—I’m gonna die. Real soon.
In a few minutes at most, probably. Hell, not even that. In one or two. Then I’ll join the farsh <piles of flesh> on the floor.
Hardly any different from a corpse.
Number Eight’s lost a third of his fucking head, after all, and Bones is missing everything south of his shoulder blades. The rest of ’em are in about the same shape. It would be a waste of time to go into detail. I know none of them counted on going out in style, but the oil-slicked floor of a pivnaia <bar>? That’s some tomb.
Tomorrow the Mops will get them, and then konets <that’s it>! Poka-poka <Buh-bye>.
Of course, it’s the bartender who’ll have to do that. Meaning this place isn’t going to get cleaned up for a few days.
As for me, I’m just lying here, basking in the warmth of a pool of spreading blood and steaming viscera.
Shit, for a second there, I thought I was gonna retch. I still might. Corpses don’t vomit—I can tell you that.
Who did this? A man who now stands on top of the mountain of bodies. Wreathed in smoke, he easily hefts an HCB—a big, heavy machine gun—in one hand. The guy has some serious muscle, unlike me. He reminds me of Captain Ilya Murometz, the bogatyr’ <heroic super soldier>, but he’s no Ilya Murometz.
His flesh—well, it’s not as delicate as actual flesh, for one thing. His chrome armor plates are covered in crimson splatters of blood, the Ilyich lamp overhead bathing him in greasy white light. That thing’s supposed to be constant current, but looking at this guy, I wouldn’t be surprised if its shine on him became unsteady.
He has a body of solid metal. Strong as a train, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He’s one of those veterans—a cyborg. Not like us miaso <meatbags>.
Pretty obvious what would happen to a person who picked a fight with a bastard like him, right? Like, say, if a miaso liquidator—a “Janitor”—tried to take on a cyborg soldier head-on. Well, let me spell it out:
I’m gonna die. Real soon.
In a minute or two at best. I guess I could do some deathbed reflection, but what would be the point, really?
I’d be better off asking myself how the hell I got into this mess. Which takes us back to…oh, about fifteen minutes ago.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Finally decided to show up, eh, Danila Kragin?”
Those were the first words I heard when I walked in.
It was a shitty little pivnaia, desolate enough that no one would care if some Janitors kicked back there.
I ducked out of the cold and into the establishment, shaking myself like a wet dog to get the snow off.
“Everyone here?” I asked.
“Yeah. They’ve been waiting for you.”
“Huh, that so?” I nodded and looked around at the others.
It really did take all kinds. They were Exhibit A in the catalog of what a client could get for dirt cheap. That included yours truly.
I recognized a few—Number Eight, Bones, Rip, Raspy. As for the rest, I knew their faces, if not their names—or I’d at least heard rumors about them. Same way they’d heard of me, no doubt.
But I wouldn’t call them friends.
Familiar faces…yeah. Satisfied that the term had come so readily to mind, I approached the counter. I took some kopecks, small coins, out of the pocket of my body armor and casually ordered a vodka.
The television in the corner was running the novosti <news> behind its magnifying glass. Another day, another triumphant advance by our Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) armies over a border somewhere.
“That shit’s depressing. Change the channel. Put on some goddamn sports or something.”
“Fuck you. This diktor zhenshchina <announcer lady> is hot.”
Turned out no one cared about the news after all.
Yes, another day, another glorious victory for the WTO. The next story would probably be about the Western bloc countries. They were whining about climate problems, but it might as well have been talk about pomidory <tomatoes>. They kept preaching about green, green, green, but their hands just got red, red, red.
Only half watching the television, I sipped my stopka <shot> of vodka, then asked, “So what’s the objective?”
“Some ugolovnik <common criminal>. Igor or Dmitry or some fuckin’ name like that,” Number Eight said, not even bothering to take off his beloved PNV—personal night-vision equipment—as he looked at me. Word was he’d nicked them off some guy he’d assassinated, but I happened to have seen him liberate them from the corpse of another Janitor.
“He’s a returnee from our glorious WTO army. Wouldn’t be good for society to leave him alive.”
“Vot tak <That so>?” I said with disinterest. I didn’t have much confidence whether it would be good for society or not.
That was when somebody noticed the submachine gun hanging over my shoulder. “A PPSh?” they asked like they couldn’t quite believe it. “Think that’ll even work on metallolom <scrap metal>?”
I took another sip of my vodka. “I’m not a good shot when I have to actually aim.”
“Guess that bounty’s all mine, then.” The guy who spoke specialized in the KS-23, a comically bulky gun converted from an antiaircraft cannon. Not a bad choice as weapons go. Just not the sort of thing I preferred to use.
“It can shoot gas bombs and grenades. You’re lookin’ at a universal’noe oruzhie <weapon that can do anything>.”
