Rise of the Enemy

by Rob Sinclair

  Lena let out a yelp and began to right herself, to correct her balance, pulling on her gun as she did so. But I didn’t give her any time. Still pushing my weight down onto her, I reached around the handle of her Berretta with my right hand. Lena’s fingers were wrapped around the grip, a finger on the trigger, but plenty of room for another. With my hand over hers, I forced my finger as far as I could toward the trigger.

  The man to her side was trying to push Lena off him, unable to move freely with both her and my weight bearing down on him. I knew that would buy me a few seconds. I pulled the gun up, feeling Lena’s resistance but easily able to overpower it. I pointed the barrel toward the driver. I wasn’t even sure whether he was aware yet of the brief commotion. I didn’t hesitate to find out.

  I fired two shots.

  Skin and bone and bloody flesh splattered on the windscreen of the car. The driver’s body went limp, his hands dropped from the wheel, the engine’s revs died down. At least his foot hadn’t stuck on the accelerator.

  In all likelihood we would still crash to a stop, but we weren’t going fast, probably somewhere around forty miles an hour. At worst, we would collide head on with another, bigger vehicle. Potentially we would simply roll to a stop. I was aware of the risk. Now it was just down to fate.

  Lena was squirming, using her right elbow as a weapon. Pulling on her hand to try to release my grip on her gun. Clawing at my arms with her free hand. But she had neither the strength nor the room, in the confined space, to manoeuvre.

  I jerked the gun around, the barrel edging towards the man the other side of Lena. He’d almost readied himself with the rifle: his finger was on the trigger, the barrel in mid-arc. But the small cabin made its swing towards me difficult and ungainly. And slow.

  In the end, the size of the gun cost him his life. I pulled on the trigger of Lena’s gun twice more. One bullet hit the man in the neck, the other just above his right eye. More blood sprayed out into the air, some of it hitting me in the face.

  Lena murmured and groaned as she tried to wrestle back control. The car swayed to the left then right as it hit the kerb at the side of the road and bounced off it. The movement pulled me away from Lena. For just a second she must have thought it would be her chance. But it was never going to happen. I threw my left elbow into her side, eliciting a shout of pain from her. I did it again. And then once more. With her fight waning, I took the opportunity to prise the gun from her. It didn’t take much effort.

  I immediately pointed the barrel at Lena’s head. We were both panting, our chests heaving. Lena had a look of both shock and anger on her face.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ she hissed.

  I hesitated, waiting for the red mist in front of my eyes to clear. I had the upper hand now. No need to act rashly.

  ‘Are you just going to kill me?’ Lena said. She tried not to sound fazed by the situation, but her trembling body gave her away. For all her bravado, she was scared. ‘In cold blood?’

  ‘You’re going to tell me the truth,’ I said. ‘I want to know the truth.’

  Lena managed a laugh. ‘Carl, everything I told you was the truth.’

  I wanted to pull the trigger. I’m not sure why I didn’t. Maybe I would have done, but in the end, the option was taken away from me.

  Even though I’d known it would come, it still took me by surprise when the car finally came to an abrupt halt. Whatever we’d hit, I wasn’t prepared for the impact. Maybe Lena’s words had knocked my concentration. The sincerity in her voice.

  At the moment of collision, I was half-turned toward Lena, sitting forward in my seat. My body was thrust forward, the belt not catching in time before my head cracked off the back of the driver’s headrest. The gun that I was holding flew from my grip. I don’t know where it landed.

  My body slumped back into the seat, my head in a daze. I closed my eyes, hoping that the world would stop spinning. But it didn’t. It only spun faster.

  And within seconds, I was out.

  Chapter 34

  The first thing I was aware of was the screams. At first, when I opened my eyes, I thought I was back in my cell – I’m not sure why – maybe because of the fog in my head, the disorientation. But as I came round fully, I quickly remembered what had just happened.

