by Ana Calin
“In 1994, fifteen-year-old Damian Novac got on a train. His purpose: illegal work abroad, since he was underage. He never came to destination, though. The train broke down in a village close to the border – somewhere around Oradea, but still in the middle of nowhere – and he checked at an old inn, which offered free lodging for him and all other travellers. What they had in common? They’d all transferred to that train in Bucharest, and had almost no contact to their families. A few days after that, a farmer found the place empty and messed up. There were stains of blood everywhere, and the windows broken. It looked as if a massacre had taken place, save for the main element – bodies.”
A chill went through me. “How did Iordache come upon all this?”
“Wait. One year later, Novac burst into a hunting lodge in the Apuseni Mountains, surprising a ranger, who fortunately stopped to think before he reached for his rifle. The ranger managed to reason with him and contacted the authorities. He was the only person Novac talked to, the boy had gone completely wild. He didn’t say a word to the cops, doctors or shrinks. The police got their info from the ranger, and Marius from his well-established sources within the police force. But, as I said, the Intelligence Service closed the cops’ snouts overnight, and Marius was left with nothing.”
“But what had happened at the inn? Did Damian ever tell the ranger?”
“He told him that and more. Apparently there was an ambush the night Novac spent there. None of the others were ever found, dead or alive. But the most shocking part was actually in the headline, which I saved until now, because it only makes sense in the context: Damian Novac escapes the hands of organ dealers.”
Chapter Five
I froze. “What?”
“Yes. The police ascribed the massacre at the inn to a criminal corporation, BioDhrome. They allegedly dissolved soon after the R.I.S. started on their trail, but Marius is convinced that’s bullshit. They were a corp, much too big to evaporate in thin air just like that. He’s convinced they used their power and money to . . . transform. Based on his later investigations he’s also sure there was more than organ trafficking involved.”
“More?”
“Experiments on humans. It was these experiments that became a matter beyond police competence, even a matter of national security. A matter for the R.I.S., the Military and Defense. Marius tried to go deeper on this, but, as I said, he eventually hit a dead end. The R.I.S. silenced all his leads, and created a file titled The Executioner on it – a name given to Damian Novac, who had returned to civilization with certain . . . powers.”
“And you believe him? Marius?” I grinned like an idiot. This isn’t happening was on replay.
“And why not, Alice? His account fits so well with what Svetlana said that night at the Bourbon. Now she acts crazy, people try to kill us with no obvious reason, and Damian’s acting all mysterious. What else could explain all this, if not that they’re after unfinished business with the Executioner, as well as our kidneys and livers? Hell, maybe it was Novac himself who drew us in this trap.”
I stared blankly at her. “It can’t be.” I shook my head. “It can’t be happening.”
“You’re in denial,” she sneered.
My mind began to wrap around the hideous reality bit by bit. A paralyzing fear gripped me.
“This is some mind-blowing shit, Leona . . . Some serious shit.”
“Now’s not the time to be a wimp, Alice,” she admonished, putting her hard face on. It reminded me of the scowling gypsy girl I’d discovered in our back yard years ago, barefoot and muddy, stealing apples.
“Easy for you to say. You’ve seen it all. Your dad was a shylock, for Christ’s sakes, and the entire city trembled only when they heard his name. But I was raised in a cocoon, Leona, I only know nasty shit from books.” A shudder went through me at the flash of memory involving her father darkening our doorstep, deep frown on olive-skinned face, heavy golden chain around his neck.
Leona grumbled. “Well, even for me, organ trafficking and illegal medical experimentation are a whole new level. Derailing trains and making people disappear without a trace means power, Alice. A whole lot of power. A hydra, its claws drilling deep in the Romanian underground.”
“If they want our kidneys and livers they’ll get them!” I squeaked. “We don’t stand a chance!”
“Pull yourself together.” She slapped my back, then jumped up and grabbed one of the metal objects from the counter. Only when she pressed it in my palm did I realize it was a short, rust-adorned screwdriver.
“What are you doing?”
“Keep it under your sleeve,” she said, tucking a knife under her own.
