The Living & The Dead (Book 1): Zombiegrad

by Hasanov, Oleg

  “Do you guys have any suspects?” Steve said.

  “I’m not sure,” Ivan said. “But if I were you, I’d keep Ksenia away from that Swedish guy.”

  “Ingvar?” Goran asked.

  “Ja, him,” Dr. Brodde said. “I don’t trust him at all, either.”

  “I don’t trust Swedes either,” Steve said. “They’re all a bunch of pervs. But I see no harm in that guy, though.”

  “God, we’re all going to suspect each other sooner or later,” Diana said.

  “We need to get to the Evacuation Center as soon as possible,” Goran said. “But we need more weapons to force our way through.”

  “And medication, too,” Dr. Brodde said. “Some people are down with the flu, and we’re running out of the hotel medical supplies. We have a woman with diabetes ... She will desperately need her insulin in a couple of days. There’s this blind Chinese girl, too. She will die if she doesn’t take her antirejection drugs regularly. She underwent kidney transplantation two years ago.”

  Goran whistled with sympathy. “We’ll have a hard time getting prescriptions for these ones.”

  “We have to get weapons first,” Andy said. “Meet me in my office in the afternoon. We’ll build a scouting team. Ivan, you make an inventory of every piece of weaponry available here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ivan said. “I will.”

  “Goran,” Andy turned to the chef. “Get the backpacks ready. Pack some snacks and drinks.”

  “Oui.” Goran looked at the swarm of the undead below. “Any ideas how we go past those dudes?”

  “We’ll be using the sewers,” Andy said.

  “Yuck!” Steve said.

  “Valera, our sanitary engineer, says the tunnels are big enough in this part of the city,” Andy said.

  “At least we have some consolation in this entire situation,” Steve said.

  Everyone looked at him.

  “If you die without getting bitten, you stay dead,” Steve said.

  ***

  Olga Rudakova had come to Max Oren’s orthopedic office complaining about her Achilles tendon injury. It was how they first met. Olga was cute and had a gorgeous figure. She was obliged to have one according to her work as a ballet dancer.

  The physician spoke Russian with a strange accent and always smiled. She assumed from the start that this bearded man was a foreigner. Local doctors were grumpy, and they looked like they would bite your head off at the slightest provocation.

  Her injury prevented her from training and performing. He assured her it was a minor one. There was no rupture, and there was hope for a speedy recovery. He began treating her. One appointment followed another. Then the appointments turned into friendly meetings in cafés outside the clinic. She got to know him closer. She let his Van Dyke beard fool her about his real age. She thought he was about 35 years old, five years older than her. But it turned out he was five years younger than her. He had come from Israel to have his internship in Russia.

  She told him she had a family—a husband and a 5-year-old daughter, Masha. But she was neither satisfied with her career, nor with her personal life. Her husband was a rich entrepreneur who had problems with alcohol. He beat her very often when he had one of his alcoholic frenzies, and once he cut her thigh with a knife.

  At the theater, they did not give her leading roles. Most of her friends were having successful careers in Europe. They were sending her greeting cards from Prague, London, and Paris. As for her, she went off the grid when Masha was born.

  Max listened to her complaints about her career and family, and he did not notice that he was gradually turning from an orthopedist into a personal psychologist.

  One day she called him and complained about the pain in her ankle. The pain was acute, and she asked for an appointment. He did her occasional favors by putting her in his schedule spontaneously jumping the queue. But that day it was his day off, and he could not see her in his office. He asked her over to his apartment instead. Of course, he realized she was a married woman, but he could not resist the temptation. At his apartment, he showed Olga how to do a massage to relieve the pain. He also recommended her some brands of creams she could use. She could feel touching her tender skin turned him on. She thanked him and said he was a wonderful doctor with magical hands. She kissed his hands. He returned her kiss on her lips.

  Since then, their meetings had turned into dates. Dates turned into passionate sex. She told her husband Vladimir that it would take one more month for her leg to completely heal. He kept on paying her bills.

