Coercion (23 page)

The first gust of the storm front swept in like a big broom from the sky, nearly knocking Alex off his snowshoed feet.  This was what Siberia was known for.  Alex reckoned that prior to the front, the temperature had been a balmy twenty below.  This plunged it another fifteen to twenty degrees, and the wind gave it teeth.  He turned
to face the darkening sky.  “I was wondering when you’d get here!” 

Alex
shifted his gaze from the heavens to his watch.  It was two thirty in the afternoon, and dark as dusk.  He promised himself to keep going for another hour before holing up.  He was still feeling good from the smoked fish and his legs were holding.  Shortly thereafter, however, it became clear that he would not last an hour; twenty minutes would be a stretch.  His eyelids were freezing together every time he blinked, and the storm had cut his visibility to near zero.  Nonetheless, Alex knew it might be more dangerous to stop.  Yarik could be ten meters behind him now and he wouldn’t know it.  Fear was a great motivator, but it could also be blinding.

Alex had not caught sight of the giant since he had spotted the descending parachute, meaning he had no objective way of knowing that Yarik was still on his tail, but he sensed it.  He had been
coddling the hope that Yarik had fallen hard on the trap he had spent valuable time preparing.  Then an hour earlier, before the wind kicked in, a shot had rung out from the direction of the cottage and killed that hope. 
So much for getting lucky
.  Of course, there was a chance that the hermit was just hunting, or even that he had killed Yarik, mistaking him for the man who stole his supplies.  But Alex was far more inclined to believe that if someone was shooting, it would be Yarik.  Furthermore, there had only been one shot, and it would take more than that to kill the hulk.

Alex put the maddening range of possibilities aside and continued to press on.  He briefly considered trying to set another trap—in the storm it was getting difficult to see your own feet, much less spot a snare—but then he realized that it would be redundant.  The weather was a trap, and both he and Yarik were already in it.

Alex wrapped both his pilfered blanket and the parachute around himself and trudged on.  It became clear after a few steps that this system was not going to work.  With his hands thus occupied, he could not run and check his compass at the same time.  That was unacceptable.  Now that the weather had cut his visibility to an arm’s length, he had to check the compass constantly.  So he cut a slot in the middle of the blanket and donned it like a poncho.  Then he cut eye holes in the center of the parachute and a slit to breathe through and draped it over his head.  He secured the new ensemble at the waist with parachute cord.  Alex finished the transformation off by laughing at himself and that gave him strength: he was now a ghost in a snowstorm.

The new outfit worked for a while, but he found that because of the wind he was
having to stop and retie it every quarter mile or so, exposing his freezing fingers and further slowing his pace.  And despite the layering, somehow the demonic wind managed to find its way through here and there, licking at him like an icy flame and burning his flesh.  The outfit was awkward too.  He was wearing a T-shirt, a shirt, two winter coats, a blanket, a fur hat and a parachute.  He worried that any moment Yarik would bump into him and he would be as helpless to fight back as a kitten in a sack.  Still, he pressed on.

After half an hour, Alex realized that Yarik was no longer the most immediate threat to his life.  Despite being dressed like the Michelin man, the cold was killing him as surely as any bullet could.  There was no way he could live through the night exposed this way.  He simply had to find shelter.

Alex struggled on and on, investigating every dark shadow in hopes of finding a grove of tightly packed trees or a rock formation that would shelter him from the wind.  There was little around.  Although ice and snow caked his face and choked his view, he was painfully aware that his labored steps were leaving Yarik a trail as plain as a furrow in a field.  It was no longer a game of hide and seek.  It was an endurance test.  Who would collapse first?

After trudging for a while across a particularly barren stretch of landscape, Alex realized he was out on a frozen lake. 
Perfect
.  If the lake were more than a mile across he would not live to see the other side.  He would freeze to death mid-stride.  Then when the spring thaw came the ice would melt and his body would be interred with the fishes. 
Vingança.
  No, no, nothing that romantic would happen, he rambled on, distracting himself from the pain with his ghastly tales.  Wolves would feast on his carcass long before the fish got him.  Mother Nature was exerting her presence and her power, and she seemed determined to put him in his place.  The man who had once been Alex Ferris, International Private Investigator, was now just so much red meat, a protein link in the great food chain.