  My head was throbbing. I pulled my hand up to it. A lump the size of a ping-pong ball protruded from my right temple. Two slight trickles of blood had wormed down my face.

  I looked over at the seat next to me. The body of the dead passenger, the man with the rifle, was slumped in the seat, his head dangling forward at an unusual angle. The impact had snapped his neck. Not that it would’ve caused him any bother – he’d been dead well before the crash.

  Only then did I make sense of the empty space next to me.

  Lena was gone.

  So too were the weapons: Lena’s Berretta handgun and the rifle the man next to her had used.

  I cursed, reaching down to unbuckle my belt. As I pulled up, I jumped in shock when I saw a face plastered up against the window next to me. A grey-haired man, in his sixties or seventies, stood there. He looked worried. No, more than that: he looked terrified.

  He stepped back from the window when our eyes met. I pushed the door open. The man rattled off something to me in Russian, but my brain wasn’t able to process any of the words. It all sounded completely alien to me.

  I looked over the scene. A few yards off to the side of me was the crumpled wreckage of another car. Two other vehicles had pulled over, their hazard lights flashing.

  The man kept on talking to me. He wasn’t hysterical, but he wasn’t far off. I started to pick up most of his words amid the screaming still piercing the air. He was asking me who I was. What had happened to the people I was travelling with. Looking at the crumpled black mess, I could see why he was so concerned. Blood and lumps of flesh covered the inside of the car and were streaked across the windows. Clearly not the result of the head-on crash.

  When I looked over to where the screams were coming from, I realised the woman who was screaming was doing so not because she was hurt but because of the horrors that lay within the car I’d come from. Three other people stood around her. All had blankets wrapped around them. I couldn’t tell which ones were the occupants of the car we’d collided with and which had just stopped to help. Each of them had a stunned look on their face. No-one seemed quite sure what to make of me. Or the car that I’d stepped from with the two bloodied dead bodies.

  The man was telling me that I should sit down. That I was hurt and my head was bleeding. I wasn’t sure that I was bleeding any more. Other than the trickle from high up on my head, much of the blood on me was from the passenger I’d shot in the face. But I didn’t say that to the old man. He seemed distressed enough already.

  He told me the police would be there any minute. A strange thing to say. Most people would have called for an ambulance after a road crash. But these people had been spooked, and they had every right to be. Mentioning the police to me was his way of letting me know that I shouldn’t try anything funny.

  ‘Where did the lady go?’ I asked the man.

  The concern on the man’s face grew. Maybe my tone had been off with him, or he’d heard my foreign accent, which had aroused his suspicions of me further.

  ‘What lady?’ he said.

  ‘There was a lady next to me. She’s gone. Did you see her?’

  The man shook his head. He seemed confused by the question, like he didn’t believe what I was saying was true. I asked him to go and ask the other people. The question was better coming from him than from me. He was hesitant, but telling him that the lady was my friend and that I was worried about her seemed to help alleviate some of his tension. He turned, walked over to the others, and put his arm around the lady who’d been screaming. She stopped.

  I heard the distant whine of police sirens. I didn’t recognise where we were but I guessed somewhere on the outskirts of the city. The sporadic residential uni
ts that were interspersed between the mostly commercial units told me that.

  From where I stood, I couldn’t hear the conversation the old man was having with the others. But I could tell from the shaking heads and the bemused looks on their faces that they didn’t know anything about a lady who’d been travelling in the car.

  Lena had simply disappeared into thin air.

  With the fast-approaching police, I knew I too should make myself scarce. The body count I was leaving behind was mounting and I no longer had any friends to help get me out of a sticky situation.

  Already isolated from the group of people that the old man was now with, I could quite easily slip away without much effort and probably without anyone seeing me, heading into the dense foliage that surrounded us. But where would I go? I was miles from anywhere familiar with no mode of transport, barely any cash, and blood on my face and clothes. Lena must have thought the risk was worth taking, but I wasn’t so sure I wanted to be out in the cold, on the run.

