David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

Alexei let his hand flutter up to the cut on his forehead. “Ah,” he said, and loosened his knees. Take me to a bunk , he willed, as he let his eyes turn up into his skull and relaxed his shoulders before he hit the hard wood slats of the deck. Take me inside, make me warm and well, and save your questions for the morning .

“Take him inside,” shouted the bald man. “Get him warmed up, and lay off the questions — plenty of time for that later. Okay, Heather?”

Alexei had to fight to keep his mouth slack, suppress the smile. His mother would have said he’d had the power. The strength of a Koldun, a lodge wizard, going through him. She had believed in that kind of thing.

Heather grunted something and took hold of an arm. Another crewmember took Alexei’s other arm, and together they hefted him off the deck. Alexei was a big man — no fat on him, but like they used to say back at school, he had lead in his muscles. He let them drag him under the canopy and inside, down some stairs to the warm lower deck where the cabins were. Long before the crew selected a bunk for him, gotten him out of his sodden clothes and wrapped him in thick woolen blankets, Alexei slipped into genuine unconsciousness — a blank, dreamless oblivion that erased Mrs. Kontos-Wu, the Romanians, and the kids. Especially them: the little bastard kids that put him in this predicament to begin with.

“Did they try to kill you? Is that it?”

Alexei blinked awake. There was a bandage wrapped around his head, and from the prickly aching underneath, he thought that someone might have sutured up the gash in his scalp. Although it wasn’t bright, the white fluorescent light in the cabin hurt his eyes and for a moment he couldn’t focus.

“Hey. I’m talking to you.” Alexei felt a hand on his shoulder, saw a blurry shadow intersect the light. It was another American, and his breath stank of garlic or something, and all told he made Alexei want to puke. But he held it down.

“Who are you?” asked Alexei. “I can’t see well right now.”

The hand moved off his shoulder, and the shadow settled back to resolve itself into the shape of a round-shouldered hulk of a man. He could have been the one from the deck — probably he was — but he reminded Alexei more of some of his former colleagues. It was something in the heaviness he projected; a weight that went beyond his wide jaw, his blunted nose, or even the expanding gut that crept an inch too far over his belt-line. Even starvation couldn’t do much about the kind of mass this guy carried, Alexei thought. It was a weight of the soul.

“I’m Holden.” The man leaned back further, so the chair legs creaked and the few remaining shadows from the overhead light vanished. “Got a good look?”

“Thank you,” said Alexei.

“Don’t fucking thank me. Picking you up wasn’t my idea. But you better thank me for not tossing you back when my kids told me what they did. You’d be dead out there, last night. On a raft in the middle of fucking nowhere. This isn’t even a shipping lane. Nobody comes out here, except to fish and you don’t look like a fucking fisherman. Now start talking. Somebody try to kill you? Or what? How’d you get that cut?”

Alexei tried to sit up. Yes, he knew this kind of guy. “I fell — or something. Don’t remember.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe…” Alexei felt a nauseating wave of dizziness as he propped the pillow behind him. “Maybe it’s going to come back to me later. What’s this place?”

Holden regarded him levelly. “Mine,” he said. “This place is mine.”

“What do you do here?”

Holden laughed. “Sell Avon,” he said. Then he twisted his larynx into a creepy falsetto: “ Ding dong, Avon calling . You remember that commercial?”

“Okay.” Alexei had no idea what he was talking about. “Like that.”

Alexei nodded politely.

“That’s not what you wanted to know, though — is it?”

Alexei didn’t answer, and Holden clearly didn’t expect him to. “Well I’m not hearing what I want to know, either,” said Holden.

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember.” Holden crossed his arms. “Sometimes,” he said, “I get instincts. About people. About things. About what to do. And you want to know something?”

“Sure,” said Alexei.

“I got an instinct about you.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, see that’s the thing,” said Holden. “I don’t fuckin’ see. I got no idea what that instinct says. It’s just screaming at me. Fuckin’ screaming . So you see—” he leaned forward, making the chair legs creak dangerously “—I gotta know your story.”

“I don’t know it myself,” said Alexei. “I’m trying.”

“Well good for you.” Holden kicked the chair out from behind him and stood. “When you’ve got a story for me, we’ll talk again. Right now—” he opened the door to the cabin and stepped out “—I’ve got a schedule to keep.”

The door swung shut again. It made a rubbery sound as it bounced off the doorframe, and finally settled, closed but unlatched.

Alexei rolled onto his side. His legs drew up toward his chest. He felt himself begin to shake. His eyes closed.

Alexei’s instincts were screaming too: they made a high, wailing sound in his brain like feedback, a microphone held too near a speaker. If he had any piss in him, he’d put it in the bed sheets now.

This was maybe not instinct at all , thought Alexei.

It felt more like terror. A formless, directionless terror — such as he had never felt.

It’s the Romanians , he told himself. The fuck-up on their boat. You are feeling bad about the fuck-up. You are feeling bad about where you are. Worried. This is, after all, hardly a U.S. coastguard rescue. Present circumstances are naturally upsetting .

It has nothing to do with…

…with the snow-covered tarmac outside a low cement block barracks building, beneath a clear sub-arctic sky and the rivers of dust at the base of a cave in Afghanistan and lights that flashed and Czernochov and trigonometry and…

…that game of floor hockey.

The thoughts slipped away as fast as they came, into a storm of memories — and Alexei opened his eyes.

He was looking at the little bedside table. It was cheap — made out of pressed board covered in dirty white laminate. It looked to have been originally in a child’s room, because the laminate was covered in stickers that someone had tried to scrape off with a pallet knife. The only two that were left was a brilliant green one of a cartoonish frog, next to a bright blue hairy monster with goggly eyes and three thick fingers on each hand, that did not look threatening at all.

Alexei smiled. He liked the blue thing. It reminded him of more innocent times, of childhood.

“Cute monster,” he whispered, and reached out to touch the sticker with his thumb.

Finally, Alexei pulled the blankets from his bare legs and swung his feet onto the deck. The dizziness came again, but it wasn’t as bad this time, so Alexei rode it out. Whoever it was had put him to bed had taken his briefs as well as his pants, and the cold cabin air actually seemed to help. He put his weight onto the balls of his feet, and holding onto the top bunk for support pulled himself upright. And stood there, facing the bunk, leaning forward on both arms like an athlete warming up for a race. A shaky athlete, after a bad night of too much vodka and maybe one too many rounds with an over-energetic whore — but still, Alexei thought, an athlete.

“Not so bad,” he said aloud.

“Depends on where you’re standing.”

Alexei started and turned — hands instinctively leaping down to cover himself.