David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

But the fact was that whatever the excuse, Alexei had done the thing. He had torn Amar Shadak in two and made puppets of the rest. From the lower levels of City 512, he could hear shouting as Rodionov’s men found the empty isolation tanks, and realized that their quarry had left. Then the small-arms fire, as some of those men turned on one another — obscuring once again the KGB’s trail to the dream-walkers of City 512.

Those puppets would never be right, Alexei knew. He had made them badly for his masters, and his masters had dropped the strings. He looked at Vladimir.

“Now,” he said, “you have work for me — to make things right.”

“Come,” said Vladimir.

Alexei looked at him. “I apologize,” he said. “This is very rude. But once again: fuck off.”

And Alexei floated again — this time not in a void, but in the air over the world. He was flying over mountaintops — high over the red-brown hills of Afghanistan. Clouds obscured things here and there, but he could see men and machinery moving below in what looked like a mountain pass. He could see the flash of explosions, the drifting of white smoke. People scurried beneath that smoke like frightened insects. Some fell and stopped moving. He could see smaller groups of men, moving around a more remote hilltop. Near the top of that hill, an opening in the stone. When he peered into it, he saw others — these ones moving through the tunnels of a cave, like ants or termites, with a common seeming purpose. He let himself float down to see inside. To return.

He fell down the chimney and drifted through the supply chamber — where an exhausted Ming Lei sat with Wali Beg, munching on biscuits that they’d liberated from the supplies. They looked at each other warily — they smelled of each other and couldn’t, either of them, recall what had happened to make that so. Alexei slipped through the crack in the wall, until he was in the chamber where he had last encountered Amar Shadak. It was empty now, so he followed the fissure into the main chamber of the cave. There, he found Shadak — and himself. Young Alexei sat cross-legged in the sand, barely a metre from Shadak — who was curled in the dirt, his fists pressed against his forehead. The Mujahedeen that were with them stood a respectful distance away — their heads lowered, as though in prayer, their shoulders trembling as though with grief. Young Alexei was mumbling something in Russian — Amar Shadak was sobbing in no language at all. Older Alexei settled down on the sand, and leaned into the space between them — as though by so doing, he could intercept the communications that moved between the two like radio waves. It was no good. There was no Discourse for Alexei to hear. The lines had been cut.

He pushed off with his toes, and drifted out the front of the cave to the sentry point halfway up the hillside. A man sat there alone, arms wrapped around an old AK-47 and chin resting on its barrel-tip. His thumb caressed the trigger as tears welled up in his eyes.

He sat there with the man — fascinated and repelled — and watched as his thumb moved away from the gun, and he sat back as the shadows grew long and the sun began to set. Just before the sun disappeared completely over the ridges of the near horizon, Alexei spied a lone figure making its way out of the mouth of the cave. The sentry saw him too. Sobbing, he sat up and levelled the rifle — lining up the lone figure in his sights. His hand wasn’t steady, though, and he soon lost his aim. He returned to his perch, shaking his head and sobbing, while young Alexei Kilodovich made his way out of the cave and set off towards the Red Army division, in the newly silenced war zone of southern Afghanistan.

“You should pull the trigger,” said Alexei. “There I am. The agent of your misery. Getting away.” Young Alexei stepped down a slope, and soon disappeared from view behind a tumble of rocks. “Got away.” He made to slap the sentry across the back of his head.

To Comrade General Rodionov, Alexei was a haunting, a ghost at the back of his head. Not so here. The poor man didn’t so much as flinch. He simply sat there — and waited, for a command that apparently no one would give.

Alexei had taken this man — a gangster from Turkey — an innocent little stripper from Hong Kong — fifty others, maybe more — and he’d mind-raped them. Turned them away from their own wills, their lives, their religions. Made them into puppets.

Or half-made them. Alexei sat down on the rock beside the sentry. He leaned over to look into the man’s eyes. There was a spark there — something that was left of him. So he had not completely destroyed him.

But in a way, that was a worse thing. The part of this man that dreamed — that felt — that part was ensconced in some place not so dissimilar to the villa where Alexei had left Amar Shadak. Small and helpless and alone — while his body, his venal body, flopped and turned and marked the years, without motivating force any greater than flesh.

Beside him, the Mujahedeen guard reached into his trousers and scratched an ass-cheek. Alexei looked at him — and then across the little valley here. His younger self had emerged from the rocks again, some distance off. Scurrying like a rabbit back to his Soviet masters. Alexei pointed at him, sighting along his forefinger with one eye closed. “Pow,” he said, raising his fingertip like it was a pistol.

As Alexei lowered his finger, the sad Mujahedeen sentry faded like a ghost — the shrub behind which he hid grew and withered and fell away. Alexei kicked his feet. He found that he was suspended now, above the rock — as though he were flying.

“Ha,” he said to no one. He really, as he thought about it, couldn’t care less what happened to his body in New Pokrovskoye. He kicked higher still, watching as years etched changes over the rough Afghani landscape.

Alexei rose above an Afghanistan finally purged of the Red Army and its shadowy agents. Time passed in a breath, and he rose higher still.

Who needed a body anyway? The only thing his body was good for, Alexei realized, was spreading more torment — tearing men in two, and turning them-selves into slaves.

Here — here, was like an afterlife.

Devoid of responsibility.

Alexei spread himself across the sky, to a point where his mind was as insub-stantial as a high cloud — then he congealed himself again, and spread his arms like wings.

“Whee,” he said softly, as he drifted and swooped free at last of the shackles of his life — of memory. He flew on toward the water’s edge. And from there, he dipped into the surface — and spread .

Water was before him and around him, above and below — a great amniotic all. Floating in it, he could imagine drawing his thumb to his face, shutting his eyes, and letting the fine, fine mother’s food flow in through his belly button. Forgetting about his troubles in a great big womb…

He could imagine it, but of course that was wrong. The ocean was no mother. It didn’t, for instance, turn around one night, kill your father and try to smother you and your first true love because its piece of shit KGB operator had decided it was time to clean house.

And mothers had nothing like the giant squid. Which Stephen Haber decidedly did: sixty-or-so feet long from ass to tentacle-tip, with eyes the size of soccer balls, two tentacles and eight arms and a nervous system that seemed almost faster than light.

Oh yeah.

Stephen guided himself through the murk — jetting the cold ocean through his middle — revelling in the new sensorium. Stephen laughed and sang inside. He was flying a squid! Through the Atlantic Ocean — miles from his body. He was fucking well dream-walking!