Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End (27 page)

In the back of the eighteen-wheeler was a huge load of building materials. On its last trip, they must’ve been planning to install a pipeline; about fifteen PVC pipes, four inches in diameter, were stacked in the truck bed. Behind the cab were a number of tools, including a crowbar. We could use that to open the office door.

Several months ago, our firm defended a small-time thief. He gave us a detailed lesson in the art of breaking and entering. The guy was a real pro who’d been caught
in flagrante
after he’d cleaned out at least a dozen apartments, so we couldn’t get him off. He was probably in jail when all this hell began. I wonder what’s happened to that poor thief, and everyone locked up in prison. I shudder at the image of entire wings of starving prisoners. Even though they were criminals, I hoped at least some of them survived.

Grabbing the crowbar with both hands, I quietly crossed the road, Pritchenko on my heels, to try out what the thief had taught me. Knowledge never goes to waste.

It was easier than I expected. I struggled briefly and took a couple of chips out of the door frame. Then the door sprung open with a loud
crack
that chilled me to the bone. The sound probably didn’t carry more than ten yards, but in that silence it sounded like a gunshot.

We entered the lobby of VNT. We’d reached our destination at last. The customer service department was located behind a wooden counter, badly scratched by countless packages sliding across it. In one corner sat the dust-covered skeleton of a houseplant. Months-old newspapers and magazines were piled on a coffee table framed by two armchairs. The stale smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air, faint but perceptible. Someone in that office had smoked a lot, although nobody had lit a cigarette there for a long time.

That wasn’t the only odor. Partly masked by the smell of cigarette smoke was the intense, sickening smell of decay. The smell of death.

Prit and I were immediately on alert. Brandishing the butcher knife, I inched up the swinging door that led to the back of the store. Prit stationed himself in front of the door, aiming Kritzinev’s assault rifle. Sweating like crazy, I looked over at him. At his signal, I kicked the door open and leaped aside, giving him a clear shot.

I cringed, bracing myself for the blast of the weapon, but all I heard was Ukrainian’s ragged breathing. I looked over and saw Prit’s expression change. I turned around to see what he was staring at. I gagged as vomit surged up my throat.

A half-rotten corpse hung by a rope from a ceiling. The guy had looped the rope around his neck and hanged himself. He wore VNT overalls rolled down to his waist. The maggots covering his face looked like a beard.

It was a revolting sight. The body was decaying, and a stream of smelly liquid dripped from his body, forming a thick, dark
puddle. The body was swollen with gas and looked obscenely fat. A thick purple tongue stuck out of his open mouth; dozens of green flies were buzzing around it. His eyes had receded into their sockets, and his swollen, bruised fingers looked like a cartoon character’s fingers after he’d been crushed. The stench was awful. Pritchenko and I covered our noses and mouths and went in, trying not to look at that grim spectacle or brush up against him. A quick look around the store told the whole story.

That poor guy had been stuck there from the beginning. He must’ve seen the first undead go staggering down the street. He reacted like most people: he locked himself in until help arrived. Unfortunately for him, help never came. That was the start of that poor devil’s personal hell. An empty snack machine, its glass broken, was proof that his only source of food soon grew scarce. Dirty laundry and some well-thumbed girlie magazines were piled up on the floor. He had sense enough to use one of the vans as the john and drink the water in the toilet, but that must’ve run out too. Poor bastard. After a while, he just couldn’t take the hunger, thirst, loneliness, and madness any more.

I shuddered to think I could’ve met the same end if I hadn’t left my house. I shook my head to drive away those dark thoughts. There was no time to grieve for a stranger. We had to look for the damn package.

And we found it—a black steel Samsonite briefcase, sealed with red plastic tape. Prit and I spent the afternoon in the stifling heat, digging around in that damn store, but we finally found it.

I can’t believe we’ve got the package. Thoughts whirled through my mind as we decided what our next move would be. My first impulse was to try to open the damn case to see what was inside. But a reinforced steel Samsonite briefcase wouldn’t be easy to break into, even if I did what that thief taught me. Only the key
holder or a real thief could open it. Unfortunately Prit and I don’t qualify as either.