  They continued to have dates after her leg had healed. They had been lovers for more than three months. All that time she was living like in a fairy-tale. But fairy-tales eventually come to an end. Max liked Russia, but not enough to stay here for a long period of time. His residence at the clinic as an intern orthopedist was ending, and he had to leave for Israel, his home country, to practice medicine there. His career had just started blossoming, and he had a promising future ahead of him. Working in Russia was a kind of tribute to his roots and his ancestry: his parents had moved to live in Israel from the collapsed USSR in the ‘90s when he was four.

  She knew he had to leave soon. But she did not want to follow him. She was afraid of living in his country because of all those reports about terrorist attacks she saw on TV. She did not speak the language, and she could not leave her daughter. Her husband with his money and connections would never let her go. Or their daughter. Though he could beat the crap out of his wife, he adored Masha.

  Max decided to make a final gift to Olga: he invited her to the Arkaim Hotel for a farewell night on St. Valentine’s Day. It was his last day of work at the clinic, and he had four free days in Russia. He wanted to give them to Olga and spend these last days together to make them unforgettable.

  In the theater hallway, there was a huge basket of roses waiting for Olga. She accepted the invitation with joy and sadness at the same time. It had been always like this in her life: bad things followed good things. Sometimes good things and bad things went together, hand in hand.

  That week her husband had in plans to go to the country to visit his parents. Olga said she was too busy at the theater.

  “Mommy, we’re going to visit our Granny and Grandpa!” Masha said. She was really excited and looked happy.

  Olga was helping Masha to pack her things. It was her first trip into the country.

  “Oh really?” Olga said. “What are you going to do at your Granny’s?”

  Olga’s mother-in-law and father-in-law lived a long distance from Chelyabinsk in the countryside. They would come to visit their granddaughter occasionally, but Vladimir had never taken them to their village.

  “Well, she has lots of animals,” Masha said. “I like animals. She has cows, sheep, a goat maybe. She got hens, too. And little chickens. Aren’t you coming with us, Mommy?”

  “Next time, Masha.”

  Olga bit her lip and said nothing more.

  She looked at her little daughter and thought that she was getting more and more father’s looks: the same facial features, the gait, the voice. From Olga, Masha had inherited only long legs. Olga had once played with the idea of making a ballet dancer out of her, but she soon had to dismiss it. She remembered all the tension and pain she herself had to go through to become of some value to the world of ballet.

  “Mommy, I want to grow up quickly and become a ballet dancer just like you. This way we’ll be always together. Right? We’ll work at the same theater. Right?”

  “Sure, Bunny,” Olga said quietly and looked out the window at the falling snow.

  Outside, Olga helped to sit Masha in her child’s safety chair and buckled her safety belt.

  “It’s nice that you’re getting better,” Vladimir said hugging Olga. Her body tensed. She let him kiss her on the lips but her lips did not respond to his kiss. They were a plastic doll’s lips now. “I promise I’ll take you to a resort in Italy for a couple of weeks. You’re going to be perfec
t again.”

  When her husband’s shiny VW Touareg pulled out of the driveway, Olga raised her hand to wave goodbye but in her thoughts, she was far, far away from here.

  That night she was trying to take in every single cell of Max. When he exploded inside her, she felt that his every atom was craving to merge with her. Afterward, they lay in the bed for half an hour without talking, thinking their own thoughts.

  Olga had trouble sleeping. She looked at the street lamp outside the hotel thinking about her life, about Max, about Masha …

  “I don’t want to leave,” Max said. He didn’t sleep either. “I was born here, you know, in this city, and it’s in this city that I’ve met my first love.” He dug his face into her hair.

  “Sometimes I wish they were dead,” Olga said.

  “Who?”

  “Them. My husband. My … My family.”

  Max sat on the bed and took her face in his hands. “No, honey. You mustn’t say so. You have to go on … For both of us.”

  “It’s good you’re leaving …”

  “Olya, I want to come back. I will come back for you. Just let me sort the things out at home, get my diploma, and then we’ll be together again.”

