Rasputin's Bastards

THE INSULTED AND THE INJURED

Mi, thought Heather. Mi mi mi mi.

“Have some more tea,” said the big bald man who had introduced himself as Miles. His friend, Richard, who looked about a hundred years old, wiped tears from his eye. Across the dining room of the little café, a table of fishermen avoided looking at them. The big bald man picked up the little steel teapot and started to pour it into Heather’s mug. She put her hand over it. Any more tea, and I’m going to be peeing a whole ocean, she thought, then, as the tendrils of her master tickled behind her ear, remembered to stop thinking.

Mi! Mi mi mi mi!

“Okay,” he said. “No tea for you. Richard?”

“Y-yes. P-please. Oh God.”

Miles poured more into weeping Richard’s cup. Hands trembling, the old man lifted it to his lips and slurped it noisily, like soup.

“You’re wondering why my friend’s crying?”

Mi, thought Heather.

“Well I’ll tell you. Richard’s a scientist. He spent — how long, Richard?”

“Oh God — thirty years! Thirty years!”

“Thirty years, at MIT. He was a full professor there for a while. Isn’t that right, Richard?”

“Oh God!”

“Actually, Richard, you know God’s got nothing to do with it. You were robbed of your life by a Devil, weren’t you now?”

The old man shook his head and lowered it over his teacup. His sobbing intensified. Mi, thought Heather, and put her hand on his shoulder. Mi mi mi mi.

“O-one d-day,” said Richard, “I-I just… left.”

“And where did you end up?”

“E-E-E-E—”

“The Emissary,” said Miles. “Say it, Richard.”

“E-Emissary.”

“Good man.” Miles reached over and gingerly pulled Heather’s hand off Richard’s shoulder. “I know you think you’re comforting him. But human contact — well. Old Richard’s had enough of that.”

You can fucking say that again, she thought.

Hey — bitch — go kill the fuckin’ Russkie, said Gibson, from a corner of her mind.

Mi! Mi mi mi mi!

Miles smiled coolly. “Yeah. You had enough of that too, haven’t you? Everybody here’s like us, aren’t they?”

Not — mi mi mi mi — not everybody. Heather glanced out the front window of the café, up the slope, to the greenhouse. The place where they all slept — all the ones that ran things around here. It was a sprawling thing like a giant cut diamond. At one end squatted a little outbuilding, fashioned out of cut logs, with little windows painted brightly. Its roof was highly peaked, and wood smoke billowed out of the top of it. How hot was it in there? she wondered. As hot as that bathhouse up the hill?

Okay, baby. I’m not gonna hurt you. Let me in.

She shut her eyes and summoned the mantra. Every time, it seemed more difficult to do. But she still could — the idea of Holden Gibson walking around in her brain — making her do stuff, like he was doing to everyone else on the crew…

Mi. Mi. Mi. Mi.

“So how’d you come here, little girl?” Miles gingerly set her hand back on the table in front of her. “Was it a smell? That was how we got the call — wasn’t it, Richard?”

Richard nodded, still not looking up.

“I’m sitting in the donut shop across from the hotel. And I’m talking a donut shop in New York City. Manhattan. Nothing smells good in that donut shop. Closest thing is the stale dough they use to make their crullers. Otherwise it’s piss and cigarettes and old coffee. But this smell—” Miles looked up at the ceiling, snapped his fingers “—what a smell — a—”

“—a-a m-mélange?”

“Yeah, Richard. A mélange. Good. You cheering up, buddy?”

In fact, Richard seemed to be doing just that. His old lips were still quivering, but they’d pulled back in a kind of a smile. He started to look up. “Pipe smoke,” he said. “Baking bread. Rosewater.”

“See? Richard smelled it too. Only not the same smells — just good smells. The stuff you smelled when you were a kid that let you know you were safe. I can’t speak for Richard here, but when I caught my whiff I was pretty much bottomed out. I’d just remembered — well, never mind what I just remembered. I was bottomed out. But I caught that whiff, I knew what I had to do.”