We got used to the smell of rotting flesh after a while. I suggested we take down the body and wrap it in a blanket, but the Ukrainian talked me out of it. Given the condition of the corpse, it’d probably burst in our arms and shower us with rotting guts. Better leave it there, in his words, “drying like a cured ham.” I was creeped out, wondering where the hell he’d learned that, but I didn’t ask.

I’ve saved the best for last. That Ukrainian is full of surprises. What I learned about him today amazed me.

While I was rummaging through an office drawer, looking for the keys to some cabinets at the back of the store, I absentmindedly set some government forms to one side and opened another drawer. Just then Pritchenko walked into the office and collapsed in the desk chair, stretching and yawning loudly. His eye fell on the forms lying on the table. He casually pronounced one word: “Siunten.”

I stopped in my tracks. I looked at the Ukrainian’s impassive face and his huge blond mustache and then at the forms on the table. I couldn’t hold back any longer.

“Siunten? Siunten?” I asked, excited, pointing to the forms. “Is this Siunten?”

“
Da
, yes,” Prit replied, surprised at my reaction.

I had good reason to be surprised. Those forms weren’t important. The really interesting part was the logo in the corner of the file folder.

“Siunten” was Pritchenko’s distorted Slavic version of
Xunta
. The Xunta de Galicia. The Galician government.

A light came on. I understood everything. Not many Ukrainians worked for the Xunta de Galicia, and Pritchenko was one of them. Now I knew exactly what my friend did. An excited shiver ran down my spine. What an idiot I’d been.

I turned to study Prit’s affable profile.

I felt completely drained all of a sudden. We’d spent five terrifying days together to retrieve that damn case lying on an old wooden table. At least five people had died on account of whatever was inside. But we were still alive. We’d come within a hair’s breadth of losing our own lives a couple of times. Natural selection had been ridiculously harsh over the last few months. We survivors are the most skilled, the fittest...or we just haven’t made many bad decisions. All that was in the past. We had the case.

Now we had to get out of that fucking store, thanks to Prit. He didn’t know it, but he was one of the most valuable people left in that part of the world. Not even Ushakov, the
Zaren Kibish
’s captain, knew who Prit was. Otherwise, he would’ve exploited his skills, not blithely sent him ashore to almost certain death.

Prit was worth his weight in gold. Sitting beside me, quietly smoking a Chesterfield, his huge blond mustache drooping over his mouth, was Mr. Viktor Pritchenko: the only living helicopter pilot for hundreds of miles around.

Wildfires plague Galicia during the summer. Because the area is so heavily wooded, voracious fires destroy acres and acres of woodlands every year. Combating those fires takes enormous efforts, materials, and human resources.

The early 1990s were very dry years, with particularly large fires. The Galician government was overwhelmed. Using military aircraft to fight the fires didn’t cut it. Firefighting crews couldn’t get to the affected areas fast enough on the ground, and seaplanes weren’t very reliable. They decided to hire pilots from Eastern Europe.

The majority of those pilots were former Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian soldiers who were kicked out on the street when the Eastern Bloc fell. After paying ridiculous sums of money in
bribes to save their planes and helicopters from the scrap heap, they earned a living in emerging Eastern European nations by giving air shows or transporting people and goods more or less legally from one country to another. They were experienced, tough, cheap, and had their own helicopters. The perfect solution.

They quickly proved they were worth every penny. Plunging into a forest fire was child’s play for those pilots, especially the ones with combat experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Where the terrified Spanish civilian pilots refused to fly, the former Soviet soldiers dived in with a recklessness bordering on madness, losing their lives on more than one occasion. What’s more, their old Soviet helicopters were tough, easy to maintain, and had a larger cargo capacity than their Western twins, making them ideal.

Since then, pilots from the East and their old workhorses fought fires in Galicia year after year, from March to October. In the winter they went back to Eastern Europe, loaded down with Western goods they resold on the black market.

