Red Equinox

Chapter Five

"Could be."

"Never."

"Why not?"

"My dear Richard, it must surely be obvious even to someone whose brains have been addled and whipped into a cold collation."

"Up yours, Doc. Just tell me why we couldn't be in Russia."

"A gateway!"

"Yeah. A gateway. A mat-trans unit. Jumps for the making of. Why not?"

Doc shook his head, the rising sun glinting off his silvery hair. "Because it's absolutely out of the question, Richard, that's why. You hardly think our Communist brethren would have allowed such a thing, do you?"

Rick nodded. "Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do."

Ryan interrupted the quarrel. "Come on, Rick. I wasn't there, but I've seen and read enough to know that there wasn't too much love lost between them and us."

"They started sky-dark," Jak added.

"Sure they did," the freezie agreed. "But you gotta look back a while. Back to the late eighties. A guy called... Oh, shit! What was his name? Khrushchev? No. Something that ended like that. Gorby? Gorbachev. Yeah, I think that was it."

"Oh, him. But we all know what happened to him, don't we? And his plans for... let me see. There was a buzzword, was there not? Glasnost. An ending to the cold war. Scrap all missiles. Eternal peace and love and brotherhood. I remember that, my dear Richard. Indeed I do."

The freezie stood up, clapping his hands together. "Jeez! It's cold enough to freeze the balls off a polar bear. Cold enough for Russia, J.B., I'll give you that. But listen. During glasnost there was an opening of frontiers. Barriers came down for a while. Now, suppose this had once been some kind of American embassy or whatever."

"And they built a gateway inside it," Krysty said. "Secretly."

"Sure," Ryan agreed. "Look at that hidden door. Even with the sun coming up, you can't see it. If we hadn't come through it, we'd never know it was there. Stairs go down inside that fake chimney, I guess. Secret's lasted a hundred years."

"Could be," Doc admitted grudgingly. "Shouldn't take us long to find out. Or for them to find us out. Would you not say?"

Once there was sufficient light for them to find their way around, Ryan led a recce party.

It had obviously been a very large house, a positive mansion. They could now see that about a quarter of the original roof had been destroyed. The blackened and charred beams told their own story of the fire. Ryan wriggled cautiously to the edge, peered down and saw that the building had originally been four stories high.

"Lots trees," Jak observed, lying flat on his stomach alongside Ryan, the chill wind tugging at his fine white hair.

It was a fair comment.

As far as Ryan could see the house was surrounded by a rambling forest, reminding him of his own birthplace back in the blue-topped Shens of Virginia. But these trees were mainly conifers, huge, nodding pines and firs, with larch and spruce dotted among them. And the whole scene was blanketed in soft, rolling banks of snow.

Ryan eased back, conscious of the way his breath plumed out into the morning air.

"See anything, lover?" Krysty asked.

"No."

"Think J.B.'s sextant's right?"

"You mean, do I think this is Russia? How should I know? I've never seen Russia. Not much on old vids. Trees and snow."

"Could be the Shens," she pointed out.

"I just thought that. I guess we better find a way down to the ground and see what we can see. Doesn't look like nuke damage."

"No. Would've brought down the chimney. Gaia! It's cold."

Picking their way over the beams and joists, they eventually found a trapdoor with a broken bolt that took them down a ladder onto a narrow, dark landing. The steps were missing every other slat, and hung crookedly to one side.

"Boy!" Rick exclaimed. "This place sure took a pounding. Looks like a New Jersey street gang's been using it for practice."

"You said it could be some place near to Moscow, my dear Mr. Dix?" Doc asked.

"Could be. I don't know the references outside Deathlands. Not that well. But it sure as black dust is Russia."

"Why, Doc? Why d'you ask?"

The old man stood in a pool of sunlight where the ceiling had been brought down. He rubbed a finger along the side of his nose. "Because, my dear Ryan, there is a little something that nags at my memory. Yet?.." He shook his head.

"Something about this place?"

"Yes. The name of Peredelkino comes to my mind and..."

"How's that?" Rick asked.

"Peredelkino."

The freezie nodded. "Hell's bells. That brings it back, all right."

"What, Rick?" Ryan asked.

"One of the things I guess you don't know about me is my college career. I majored in electrophysics, specializing in circuit miniaturization and genetic computer coding."

"And?" Krysty prompted.

"And I took a minor in Russian. Did some basic language and a bit of history. Nothing too deep. Enough to be able to ask the way to the American Embassy and kind of skating over Ivan the Terrible and Rasputin. I guess I've forgotten most of it. But when Doc mentioned that name, Peredelkino..."

"Something to do with Stalin, was it not?" the old man asked.

"Right on, Doc. Twenty miles southwest of Moscow itself. Originally it was some kind of commune for the acceptable writers and artists who toed the Stalinist line. Collection of very nice dachas, set among woods and lakes. Rural idyll. Kind of a pat on the back for being a good guy. Or a good gal."

"A dacha's a kind of house, like this?" Ryan asked.