Richard nodded vigorously.

“I went back into the hotel lobby — isn’t that right, buddy? Walked up to Richard here — and said to him: Babushka.”

“Babushka.” Richard repeated it like a line of liturgy at a prayer meeting.

“Yeah.” Miles spared Richard a sidewise grin. “He said it back to me because he’d smelled the same smells. Or the same kind of smells. And he knew like me that it was time to go. So we went!”

Richard gulped down the rest of his tea, and nodded. “G-g-g-got bus tickets up to H-H-Halifax,” he said. “The b-bus was pretty crowded.”

Miles nodded. “A lot of people. But we got there early, hey bud? Found ourselves some seats near the back.”

“Near the b-b-back.”

“See, before — before I came here, I used to work in security. At the Emissary. So if I’m on a bus, or a plane, or whatever, I like to see what everybody’s doing. I like to have my back to a wall.”

“T-t-t-t-tell about the others.”

“I’m getting there. So we get on the bus. Sit down. We didn’t pack too much to bring with us.”

“W-w-w-e knew we-we would be provided for.”

“Right. Anyway — the bus is pretty empty at first. But after we stop in a few towns up the east coast, the bus starts to fill up. And it’s like a family reunion.

“But you probably know all this. You probably got on a bus too — saw all these people you recognized, or thought you recognized.”

It wasn’t a bus. It was a boat. And yeah — that’s what I thought.

Heather’s hand twitched, as dreaming fingers reached around her momentarily forgotten mantra, tugged on the tendons in her wrist. Good girl, said the voice of Holden Gibson in her head. That’s how it goes… Now give it up, and rela —

“Mi!”

Heads turned and the tearoom went quiet for a moment. Heather blinked, flexed her fingers, and smiled weakly at the fishermen who stared at her from their table by the window. Mi mi mi mi mi, she thought.

Miles gave her a funny look. “You’re like Richard here, aren’t you? All fucked up inside because of what those bastards did to you?”

Heather found herself nodding quickly — this time of her own accord, but not, still, because she completely agreed with Miles. She didn’t want to go too deep on the question. Formulating a more complete answer would take thought. And thought would let Gibson back inside her, and then before you knew it, she’d be gone and Gibson…

Mi mi mi mi. The mantra — mi — was her only — mi — shield.

“It’s amazing all the people they got over the years, isn’t it?” said Miles. “Remember when we stopped in Boston? That’s where Richard used to teach,” he said in an aside to Heather, then turned back to Richard. “There were people who got on that bus that you hadn’t seen in what — twenty years?”

“M-Mike B-Berry,” said Richard.

“Right. He was one of your grad students.”

Richard shook his head sadly and looked down again. “N-n-no,” he said. “H-he o-only p-p-pretended to be.”

Miles’ face fell a bit. “True,” he said. “We were all just pretending — weren’t we?”

Heather started to get up. The last — mi — thing — mi mi — she needed was another — mi mi mi mi — morose conversation with another of the growing crowd of fucked-up freaks that were dropping into this town like mayflies.

Miles put his hand on her arm. His eyes held a sad desperation.

“Wait!” he said. “Don’t leave us alone!”

Ah, fuck it, she thought. How long can a girl keep this up?

“Don’t worry,” she said, feeling herself slipping back into her own memories, the world fading in front of her, “you’re never alone for long, here in the fuckin’ village.”

“Fuck,” said Heather, sitting on the long porch outside the old Arts and Crafts building of the Transcendental Meditation camp. “Fuck!”

Hippie Pete crouched down beside her. “Swearing,” he said, “can cause stress, and stress can take us further from the centre. Seek the centre, Heather.”

Heather turned around and glared at him. “I’m pretty much in the fucking centre right now, aren’t I Pete?”

The big man shrugged. “The centre is not an ‘in,’” he said.

“Oh fuck — off,” she said, and stood up. “I’m going for a walk.”