Prit related all this in a monotone, lighting one cigarette after another. He was from Zaproshpojye, a tiny village in northern Ukraine, but he was a Russian citizen. He joined the Red Army when he was only seventeen. After basic training, he was assigned to a company of transport helicopters. He fought in the final days of the war in Afghanistan, where he was shot down once, and in the Second Chechen War, transporting Russian troops to the front. He had a bright future in the army. Then he married Irina.

He took a crumpled photo of Irina out of his wallet. His voice trembled, and tears welled up in his eyes. Irina was gorgeous, a little Slavic doll with blonde hair and huge green eyes. He met her on leave, and they got married a year later. Little Pavel came along a year after that, complicating the couple’s lives. A Russian
military pilot’s salary was terribly low compared to what he could make in the West. Plus the Chechen war was getting more dangerous and out of control. Prit had a family to support, so the decision was easy.

Three months after getting out of the army, Pritchenko was working for a shady German transport company. He first came to Spain as a forestry pilot in 2002. He’d returned, year after year, while his family settled in Düsseldorf, Germany. He’d been considering bringing them to Galicia to live when the apocalypse started.

Prit was now sobbing. He hadn’t heard a word from his family since late February, when they took refuge in the Düsseldorf Safe Haven. He was sure they were dead. I didn’t dare give him any hope. What good would that do?

The question was on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t dare ask it as Prit wept bitterly on my shoulder for people who’d been killed or turned into monsters months ago.

When he’d calmed down, I blurted out, “Prit, where’s your helicopter now?”

“Where I left helicopter two months ago, maybe,” he replied, his breathing still ragged. “At forest camp. Mount Facho, twenty miles from here.”

“What about the other pilots? Where are they? What did they do?” The questions shot out of my mouth.

“Oh, when everything kaput, they go. I don’t know where.”

My heart sank. Had Pritchenko’s helicopter disappeared in the chaotic days before the fall of the Safe Havens, or been stolen by another pilot or seized by the army? To my surprise, the Ukrainian shook his head.

“Not possible,” he said. “Helicopter damaged. Need cog tail rotor. Part small, but very expensive. Mailed from Kiev to Vigo.”

My temples throbbed as I guessed the rest. “Where’s that piece, Prit? Do you have it?”

The Ukrainian shook his head again. “
Nyet.
VNT make mistake. They know that part for a Ukraine, but give to wrong Ukraine.”

I plopped down in a chair, thinking at top speed. Ushakov or Kritzinev must have gone to the VNT office to pick up their fucking package. The employee couldn’t read the label in Cyrillic, so he gave him the package with Pritchenko’s part. The situation at the time was chaotic. A scared employee anxious to get the hell out and head for home wouldn’t have bothered to check IDs. The package was from Ukraine, and Ushakov was Ukrainian. When Prit showed up for his part, they discovered the mistake, but by then it was too late. The world was falling apart.

This is great. I have a pilot and a helicopter at my disposal. That changes the situation dramatically. I only need two things: a small helicopter part and a cat. And I know where they both are. On the
Zaren Kibish
.

The sun’s coming up. It’s really cold in the VNT warehouse. Prit and I plan to leave in fifteen minutes. The Ukrainian is checking the battery and tires of one of the delivery vans parked in the garage. They aren’t as safe as that ill-fated armored van we came in, but at least we’ve got four wheels to drive to the port. Or as far as we can get.

I’m jotting down these notes as my friend tunes up our transportation. We changed out of our torn, filthy clothes and into gray-and-black VNT coveralls we found in a dressing room. We couldn’t take a shower since there’s no water, so our odor and appearance still leave a lot to be desired. At least we don’t look like fugitives from the law anymore.

We talked at length about how we could swap the briefcase for Lucullus and the helicopter part. We finally had a plan. We spent hours working out all the details, but I think it’ll work.

This’ll have to be fast. Pritchenko’s just started the van and is signaling for me to raise the garage door. The engine sound will soon attract a mob of those creatures, and we still have to make a stop along the way.

I hope everything goes well. The next time I write in this journal I’ll have Lucullus.

Time to go. We’re off.