Vlad Varennikov threw his chicken sandwich on the employee breakroom table, hopped up from his chair, and strode into the adjoining kitchenette. One of his coworkers, also an apprentice electrician, had the company secretary backed into a corner. With spittle-flecked lips and apoplectic red face, the man jabbed his finger mere inches from her face as he whispered shocking threats at her.

His back was turned to Vlad as he menaced the secretary. Vlad was much larger than the other man, but fair fights and decorum had no place when a man had a woman cowering in fear. Vlad grabbed the man’s shoulder and effortlessly spun him around. Before the man could register that he was no longer facing his obsession, Vlad’s big fist smashed his nose with a bone-jarring thud, and a crack that echoed off the walls. The threatener slumped to the ground in a heap in front of the borscht-stained microwave.

Moments before, the man had confronted the secretary in the kitchenette and began his assault by loudly threatening her and her young children. Overhearing that grotesque harangue made Vlad abandon his sandwich and forfeit this good job to rescue his coworker. Workplace violence was seldom excused by management, even if justified.

The scuttlebutt around the company was that after four dates, the secretary had told the electrician, “Давайте просто дружить,” or “Let’s just be friends,” and this had “broken his heart.” He should have moved on to date other women. Instead, he resented and stewed over the secretary for several weeks.

Other than terrifying her, was he physically harmless? Or was he unhinged enough to carry out his threats? Vlad didn’t know. But he wouldn’t let the secretary find out or need to worry about it. No man will threaten a woman when I’m around!

Vlad knew his attack was necessary. He suspected the secretary would back him up. But they both heard the crack when Vlad landed his punch. Bone had broken, and it wasn’t Vlad’s. Vlad stood over six feet tall, was almost three feet wide at the shoulders, and had a head-turning physique. If this went to court, he might end up in trouble.

Without a word to the secretary, he made a beeline to his car. No clock out. No goodbyes. Only the clothes on his back and his ancient Yugo burning rubber in the parking lot. Who cared if the crack was the threatener’s nose, face, or neck? Now he would not waylay the secretary again or carry out his threats. To quote poet Ivan Drago, “If he dies, he dies.”

Time for a new city. Again.

Vlad was confident the man’s punishment was warranted, but Russian law might disagree. He was fine with this. Often the law got things wrong or punished evil people with a slap on the wrist. Vlad believed a better punishment for people who have committed evil crimes against other people to be a slap on the face with a baseball bat. Or five or six good hard “slaps.” It was sad to think, but justice by Louisville Slugger might be fairer and more effective than justice by the cumbrous, inept court system. I will stand for what is right wherever I am and whenever I can.

* * *

Vlad’s mind wandered as his Yugo sped randomly to another oblast, then another city. His home life had been great until he was 19. He loved his parents. They raised him right. School was uncomfortable, as his classmates had teased him mercilessly about his size during the years of his public education. He’d always been big, but during his school years the only exercise he’d gotten was for his thumbs on video game controllers, combined with a diet of mainly junk food. Consequently, he had been fat.

During his first year of college, his parents died. The shock of suddenly losing his family made him flee the university and his hometown. He picked a random town and found work. Then moved on. Different towns and different jobs, always in construction. The physical labor and heavy lifting had packed pounds of muscle onto his frame, and he’d burned off much of the childhood fat.

He didn’t mind the lifestyle of running to new towns every few months. Nothing wrong with being itinerant. Not mad at living like a nomad, this Vlad. Where the wind blows, there vagrant Vlad goes!

After the kitchenette incident, Vlad found himself in Bryansk. He liked the place. With steady construction jobs he didn’t mind staying put for a while. He’d managed to stay in this town for a year and a half without anybody arresting him for his “crime” of defending the secretary. Was this a record for staying stationary so long? There were always jobs available, but the day labor and temporary construction projects weren’t paying well. He barely had enough rubles to rent motel rooms and buy dried fish and kvass. The variety of different work environments and rarely working for the same boss for more than a few months was appealing, but the lack of money was stressing the 27-year-old.

“This is no way for me to live,” he mused to a stray beast outside his latest weekly rate motel one night. “How can I get some dead dictators?” he asked the Saint Bernard who gobbled a few Totino’s Pizza Rolls from Vlad’s hand and lapped Red Bull that he poured on the sidewalk.

Next morning at the day labor office, he was sent to dig a hole for a sewage tank. His coworker, Ivan, had shown up already half through his “water bottle.” Ivan preferred the burn from distilled potatoes over soothing sips of water. As such, he slurred silly theories and sang goofy songs as his shovel threw half the dirt it should have. Vlad liked the quirky drunk. Though not overly social, Vlad would join a conversation if asked to. Every time Ivan voiced a conspiracy theory, Vlad played along, encouraging Ivan to think up more outlandish scenarios.

