Beyond the Arctic Circle, there's nothing much but an endless snowy desert. The icy steppe, the prairie land – they’ve got a bunch of different names to call the place. Reflecting off the snow, the gleaming knife of the sun made the eyes slit. Squinting so hard the semi-dismantled skeleton of the drilling rig blurred into a single gray stripe, Misha headed from the residential block to the warehouse. None of the watchkeepers had worked for a week and a half now, and they had gone without food for four days. That is why the heavy tulup[1] was pushing Misha down to the ground even harder.

The Polar sun had already started to get warmer in April, yet the cold in the warehouse seemed to get mothballed and refused to step back. Unwittingly, his hand reached for the switch and stopped halfway. Misha remembered them cutting off power the day before yesterday to save diesel in the generator. Once his eyes adjusted to the low light, Misha stepped to the rack near the entrance and moved the plastic box with a crowbar. The hand went through the dark and pulled out a hidden cigarette barely touched. Misha threw the tulup off on the floor, pleased to be rid of the extra weight. He sat down, leaning against the rack, and lit a cigarette. The smoke hit his lungs, flattening his racing thoughts. Here it was – the Nirvana.

Meanwhile, in the canteen block, there was quite a scandal. In fact, it was the very reason Misha left in the first place, choosing not to interfere and leaving the fuss to Brigadier Yuri “Sanych” Bethke to deal with it. Strict and strong, the 50-year-old man was a descendant of the Volga Germans.

There were eight of them in the brigade: Yuri Sanych, Sergey Popov aka “Doctor,” Victor Mikhailov, Alex Redkin, Oleg Varlamov aka “Engineer,” Sanya Lapshunov, Farkhad the Cook (this one was either Tatar or Bashkir), and Mikhail Myakinin, a 32-year-old former senior officer of the Criminal Investigation Department (and later, the Economic Security Department). He had been a convict and was now a driller. They were brought to Sengeisky Island in early December, when the polar nights were just beginning and the cold was fierce. Their job was to dismantle the drilling station. According to "the legend" – that's how Misha referred to the story the recruiters told them – the geological intelligence reported the discovery of oil on Sengeisky Island. Later on, an oil company had built a drilling rig there, but they never got to the oil. The intel had been wrong, and now the rig had to be dismantled. Truth be told, Misha didn't really believe "the legend." Most likely, he thought, the oilmen had "implemented" the national budget like they usually do. The oil discovery was a typical cover used for stealing money with its subsequent transfer to overseas accounts.

 Because the men were well paid for their nut-turning and gear-fetching, they turned a blind eye to the corruption. Only Sanych was a real driller. He was also on to them, but he kept his mouth shut.

Once a week, a shift-truck named Orange came to them from Naryan-Mar[2]. This was a KAMAZ[3] painted in orange carrying an orange booth on its ridge. For some reason, it was always dirty. Never washed since, probably, last fall, it was mainly delivering food supplies and occasionally other items essential for work and life. Since the arrival of the shift-truck was the only entertainment you could hope for in this desert, everybody would come out to greet it. Once the cargo was dumped, the KAMAZ would turn around, its orange flanks invitingly wiggling. At times like this, Misha was not the only one wishing he could just duck into the warm booth and get over to Naryan-Mar. They imagined the town to be small, beautiful, and as colorful as gingerbread houses.

Five weeks ago, the shift-truck did not come. Two days before that, there was a complete communication shutdown, too. Both satellite and radio equipment were dead. For occasions like these, they had emergency ration packs of canned meat and fruits. The men managed to make those last for some time. About a week ago, no one doubted that Orange was not coming, and the work had come to a standstill. Realizing that there was no need to put pressure on his men, who were growing increasingly impatient, Sanych kept quiet.

This day began as gloomy as the last four. Farkhad took out a can of beef stew and put it on eight plates. He also gave each of them a frozen soused apple and a rye rusk. The faces of the other seven men, emaciated and unshaved, were watching him in sullen silence.

“We're running out of gas,” Farkhad said, looking at Sanych. “Got to connect to the generator.”

“Excess fuel will run, and diesel is already limited,” Engineer Varlamov noted.

“Dump it off your valve,” Alex Redkin replied. Varlamov could fix anything, and he had worked on the valve.

“Did that, with you," Engineer remarked, taking another crunchy bite of his rusk.

“Didn’t dump enough, then!” Alex raised his voice and violently threw his fork at the table. Redkin was a young, twenty-four-year-old bully from Shatura. A boor and scumbag, he was fond of criminal culture, always posing as the meanest jailbird. Redkin had never been in jail, but he claimed to have been repeatedly charged with administrative violations such as drinking and fighting.

“Easy, easy!” this time it was Sanych who raised his voice. “We'll figure it out!”

“Figure it out,” Alex mocked Bethke. “Look at the top dog! It’s your responsibility to provide conditions for us.”

Sanych was about to say something but he didn't. He had decided not to argue with Alex, instead letting him blow off steam and calm down on his own. But Redkin had already riled himself up. He glanced at Farkhad:

“I see you have no appetite. Ate some from your secret stash today, didn't you? Why are you shaking your head? How come everyone’s losing weight but you? Explain it to me.”

“Leave him alone, Alex,” Victor Mikhailov said. Either a robbery or a murder convict, he was the only one who Redkin actually respected. “The cook is living by the code.”

Farkhad looked at Victor with appreciation.

For a while, Alex remained silent, eating his meager breakfast until his plate was empty. Then, he took another gloomy look at the watchmen. Across the table, Alex spotted Sanya Lapshunov, a 40-year-old man, quiet and well-educated. He had graduated from Baumanka[4] but never found his place in the world, which is why he ended up on watch in the Polar Region.

“And what are you looking at, nerd?!”

“That's enough!” Bethke snapped. “Don't you have anything else to do? If you have too much energy, go dismantle the rig!”

“Yeah, right! Better get me some food first.”

“You know, Brigadier, Alex is right.” Victor expressed support for Redkin. “We’ve got a snowmobile, and you’ve got a carbine. Give it to us and let us find something to shoot at. I know bear hunting is prohibited, but we have an emergency situation. I'm sure the Criminal Code will be on our side.”

There really was a carbine. It was not meant for hunting, though, just as a precaution in case polar bears come by and make trouble. It was a rare thing to happen, but the rifle could come in handy. Sanych kept the carbine in a heavy multilayer vault and tucked the key away.

Before Bethke could answer, Varlamov spoke up:

“What, you think bears are walking around in flocks? It will be nothing but a waste of fuel, and it's almost gone by now.”

“Shut up, Engineer!” Redkin was clearly pissed off.

Misha put down the fork next to the empty plate and got up. The iron legs of the chair scraped on the tiled floor. Not feeling like taking part in the argument, he was about to leave.

“Where do you think you’re going, copper?”

“Go to Hell,” Misha said to Redkin. He had met plenty of people like Alex back in the CID. All they needed was a brutal detention with a sandbag punch to the gut. Once a peg or two was taken off them, they became the whining opposite of who they were. Misha despised Redkin, and upon seeing him get up, he went towards him, meaning to gladly punch him in the face – something he wanted to do for a while now. Bethke rose between them – almost a foot taller than each. 

