My father was dead. Mother spelled it out like she always did, plainly and without emotion, explaining how he’d been playing golf and just keeled over from a heart attack in the middle of the afternoon a few months earlier. At first it didn’t hit me. But by the third time I’d read the note, a feeling had begun to build that no matter what happened, I couldn’t die in Almaty, that I had to make it out because I didn’t want to wind up like my old man. Funny. Every fight we’d ever had raced through my mind, and it occurred to me that the last time he’d seen me was when I’d flicked him off because I was too high to realize that he’d been crying upon finding out about my Kaz assignment, that he wanted me to stay home. He’d been smarter than me. Always. Looking back, I realized the
guy had been smarter than all of us, never missing a chance to tell me how stupid it was for someone to join the military or to have anything to do with it, always finding ways to get me jobs or get me into different schools to follow in his path. That was the bottom—the worst moment of my life—sitting in a cold tunnel while plasma shells rained topside, with a sudden realization that I wanted more than anything to get a second chance, to live, and that odds were it’d be over within the next couple of weeks. It was too late to let him know he’d been right. But this sensation of having to get home wasn’t about making something up to him or my mother; this was something inexplicable, like the news had opened the throttle on an internal engine so that it revved out of control, making me feel as if something would crack if I didn’t get out soon. He was dead; that was all that registered. And living was better, so being in Almaty just wasn’t going to work for me anymore.
There they were again: thoughts. As if I hadn’t learned my lesson, they crept in unnoticed, then ambushed me because I’d let my guard down.
The kid woke up and glanced over. “What time is it?”
“Does it matter?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
I thought about it for a moment and then shook my head. “Nothing. You got any food?”
“Nah. But I’m starving. Wanna go on a run?”
“Sure.”
We geared up and left. I felt better already. Food runs were the least risky of activities, because you didn’t have to go topside—not at first, anyway. Not until you’d exhausted all possibilities. Over the past week I’d lost
weight. It wasn’t like there was a scale to tell you it had happened, but one day you woke up and realized that the undersuit wasn’t tight and that the hoses and wires hung a little more loosely, rattling against the inside of the carapace whenever you moved. Hunger was a constant companion—a demanding one. The only way to forget it was to pull topside duty in the middle of one of Pop’s barrages so that you’d be too scared to think about how long it had been since your last pouch, and it had gotten so bad for some that guys had started risking topside during lulls to hunt rats. And there weren’t any supply drops. The Russians had taken the skies some time earlier, so no help would be given to us from the outside, and Urqhart wasn’t able to work any magic on that one, his insights useless in Almaty. I hadn’t seen the general that much lately, but when I did, he never smiled and almost seemed not to recognize me, so I took to avoiding him as much as possible. It was one thing to see panic on some kid’s face, or on a sergeant’s. It was another to see it on his.
We were on our way to one of the ration distribution points, to see if we could trade or scrounge, when the pounding overhead ended, as if someone had flicked a switch and turned off the barrage. The kid looked at me. We didn’t have to say anything and both of us buttoned up as we sprinted for the elevators, meeting ten or twenty guys who had the same idea. When we got to the cars, we had to fight for room, eventually cramming ourselves into the last one.
Once we got to the surface, everyone fanned out, not bothering to check through the rubble closest to the exit, because the ground had already been covered, scrounged. The kid and I developed a system. He’d watch the skies
while I crouched, occasionally stopping to lift a small block that might hide a basement or a crawl space, something unnoticed that might contain food. We worked our way through the city like that for an hour before he tapped me on the shoulder and pointed.
“What?” I asked.
“Look. That’s just whacked.”
The hotel was still there. It was late in the evening, so the building’s shadow fell long over the rubble, and I marveled at the fact that even through all the recent barrages, the structure
still
remained much the way it had been the last time I’d seen it—albeit a little more charred. The Premier Hotel.
“I don’t like this place,” he said.
“Me neither.”
“We should go back down into the tunnels. Pops never stops for more than an hour.”
“You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
I grunted. “Me too, and there’s nothing in the tunnels. I say let’s risk it.”
“Don’t you think guys have already scrounged here?”
“I think everyone thinks the same, that this place is messed up, and nobody wants to go in because it’s still standing. I mean, how can something survive all this? Still, I’m too hungry to care anymore.”
We went in. The hotel blocked all the noise from outside, muffling the sound of men shouting to each other in the distance until we heard almost nothing except our feet crunching on broken glass and rock. The lobby had been torched, and overhead a hole in the ceiling opened onto a hole in the ceiling above that and so on, until you saw a
porthole on the sky, several stories up. A narrow set of stairs led downward.
“Should we go down?” the kid asked.
“After you.”
“I don’t wanna go down there.”
“You hungry?”
“Yeah. I’m hungry.”
I grunted again, shouldering my carbine and yanking a pistol free. “So let’s go.”
The stairs were wood, and I tested them before putting all my weight down, not sure if they’d support a fully loaded soldier or send us crashing to the basement below. They held. We worked our way down until the darkness triggered light amplification, and just to be safe, we switched on chameleon skins, careful to make sure that we had plenty of juice in our fuel cells. Those would go next. We already heard the whispers that fuel cell rationing would start any day, and it had almost gotten to the point where we prayed for Pops just to attack, to get it all over with.
The stairs emptied into a huge cellar, a single room about forty by forty meters filled with shelves and cabinets. Clearly others had already been there. Broken bottles covered the floor, and many of the shelves had been tossed over, shattered in someone’s eagerness to get at their contents.
“There’s a door,” the kid said, pointing. “Over there.”
“That’s some door.”
