That night…lying awake in my bunk, I tried not to think about what had happened. I tried not to think about the fact that the MPs had taken Petrenko away, or that our weapons had been locked in the armory. I knew I should have felt bad for the child, angry, even vengeful toward Rat Face, and maybe even a little bit guilty because I didn’t lift a finger to stop it. I knew those were the kinds of emotions I should have been feeling; at that point the only thing I could feel was fear. I kept thinking about what Baburin had said, that something bad was going to happen. I just wanted to go home, see my parents. What if there’d been some horrible terrorist attack? What if it was a war? My family lived in Bikin, almost within sight of the Chinese border. I needed to speak to them, to make sure they were okay. I worried so much that I started throwing up, so much so that they checked me into the infirmary. That’s why I missed the patrol that day, that’s why I was still on bed rest when they came back the following afternoon.
I was in my bunk, rereading an outdated copy of Semnadstat. 2 I heard a commotion, vehicle engines, voices. A crowd was already assembled on the parade ground. I pushed my way through and saw Arkady standing in the center of the mob. Arkady was the heavy machine gunner from my squad, a big bear of a man. We were friends because he kept the other men away from me, if you understand what I mean. He said I reminded him of his sister. [Smiles sadly.] I liked him.
There was someone crawling at his feet. It looked like an old woman, but there was a burlap hood over her head and a chain leash wrapped around her neck. Her dress was torn and the skin of her legs had been scraped clean off. There was no blood, just this black pus. Arkady was well into a loud, angry speech. “No more lies! No more orders to shoot civilians on sight! And that’s why I put the little zhopoliz down…”
I looked for Lieutenant Tikhonov but I couldn’t see him anywhere. I got a ball of ice in my stomach.
“…because I wanted you all to see!” Arkady lifted the chain, pulling the old babushka up by her throat. He grabbed the hood and ripped it off. Her face was gray, just like the rest of her, her eyes were wide and fierce. She snarled like a wolf and tried to grab Arkady. He wrapped one powerful hand around her throat, holding her at arm’s length.
“I want you all to see why we are here!” He grabbed the knife from his belt and plunged it into the woman’s heart. I gasped, we all did. It was buried up to the hilt and she continued to squirm and growl. “You see!” he shouted, stabbing her several more times. “You see! This is what they’re not telling us! This is what they have us breaking our backs to find!” You could see heads start to nod, a few grunts of agreement. Arkady continued, “What if these things are everywhere? What if they’re back home, with our families right now!” He was trying to make eye contact with as many of us as possible. He wasn’t paying enough attention to the old woman. His grip loosened, she pulled free and bit him on the hand. Arkady roared. His fist caved in the old woman’s face. She fell to his feet, writhing and gurgling that black goo. He finished the job with his boot. We all heard her skull crack.
Blood was trickling down the gouge in Arkady’s fist. He shook it at the sky, screaming as the veins in his neck began to bulge. “We want to go home!” he bellowed. “We want to protect our families!” Others in the crowd began to pick it up. “Yes! We want to protect our families! This is a free country! This is a democracy! You can’t keep us in prison!” I was shouting, too, chanting with the rest. That old woman, the creature that could take a knife in the heart without dying…what if they were back home? What if they were threatening our loved ones…my parents? All the fear, all the doubt, every tangled, negative emotion all fused into rage. “We want to go home! We want to go home!” Chanting, chanting, and then…A round cracked past my ear and Arkady’s left eye imploded. I don’t remember running, or inhaling the tear gas. I don’t remember when the Spetznaz commandos appeared, but suddenly they were all around us, beating us down, shackling us together, one of them stepping on my chest so hard I thought I was going to die right then and there.
Was that the Decimation?
No, that was the beginning. We weren’t the first army unit to rebel. It had actually started about the time the MPs first closed down the base. About the time we staged our little “demonstration,” the government had decided how to restore order.
[She straightens her uniform, composes herself before speaking.]
To “decimate”…I used to think it meant just to wipe out, cause horrible damage, destroy…it actually means to kill by a percentage of ten, one out of every ten must die…and that’s exactly what they did to us.
The Spetznaz had us assemble on the parade ground, full dress uniform no less. Our new commanding officer gave a speech about duty and responsibility, about our sworn oath to protect the motherland, and how we had betrayed that oath with our selfish treachery and individual cowardice. I’d never heard words like that before. “Duty?” “Responsibility?” Russia, my Russia, was nothing but an apolitical mess. We lived in chaos and corruption, we were just trying to get through the day. Even the army was no bastion of patriotism; it was a place to learn a trade, get food and a bed, and maybe even a little money to send home when the government decided it was convenient to pay its soldiers. “Oath to protect the motherland?” Those weren’t the words of my generation. That was what you’d hear from old Great Patriotic War veterans, the kind of broken, demented geezers who used to besiege Red Square with their tattered Soviet banners and their rows and rows of medals pinned to their faded, moth-eaten uniforms. Duty to the motherland was a joke. But I wasn’t laughing. I knew the executions were coming. The armed men surrounding us, the men in the guard towers, I was ready, every muscle in my body was tensing for the shot. And then I heard those words…
“You spoiled children think democracy is a God-given right. You expect it, you demand it! Well, now you’re going to get your chance to practice it.”
His exact words, stamped behind my eyelids for the rest of my life.
What did he mean?
We would be the ones to decide who would be punished. Broken up into groups of ten, we would have to vote on which one of us was going to be executed. And then we…the soldiers, we would be the ones to personally murder our friends. They rolled these little pushcarts past us. I can still hear their creaking wheels. They were full of stones, about the size of your hand, sharp and heavy. Some cried out, pleaded with us, begged like children. Some, like Baburin, simply knelt there silently, on this knees, staring right into my face as I brought the rock down into his.
