar Zimyanin, for inter­rupting you."

  "Come in, Alicia Andreyinichna. What is it?"

  The secretary wore a plain skirt that fell just below the kn
ee, in the dull maroon material that was the uniform color for Internal Security, Moscow.

  "A message from your wife, Anya, Major-Commissar."

  "Yes?"

  The girl coughed nervously. It was common knowledge that all wasn't wonderfully well between Gregori Zimy­anin and his tall, heavy-hipped wife. There were often an­gry calls on the telephone, generally ending with the receiver being slammed down and some colorful cursing from the senior officer.

  "She wished to know what time you would be returning home tonight, sir."

  "By the anvil and the hammer! She knows I'm going to be late. I told her this morning over first food. I told her!"

  He remembered telling Anya, remembered her expres­sion, remembered that she had mentioned something about an invitation they had for last food to an apartment in the adjoining block on Begovaya Ulitsa. He couldn't even re­call the names. Some woman who worked in the offices of Pensions and Domestic Debts with Anya who had a buck-toothed, stammering husband with a secret taste for deca­dent music. Zimyanin had arranged to have them investi­gated. You couldn't be too careful who you knew.

  "Can't be too careful," he said.

  "What, sir?"

  He smiled. "I didn't mean to speak out loud, Alicia Andreyinichna. My apologies. Tell her, as softly as you can, that it will be after eleven." An afterthought struck him. "And offer my deepest regrets that I must miss our last-food date."

  "Yes, Major-Commissar."

  He managed a smile, though his wife's constant harry­ing was becoming increasingly tedious. The girl smiled back and withdrew, closing the door carefully behind her.

  Zimyanin leaned back, putting his high boots of tanned hide on his desktop. He had been married to Anya for only six weeks. It had only been ten weeks since his promotion from plain major and his arrival at the center of the gov­ernment, the spiritual and historical home of Mother Rus­sia.

  "Anya," he murmured to himself. Perhaps an acciden­tal fall from the high balcony of their apartment? Perhaps a sudden seizure while she was in the bath. His strong fingers flexed at the thought, imagining how it would feel to close them around her soft, fleshy neck, pressing her with an inexorable power under the scummy water. Eyes open. Mouth open. Tongue protruding, purpling, blackening.

  He drew out the phrase book and flicked through, looking for the page he wanted. There it was.

  "I regret deeply that my lady wife will not be able to attend your soiree on account of her sudden indisposition."

  The officer straightened then buried himself in a pile of reports and documents. The spring thaw would soon begin to release the city from the clawed grip of General Winter. There would be much to do, work parties to enlist and press into reluctant action.

  A thick red folder on a shelf across from the desk was marked with the single word "Subbotnik." In the old days, Zimyanin knew from his researches, the citizens of Moscow would have to give up their free time to work for the city. This was Subbotnik, the Saturday when you "volunteered" to help with manual labor. Things had changed.

  During the cleansing days of the megacull, great swathes of Moscow had been laid into perpetual dust by the nuking missiles of the hated Americans. Little of the center had been rebuilt, but the suburbs survived—after a fashion. But there was so much to do. A century later and there was al­ways so much to be done.

  Subbotniks now tended to refer to people snatched by armed patrols of sec men and forced to perform the me­nial, essential tasks.

  And the time of the spring thaw was the worst for that. The thought of the melting ice brought back a memory to the officer.

  Another phrase from his well-learned book. "I am de­lighted to have made your acquaintance." He paused, his totally bald brow wrinkling with the effort of concentra­tion. "But I do not believe we have been formally intro­duced."

  They hadn't.

  But he could still see the face of the mysterious Ameri­can across the frozen sea that nestled against the Kam­chatka Peninsula and touched the land of the Americans in the region they called Alaska. It had been there, not far from a hamlet called Ozhbarchik, following the brutish killing band known as the Narodniki.

  "Hozhdenie v narod," Zimyanin said to himself. It meant to be going to the people.

  The leader had been called…? "Uchitel," whispered the officer, nodding his head. The Teacher. That had been the name of the psychopathic slaughterer.

  It came back.

  The defeat of the Narodniki had been a triumph for Major Zimyanin, his passport away from the icy waste­land beyond the tumbled ruins of Yakutsk. He returned to Moscow with a promotion and thanks from the grateful Party.

  "Americans," he said, half smiling.

  He had never been sure how many there had been. Even with his precious Zeiss binoculars he hadn't been able to make out their numbers, but he had seen the missile they had ready. That had all been reported to the central of­fices, an indication that the remnants of the United States weren't yet ready to fall into the hands of Russia.