Hippie Pete let her go. The first few times Heather had found herself back in this recollection since coming to the village, he’d been just about impossible to shake. Now, she could get rid of him any time she wanted. It seemed like mental holograms made of a boatload of false memories were no different than other men: given enough time and patience, you could train them one the same as the other.

Train them just like Holden had trained her and everyone else on the yacht. Maybe, the way someone had trained everyone else in this evil little village. Heather stomped down the crude stairway and along a green roadway between rows of man-planted cedars high enough to scratch cloud.

Now who the fuck, wondered Heather, had trained Miles and Richard?

She put that question at the end of the growing list she’d been making since she’d first seen the weird fairy tale fleet of boats, chugging and sailing and humming and rowing down on them through the sunrise, over the bow of the yacht.

Heather’s head was swimming — that bastard Alexei had just brained her after all — and she thought she might have been hallucinating.

It wasn’t just the weird colours they painted their boats, or the Halloween costumes they wore. Heather picked it up immediately, as the canoes bumped up against the side of the yacht and those strange brothers climbed on board to guide them into the harbour: the people here were strange — and not Star Trek fan strange, but really different-planet strange. They never quite looked at her when they were looking at her. They seemed to look through her and past her, and when they talked they talked to that space, and not Heather.

It freaked her out pretty significantly at first. When she came to on the bridge of Gibson’s yacht, and looked out the windscreens, the first things she’d seen had been those strange banners, all red and green and orange… .

It was as though they were doing the Santa Claus Parade in boats.

Of course, the children caught her before she could make a fool out of herself. “Don’t worry lady,” said one. “They’re just celebrating — because we are home and united at last.”

When she went out onto the aft deck, little Vladimir beamed at her from that bastard Alexei’s arms. “We are delivered from our shackles,” he said. “Ha! This is a great day, lady.”

“Put him down,” she’d hissed at Alexei. “You fucking monster.”

Alexei didn’t appear to hear her, but Vladimir giggled. “Alexei,” he said, “is not here right now. He will join us later.”

Heather nodded. It made the most sense of anything she’d seen or heard in the past few minutes. Maybe Alexei had gone to someplace like her Transcendental Meditation camp, and this guy who’d whacked her on the head was somebody completely different. Somebody else calling the shots.

“Good,” said Vladimir. “You’re not as stupid as you pretend to be.”

Heather told him to fuck off and had gone back inside — where the rest of the crew were shaking their heads groggily amid fallen down chairs, and babbling to one another. James, for instance, was going on about kindergarten and some kind of tricycle. Sheri couldn’t stop talking about a cabin her family had in Wisconsin — which didn’t make any sense, because Heather remembered they’d picked up Sheri in Florida and her parents were dirt poor drunks who lived in a trailer park. Even stranger, Leonard was going on about elves and hobbits like he’d grown up in the freaking Shire.

Heather finally had to clap her hands and shout: “Hey! Reality check!”

Everyone stopped and stared at her.

“Where’s Holden?” she said.

The crew parted, and looked down as if for the first time, to see Holden Gibson lying splayed on the floor, eyes open and staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Heather had to suppress a monstrously inappropriate laugh.

He appeared to be dead.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered, wrestling back a smile.

“Shit,” said James. “How’d I miss that?”

“Someone fucking killed him,” said Sheri. She looked at Heather accusingly. Heather put her hands out in front of her, shook her head and widened her eyes in innocent denial.

“He’s not dead,” said Leonard, kneeling down and touching his throat. “Pulse.”

“No,” said a commanding voice from behind them. “He is not dead at all. Step away from him, sleepers.”

Heather turned. Standing in the doorway was a tall man, fit, with a greying beard and long hair tied behind in a ponytail. He wore a long oilskin raincoat, and he was old enough to be Heather’s grandfather. But that didn’t seem to matter: he made her weak in the knees like he was a high school jock. And when he spoke, she obeyed the same as everyone else and stepped back.