With that joyous thought, he felt the gradient change, bumped into a low hanging branch, and fell backwards into the snow.  He had made it across the lake!  And, wait a minute, it wasn’t a branch, it was a railing covered in snow!  Alex was standing in front of a cabin, a cabin more glorious than the Taj Mahal.

He followed the railing until it ended and then he climbed two steps up onto the porch.  He tried the front door without knocking and found it locked.  He wanted to ram it with his shoulder, but there was a big bear spike set in the middle to prevent exactly that move.

Alex looked for a
pregnable window, but found them all small and shuttered.  As panic began to close in, he shed the ghost suit, retrieved the hermit’s hand axe, and began working at the aged oak surrounding the door’s lock with vicious blows of wild desperation.  The axe was old but the blade was sharp and he made steady progress.  Still, given that the door was made to withstand a bear attack, the job was maddeningly slow.

After about fifty whacks, the wood around the latch looked sufficiently splintered.  Alex tried kicking the door.  It gave a little.  He took a couple steps back and aimed a lunging sidekick just below the spike.  The wood screamed in protest and then surrendered, sending Alex crashing into the cabin and onto the hardwood floor. 
He was saved!

The wind came in with him, disturbing the thick layer of dust like a tomb raider’s brush.  Stale air had never tasted so sweet.

By the time Alex managed to regain his feet there was already a mat of snow on the floor.  It had rolled in after him like winter’s hungry tongue.  Alex had to expend some effort to push the door closed against the blustering fury, but he managed, grateful the latch still found something to cling to.  “Feast on the giant if you’re so hungry!”

Frozen and exhausted, he collapsed right there onto an inviting bearskin rug.  For the brief moment he remained conscious, Alex felt himself melting, draining, soaking into the warmth of the fur, and he was happy.

It seemed only seconds later that the door crashed open in the wind.  Was he dreaming?  No, the icy gale was very real.  It took a strength of will far greater than that required by the earliest Monday morning alarm for Alex to roll over and get up to close it.

Half way to the door, he stopped in his tracks.  Something was there.  The light was dim and at first he didn’t understand what he was looking at.  It was like a giant frozen breakfast sausage lying there defrosting on the floor before the door.  Was he hallucinating?  He had been having visions of sausages for the last forty-eight hours, but those had been cooked and served with waffles.  This one began to roll.

Alex found himself hypnotized, his starved mind slow to engage.  He watched with abstracted non-comprehension as Yarik struggled to extract himself from the sausage casing.  Apparently, he had cut arm, eye, and leg holes in a brown sleeping bag and then zipped it up around himself.

As their eyes met, Alex saw that Yarik, too, was surprised.  The eye-to-eye contact carried the force of a cattle prod, giving each the electric adrenaline surge necessary to tap into reserves neither knew he possessed.  Siberia still wanted her sacrifice.

Time slowed for Alex as Yarik sloughed off his sleeping bag to rise like a demon from the mire.  It was disorienting.  It seemed he could feel the individual chambers of his heart contracting—bu-bum, ba-bump, bu-bum,
ba-bump.  Were they to be his last? 
Don’t think that way.  Find a weapon
.

Alex scanned the room and spotted the hand axe on the floor to his left, lying where he had dropped it when bursting through the door.  He spun down, snatched it up and continued spinning around, wielding the axe in a wide clockwise arc, a helicopter with one blade.  He whipped his head around faster than his body so his eyes could fix on an appropriate target—a head, hand, or throat—and saw Yarik bringing his
hand cannon to bear.  Alex adjusted the arc, and a split second later the hand axe and the Stetchkin flew out the door and into the snow along with Yarik’s forefinger.

Yarik seemed unfazed by his loss, and dove at Alex like a gorilla gone ape.  Alex dodged with a diving roll and jumped back to his feet with a couple yards between them. 
So much for the opening salvos.

The two veteran combatants faced each other.  Like a boxer against a wrestler, Alex knew he couldn’t let his opponent get hold of him or it would all be over.  He backed away to gain some time to think and saw the giant’s hand go back down to his side. 
Another gun?
  Alex’s heart wavered, but whatever it was that Yarik had reached for was not there.  His hand came back empty.  Death was demanding a fair fight. 
Fair?