“Alright, sit down!” With his huge paw, Bethke slammed Alex on his shoulder, forcing him to sit back on a chair. Then, he said to Myakinin:

“Misha, I need you to go for a walk now!”

Myakinin went outside. He stood there, inhaling the dry, cold air of the tundra winter and fought the urge to smoke. . It had been three years since he quit, and it wasn’t worth his health or money to start again. That's okay. The payday was not far off, and then he can go home. This made him feel better. He thought about how somewhere in Europe or in the U.S., even for the donkey work in such conditions, they probably select people who are psychologically compatible. Here, however, he was surrounded by outcasts and losers. Anything will do, as long as it's cheap.

Take Alex, for instance. It wasn’t really the salary nor Sanych that forced him to work here. It was the fact that the oligarchs who owned the rig were basically above the law. There were no rules or principles that these people would comply with. If a man doesn’t work, he’ll end up somewhere in the middle of tundra, and there will be no way back. Of course, it was not up to the oligarchs but to their “soldiers” to take care of it. All in all, only fear can make scum like Alex work. Even harsh conditions and involuntary asceticism in the middle of nowhere had not brought anyone closer to Redkin except Victor.

Giving in to temptation, he found a cigarette in the warehouse and had a smoke.

When Misha came back in, it was even louder but mostly from the watchmen's laughter and Redkin's satisfied gaggle.

“We’re drawing matches, copper,” Alex said to him. “The five of us. Doc’s untouchable, and we need Brigadier to keep an eye on things here.”

“We figured we’d choose two men to go to Naryan-Mar," Sanych explained to Misha, who looked surprised. "The one who draws a short match is going. After all, Misha, the fellas are right. There's been no Orange for a month, and the communication is dead. What if there’s been a NATO attack?”

What Bethke said about NATO was either a joke or a serious thing but no one smiled.

"Now, sit down, everybody!”

No one did. On the contrary, they gathered around the dinner table in a semicircle, with Brigadier standing in front of them. Sanych used his thumb to hold five matches in the open palm and stretch out his hand over the table.

“Here we go!” Redkin was the first to grab a match out of the middle. Everyone expected him to do that, so nobody else reached for a match. Redkin's match was short, making him do a little dance:

“Go on, Vic, get one! We'll go to the city, buy some booze, and pick up some chicks!”

“Oh, man!” Lapshunov exclaimed. If he had to go, he obviously did not want to go with Alex.

“Go on, Sanya, grab the stick!” Victor Mikhailov's face was bursting with a big smile. If the smart one went with Redkin, it would be worth being hungry for all these days. The smile went off his face when Lapshunov drew a long one. Farkhad didn’t get a short match either.

“And now – the grand finale!” Mikhailov commented and reached for the matches with a wink at Alex.

“Don't let me down, brother!” He responded.

Victor took the match out and laughed as he looked at it. Covered with sparse frizzy hair, Redkin’s face fell.

“Hey, are you kidding me?! That's bullshit! I am not going with the cop!”

 “That’s fate, Alex!” said Mikhailov, still laughing. “Besides, the cop, unlike you, spent some time in the facility. Maybe he'll teach you something on the way!”

This morning was definitely fun for Victor.

“The Hell with you!” Alex waved his hand and stepped towards the passageway leading to the locker room.

“So…”

Sanych glanced at the kitchen clock on the wall.

“It is half past ten now. Oleg Evgenievich, is the battery on the snowmobile charged?”

“A month ago, we flattened the winter road. Since then, I only plugged it once for half an hour.” With his forehead wrinkled, Engineer replied. “Anyway, the recharge will take about forty minutes at the most.”

“We can leave in an hour, then," Bethke concluded. “The town is one hundred and twenty kilometers away in a straight line, and one hundred and eighty taking the winter road. Is there enough gas?”

Engineer nodded.

“Well, Mikhail, go get ready. You are driving, so you are in charge.”

Like in a theater, Sanych paused for a while and added in the fatherly voice:

“Play nice along the way. Tundra doesn't get jokes.”

Brigadier looked at Engineer and got immediately burned by his piercing, sorrowful look. Neither he nor Bethke told anyone that the satellite phone had been silent for over a week. Not only that, but the radio, two days before the shutdown, was wheezing desperately. Through the interference and expletives on the other side, they could make out two legible words, "virus" and "the end," but none of them believed in movie storylines.

***

Misha used to imagine a frozen tundra as a huge, snow-covered lake or an almost flat field, but he never expected it to resemble a steppe: undulating, cut with girders and ravines. Bypassing those along a hackneyed winter road, a rumbling "Wolverine" snowmobile drove by. In the vehicle were the watchmen wearing black tulups, unty[5] , windproof woolen balaclavas, and plastic sunglasses. Before leaving, Alex had found a player, which with Sanych's kind permission, he was now charging from his laptop. That's why he didn't bother to talk, but sometimes shouting at turns, "Easy, it’s not firewood back here!”

They entered the city from the eastern side, as Bethke advised. From there, it was closer to Lenin Street, where the office of the company that hired them was located. They were also advised not to drive the snowmobile into the city. It was unclear how the locals would feel about it, as they had their own rules here. Even if it was allowed, the city was small, and they could take a walk while the weather wasn't particularly cold. So, they left Wolverine near the Children's and Youth Sports School, having parked it by a house next to the port. Alex pointed at the sports school and suddenly played a smart guy:

“Look. All windows on the first floor are boarded up. You know why? Because of bears. One day, a polar bear snuck into a school. Not here, I don’t think, but kids got killed.”

“Yep,” Myakinin agreed, throwing the keys to the snowmobile into the deep pocket of his tulup. “Let's get going.”

The snow was crunching under his feet as Redkin grumbled:

“It's been over a week since the last snowfall. The public workers must be on strike or something.”

Slowly, it became clear to Misha that something was not right. The place was too quiet: doors were not slamming the kids were not happily shouting while playing in the relatively good weather. They heard no cars driving around the neighborhood. The street behind the sports school was also covered with snow and laced with chaotic footpaths. In some places, two or three paths went side by side as if someone was "combing" the street. At one point, the men stopped to have a look around. Here and there, windows were shattered, some with the frames torn out. The roofs of cars were covered with huge piles of snow. In the middle of the street, there was a black skeleton of a burnt-out truck, the model of which was now hard to determine.

“What happened here?” Misha either asked himself or Alex.

“Must be a storm,” Redkin replied. He certainly was not familiar with the laws of nature in these geographical areas. Having rolled his mask up, he turned to Myakinin:

“Where do we go from here? Straight?”

Then, he answered his own question:

“Let's go. We'll sort it out later. It's no big deal, as long as we get paid. They might chalk everything up to a natural disaster.”

Obscurely anxious, Misha went after Redkin.

They came across the first body a hundred meters away from Lenin Street. It was lying next to the shopping mall. The entrance was completely blocked by a long and high snowdrift almost reaching the second floor. A bulldozer, which was probably used to shovel the snowdrift, stood lonely nearby, its blade sadly lowered.

