The Living & The Dead (Book 1): Zombiegrad

by Hasanov, Oleg

  They removed part of the barricade, freeing just enough space to squeeze in. Marcel went in first. He held his gun in front of him. His empty Kalashnikov was slung over his shoulder. He made a quick look around. It was safe to go out. They went out onto the landing.

  The soft carpeting muffled their steps as they walked upstairs. Because of the moaning, nobody would hear them anyway.

  They went up higher. Smears of blood on the walls looked like a demented man’s graffiti.

  ***

  Ksenia told Mimi that her father had been wounded. Better the bitter truth than sweet lies. Always had been her rule in life.

  Mimi covered her face with her hands and began crying. Palchikov grunted in his tent and grumbled, disturbed by the noise they were making but then resumed snoring.

  Ksenia didn’t try to calm down Mimi. Didn’t say anything. Just let her cry it out.

  The girl sighed and wiped her tears away. “But he’s not dead, is he?”

  “No,” Ksenia said. “I’m sure he is going to be all right.”

  They lapsed into silence. Ksenia saw the girl had let her pain out and was beginning to calm down.

  “What does he do?” Ksenia asked Mimi. “Your father? I mean, what did he do, before the plague?”

  “He’s a fisherman.”

  “A fisherman?”

  “Yes, he’s been putting a lot of effort and money to put me through school. He doesn’t want me to be as poor as him.”

  “He’s a very good person,” Ksenia said. “And he will do everything to protect you.”

  “I know,” Mimi said. “Thanks, Ksenia. You’re a good friend. I wish you were my sister.”

  She hugged Ksenia. Ksenia remembered that she had always dreamed about having a sister as well. She dreamed they would play together and talk together and tell each other little secrets. But then her mother died, and she understood she would never have a sister or a brother. This Chinese girl never talked about her mother. Only about her father. Maybe she had lost her mother too. Just like her.

  “You are my sister, Mimi,” Ksenia said. “Since the day I met you.”

  Mimi smiled through her tears.

  “Now go to your bed, little sister. Dr. Brodde has probably lost you. And it’s cold here.”

  Mimi nodded and smiled again. “Okay. Be careful, Ksenia.”

  “Yeah, stay alert. Don’t get hurt.”

  Mimi went to her bed by the fireplace, avoiding obstacles in her path. Ksenia was left alone again on her duty. She strolled to the barricade. The noise outside was terrible. All these scratching and moaning and thumping sounds made her shudder.

  She hastened to leave this dreadful place. On her way to her post she went into the bathroom and closed the door. She wrinkled her nose. They used up all the stocks of disinfectant they had to kill the horrible odors in the bathroom, but the smell still stayed.

  She walked into the farthest stall. The bathroom had only one window, and when she closed the door, there was only a tiny strip of light left under it. There was nobody else in the bathroom, so she didn’t bother to lock the door. In semidarkness, she put up the lid and placed her gun on the floor next to her right foot. She sat and winced. The toilet seat was icy cold. She cursed for not having brought something warm to place on the seat. But the urge to pee was strong, and she tried to cope with the cold.

  As soon as she started tinkling, the front door opened and, and she heard footsteps on the tile.

  “Mimi, is that you?” Ksenia called.

  No answer. Only the light, cat-like steps.

  Ksenia kept doing what she was doing, staring on the floor. Then the door was snatched open, and someone grabbed her by the front of her sweater. She didn’t have time to scream as she was dragged off the seat. She hurt her knees upon falling and peed in her jeans. The assaulter hit her on the head, and she fell face-first on the cold floor. Her vision blurred.

  She rolled on her back with a painful groan and saw Grigory Palchikov standing over her. A sinister grin was plastered to his red face. He was puffing. Without saying a word, he gave her a kick in the stomach, and she curled up in the fetal position, suffocating with pain. Everything blurry, she couldn’t focus. She heard the zipper being unzipped and her immediate thought was Palchikov was that hotel rapist and killer. The one who had nearly killed her the other day.