The back wall was solid concrete, cracked in places where the constant barrage and damage from previous battles had spalled off whole chunks. All the shelves had been pulled away except one. From that distance it was
hard to tell, but it looked as though a set of shelving had been bolted to a concrete block, which itself had begun to separate from the rest of the wall to leave a thin crack, perfectly rectangular and barely visible.
We got closer and the kid laughed. “That’s a freaking secret door. No shit. I’ve never seen one.”
“Me neither.”
The door wouldn’t move. It opened outward and we had to move two large blocks of concrete that had fallen from the ceiling before we managed to pry a flat iron bar into the crack. Little by little it scraped open until finally we could see behind it; the kid jumped back.
“They can’t hurt you,” I said. “They’re dead.”
A vast storeroom was beyond, stretching out farther than either of us could see, and close to the door lay the bodies of three men in Russian combat armor, their helmets off and skin long since dried out, mummified. The men’s cheeks had hollowed, and instead of eyes there were black holes. I inspected the door more closely and saw that it looked like someone had been pounding it from the inside with tools, and maybe bits of fingernails had become lodged in it, as if the men had tried everything they could to get out. We stepped over them to get a better look, and I switched from light amplification to normal before flicking on my helmet lamp.
The shelves in this room hadn’t been disturbed, and held stacks of ingots, their metal a bright silver that shone in my lamplight despite a thin layer of dust that had settled. I picked one up. It was heavy, but not silver or platinum heavy, and at the base two Cyrillic letters,
Pe,
had been stamped. I’d seen enough Russian by now to read it.
“Rhenium. Now I know why the hotel is still here.
Pops isn’t targeting it because he doesn’t want to make it harder than necessary to get this stuff back.”
“Screw metals.”
“Whatever happened to that speech?” I asked. “You know, how your hometown needs metals to survive, and how we’re here to fight Russian aggression?”
“That wasn’t me; that was the other guy. And screw you too.” The kid moved away from me into the darkness and a minute later yelped. “Who cares about metal? We got
food.
”
I ran toward his position indicator, eventually finding him near a wall. Piles of cans rested against it, and I agreed with him that this was the more important find, so we nearly tripped over ourselves and drew knives, not even caring what the cans held. Mine was potatoes. I hesitated before popping the helmet, looking over my shoulder in the direction of the corpses before deciding that I was too hungry to care about the smell, which was true. It wasn’t too bad anyway. Once I got my helmet loose, the air seemed stale and gamey, but nothing as bad as I’d experienced in the proximity of the Karazhyngyl corpse trains. It took a few minutes to pound the knife through the can’s top and work it around to the point where I could pry the lid off, but soon we got a system down. Half an hour later, the kid and I looked at each other and grinned. His chin was smeared with something, which in the dim lamplight looked red.
“What have you been eating?” I asked. “Blood bags?”
“Cherries in syrup. I think I’m going to be sick.”
“We can’t tell anyone about this.”
“I know. How are we going to hide it, though?”
“Come with me.” We filled our pouches with a few
cans and then moved back toward the door, where I lifted my helmet, to aim the light for a better view.
“We can clear the other side of the door and shut it from inside. It looks like the locks are probably still working. We’ll just have to hope that we don’t get blocked in like they did.”
“Won’t anyone miss us?” he asked. The nausea must have passed, because the kid was already at work on another can.
“Are you kidding me?”
We were close enough to the surface this time that when the barrage restarted, it was almost deafening, and tiny chunks of concrete rained down from overhead, forcing us to replace our helmets. But it didn’t matter. The kid had found water bags, clean, not like the reprocessed stuff we got in the tunnels, and I emptied my water tank to fill it with the good stuff, then sipped slowly from the inside of my suit while we waited. There wasn’t anything to worry about. A few rounds came close, but I just knew that as long as we stuck close to Popov’s rhenium, we were safe; none of them would hit the hotel. It was as near to happy as I ever came during that time in Almaty.
“How do you think they died?” the kid asked at one point.
“They didn’t die of starvation,” I said. “This place must seal tight, and I bet they suffocated to death.”
The kid kept me sane, for two reasons. The reasons were another epiphany, one that hit me in the darkness of that hotel basement, which we had turned into our personal vomitorium after propping up the three Popov mummies
so they stared at us with empty sockets from a few feet away. I lifted my head. The suit sensed my movement and flicked on light amplification, bringing the three corpses into green focus so that as I went through my thoughts slowly, methodically, it was as if the dead men listened with grim approval. First, I hadn’t thought about drugs or Ox or my father or Bridgette since I’d met the kid. Not once. Why? Because he soaked up most of my time with his stupidity and didn’t know shit about shit, and some unseen force made me feel responsible for teaching him everything—from the best way to strap your waste tubes tight, so they wouldn’t dislodge during combat, to the proper way to ram a combat knife through joints in Russian armor. And second, was it selfless of me—was this what being generous meant? I thought about that one for a while, half expecting one of the Russian corpses to start laughing, to get up and puke on my lap, but eventually I came to the realization that it didn’t matter. The motivations were meaningless. What mattered was that regardless of whether I wanted to, I was helping someone who had the same goal as me—to stay alive, to make it out—and that act alone had somehow brought with it a measure of grace. If the kid had been hiding drugs, I might have taken them from him. Who knew what I would have done? But he hadn’t tried zip, didn’t even drink, so it all played out the way it did and subdued the worst part of my mind into some kind of hypnotized state. All the bad crap was still there; being in Almaty wouldn’t have helped anyone as far gone as I was to get sane again. But for now it had gone dormant.
The kid stirred and sat up. “What time is it?”
“The barrage is still going, and my chrono is messed. What does yours say?”