Anthony Horowitz: Russian Roulette

I leapt off the bed, dropping the book, and ran down the stairs and out of the house. The village was completely deserted. Our chickens were strutting around on the front lawn of our house, pecking at the grass. There was a dog barking somewhere. Everything was ridiculously normal. But then I heard footsteps and looked up. Mr Vladimov, our neighbour, was running down from his front door, wiping his hands on a cloth.

“Mr Vladimov!” I called out to him. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” he wheezed back. He had probably been working on his tractor. He was covered in oil. “They’ve all gone to see. I’m going with them.”

“What do you mean… all of them?”

“The whole village! There’s been some sort of accident!”

Before I could ask any more, he had disappeared down the muddy track.

He had no sooner gone than the alarm went off. It was extraordinary, deafening, like nothing I had ever heard before. It couldn’t have been more urgent if war had broken out. And as the noise of it resounded in my head, I realized that it had to be coming from the factory, more than a mile away! How could it be so loud? Even the fire alarm at school had been nothing like this. It was a high-pitched siren that seemed to spread out from a single point until it was everywhere – behind the forest, over the hills, in the sky – and yet at the same time it was right next to me, in front of my house. I knew now that there had been another accident. I had heard it, of course, the explosion. But that had been half an hour ago. Why had they been so slow to raise the alarm?

The siren stopped. And in the sudden silence, the countryside, the village where I had spent my entire life, seemed to have become photographs of themselves and it was as if I was on the outside looking in. There was nobody around me. The dog had stopped barking. The chickens had scattered.

I heard the sound of an engine. A car came hurtling towards me, bumping over the track. The first thing I registered was that it was a black Lada. Then I took in the bullet holes all over the bodywork and the fact that the front windscreen was shattered. But it was only when it stopped that I saw the shocking truth.

My father was in the front seat. My mother was behind the wheel.

I didn’t even know my mother could drive. We hardly ever saw any cars in Estrov because nobody could afford to buy one, and anyway, there wasn’t anywhere to go. The black Lada probably belonged to one of the senior managers.

Not that I was thinking about these things just then. The driver’s door opened and my mother got out. Straight away, I saw the fear in her eyes. She raised a hand in my direction, urging me to stay where I was, then ran round to the other side and helped my father out. He was wearing a loose white coat that flapped over his normal clothes, and I saw with a sense of horror that was like a pool of black water, sucking me in, that he had been hurt. The fabric was covered with his blood. His left arm hung limp. He was clutching his chest with his right hand. His face looked thin and pale and his eyes were empty, clouded by pain. My mother had her arm around him, helping him to walk. She at least had not been hurt but she still looked like someone who had escaped from a war zone. There were streaks running down her face. Her hair was wild. No boy should ever see his parents in this way. It is not natural. Everything I had always believed and taken for granted was instantly smashed.

The two of them reached me. My father could go no further and sank to the ground, resting his back against our garden fence. And all the time I had said nothing. There were a million questions I wanted to ask but the words simply would not reach my lips. Time seemed to have fragmented. The first explosion, the gunfire and the smoke, going downstairs, seeing the car… they were like four separate incidents that could have taken place years apart. I needed them to explain it for me. Somehow, perhaps, they could make it all make sense.

“Yasha!” My father was the first to speak and it didn’t sound like him at all. The pain was distorting his voice.

“What’s happened? What is it? Who hurt you? You’ve been shot!” Once I had begun to speak I could barely stop, but I was making little sense.

My father reached out and grabbed hold of my arm. “I am so glad you’re here. I was afraid you’d be out of the house. But you have to listen to us very carefully, Yasha. We have very little time.”

“Yasha, my dear boy…” It was my mother who had spoken and suddenly there were tears coursing down her cheeks. It didn’t matter what had happened at the factory. It was seeing me that had made her cry.

“I will try to explain to you,” my father said. “But you can’t argue with me. Do you understand that? You have to leave the village immediately.”

“What? I’m not leaving! I’m not going anywhere.”

“You have no choice. If you stay here, they’ll kill you.” His grip on me tightened. “They’re already on their way. Do you understand? They’ll be here. Very soon.”

“Who? Why?”

My father was too weak, in too much pain to say anything more, so my mother took over.

“We never told you about the factory,” she said. “We weren’t allowed to. But it wasn’t just that. We didn’t want you to know. We were ashamed.” She wiped her eyes, pulling herself together. “We were making chemicals and pesticides for farmers, like we always said. But we were also making other things. For the military.”

“Weapons,” my father said. “Chemical weapons. Do you understand what I mean?” I said nothing so he went on. “We had no choice, Yasha. Your mother and I got into trouble with the authorities a long time ago, when we were in Moscow, and we were sent out here. That was before you were born. It was all my fault. They stopped us from teaching. They threatened us. We had to earn a living and there was no other way.”

The words were like a stampede of horses galloping through my head. I wanted them to stop, to slow down. Surely all that mattered was to get help for my father. The nearest hospital was miles away but there was a doctor in Rosna. It seemed to me that my father was getting weaker and that the blood was spreading.

But still they went on. “This morning there was an accident in the main laboratory,” my mother explained. “And something was released into the air. We had already warned them it might happen. You heard us talking about it only last night. But they wouldn’t listen. Making a profit was all that mattered to them. Well, it’s over now. The whole village has been contaminated. We have been contaminated. We brought it with us in that car. Not that it would have made any difference. It’s in the air. It’s everywhere.”

“What is? What are you talking about?”

“A form of anthrax.” My mother spat out the words. “It’s a sort of bacterium but it’s been modified so that it’s very contagious and acts very quickly. It could wipe out an army! And maybe we deserve this. We were responsible. We helped to make it…”

“Do it!” my father said. “Do it now!” With his free hand, he fumbled in his pocket and took out a metal box, about fifteen centimetres long. It was the sort of thing that might contain a pen.

My mother took it. Her eyes were still fixed on me. “As soon as we knew what had happened, our first thoughts were for you,” she said. “Nobody was allowed to leave the factory. That was the protocol. They had to keep us there, to contain us. But your father and I had already made plans… just in case. We stole a car and we smashed through the perimeter fence. We had to reach you.”

“The siren…?”

“That was nothing to do with the accident. They set it off afterwards. They saw we were trying to escape.” She drew a breath. “The guards fired machine guns at us and they sounded the alarm. Your father was hit. We were so frightened we wouldn’t be able to find you, that you wouldn’t be at the house…”