“But Damian said – ”
“I don’t care what he said. Right now, I don’t trust anyone in this place any more than I do People out there.”
“Leona, you’re losing it.” The words were careful to leave my mouth. She looked as manic as Svetlana had just a few hours earlier, save for the dark circles around the eyes and the sucked-in cheeks.
“Oh, you think?” she snapped, her face red and her brows scrunched. “There are three people here who knew about BioDhrome – Damian, Marius and Svetlana. Now you mark my words: one of them has drawn us in this trap. One of them works with those butchers hand in hand. So I’m not following a suspect’s orders. And neither are you.”
As soon as she finished her sentence she grabbed my wrist roughly and dragged me out.
The main room was loud and crowded, but she elbowed our way close to the center, where Damian and Hector answered questions worse than in a press conference with the President. George tried for the anchor role, appointing the next questions, but no one minded him. He looked overwhelmed and utterly useless. Leona shot a few of her own arrows in the mix, but they didn’t hit anyone’s ears, not until she managed to clasp Hector’s arm.
“This is crazy,” she yelled. “What’s the plan?”
“There is no plan,” Hector yelled back. “We just get out of here as soon as Damian and I have checked the area.”
“Out? Freaking out? Into what, chains, knives or bullets?”
Angered, Hector pushed her into a mass of bodies. I was in the front line, her shoulder squashing my face.
“Stay here, if you prefer gas.”
“What do you mean, you troll?” she shouted after him, but he was already too far. He talked to George and pointed in our direction, making the latter nod. Proud to have gotten a direct assignment, George hurried over and led us to the putrid sofa by the stove.
“Gas, yeah,” he said as if he’d lived through this before himself. I couldn’t decide if his composure was admirable or just plain ridiculous. “Gas that doesn’t smell or burn, but that’ll blast our adrenaline levels so high, that we’ll jump at each other’s throats.”
“We’ll fucking kill each other?” Leona shrieked.
“Some would end up dead, others severely wounded.” The words dropped on us like bedrock. “In any case, it would go fast. When no one, or just too few still stand, they’ll barge in. They’ll shut down the survivors and take the bodies.”
Hellish killing techniques.
“Novac told you that? Why didn’t he fucking do it from the start?”
“You use that word a lot,” George admonished. Both he and Leona seemed to be growing furious for no real reason, as if they barely waited for a pretext to catch fire.
“Oh, don’t you try to educate me, George, I’m too old for that shit!”
“Mind your fucking tone!” Before I knew it, he slapped her hard with the back of his hand. Leona’s head snapped sideward. I jumped between them and shielded her with my palms up, stricken by George’s violence that showed in his face as if his arms had never been around her and his lips never on hers.
“For Christ’s sake, what’s gotten into you, George?”
He skirted around me, grabbed Leona’s shoulders and pushed her against the wall.
“You started this, bitch! You talked too much in fro
nt of too many, now look at the panic around you. They assaulted him with questions, he gave them answers, and all hell broke loose.”
“At least you know the shit you’re in, you slobbering moron.” Her knee found a quick way between his legs. George crouched in pain, with both hands on his jewels. His face was a swollen red, his eyelids wrinkled as he pressed them shut. Leona clutched his nape and the same knee kicked his mouth, while I watched dumbfounded.
The next instant George got hauled into the wall. The attacker immediately flung himself into the picture too, hands stiff like claws, hair messed up, his nostrils almost fuming – the Wretch. No longer a zombie, but a crazed animal, holding its prey in place and looking eagerly around for something to grab, something to hurt with. Leona had taken care of him when he’d come back from the horror blizzard, so he must’ve felt protective of her and furious of George. Out of reflex, I followed his scowl. Nothing, there was nothing around us except a lonely beer can that I kicked out of his reach.
Leona grabbed me above my elbow and wrenched me aside. “Don’t freaking come between them, you’ll get hurt.”
“They lost their minds! They could stab each other!” I jerked to free myself from her clasp, but she held on.
“No, they can’t. Novac had everything that might be used as weapon gathered in piles, and the piles are nowhere around here. Just let them cool down.”
