“A-are we…alive…?”
“Yeah. If I let you die, I don’t get paid, remember?”
We crawled out of the Lada Niva, which looked unlikely to ever move again, and into the store.
The place was a wreck—well, I couldn’t see at first. It wasn’t like I had PNV. But as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could tell. The car had plowed into rows of empty freezers, smashing the glass and scattering the frames everywhere.
Didn’t matter. The store was a big place, with plenty of things to hide in or behind. And lots of entrances and exits, too.
Then there was the fact that the spetsnaz wouldn’t just come racing in. I mean, this was the special forces we were talking about, right? They weren’t some half-cocked Janitor. These guys were elite. They’d be careful. Consider possible traps.
They’d ask themselves: Was it just an accident? Had we been crushed inside the car, or were we merely injured and not hiding? Was it an ambush?
They were well drilled on when and how to use their armored vehicles, and they could bring them to a halt at a moment’s notice.
Plus, there were seven of them—no, six, I guess. And that was assuming there wasn’t anyone else in the vehicle. But anyway, with that number, they wouldn’t be able to surround the building—or cover all the exits.
When it came time to see whether we were even still in the supermarket, Miss Tachibana and I could only hope and pray. Me, I would have long ago given up and just blown up the entire store, but the spetsnaz wouldn’t resort to that, I didn’t think. If they’d wanted us that badly, they would have sent more than one squadron, and I would’ve been dead long before I could be pondering this situation.
Iz pushki po vorob’yam ne streliaiut <Only a fool shoots a sparrow with a cannon>.
Which was another way of saying that those guys had no choice but to check the inside of the supermarket. Even better, they’d have to split up their meager forces to do it, some outside, some inside. They were probably tearing their hair out about it.
Not like I would stick around to play hide-and-seek with them. I was going to kick that table over and run away.
We would have to get out of the car and make our way through the store as fast as we could, in a matter of seconds. We would have a few precious minutes until they figured out for sure that we weren’t in here.
To gain that time, though, I needed Commissioner Tachibana to hurry and get on her feet.
“We’ve got to go. Unless you’d prefer to stay here and die?”
“N-no, let’s go…”
If we went quietly, we could get that much farther.
Even before we heard the screech of the spetsnaz hitting the brakes on their Horseshoe Crab, we were already crouched low and rushing through the store.
Most of our motherland’s buildings have similar layouts. The spetsnaz knew that as well as we did, of course, but in this case, it worked to our advantage. For example, even in a place you hadn’t been before, you never got lost looking for the toilet.
We exited via the service dock, then disappeared into the Moscow night, leaving no trace.
“Where do we go now?” Miss Tachibana asked.
“Somewhere they won’t come looking for us.”
As we ran, I detached my PPSh’s spent clip and traded it for a new one. Just because it wouldn’t scratch them, that was no reason not to keep the gun loaded.
Letting my hands do the work by muscle memory, I scanned the night for the “blizzard.”
I found her in a flashing signal. There was an intersection—the lights straight ahead and to the left were red, but the one to the right shone green.
The number showing how long the light would stay green never changed, just flickered, urging me to hurry.
Man, I had such a great little sister. Without a second thought, I dove down the road to the right.
We went left at the next intersection. Then straight ahead. Right, right. Straight.
Nothing wrong with the guys at TsODD, the transport organization center, helping us out with our work once in a while, right?
And it led us to…
“Yes! Perfect timing! Vibro!”
A GAZ truck pulled up in a sidelong drift, tires screeching, and halted right in front of us. In the driver’s seat, wearing dark sunglasses even in the middle of the night to protect his eyes from snow blindness, was Valery.
“Hey, Big Bro! Your ride’s here!”
“Thanks. Good work.” I reached through the window and mussed his hair, then headed for the covered bed at the back. The rambunctious kid was a certified contrabandist now.
Frankly, I had almost as many objections to that as I did to Mariya’s occupation, but at least he had a job.
It was better than Nora, anyway. I tossed my PPSh in the back and clambered up behind it. “Commissioner, you ride in the passenger’s seat. Valery, be polite to her.” The corners of my lips turned up in a smirk, and I was glad they couldn’t see me. “She’s a gospozha <proper lady>, after all.”
“All right. Thank you for your troubles, comrade.”
Of course, I couldn’t see them, either, so I didn’t know what expression was on the commissioner’s face.
As for Valery, I didn’t have to work to imagine his expression as he chirped, “Just sit back and enjoy the ride, Miss! I’ll get you there safe and sound!”
I bit back a laugh as I settled against the bed and waited for Valery to get going. He was putting on a bit of an act—do you suppose he realized it wasn’t quite working? I was assuming, of course, that it wasn’t “Technical” driving the car.
Technical being the name of the heavy machine gun mounted on the truck.
The vehicle was more advanced than the covered wagons society had three hundred years ago, but then, so was everything else. In other words, that advancement only made so much of a difference. And the people coming after us were wielding the most cutting-edge technology available, so we had absolutely no wiggle room.
“Hey! Here they come!” I shouted, and pounded on the sheet of metal between me and the driver’s seat. I could see the shellfish-like armored vehicle.
“I hear you, Big Bro! Try not to fall out!”
“Real cute!” I shouted back. “That’s Lubyanka behind us—just floor it!”
The GAZ wheezed like the ancient vehicle it was before it shot off into the streets of Moscow. Trying to stay upright despite the relentless shaking of the truck bed, I worked my way over to a gun mount that had been attached in an amateurish weld job.
But the mount was all that I found.
“Hey! Don’t you have any weapons back here?!”
“Oops!” I heard Valery shout. “I pitched ’em when the militsiya came sniffing around!”
“Well, aren’t you just a fucking genius!”
If he’d been five years old again, this would have earned him worse than a spanking.
I grabbed something long and thin lying in one corner of the truck. When I pulled the tattered cloth off it, I found a Degtyaryov heavy machine gun.
“Wh-whoooa…”
While I was busy fixing the thing to the gun mount, though, the spetsnaz’s Abakan opened fire again. Bullets tore through the cover without pity or mercy, and I had to get on the gun while it was still only half attached.
“Ya poshol <Here we go>!”
There was a deafening roar, and spent shell casings clattered everywhere. The flames hurt my eyes, and I could see sparks blossom on the armor.