  Only this time he would succeed in killing her.

  Palchikov pulled off her boot, then the other one. Then he pulled off her jeans in one jerky movement. Just as he placed his hands on her panties, she recoiled like a spring and hit Palchikov in the nose with her forehead. Palchikov let go of her, temporarily blinded by the blow. Ksenia cried in pain and tried to get up.

  “I’ll kill you for this, bitch!” Palchikov said and hit her in the face. She sprawled on the floor and started crawling toward the stall where she had been so peacefully sitting a minute ago.

  Palchikov grinned, feeling the power over his victim.

  She crawled into the stall and grabbed her gun from the floor. She clicked the safety off with a flip of her thumb.

  “No, you won’t get away!” Palchikov said. “I’m not finished with you yet!”

  He grabbed her by the legs, and the gun slipped out of her hand and clattered on the tile.

  The man grinned. There was a quick movement behind his back, and his face froze like somebody pushed the pause button. A thin metal object came out bursting through his throat. Then the tip of the metal thing disappeared quickly in the wound. Gurgling sounds emerged from the man’s torn throat, and he staggered on his feet. He stood like this for another moment and toppled sideways on the floor.

  Above his body, Alyona stood. She was breathing loud, a fireplace poker in her thin fragile hands. She staggered and dropped it. Its tip was covered in blood.

  THIRTY-THREE

  They didn’t extinguish the fire. They had no fire engines, and even if they had, they wouldn’t waste the precious drinking water on it. So they just let the kindergarten burn out to the ground. The building was still smoldering, and a number of orderly officers had been appointed to watch the fire and prevent it from spreading.

  Litvakov sat in his car, watching the smoke curling from the ruins. Besides Misha, only two other kids had survived. All of them, including Misha, were placed in quarantine.

  Litvakov started as a stone hit the back window of his car. He spun around and through the shattered window saw a man standing behind his patrol car. He gesticulated frantically.

  “Get out of the car, bastard!” the man yelled. “How can you go around breathing when my daughter is dead?”

  Two soldiers dragged the man away. People in hazmat suits lifted Svetlana’s charred body in a black body bag and put it on the stretchers. Zipped her up. Took her away.

  Litvakov put his face on the steering wheel and sat for a few moments. Then he started weeping. The weeping was soft at first but then grew into a loud howl of a wounded animal. He cursed himself for not using the chance to escape from the city when he had it.

  He didn’t have much time for grief. In half an hour a military helicopter landed on the helipad in the middle of the school stadium. Litvakov recognized the aircraft immediately. He had seen it already. A Mi-26, a heavy transport helicopter. It was General Petrov’s.

  The helicopter rotor blades whirled up snowflakes in the air. Ten armed men jumped out of the Mi-26. Then a young man stepped down the ladder. The general’s aide, most likely. Followed by General Petrov himself and a tall bearded man clad in a priest’s black cassock. Litvakov could see the golden cross on the man’s chest from a hundred yard distance. His skufia, which was a brimless cap, had a cross, too. The men pressed their hats to their heads so the whirlwind of the rotor blades wouldn’t suck them up. Two jeeps drove to the helipad, and the men got in. The vehicles rode toward the school building. When the second jeep was passing past the ruins of the kindergarten, it halted, its engine humming idly, and the general rolled down the window.

&nb
sp; Reluctantly, Litvakov got out of his car and saluted him.

  “Good morning, Comrade Colonel,” the general said. He looked at the smoking ashes and added sourly, “If only mornings can be good. I’m really sorry. We have an emergency meeting right away. Your attendance is obligatory.”

  Litvakov nodded silently, saluted again and slid into his car. He squeezed the steering wheel tight, his knuckles turning white. He was firm with the decision he had made within this hour. To escape with his children from the camp early next morning and head toward the city border. He thought about taking Tatyana and Nastya. He owed Tatyana for saving Misha. But then discarded this idea. He had spent enough of his time thinking about other people, while he should have paid more attention to his own family.

  Snow spewed from the tires as he ground his way to the main facility, situated in the school building.

