Tainted Blood

by Ferrel D. Moore

  “The backseat was built for containment, so don’t waste your time,” Sveta said. But his eyes flamed like burning plastic. As though somewhere behind his features was a boiling vessel of rage waiting to explode into full-blown insanity. It was impossible for any man to break through bulletproof glass with his fists; but Drogol was clearly not just any man.

  “Last chance before I turn on the gas,” she yelled.

  There was no amount of money worth what she had dealt with tonight.

  She was cruising the speed limit down Gratiot trying to look normal while a six foot six man was beating on the bullet-proof glass wall that separated them in her Mafiya-owned car. Better to stick to the main roads, though, since Hauck would be covering the back roads, not expecting her to drive down a main street, even one as third world as Gratiot.

  “Don’t,” Zoe suddenly screamed over the car’s speakers. “Don’t do that.”

  Their eyes met in the rearview mirror again.

  “Don’t weaken his mind while he is angry. Please.”

  Drogol bellowed like a wild animal. His long hair whipped about his shoulders as he howled.

  “Never talk about me as though I am not present,” he said in a voice loud as an imperial decree to a courtyard full of peasants.

  Sveta reached for the volume control and turned it back.

  “Then get control of yourself,” she snapped back. “I don’t have time for this. I need to stay alive and the only way I can do that is by getting out of here fast. You’re slowing me down with your bullshit. I have a target on my back and I need a good plan to avoid getting shot, so I’d thank you very much to quit acting like an asshole.”

  “I owe you nothing,” he shouted. “I set you free.”

  “I wouldn’t have been chained up in the first place if it wasn’t for you.”

  Zoe scooted as far away from Drogol as she could. If there were door handles, Sveta had no doubt that Zoe would have opened the car door and jumped.

  Where to go? What to do?

  “Who are you? And I mean really and not this I’m a poor persecuted fugitive,” said Sveta. “That’s for starters, and what was that thing? Was that your beast?”

  Drogol’s composure returned like sunlight coming out again from behind a dark cloud. He studied her eyes carefully in the mirror.

  “So,” he said. “How very much like a soldier. You do not know who you hunt. You do not care who you hunt. You only follow orders. Point your gun this way. Pull your trigger that way. Tell me, who did you think you were hunting? Who did you think you were sent to kill?”

  “I only know your name, and that a lot of people seem to die around you.”

  Drogol turned his head sideways to watch the night go by through the tinted glass. Traffic was thin. He seemed to withdraw inward. For the first time she noticed he wore a heavy coat with a high collar that reminded her of a priest’s robes. His face was alternately highlighted and then shadowed by the passing streetlamps. They drove by abandoned storefronts placarded with sheets of worn and cracked plywood nailed over broken windows. She saw in his face a look of haunted forlornness as he stared at them.

  “I have been conspired against and hunted all my life,” he said, “but I have never sought the death of another. Each spark of life is from God’s eternal flame, and as His children we must keep the fires of His love alive. The man you work for, the man who pays you, he has no respect for the sanctity of life and breath. He is a man who does not know how to love. He hates me because I do.”

  Sveta rubbed a hand across her forehead.

  “That tells me exactly jack and shit.”

  “Years ago, he imprisoned me on the orders of his lover, a high-ranking member of the secret police. They held me captive. Do you wish to hear more?”

  “What was her name?”

  “Anna Kazakova.”

  “The Anna Kazakova?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  Sveta tried to keep focused on the road, but of all the names in the world that Sveta did not want to hear, Anna Kazakova was near the top of the list.

  “Not what, who. The Red Mafiya Anna Kazakova. She used to be KGB, but now she is a criminal. She must be the one who was working with Hauck to find and capture you.”

  She saw Drogol turn toward Zoe.

  “Can this be true?” he asked.

  The small, hesitant voice was almost inaudible over the speakers. Sveta turned up the volume.

  “I don’t know, Father. I don’t know.”

  Sveta risked a glance in the rearview again and saw Zoe close her eyes. After a few moments, her eyes still closed, she replied, “An old woman. Yes. An evil, cold heart. Everywhere she goes the nine of swords goes with her.”

  “What is she saying?” asked Sveta. “And how would she know Anna Kazakova?”

  “Because unlike you, she is a woman with heart and sees by inner vision.”

  Sveta slammed on the brakes so hard the car swerved.

  “That does it,” she screamed, unlocking the rear doors. “Get out. Get the hell out. I don’t need this. All I want to do is get out of town before Hauck finds me.”

  “How dare you?” hissed Drogol. “You who have seen a miracle from God before your very eyes. You saw that through my hands He fanned the embers of this woman’s soul from death to life and now you would cast us out?”

  “She was injured, she was hurt, but she couldn’t have been dead. I was wrong. No one comes back from the dead.”

  “You would deny this? Your soul, too, has returned from death to join me, and you would deny her this very miracle?”

  Sveta turned in her seat to face him.

  “You’re crazy,” she said. “You are out of your fucking mind.”

  “Drogol,” said Zoe urgently. “Someone is coming. Someone like you.”