  “No, we won’t,” Olga said. “He’ll kill us both.”

  “Who? Your hubby?” Max chuckled.

  “Don’t call him that,” Olga said. “He’ll kill me. But before doing that he’ll break my legs.”

  “You sound like he’s Russian mafia or something.”

  “You just don’t realize how serious all this is.” There were tears in her voice.

  “Your injury,” Max said. “Was it him?”

  She said nothing. She hugged him, and her body became soft in his strong arms.

  ***

  Next morning a series of explosions woke her up. Sun rays were caressing her cheek through the hotel window. Max was not in the room. She cursed herself and Max for failing to wake her up. She was scared. Her heart was racing. She had to be at home to be able to answer the landline phone in case her husband called.

  She looked out the window and saw the frightening trail in the sky. What had happened? A plane crash? She tried to reach Max via her cell phone and failed. There was no connection. The thought that she tried to call her lover in the first place instead of her family members made her feel look guilty, and she dialed her husband’s number. The result was the same. The line was dead.

  When Max entered the hotel room, he found Olga sitting in an armchair holding her cell phone and looking blankly in front of her. He tried to apologize he had left her, but she did not respond. Her face was pale, her gaze was blank, and she ignored any external stimuli. She held this rigid pose for a couple of minutes while he desperately tried to get through to her. His first thought was that she was in a catatonic stupor of some sort. He bent over her to check her vitals and then call the ambulance but she suddenly came to, shifted her glance at him and held out her cell phone.

  He gave her a strange look and took the cell phone. There was one incoming message. Olga had received it right after the explosions and before thousands of callers jammed the cell phone network.

  “I know everything,” Max read Vladimir Rudakov’s message aloud.

  SIXTEEN

  What Gavrilov was looking at was the epitome of death. Patient Zero lying in the bed snarled at the newcomers fiercely, white foam dripping down his chin. His eyes were rolling widely in the eye sockets. Blackish veins stood out on his neck like little snakes when he tensed himself, trying to tear apart the ropes, which were restraining him. His head was lolling from side to side like a broken pendulum, and the stand for the IV dropper, to which the patient’s arm had been hooked, tottered and nearly fell but the Spetznaz man straightened it with his elbow. Gavrilov could see the infected one’s beads of perspiration running down on the dirty pillow. It was deadly cold in the room but the monster did not seem to need warmth to sustain life. He was apparently in fever, and Gavrilov was sure the infected man’s body was hot like a furnace.

  The way the man’s eyes were rolling reminded Gavrilov of that chicken from his childhood.

  When he was ten years old, he used to play gorodki, a game similar to the skittles, when he was visiting his grandmother. Once he was left alone in the household. He went outside to play in the yard, and in the heat of the game, he knocked a young rooster off its feet with the bat. The chicken clucked and fell down like a hit skittle. Little Kostya came up to it and saw it screwing up its eyes. The bird was in pain but he didn’t know how to help it. He scooped it into his hands and brought it to a feeding trough trying to make it drink. But it wouldn’t even open its beak. He tried to stand it on its legs but it tumbled into the trough like a rag doll. Gavrilov felt so helpless and alone sitting there. He got scared and started crying.

  Grandmother’s household was big, and Granny wouldn’t have noticed the loss of one chicken. But still, he was afraid of punishment. He could not bring himself to finish the bird off so he brought it to the barn, climbed up the ladder to the hayloft under the roof and laid it there. He covered it with hay and left.

  He had never told anybody about it. All that night, he cried thinking about the poor bird. Eventually, he let his tears drive him to sleep. In a couple days, the warm water in the nearby lake and his village friends he made that summer helped him forget all about it. It was only when he was leaving for town, he remembered about that accident. He decided to check on the chicken one more time. As he was climbing up to the hayloft, he smelled the horrible stench. He located the burial place and removed the pile of hay. The carcass of the bird was still there. Little worms and maggots were swarming in its white feathers. The eye sockets were empty holes. He spent an hour sitting beside the dead chicken mesmerized by that little show of death. In a couple months, when he came to his granny’s during his fall vacations, he saw only a little pile of feathers and clean bones.

