Mother Russia

Chapter Thirteen

A car raced by them, going in the other direction, and was soon followed by two others. Arkady stopped to watch them but Ada barely slowed down. She caught a glimpse of the people in the cars, and it did not reassure her. They all looked terrified, hands tight on the steering wheels. A woman in the passenger seat of the first car was crying. They were trying to get away, and Ada just happened to be going in the direction of the things they were trying to get away from.

She considered turning around and going back, but she couldn’t do that either. There was a mob of infected people in the other direction. And they were on foot, which didn’t help. Ada considered stealing a car, but it wasn’t as easy as it used to be. Back in the day, she could just pop open the steering column and twist some wires, but modern cars were much harder to hotwire. She needed tools, and her tools were in her apartment, and her apartment was four kilometers away. The only thing Ada knew for sure was that she had to get to the apartment, because that’s where her weapons were, and weapons were a priority.

Other than those few cars, the city seemed abandoned and dead. Houses and businesses had their lights off and the doors locked. Arkady suggested earlier that they knock on doors, but Ada told him it would be a waste of time. Maybe that wasn’t entirely true, but she felt that Arkady simply wanted to find a place to hide.

Ada believed that the only reason she had survived the outbreak in Raccoon City was that she had kept on the move the entire time. She didn’t stay in one place, she kept moving. If she had locked herself in her hotel room that morning and tried to wait it out, she’d probably be dead right now, most likely dying in the nuclear strike. She intended to keep moving, get armed, and fight her way out. If possible, she would take Arkady with her. And if not, then that was also an option.

Arkady was half a block behind her now, and he jogged to catch up. They walked the next few blocks in silence, passing a few apartment buildings and rows of businesses, all of which were closed. Up ahead was a larger complex of long two-story apartment buildings.

“There’s lights in some of the windows,” Arkady pointed out.

“Yes, I see that.”

“Do you think … do you think the government has sent out a warning for people to stay in their homes?”

“I doubt it,” Ada said. “Communications are down, remember?”

“We could … we could check ...”

Ada shook her head. “What would you do if you saw your neighbors or even your own family members turn into zombies? Would you open the door if some strangers knocked on it?”

“I suppose not.”

“We should keep moving,” Ada said. “We still don’t know how bad this outbreak is. Maybe we’re lucky and it’s not that bad. If that’s the case, then we can make it to my apartment and hole up there until help arrives, if that’s what you want. But if it’s bad, like it was in Raccoon City, then getting to my place is the only chance we have at staying alive, do you understand?”

Arkady lowered his shoulders, looking defeated. He said, “I just think we should –”

He was cut off by a hideous howling sound off to their left, like the scream of a wild animal, followed by the sound of a crash. Ada spun around and stared down the dark street, her gun held firmly in both hands, even though she knew whatever could have made that noise would not be stopped by a few harmless bullets.

Arkady was next to her, his hands shaking. “What was …?”

“Let’s go,” she said.

“What .. what was that?”

“Whatever it was, we should get as far away from it as possible.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Arkady said.

“No, we’re not waiting even a second. We should go.”

“Konstantin lives near here.”

“What?”

“Konstantin,” Arkady said, pointing at a nearby street sign. “He’s one of the scientists I had working for me. I think he lives in one of these apartment buildings.”

Ada stared at him. “Arkady, we should go right now.”

“But he might be –”

Another blood-curdling roar echoed down the street, and then screams of terror. From around the side of the nearest apartment building came three people running for their lives, two men and a woman. Ada grabbed Arkady’s arm and pulled. “Come on!”

Even as she grabbed him, she caught sight of a huge misshapen figure emerging from around the apartment building and chasing after the other people with a deranged cry. Ada kicked off her heels and ran in her stockings, with Arkady just a few steps behind her. The other people were screaming for help, but their cries were drowned out by the pounding in Ada’s ears. Another panicked glance over her shoulder showed her just what was coming after them.

A man, or something that used to be a man. Its skin was a hellish red, scabbed and blistered, with jagged spikes poking out of its shoulders and other joints, what remained of its clothing a shredded ruin. It had black hair and the remains of a patchy black beard on its distorted, elongated face. Demonic orange eyes seemed to glow from under heavy brows. It loped after its victims like a rampaging gorilla, running on all four limbs more often than not.