“Bumped off,” Alex concluded, once he approached the body and had a closer look. Misha carefully swept the snow off the corpse and examined him with professional interest. The man was missing half of his skull, damage clearly caused by a close-range gunshot. The lower part of his face, including the nose, had remained intact.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he remarked pensively. Alex, however, didn't hear him. He went to investigate a little further.

During his time in criminal investigation, Myakinin had seen all kinds of dead people. There were ones killed with cold and firearms, shredded with an ax, and beaten to death with objects not meant for killing. But this time, it was not the remaining half head or swollen, rotten gums with crooked teeth that troubled him. It was the fact that the corpse with holes in his dirty clothes was covered with dark spots. It seemed like he has been lying in a grave and then dug out, which seemed impossible in today's Arctic conditions. All this made the dead man look exotic, like a Sioux Indian with a painted face in the middle of Redkin's provincial town of Shatura. At the same time, the corpse may have been kept someplace warm before being brought to its current location. But if so, why were there dark brown snow lumps sprayed right where the brains were supposed to fall after the gunshot? They were barely powdered with snow, and so was the body, meaning that the murder took place no longer than a week ago.

The pondering was interrupted shortly by Redkin's scream:

“Hey, FBI agent! Why don’t you stop staring at the stiff and take a look at this?”

Like a huge black crow, Alex had nestled on a white snowdrift. He was looking down on the other side where the entrance and shop windows were supposed to be. Before Misha could climb the snow pile, Alex got out of the bulky tulup and started coming down. He was heading towards the damaged entrance or, to be more precise, to the shop window. All that remained were the bony glass teeth sticking out of the side frames.

“Article one hundred and fifty-eight – theft!” Myakinin shouted after Redkin.

“Theft is when you intend to gain profit, and I have an emergency. There is an article in the Criminal Code," Redkin repeated what his friend Victor said. "I haven't eaten anything for over a week. You are not the only smart one here," he snapped.

The shards of broken glass were already crunching under Redkin's feet. Something fell on the floor and clattered. Invisible in the darkness of a non-working store, Alex scolded. Misha felt a hungry rumble in his stomach displacing thoughts about a strange dead man lying by the snowdrift. Wait a minute! Myakinin took another look at the body: it was lying with the legs facing the pile, just opposite the spot where Misha was standing now. Although his knowledge of forensics was rather poor, it occurred to him right away that the shot was most likely taken from here. Meaning the shooter could have been inside the store.

“Alex!”

Misha slid down the snowdrift and slipped through the shop window. His eyes rushed through the shelves stacked with grits, boxes of cereal, and other food items. Between two boxes, he saw two guns placed horizontally and looking right at Redkin. Alex froze with his arms raised, one of them holding an open can of corn.

“What’s up, fella?” Alex said, his eyes batting.

“Baikal, just like my dad’s,” Misha thought, having checked the gun out. He raised his hands, too, once he realized that the "fella,” a tall bearded man in his forties, had noticed him already.

“Who are you?” the Baikal’s owner asked.

“People,” Alex replied with caution.

“Have you seen the dead?” The interrogation went on.

“The dead?”

“The living ones. Wandering around the town. What, are you trying to play, a fool?”

Things were clear. They had run into a lunatic. “Now, if the gun was loaded with buckshot, Alex’s head would explode like a watermelon from that distance, and he wouldn't have time to hide or run away,” Myakinin thought dreadfully. In the meantime, Redkin remained silent, stumped by all the questions.

“We’re headed to Lenin Street,” Misha spoke up. “It’s just, there has been no shift-truck for a month. We haven’t eaten anything, and the kid couldn’t take it anymore. We will pay for the can he ate. Let us go.”

“Where did you come from?” The man asked another question.

“Sengeisky,” the watchmen replied together.

In a way, the "hunter" seemed even delighted. He exclaimed:

“So, you don’t know anything?”

He did not put his gun down, though. The next moment, a stocky dark-skinned man, eyes slightly slanted, came from behind the nearest stand. He was wearing a white woolen sweater. The stranger turned to the "hunter":

“What’s going on, Nikolaich?”

“Sengeisky men arrived. They got no clue!”

“Lucky ones,” The dark-skinned man chuckled, a machete shining in his hand. There was hardly any chance to attack or slip away.

“What the Hell is wrong with you, fellas?” Alex snapped. He was starting to lose his nerve. In one sharp motion, Nikolaich took the gun away, having placed it on his shoulder. With a skill this good, it would take him a split second to get the gun off the shoulder and shoot.

“Too much to explain,” he said. “Here’s what you’ll do. I will give you a bag. Take food, vodka, cigarettes, and go back to Sengeisky. It's better not to show up here until summer. Nearly everybody is dead, so there's no way you can find your employers.”

Meanwhile, Alex was getting his boldness back. The "hunter" noticed him turning his head and focusing his look on the shelf with booze.

“You want to drink?” He asked.

Redkin nodded. Once he heard Nikolaich's permission, he almost ran up to the cognac shelf and grabbed a bottle. A second later, he popped the cork and sucked on it. “Boy, am I lucky to have him as a partner!” Misha thought. He had no pleasure watching him hogging more than half a bottle in one go. He's going to drop dead, drinking on an empty stomach! What shall he do with him now?

“We can go then?” Misha asked.

“Don’t forget the food. No offense, but we will look after you. You are noisy, and you’re unarmed, too. The dead bastards are drawn by the sound. If you want, though, you can stay and spend the night in our back room. There is an iron door and no windows. The living dead will not get there.”

“We’d better go. If anything happens, we’ll come back.”

All Mikhail wanted was to get away from these crazy men. Thus, he decided to do his best to show his concern about unfinished business and not neglect their hospitality.

“Maybe we could stay?” Redkin spoke in his manner, bold and pushy. His eyes were slowly starting to get cloudy.

“And what will you tell Victor? He expects you to come back today. He wants to know when they will pay him and send him home.”

Victor’s name had a magical effect on Alex.

“Let’s go!”

Nikolaich cast a strange glance at the watchmen. He muttered:

“It’s up to you. Only it's unlikely we'll meet again.”

The swarthy man grinned and handed the machete to Alex:

“Here I see you’re the fighter here. You might want to use it.”

As they were walking towards the exit, Misha couldn't help stealing a chocolate bar from one of the shelves. He didn't take any more risks, feeling Nikolaich's eyes on his back. Misha still wasn't sure that he wouldn't shoot. After all, it was probably them killing that man on the street. Alex, on the other hand, was all spruced up. Filled with cognac, he walked fast and cheerfully. Redkin rushed past a tulup he had dropped and slid down the snowdrift on his ass. Then, he walked down the street while swinging the machete drunkenly:

“Where are you, living dead? Come on out, one by one!”

Myakinin walked behind, having rolled the mask back on his face. He was ashamed of Alex being drunk. What if someone sees them together? Mikhail didn’t say anything about the tulup. He’s not his nanny, for Christ’s sake. He couldn’t stop thinking about what he had just heard in the looted shop. Misha kept looking around, noting the absence of people, broken windows, and abandoned cars. Everything indicated that the only thing Nikolaich could be wrong about was the ultimate reason. Myakinin’s mind was unable to digest dead rising, alien invasion, werewolf infestation, and other kinds of nonsense.

