“Thanks,” Ingvar said, and fastened the ear flaps at the chin. “Always wanted to put one of these on.”
Ramses took the tablecloth off a coffee table and covered the gap in the barricade, hiding the ugly muzzle of the zombie girl. Thankfully, the space was not wide enough for the little creature to squeeze in.
“Jeez,” Ramses said. “She’s giving me the creeps.”
“Yeah,” Ingvar said. “I can’t get used to them either.”
He shifted his position in the armchair and switched the topic of the conversation.
“I think it’s rather convenient to have dreadlocks,” Ingvar said, “with the water supply cut off and all that. Do you ever wash them?”
Ramses touched his hair and sighed. “Sure thing. Not so often, though. But give it another day or two, and my scalp will start getting itchy too. Why?”
Ingvar yawned and shrugged his shoulders. “Just shooting the crap, man. What else is left to do on the night shift?”
“I would have nothing against a couple of beers,” Stas said, without taking his eyes from the touchscreen. His English was fluent, but he spoke it with the thick Russian accent because as a programmer he used mostly written English for his work.
“It’s a good thing we’re not living in some cabin in the woods,” Ingvar said. “Or we would surely have been taken over by cabin fever.”
“I wonder if there’s such a thing as hotel fever,” Ramses said and took out his tablet.
Ingvar yawned again. “Mr. Perfect—the boss dude—is trying to keep us busy with work. But it’s not enough. All work and no play and shit. Now, look at what we have for entertainment. The TV sets are on the fritz. The bars are closed. Some dudes have their tablets and cell phones but their battery power is dying.”
At that moment Stas groaned and put down his cell phone. “Damn you, Ingvar! My battery’s dead.”
Ingvar chuckled. “No worries, Angry Birdman. We’ll find you a board game in the morning. Or jigsaw puzzles.”
Stas pocketed his iPhone and stood up, stretching his limbs.
“So how would you entertain us?” Steve said to Ingvar, wiping a plate on the towel.
“For starters, I’d just suggest we make a porn video,” Ingvar said, deadpan serious.
Gleb looked at them. Must have heard the only English words he could grasp.
“That’s an idea,” Ramses said with a smirk. He opened the folder with pictures on the tablet. His wallet and iPhone were lost, and the tablet was his only connection to his past life. He could not get access to his GoogleDrive where he kept his family photos, but he had some snapshots on his tablet.
“Nah, too cold,” Steve said.
“With the hot girls around, it wouldn’t,” Ingvar said.
“Did you come to Russia for business or for pleasure?” Stas asked.
“Dude,” Ingvar said, “you sound like a phrasebook, you know that? My business is my pleasure.”
“What’s your occupation, Ingvar?” Ksenia said. “What value can you bring to the community?”
“I’m a sex toy designer,” Ingvar said, adjusting his scarf. “I run a little designing bureau back in Stockholm. Value to the community? Oh, I can provide lots of value to a community, Honey Bun.” He winked at Ksenia. “I can do my share of work.”
Ramses looked at Ingvar with a frown. Ingvar caught his glance. “Woah, California, sorry. Is the lady your girlfriend?”
“Just stop calling me that,” Ramses said.
“No,” Ksenia said with a smile. “We came here together. Went through a lot. We’re sister-and-brother-in-arms. Sort of.”
“Ah! Okay then,” Ingvar said. “That changes everything. I have a video camera upstairs in my room. Full battery with an extra battery. It will be enough for a couple of hours. I still need a computer to do the editing but we can make it found footage style. It’s played out, I know, but taking into account the circumstances … What do you say, Honey Bun?”
Ksenia broke into laughter. “In your Valhalla dreams, Ingvar.”
Ingvar pouted his lips and rose to his feet. “No wonder people take their lives here. They’re too bored.” He took a flashlight from the coffee table. “I’m about to check the windows on the ground floor. Anyone with me?”
“I’ll go,” Stas said.
“Be careful around him, kid,” Steve said. “Keep your back to the wall and avoid isolated spaces.”
