How is that not a clue? Yuri asked himself.
The files were on the next floor down, squirreled away in a safe behind a huge desk in a big office. The faded name plate on the door read ‘V.S. Grebennikoff’. This Grebennikoff must have been a big shot because the back wall was covered with fancy framed diplomas and even bigger black-and-white photographs.
Yuri scanned the photos as Iosif knelt at the safe. All of them featured a bald, spectacled professor-type standing with assorted nomenklatura. These government patrons were his real credentials, because despite the degrees and awards, it was who you knew, not what that really mattered. Especially back then.
The officials loved the camera, grinning like fat cats who’d swallowed the cream, while the Grebennikoff character was as stiff as a man facing a firing squad. Which he might have — later — because that too was how such things were back then: up one minute, down the next. Like a mad carousel.
The safe opened with a soft click and Yuri was not surprised Iosif knew the combination. The scientist stuffed two bundles of papers in his backpack.
“Where to next?” Yuri asked.
Iosif pointed down.
5. a man should face his enemies
Half the lights were out in the stairway.
“The radio thing is down there?” Yuri tried to keep the reluctance out of his voice.
Iosif switched his flashlight on. “Bottom floor.”
The stark purple-white light carved his face in hard shadows, made him look ghoulish. He aimed the beam at Yuri. “The transmitter is in a side room near the power station.”
The beam made Yuri wince but his headache had subsided. “We’ll need that?”
“I hope not.”
“’Hope for the best’ is not a good strategy,” Yuri said as they started down. “And tell me why the flashlight.”
“The lights are out, for one. Two, they hate bright light,” Iosif explained.
“The survivors?”
The scientist nodded. “Something to do with the changes in the regular sensory areas of their brains.”
“So they worked, your ‘drug and shock’ experiments?”
Iosif grunted. “Ninety percent of the subjects died. Five percent of those that lived would have been better off dead.”
Yuri couldn’t help but comment. “Well that is a reduced sentence, I guess.”
Iosif ignored that and continued. “The remaining five percent… they changed. In mind and body.”
Suspicion crawled across Yuri’s skin like ants. “Changed how?”
“They swelled, shrunk. Thickened. They became dwarves — on steroids. We called them zhaby — toads — but Kirov, the lead pharmacist insisted they be ‘Burers’, after this Gypsy girl who’d taken him for a good ride. “Twisted little mind-readers, just like her.”
“They could read minds, these dwarves?” Yuri said worriedly.
“No,” Iosif said. “We never saw any telepathic development. Telekinesis, however — ” The scientist noticed Yuri staring angrily at him, and sighed. “They could move things with their minds.”
They had reached a landing. The lights were completely out on this level and the stairway below was a well of black.
“Move things…” Yuri repeated. “And you tell me this now?”
The scientist looked over his shoulder, genuinely puzzled now. “Can you think of a better time?”
Yuri had to admit he had a point.
They reached the bottom and the instant Yuri’s boots hit the floor, he heard a baby cry out from the darkness. His skin prickled. “What the fuck was that?”
“A gypsy toad,” Iosif said, and stepped carefully through the door. “Get your rifle ready.”
They entered a large room with a tall ceiling. Iosif’s lamp played across heavy steel doors. A faded ‘X-17” was painted in white block letters on the wall and there were three corridors, each heading in a different direction. The harsh light flashed over the mouth of each. There was a faint humming from the middle passage and a sigh of stale air.
“This way,” the scientist said.
They padded through the darkness, the bright circle leading them on. Iosif was doing his best to keep the flashlight steady but Yuri saw it shiver and dip. The man was scared. Not that Yuri could blame him; he was sweating despite the cool air. He pulled Sasha’s stock tighter into his shoulder.
Next time, I remember to bring my own flashlight.
Next time…
The hallway was long and Yuri sensed they were passing open spaces, open doorways and rooms, as they went. After what might have been five minutes or fifteen, Iosif stopped and snapped off the light. The blackness sprang back and swallowed them up. Yuri heard cloth creak and suddenly Iosif’s breath was in his ear.
“The generators are ten meters straight ahead,” the scientist whispered. “The transmitter room is the second door on the right. The second one. The first is the boiler room. Go in there and you’re stuck. So you must take the second door.”
Yuri nodded, realized his mistake. “Yes” he said quickly. “But why are you telling me this?”
“In case we get separated.”
Yuri swallowed. “So survivors are there? The Burers?”
“Well someone turned out the lights.”
“And you think they’re down there?” Yuri was liking this idea less and less. Perhaps they should take their chances--
Iosif put a hand on Yuri’s shoulder. His voice was tight. “I think if there are any, that’s where they’ll be. Remember, no matter what you see, if I say ‘shoot’, you shoot, got me? No hesitation.”
Sweat tickled behind Yuri’s right ear. “Yes.”
Iosif clenched Yuri’s jacket in his fist. “Yes what?”
“Yes. I’ll shoot. Yes.”
“Good.” The scientist let go. “Now put one hand on my back and stay right behind me. Keep one eye closed for when I turn the flashlight back on, OK?”
“OK.”
The generator room was big and warm. There was a kiss of moving air and whirring noises from every direction. Faint lights blinked throughout the area, scattered across machinery and instrument panels: red and yellow, green and white. Tiny hazard stars. They gave off just enough light for Yuri to make out the geometry of hard shapes, pipes and equipment.
Iosif stopped a few steps inside the room and crouched, coiled and taut as a spring. He had his pistol in one hand, flashlight in the other, with his arms folded across his chest. He was listening, perfectly still, as if he were frozen in the first position of a Cossack dance. Yuri knelt behind him, a hand on the man’s bony back. He held Sasha over the scientists’ right shoulder with the other.
I shoot, he’ll be deaf for a week, Yuri thought. But better deaf than dead.
After a full minute, Iosif relaxed and made a tick, tick noise with his mouth. He jerked his head to the right. Yuri spied rectangle door shapes, two of them.
Good, good, good. All according to plan, Yuri nodded to himself. Second door.
Another tick and Iosif rose, and started sidestepping toward the doors, still facing the center of the room. It was awkward, but Yuri stayed with him, the two of them struggling in tandem like drunken guests at the end of wedding celebration.
They were halfway there when Yuri heard a wet huffing, shuffling sound.