“We’re here, aren’t we?” Redkin asked, watching Myakinin examine the iron door leading to the office entryway. The intercom didn't work, and neither did the magnet. Even the door closer was torn out.

Inside the office, it was silent. Myakinin flipped a switch on the left side of the front door, under the switchboard. The power was out. The watchmen walked along the hallway past an empty reception desk.

“Is anybody here?” Redkin shouted into the dark. Then he kicked the door on the left.

“There’s no one here,” Alex concluded. Then, as if he was hypnotized, Redkin looked over at the multilayer vault that stood right in front of the door he just opened. Misha pushed the door across the hall and entered carefully, examining the room. The absence of people in the office did not surprise him after what they saw on the streets. Yet, he found it even more puzzling. His eye caught a desk with a heap of papers scattered all over it. Misha started to look through those absently, though he had no idea what he was looking for. Instead, his mind was trying to make sense of everything he had seen and heard today.

“There must be money in you,” Redkin said to the vault, having stroked it as a pet. He looked back at the room Myakinin had entered. His tulup was lying on a chair. It resembled a large black dog, and his mittens were sticking out of the pocket. Misha began to rummage through the table drawers, throwing stacks of some papers on the top one after another.

Satisfied, Alex hummed and went back to the vault. He tried picking it with the machete before giving up and putting the weapon on a stand. There must be a key somewhere. His glance ran across the room from the right corner: squashed boxes from the appliances, a cupboard with doors broken – the insides covered by a curtain. The curtain itself was thrown onto the cupboard and pressed by a printer on top. His eye went further to some more junk, an open door, a table, another one behind it, and finally, a window. Suddenly, he heard a muffled knock from behind, as if someone had stomped. What the Hell? Alex turned around. The cognac was ringing in his ears. Redkin was about to chalk everything up to a drunken buzz when he heard the knock again. It was coming from the cupboard. Alex stepped closer and stretched out his hand to rip the dark curtain off. An ancient instinct, the one that kept his ancestors from unexpected attacks of saber-toothed predators, stopped his hand halfway. Alex turned around and looked for the machete. Then, not really knowing what for, he reached out for it.

It was then that the curtain moved, and Redkin raised his hands up instinctively to shield himself from the printer dropping from above. Something pounced on Alex, knocking him down to the floor. Rumbling and clawing, the creature was trying to free itself from the fabric in which it was trapped. Alex wriggled in a desperate attempt to shake off his attacker. The curtain came off, revealing a grey face with yellow, piercing eyes. A sneering mouth with swollen gums and crooked teeth grazed the arm Alex was using to protect his face. As the fangs failed to bite through a thick sleeve, the creature snarled. Without letting go of the arm, it shook its head as its whitish hair grew disheveled in the scuffle. Alex screamed.

Misha ran into the room. A stocky man, turtleneck tight around his fatty sides, swarmed Redkin and snarled. With no further hesitation, Myakinin put his fist down, aiming at the right kidney. His own experience taught him that after such a blow, an attacker of any size would let his victim out. The man, however, kept smashing Alex, trying to grab his throat with a mouthful of teeth. Misha grasped the attacker's thick waist and jerked him upward, throwing him off Redkin. The man attempted to jump back on his feet, but Myakinin pushed him back on the floor. Despite his agility, the stranger wobbled as though he had suffered a concussion. Something was clearly wrong with him: grey, sickly face, and red hair sticking out as though he had never used a comb in his life.

“Damn!” Misha gasped. He recognized the attacker: it was Leon Zubov, the executive director of the company that hired them. The guy was actually a pretty nice person. Meanwhile, Leon rushed towards Myakinin, his hands stretched out in front of him. Misha recoiled to the side and tripped, losing his balance. Luckily, he managed to lean on the table and straightened up, ready for the next round.

But there was no one to fight with: Leon made a tired growl and kneeled down. His head was split with the machete Redkin was now pulling out. He snuffled angrily, trying not to get dirty in blood.

“I knew you would come to no good!” the thought raged in his head. This is how Redkin's fate came to a logical conclusion. Too bad he ended up killing a man. Got to jam him up and hand over to the local cops! Misha came closer from the back and pinned Alex's arm to his back. The machete jangled as it hit the floor.

“Hey, what the Hell?!” Alex yelled.

Myakinin let go of Alex's arm and threw him on the vault. With the left hand, he pressed the man against a heavy box and put his right foot back. Misha was going to cast a straight jab in the chin uncovered – something he had been dreaming about for a long time!

Redkin's body shuddered as though an alien had tried to escape from it, and Misha barely had time to flee. Alex's lunch spurted out of him: cognac with pieces of undigested corn. Myakinin's rage was suddenly gone, leaving behind an empty tired look at Redkin vomiting.

“What the Hell?” Alex asked again, grunting.

“You killed a man,” Misha replied, not feeling so sure about his words. Everything he just saw came together in an overall picture, the one he found impossible to believe in.

“Can’t you see it was a zombie?” Alex spoke in a strange absent voice.

Redkin stood up straight, intending to say something else. He was slowly regaining his usual cockiness when the heavy footsteps in an empty hallway shut him down. In fact, these were numerous footsteps accompanied by either growling or snorting.

“The do-o-or!” Alex shouted, but Misha already made one jump towards the entrance and pressed his body against the flimsy office door. Hands with greyish fingers squeezed into the remaining gap, not letting the door close. As a whole tangle of bodies piled up on the other side roared and scraped, Misha was slowly driven back.

God bless the kind Naryan-Mar people for not having bars on the ground floor! Redkin picked the machete up and started twisting the knob on the frame in a raging hurry, trying to open the window. “Do not break it!” Myakinin begged him in his mind, not daring to waste his last bit of strength on screaming it out loud.

The moment Alex vanished in a light square of the frame, Misha bounced back sharply so as not to be crushed by the bodies falling in. He rushed to the window, with someone's fingers trying to grab him by the collar. Instead, they only scraped him along the ridge, giving him cold goosebumps. Like they taught him at unarmed combat class, Misha dove outside head-first. It turned out to be pretty high for the ground floor. He rolled over and stood up, feeling the snow melting down his hot back.

With the snowy northern light wrapping him up from all sides, Myakinin stood, getting used to it and thinking. Scattered viscous lava of a rumbling dead crowd came along the street. Greyish and pale, it overshadowed the low northern sun. Misha saw Alex walking backward, the machete taken out in front of him:

“Go on! Come closer, one by one!”

Misha, overheated and exacerbated, felt as though his brain was about to explode. There was no way to go straight ahead, and they would get lost once they turned right. “Try going around the building and sneak out to the snowmobile down the backstreets!”

“Redkin, over here!”

Alex, being experienced in extreme street situations, did not think twice about it. They skirted the building and rushed along a parallel street. They ran, dodging between buildings, jumping on half-melted snowdrifts like antelopes and hopping over piles of household garbage.