“Don’t you worry, Pops,” Ingvar said. “I’m straight as a ruler.”
When they left, Ramses exhaled a sigh of relief and looked at Ksenia.
“What a moron,” she said with a smile.
She sat on the wide leather couch across him and unfolded one of the leaflets the helicopter had dropped in the morning. Andy had distributed the leaflets among the personnel and guests.
“Can’t wait till you get there?” Ramses asked.
Ksenia nodded. “One more night at this hotel will drive me nuts.”
“Still better than the jail,” Ramses said.
“How far is the nearest evac center?” Steve said.
“Twelve miles to get to the Western Evacuation Center,” Ksenia said. “Would’ve taken less than five hours on foot on a normal day.”
“And there’s not been a single normal day for eight days now,” Steve said, putting a stack of clean plates on a luggage cart. “And I don’t mean the shitty blizzard.”
Ksenia folded the piece of paper and put it into the pocket of her warm coat. “I wonder why she hung herself. That girl. That’s crazy … We’re safe here. We got food for three weeks. Not many weapons, though, but we’re safe, aren’t we?”
“No, we’re not,” Steve said. “Not with that sick fuck walking around.”
“Do you think she was murdered?” Ksenia said.
“I’m more than certain,” Steve said.
“Yeah, two deaths in one day—that’s too many,” Ramses said. “I was starting to get used to the quiet life again. If you don’t take into account the moaning choir outside, of course. That’s a hella tour we’re having here, Steve.”
Marcel was sleeping quietly in the armchair, his AK-47 clutched in his arms.
“How I envy him,” Steve said pointing at Marcel. “Sleeping like a baby.”
“The last time I was sitting like this, by the fireplace, caught by a snowstorm, was in Aspen,” Ramses said.
“What did you do there?” Ksenia asked.
“I used to go skiing there. Almost every winter. I proposed to my wife there, my ex-wife, that is.”
The silence hung in the air for a while.
“I hope we get out of this mess, guys,” Steve said quietly. “And I hope we’ll still have someone to return to.”
“Amen,” Ramses said.
Then they heard the sound of hurried footsteps coming from the hallway.
Ingvar and Stas came running, the flashlight poking a cone of light in the darkness in front of them.
“Guys!” Ingvar’s breath was coming out with clouds of vapor. “There’s another dead body there!”
“No shit,” Ramses said.
“You better believe it!” Stas said. “It’s a girl again. Her throat has been cut.”
Ramses, Ksenia, and Steve exchanged glances. Marcel woke up and demanded to know what was going on.
“A busy night ahead is what’s going on,” Ksenia said.
Without saying a word, Gleb took the safety off his pistol and stood up.
Ramses’s tablet beeped a low battery power warning. He looked at his daughter’s face for the last time, and the screen faded to black.
FOURTEEN
The sunrise was pink in the east when Ex-Major Konstantin Gavrilov woke up in his solitary cell. It was Saturday, February 23. After a luxurious meal granted to him in honor of Motherland’s Defender’s Day, the door of his cell opened and three armed guards walked in to cuff him and led him out.
Yesterday the plan to retrieve Patient Zero from the hospital was approved. On this ear
ly Saturday morning, the six other volunteers were also fed, cuffed and led out of the Yekaterinburg maximum security prison. This little unit under Gavrilov’s commandment was dubbed The Demented Seven by the mission planners.
Gavrilov had initially chosen ten men for his operation team. All of them were real cutthroats and scumbags. Their relatives had already forgotten them or were trying to wipe their names from their memories. No one would be sorry if they died. Two of the chosen ones had not been approved by the prison administrators for many reasons. Two others had refused to be involved in the operation after having seen the battlefield footage.
The mission was no stroll in the park because the epicenter of the plague was a dead zone. Twenty-two excellent fighters had been killed in this abattoir trying to get inside the hospital building. Only one of them had succeeded, but he had never gotten out and had most likely become one of the infected ones. General Petrov had high hopes that Gavrilov’s squad would succeed. Getting Patient Zero was one of the primary goals of the headquarters. It would accelerate development of the vaccine against the virus. Gavrilov had not been given any other information but he could read between the lines and assumed that one of the reasons this whole shebang was being kept hush-hush was that the Government wanted to create a new biological weapon.