  He'd met four of them face-to-face: a tall black man; a short, fat man with the cold eyes of a born slayer; a woman, handsome with the reddest, most fiery hair that Zimyanin had ever seen.

  And their leader…

  "I am desolated to see that you have been incapacitated by an accident, sir," he recited.

  His gaze moved to the far wall of the small office, near the window, jammed with brown paper to stop it rattling in the winter gales. A rifle hung there on two rusting nails, his own weapon, an old SVD Dragunov sniper's blaster with a PSO-1 scope sight. It had been given to him by the marks­man in his unit out east, Corporal Solomentsov, when Zimyanin had received his promotion.

  He ran a finger down the furrows of his pockmarked cheeks, thinking about that adventure and the blood that had flowed.

  There was a cautious knock on the door again and his clerk stuck her head into his office.

  "I am sorry, Major-Commissar Zimyanin, but I'm afraid that—"

  "My wife has called again and she wishes to speak with me," he guessed.

  "Yes," she replied, surprised at the accuracy of his guess. "She said to tell you—" She stopped as the officer held up a weary hand.

  "Don't, sister-comrade. I'm sure I can imagine what my dear…" He gestured for her to leave, watching as she turned in the doorway. The material of her skirt stretched tight across the firm buttocks; her muscular thighs slid down toward her polished boots. Zimyanin sat for a mo­ment after the door had closed, allowing his sensual imag­ination to run on for a while, imagining himself locked in a sexual embrace on a soft feather mattress with Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna.

  But the vision faded with the certainty of how shrill his wife's voice would sound when he called.

  Gregori Zimyanin reached for the Bakelite phone, part of his mind still recalling the leader of the American guer­rilla group—the man with the scarred face and a patch over his left eye. A face he would never forget.

  Chapter Seven

  "CLOSE BASTARD DOOR!" Jak yelled, his heavy satin-finish Magnum in his right hand.

  "No, leave it!" Ryan countered. "Anyone out there could have an angle to put a bullet through someone going near." He looked sideways at the freezie, who lay flattened against the wall of the long hallway, his bamboo cane just out of reach. "Rick? You all right? You hit?"

  "No. I'm terrific, Ryan. Great shape. Popper of amyl'd be down the white line." His voice changed suddenly, louder, more shrill. "Course I'm not all right, you dumb-ass bastard! I damned near turned my Jockeys brown."

  "Sounds like he's okay, lover." Krysty grinned.

  "I believe that the firearm sounded like something from my childhood," Doc called, crouching at the bottom of the stairs.

  "How's that?" J.B. said.

  "A musket. Black powder. A percussion cap from the flatness."

  The armorer glanced around at Ryan and nodded, the light from the half-open doorway glinting off his eye­glasses. "He's right. Not a modern blaster. S
ome old Ken­tucky musket. Or whatever they call 'em over here."

  Ryan had thought the sound of the gun, bursting at them from the snowy wilderness, had indicated a cap-and-ball kind of weapon. One round, the bullet ripping a long splinter of white wood from the leading edge of the door.

  They lay in the dim light for about five minutes, but there was no further shooting. No voice, no sound of move­ment. Trader had taught Ryan that the worst thing you could do when you suddenly found yourself under blaster fire was to start rushing around carelessly.

  "Chickens without heads," Trader had said, in that calm, measured way of his. "Think of a chicken skittering around a yard, blood gushing out the windpipe. Hold that in your mind, and it might—just might—stop you doing something real foolish one of these hot days."

  Gesturing to the others to hold their positions, Ryan crawled toward the door, eased his good eye around it and peered out into the stark morning light.

  The view was the same as it had been from the roof. Just a little more limited. Snow lay everywhere, piled deep against the trunks of some of the trees. There was no sign of life.

  "Jak, cover the rear. Just look, don't shoot. J.B., take the east. Krysty, the west. Doc, go slow up the stairs and see what you can see from the second floor. Slow and easy."

  "How about me, Ryan?" Rick asked.

  "Sit still, stay quiet and keep a tight grip on your ass."

  Ryan stayed where he was, watching the wilderness of tree-scattered white. If it had been a shot from an antique musket, the chances were that the attacker was within a hundred paces. He had come across a beautifully pre­served Sharps .50-caliber buffalo rifle a year or so ago. In the right hands, the weapon was capable of putting a man on his back from half a mile away.

  He waited for something to happen.

  They had cover in the house, although an assault by anything over a dozen might be tough to hold off. One shot. A warning? Too close to Rick for that. It had been aimed to hit. To chill.

  Ryan caught a flicker of movement a hundred paces away from the front of the house—an elbow, knee or a shoul­der, a dark triangle that showed for a splinter of a second, like the fin of a cruising shark amid the snowy billows.