As the two men circled each other like contenders in a ring
, Alex got his first real look around the cabin that had saved their lives.  Would this wooden box be his coffin, or Yarik’s?  Keeping his eyes on his foe, Alex used his peripheral vision to survey the room for areas of tactical advantage and improvised weapons.  The pickings were as slim as Alex felt, but he saw a homemade end table that might work.  It had four heavy wooden legs. 
Batter up
.

As he lunged for the table, Yarik jumped atop
a dusty couch and reached for the enormous moose rack hanging above it on the wall.  The antlers were joined together without the head in the middle—probably because the nearest taxidermist shop was a thousand kilometers away.  While Yarik worked to pull the rack off the wall, Alex inverted the end table and pried off two of the legs.  Now he had a pair of clubs.  With them, he had to fend off Yarik’s six-foot spiked pugil stick.  It occurred to Alex that he could make a lot of money selling the next few minutes to pay-per-view.

Yarik jumped down off the couch to land squarely on both feet with a mighty thump.  His weapon was an awkward one, but very deadly.  The beast’s rack also provided Yarik with a formidable shield.  Alex’s weapons were far less deadly, but they left him more quick and nimble, accenting his only natural advantage.  He had to concoct a strategy to leverage that advantage, and quickly. 

With a devilish grin on his face Yarik began backing Alex into a corner, swinging the rack before him left to right to left like a prickly pendulum.  He was the grim reaper with a twenty-pronged scythe.  Alex was just grim.

Alex watched as if in third-person, mesmerized by the approaching kaleidoscope of death.  Yarik was getting a feel for the new weapon in his hands, and he began to swing it faster and faster until the wind whistled and the points disappeared from view.  He moved a small step closer with each deadly swing, swoosh step, swoosh step, swoosh step, obviously savoring the climax of their whirlwind romance.  Speak now, or forever rest in peace.

Alex waited for a swing toward Yarik’s right and then shot forward and crouched down on his own right knee.  He used the bat in his left hand to block the rack’s return while channeling all his own momentum through his right arm into that club as it crashed down on the giant’s leading left shin.  Even as he heard the crack of snapping fibular bone, Alex felt the searing pain of moose prongs ripping into the back of his skull.  Fortunately, he had pre-programmed his moves and continued his planned combination without hesitation or loss of momentum.  Ducking his head, Alex dropped the left blocking club and brought that hand down to join with his right on the thick end of the offensive club.  Then, still crouching on one knee, he spun his shoulders 180 degrees and brought the thin end of the club up and around to impale the giant’s stomach with all the force he could muster.  There was a mortal squish and then Alex rolled to the side as Yarik crumpled forward and fell on the rack in a heap.

When Alex regained his feet the sight that met his eyes was sickly sweet.  Yarik had impaled his chest and throat on
the moose rack as he fell.  Though his corpse now wept rivers of blood, the giant himself had not made a sound.

Alex averted his eyes and walked over to close the door.  He was shaking, but not from the cold, and his head was pounding like the stage at Riverdance. 
What now?
 

A fire seemed to be the first priority.  He needed to absorb energy.  Fortunately, the
hearth and kindling were right there.  Alex managed to get a healthy blaze going in no time.  That done he looked around the cabin for a source of water but of course there was none.  There would be a hand pump outside for use during the warmer months, but nothing for the winter; this was a seasonal place.

He did find a mirror in the kitchen cupboard, and brought it back in by the fire to try to survey the damage.  He could not see the
entire wound on the back of his head, but the portion the mirror exposed was a scary sight.  In addition to boasting a beautiful collection of dirt and stubble, his head and shoulders were covered in blood, and part of his scalp seemed to be hanging there like a hairy red post-it note.  Alex desperately wanted to give in to his body’s screaming desire to sleep, to push the proverbial snooze button.  Instead he had to face the sad, irrefutable fact that he was in serious need of medical attention.

He
found a dishrag and bound his scalp as best he could to stanch the bleeding.  Then he turned his attention to the grisly task of searching the whale of a corpse that was beached and bleeding in the foyer.  Alex was delighted to find some strips of venison in one pocket, as he was craving meat.  Then he found what he thought was a frozen fish in another, but recoiled in disgust when he saw what he had pulled from the corpse’s pocket.  It was a human hand. 
What kind of a sick creature had he killed?  Did Yarik collect hands the way Indians had collected scalps?
  A moment later Alex understood, and he looked down on the relic in a very different light.  Andrey.  Fingerprints.