  *****

  His world was soft white gauze and confusion. Voices came and went like whispered imaginings. He had no sense of time passing. It was as though he hung suspended in a filamentous aethyr; waiting, waiting for something but he did not know what or why. From somewhere in the mists, Sasha heard a soft voice say, “Someone is coming, someone like you.”

  The ambulance hit a pothole, and his cage flew up in the air and then crashed back to the van floor.

  One of the four guards riding shotgun said, “Crazy bastard’s dreaming. Talking to himself in a girl’s voice.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The road was slick with water as Sveta turned the corner onto a street lined with blasted warehouses and abandoned storefronts shielded with crossed wire metal grills once decorated with glass and curtains. Dawn was coming, and she thought its cold light would reveal these barren neighborhoods in an uncompromising, pitiless gray light.

  They had driven for fifteen minutes, winding through streets washed with hopeless pallor, driving past buildings tall and faded, like artifacts abandoned on an alien world. Sveta felt the presence of the beast grow closer, following them like a hunter tracking its prey, and she shuddered. She was exhausted. She could not afford to imagine things.

  “Which one?” she asked.

  “The third from the end. Up there, on your left. The one with the big roll up door. I will go inside and open it so you can drive in. We must do this quickly.”

  “I see it.”

  As the car rolled into the broken concrete driveway, Sveta again unlocked the backdoors and hit another button to pop them open. Drogol got out and went to a metal door near the overhead, pulled a key ring from one of his pockets and moments later disappeared inside.

  Sveta flicked the switch to lower the bulletproof glass and swiveled in her seat to face Zoe. The young woman’s hair was disheveled and she looked slightly dazed, as though she’d been hit in the head and was still recovering.

  “I need to know what’s going on here,” she said.

  “We can’t talk now. He’ll be back soon.”

  “Who is he really?”

  “You wouldn’t believe
me if I told you.”

  “Don’t fuck with me,” said Sveta. “I need answers.”

  “The door is opening.”

  “We’ll talk later. Count on it.”

  The sound of chains grating across a pulley confirmed that the big overhead door was, in fact, opening. Sveta turned back to see it rise halfway up, like a stage curtain rising to reveal the next scene. Inside she could just make out an open space and a back wall stacked with boxes. If she was going to bolt, all she had to do was throw the car in reverse and leave this strange and frightening man behind. But she needed answers, so she turned off the lights and drove forward, trying to keep calm as she heard the sound of the metal door coming down behind her, closing her in darkness.

  She turned off the ignition.

  “Come,” Sveta heard Drogol say.

  “Stand away from the door.”

  She needed time for her eyes to adjust to the light. But a moment later, an orange-yellow light flared and she saw that Drogol had lit an old fashioned oil lantern. It swayed and sent dark shadows skittering about the garage. The smell of hot engine and burned oil diffused through the room.

  Sveta picked up the AK47 and her pistol, threw her bag of clothes, more weapons and money over her shoulder, and stepped out of the car. The cold, moist air caused her to shiver, but she straightened and saw Zoe getting out as well. The girl faltered slightly, but pressed a hand against the car frame to keep from falling.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I can make it.”

  But Zoe’s voice was tense with pain, and trembled with weakness.

  “She lost much blood,” said Drogol. “Much time will be needed for her to recover fully. Come. I have medical supplies in my laboratory.”

  Before Sveta could question what quality of laboratory he could have in the crumbling structure, Zoe was walking toward him.

  With the lantern lifted high, he opened a door and went through. Zoe followed, and Sveta, her pistol held at the ready and her AK slung over one shoulder and duffel over the other, stepped through behind them. They walked down a hallway lined with unpainted and peeling drywall across a dusty cement floor. Zoe was an eerie shadow in the bouncing lantern light. The hallway ended abruptly at a locked steel door that Sveta glimpsed over the girl’s shoulder before Drogol’s back obscured her view. She heard the jangle of his key ring again, and then they followed him down a steep stairway that doglegged left and left again until it was clear that they were following a path of ever descending squares.

  Zoe stumbled and Sveta hurried to catch her.

  “Are you well enough to walk?” asked Drogol.

  “I’ve got her,” said Sveta.

  She slid beneath the girl’s shoulder and, holstering her pistol, slid an arm around her waist.

  “We can make it.”

  The descent continued and time merged with the darkness. Drogol’s lantern silhouetted him with an aura of flickering orange gold, leading them deeper into the maze beneath the surface. Under the weight of her duffel slung across one shoulder and Zoe’s slack body on the other, Sveta began to tire. Like a good soldier, she said nothing and pressed on. When she was near exhaustion, Drogol suddenly stopped.

  He turned slowly to face them. With his lamp held high, he looked like a crypt keeper. In the rich orange light, the unpainted wall was jaundiced. Behind him was a massive steel door, gray black and forbidding as the door holding back Hell.

  “Where you are about to go I have taken no one else. It has been my sanctuary for many years, my place of safety in this evil city.”

  With an almost irrational sense of fear pressing down on her, Sveta looked up, suddenly afraid that the beast was hurtling down upon them. But there was nothing overhead except the shaft of darkness that speared straight up towards the surface. She had lost count of how many levels they descended in their spiral descent.

