After that, everything tumbled along steadily.
We felt like mice partying while the cat was away—for exactly one day.
In less than a week after I killed the guy, bratniye patsaniy <mafia thugs> started lurking around. And I wasn’t stupid enough to imagine I could fight them and survive. At the same time, if I went to a bunch of ugolovniki to take care of us, it would just be the same thing all over again.
Two bad choices. Which meant there was only one thing to do. I reset the Tokarev’s breech, somehow, and stuck the gun in my trousers, then went to have a chat with the patsan.
“That asshole? He went off somewhere,” I said. “So I’m gonna look after this rathole now.”
It wasn’t really a lie. The fact was, I didn’t know what had happened to the guy’s body—but his arms and his Kalashnikov were with the junk dealer, who’d been more than happy to buy them. Plus, thankfully, it looked like the bratniye lived better than that veteran. Or maybe they didn’t have the free time to bother chasing some brats out of a manhole.
Whichever it was, a young mob soldier said, “Yeah?” Then he snorted. “You ever want a job, give me a shout. I’ll find you something.”
Me, I figured I ought to go ahead and just accept what amounted to a show of decency.
The mafia was constantly involved in feuds and fights; they were after someone or another twenty-four seven. They would ask me if I hadn’t seen a person fitting such and such description, and I would search high and low for them, trying to bag the reward.
At first, when I found the target, I would go straight back to report it and happily collect a few rubles. When the junk dealer heard about that, though, he grinned and said, “Dumbass.” That ticked me off, but he added, “Think about it. You found the prey, but you go tell some other hunting dog where it is, wagging your tail the whole time? Stupid.”
When he put it that way, he was right. Instead of a hunting dog’s lackey, it would be better to be a hunting dog—and better a hunter than a dog. It certainly seemed to offer better odds of survival than attacking a cyborg in his personal hideout.
The second time I killed someone, I was nervous, but at least I managed not to do anything as stupid as cutting my hand on the breech.
By about the fourth time, I’d started to pay attention to my aim, so I could economize on bullets. When I got somewhere past ten people, I finally discovered this was what they called being a liquidator—a Janitor.
I would do anything; clean up anything; tomorrow’s working-class hero.
I bought food with the money I earned, then gave it to my little brother and sisters. Among us remaining children, I was the oldest and the only one who knew his last name. I didn’t want to hoard all the good eats to myself, lording it over the place—then I would be just like him.
So they all called me Big Brother, and I gave them the name Kragin.
Mariya Kragin, Nora Kragin, Valery Kragin…just like that.
“Danya? Big Brother?”
Then, before I knew it, I was fifteen, and Mariya, with her long black hair, was shaking me awake.
We’d long ago traded the sofa that I’d splattered with red for something better from the junk heap. It had seemed like the most comfortable thing in the world, but once I got used to it, I realized it was nothing special, and the springs stuck into my back. Thanks to those springs, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gotten decent sleep.
“…Hmm?” I grunted. My eyes fluttered open, and I sat up, my bones creaking unpleasantly.
“Nora and Valery said they’re hungry,” Mariya said. It was just like her to avoid mentioning that she was hungry, too, but her face—the one that asshole had been “looking forward to”—was hollow and sunken.
“We’ve got bread, don’t we?” I asked.
“We ate it all yesterday…”
I glowered, looking around the living area. Mariya flinched and shrank back. Nora and Valery were crouched in one corner, looking despondent. Doe eyes gazed back at me. Man, I could get sick of those eyes…
“Tsk,” I grunted. “Just hold on a minute.”
Without even glancing at my ten-year-old sister, I went to the kitchen, grumbling loudly all the way. The kitchen is what we called one of the earthen pipes where we had somehow managed to assemble a collection of stuff resembling cooking utensils. I popped a couple of bricks loose and took some frozen pelmeni from our improvised icebox. They were basically just round lumps of flour with nothing in them, but if the shape was right, then it was a dumpling.
