Page 18 of Kingmakers, Year One

“Hey!” he shouts a little louder in his raspy voice. “I’m talkin’ to you!”

His lank, unwashed hair hangs around his shoulders. He’s wearing a jacket with nothing underneath, his skinny chest bare. He’s got scabs on his face and body, and I can tell from the stiff way he walks that his feet are swollen. The effects of Krokodil.

The government has tried to stamp it out a dozen times, but it always pops up again. It’s just so cheap to make. You can cook it in your kitchen with shit bought from pharmacies and hardware stores: hydrochloric acid, paint thinner, and phosphorous scraped off the side of a matchbox.

It’s an imitation of heroin, just as addictive. The only downside is the way your flesh rots away from the injection site, and your brain starts to atrophy inside your skull. Which doesn’t lead to the best decision-making.

Which is why this fucker thinks it’s a good idea to talk to me.

“That a new iPhone?” he demands, eying my phone greedily.

I stop walking, turning to face him slowly.

“You want to fuck off now,” I tell him. I slip the phone into my pocket, so my hands are free. While I’m doing that, I close my fingers around the smooth handle of my switchblade instead.

Without that faint blue light, the tunnel is even dimmer. It doesn’t matter. I’m sure I can see better than the three junkies.

They’re all standing now, fanning out silently so the woman is in front of me, the two men trying to flank me.

“Give us the phone,” the second man hisses.

The problem with fighting these three is that I have no idea what diseases they might be carrying. One scratch from an uncut fingernail and I could get hepatitis.

As they close in around me, I plan to end it quick.

The guy on the right charges first. I send him stumbling backward with a kick to the chest. The second guy isn’t aslucky. I press the button to flick out my blade while it’s already whistling through the air toward his torso. I stab him in the liver with medical precision, then jerk the blade back before I get any blood on me. It still splashes down on the toe of my sneaker.

He drops to his knees, groaning.

That takes the steam out of the other two.

The girl raises her hands, blubbering, “We don’t want any trouble.”

I tell her, coldly, “Then fuck off like I said.”

She grabs the duffle bag and scrambles off down the tunnel, the opposite direction I was walking.

The guy I kicked looks at his fallen friend, then at me. He runs after the girl, abandoning the man I stabbed.

I ignore him too, continuing on down the tunnel.

He’ll probably bleed to death, but the thought doesn’t disturb me any more than the knowledge that every butterfly you see will be dead in a month’s time. That’s the cycle of life—junkies die young, from the drugs, the company they keep, or trying to rob the wrong person in a tunnel.

I continue on my way, until I reach the staircase up to Krymskiy Proyezd.

Spring in Moscow is hell.

There’s a word the Russians use to describe it:slyakot,which means “slush mud.” That’s partly why I stayed down in the tunnels—so I wouldn’t have to navigate the torrents of thick brown mud, stiff with ice crystals.

The roads in Moscow are always shit. But in the springtime you have to worry that you’re about to step through a slush drift into a pothole that will break your ankle. The sidewalks become crowded with shuffling, slipping pedestrians, and the traffic is worse than ever. The melting snowdrifts are black from a whole winter’s worth of car exhaust.

Without any proper drainage system, the melted snow sits in stagnant puddles. It’srasputitsa—the time of the year “when roads stop existing.”

I hate Moscow.

I’m an American. I was born in Chicago. My mother is American.

And yet my father brought me here, back to the city he never loved. Back to the environment so miserable that it drove my mother to drink herself half to death, until the only way to save herself was to leave.

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