Pyotr sat forward, his eyes widened as a flash of despair crossed his face. He opened his mouth, but for a moment no words came out. He clenched his jaw, taking a deep breath through his nose. Vasily could see the man’s ribcage expand with the breath and then hold there for a moment, as if in pain, before a long, sad exhale, and the older man pushed his head back in resignation or supplication.
“Uncle Lev is… dead?” he asked, in English. The sound of the words was plaintive. His hand reached out and gripped Vasily’s shoulder, steadying himself.
“He is, Pyotr. He has to be. There is no other way for me to know, but he has to be. He cannot be alive.”
Vasily went through the story of the planned escape, telling Pyotr about Volkhov’s words, and how Vasily was to exit the front of the prison with the backpack, get to Pyotr, and then go to some water plant. He told Pyotr about how Volkhov and Clay were going to try to rush the guard at the back entrance and somehow make it through the destroyed fence line and then head to this same water plant.
“It was always 50-50, Pyotr. We all knew that. Either Lev and Clay would get the drop on the guard, or the guard would get the drop on them. And… and… just as they made their exit, the troops parachuted in on top of them and dropped down all around the prison.”
There were tears in Pyotr’s eyes as he listened, but he nodded his head and did not interrupt until Vasily had shared his whole story. Vasily told him how the soldiers had landed all over that end of town, and he told of the sound of machine gun fire coming from behind the prison. There was the sense of finality in his voice, a certainty gained not through witness, but certainty nevertheless, based on the only reasonable conclusion he could draw.
“That’s it then,” Pyotr said, choking back tears. “They’re dead.”
Pyotr stood and walked over to the ikons on the wall and, with tears in his eyes he bowed his head to the holy saints. “Now… Now I’ve lost everyone,” he said to the saints who were flat and long dead and who could not hear him.
Vasily sat and watched him and the twin of his shadow on the wall. Pyotr stood for a moment before exploding in anger and, ripping the sacred iconography from the wall, he smashed each frame individually against the table that held the candles. He hurled the broken frames against the opposite wall. They burst into a hundred separate pieces against the plaster, each one a tiny fractured narrative describing the man’s pain and anguish. Vasily flinched, but he understood Pyotr’s pain. He could hear the sound of humanity in his weeping, and he commiserated with the language.
Pyotr wept until he collapsed across a nearby table, his sobs coming in rolling, heaving waves, each gasp passing through his body and then out into the universe.
After a time, through some inner strength, Pyotr regained his composure, steadied himself and walked calmly back over to Vasily. He wiped the tears from his face. His eyes were red, and he seemed to have exhausted himself with the outflow of emotion.
“What do we do now, young Vasily?” he asked. “They will come for you.” Pyotr, it seems, was fully Russian. His attitude now reflected the millennia of Russian experience, which was to say… Enough of crying, I’m done with that, now what do we do?
Vasily’s eyebrows arched. Hearing the danger that he knew was around him expressed in the words of another suddenly made it real, and he tried to push it away.
“Why would they come for me? I was out of the prison before it happened. Maybe they won’t know I was involved.”
“Don’t be silly, son. How did Uncle Lev and Clay get out of their cell, Vasily Romanovich? Think! How did they get out of the cluster? Who could have let them out?” As Pyotr spoke, his voice started to rise in anger.
“Well, they can’t know it was me. Maybe Lev or Clay got a key from somewhere else, or picked the lock, I don’t know.” He was searching in his mind for an explanation, anything… even as he knew he would find none suitable.
“Listen, Vasily. Those paratroopers you saw were probably Russian Spetznaz. Special Forces. Uncle told me that the EMP attack would probably come on Tuesday, during the election. The arrival of Special Forces troops in Warwick means that someone felt like there was a risk of something leaking out before the event. Or maybe there is someone here who they do not want to escape. Maybe Mikail contacted them as soon as his gang had taken over the town and told them he’d captured an American spy. Who knows? That’s the thing, Vasily, we don’t know anything.”
Vasily flinched at the name of the gang’s leader. Mikail Mikailivitch Brekhunov was the leader of the gang that had, just recently, taken the prison and overthrown the town. He’d been the one who had misjudged Vasily. Volkhov, before he died, had told the young Vasily not to trust anything that Mikail said.
“Well, I said that we don’t know anything, because we don’t have a clue what’s going on, but we do know one thing,” Pyotr said. Pyotr had been raised and trained by Lev Volkhov, and knew his old uncle’s mind backward and forward. He spoke steadily now, in perfect accentless English. “We know that we must get out of here right now. I know that’s what uncle wanted, and that’s why he risked himself to get you out of there first. If you go back up there to find out what’s going on, they’ll probably kill you. If you don’t go, they’ll come here and kill both of us. The only option is that the two of us leave right now.”
Flee? Vasily thought. It made sense, and that is what the outsider Clay had done. That is what Lev Volkhov himself had attempted. It was, of course, the best, or at least the most sensible, option. But the heart of valor has a stubborn fiber. There were too many friends and loved ones still in harm’s way for Vasily to flee just yet.
Didn’t everyone deserve a warning? Isn’t that what Solzhenitsyn had done? Warn people? Isn’t that what the Prophets had done? Isn’t that what Volkhov himself had done?
Vasily was no prophet. Nor was he a revered teacher. In fact, he was nothing more than a simple youth thought by his townsfolk to be a simpleton. But having recently been imprisoned with Mikail in the belly of the beast, the town’s prison where the brutal uprising had begun, he was determined, like Noah before him, to run to his town and tell the townsfolk what was coming, so they would at least have the option to leave.
Vasily shook his head. “No. No. No. We can’t just leave all of these people, Pyotr. These are our friends and our neighbors. We’ve got to try to get some of them out. What about the Malanovskys? What about Irinna? Do you remember Irinna, the pretty girl who works in the bakery? Are we going to just leave them all here on this battlefield? We have to do something to get as many of them out of here as we can.” He was speaking as much from compassion as from bravery. It wouldn’t even occur to him to leave without taking others, even as he had given no thought to trying to help the two prisoners escape. For him, there was no higher calling than answering the instinct towards one’s fellow man. No greater love hath any man than that he lay down his life for his friends. Vasily, having lost his parents while still a very young boy, had no one in this world but his friends, and he was determined to try to save them
“What can we do, Vasily? What can we do if you go up there and get yourself shot? What can we do if we wait here and the Spetznaz troops come down here and shoot both of us for participating in Lev’s breakout?”
“I’ve got to go back, Pyotr. I have to,” Vasily said, shaking his head. The finality in that word hinted at both conviction and destiny. “You prepare yourself to go, and if I’m not back, or if you get spooked, or if you hear gunfire, you just go.” He spread his hands as if to answer any objections. He looked Pyotr in the eye and nodded to him. “Lev would have wanted me to at least try, Pyotr.”