Her house was the one he’d gone to first when he was asking people to come along on their journey, and for a brief moment he’d hoped she would come. She’d seemed curious and receptive, asking questions about where they would go, how they would get there, when they would leave. He’d laid the plans out in hopes that she’d follow, but in the end she’d shaken her head and declined. She didn’t give a reason, simply saying that she wished him well, but that she just couldn’t go. He’d left in sorrow, and as he slept that sorrow returned.
Had he been able to extract himself from that dream at that moment and spirit away to the town of Warwick, and if he could have hovered there to view the village where the chaos had overtaken even the premise of any workable resolution, he wouldn’t have been so inclined to feel that way. For as the town fell into complete and utter disrepair, the lovely Irinna was indeed inside her house making her own plans for escape. She was readying her belongings. She watched out the window to see whether there was any hope that the Spetznaz soldiers would bring the town back into some kind of order, or whether a coalition of the people would rise up and turn the tide in a decisive way.
As she watched, it became clear—it became clear to everyone, even the gang from the prison that had begun the trouble—that the cause was lost, and without it, so was the town. She sat quietly and waited until she heard a predetermined knock at the door that her escape route had arrived.
As the chaos descended and the town crumbled, she heard the knock. Rushing to the door in breathless anticipation, she found standing there a man whom she had come to love dearly. The match was made secretly as she made her bread deliveries in and around Warwick. She’d passed his house many times, and one time she stopped for a moment to chat, and then eventually stayed too long and then eventually wanted to stay even longer. And now she was ready to leave with her love.
She rushed to the door to find him standing there, just outside the window in the door. She looked up and saw him motioning silently through the glass to her. And with that, she grabbed her belongings and opened the door and took the hand of the stocky bulldog named Mikail Brekhunov.
Mikail had a few of the loyal Spetznaz soldiers with him, and the small group had decided that the cause was indeed lost in Warwick, and they were going to make a break for it and try to leave before some form of authority was restored and recriminations started.
They talked as they carefully made their way in a circuitous route back to the gym to gather up Sergei and Vladimir and the remnant of their loyal forces. In passing, Irinna mentioned to him, since they were now discussing escape, that the young, dull boy… Vasily… had come to her house last night and had asked her to escape with him. Apparently, even the town dunce had a way out.
This surprised Mikail, and not just a little. The red scar on his forehead began to throb and his mouth twitched as he mulled the thought in his mind. As they drew close to the gymnasium, his rage began to build, and, although they had not reached a place of safety, he grabbed Irinna harshly by the hand and spun her around to face him, his rage to the point of boiling over.
“How were they getting out?” he demanded angrily.
“I have no idea, Mikail. He gave no details. He just said that they were going to be leaving and that he wanted me to go with him.”
“Oh he did, did he? Who was going with him?!” He spat the words. “Damned fool!” It was unclear from the way that he said this exactly to whom he was referring. “Dumb, little Vasily! He wanted to take the most beautiful girl in Warwick with him?! He had a way out! Maybe young Vasily wasn’t so dumb after all!” He said this not in a way of kindness or to flatter Irinna, or even Vasily. He said it in anger. The soldiers escorting the pair were growing wary of being out in the open with the town in rebellion, and they attempted to move the two arguing lovers along with them in order to get them as quickly as possible into the safety of the gym.
“I kept that little idiot alive when Vladimir wanted to kill him! I gave him life! And this is what he gives me!”
“Mikail, there was nothing! He seemed to be going house to house. There was nothing between us!” As she said this, the soldiers grabbed the two and forcibly moved them toward the gym, toward cover.
The soldiers were moving in formation, sweeping their guns in wide arcs, and as they did so, the chaos of the town opened up around them and the people formed in crowds and looked on, urging an offensive.
A sharp crack split the air, and the soldiers dropped to the ground instinctively. Mikail spun around and dropped to the ground with them, looking at the crowd to see if he could determine who had fired on them.
Just at that moment, the lovely Irinna stood still in the street. She reached her hand up to brush away the wisp of hair from her face and, as she did so she left a small trail of blood smearing across her fast-draining features. Looking up, Mikail reached for Irinna’s hand to pull her down with him, and only then did he see the blood running down her face, down her dress, circling the curves of the one he loved so. Her legs collapsed and she fell to the ground, falling into Mikail’s arms as he attempted to understand what had happened.
Mikail crouched over her, and the soldiers grabbed at them both and began to drag them, and then, seeing that the girl was dying, the soldiers dropped her and began forcibly to drag the unwounded Mikail towards the gymnasium, toward safety. Finally they broke out into a sprint as Mikail stumbled along in their midst. He gave a final look over his shoulder, over the shoulder of a soldier, and saw his lovely Irinna lying in the snow, bleeding into it. He turned his face toward the gym and picked up his pace with the soldiers, until they came into the warm embrace of their shelter.
In that look and in that moment, Mikail focused his mind on what was ahead of him. For now, perhaps for the first time in a lifetime of calculation, he found himself feeling an entirely new emotion. It was a feeling that he suddenly confronted but did not have any real way to account for in the way that he always calculated everything. It was feeling of overwhelming and ancient reckoning, a feeling of un-appraisable anguish.
Mikail now had a reason to hate.
CHAPTER 15
Tuesday Afternoon — Election Day
It was nearing noon as Klaus von Baron stepped out onto the platform of his multi-million dollar Red Bear Starjump capsule and looked downward, 128,000 feet, toward the blue, grey circle of the earth. In its curvilinear contrast to the deep, black expanse of space, the planet splayed beneath his feet, looking mysterious and malleable, like a floating lump of clay waiting to be formed if only he could get his hands around it.
“Checklist, item seventeen,” Klaus heard through his headset from Starjump Mission Control in Roswell. “Engage capsule release timer. Near your left hand, Red Bear, down below the seat reconnect and next to the O2 injection port. Flip up the guard and throw the red switch.”
The command sounded like a faraway dream reaching into his conscience, the only other sound being the measured rhythm of his own thick breathing. Klaus looked down, as did the millions of people worldwide watching over his shoulder, over the internet, and took in the awesome scene, feeling his smallness against the massive earth.
With the bulky suit restricting his movement, he moved clumsily in response to the instruction. He thought about the millions of dollars that had gone into manufacturing the suit knowing that, in just a moment, he would be plummeting at greater than the speed of sound, the first human to break the sound barrier outside of a vehicle, without a capsule or ship, in a tumbling, rotating freefall. The suit would be the only thing between him and death. In fact, without it, right now he would already be dead.