Polina Dashkova - Madness Treads Lightly

After their break, they were again walking through the taiga. Lena kept hearing a noise. It would get closer, then move away, and sometimes disappear altogether. The noise seemed to be in her head, from exhaustion and hunger. But the killer explained it was a drill.

“Where are we going?” Lena asked.

But he didn’t answer. She suddenly had the thought that he himself no longer even knew where they were. They were lost. How much farther could they go without food? There was only a small piece of chocolate left. It was getting dark. The twilight was gloomy, and the sky grew overcast. If the moon didn’t peek out, it would soon be pitch black.

Her ears were ringing. Lena no longer felt her own body, which had become light, almost weightless. And the gloom kept thickening. The wind was noisy in the tall firs’ crowns. Snow dust was hitting her in the face. A snowstorm had kicked up. Lena felt like she was flying along with the tiny snowflakes. The ringing in her ears was deafening, and vomit was rising to her throat. The black tree trunks started spinning before her eyes. The heavy, pulsing gloom pulled in everything around her.

Lena fainted.

The special ops team scaled the two-meter stone wall one after the other. The four doghouses were empty.

The house was silent. The team scattered to their positions. A military helicopter hovered over the roof. Two men dropped down a rope ladder and entered the attic through the dormer window.

It soon became clear that the stone house was empty. A thorough search yielded nothing. No weapons, drugs, papers. Nothing.

Or almost nothing. In one of the closets Colonel Krotov found his wife’s leather jacket. The jacket was hanging neatly on a hanger, and her checked woolen scarf was poking out of one sleeve. In the pockets, the colonel found a clean handkerchief, thirty-thousand rubles in small bills, and a key for the Tobolsk Hotel.

On the floor of the same closet lay Lena’s purse. All her documents were there—passport, international press card, an opened pack of cigarettes, two hundred dollars, makeup, and a hairbrush.

The smell of Lena’s perfume lingered in the scarf. The colonel buried his pale face in it.

At first, Lena heard a slow, rhythmic rumble. Then she sensed light through her closed eyelids. Then she smelled something odd, not unpleasant, exactly, but odd. Still not opening her eyes, she realized that somewhere very nearby a train was rumbling. A freight train, probably. There was the smell of cinders and coal, that special railroad air you can’t mistake for anything else.

She was a little cold. She discovered she was lying on a pile of black and yellow rags, wearing someone else’s peacoat, and covered with a ragged quilted jacket. Cautiously rising, she scanned her surroundings.

Around her, wooden walls bore scraps of torn wallpaper. Lying on the floor were pieces of iron, scraps of newspaper, a broken stool, a few empty cans, and a vodka bottle. In the corner was a half-collapsed stove. A gentle morning light poured through a broken window. The door creaked and flapped in the breeze.

The rumble of the train fell silent in the distance.

“Vasya!” she called out.

But no one responded. She went outside. Directly in front of her was a rail bed with a single track. Deep taiga on either side. Not a soul to be seen, just the trackman’s small, abandoned hut.

Lena scooped up a handful of clean snow and wiped her face. Her clenched stomach hurt; she was so hungry. Sticking her hands in her pockets, she discovered a small piece of foil. She took it out and unwrapped it. Of the four squares of chocolate, Vasya had broken off only one for himself.

She vaguely remembered the killer carrying her on his back. She even remembered him saying, “Hold on just a little longer, I’m begging you.”

She didn’t know how long they’d traveled to get to this abandoned hut, but she did remember him laying her on the rags and covering her with the quilted jacket.

The chocolate melted slowly in her mouth. Lena washed it down with clean snow. She didn’t hurry. The killer had taught her to eat slowly. “Cold cocoa.” Chocolate with taiga snow. She felt better, and the pain in her stomach eased up.

Lena brought out the quilted jacket, spread it right by the rails, and sat down. A train would have to come down the track. One already had. There’d be another. She’d hear the wheels knocking from far off and would go out on the rails. The engineer would notice her and stop the train.

The cold sun peered through the thin clouds. The taiga silence was deafening. She could hear tree trunks creaking.

Lena didn’t know how much time had passed. She sat curled into a ball, gradually losing heat. She was afraid to go back into the hut and miss the train. The sun was slowly crossing to the west. No train. Not a one. She closed her eyes. She was so sleepy. She understood she shouldn’t sleep, but she couldn’t do anything about it. The train will wake me up, she thought. It has to wake me up.

But there was no train.

The helicopter circled above the taiga without any hope. Colonel Krotov’s face was pressed up to the porthole.

If they took her away, he thought, her jacket wouldn’t have been hanging there. If they’ve already killed her, I would have found something else, her boots, for instance. She might have run away. Yes, she must have run away.

He sensed there was little logic to his reasoning.

Let’s assume she ran away. How much time has passed? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? No more. It hasn’t been intensely cold. It is March, after all. She could have gone toward the sound of the drilling or the railroad. But there’s a phone at the drilling site. They would have let us know.

“It’s going to get dark soon,” the pilot commented. “We’re going to have to go back.”

“Just a little more,” the colonel asked, not tearing himself away from the porthole.

At first Krotov saw a level cut-through, and then the slender stripes of rails. Then a solitary hut, tiny, like a toy.

“Almost no one uses that single track anymore,” the pilot told Krotov. “Only the occasional freight train comes through with timber from Tovda. If the trackman’s hut is still there, it’s abandoned.”

“Lower, please, just a little!” the colonel requested.

He himself couldn’t understand why his heart had suddenly started beating so loud.

The helicopter began to descend. From not very high up, he could clearly see a small, dark figure in the snow. It was a woman, and she was lying there, curled into a ball, right by the tracks.

Lena was trying to keep warm. She didn’t want to wake up. But sleep blocked out the loud noise and cutting wind that made the bottom of her short loose pea jacket flap. Slowly, heavily, she opened her eyes. It took tremendous effort. The wind was beating at her face, her eyes teared up, and she couldn’t see a thing. With a last heroic effort, she raised herself up on one elbow. She saw Seryozha and some other men running toward her through the deep snow. Nearby the helicopter’s huge rotor was turning.

Colonel Krotov picked up his wife.

“Regina Valentinovna, you may find the question I’m going to ask difficult. How did you manage to jump right back into work after suffering such grief?”

The TV reporter, a young man with a beard, looked at Regina with his light gray, slightly squinty eyes. Written on his face was sincere sympathy.