  “Now, my enemies are upon me once again. Always I have had to run like a criminal in the night. Each time I abandoned my experiments and took with me only the essentials of my work. Now, I am so close, so close that I will not run. I will instead stay here and you will help me so that I will be once and for all free from the curse that has plagued me all these years. I will be separated from God no more.”

  His voice resonated through the hallway like a dark, hypnotic song.

  Somewhere overhead, Sveta imagined that cold rain still glistened the barren streets of Detroit and the homeless still shuddered beneath viaducts and in the shadows of crowded buildings without knowing that a madman made his home beneath the broken concrete of the Motor City.

  *****

  Drogol stepped toward the massive metal door, and when he was within a few steps, she heard a series of loud clicks as hidden bolts pulled back into the door frame.

  Hidden transmitter on him and receiver concealed beneath the drywall, thought Sveta. Had to be. She didn’t want to think about any alternatives.

  He turned and transfixed them with a stare so intense, Sveta saw Zoe cringe.

  This mysterious, frightening man held the answers to what she needed to know.

  But he was nothing like Hauck had told them; there was simply no way Drogol was in his eighties. He appeared to be no older than his late forties or early fifties. There were men who were still healthy and vital as they aged, but this was a man still charged with power and possessed an almost animal magnetism. But had he ever had the physical strength and ability to wipe out a KGB prison station?

  No. No one was that powerful.

  And now she was wondering if there had ever been a prison, much less a prison break. Lies within lies were all that she could believe in.

  Her instincts told her that somewhere within these questions were answers that just might hold enough bargaining power to buy back her freedom from Hauck and Anna Kazakova. If germ warfare had been involved, then perhaps the stakes were still high enough to be useful to her.

  Drogol set down the lantern, and she saw him grab hold of a massive steel ring welded onto the door. He said something beneath his breath then pulled backward. A hiss like a dying breath escaped the opening as the door slowly gave way, and Sveta unconsciously held her breath. The door was six inches thick and must have weighed over a thousand pounds.

  He spoke once again, his words a somber pronouncement in that strange tongue he’d spoken when bringing Zoe back from near death. When he picked up the lantern, Sveta began to breathe again.

  As he led them through the doorway, Sveta felt, rather than saw, Zoe move closer to her.

  “You will stay immediately behind me,” cautioned Drogol. “There is great danger for the inattentive here. Stay close behind my guiding light.”

  His voice rang throughout the darkness as though they were standing in a large cavern.

  But Sveta had enough. She withdrew an LED flashlight from a side pocket within her duffel bag and flicked it on. What she saw caused her jaw to drop.

  “Extinguish that light,” snapped Drogol.

  But the shock of revelation kept her from moving.

  “Turn it off. I command you.”

  She felt Zoe touch her cheek.

  “Please,” she said.

  Sveta turned off the flashlight.

  Drogol strode toward them. In the swaying lamplight, his intense, almost burning gaze, his wild beard and his long hair gave him the look of a wild animal.

  “This is my sanctuary and my workshop and my home. You will not defile it. I searched the world to find it, worked longer than you have been alive to re-build it, and now that I am about to complete my experiments and make real what my father created I will not have you compromise it. Do you understand me?”

  The confusion on Sveta’s face was evident. What she had just seen bewildered her beyond what she would have thought possible. They were several stories underground, and there before her, stretching out in the middle of a cavernous laboratory, were things that just could not be. Before she turned out her flashlight she saw glassware
distillation columns, globes of glass each as large as a hot air balloon, electrical towers, substations and glistening black cables, gears big as tractor trailers and rows upon rows of shiny brass and silver bells, some large as small planes and others tiny as a child. And in the midst of that wonder stood an antique train, complete with an engine, five cars and a caboose, sitting on a track that seemed to run the length of the space and then disappear at both ends into rock walls.

  Drogol snapped his fingers inches before her face to get her attention.

  “Do you understand me?” he repeated. “This place is my only hope of salvation. Is it not enough that I bring you here for your safety and to help me? Must you pry instead of ask? Must you spy into that which you have not been invited to see?”

  “What is this place?”

  “Follow me,” said Drogol brusquely, “and you will learn. Time slips away and we have much of urgency to do.”

  Zoe gave Sveta’s arm a gentle squeeze when Drogol moved past them to lead the way again down a single flight of roughhewn stairs.

  Sveta allowed him to get a few steps ahead before she whispered to Zoe, “Tell me. What is this place? And who is he?”

  From up ahead, she heard Drogol’s stop, then walk back toward them. The lantern creaked as it swung back and forth with each step. Again his face appeared haloed in the pallid light.

  “You wish to know who I am?”

  “Yes,” said Sveta. “I want to know who you really are and what this is all about. I want to understand why Hauck and Anna Kazakova are really after you and what that beast is.”

  “And why do you care, my child?”

  Sveta’s temper, pushed to the limit by all that happened in one night, flared again.

  “I am not your child.”

  “You have the temperament of an arrogant child. You are self-centered and demanding.”

  “I am a tired, irritable woman with an automatic rifle,” she said. “So don’t talk down to me.”