Each fighter was given a radio handle for the operation. The planners did not have to ponder on the trail names for a long time as most of the zeks went by nicknames in prison instead of actual names.
Gavrilov who was to orchestrate the operation was given the nickname Maestro.
Dmitry Smirnov was called Afghan. He was actually an Afghan war veteran. After coming home from the war in 1989 he never walked past injustice in silence and once killed five drunken men in a brawl defending a young couple. In the prison, he refused to behave well and in the span of ten years of imprisonment he washed out five more people. His prison sentence was prolonged every two years.
Vadim Voluyev, also known as Joker, was a bearded man with a beer belly who laughed in any situation no matter how serious it was. Even getting beaten in a fight. Rumors had it that he laughed in the court when his sentence for a child’s rape and murder case was being read aloud.
Yuri Nikitin was dubbed Bulldog. He was the biggest guy in the prison. In the ‘90s, when he could not find a job after he had returned from the first Chechen war, a drug-dealing gang picked him up and offered him work as an assassin.
Everyone in the prison called Armen Minasian by his first name—Armen. He used to be a drug cop who had busted lots of criminals single-handedly. But he was a drug user himself. One winter night, under the influence of drugs, he had imagined that a demon had possessed his girlfriend in her sleep and her face had turned black. Decapitation seemed to be the only possible way to get rid of the demon, and he cut her head off with a butcher knife. After that, he ran outside naked and hid in a dumpster. Two kids were passing by. He attacked one of them and tried to tear his face off. He failed to kill the little demon as he was stopped by the police. The boy was in a state of shock for many days.
Georgy Karpov, or Carp, used to be the leader of a Spetznaz bomb squad. After he had been kicked out of the police service during the financial crisis in 2008, he had joined a radical terrorist group and got arrested after he had tried to plant a bomb on a railroad.
One more man was added to the team by General Petrov himself. Ilya Stolyarov was the only non-combatant in this squad. He was a hacker and a drug dealer who had set his apartment on fire when he was stoned. Three little kids and their grandmother had been trapped in the apartment above and burned alive. He was sentenced to thirty years in prison. He was the youngest bird in the jail. For his angelic face and quiet behavior (he was the quietest prisoner in all the history of the prison), they had dubbed him Angel. His mission task was to retrieve the CCTV footage from the security digital data storage.
In the prison bus on their way to the airport, they gave them orange-colored combat fatigues, bulletproof vests, empty gun holsters, and orange helmets equipped with mikes and video cameras. No weapons and no ammo.
“What’s this shit with the camouflage?” Carp asked the guards. He was a thin man with a lizard-like face.
“It’s easier to spot you from a helo this way,” a guard said. “And shoot you if you try to pull off something weird.”
“That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen,” Armen said.
Carp grinned, showing a set of rotten teeth.
“When do we get our guns?” Bulldog asked.
“Not so fast, big boy,” another guard said, cuffing him to the seat. “You’re going to have some fun with your toys soon. Just have a little patience.”
All of them were handcuffed to their seats. The prisoners kept silence all the way to the airport. It was forbidden to talk. The ride was fast, though. The sky was cloudless, and it was sunny. The bus drove up to the two dark green military helicopters sitting on the helipad and halted to a stop. Both the helicopters had biohazard signs painted on their sides.
A black Volga and an off-road military UAZ-469 were parked nearby. The door of the Volga opened and General Petrov stepped out. He was wearing a gray overcoat. Three armed soldiers came out of the military vehicle and accompanied the general to the bus.
The general climbed into the bus, greeted the pilots and the guards and looked at the convicts. The soldiers stood behind his back, guns at the ready.
“You’re here because you’re the best fighters our country has seen,” General Petrov said, looking each volunteer in the eye. “Fighters, mind you. Not citizens. You’ve taken some wrong steps in your life but the Rodina is giving you one more chance to become good citizens. Don’t blow it. Prove that you deserve your freedom.”
