“The guy was a svin’ia <pig>,” I said, my mouth dry. “I wasn’t scared at all.”
The first time that I, Danila Kragin, ever killed a person, I was ten years old.
The other guy was a veteran back from the wars, and a cyborg to boot. He even had a damn Kalashnikov.
As for me, I just had my Tokarev—which I’d found in the trash.
I had understood one thing, though: If I didn’t do him in, I would die.
He’d shown up in the manhole that we had commandeered for our living space.
Moscow has an extensive underground. The junk dealer talked my ear off about it once—he said it started with some king who had underground tunnels made seven hundred years ago.
Seven hundred years might as well be a million. The number didn’t mean anything to me.
After that, people built other stuff down there—sewage canals, transport canals, subways, air-raid shelters. Everything underground.
Then there were the folks who’d found life up top less than pleasant. They all packed into the Moscow underground.
All that mattered to me was that the underground was dry, there was no snow, and the wind didn’t blow there.
Even better—although there were plenty of little ratholes, the one we’d crawled into had one very important feature: Some of the hot-water heating pipes went directly through it. Of course, there had been some people who died living in the underground, but at least it wasn’t from freezing to death.
We didn’t have a house, but this was someplace we could call our home.
—And then he showed up.
His name… I don’t remember his name. For that matter, I don’t remember telling him my name. He probably didn’t tell us his, either.
He was a heavy guy, and his daily activities consisted of four things: drinking vodka, shouting, hitting us, and sleeping. His favorite thing to say was “You brats are only alive because I fought for you!”
—Khren znaiu <Like I gave a shit>.
It was all I could do to put food on the table by handing over the stuff I pulled out of the trash to the guy who bought people’s junk. With this clown swiping my haul, I couldn’t even do that. Not to mention that after a while, I figured out that he was planning to make bratniye shestorki <mafia runners> of us.
There was no way in hell I was going to risk my life doing mob work just so this asshole could have more drugs to get high on. So when I found a Tokarev in one of my dumpster dives—and when I noticed it was still loaded—I steeled myself.
If he figured out what I was up to, I would be finished. But I wasn’t smart enough to come up with an actual strategy.
That’s why we played along with him that day, like we always did.
I went from trash heap to trash heap, rifling through them until my fingers were red, searching for anything remotely useful.
Our glorious motherland had won a war someplace—or maybe lost, I didn’t know—and the military had tossed out a whole bunch of mechanical stuff.
In that respect, at least, what the asshole said was almost true. The only problem was that me and mine had been thrown out along with the rest of the trash. We’d learned in our very bones that not being wrong didn’t make you right—and the reverse was true, too.
When I had a whole cardboard box full of metal bits I’d collected, I sold it to the junk dealer. He eyeballed the junk and gave us a few kopecks for our trouble.
Yeah, I knew he was lowballing us. But he wasn’t rolling in cash himself, and it was plenty for us to get by on. I wasn’t upset.
I tossed the kopecks into a can that I half hid under my shirt, then crawled back into our hole.
Inside was a sofa we’d dragged in and set next to the heated pipes, and the pig treated it like his throne. He would sit with his oil-streaked arms spread wide, his Kalashnikov and a bottle of vodka for company.
I would humbly offer him the can—he wouldn’t even glance at it, but would take a swig of his alcohol and say, “All right, kids. Clothes off.”
We knew it was coming, of course. We knew that if we tried to object, insist we’d given him everything we’d made, he’d just bellow, “You’re hidin’ some, I know it!” and beat us.
If he was going to beat us anyway, better to take one hit and get it over with.
When it was the girls’ turn to undress, he took his time, patient and slow. And sometimes when he was done, he’d get a grin on that filth-covered face of his and say, “Can’t wait till you grow up.”
So as always, I brought him the money, held it out, took my whack, and went sprawling head over heels onto the floor.
Getting hit with a hunk of metal made mind sort of go blank for a second. Then I’d sway like my whole body was going every which way, and the next thing I knew, the floor and the ceiling had traded places.
He snorted as he watched me crawl on the floor, then grabbed his bottle and brought it to his lips.
I was sure he somehow believed we would go on living even if he never fed us anything.
There was no need to correct that misconception. Today was the end. I couldn’t put up with one more minute of this.
I stole a glance at him, then hunched over and crawled back outside the manhole.
Snow was falling. Snow was always falling. The wind gusted, it was cold, and soon it would be night.
“This ends today,” I said with chattering teeth to two girls, who stood—fully dressed—outside the hole. Both of them had black hair—they looked so similar they could have been twins, but they couldn’t have been more different. One bit her lip but tried to look ready; she just watched me silently. She had long hair. The other child was sobbing, but when I offered her some candy from my pocket, her face lit up. She had short hair.
If we didn’t want that guy leering at us while we changed, we had to go outside the manhole to do it. She cried because it was cold, and froze because she cried. There was frost on her face, and her skin was red even though she hardly seemed to have any circulation.
I couldn’t stand to look at the state she was in—that’s why I gave her the candy.
—I really wanted to save that until the very end.
I’d seen it in some comics in a pulp magazine I’d fished out of the trash. I didn’t know what the story was—that would require knowing how to read—but it didn’t matter. Anyone would know that the hero was the bogatyr’ Captain Ilya Murometz.
He was probably having yet another battle with some villain, maybe a Western bloc spy. Just before sneaking into the enemy base and shooting the place up, he’d set aside a cigarette, which he would smoke after winning.
I’d planned to do sort of the same thing—suck on that candy after today’s business was all over. My special treat.
But she was crying, and if that asshole caught on to me, it would all be down the drain. There was really nothing else I could do.
“Sorry,” I told the long-haired girl as she stared at me. “That’s my last one. If this works out, I’ll buy you one tomorrow.”
“…Mn.” She nodded.
If it works out. If it works out, I might be able to save one ruble. Might be able to buy a chunk of white bread. There might be change—enough for two or even three pieces of candy. If it works out.
“If it doesn’t, though… Then you have to run. As fast as you can.” I directed this toward the other child there, a boy with snot dribbling from his nose. He sniffled in answer; I wasn’t sure if he understood what I meant.
I let out a breath.
They were all about five years old—definitely younger than me in any case.
Me and these three: We were all the kids left in this hole.
There had been others. Kids older than me, stronger than me. But they ran away.