About half a mile across, Ilya allowed himself to glance back across the lake. The Volk was traveling fast, making good time around the lake, but there was no way it was going to reach the other side before either of them.
He grinned. His heart pounded and his chest burned, but he felt amazing. A certain euphoria was rising quickly, as he realized they were going to make it. They’d lost the fish, but they were going to live. Having gained nothing, he was now far better off than he could have ever wanted to be. They would go hungry, but the experience had somehow brought him closer to his brother than he would have ever predicted — they were both tough men, and they would survive.
Ilya heard the shattering of thin ice, and instantly knew its cause. His euphoria was immediately replaced by fear as a sharp crack echoed away from his feet. Instinctively, he threw himself flat as the ice disintegrated under his weight. Panic gripped him as his hands slipped away from the ice and the icy water took his breath away.
His head dipped under.
The bite of the icy water was fleeting. Instead, the pain was replaced by the terror of drowning. Growing up in Oymyakon, neither he or Demyan had ever learned to swim. Controlling his fear, Ilya concentrated on trying to achieve some form of coordinated movements with his arms to pull himself to the surface. He cupped his hands and pulled the water from above downward, as though he was climbing an invisible ladder.
It was a cumbersome movement. One that produced a disjointed and fragmented progress, but eventually his head broached the icy surface.
His eyes swept the surface. An area of several feet had shattered and he was surrounded by icy water. His head dipped under again, and he fought to pull his mouth above the water again. On the third go, he spotted Demyan at the edge of the ice, lying prone, reaching out with his arm.
“Grab my hand!” Demyan shouted, his green eyes fixed with terror.
Ilya didn’t have the breath to respond.
His head dipped under again, and again. Each time he kicked and fought to reach the surface. It was a painfully slow process, and with each subsequent dip, he sunk deeper and struggled harder to reach the surface, as his heavy clothes gathered weight from soaking through with water.
Something kept dragging him downward. By the time he realized it was his fur boots that had become heavy weights under the water, he no longer had the strength to do anything about it. He tried, but his hands couldn’t even reach the latches, and instead, he concentrated his remaining efforts on reaching the surface.
His brother was shouting at him, but he could no longer hear the words and even if he had, his brain was now so starved of oxygen that he would have had trouble interpreting them. He spotted Demyan’s face one last time. The terror seen a few minutes earlier had already been replaced by something different, something entirely more painful — a profound and despondent loss — and dishonorable shame.
Ilya wanted to tell his brother it was okay. There was nothing he could have done. Neither of them could swim. But he couldn’t seem to get to the surface. And even if he could make it one more time, he’d never have the breath to produce words.
Fatigue and hypothermia kicked in and fear was replaced with a simple feeling of regret and loss. They say on your deathbed you eventually reach acceptance, but that wasn’t the case for him. Instead, he just felt the harrowing torment that he had never escaped Oymyakon.
His burning lungs settled, and he no longer felt the urge to take a breath. Everything slowed. His failing heart eased into a progressively slower rate. His vision turned into a strange purple blur. That was unexpected, he thought with surprising curiosity, no one had ever told him about seeing purple before you die. The muscles in his arms and legs jolted, as he vaguely attempted to continue to move them until they simply stopped working.
Ilya heard the final beats of his heart pounding in his water-soaked ears. He heard the very last one, and waited for another… but it never seemed to come.
Every muscle in his body went limp.
Paralyzed, he retreated into the deep subconscious branches of his rapidly deteriorating mind. With the heart stopped and his brain starved of oxygen, he knew it wouldn’t be long now.
The pains he’d lived with for most of his life had finally ended. They hadn’t been replaced by any sense of euphoria, but the loss of pain was a comfort.
So, this is death.
A calm peace and clarity swept his mind, in a way he’d never experienced in life. Fear and loss disappeared and at last there was acceptance.
This is not too bad…
A split second later, something gripped his leg and yanked. It pulled him downward with the ferocity of an ancient predator. And Ilya retreated into the final branch of his subconscious, where total darkness finally swept him away.
Demyan watched bitterly as his brother disappeared into the icy waters below. At the last moment, the water turned a fluorescent purple, and a strange creature — that looked remarkably similar to a merman — took Ilya, and dragged him deep into the lake.
Unable to grasp what his eyes had seen, the shock stirred some inner desire to survive. There was nothing he could do to save his brother, even if he’d been taken by some mysterious creature from the lake’s icy depths. He turned toward the south and spotted the Volk. It was still far away, but getting closer. There was time, but not a lot of it. He might still just make it into the forest.
He glanced at the now dark water below, where he’d lost his brother and cursed Oymyakon and the wretched world that took his mother and brother in the same week. Fear finally broke through the shock and despair as he forced himself to run toward the western edge of the forest.
On the western bank of Boot Lake, he hacked at the fence — cutting through with the third hit — and kept running up the steep slope into the dense forest of spruce.
Behind him, he heard the Volk’s massive engine whine as it tried to follow his trail up the slope, followed by the sound of soldiers climbing out and running after him. Demyan was big and at the age of fourteen, was already larger than most adult men in his village. A life of hardship had sharpened his body with the endurance of a professional athlete. Adrenalin surged through his veins and he kept running.
Soon the distant sounds of his pursuers, unused to and ill-prepared for the inhospitable environment, quietened and eventually disappeared.
It didn’t slow him down. Instead, he continued running all the way back to his family home. As it became apparent the soldiers were no longer following him, Demyan’s mind returned to the loss of his brother and the mysterious purple creature that took him to his death. Fleeting thoughts of despair and wonder distracted him from his burning thighs and slowly numbing toes.
Guilt tore at his soul, and he wondered how he could possibly face his father. He even considered grabbing whatever possessions he could carry and leaving Oymyakon before his dad came home from the mines. That was a coward’s path, but he couldn’t see any other way out of it.
Demyan never stopped to look over his shoulder. He didn’t have to. If they had kept up with him, and followed him, there was nowhere else for him to go. It was early evening by the time he ran down the main road of his village, and stopped just short of his house.
There, someone was waiting for him.
An older man, in a thick fur coat, standing in front of the wooden cottage glanced at him expectantly. Demyan swallowed hard. Surely, they didn’t know where he lived? His face had been mostly covered the entire time. His eyes swept the rest of the Oymyakon village, deciding whether he still had time to make a run for it — head back into the forest and disappear into the Siberian wilderness where few people could survive more than a few hours in winter.