  I did know that I had to get away before the police arrived. And as much as I didn’t want to, I knew I had only one option.

  I walked over to the group of people. Without a coat I was already shaking violently from the cold. Or maybe it was adrenaline, or anxiety, or a mixture of all three. Either way, even after standing out for only a minute or so, the cold was too much to bear without the extra layer of protection.

  Heads immediately turned as I approached the group and their muted conversation and whispers stopped. The old man stepped forward, away from the others. He was small and slight, but he was obviously the plucky one in the mishmash group of people. The one willing to stand up for the rest. To protect them from me.

  ‘I need a coat,’ I said to him. ‘And a car.’

  I was surprised when he simply nodded, took off his thick coat and handed it to me. He then gestured towards a compact hatchback pulled up on the kerb behind me, before fishing for the keys in his trouser pocket and holding them out. I took them from him without saying another word. He walked back over to the group and huddled under the blanket with the woman who’d been screaming.

  He wasn’t going to try to stop me and neither were any of the others. I admired his handling of the situation. Sure, he and his group would have preferred the police to have been there to cart me off. But the police weren’t there. And allowing me to leave was probably a blessing for all of them. The threat gone. That was what he and the others wanted.

  I walked over to the car briskly. It was already facing the direction I wanted to head in: away from Omsk. It was an almost dead cert the police would be coming from the city and I didn’t want to end up in a face-off with them.

  If Lena had escaped on foot, alone, then the chances were she would have headed in the opposite direction, back towards life and civilisation. She would have had no chance heading out into the cold wastelands that surrounded the city. It was different for me. I had a vehicle now. And at that moment, I wanted to get as far away from everything else as I could, Lena included. She could wait. I would get to her eventually. For now I had to get away.

  And then I would figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

  Chapter 35

  It wasn’t long before dusk was upon me – Omsk has few daylight hours during winter – and not too long after darkness had descended I left civilisation for good and the last of the streetlights faded away in my rear-view mirror. The headlights of the car were good enough to light up the frosted surface immediately in front of me, but I couldn’t make out anything else around. It just seemed like an endless black expanse. Traffic was sparse and becoming sparser.

  After two hours of driving, I pulled onto a track off the main road. I crawled a few hundred yards up the frozen surface, into a wooded area, then shut off the engine. The cabin light came on and, without the beam of the headlights, made it seem even darker outside. The last building I’d seen was a farmhouse some five miles away. I presumed the track I’d taken would lead somewhere, maybe to another isolated house. From where I was I could see no streetlights, buildings or any other evidence of life. The place was eerily quiet.

  My stop here was only temporary. I wasn’t planning on going on the run in the vast wilderness. Not in these temperatures. Not in this country. But I would make do for a few hours at least. I had the shelter of the car, and the blankets that the owner and his companion had brought with them on their journey would protect me further. It was rare, foolish even, for people in conditions like this not to take precautions in case of a breakdown whenever they ventured out. In addition to the blankets, the old man had been sensible enough to have brought a large plastic bottle of water.

  I stepped out of the car and used a handful of the water to wet my face, which I then wiped dry with one of the blankets. I wanted rid of the blood. And if nothing else, having a clean face would make me seem more normal should anyone come across me. My trousers and jumper were also covered with blood, and bone and tissue. At least the coat, taken from the man, was clean. Other than wiping off the lumps, I could do little about the clothes. I had nothing else to change into. I would have to just hope the coat covered up the worst of it.

  Although I would be warm enough in the car for the night, I wouldn’t stay out in this place any longer than was necessary. I wasn’t going to be forced on the run. Coming here was simply a means of getting some breathing space to think about what to do next. I still didn’t know what was happening to me. I couldn’t be sure who my enemy really was. But I would find out.