“Well if it isn’t old John Kaye,” he said, looking down at her sleeping boss. “This might be the first time we meet in person, and still you can’t see me. Well. What would she be bringing you here for?”

Gibson snorted in his sleep.

“Can’t talk now, hmm? That’s fine. But soon enough we’ll meet again. And then we can speak a great deal.”

John Kaye? Who the fuck is John Kaye? Heather wondered.

She would have asked the question — maybe even pointed out helpfully that this wasn’t John Kaye but Holden Gibson and he was such an evil bastard that they’d do best to toss him into the ocean and have done with him before he came to. But she couldn’t seem to make her mouth work.

“Until then,” said the tall man, “we’re going to have to find a better place for you to rest.” He clapped his hands. “Sleepers! Take care of your dream-walker!”

Dream-walker?

And along with the rest of them, Heather had lurched to work. They hefted Holden onto one of the tables, and lifted it like a litter between six of them, to carry him out onto the deck. The children were gone when they got there. Heather thought she could see them out of the corner of her eye, crowded onto the deck of a fishing boat that was motoring away.

Alexei hadn’t gone, though. He stood beside the old man — staring ahead with those creepy unseeing eyes of his. Heather wondered if he was in the same kind of thrall as the rest of them. And if he was, why wasn’t he fucking well helping? The table weighed a ton.

But there were no answers that day — not from Alexei, who boarded the sailboat with Holden and the children and the old man — and not from any of the other crew, who all worked together, to steer the yacht alongside the flotilla of boats, first toward the coast and then through the rocky teeth of an inlet, and finally into a fantastical village’s harbour.

Heather hadn’t seen Alexei since. Indeed, it was only when she remembered to use the mantra that she was able to see much of anything. Once they came close to the docks, Heather had felt the world growing grey, her breathing slowing down — and there she was, back in the Transcendental Meditation camp, being stalked by that terrible giant Hippie Pete and completely oblivious to what was going on with her body.

And try as she might, she couldn’t find another way out of the camp than drowning herself once more in the lake. Since she’d come to this creepy place, Heather figured she’d killed herself some nine times. Every time she forgot to say her mantra, it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds — somebody would be there to come in and take over her mind.

Lately, that somebody appeared to be Holden Gibson. Or John Kaye, or whoever the fuck he really was.

That was something that Heather would have dearly loved to have been able to figure out: just who was Holden Gibson; and how, even though he hadn’t woken up once from his little coma, so powerful and all of a sudden?

As she emerged at the top of that old familiar cliff overlooking the same old fucking lake, and readied herself to take another Goddamn plunge to yet another fucking watery death, Heather hoped she’d be able to find at least some small clue about what it all meant this time through.

She had almost made it to the end of the cliff, when she pulled herself up short. Looked at the thing that was floating in the water, like a fat white jellyfish. A jellyfish with rounded shoulders and grey hair that washed out in tendrils around its wrinkled head. A jellyfish that floated face-down in the lake.

“Now who the fuck,” she said out loud, “is that?”

Suicide could wait, Heather thought as she plunged headfirst into the water. This time, rather than diving down and sucking all the lake her lungs could hold, Heather did a fast crawl across the water towards the body. From a distance, she couldn’t tell who it was — but she had a faint and irrational hope that it might be Holden Gibson, finally sucked into his own little Transcendental Meditation hell.

If that was the case, there was no way she was going to let him drown and escape this place. What’s good for the goose is good for the fuckin’ gander, she thought as she came up to the floater and hooked an arm to him. She paddled back to shore, and gasping for breath herself now, dragged the body onto the beach.

She crawled further up, shook out her hair and flipped over onto her haunches. She swore. It wasn’t Holden Gibson at all. It was some old guy — older than Holden by about a decade, she figured. What hair he had left was long and almost as grey as his flesh. He was completely naked, and he looked like he’d been dead about a day.

