Page 56 of Ascendent
He watched the man walk down the tarmac and speak into a radio. In Evenkiysky, like in most of the rural region, cell phones were useless. Radio was the only way to communicate. Most villages had a single radio, and important men, like Kilaqqi, and the other shamans, along with the reindeer herders and the forest rangers, had radios as well.
Would Kilaqqi even answer? Did he even care at all about Sasha?
He closed his eyes. Tried to force his heart to keep beating. Willed it to continue, willed the ice in his arteries to hold back.Not yet. Not yet. Sergey.
Boots appeared beside his head. The Evenki man reached for his coat and hauled him up by his lapels. Sasha was taller than him, but he was sick, and he almost fell forward. The man helped him stand, offered a shoulder for him to lean on. He pointed to a helicopter across the small airport. A man in faded pants with no shoes was climbing into the front seat. He had an unbuttoned shirt on and a furry hat with ear flaps on his head. “You are in luck,Russky. Kilaqqi says he has been waiting for you.”
Sasha stumbled with the man’s help to the chopper. His duffel slipped off his shoulders, fell to the ground. He left it. If he stopped moving, he might never move again.
The chopper pilot was barely twenty years old. His beard was patchy, still growing in places, and he had pimples on his forehead. But, he had the engine running and the rotors whirling, and he flipped switches in the cockpit like he knew what he was doing. Sasha slumped in the cargo hold, pitching over onto his side. If he died in a chopper crash, at least he’d be warm.
The world tilted, wobbled, and tilted again. Boreal forest, endless taiga, danced beneath the old chopper’s belly. They were tiptoeing on the tops of pines, so close he could brush the evergreen feathers. He felt the helicopter rumble around him. Heard the roar of the rotors, like the roar of the blizzard that whited out his vision again. He closed his eyes––
And opened them. The helicopter had touched down in a clearing in the middle of the forest. Fallen trees, stripped of bark, were piled on one side of the clearing. A stream meandered across the grassy lowland. Conical yurts were spread carelessly, a central bonfire in the clearing spitting out gray and white bitter smoke. Reindeer chewed grasses and lichen at the forest’s edge. Poles carved into totems, shaped into birds and bears and reindeer, stood watch over the camp, ten feet in the air.
Shouting. Naked children running across the grasses. Women chasing after them, grabbing hands and arms and elbows, holding them back. One man pulled away from the others, from the men gathered around the herd of reindeer. He strode for the helicopter, waved to the pilot. Kilaqqi.
Sasha struggled to sit up. He fumbled for the door handle. Failed.
Kilaqqi opened the side door of the helo. Sunlight haloed him, fell like golden filigree through his arms, his legs, every strand of his long, loose hair. Wind whipped up, swirling around and within Kilaqqi, into the helo, around and into Sasha.
He groaned. Held out his shaking hand.
“Si bulmuche bihinni.” Kilaqqi took his hand and laid his palm over Sasha’s forehead.You are ill.
Finally, he could breathe again. He gasped, drawing in a breath like he’d just broken the surface of the ocean, like he’d been trapped beneath ice in the Arctic, but now was free. He pressed his face into Kilaqqi’s touch, turned his cheek up into Kilaqqi’s palm.
He understood Kilaqqi, somehow. He answered in Evenki. “Bi sot hiktirewche bihim.”I am very cold.
“I’ve been calling you,” Kilaqqi rumbled. “I’ve been waiting for you, Sasha Alexanderovich Andreyev. We have work to do on your souls.”
* * *
Silence saturatedthe forest around Andreapol Air Base. There were no bird calls, no rustle of tree limbs. Even the insects seemed to be silent. Everything living was avoiding Andreapol. Everything and everyone, except for them.
Sergey peered through his binoculars toward the base. Ilya stood by his side, doing the same. “Nothing. We can’t pick up any movement. FLIR is reading some sporadic heat signatures from one of the hangars, but that’s it. It doesn’t look like there’s anything alive there.”
“Not anymore.” Sergey slid a glare sidelong to Ilya.
“What would you have done,Seryozha? Stormed the base? Possibly allowed your men to be infected?” Ilya jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “You saw the corpses we found!”
Sergey swallowed. His gaze drifted to the rear of their tent, Ilya’s command bunker hidden in the trees a kilometer back from Andreapol. Along one canvas wall, photos of the corpses Ilya’s team had recovered from the villages and in the woods were tacked up in columns, each long list of photos labeled with a terror-inducing disease.Botulism. Plague. Anthrax. Hemorrhagic Fever.
Ilya had found two more bodies in the forest. They were in military fatigues, unit patches from Andreapol on their chests and arms. They’d probably tried to flee the base. Cuts on their palms matched the pattern of concertina wire that ringed the base’s perimeter. Their photos screamed from the tent wall like something out of a horror film, or one of Sergey’s worst nightmares.
They were found on the ground, like they’d collapsed while running. Their faces were a mottled bruise, slack and misshapen, as if the muscles and tendons that had held their face to their skull had dissolved, had been replaced by bloody hemorrhage. Black blood had poured from their noses, their mouths. Their eyes were open, but swam in lakes of crimson. Blood ran down their fallen face like tears. Soaked the dirt beneath them. Their bellies were swollen, full of hemorrhaged tissue.
Blood waseverywhere. Staining the dirt around the men in the photos, saturating their uniforms, their flight suits.
When they’d collapsed, their bodies had finally given up. They’d crashed. The virus had caused their internal organs to shred apart and liquify, Dr. Biryukov had told Sergey, walking him minutely through the corpse photos. Their organs, their stomachs, their intestines, their lungs, even their brains, had liquefied, bled out within their abdomen. They’d been running themselves apart until there was nothing holding their guts together anymore. Like a bursting balloon, they’d crashed to the ground, and everything had erupted from them. From every orifice.
Every drop of their blood carried a hundred thousand strands of whatever virus the GRU had engineered. They’d fallen in an ocean of hot virus. Dr. Biryukov had ordered that their bodies be burned after the photos were taken. Burned where they had fallen, until the earth was scorched, until every sign of their death was banished, obliterated.
“Hemorrhagic fever,” Dr. Biryukov had said. “But not natural. Weaponized. You know the Soviets, and then Putin, were working on such a weapon for years.”
“I would not wish this death on even Moroshkin,” Sergey had growled. “This is no way to face your end.”
“If it helps, they died sometime long before this. The virus destroyed their brains. Liquefied the parts of their mind that controlled their personality, their higher brain functions. All that was left, when this happened, was the primal mind. And that was trying to escape. Get to safety. But the body had been hijacked by the virus, and they were doomed.”