  The problem was, countless people were out there looking for me: the police, the Russians, my own agency. It wasn’t going to be easy to evade everyone. What I had to do, I realised, was get back to Omsk. I was going to pursue them. Lena, Chris, Mary, whoever else was coming after me. I had to get to the truth.

  How to do that was a different question. I couldn’t take the car I’d commandeered back to the city. For all I knew there would be police patrols out looking for it. It would be game over before I’d even made it back to civilisation. And I’d already seen there were few others cars on the road so late in the day. So I didn’t have many options left to me. I would stay here, in the warmth, and rest for the night. Then head out in the morning and somehow hitch a ride back to Omsk.

  Once there, I would head off to find Chris and Mary first. Because they were the only people I knew how to locate. And a small part of me wondered whether – no, hoped – I could trust at least one of them. Which one, I wasn’t sure.

  I lowered the driver’s seat as far back as it would go and placed the dank blanket over me. It smelled of oldness and mould and had obviously been left in the car indefinitely, awaiting its moment. But it would do.

  My belly rumbled and grumbled. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. I now regretted not having had anything in the café earlier. Though the very thought of being in that place, of seeing Mackie’s final moments of life, made me feel sick.

  I didn’t want to replay my meeting with Mackie. I didn’t want to think about anything at all. But I couldn’t stop it.

  Those last moments with Mackie had been anything but poignant. They’d been uncomfortable and messy. He’d thought I was working for the enemy. I hadn’t been sure whether he was the enemy.

  Yet he was still the same man I’d once trusted with my life. And during our brief conversation, I’d really wanted to believe what he’d been telling me. I wanted everything to be just like he said. I’d been willing for him to show me the clincher, the one piece of evidence that would have convinced me that everything I’d been told about him was a lie. That every doubt I’d had was misplaced. Despite all my feelings of hurt and abandonment at having been left to torture, I’d wanted so badly for all of it to be washed away as we sat there in that café.

  But in the end I hadn’t got there. And now Mackie was dead and I’d run away from the scene, straight into the arms of the people who’d murdered him.

  I knew the moment of reconciliation that I’d so craved would n
ever come now. Even if everything Mackie had said was the truth, nothing would ever be the same again.

  I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the cold and the blackness all around me. But it was impossible. I was tired, cold, hungry, being hunted by the Russians and my own people. And more alone than ever.

  Chapter 36

  It had been a long and shivery night in the car. I had been wide awake well into the early hours of the morning. When I finally managed to drift off it must only have been for a few minutes at a time.

  It wasn’t just the cold air and the cramped, confined space that was the problem. I struggled with the ever-changing predicament that I found myself in. Every time I closed my eyes I could do nothing to stop the nightmarish thoughts. Of the torture chamber and Lena’s beautiful but evil smile. Of the last moments of Mackie, my friend and mentor. Of the Russians, closing in on me, willing me to join them. And finally, of my own people, hunting me down, bloody revenge on their minds.

  By the time dawn broke, I was a groggy mess. Half asleep, the thoughts came and went even with my eyes wide open. At least I thought they were open. More than a few times I’d dreamt I was awake, looking out of the windows into the faint moonlight, only to open my eyes and realise that I’d in fact been asleep.

  But morning had finally arrived and the car engine was now up and running. The heat was on, slowly thawing out my ice-cold hands, feet and limbs. I was en-route to Omsk. With the small amount of cash I had left I’d splashed out on sugary drinks, snacks and sweets from a garage that was just opening for the day. I was riding the crest of a sugar rush. It would dwindle quickly, leaving me no better off than before. For a short while at least, though, I was feeling almost human again.

  I was heading back to Omsk but I knew I needed to dump the car. Riding back into town on the same stallion I’d stolen to get out was asking for trouble that I really didn’t need. But I had no money left, having spent the paltry amount left over on food and drinks. The only other ways to get back to Omsk were hitching or stealing a car from another hapless victim. In the end I opted for the former.