[She sighs softly, glancing over her shoulder at the one-way glass.]
Brilliance. Sheer fucking brilliance. Conventional executions might have reinforced discipline, might have restored order from the top down, but by making us all accomplices, they held us together not just by fear, but by guilt as well. We could have said no, could have refused and been shot ourselves, but we didn’t. We went right along with it. We all made a conscious choice and because that choice carried such a high price, I don’t think anyone ever wanted to make another one again. We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”
BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION
[Trevor’s Bar personifies the “Wild West Indies,” or, more specifically, each island’s “Special Economic Zone.” This is not a place most people would associate with the order and tranquility of postwar Caribbean life. It is not meant to be. Fenced off from the rest of the island and catering to a culture of chaotic violence and debauchery, the Special Economic Zones are engineered specifically to separate “off-islanders” from their money. My discomfort seems to please T. Sean Collins. The giant Texan slides a shot of “kill-devil” rum in my direction, then swings his massive, boot-clad feet onto the table.]
They haven’t come up with a name for what I used to do. Not a real one, not yet. “Independent contractor” sounds like I should be layin’ drywall and smearin’ plaster. “Private security” sounds like some dumbass mall guard. “Mercenary” is the closest, I guess, but at the same time, about as far from the real me as you could have gotten. A mercenary sounds like some crazed-out ’Nam vet, all tats and handlestache, humpin’ in some Third World cesspool ’cause he can’t hack it back in the real world. That wasn’t me at all. Yeah, I was a vet, and yeah, I used my training for cash…funny thing about the army, they always promise to teach you “marketable skills,” but they never mention that, by far, there’s nothing more marketable than knowing how to kill some people while keeping others from being killed.
Maybe I was a mercenary, but you’d never know it to look at me. I was clean-cut, nice car, nice house, even a housekeeper who came in once a week. I had plenty of friends, marriage prospects, and my handicap at the country club was almost as good as the pros. Most importantly, I worked for a company no different from any other before the war. There was no cloak and dagger, no back rooms and midnight envelopes. I had vacation days and sick days, full medical and a sweet dental package. I paid my taxes, too much; I paid into my IRA. I could have worked overseas; Lord knows there was plenty of demand, but after seeing what my buddies went through in the last brushfire, I said, screw it, let me guard some fat CEO or worthless, dumb celebrity. And that’s where I found myself when the Panic hit.
You don’t mind if I don’t mention any names, ’kay? Some of these people are still alive, or their estates are still active, and…can you believe, they’re still threatening to sue. After all that’s gone down? Okay, so I can’t name names or places, but figure it’s an island…a big island…a long island, right next to Manhattan. Can’t sue me for that, right?
My client, I’m not sure what he really did. Something in entertainment, or high finance. Beats me. I think he might have even been one of the senior shareholders in my firm. Whatever, he had bucks, lived in this amazing pad by the beach.
Our client liked to know people who were known by all. His plan was to provide safety for those who could raise his image during and after the war, playing Moses to the scared and famous. And you know what, they fell for it. The actors, and singers, and rappers and pro athletes, and just the professional faces, like the ones you see on talk shows or reality shows, or even that little rich, spoiled, tired-looking whore who was famous for just being a rich, spoiled, tired-looking whore.
There was that record mogul guy with the big ’ole diamond earrings. He had this tricked-out AK with a grenade launcher. He loved to talk about how it was an exact replica of the one from Scarface. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Señor Montana had used a sixteen A-1.
There was the political comedy guy, you know, the one with the show. He was snorting blow between the air bags of this teeny Thai stripper while spewing about how what was happening wasn’t just about the living versus the dead, it would send shock waves through every facet of our society: social, economic, political, even environmental. He said that, subconsciously, everyone already knew the truth during the “Great Denial,” and that’s why they wigged out so hard when the story was finally broken. It all actually kinda made sense, until he started spewing about high fructose corn syrup and the feminization of America.
Crazy, I know, but you kinda expected those people to be there, at least I did. What I didn’t expect was all their “people.” Every one of them, no matter who they were or what they did, had to have, at least, I don’t know how many stylists and publicists and personal assistants. Some of them, I think, were pretty cool, just doing it for the money, or because they figured they’d be safe there. Young people just trying to get a leg up. Can’t fault them for that. Some of the others though…real pricks all high on the smell of their own piss. Just rude and pushy and ordering everyone else around. One guy sticks out in my mind, only because he wore this baseball cap that read “Get It Done!” I think he was the chief handler of the fat fuck who won that talent show. That guy must have had fourteen people around him! I remember thinking at first that it would be impossible to take care of all these people, but after my initial tour of the premises, I realized our boss had planned for everything.
He’d transformed his home into a survivalists’ wet dream. He had enough dehydrated food to keep an army fed for years, as well as an endless supply of water from a desalinizer that ran right out into the ocean. He had wind turbines, solar panels, and backup generators with giant fuel tanks buried right under the courtyard. He had enough security measures to hold off the living dead forever: high walls, motion sensors, and weapons, oh the weapons. Yeah, our boss had really done his homework, but what he was most proud of was the fact that every room in the house was wired for a simultaneous webcast that went out all over the world 24/7. This was the real reason for having all his “closest” and “best” friends over. He didn’t just want to ride out the storm in comfort and luxury, he wanted everyone to know he’d done it. That was the celebrity angle, his way of ensuring high-profile exposure.
Not only did you have a webcam in almost every room, but there was all the usual press you’d find on the Oscar’s red carpet. I honestly never knew how big an industry entertainment journalism was. There had to be dozens of them there from all these magazines and TV shows. “How are you feeling?” I heard that a lot. “How are you holding up?” “What do you think is going to happen?” and I swear I even heard someone ask “What are you wearing?”