  They gathered together in the school principal’s office. The room was small. Two desks. A set of chairs. The Russian flag in the corner. Certificates on the walls. The president’s statuette in the image of a sitting Buddha on top of an audio system.

  There were four people in the room: the general, his aide, Litvakov and the camp commandant. The aide was new. Litvakov had never seen him before. Lanky young type in his mid-twenties. Brisk movements. Observant and intelligent. The general’s guards were in the hallway. The chaplain was somewhere else.

  The commandant’s name was Fyodor Borisovich Lesnov. He was a Major. He was an energetic man in his fifties. Very religious. He had eagerly wanted to have a chaplain in the camp. He had asked for a chaplain half a dozen times. But his pleas had not been heard. He was so desperately missing the Word of God that he had started organizing religious meetings and delivered clumsy sermons himself. They were not popular, and after two boring meetings, his flock had left him.

  Lesnov thanked the general for bringing the priest, but General Petrov was in low spirits and glanced angrily under his bushy, gray-haired eyebrows. Lesnov clammed up.

  General Petrov pulled his glasses down his nose and looked at the men over their rims. “The current situation in the city is bad, as you can see it for yourselves. And that’s a wrong word. The situation is shitty. And that’s a wrong word again. Emergency camps “North” and “East” are down. They’re gone, overrun … The “South” camp had been closed, too. They evacuated their staff yesterday. No one survives in that area. No refugees coming in. So the camp became redundant. This camp here will eventually go down, too. Just a matter of time. We’re losing this battle.”

  “But hopefully not the war,” Lesnov said. “We’re still holding.”

  “You have been holding, Comrade Commandant,” the general said. “Until this morning. You’ve had a security gap today that led to deaths of thirty-four children and one adult, Colonel Litvakov’s wife. Thirty-five dead persons in one morning. The court-martial will have a closer look at this case of utter negligence. You both are going to be arrested right after this meeting.”

  Lesnov sat straight as if he had swallowed a rod. His face became florid and sweaty. He put his eyes down and stared at his hands. Litvakov swallowed hard but said nothing.

  General Petrov leaned down and opened his briefcase. He took out an envelope and put it on the desk. He opened it slowly and retrieved a document. “I’ll make our meeting short. No time for idle talk. I have an order directly from Moscow to eradicate the city and its adjacent territories within the thirty miles around it,” he paused, and looked at the members of the meeting, “by a nuclear strike.”

  The aide looked at the general and at the document lying on the desk. He gulped nervously but didn’t say a word. There was a moment of grave silence, and then the room exploded with shouts and exclamations.

  “But this is madness!” Lesnov said.

  “Whose order is that?” Litvakov demanded. He felt his hands covered with cold sweat.

  The general raised his hand. “Hold your horses, everyone. Calm down, goddamnit!” he said. “Protocol 9”, issued by the Ministry of Defense, approved and signed on February 25 by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, that is the President of the Russian Federation. The order is to be executed on Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m., March 2.”

  He shared the document with them.

  “But that’s in three days!” Lesnov said, his eyes buried in the paper. “We have more than five thousand civilians in this facility. We won’t be able to process and evacuate all of them in such a short term.”

  The general said, “No one is talking about evacuation, Comrade Commandant, because no one is leaving. There will be no new refugees. And you won’t have to process the rest of them. No one is getting out of the city. At all.”

  “This is insane,” Litvakov said. “Is that kind of a fucking joke? With due respect, Comrade General, it’s you who has failed to regain control over the city. One day you will stand before the court-martial yourself for this.”

  The general took the document and returned it into the envelope, the corners of his mouth tugged with a smile. “Thank God, this is not going to happen soon, Comrade Colonel. The Minister of Defense is resigning. I was appointed as his deputy this morning. I’m moving to the Kremlin at the end of this week.”

  Litvakov’s grief over his dead wife had evaporated in a flash. “I can’t fucking believe it,” he said under his breath to no one in particular.

  “Why was the carpet bombing stopped?” Lesnov said. “I think it was quite effective.”