The prisoners looked silently at the general.
“Don’t forget that you’ll be under constant observation,” the general went on. “So, no tricks on your part or you’ll be shot on the spot.”
The soldiers bolted the slides for a better effect.
“Your money is waiting for you around the corner. Just get me Patient Zero. Dead or undead,” the general chuckled. “This operation can save us a year of research and perhaps millions of lives. As for the firearms, you’ll get your weapons when you arrive in Chelyabinsk. We don’t want to take any chances. Captain Voyevodin will give you further orders on the site. He will follow you in the other helicopter. This is all I want to say. Carry on, soldiers.”
He saluted them and marched out. One by one they were escorted to one of the helicopters and cuffed to the benches there. They also put shackles on their legs. The guards stayed in the bus. The three soldiers were their relief now.
“We’re like berserks,” Angel said.
Bulldog looked at him questioningly.
“Those were the Vikings who were transported separately, in another boat,” Angel said.
“Why so?” Bulldog asked. “Were they faggots or something?”
“They were so wild that ordinary Vikings were scared to be near them.”
Joker sneered.
When everyone was settled the pilot turned his head toward the general. He made a circle in the air with his index finger. The pilot nodded and started the engine; the soldiers slammed the door shut and sat down, their Kalashnikovs pointed at the zeks.
“Thanks, Maestro,” Angel said as the helicopter started to take off.
Gavrilov cringed. He had just closed his eyes to have a little nap.
He opened his eyes reluctantly. “For fucking what?”
The soldiers did not try to prevent them from talking. They were following their instructions. No one in their right mind would start a riot at 10,000 feet with their hands and legs chained.
“You know,” Angel said, “for letting us breathe the air of freedom again.”
“You’ll thank me when you come alive from the hell that’s ahead of us and when you’re screwing a skinny whore on the beach in Sochi. Now shut the fuck up and breathe.”
&nb
sp; Joker broke into laughter. “That’s a good one, Chief.”
Gavrilov shook his head and closed his eyes again.
“Hey, guys,” Angel wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. “What are you going to do on the first day of your freedom?”
“I’ll get pissed to the ears,” Bulldog said.
“Listen, you don’t look like a military man type,” Carp said. “Can you at least shoot?”
Joker gave a laugh.
“Of course, I can,” the young man said with pride. “I’ve beaten twenty or thirty first-person shooters.”
“You’re a goner,” Carp said matter-of-factly.
“Hey, Afghan, what about you?” Angel asked. “What are you going to do?”
The man said, “We’re all going to die.” He spat on the floor and turned away to the porthole window.
In an hour they saw black pillars of smoke rising above the burning houses.
“What the fuck is going on there?” Carp said.
“Looks like a fucking world war,” Angel said.
The co-pilot knocked on the window. “All right. We’re here.”
The soldiers took the cuffs and shackles off the prisoners.
Gavrilov heard a static crackle in his helmet. “Maestro, Maestro, do you read me?”
“All right, guys, listen up. Put the damn things on,” Gavrilov said, putting the helmet on. All of them followed the suit, putting the helmets on and strapping them under their chins.
“Good morning and welcome to Chelyabinsk, you loads of crap,” the voice said. “Captain Voyevodin is speaking.”
The men looked at each other but said nothing.
“In ten minutes we’ll be in the combat zone,” Voyevodin said. “You’ll get your weapons once you’re on the ground. Please keep this in mind: if you try to escape, we’ll shoot you. Like rabid dogs. If you try to kill one of our men, we’ll shoot you. If you disobey my orders, I’ll shoot you myself. From now on your asses are mine.”
Angel put up his middle finger to the video camera mounted on his helmet.
“Angel?”
“Here,” Angel said.
“I saw that, you sorry loser,” the captain said. “It’s a pity I got no time for kicking your butt for this right now.”
The Living & The Dead (Book 1): Zombiegrad Page 14