Maybe… maybe she was caught in between? In a hole without age, without time?
Some things she could count. The old man sat at the same table with her for roughly two out of every three meals. And not just him. There were others living in this Dead Town too, and most of the time they came for the meals. First there was the old lady who worked in the kitchen. She was a grandmotherly type with broad shoulders, big ass, thick glasses. She made all three meals and looked after the girl’s needs. Then there were two middle-aged women with almost identical faces, most likely the old lady’s daughters. And then there was a middle-aged guy, probably the old lady’s son, whose head was completely bald. None of these four seemed to be related to the old man. Not by blood anyway. Neither did the old lady and the old man appear to be married.
Still, here in the Dead Town, they sat down to take their meals together. Not just them, but the girl too. She was just old enough to be the old man’s granddaughter, except that she wasn’t related to him. She didn’t even belong to the same race.
Still, the pseudo family ate together. All six. All the time.
Ukha, smoked salmon, borscht, some kind of boiled dumpling things.
Sour bread.
Pickled mushrooms, again and again. Always these fucking pickles.
The girl glared across the table at the four or five others.
No one glared back. They were unfazed.
The old man even smiled.
“You all creep me out,” the girl said. “What are you, fucking ghosts?”
Speaking, of course, in Japanese.
Would you like some more? the old lady asked in Russian.
The old lady didn’t only cook for the girl, and she didn’t only cook for the pseudo family. The old lady spent her time in the kitchen preparing large quantities of food not meant for human consumption. Dog food. This Dead Town, which had been left empty ever since the Russian Federation abandoned it, was now home to a few people and an even larger nonhuman population.
A few dozen dogs.
Kept in special kennels outside.
Left exposed to the atmosphere, in this region of bitter winters, to keep them wild. So that their fighting instincts wouldn’t dull. Often the old lady cooked mutton for the dogs. She had a store of it that she bought in large quantities and kept in an underground freezer. Every other day she would take some out and cook it. Mutton legs, mutton heads, mutton skin, mutton fat. She used just a few spices. Enough to give a slight Central Asian flavor. This, too, was supposed to keep the dogs wild. To keep them from forgetting the odor of flesh.
This way, they wouldn’t hesitate to attack a living person.
The old lady’s “Russian dog food” recipe had been carefully thought out.
The dogs also drank milk, sheep’s milk.
The girl watched from the spacious first-floor room with the fireplace as the dogs wolfed down their meal. Stared at them across a distance of a few dozen meters. The windowpanes were clouded from the heat inside, but she had swept three fingers down the glass and peered out through those three lines. She had used her right hand, moving it in a furious sweep… her fingers held together, a single motion. After that, she stared out without moving, absolutely still. She had known it was time because she heard the dogs barking. She knew the others were feeding the dogs because there was no one in the room. Woof woof. A few dogs started barking. The girl watched them. The middle-aged women were carrying over a giant pot of milk, together. An enormous silver pot that reminded her of school lunch. Fucking lunch ladies, she thought, for the fucking dogs. That’s why they had to take the pot to the kennel. It would say MILK on the calendar.
The dogs were barking wildly. GIVE IT TO US! they seemed to be saying.
GIVE IT TO US! GIVE US MILK!
Released from their cages, the dogs devoured the milk. Clouds of white breath rose from their mouths, drops of white milk dribbled down. Fucking Russians, the girl thought. Fucking eat anything as long as it’s got fucking nutrients. Middle-class shit dogs.
Too much white. Your breath. Your slobber.
Assholes.
Such a fucking cold color!
But she went on watching them through the glass. She kept cursing them in her thoughts, but she was a hostage, what else could she do? She had to watch the dogs. She would watch as they ate, and then she would watch them exercise in the exercise grounds. Exercise. A field day for dogs. Or maybe… they’re practicing for doggie field day, she thought. Their exercise—or maybe their practicing—went on for two hours every morning. And that was just the morning.
The dogs were being trained.
In different ways. They were given different tasks. There were also various breeds of dogs. The only two the girl had seen before were Doberman pinschers and German shepherds. She didn’t recognize most of them. They weren’t like the Western dogs she knew. They looked sort of odd, somehow—their bodies. Most were mid-sized with ears that stood straight up, pretty long hair, muscular hind legs. Their coats were all different colors, and yet they seemed, overall, to make sense together. Ten to twenty of them probably had the same blood running in their veins.
…blood?
The girl began to sense something, a sort of authoritative aura, in the ten to twenty similar dogs. I bet you cost a lot, you shits, she thought, getting angry.
I bet you’ve got good parents.
The dogs barked, and the training got under way. The girl stared fixedly at them, unmoving, as they ran around. Caught somewhere between the dogs’ dynamism and the girl’s stasis was a man, or rather two men, exposed to the same minus-twenty-degree air as the dogs. Two men out there with the dogs on the exercise grounds, directing their movements.
They called constantly to the animals.
The old man most of all.
The old man led. He was training the dogs to fight, to attack. The dogs were fast. When he gave the sign, they dashed off at about forty miles an hour. Ran as hard as they could toward their target and leapt at him, hit him, took him down. The second man was the target. He stood some distance away, dressed in protective gear. The bald man, the old lady’s son. Not that his face was visible. He had a helmet on that covered his entire head. His throat, too, was wrapped in two or three protective layers. That was what the dogs aimed for. Biting, twisting, dragging him down. Ordinarily, such protective outfits only covered the arms and trunk. Because as a rule, war and police dogs are trained to go for the wrists. Their primary goal is to disarm, to “kill” only the target’s wrists. That wasn’t how the old man trained his dogs. His aim was different. He didn’t want his dogs to kill the target’s wrists, he wanted them to kill the target. To lunge at his face, his throat. To maul. To kill.
Again and again, they repeated the simple exercise.
Learning to kill. That was it. As quickly and precisely as possible.
Clearly when one of those dogs got up its speed, it had all the momentum it needed to hurl itself at its target and take him down, rolling and twisting, biting clear through his neck. Those dogs had the force they needed to detach a head from its body.