I guess they were afraid of that asshole hitting them. When a cyborg whacks someone, they really feel it.
I showed them the gun I found, but they just said stuff like “That’s dangerous!” or “What if you mess it up?” and squeaked timidly.
Sometime after that, they vanished—well, they didn’t rat me out, so I wasn’t angry about it. I was the oldest of the remaining children, though, so it was decided that I’d be the one to do it.
I went over to a towering pile of trash beside the manhole and pulled out a cardboard box. Inside was a bundle of the Pravda newspaper. I unwrapped it, and a hunk of metal dropped into my hand.
The Tokarev.
I worked the breech, imitating Captain Murometz, and chambered a round.
The gun was black and pretty heavy. It felt like it might just tumble out of my hand. I didn’t even know if I could shoot it. But it was all I had. So it was the best gun in the world.
—They want to know what happens if I mess it up?
“…I’ve just gotta do whatever I can,” I muttered, then slid back into the darkness from which I’d just come.
The guy was a svin’ia. I wasn’t scared at all. Or so I kept telling myself.
—Do real pigs act like him? Just eating and sleeping and snorting?
I sure didn’t know. But it seemed like that was the way to describe him.
I decided not to think about what that made me, the one being pushed around by the pig.
—Whether this works…or not…it ends today.
Thinking that made my steps a little bit lighter as I worked my way through the sewer.
The underground tunnels, which were like a marriage of brick and concrete, were somehow wide and cramped at the same time. It was too dark to really know. I couldn’t even see my breath fogging in front of my face.
The pipe where that bastard was, though, had a light in it. I’d been there and back plenty of times; I wouldn’t get lost.
I made my way along carefully, so that my too-big, ill-fitting shoes wouldn’t make any noise as I approached.
The Tokarev was hefty; my hand felt stiff, like my fingers had ballooned to twice their normal size.
I peered slowly into our space.
There he was. Just like always. Sinking into the sofa that had exposed springs, gazing into the blank air—he might’ve been awake or asleep; who knew?
The Kalashnikov was in his metal hand. In the other was his bottle of vodka. Like I said, same as always. He was kicking back, reclining among the junk furniture we had struggled to acquire.
I took a step closer.
I heard him mumble something to himself.
I took another step.
His head lolled heavily to the side.
Another step.
He still wasn’t looking my way.
Somehow, I managed to raise my arm. I didn’t have the courage to get any closer—but I also didn’t have the courage to back away.
Captain Murometz fired his gun casually, with one hand, but I didn’t think I could manage that. The Tokarev was just so heavy, and my throat was so dry—I hardly felt like I could aim in a straight line.
Nonetheless, I somehow forced myself to raise the gun and stretch my arms out in front of me. They were shaking, but I still tried to aim carefully, fixing my target…
“Oh, huh? It’s you…”
I fired.
There was a high-pitched crash, I flew backward, and the bottle of vodka shattered into a million pieces.
“Oh, you’re dead, you little shit!”
I couldn’t say it had gone well.
Almost immediately, I was tumbling backward through the pile of trash from the guy’s meals.
“Urgh… Ah?!”
I felt a burning pain on my left cheek—it had been sliced open by the broken glass bottle flung with all the strength a cyborg could muster. I didn’t have time to be thankful that I still had my eyeball, though.
It was practically a miracle that I hadn’t dropped my Tokarev. Keeping a tight grip on my gun, I scuttled back into the tunnel.
There was a metallic groaning sound and a gust of wind as something flew over my head. The guy had taken a swing at me again, with all his strength.
I heard the crash of something else breaking, but I didn’t have time to care. I just made sure I held on to my weapon as I got to my feet and tried to point it at my attacker.
“You son of a bitch!” he howled, and I found the muzzle of the Kalashnikov locked on me. The king’s scepter, pointing at me with almost mechanical precision.
“Aahhhh!” My finger pulled the trigger basically on instinct. There was another boom. My arms jerked up, and my eyes burned from the flash. I reset and fired again. Then again. I kept firing.
Only a pain like my thumb was going to come clean off alerted me that the trigger had stopped moving.
“Wh-when…?”
I let the Tokarev clatter from my throbbing hand. I looked down and saw a massive tear at the base of my thumb, blood pouring out of it. When the Tokarev’s breech moved backward, the weird way I was holding the weapon had resulted in it savaging my hand.
“………” I applied pressure to the wound while staring vacantly in the guy’s direction. He was lying back on the sofa, a hole under his right eye. There was red stuff on the walls and on the floor behind him, like beet juice, spreading in a pool. His metal hands clicked eerily as he spasmed, endlessly gripping and opening.
“Is he dead…?”
It looked that way.
If I’m being honest, I couldn’t really process what had happened or why. I collected the Tokarev with my left hand—I wouldn’t be doing any more shooting—and kept a tight grip on it, though it was pointless.
Approaching slowly, careful to avoid the quivering Kalashnikov, I gave the guy a good once-over. He was gazing into the air, just like he had been moments before this all started, but now his tongue dangled limply from a corner of his mouth.
He was dead. There was no question about it. One of the bullets from the Tokarev—I had no idea which shot it had been—had spattered his brains everywhere.
Even after I realized that, I didn’t understand why I was still alive.
I brushed my cheek and clenched my right hand to try to numb the aching pain. Then I slowly turned in the direction he’d been looking in.
“The pipe…,” I murmured.
The hot-water pipe. It was lying sidelong where I’d been standing just moments before.
Of course. How else could a cyborg veteran have failed to kill a ten-year-old?
Just as he’d been taking aim, he’d noticed the pipe—our lifeline—and thanks to his hesitation, I’d gotten in the first shot.
It was because of this asshole that I’d had to do this, and it was because of him that I’d survived it.
—And he was dead.
Me… Apparently, I was so at a loss for what to do that I just stood dazed in front of the guy.
I say “apparently” because I don’t remember doing that, not even for a minute. But that’s what the girls told me I was doing when they and the boy discovered the terrifying scene.
I only snapped back to my senses when the girl with the long black hair tugged on my sleeve. She was biting her lip, and I saw tears beading in the corners of her eyes.
The girl with short black hair was crying helplessly, and the boy was starting to sniffle, too.
So I… Well, I thought I should try to do something appropriate for the moment.
“Tsk…,” I clicked my tongue, and then wrenched the Kalashnikov from the guy’s hands. I could sell it to the junk dealer—it would get us bread for tomorrow, with enough rubles left over to buy some candy.
The asshole was dead, but I was alive and so were the kids, and so we needed food.
That was no different from before.
I’d learned a few things, some important lessons, from that day.
One was that even a cyborg could die—which meant meatbags could die even easier.
And the other was to never point a gun at something I didn’t want to shoot.