It hit me. “My God. Damian never intended to arm us, but to make sure we don’t . . .” My body fell mellow as I realized what was truly going on, and Leona let go of me.
“The gas. It’s already inside, and it’s turning us into crazed animals,” I concluded.
One glance around the room was enough to see a number of heated arguments and fights had started everywhere. Leona looked more and more like a cornered animal herself as her eyes darted around, her hands clenching like claws.
“You’re right,” she said, her eyes sweeping the room. “The poison has probably been in the entire time, maybe in small check-doses. It was in yesterday, when Marius provoked Damian. Tonight, when Svetlana attacked you. Now it’s pouring in full force.”
“But where is it coming from?” I spun in place, getting dizzy as I searched for the source. The windows were closed. The door to the corridor was open, most certainly the ones to the bunkroom and kitchen too, but the entrance door was shut. No draught. Gas that doesn’t smell or burn. The answer fell into place like dollar signs on a slot machine.
“It’s the freaking stoves,” I cried out. “We need to get out, Leona! We need to get everybody out, it’s the only way to stop a massacre!”
She looked at me with knitted eyebrows, flash-filtered my words, then nodded, and grabbed my hand. She dragged me in her wake, plowing our way towards the exit until a thought of Damian stabbed my brain. I drilled my heels into the ground, technically pulling the brakes. Leona turned to me with desperate, bloodshot eyes.
“What the hell are you doing?” she bellowed.
“We need to warn the others, we can’t just save our own ass.”
A second later someone shoved Danny between us, the hippie woman’s younger boyfriend. He knocked our hands from each other’s clasp as he stumbled backwards, and we came apart.
“Leona!” I called out, my arm outstretched, reaching for her. No use, I lost her in the rapidly growing hustle, bodies squashing me between them. I managed to wriggle out of the congestion, but I couldn’t find Leona.
Damian, he can stop this. I spotted him with two of his iron-pumped friends, their fists balled by their thighs, ready to attack him. Damian watched them with the sharp gaze of a hawk, ready to fight. I started toward the scene on an impulse to help him, but before I took a few steps a mass of hysteria poured my way. The noise turned deafening. I lost Damian from sight and hurried to move out of the congestion before people’s eyes fell on me along with their wrath. My heart pounded with fear, my eyes wide and my mind alert. There wasn’t a friendly face left, every single person everywhere I looked had turned into an animal.
As I found refuge by the wall, I realized my hand was cramped, clutching hard to a thick handle – the screwdriver. Air, I had to let air in.
I reached the window, the one closest to the stove, gripping to the handles and trying to jerk the frame open when my eyes struck against the black pane. I let out a startled cry.
There they were again, those eyes, now clear and perfectly defined. Like the glare of an animal caught by camera flash, they glowed bright, only that the color was clear – blue. The pane broke instantly with a splintering sound, followed by a sharp pain in my knuckles. Without realizing, I’d punched the window. The fog of shock dissipated, stripping the truth.
Mine. Those were my own eyes. I squeezed my hand above the cuts to numb the pain, while automatic connections built in my head. Luminous eyes – was it an effect of the gas?
The next thing I knew, a groan cracked in my ears. George gripped the pointy shard that hung from the frame like a lonely fang, and stabbed his opponent in the throat with it. I screamed as thick, dark red blood poured from under the hand the Wretch took to his wound, between his fingers and down his wrist. He opened his mouth in distorted awareness that life drained out of him, the nerves in his eyeballs exploding like red lightning while blood gurgled in his mouth. He was dying.
Maybe there was still time. I flung the coat off and jolted to him, intent to press it on his wound and stop the bleeding, but bumped into George’s arm that punched into my stomach like a barrier of bone. Struggling for breath, I managed to pull myself up. It was too late. The Wretch crouched on the floor like a squirming pretzel, coughing out blood. The sound drilled into my brain.
Time lost meaning. I stood there, watching transfixed how this young man died. Every second of his suffering imprinted in my adrenaline-fueled heart as everywhere around fists punched, windows broke, men and women growled like beasts.