Despite his former rackety lifestyle, Alex turned out to be slick and nimble. On the way, they ran into a living dead, who tried to capture them lubberly, like a cocky and mischievous drunk. Redkin dashed to the side, escaping him. Myakinin, however, wasn't so fast. Instead, he had to knock the zombie off his feet like a football player. At last, the houses were left behind, opening them to the white silence of tundra. The watchmen took a moment to catch their breath, squinting their eyes at the dazzling sun. The next moment, they had spotted the sports school and their snowmobile standing by its side. A muffled roaring of a dozen or perhaps a hundred pursuers was approaching the men from behind. Together, they ran, panting heavily but motivated by close salvation.

They passed meter after meter. If only it would start right away, but Wolverine hadn’t failed them before. Misha slowed down slightly, patting his pockets as he ran. Holy shit! He had left the keys in his tulup that now rested in the office they fought with their first dead man.

“Where are the keys?” Flushed from all the running, Redkin turned to him. Seeing the look on Myakinin's face, Alex understood that he did not have them.

“Where are they, you prick?!” Alex’s voice rose to a shriek. He was ready to lunge at the ex-cop but knew that danger much worse than a fist was approaching. It seemed like the dead, albeit running slower, were unable to get tired. The watchmen, however, couldn't run anymore. There was also no place to run. The path to Nikolaich's store was blocked by the crowd. There were two dozen or so monsters getting closer, clumsily waddling as they trotted. Behind the watchmen was nothing but tundra. For those unprepared, the endless and silent terrain could be much more dangerous than the living dead.

“That’s it! We’re done!” Alex concluded with hopeless anger as he put the machete in front of him and pressed his back against the snowmobile. Misha looked around but found nothing that would pass for a decent weapon. So, he stood beside Redkin, ready to fight.

The deep rumble, which rose sharply from somewhere behind, forced Myakinin to turn around. Heavy, white, and therefore imperceptible in the rays of the polar sun, the Hover[6] SUV crashed into the rearguard of the dead, scattering them around like ninepins. Once ripped off, rotten limbs of bodies flew in all directions, their bloody remains flopping down on pristine snow. A man wearing a rabbit fur hat got off the front passenger seat. Using the door as a parapet, he began firing a Saiga rifle at the dead in short bursts. As bullets crashed into the bodies with a barely-audible squelching sounds, the dead twitched. Then, they pushed onward with a howling roar. Sometimes bullets hit a head, jerking it to one side. After that, the dead man would drop down and never stand up again. The rest of the zombies were already coming from the town side, like hyaenas drawn by the fat prey. The back left door opened invitingly:

“Get in!”

They didn't need to be called twice. In a single bound, Alex jumped right in the middle of the back passenger seat. Myakinin threw himself next to his workmate and slammed the door. He could feel his body shaking from the adrenaline.

The right front passenger ducked onto the seat and closed the door. Having clicked on the safety thumb catch, he placed the gun on his knees with the barrel facing the door and shouted:

“Let’s go!”

Once the car was started, the driver responded gruffly:

“I told you, take the carbine. This Saiga is all noise and no cider! Another moment and the living dead would get inside the car. Say, how much ammo did you spend on one dead man? With the carbine, that would be one shot, one down. It is pretty hard to miss their rotten loaves.”

“What do you call them?” Myakinin asked. He was still feverish from these – to put it mildly – unusual adventures. That is why he completely forgot about courtesy, not even bothering to thank the men for the rescue. Even if there was anybody willing to reply, Redkin interrupted the answer, overwhelmed by emotions and excitement:

“Dope, guys. Dope! And right on time, too. Phew!”

The front right one turned to Alex, with clever, attentive grey eyes looking at him:

“What are you, a thug? Or just not good with the language?”

Myakinin picked up a chill and a bit of contempt in his voice. Alex figured he had better not answer. After all, he wasn't a thug, and it might be a lot more trouble for him to get into polemics. So, he turned to the window, fidgeting to make himself comfortable.

The Hover moved around the town quickly, squashing the snowdrifts that had partially thawed under the sun.

“We saw you out the window in one of the buildings we were on business." The man with the rabbit hat and Saiga spoke again: “When you were heading towards Lenin Street. We thought of going out and calling you up, but you guys looked like lunatics. With such chaos around, one of you was swishing a machete like a Mexican, while the other one looked like a polar ninja in his black tulup and black mask. We figured that you either went crazy on account of the latest events, or you were stoned. Now I believe that you don’t have a clue.”

“A clue of what?” Myakinin asked automatically.

“I'll tell you once we arrive at the base. Come on, Oleg, take this shortcut. There are no dead people here for sure." He poked his finger between the houses they were approaching. By diverting attention onto the road, Saiga man showed that he was not willing to continue the conversation.

The base was a school – now a former one – enclosed by a high metal rod fence someone had reinforced with snow raked from the surrounding area. Above the snow wall, there were trampled observation posts for sentinels. The gates, covered by thick wooden screens with loopholes cut through them, were supported from the inside by iron pipes. The courtyard resembled a children's scout camp. Kids played, and people moved about freely to satisfy whatever needs they might have. The place contrasted sharply with the rest of the empty town. The residents came in and out of the front entrance, throwing curious glances at Myakinin and Redkin, who had just exited the car.

“Well, did you bring it, Vitaly?” A man in a shrilly colored Finnish coat called to the Saiga shooter.

“Yep, it’s here in the trunk,” Vitaly responded. “No need to call anybody, Sergey. We’ll unload it ourselves. Come on, guests. Give us a hand.”

Having smacked a cardboard box with some canned food into Myakinin's arms, Vitaly ordered:

“Follow Sergey. He'll show you where to drop it.”

It was semi-dark inside the school, meaning either they were saving the electricity supply or there was no power at all. Sergey walked around with confidence like he knew every doorstep. Misha, on the other hand, tripped twice, having spit a few oaths quietly. They took the cargo to the school canteen. Here, Sergey pulled a down jacket off and threw it on the boxes.

“Pretty hot in here,” he commented and then turned to the guests:

“Come on, I'll walk you to the gym back room. It is Vitaly's office now. He will want to talk to you anyway. The thing is, he used to have a specific job which now provides him with the skills we all find useful.”

“Was he a personnel officer?” Redkin asked.

“You could call it that.”

The gym teacher's cubby hole was small and windowless as in all schools, except that all the unnecessary stuff, such as the remnants of a broken sports inventory, old posters, and other junk were missing. All that remained was a small table, three chairs, and a bench with some notebooks stacked on it. There was also a cupboard with dusty prize cups on top of it. Sergey flipped the light switch.

“Woah, there’s power here! That’s a service!” Alex exclaimed as he sat down in an old squeaky chair.

“No one lives or works here. We just bring people in for filtration,” Sergey explained.

“For what?” Redkin didn’t get it.

“The men infected are not to come into contact with the healthy ones. And here, it's easier to lock them up.”

“What?!” Alex’s eyes popped out of his head.

“Take it easy!”

Vitaly came inside, looking like he owned the room. Sergey went outside to avoid crowding. Vitaly dumped his jacket on the bench and sat down on one of the chairs. Then, once he ran his eyes closely over the guests' strained faces, he said:

 “My name is Filippov Vitaly Sergeyevich, and I am the head of the Naryan-Mar Criminal Police Department. Now tell me who you are, where you came from, and why.”