"Yes, yes, of course!" Doc exclaimed, rapping on the worn boards with the ferrule of his swordstick. "During glasnost, was it not? A gesture of brotherly affection from Mother Russia to Uncle Sam. We were given our very own dacha."

"And this is it," Ryan concluded.

"Well, I guess it could be. But to believe that the gateway could possibly have survived in working order for a hundred years! It's bullshit! Come on guys, come on!" Rick leaned his hand against the dull plaster of the wall and shook his head sadly.

"J.B.? You sure about the reading? If we're stuck in Russia and the gateway's fucked for us to get out, then we're in the deepestshit."

The Armorer rubbed his hands together, eyes invisible behind his glasses. He looked away from Ryan, along the shadowed corridor, hesitating before he replied. "No way around it. Machine can't lie, Ryan. Even friends can, but not a machine. What Doc and the freezie said makes a kind of sense. That stair was real well hid. After the nukes dropped over here, there can't have been many of the Commies eager to search out anything that well concealed. No, I guess this old house could once have been a little part of America."

It was an uncharacteristically long speech for J. B. Dix.

"Food," Jak said. "Fucking hungry. This place dust-dead."

It didn't look all that promising.

The house had no furniture, no carpets, no drapes to cover the broken windows. The floorboards were warped and cracked, and fine dust hung in the cold morning air, dancing in the bright spears of sunlight. On either side of the passage, doors opened onto totally empty rooms. In fact, most of the doors were actually missing.

"Surprised the whole place hasn't been burned down," Krysty said, walking cautiously into one of the rooms.

"Look." Ryan pointed up to a corner where a small metal bracket remained. "Sec vids were there. Seen them in the corridor."

"In here," Doc called.

"What?" Ryan replied, following the sound of the old man's voice. He found him in another room, looking at a faded drawing on one of the walls. It was a sketch of some balloons, held in the white, gloved hand of a circus clown. Beneath it was a line of neat lettering: Hi, from your friend Penny wise.

All six of the group stood and looked silently at this cryptic message from the long-dead past. Ryan broke the stillness.

"Anyone understand it?"

Nobody replied.

Doc coughed. "Private joke of some sort, I guess."

"Rick?" Ryan asked.

"Pennywise the clown? Sorry, brothers and sister. No. Doesn't mean a thing."

"Let's go down," Jak suggested, leading the way out of the ravaged room, along the corridor, to the top of the main staircase that led down to the first floor of the house.

The devastation was at its worst at ground level. Every door and window had been smashed, and a cold wind blew in from every direction. Fine snow was piled softly in the corners, drifted in. The floorboards were largely rotted, making walking dangerous. Ceilings had fallen, and the walls bore the marks of sledgehammers and the dark scars of fires. It was amazing that the structure was standing.

"There's not going to be any food at all around here, lover," Krysty said quietly.

Ryan nodded. "I know it."

"So?"

"So we'll have to go out and find us some. If this is Russia, and not the Shens in a cold-out, then we have to get the gateway working."

The woman glanced behind them at the man leaning heavily on his walking cane. His face was pale, his eyes sunk cavernously dark.

"You mean Rick has to get it working?"

"Yeah. Not going to be easy. Then again, lover, nobody ever said it would be easy."

There were daubs of heavy, tarlike black paint in the largest room at the front of the house, strange signs that were like recognizable letters, yet oddly different. They partly covered another piece of graffiti, which was difficult to read in the gloom.

"Shall I open the doors?" Rick asked, moving unsteadily into the wide, echoing hall.

"Careful," Ryan warned. "When we were up on the roof anyone could've seen us from miles off."

J.B. coughed. "We have to make a fast decision, Ryan. No food here. Mebbe a ville near. But if the Russkies know we're Americans..." He allowed the sentence to drift away into the bitterly cold silence.

Ryan sniffed. "Yeah, but the gateway's well fucked. Gotta look around some. We don't find anything in a day's march, then we have a problem. Keep looking and mebbe starve. Come on back here to the gateway..."

"And mebbe starve," Krysty concluded quietly.

"My view, for what little it may be worth, is that we should hazard a trip into the great outdoors," Doc said. "Better to try and fail than not to try at all."

"Nobody this side," Jak reported from near the broken windows on the eastern flank of the large room. "Just lotta snow."

Doc was still trying to read the daubed-over lettering. "I just can't make it out. It's so fearfully faded."

"I'll open this door," Rick called, heaving at the handle. He put his frail weight against the rusted hinges, making them squeal angrily in protest. But the door opened, letting in a dazzling shaft of morning light.

"Uncle Vanya Sucks!" Krysty read.

"What's it mean?" J.B. asked. "Sounds like a Russkie name."

"My memory is not what it was, but I believe it was the nickname for the Communist leader Stalin," Doc offered.

Rick laughed. "No, it's a play. Chekhov. It's the name of..."

The bullet smashed into the door beside Rick Ginsberg, and he toppled into the hall, flat on his back.