After Ivan’s “lunch” of a jar of pickled jalapeños and two pints of Guinness, he brought up the medieval fantasy of alchemy: the quest to turn metals into gold.

Putting a hand up on Vlad’s shoulder, and staring dreamily off into the distance, Ivan said, “Vlad, m’brother, there’s an entire city of solid gold surrounding the Chernobyl meltdown.”

“What? How?” Vlad asked.

“Well, I don’t know for sure, but I bet 500 rubles it’s true.”

“You need to switch to water, buddy.”

“No! Listen! That place has been bathed in radiation since the 1980s. The radiation will eventually change everything into gold, by messing with each atom’s nucleus or something,” Ivan insisted.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Of course, it does! I read it on the internet.”

“Your source is beyond reproach and I ‘trust the science,’ but let me suggest only the heavy metal changed to gold. The lighter elements couldn’t have.”

“Ah-ha! I see! Five Finger Death Punch, Mortification, and Nodes of Ranvier are solid gold! I kid! But, yes, this is true! Still, the nearby ghost town of Pripyat must have hundreds of tons of metal that is now pure gold.”

“I’m sure all the gold has already been carried away by adventurous alchemists from across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.”

“Ah. This is true,” Ivan agreed dejectedly.

* * *

The following day’s work was to hang drywall. He wasn’t paired with Ivan again, so it was boring without his stories and theories. But the idea of heading west to check out Chernobyl stuck in his brain like a neon sticky note. I’ll make it there someday.

A week later, a trivial error another worker made caused the foreman at the job to yell at Vlad. Though the foreman was out of line for yelling at him, Vlad stayed cool. And he didn’t tattle on the worker who made the error. By the time he collected his pay that afternoon at 5:02pm, he had decided to move on. It was time to check out Pripyat. Vlad didn’t believe the radiation had created any gold, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the place ever since that conversation with Ivan. Maybe he’d send somebody a postcard from there. But who did he have in his life who would welcome a postcard? Dang, that’s depressing, Vlad!

Even though the whole town had probably been looted by people with more greed or need than sense or cents … Who knows? Maybe I’ll find some cool abandoned trinket to take as a souvenir or sell.

Ready to leave Bryansk with no look back unlike Lot’s salty wife, he sped past the dumpy motel he had been staying in and forgot his meager possessions. At least he had his trusty car, cell phone, and his own bag of work tools in the trunk.

Stopping at a truck stop gas station on the outskirts of town, he fueled up, then used the restroom. Staring at his reflection in the grungy mirror ignoring the messages scrawled in black Sharpie that you could “CALL CHEF POLINA FOR A GOOD TIME” and that classic bathroom vandal limerick, “There once was a man from Ladushkin …” he saw the face of a hundred Russian villains in American films. A stalwart, Slavic, mildly crazy face sporting a week-old beard. And that jaw! Vlad had one heck of a solid mandible. He blew out a breath and ran his hand through his close cropped dark hair. He left the bathroom and pulled two 24-ounce cans of Red Bull from the ice water in a cooler. It’s going to be a long night. Eight hours of driving, at least.

There was no modern music capability in his Yugo. The elderly man who sold it to him mentioned the cassette player died a decade before, so Vlad was thankful he had a radio. Only the front right speaker and the back left speaker worked. At least he got somewhat stereo sound. He jiggled the dial every 50 miles to pick up the next station in range. Even though he wanted upbeat music, Vlad stopped on a station with a DJ passionately ranting. He was fired up about a police bust in Belgorod that week.

The news was that Belgorod politician Olga Yatskaya and her boyfriend, bank CEO Fyodor Timoshinin, were caught running a human-trafficking ring that kidnapped women and children to sell to reprobates. The accusations were bad enough, but what seemed worse was the powerful couple had gleefully spoken to reporters saying they loved sending women and children to their forever homes and laughed about how short “forever” would be.

Vlad agreed with the DJ. These two were monsters! He likely couldn’t help the victims or kill the evil men who bought and abused them, as they were hiding in shadow. But if given the opportunity, he would kill the two who set this all up for financial and perverse gain. His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel as he schemed about what he would do to these psychopaths if he met them.

The station began going fuzzy. Finding the next radio station, he heard “Take it Easy” by the Eagles, which relaxed the big man some. Vlad cracked open the second Red Bull. Six more hours to go.