I tossed some snow into a stewpot and lit a fire under it to melt the stuff and boil the water, then I dropped in the pelmeni to cook. The Nichrome heating element stayed dark. I glared at it, urging it to hurry up and turn red. While the stewpot heated, I took swigs of water to quiet my growling stomach.
Once the dumplings were ready, I flung them onto a plate and slapped some smetana <sour cream> on them. I didn’t know how many months we had had that stuff. Love it or hate it, one thing you could say for smetana—it never went bad.
“There. Well? Eat!” I said.
“Hooray! Thanks, Danya!” Nora, the one with short black hair, jumped at me like a kitten, her face aglow. As always, her mood could turn on a dime.
I pushed her away and put the plate on the table before I sat down on the sofa.
“Thank you, Big Brother,” Valery said. “I was starving!” He sounded apologetic, but it didn’t stop him from grabbing a spoon and stuffing pelmeni into his mouth.
Mariya was the last to take a seat at the table. She hesitantly brought one of the dumplings to her mouth, but then she stopped and looked at me.
“Um, Danya, don’t you—?”
“I don’t need any. You guys eat up.” I waved my hand dismissively, and after another moment of hesitation, she wolfed down the food.
From then on it was silent, except for the sounds of the kids chowing down so single-mindedly that I was afraid they might eat their plates, too.
I had more important things on my mind, like how I needed to earn some money so I could buy more flour and bread.
—But how?
That was the question.
It might seem obvious to say, but a Janitor couldn’t do his job if there was nothing to clean up. The bratniye went at it pretty relentlessly, but even they stopped for a breath occasionally. Right now, they were ignoring the sort of two-bit thugs that a fifteen-year-old brat with a Tokarev could hope to shoot. And the junk dealer had gotten drunk a while ago, fallen asleep by the roadside, and died. Another stroke of bad luck for me.
It was only after I lost him that I realized how important a trustworthy business partner was. I was just a kid, unable to get a read on the changing times, and this was where it had left me.
I sank back onto the sofa and looked at what occupied the space where the Kalashnikov had once been.
—I’m starting to think maybe it was a mistake to buy this thing.
But a PPSh was a necessity—at least, it had been when I bought it. At the time, I’d been convinced that I was going to have to start thinking about fighting cyborgs.
If I didn’t have this thing, I could probably have kept putting food on the table without doing that. But now that I had it, I had to take on those mechanized soldiers.
Right or wrong, you had to make a purchase when it was available, or you might never have another chance.
—Hell, I might not even have another chance right now.
“Hey, Valery,” I called. His shoulders jerked up as he flinched, but he looked up at me. “You done with your job?”
“Yeah, Bro, I am.” He licked the wound on his thumb that he’d incurred from a spring. “The bullets are all loaded up. Na <Here>!” Valery held up a flat, round hunk of metal for me to see.
I had no idea why it was called a baraban <drum magazine>. No matter how I looked at it, it was obviously more of a konserva <can> or even a discom <disc>.
“Good.” I stood up, went to the junk-covered table, and took the magazine from Valery. It was packed with no fewer than seventy bullets, the same kind that fed my Tokarev. A veritable fortune.
The PPSh had one real drawback, which was that if I slipped up when I was loading it, the spring could easily jump back and hit my finger.
I pulled on my jacket, hitched the magazine to the PPSh, and let it dangle from my shoulder. Then I tucked my Tokarev—a much better one than the gun I’d fished out of the trash that fateful day—into my jacket.
Last, I grabbed my business balaclava and stuffed it in my pocket.
Neither Mariya nor Valery said anything. They just watched me get ready to leave. I didn’t say anything, either.
I clicked my tongue for the umpteenth time and turned toward the exit.
“See you later, Danya! Ni pukha, ni pera <Hope you don’t catch any birds or beasts>! Break a leg!”
Nora’s voice, irritatingly chipper whether she knew it or not, echoed through the sewer behind me.
If one prayed for failure, the evil spirits wouldn’t be drawn to them. That was why I couldn’t reply the way I would have liked.
Instead, I said, “Aw, k cheortu <go to hell>.”
And my mouth and my tongue seemed to move awfully fast.