Just before Volkhov and Clay were ushered into the cell they’d been standing in the cluster day room when Mikail came in to give instructions on their care. Mikail, speaking in English, probably out of habit more than anything, had ordered Vladimir to have Vasily oversee the two prisoners as their caretaker. He had given Vladimir specific instructions that no one else should be admitted to the room to see them.
“Vasily is young and stupid and doesn’t speak English,” Mikail had told Vladimir.
They smiled and nodded but Clay had seen a change in Vasily’s face. It was subtle, so subtle that no one else noticed it. His jaw had tightened and his eyes had narrowed only slightly and his gaze had met Clay’s. There had been an invisible communication between them. Vasily understood English. He was a book that had been judged by his cover, but they had misread him. He was not stupid, although he was indeed young. Clay had decided that perhaps he had an ally.
Now, in the cell, as Vasily dropped off the water, Clay looked at him and pointed to the ceiling and then to his ear asking Vasily silently if the room was being monitored. Vasily shook his head ‘no’ then spoke in perfect English, “The whole electronic security apparatus is down right now. The entire facility is on minimum power, and since you two are the only prisoners, they have shut down everything but the emergency lighting.”
His words hit Clay like a rocket. What is this place, where even those who seem the meekest are so competent? To the two adults in the cell, the boy had just summed up a mountain of information in the most efficient way possible. He was like a co-conspirator or… a spy.
He went on. “They’ve ‘appropriated’ several homes in town for themselves, and there are only four guards placed at the entrances of this building for security.”
Volkhov looked at Vasily with concern and care on his face and asked, “What will you do, Vasily Romanovich?”
“What would you have me do, grandfather?” Vasily asked affectionately.
Clay wondered whether this term was a sign of respect or an indication of lineage. He was finding it hard to see, in the big picture, who was on which side in this vast game of chess, but he knew in his heart, as well as he had ever known anything, that the three of them in this cell were of one mind in that moment.
“You must escape here, Vasily. The attack, if it comes as planned, will start in three days and if you are still here, things will get very bad very fast.”
Volkov turned to the cinder-block wall and drew a map of the east coast with his finger. “It will start in the areas currently blacked out, and the attack will focus first on Washington D.C. and the rest of the eastern seaboard. News will be sketchy, and any government information will be lies. The rest of the country will just hear about the continually plummeting stock market, and the major power outages. They will say that information is unreliable because of the lack of power and fuel.”
He paused and looked at them. “Turmoil and confusion.”
“It’s already gotten pretty bad out there, grandfather. It has been bad since the first storm hit, but in the last two days everything has just gone haywire. You haven’t heard the news. We’ve been listening in on the radio pretty much whenever we have free time. The world is spiraling into chaos even now.”
The boy paused. Clay heard in the pause, as the old man did, the boy asking, “How will I escape? And where will I go?”
Volkhov offered a way out.
“Clay here says that the fence is destroyed on the south side of the facility. If you can get out that way, you could escape. I don’t know where you can go in the long-run. Go to the Amish, if you can. We’ve talked about that.”
Clay looked at him, surprised.
“Or just find someplace away from the cities to hide out. There may not be a good solution out there, but being in here would be the worst solution of all,”
Volkhov shook his head. He tried to be secretive about it, but Clay saw him wipe away a single tear that had welled up in his eyes.
“They have guards posted on all of the exits,” Vasily said. “If I leave through the north door, towards Warwick, I will not be noticed, but if I attempt to leave out of any of the other doors, they won’t open them to me and they’ll ask questions. Besides, what about you grandfather? And Clay? What should we all do?”
Clay looked at Vasily intensely. He really did hope that the boy would escape, but Vasily didn’t seem to have much hope for himself. Clay grabbed a bottle of water and took a long drink, and then he handed one to Volkhov.
The old man received it with a nod, as a way of thanks. Clay offered one to Vasily, who refused, saying that he had plenty and that he didn’t want to drink theirs.
“Where are you staying, Vasily?” Clay asked.
“Most of us who are considered ‘worthless’—we who do not have homes and families to go to—are sleeping on cots in the gymnasium.”
Clay looked at Vasily and decided that he had to trust him. “Vasily, I need to tell you that I have a backpack hidden in the Tank. They never thought to look for it, at least as far as I know. I think mostly because they killed the only man who ever saw it. Why they never searched the Tank for the camera is beyond me, but with so much going on, I think—once they realized that I was just a lost hiker—they just forgot about it.
“Anyway, the backpack is stowed under the bunk in the Tank, hidden under a blanket.”
“What should I do with it?” Vasily asked.
“Do you think you can get it out of here?”
“I can. I can walk it out the north entrance and tell the guard there, if he asks, that I am taking it to Mikail. They all think I’m stupid, so they don’t suspect me of anything. They don’t think I’m capable of trickery, lying, or subterfuge.”
“That makes you the best spy ever in a whole town of spies, Vasily,” Clay said, smiling.
“They could eventually figure it out if the guard thinks to ask Mikail about it later, but that won’t happen for some time, if it happens at all. Most of the people think of me as an ignorant automaton and I do my best not to rid them of the notion.”
He smiled at Clay. “It made my life easier in here for them to think that I was stupid and that I didn’t speak English.”
“What in the world were you locked up in here for, Vasily?” Clay asked.
“I got drunk,” Vasily replied. “I was tired of all of the abuse and I stole some vodka from the store and sat out behind the church in the cemetery drinking. Some students from school came by and started in on me, so I set into them like a windmill in a hurricane. It’s the first time I ever did such a thing, but I think it had built up in me for a long time.”
Clay smiled at Vasily and replied, “Well, I’ve been there, brother. Got locked up for it too! Ok? So listen, the backpack isn’t immediately critical, but if any one of us can escape, it has things in it that might keep us alive,” Clay said. “There is at least one clean change of clothes in there too. I think Todd stole my other clothes, thinking they were the only ones I had. But there are some other things in there that might be useful as well.”
Volkhov stood up and took a long swig from his bottle of water. He looked at the bottle intently.
“This reminds me, both of you, starting tomorrow, if we are still alive, do not drink any municipal or public water supply,” he said.
“Why?” Vasily asked.
“Just don’t.”
“Ok.”
Volkhov continued, “Vasily, when you leave here you need to find Pyotr Alexandrovitch, my nephew. He knows the whole story. There is another way out that he will show you.”
“Yes, grandfather, I’ll do it, but what about you two?”