“Konstantin!” Arkady cried in shock. “My God! It’s Konstantin!”

“I told you!” Ada screamed. “He got infected!”

Behind them, the mutated primary host that used to be Konstantin Rykov chased down one of the other people and slashed with an inhumanly long arm, severing the man’s spine and nearly cutting him in half. The body flopped to the ground in a splash of blood and ruptured organs. Konstantin howled and leaped over the corpse. The woman faltered and cried out, staring in horror at the man’s remains, and was promptly impaled by Konstantin’s clawed hand. He swung hard and hurled the body away from him, trailing a line of blood.

“Shoot it!” Arkady shouted. “You have a gun!”

Like that would do any good, Ada thought. Shooting that thing would be about as useful as flicking rubber bands at it. It would probably only piss it off even more. Instead, she turned and ran around a house to go down another street. They needed to get somewhere where it couldn’t reach them, it was the only way.

Behind them, Konstantin slaughtered the other man, whose strangled dying screams joined with Konstantin’s bestial roar to create a hideous sound that curdled the blood.

Visions of William Birkin lurked in her mind, threatening to overwhelm her. She had nightmares about him sometimes. A huge twisted monstrosity pounding after her in the darkness, bellowing like a demon from hell, reaching out with bloody monstrous claws.

Up ahead, she saw a large drainage pipe that extended under the next intersecting street. There was a ditch along the side of the street and it emptied into the drainage pipe. It was about two feet in diameter. Not very big, but big enough for them to crawl into.

She turned back to Arkady. “Come on!”

But he was too slow. Ada was younger, and in better shape. Arkady had fallen behind, and was panting for breath as he tried to keep running.

“Arkady!” Ada screamed. She met his eyes, and in that moment they both knew it was too late. Behind him, surging forward with the momentum of a freight train, Konstantin Rykov reared back with his huge clawed arm and swung down, impaling Arkady right through the chest. Konstantin roared and whipped his arm up, and Arkady flopped around, his limbs flailing. He slipped off the gory claws and somersaulted through the air, falling to the ground with bone-crunching force and landing in a crumpled heap.

Ada crawled into the drainage pipe. A split-second after she pulled her legs all the way inside, Konstantin slammed his claws viciously into the entrance of the pipe and stomped around, roaring and shrieking furiously. Ada crawled another foot and slumped onto her side, lying in two inches of foul-smelling runoff. Konstantin stuck his face into the entrance of the pipe and screamed, and Ada had to slap her hands over her ears as the deafening roar reverberated down the pipe, so loud that it rattled her teeth.

And then, suddenly, it was over. She heard Konstantin thunder away, his footsteps nearly shaking the ground, and lifted her head to look back out of the pipe. She felt like she was going to pass out.

She didn’t know how long she waited. A few minutes, probably, but her sense of time was distorted. Maybe it was only a few seconds. Maybe it was an hour. But she managed to get her hands and knees underneath her and slowly backed out of the pipe.

She stood up and looked around, feeling numb. And then she looked down at herself. Her dress was ruined, she thought vaguely. Her legs were covered in mud and slime from the inside of the pipe. After a few confused moments, she walked on wobbly legs to where Arkady lay in the grass.

He was on his back. One of his arms was folded underneath his body, and one leg was twisted up unnaturally. His stomach was a gory ruin and she tried not to focus on it.

His eyes were open and he looked at her. Ada fell to her knees and put his hand in hers. She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel. Not grief, surely. She barely knew Arkady, and he was nothing to her but an asset, after all. There was no sorrow or anguish in her expression, but there was something else, something she couldn’t quite place.

Was it regret? Maybe if she had let him hide in one of the buildings earlier, he would have survived. Did she feel like she had inadvertently gotten him killed? She didn’t think so. She had wanted to save both of them. If Arkady had been able to run just a little bit faster, he might have made it. And yet, she still wondered if it was her fault.

“J … Jeane ...” he tried to say. Blood poured from his mouth.

She shook her head. “Don’t talk. I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”

He squeezed her hand to let her know that he understood.

“My name is Ada,” she said.

Arkady smiled, closed his eyes, and died.

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