“Fine.” Obviously, someone had figured out Heather’s escape route and was planting distractions to keep her inside. “Mi mi mi,” she said, tromping back up the steps to her original launch point and preparing herself for a proper death once more.

She’d almost made it to the top when a voice stopped her.

“Hey! Leetle gorl!”

A part of her told her not to look, to just go through with the death scene and get back to the village where she could actually do something. But Heather stopped all the same, and looked back down the stairs to the beach.

The corpse was sitting up — like a big German tourist, vainly trying to sun away the pallor at a Club Med beach.

Except he didn’t sound German.

He sounded Russian.

And while there were plenty of Russians in the village, and Heather figured she must have seen them all by now — she didn’t ever recall seeing this one.

“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded.

“I should ask the same, yes?” The corpse stood up, primly moving one hand over its private parts while it beckoned her with the other. “Come down. I don’t bite.”

“Fuck off,” she said, taking a step backwards. “I’m going to kill myself and you can’t stop me!”

“Why would I stop you?” said the corpse. “Aren’t we both dead already?”

Heather squinted down the steps at him. “Do I know you?”

The corpse squinted back. “I don’t know,” he said. “You are — one of the children, yes? Maybe you know me as an ‘old bastard’? Ha!” The corpse threw both hands into the air in a sudden revelation. His lake-shrunk member bobbed grotesquely between his legs. “That is it, yes? You have come to see horrible old Kolyokov off, before his spirit dissolves into the nothingness of the ether.”

“Kol-yokov?” Heather started back down the stairs. If this was a trick to get her to stay a while longer at summer camp — well what could she say? It was just intriguing enough to work. “Sounds Russian. You another KGB guy?”

The corpse was pacing in circles now, hands waving in the air with extravagant sarcasm. “Yes, yes, mock poor Fyodor Kolyokov as he vanishes into the Godless void. For what is he, but a pestilent bastard who would only harm his young prodigies? A foolish old monster! Well — we will see if you like your benighted Babushka any better!”

And with that, the corpse Fyodor Kolyokov whirled on a pale, rotting heel and headed back for the water. “I should have known better!” he spat as the lake water lapped higher and higher on his thick calves.

“Wait!” Heather started to run down the little stretch of beach.

Fyodor Kolyokov waved a hand dismissively and stepped in up to his waist. “What does it matter?” he muttered. “I am long enough dead that I should have the good grace to die properly. Fuck, this is cold on my balls! For a warm brine again…”

Heather was running full tilt when she hit the water, and her momentum sent a silvery wave of it smack into Kolyokov’s pale dead ass. He squealed, clutched at his sagging butt and stumbled — but before he could fall into the water, Heather had him by the arm. His flesh felt like loose rubber, but she didn’t let go, and step by step pulled him cursing and thrashing back to the shore.

“You are not going anywhere,” she said through gritted teeth as they stumbled back through the wet silt at the water’s edge.

“How true,” he spat. “Trapped in incessant metaphor… I am fixed. Denied even a clean passing.”

“Oh fuck off and get over yourself.” Heather gave him a two-handed push in his middle, and sent Kolyokov sprawling on his ass in the shallow water. “Now. What do you know about this Babushka? It’s all I ever hear around this fucking village.”

Kolyokov smiled down at her and shook his head. “What a mouth on you, little girl,” he said. “Babushka? That is what they call her now, yes. This woman you have tried so hard to rejoin. And she’s trapped you here, hasn’t she? Like a moth in a jar.”

“I wasn’t trying to rejoin anyone,” said Heather. “But you’re right about one thing: I am a moth in a jar. Every time I let slip.”

Kolyokov narrowed his eyes and his smile faltered. “I see.” He stopped, ankle-deep in water, and pulled his hand back. He regarded her appraisingly. “Your American accent is very good, little girl. Vladimir taught you that, did he?”

“That little shit?” Heather laughed. “No way. And I don’t have an accent. You’re the one with the accent.”

Kolyokov nodded, and slowly, his smile reasserted itself.

“I see,” he said again.