Filippov was quite young, barely older than Myakinin. However, the harsh lessons of being an officer had instilled firm confidence in him, and his ominous appearance left people no choice but to take him seriously.

“And you must be in charge here?” Redkin inquired.

“No,” Filippov replied. “I'm just the deputy chief of security here.”

“So, we’re busted now, huh, boss?” Alex took a chance to screw around. But Vitaly's scalding look made him bite his tongue.

Myakinin took a glance at Redkin getting unusually serious and started talking. Vitaly listened without interrupting. Once Misha finished, Filippov drew a tired sigh. It seemed like it wasn't the first time he heard this kind of story. Then, with no further comments, he said:

“You will now be examined by a doctor for any wounds that might happen to be bites. We can't take any chances.”

“Would that be a young female doctor?” Redkin grinned.

“The examination is performed by a male physician,” Filippov replied rather seriously.

“I’m not a homo, you know,” Alex snickered. But then, after realizing that nobody shared his playful mood, he asked, his lips twisted:

“What if I don’t want to?”

“You won’t pass filtration, then,” Filippov shrugged his shoulders.

“And?”

“You got the machete. That will work just fine to fight off zombies behind the camp gates.”

Alex realized he wasn't the one to set the rules around there. Filippov didn't seem to have any intention of arguing, so Redkin paused to think. While he was figuring out a way to agree to the physical without showing his fear of being alone in the empty town, Myakinin spoke up:

“We don't know why we need to pass the filtration or what awaits us in the town because we know absolutely nothing. We'll have the damn physical, but only assuming that you finally tell us everything.”

Filippov took some time to examine Misha. It seemed like he was trying to understand what kind of a man he was. He also vacillated over whether these two should be told the truth or just kicked out.

“Fine!” Vitaly slapped his knee, stood up, and turned his chair around. Then he sat on it backward, his chest leaning on the cross rail. His left elbow now rested on the handle of a long knife, the one hanging peacefully, sheathed on his belt.

“It started a month or so ago. The TV showed some murky news about a new exotic epidemic. Like it had been brought in or coming out of someplace where it had been canned since ancient times. You know, for a long time, smart people have been watching TV just for fun. They prefer to get their news from Internet portals. The media is always trying to distract us from the never-ending crisis: they show the Greek strikers, the Somali pirates. We watch Negroes and Arabs fighting against the white population in the civilized countries and killing each other in their homelands. Here, it was the same. It began with the "decadent" West, where a bunch of lunatics were attacking the passers-by. With undisguised sarcasm, they told us how the Americans and Europeans grew feebleminded after watching too many zombie movies. When the infection spread to the Russian mainland, things got serious. Yet again, they were talking nonsense – like the plague that had wiped out half the world in the Middle Ages had suddenly awakened in the New Age. But the President, they said, had issued a bunch of orders, and there was nothing for us to worry about. At that time, the living dead were already ripping people apart – both in big cities and rural towns. We never knew if anyone had deflowered the President's never-executed orders. One day, the TV coverage abruptly stopped.

“Everything happened so fast. In normal times, it took a while for the events taking place on the mainland to reach people's heads and hearts. Now, no one could understand or accept what was going on. Meanwhile, a passenger plane from Moscow landed here, full of living dead. I have no idea who put them there and how. They must have boarded the plane in Moscow still being human. During the flight, all or some of them turned into zombies and bitten the others. It may have happened to everyone at once, like mass psychosis.”

“What about the pilots?” Myakinin interrupted the story in perplexity. “Were the pilots zombies, too?”

“No,” Filippov shook his head. “The pilots were regular bastards. The country is no longer giving birth to heroes. They were aware of what was happening on board. Yet, instead of crashing a plane full of living dead somewhere in the tundra, they offloaded them at the airport.”

“Every living creature wants to keep it that way!” Redkin remarked philosophically.

“Yep,” Vitaly agreed. “Only, the pilots did not live long. They managed to leave with those who evacuated from the airport. Later, they turned into zombies in Naryan-Mar, even though they claimed in the car that no one had bitten them. They locked themselves in a side house, so the living dead simply couldn't reach them – not until they became their brothers, of course.”

“Wait a minute,” Myakinin scowled. “Are you saying that everyone who stayed on the mainland has turned into zombies?”

The stress in Misha's voice tensed even Redkin, who hardly cared much about anything in his life.

“That’s unlikely,” Filippov shook his head in confidence. “That’s not the whole story. Another plane had landed here before that, a week earlier. Those who had arrived on it left the mainland just before the riots. Most of them turned into zombies, and there were also those who remained human. Nobody had bitten them.”

Vitaly got quiet. It was hard to tell if he wanted to say something else or saw that the listeners were no longer paying much attention to him. Myakinin sat gazing at something behind the backroom wall. Redkin's depraved mind was caught up in his own thoughts. He twisted his head to the left and right, sometimes turning his face up against the ceiling. Filippov did not break the silence, waiting for the incredible things they just heard to move from their ears to the brain. At last, he broke off and burst into Myakinin's thoughts:

“You got a family?”

Misha nodded.

“I've got my father and mother in Gatchina," Filippov expressed his support to Myakinin, “and here, a wife and two girls.”

“I have a son, no wife,” Myakinin uttered in a slow, viscous manner. He looked askance at Redkin, reluctant to bear his heavy heart in front of this pokemon.

Before Vitaly had a chance to respond or Alex had time to mock Myakinin, they heard a gunshot somewhere in the yard. Two more came, one after another. All three grabbed their jackets and rushed out the back door. As they were trotting through dusky school hallways and lounges, Filippov explained briefly:

“We do not allow shooting so as not to attract the dead ones. They must have an emergency!”

Myakinin climbed after Filippov upon a snow wall, slipping on the hardened steps. The hunters on the wall had scattered a little so as not to crowd each other. They aimed carefully and shot at someone on the other side of the wall with carbines. Misha stepped aside and looked behind the wall. He could feel a cold, heavy heartbeat inside of him. A woman with a child of maybe seven or eight ran along the road leading from a row of houses to the school. Disheveled with her hat knocked to the side , she kept moving. “Running” would be a strong word, she was kind of dragging along rather fast. The kid, deadly tired, was screaming with fear. It looked like she was no longer able to carry him. Over twenty dead ones were snarling as they gained on her, and guards were firing at the zombies with bullets and spiteful cursing. They would hit the bodies quite frequently, yet only causing the zombies to twitch. Only the man standing close to Misha, the one with a precision Remington rifle, skillfully knocked the brains out of their dead skulls.

“Cease fire!” Filippov shouted. He rushed down to the guards carrying the pipes away from the gate to run towards the woman and help her. Myakinin ran after him, having grabbed a piece of rebar on his way. There were plenty of those around, apparently, being used as a decent weapon always ready to hand. Or, perhaps, it was just a part of pegging around the wall.

Before the gates were fully opened, the guards hurried outside to rescue the woman. Two men ran ahead, followed by Vitaly and Misha, who tried to keep up with Filippov. It was the beginning of the long northern twilight, and Myakinin could clearly make out the dead. They dragged their legs quickly, almost running towards the school.