“Tebe povezlo <Ain’t that nice>.”
“One thing I’ll say for a machine gun. At least you can swing it around real easy.” Bones worked at his teeth with a toothpick—guess he had nothing else to do—and nodded like he knew what the hell he was talking about. “But if you want ease of use, there’s better stuff out there—like what I’ve got.”
He patted his own submachine gun, called Groza <Storm>, which had a grenade launcher fixed under the muzzle. The launcher was built into the weapon, and the magazine behind it gave the whole thing a real twisted look.
“My brother’s with the army of the NKVD,” Bones added, leering. He was talking about the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. As if anyone had asked him. “He made sure one got to me.”
“Sounds like a great guy,” I said.
“Eh, he comes in handy once in a while.”
It wasn’t much of a conversation. All of us were nervous. That’s all there was to it. Yeah, even me.
Janitors who don’t get nervous don’t last long. The ones who do get nervous are the next to go. Everyone just tries to be the last in line to punch their ticket. Yeah, even me.
“Sure, whatever,” said a guy whose name I didn’t know. He was reading a pulp magazine, looking at an announcement for the Moscow Olympics accompanied by gravure pictures of an attractive woman with a cold smile. Apparently, only the Western bloc countries had decadent art. Well, naturally, I guess. Aren’t beautiful women decadent?
She had hair so blond it was almost silver, skin as pale as porcelain—you could tell even with the crappy print quality—and eyes as cold as ice.
“Miss Moscow… There’s a hell of a woman,” the guy said.
“Yeah, a woman you have no chance with,” I answered, deciding to humor him with some conversation. “Stasia’s my lover’s name, too.”
The pivnaia went quiet for a moment. One of two things would happen next. If we didn’t hear a gunshot, there would be an explosion of laughter.
“Some old hag, I’ll bet! Every second lady you meet is named Stasia!” Number Eight said, pounding on my back with a guffaw. “What about her? This Stasia of yours get on you for child support?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ve got a younger brother and a couple of younger sisters.”
“Hey, I don’t give a shit!”
Soglasen <That’s fair>. I couldn’t have cared less to hear about other people’s loved ones, either. So I just shrugged and decided to focus on my stopka. I drained the rest of what was in there in one gulp, and the bartender poured me another.
—Now that I’m thinking about it, what was the first alcohol I ever drank?
A kind of bug-repellent cologne or something else containing straight ethanol, I’m sure. Whatever it was, it tasted awful.
Instead of going further down memory lane, while the other guys shot the shit with one another, I glanced down at my wristwatch. It was a Sturmanskie—the same kind that had gone into space with Gagarin. Very precise hands.
“Question—where the hell is Lion?”
“In the john, ain’t he?”
“Ey, ya think diarrhea can kill a cyborg?”
—That was when the door flew open with a bang.
“Privyet <Hey> dumbasses! You’re dead!”
I heard the click of an HCB trigger, and then Rip and Raspy were turned into borscht. Those guys were no slouches on the draw, but they weren’t quick enough to get to the Tokarevs on their hips.
“Koshmar <Shit>!” Number Eight went for his precious PNV, Hawknose screamed, and bullets flew everywhere.
Times like this, the best weapon is one you don’t have to aim carefully. All you want is to hit something—although all you’ll get is to have hit something.
The doorway of the bar was filled by a huge figure, our lead sparking as it bounced off him. Ahhh, vot tak <so that’s how it is>.
One second later, the HCB brrrapped again, and Hawknose disappeared, nose and all.
Number Eight got caught in the spray, and his head, with the goggles still attached, split into three pieces that went splattering across the floor.
Bones at least got his submachine gun up; the guy with a metal body was always going to be faster than the rest of us. The moment Bones’s weapon started raining lead on our attacker, my ears started ringing and the target disappeared.
That was high-speed movement at work—faster than the speed of sound—so there was no way bullets were going to keep up. A shrieking noise pierced the air—the scream of a cyborg. His soul was as blue as the blues.
Or anyway, I think that’s how some capitalist somewhere put it once. Guy’s long dead, anyway.
I had to feel bad for Bones. He flew backward like a truck or a tank had hit him.
The whole time, his beloved comrade Igor—or whatever his name is—was diligently unloading his own HCB. The walls of the bar were riddled with bullets, glasses shattered, alcohol flew everywhere, and a whole pile of cheap Janitors were spread here and there. The bartender didn’t even get to scream, let alone run away. I felt for him.
’Course, I didn’t have time to do those things, either.
I dove for the ground and rolled, tumbling among the flesh, viscera, and blood.
—I’m gonna die. Real soon.
Hardly any different from a corpse.
Well, hey. Sometimes that’s the way it goes.