Exposure. It was a long shot. But it was the only shot. Enough planning.
I turned on my heels and sprinted to the main door, grabbing coats, jackets and arms in my way, pulling hair, bumping into brawling bodies, as many of them as I could in order to draw attention. I don’t know by what miracle fists hit only the air behind me, by what newly surfaced instinct I ducked down before anybody could grab me. Maybe fear had really kicked my adrenaline level so high that my feet moved like propellers and my reflexes sharpened of their own accord.
I threw the main door open and cast myself into the raging blizzard that felt like needles on my skin. Sight instantly blurred, visibility reduced to inches, but my legs kept running as if a whole murderous army chased me.
I hoped it did. I hoped they’d gotten out of that slaughterhouse disguised as a lonely cottage, a wooden ghost in the Carpathians. I hoped I’d angered them enough to have them rush after me, screeching their teeth, thirsty to see blood drain from my body like it had from the poor Wretch. Thirsty to see me squirm in dying pain. But I also hoped that, by the time they caught me, they’d be themselves again. This wasn’t supposed to be a suicide mission, but a wake-up action.
The snow was quicksand to my legs, sucking me down, but despair fueled my muscles and propelled me forward. Every glance I threw behind revealed nothing, the storm a wall both in front as well as behind me. It roared, swallowing all other sound. There might have been wolves just meters away, I wouldn’t have known, I wouldn’t have heard them howl or growl.
Suddenly, something heavy and metallic closed around my ankle like an iron fist, and jerked my leg from my hip, causing such pain that my heart stuttered out of rhythm. I fell flat on my face. Before I could spit out the snow in my mouth, a force yanked me in a pull. I snaked backwards, dead trees, roots and stones rushing by, while I desperately tried to hook my fingers in the ground.
Snow was scraping glass to my palms, and I knew exactly when a couple of fingernails sprang off. The pain was there, but just so severely unimportant that it didn’t stop me from grabbing on to every dead branch, from hooking my
fingers into the frozen ground again and again. Still, I let go quickly of anything stable, or the pull would’ve ripped the leg from the rest of my body. The ride was dizzying and my screaming automatic. My reason shut down, and autopilot kicked in.
Only moments after I came to a brusque stop. I waited a few moments for the pull to start again and, when it didn’t, I rolled on my back. My flesh was stiff. I couldn’t flex my muscles to get up, I only managed to lift my head. Torn clothes, the skin on my stomach and breasts looking like beaten meat. I cried before I touched myself, expecting pain. But there was nothing, my entire body was numb.
Whimpering, I put snow on the reddest places with a stiff hand, but even that small amount of wit fled off when a pair of legs in earth-gray pants and rubber boots emerged from the white storm. The face cleared only when it was close above mine. A face withered by many winters, with ashen stubble and a rotten grin. A face that might once have been peasant’s, but belonged to a bloodthirsty animal now. Not for a second did I have hope. I knew he was there to hurt me, I saw it in his eyes.
He said something, but I didn’t hear it. The storm’s roar covered the sound. He pressed his fingers on my stomach, grinning with expectation, hungry for the pain. But, when nothing came, he tightened his lips in anger and threw himself over me. With sadistic appetite, he crushed my face with his fist.
The blow felt like lightning in the most literal sense. Then it all went black for moments, until the next one came. Then the next one, until I tasted blood in my mouth. He wasn’t going to stop. He’d beat me to death, leaving my corpse disfigured.
In a surge of despair sight returned, bringing the madman’s face into focus. That ugly face with a bad, stinking grin. The face of an evil maggot who didn’t deserve to live. Who thrust himself at a helpless woman, taking her for an easy prey, for a chunk of meat on which to unleash his killer instincts.
Anger pumped frantically in my veins, making me feel as strong as a machine gun. I let out a cry of rage and sank my fingers in his eye sockets, pushing my thumbs hard in the jelly of his eyeballs and wishing for the rusty screwdriver I’d dropped at the cottage. He grabbed my wrists and tried to pull away, but I didn’t let him. I wound my legs around his waist, sticking to him like a leech.