As the guards rushed past the woman, who had collapsed on the snow, they clashed in a hand-to-hand battle. Like ancient people did thousands of years before, they shouted fiercely, their screams accompanied by the sound of iron cutting flesh.

The creature closest to Misha was once a woman, her hair blackened with either dirt or blood. There was no way to tell whether she was old, young, pretty, or ugly back when she was alive. Her teeth, yellow and gnarly, clacked in swollen gums as though attempting to taste fresh human meat. Misha lingered in confusion, just long enough for the creature to attack, at which point he stepped aside and hit her in the face with the rebar. The edge of the hardened metal ripped the skin on her grey cheek, leaving a torn black mark. The zombie neither got angry nor felt any pain. She just went on, roaring and stretching her dead hands to the Myakinin as she approached him. Misha raised the rebar and hit the dead woman's face again. This time, he didn't smash the flesh but instead pierced it as if with a dart. At the very last moment, the treacherous thought of hitting a human being pulled the rebar lower. A nasty crunch of sternum could be heard, and again, no emotions except for its insatiable hunger for flesh. The dead one reached out to Myakinin and grabbed his jacket tightly, skewering herself on the rebar deeper and deeper. Her teeth were clacking in his face, forcing rancid breath out of her mouth. Misha twisted the rebar from side to side, dodging the grinders and trying to pull the weapon out at the same time. The zombie was twitching her body, too, not letting go of her prey and lugging Myakinin along. Misha realized that if he fell first, he'd be dead. The zombie would get him.

Luckily, the zombie was relatively slim, and the fact that Myakinin was twice her size enabled him to knock her down. With his legs pushed off the ground, he managed to break away. Although Misha had to leave a piece of his sleeve in the zombie's hands, he finally pulled the rebar out. Once his ancient instincts of self-preservation were awakened, he rejected his treacherous pity and damnatory morality. The next blow penetrated the living dead's eyeball. As the rebar punctured its skull, black blood spurted out. Misha swallowed the lump coming up his throat.

“Stop messing around! They would eat you up if there were more of them!” One of the guards commented in a strict and hortatory manner. Myakinin said nothing. While he was coming to his senses after the fight, Misha looked around the battlefield. The combat against the dead was something he had yet to get used to. Meanwhile, the others picked up the woman and child and carried them to the fortress school. Vitaly turned to Misha and pointed the knife towards the houses. One after another, dozens of the dead were coming to dinner. The rumble emitted from their sips fused into a single incessant growl.

“Look at those bastards coming right up! We'll have to draw them away again tomorrow. Or maybe we could do it today. Let more of them gather around!”

The gates were closed, with steel pipes put back to support them. The woman was crying on the shoulder of a grey-haired guard. There were only a few words Misha could make out through her sobbing:

“The crowd…they broke in…Roma to pieces…I told him…”

Redkin cut short his attempt to listen. He came out of nowhere and muttered in his ear:

“Well, now you’re a murderer, too!”

“And where were you?” Misha snapped.

“That’s it, hush!” Filippov shouted at them. “You two go to filtration. Then, you can have dinner and get some sleep. I'll deal with you tomorrow!”

The so-called filtration was very reminiscent of a dermatological check-up. The doctor told them to take off all their clothes and thoroughly examined their skin. The dull procedure was suddenly brightened up by Alex. He made jokes all along, albeit rather corny and trifling ones like: “Doctor, do you want me to spread my buttocks apart? Last time, they found an arctic fox in there," or "Don't come any closer! The watch gives me an involuntary boner for anything that moves.” After that, they were taken to the gym. Apparently, that was where people lived. Even Myakinin, unable to stop thinking about his family, was amazed at what he saw. The place looked like a tiny Indian settlement. There were ropes stretched through the length of the gym. Animal skins and blankets were hung on them, forming separate rooms. Cheerful imps ran around, laughing and crashing into soft "interior" walls from time to time. A little off to the side, someone was plucking guitar strings. On the ceiling, light diodes were shining softly instead of daylight lamps, creating a bar-like vibe. It was the epitome of post-apocalyptic surrealism.

“What, you didn't have enough classrooms for everybody?” Misha asked Sergey.

“Yes and no,” he replied. “What we have here is a hotel as well as a casern for those who became claustrophobic. Believe me, there are many of those now after the living dead caught them in cramped apartments. Come on. I'll show you a place to lie down.”

“I’m not sleeping next to him!” Redkin spoke up, nodding his head toward Myakinin.

“That won’t be necessary,” Sergey snickered. He walked Redkin along the "corridors" to the wall far from the entrance, and they stepped inside an improvised room. This one was very small, almost entirely occupied by an inflatable bed covered with deerskin and a quilted blanket.

“Woah, some bunk we got here!” Redkin said as he flopped down on the mattress.

“Be quiet, there are people around,” Sergey told him.

“And what, I’m not a person? You can go now, and close the curtains behind you. Thanks for the room!”

“You’re welcome!”

Sergey went back to Misha, who still stood by the entrance, looking at the "village" inquisitively.

“Where did you get this jerk?” Sergey asked Myakinin.

“Don’t ask me. Now, where’s my VIP suite? I'd like to have one with a minibar.”

“Er, no,” The escort shook his head. “Vitaly’s waiting for you. He said to put this clown to bed and bring you to him. I guess there’s something he wants to talk to you about.”

Myakinin was happy to hear that. He was scared to be left alone with his restless thoughts, even in a rather bustling “hotel,” so he didn't ask any unnecessary questions and opted to follow Sergey through the dark corridors in complete silence.

Vitaly sat at the table in the teacher’s room. The place was barely illuminated by a thin stream of light coming out of a paraffin lamp. Fueled with some sort of technical oil, it emitted a specific smell that filled the air.

“They will turn off the generators in two minutes,” he explained, nodding toward the lamp. When Sergey walked out, Filippov pointed at a chair:

“Sit down.”

Myakinin reclined in the chair and crossed his legs.

“We haven’t finished talking in the back,” Vitaly began and asked all of a sudden:

“Do you know the woman you killed? She had an unusual name, Camilla. She was a nurse at the hospital. Apparently, that's where she was bitten. She turned into a zombie and bit her husband. Then they devoured their child together. I am telling you this because you have already seen everything and will take my words correctly. They are not people anymore. They are creatures – evil and carnivorous ones.”

Vitaly added with a smile:

“She was, indeed, quite a babe when she was alive!”

“I noticed that,” Misha agreed.

“Are you a necrophiliac?”

“Not yet, but I don't know what’s going on with the women on the mainland.”

Filippov smiled again:

“And you’re good! You’re not an ex, by any chance?”

Misha knew right away that Vitaly was not referring to criminals or officials but to his own kind – the cops.

“I am. Four years in criminal investigation, then almost a year in economic security.”

Myakinin could see Vitaly rejoicing at the fact that he drew the right conclusions about a person sitting before him.

“Why did you leave?”

Misha took a moment to think about whether to open his soul to a stranger. He then snorted loudly and went for it. Actually, there wasn’t much to tell. He was born and raised in a small village of Udelnaya in Moscow Oblast. He got married, had a son, and lost his wife before the boy came of age. He quit the force because he had never been home and the pay was low.