  This was his first encounter with death. He got to know that life is too fragile. And he got to know that death could give him some power over other living beings. He had seen death many times since then. He saw it when his grandmother died, and he met it again when he got into a car crash, which killed both his parents. When he turned up in an orphanage, his only friend hung himself after his foster parents had refused to keep him and returned him back. Death was everywhere. It was following him.

  He saw many deaths during the war in Afghanistan, Chechnya and many other war zones. The more deaths he saw, the less precious life was becoming for him. Only his own life was of value to him.

  The Spetznaz fighter raised the device above his head and unbuttoned his khaki jacket to reveal a string of explosives attached to his body. “Back off! All of you! Or no one here gets out alive!”

  The small clouds of his breath hung in the air like comic book speech balloons. The man pulled with his left hand a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at Gavrilov and his men. Gavrilov motioned his companions to lower their weapons and make a step back. He himself remained standing where he was.

  “Who the hell are you?” Bulldog demanded.

  “That’s none of your concern,” the Spetznaz man said. He waved his gun at them. “Get the fuck out of here to where you’ve come from.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Gavrilov said, “because I need him.” He pointed at the humanoid with red-rimmed eyes set in the gray face.

  “Ah, Colonel Bandurov,” Captain Voyevodin’s voice boomed in Gavrilov’s helmet. “I see you’re still alive! Good to know that.”

  “Remove your helmet and get rid of it,” the man said to Gavrilov. To show that it was an order and not a request, he fired into the ceiling. Pieces of plaster came showering down.

  “Abstain from communicating with this man!” Captain Voyevodin said. “No negotiating with terrorists!”

  “A terrorist, huh!” Colonel Bandurov said with a nervous chuckle and shouted toward the camera set on the helmet. “You’re the fucking terrorists here, you bunch of
scumbags!”

  He cocked the gun and motioned it at Gavrilov, “Now take this damn thing off!”

  “Don’t do this!” Captain Voyevodin’s voice peeped in the headphones.

  Gavrilov took off his helmet and threw it across his shoulder. It hit against a bedpost, smashing the camera to pieces. “I’ve wanted to do this since morning. Got tired of his buzzing into my ear like a frigging mosquito.”

  “Put your hands up!” Colonel Bandurov said.

  Gavrilov complied and put his hands on his head. He sensed the man was not bluffing. Everyone in the room was tensed expecting any kind of reaction from this guy any moment.

  “Who is senior among you?” Colonel Bandurov asked.

  “I am,” Gavrilov replied, “obviously.”

  “All right,” Colonel Bandurov said. “I’m going to talk only to you. The rest of you—step the fuck out!”

  Gavrilov turned to look at his men and nodded. They walked out backward, their jumpy fingers on the triggers.

  Once they left, Gavrilov motioned with his head at the man lying in bed. “Is that him? Patient Zero? The boss zombie?”

  The Spetznaz man clenched his teeth, and his eyes darkened with rage. “Shut the fuck up! It’s my brother you’re talking about!”

  “Oh, right. Colonel Bandurov. His name was Bandurov, too. Still is, I mean. Pavel, right?”

  The man said nothing.

  “So what are you doing here?” Gavrilov said.

  “You’re in no position to ask questions here,” the colonel said. “Now take off your coat and drop it on the bed behind you. I want to see you’re not armed.”

  Gavrilov did so. Then he raised his hands again, his calm stare riveted to the metal muzzle of the gun. He was not afraid of death. His life was full of death, and he thought a lot about it. Death for him was just the final point, which everyone eventually reaches at the end of their life. Some of them sooner. Some of them later.

  “You’re that Spetznaz fighter who’s gone missing?” Gavrilov didn’t wait for an answer and asked another question instead. “And you killed all those guys outside in the hallway, didn’t you?”