“See what? What the fuck is going on?”

But Heather was shouting it at the old zombie’s back, as he climbed up the rocky beach to the stairs. As he climbed, it seemed as though the colour returned to his flesh, in tiny patches on his back and his ass — like watery ink drops, spreading themselves over age-mottled parchment.

They settled at the top of the stairs, where they had a view of the lake. Kolyokov said he wanted to be somewhere where he could watch the horizon, and once they sat down he never took his eyes off it. It was as though he thought he was a sailor, watching for signs of a coming storm.

“Now,” said Kolyokov, “tell me how old you are.”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Very good.” He laughed. “You say it like a little girl still: ‘How old are you my dear?’ ‘I am almost SIX!’”

“Fuck off. My voice isn’t that high.”

“No,” said Kolyokov. “It isn’t. Because this is all bullshit now, isn’t it? Your voice, your size. You’re living in something like a memory. You’re really a grown woman. But just now someone’s stuffed you into yourself as a child. Do you know why that would be?”

“Tell me.”

“It makes you feel weaker,” said Kolyokov.

They sat quietly for a moment. Heather glared at Kolyokov. “I’m not weak,” she said. “If I wanted to, I could make you do anything in the world.”

Kolyokov looked down at her from the corner of his still putrefied eye. “By beating me up? Or maybe by seducing me? Maybe out in the real world of Physick. But here? You’re too little to do either.” Now he looked away, casting his eye back to the lake. He squinted at it — like he was appraising a painting. “This is a very pleasant metaphor,” he said. “What does it signify?”

“Metaphor?”

“I’m sorry. You’re confused in here, and I am not helping any. Just tell me — what does this place signify? It seems familiar.”

“I’m not confused. This place is bullshit. It signifies complete bullshit. It’s a bullshit summer camp in bullshit California that Holden took us to when I was little — it was run by the Transcendental Meditation people and they—”

“Ah! Of course! CIA.”

“Are you going to let me finish?” Heather stood up. Her fists were angry balls at her sides. “What do you mean, CIA?”

“The camp was a CIA camp,” said Kolyokov, “if it’s the one I’m thinking of. And yes… yes, I think it is. I think I have been here.”

“What?”

“It was before you were here. It was probably before you were born. The CIA was using this lakeside camp to train sleepers. Quite a few of them passed under the gates of Kamp Kiwichiching before they shut it down.” He stood up. “Yes! I remember it now! That is why it was so familiar! The lake I only saw by moonlight, as we swooped in. We were very nearly captured here — they had placed their dream-walking sentries about the camp. But the Americans were amateurs at this sort of thing in those days. They had barely mastered what they called ‘remote viewing’ then.”

“No,” said Heather. She didn’t like where this was going. She took a deep breath and went on. “This is a Transcendental Meditation camp. Transcendental Meditation. Hippie Pete runs this camp. Not the CIA.”

“This,” said Kolyokov, “is an imaginary place. And the place it was modelled after? It was never a Transcendental Meditation camp. It was a place for making sleepers. People who would do their master’s bidding, without even knowing it were so. Sleepers would spend years here. That’s how long it took in those days, to lay in the metaphors. No simple business.”

Heather swatted at Kolyokov’s flank. “Fuck off!” she yelled. “Mi mi mi mi!”

“Ah. You are attempting a mnemonic block. Clever girl.” Kolyokov smiled sadly. “But that won’t work here. And it won’t work out there for long, either, once the people who are controlling you figure out a way around it.”

Heather felt herself beginning to cry. A part of her wondered why this was so. What had she really to be sad or upset about, talking to this old zombie about two groups of people — one who walked in their dreams, the other who just seemed to sleep all the time? It was obviously bullshit.

Wasn’t it?

Kolyokov put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re working it out now, aren’t you? The fact that you may not be the person you thought you were. It is common to cry out when such a realization comes upon you.”

“What do you mean, ‘such a realization’?”

Kolyokov knelt in front of her.