He set the hand reverently aside and continued the search.  One pocket contained a couple of clips of ammunition.  Alex retrieved the bloody pistol from the porch but found that the axe had ruined it.  You couldn’t win them all.

Returning to the pockets Alex extracted a plastic tube that looked like it would hold a long cigar.  It bore a stenciled fourteen-digit sequence with “Ferris” written just below.

As he read his name, Alex felt a huge weight lift off his shoulders. 
Now he had his own number
.  He took a minute to memorize it and then tossed the tube into the fireplace.  He started to smile but then winced at the pain this caused.  Man, did he have a headache.

Alex kept searching the dead giant’s pockets.  He found a wallet, a plastic bag, foreign and domestic Soviet passports, and a ring with a plastic identity card and three sophisticated metal keys.  He pocketed everything.

Alex restocked the fireplace with logs and then went to the kitchen.  He found four large glass jars, the kind Russians used to pickle cucumbers, tomatoes, and anything else their garden produced.  He took the jars outside and packed all four tightly with ice and snow.  Then he set them in front of the fireplace, threw some tea leaves in each, and sat down to eat the remainder of the smoked fish he had poached earlier that day.

Alex drank his fill of tepid tea and then some more and more again.  Then, leaving two jars of water by the fire to warm, he began searching the cabin.  It was time to face up to the fact that with a head wound as serious as his
was, he was going to have to venture out in search of help.

Alex desperately wanted to sleep, but he knew that if he went to sleep as wounded, exhausted, and depleted as he was, he would most likely slip into a coma and die.  The setting on the other side of the cabin door also offered him nothing but death, unless he could first find what he needed.  Even then his odds of survival were probably just one in ten.

One of the first treasures he uncovered was a bottle of aspirin. 
Thank you, God!
  And then, as if in a personal answer to his other prayer, he found the prize he needed most: a map of the surrounding area.  Stored in a box of fishing tackle, it was large in scale and showed little but mountains and lakes.  There was a star to the side of one lake, presumably marking his present location.  Many of the other lakes had notes penciled in on them, references to the type of fish and the best fishing locations.  Alex could not care less about that.  Fortunately the map also contained one thing that might save his life: a road. 

At the closest attainable point,
the highway to Novosibirsk appeared to be just ten kilometers away.  He could run that far in forty minutes, in good conditions on flat land.  But the land wasn’t flat, the conditions were as bad as conditions could get, and he was two steps from death’s door.  Alex reckoned it would take him anywhere from two hours to eternity to get there.

He returned
to the fire and reinspected his head.  The bleeding had stopped.  He used a jar of water to wash his wound as best he could.  Then he rebound it with a fresh towel and sat down to eat some dried venison and drink a jar of tepid tea.  He studied the map while he tore through the food, knowing full well that it would probably be his last meal.

Despite the gravity of the situation and his resolve to complete his quest, Alex found his head bobbing on his chest.  He desperately needed to sleep and he could not fight it anymo
re.  Maybe just a few minutes…

Alex pulled the bearskin rug before the fire and collapsed onto it.
  No sooner had he closed his eyes than they sprang open again in shock from a mighty crack.  It was just the fire.  His eyelids had begun dropping again, along with his adrenaline and life expectancy, when his eyes came to rest on Andrey’s hand.  First it shocked him one way, then another.

The strength and dedication of his fallen comrade seemed to fl
ow into Alex, and heard Andrey’s final words once again: “Don’t you fail me Alex!  Don’t you let my children down!” 

Alex
found the means to force the Reaper’s sleep to wait.  With labored moves, he stood up and got dressed again, choosing the best of the clothes from his and Yarik’s wardrobes.  With that accomplished there was just one thing left to do.

Alex threw more logs on the fire, arranging a couple of them on the top like a platform.  Then he took Andrey’s hand and consigned it to the flames with a prayer of thanks and a blessing for his friend’s soul.  Andrey had given his life to the mission; Alex could do no less.

Fully aware that this was either the bravest or most foolhardy thing he would ever do, Alex bid farewell to the warmth of the fire, screwed determination firmly to his heart, and strode back out into the stormy Siberian night.