  The general’s aide cleared his voice and said, “According to the 1977 Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, carpet bombing of areas containing a concentration of civilians is considered a war crime. And our drastic measures have triggered a political unrest in the United Nations.”

  “A war crime?!” Lesnov exclaimed. “Wouldn’t nuking a whole city be a war crime? Why has all this been swept under the carpet all this time? Why are the mass media not allowed to cover what’s happening here? Why is everyone silent? Where are the journalists?”

  The aide said, “All journalists, both Russian and foreign, are in the vicinity of Lake Chebarkul. They have a lot to do there. NASA representatives are there, too. They’re helping to extract the meteorite from the bottom of the lake.”

  The general said, “This is an unprecedented event we’re having here. We didn’t know how to handle it. Didn’t want to arouse panic.”

  “Ha!” Litvakov said. “And you thought it would be best to keep your mouths shut. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to be burned in the nuclear fire, but everybody stays calm. No panic!”

  The general said, “It’s all very complicated, Colonel. NATO demand military presence here. They are sure we have developed a biological weapon. Which, ironically, is not true. It has developed itself in the course of the strange chain of events. We are on the verge of World War Three. In two weeks, we’re going to let them do a little inspection, so to say. Let them do it,” he chuckled. “By the time they arrive here, we’ll have destroyed all the evidence.”

  Silence hung in the room. The midday sunlight mirrored off the shiny desktop.

  “Can’t anything be done at all?” Litvakov demanded.

  The aide chimed in again. “There’s nothing we can do. Even if we terminate every infected one in the city and its limits, there will be left thousands of corpses to dispose of. It’ll take a year, even more, to clean the city up. Springs starts soon. The heat, all these decomposing bodies. The place is going to be worse than Rome during the Black Death plague. It would take months to burn all the bodies. And don’t forget that the virus is highly contagious. Even if we burn all the bodies, there will be patches of organic matter lying here and there and everywhere. Sooner or later, your cat will dig up a piece of contaminated flesh and bring it home, or a kid gets scratched on a half-buried bone playing in an abandoned building, and it will start all over again. Also, the virus is not studied thoroughly. What if it suddenly gets airborne?”

  “But what is the meaning of this holocaust?”
Litvakov said. “Just leave us alone. We’ll manage here on our own.”

  The general took off his glasses and tapped them on the document. “No,” he said. “It’s not up to me now. It’s an order, and orders exist to be executed, not to be discussed.”

  “You’re a fascist pig!” Litvakov said.

  “You can be rude all the way you like but it’s not my order,” General Petrov said and shrugged his shoulders.

  “We have more than five thousand people here,” Lesnov said. “Their lives are at stake.”

  The general said, “Once you tell those five thousand people about what is in store for them, they’ll be rushing to the city border. We can’t let it happen. And we can’t have this place as a permanent rescue station. The camp won’t be given any more supplies. First, you will eat what you have, then you’ll eat animals—dogs, cats, rats—at the risk of contamination. Eventually, you’re going to eat yourselves.”

  He pushed the document aside and folded his hands on his chest. “But I’m allowing you to have a personal privilege to evacuate your loved ones.”

  Litvakov glanced at his hands, deep in thoughts, then back at the general. “What about the rest of the people? Can we save them?”

  The general stood up with a sigh and strolled to the window. “Father Arkady will be holding a night mass tonight. At least, the souls of your people will be saved.” He turned to Lesnov. “Isn’t it the most important thing for a Christian, Comrade Commandant?”

  Lesnov started crying.

  “After the mass, everyone who’s willing will be given a host laced with cyanide,” the general’s voice was ingratiating. “Wouldn’t you like your people to die quickly and peacefully and not witness the eternal flame of Gehenna, which is at hand?”

  The commandant gave no reply.

  “What about you, Colonel?” General Petrov said. “All of you will die, your daughter and your son. Think about it. Tomorrow morning you could be in the safety of your new flat in Yekaterinburg. All you have to do is give us a little help.”