“Such a realization,” he said softly, “that you are a sleeper and not a dream-walker. And because of that, you are even more powerless than this metaphoric little girl they’ve stuffed you inside.

“You are as powerless,” he said, in a tone like he was intending the words to be kind, “as a sock puppet.”

The sun never set at the Transcendental Meditation camp. It was always afternoon here — sometimes cloudy, sometimes bright and sunny — but the sun always sat above the tree line on the far side of the lake. Heather lay curled on the dock with her eyes shut against it. Kolyokov sat beside her.

“We could do this forever, you know,” he said.

“Forever?”

“This place seems safe,” he said. “We have been here for ten hours by my accounting — and no one has come for me.”

“Would someone come for you?”

“The creature you call Babushka. I think. If she knew that I lived — yes.”

Heather opened her eyes. Squinted up at the zombie. His flesh was getting some of its colour back now, and the lake-water bloat was melting from him. White hair tufted up from his shoulder blades like wisps of lake mist. He squinted at the sun.

“Who’s Babushka, anyway?”

“Her name,” said Kolyokov, “is not important. It used to be Lena. But I don’t think she uses it any more. She’s past that — or she believes that she is which is the same thing here. But she’s very powerful. And she wants to become more so. That is why she seized the children. That is why she put you here.”

“Oh no,” said Heather. “Babushka didn’t put me here.”

“Really, now?” said Kolyokov. “Then who did put you here, if not her?”

That one was easy. “Holden Gibson,” she said. “The old fucking bastard.”

Kolyokov frowned. “Holden Gibson,” he said, then shook his head. “No. Doesn’t ring a bell.”

Heather lay quietly for a moment. She thought about Babushka — and how according to old Kolyokov, she’d used to be called Lena. An idea came to her.

“He might have had a different name,” she said. “Before.”

Kolyokov looked at her with raised eyebrows. His face was almost living now.

“What was the name?” he said.

“Kaye,” said Heather. “The Koldun guy — he called him John Kaye.”

Colour flushed back into Fyodor Kolyokov’s face, and he leaped to his feet with uncharacteristic agility. “Kaye?” he said, hauling Heather up too. “Are you certain?”

Heather nodded — flinching back at the zombie’s sudden intensity. “Um — pretty certain,” she said.

Kolyokov said something in Russian, and started up the dock. “John Kaye,” he said. “After all these years. He should be dead — we thought he was dead… . But… It begins to make sense now. Yes…”

“Hey!” shouted Heather. “Where are you going?”

“You’d better join me,” he said. “We’ve got dark work ahead of us.”

“Dark work?” Heather rolled her eyes.

“Yes.” Kolyokov turned. He seemed to have grown a little bigger — and the sunlight, the way it reflected in his eyes, made it seem as though they burned inside with their own light. “We have to get out of this metaphor of ours once and for all.”

“Oh great,” said Heather. She started up the cliff. “Okay. I’ll kill myself first, and you follow.”

“No. It’s not ourselves who must die. Tonight,” he said, stomping up the hill, “we must murder this Hippie Pete of yours. That is the thing that will break this place’s hold on you.”

Murdering Hippie Pete. It was, of course, a brilliant idea. Something that Heather was a little disgusted with herself for not having considered before.

Kolyokov stopped. “You are not squeamish — are you my dear?”

“Squeamish?” Heather ran to catch up with the old zombie. “Fuck no! How’re we gonna do it? There’s no guns here, but I know where the power tools are! Can I help? Can I?”

Kolyokov laughed and patted Heather on the top of the head.

“You are,” he said, glancing back at the horizon as he spoke, “a delightful child. Truly. I wish I had ten thousand of you.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Heather could see flashes of what looked like lightning in the gathering clouds beyond the far treetops. That was fine with her. Whatever storm the sky could let loose on their heads would be nothing compared to the shitstorm of trouble she and her zombie pal Fyodor Kolyokov would let loose on Hippie Pete when they found him.