“I don't even have my own place. We live with my parents. I still have loans to pay, the ones we took out with my wife – just like most of the poor Russian population.”

“A regular outcast and a loser,” Myakinin concluded, looking Filippov right in the eye, dimmed with the murk of the room. Suddenly, Vitaly smiled. He got up and went to get something in the cupboard. The glass thundered. In a moment, an open narrow-neck bottle of cognac, a pair of shot glasses, and a bar of chocolate in a colored wrapper appeared on the table.

“That is one way to say it,” Filippov chuckled again, pouring the amber liquid into the shot glasses. “There are no more banks, no Internal Affairs, no ‘red’ or ‘black’ zones, no presidents, no governments, no law. Only a rogue past, a grim present, and a dubious future – but, let's toast to a future better than the past!”

Misha never knew if Filippov understood what Myakinin wanted to say or almost said. He just wanted to believe that he did. And he still had much to say about how painful it was to see the scammers and unscrupulous cons feasting while the honest men were left behind. The rascals that climbed up from rock bottom would have remained there at a different time, but now they were drunk with power, ruthlessly trampling those beneath them without regret. All this casteism unspoken – Russian Kshatriyas and Brahmans – all went unnoticed by the rabble as long as it wasn't about them. Myakinin had focused on his son's upbringing, determined to provide him with the best a father could give.

Filippov spoke about himself, too. He made it short, and not because he was hiding something. It was just that the new acquaintances were eager to get to the main subject. Vitaly grew up in the town of Talnakh close to Norilsk. Later on, the military transferred his father to the mainland, which required Vitaly to finish high school in the Moscow suburb of Zarya. After that, he joined a mandatory military service, then served a year and a half in external surveillance at the FSB. After being dismissed, he joined the Naryan-Mar CID. Apparently, he had always been fascinated by the North.

“So, where was I when I talked about the virus?” He paused. “Ah, right. It started in densely populated Europe, India, and China. All Hell broke loose rather quickly. Here and in the U.S., though, things went slower. Next thing we knew, the virus disappeared. It seemed to have chosen enough carriers and was now transmitted only by bites. It never made it to us, but once the dead arrived from the mainland, they created enough of their own kind. After all, we put them in the hospital and carried them around the town. They went to work and roamed the streets, too. There were just over twenty thousand people living here. Now, we got seven or eight thousand dead ones hanging around. The rest either got eaten or killed. Some managed to escape alive. Besides ours, there are other "pockets of resistance," so to speak. I don't know how many more people we got left. There could be around four thousand, including women and children, maybe less. Here, we have seven hundred and twenty-three people. Each week, we get ten more, on average, but the number of those who stayed in their houses is getting lower. They are either dead or have already grouped with someone else.”

“We came across one of the “pockets”: Nikolaich and some other guy, not Russian.” Misha smiled, remembering the encounter.

"A-ha! Those are Nikolaich and Tikhon. They call him “Metis.” His mother comes from the Evenks, and his father is Ukrainian. The men are nuts, planning to go to Finland on a boat when the ice comes off. They say that's Europe, and they wouldn't let such a mess happen there. But if you ask me, I don't think so. The façade of civilization comes right off when faced with disaster.”

“What about you? What are you planning to do?” Myakinin asked.

“Personally, I will stay here and keep convincing the others to do the same. Here, we got everything we need. We have guns, food in the tundra, and the sea. We can build ovens and fetch firewood. We’ve got handymen, hunters, and doctors here. We still have gas, you know. No idea how this works, really. Of course, we have no communication, not even cellular. The satellite phone works for now, but who we got to call? As long as we have the gas until summer, we'll be fine around here. We get rid of the living dead slowly, and then we wait to see if the civilization will kick it or come back to life.

“I got to go to the mainland anyway,” Myakinin said pensively. Despite fervent efforts to distract himself, his son dominated his thoughts.

“Forgot to tell you,” Vitaly poured more cognac in his and Misha's glasses. “Not sure if this will make you feel better, but the brains of children could not stand up to infection. They just died – all of them, up to about fourteen years old. That is why you don’t see as many kids among the dead. Besides, a child is too weak to confront a grown-up zombie and infect others between infection and death.”

Misha's hand squeezed a nearly empty bottle, hurting his fingers. All at once, his insidious imagination began to conjure up gruesome pictures. His son was all alone, far away, in the middle of the ruined world. There was no one to help save that innocent, vulnerable soul from the infernal clutches of the living dead.

Vitaly gave Misha a good long look over the dim light and turned around in his chair. The safe door clanged open, and Myakinin saw two small round white pills lying in front of him.

“Illegal stuff?” Myakinin smirked.

“Yep. A month ago, the junkies would kill for these. But they have a dosage starting from three. For you, two should be enough to put you to sleep. Today, you had as many experiences as a child at the zoo. You’ll be up all night at this rate, and you need strength for tomorrow.”

As Misha popped the pills, Vitaly added:

“I know you won't stay anyway, but still, our doors are open for you. As for your friends, I don't know them and won't accept anyone, even if you vouch for them. In times like these, I can't afford to be humane. And that fella, what's his name?”

“Redkin,” Misha prompted.

“Right. Be careful with him. Both you and I have known our share of assholes like him. They used to be held back by the law, but they run loose now. He didn't get it yet, but when the time comes, you'll have to kill him. Maybe not him but someone very similar. I can see you haven't even thought about it. For now. But, there are things you have yet to realize. For you, the word "kill" is still scary and coming from Hell. Okay, let’s call it a day!” Vitaly said brusquely. He took a rechargeable flashlight off the table and winked at Misha:

“Come on, fellow officer. I'll show you the way. You may get lost.”

The pills actually worked. Before his head touched the pillow, the thoughts racing in his mind came to a grinding halt.

“Hey, get up!”

Sergey tugged Myakinin awake. Misha shook his head, coming to his senses. The campsite in the gym was already back to life, filled with children's and adults' voices.

“Come on. It's time for breakfast. Then, we'll get you a car to drive.”

The former school cafeteria was crammed full. The kids were eating porridge at the tables, busy with their children's talks. There were also babies fed by their parents. The grown-ups stood in line holding their plates. Once they got a meal, some of them found a place to sit while others took the food outside. It looked like a refugee camp he had seen in the news.

“Oh, Misha, hey!” Redkin fell out of a line with a bowl full of steaming millet porridge. Yeah, this one is going to be fine no matter what.

It had been half an hour since the northern dawn broke. Freshly-shaved and smooth, Vitaly stood on a snow wall. He was talking to a stocky man in a sports hat, pointing towards the dead men flocking about the camp. Misha climbed the steps of the snow wall until he was standing beside Filippov.

“Blimey!” he exclaimed. There were hundreds of the dead, and a mob of zombies crowded along the wall. Swinging, rumbling, and howling, they tried to get inside and grab the unreachable, delectable prey.

“Did Sergey tell you that we're going to get a car for you?” Vitaly asked instead of greeting.

“He did. But how do we get out of here?” The mere sight of the crowd pierced his spine with a primordial terror.

Filippov chuckled:

“It's not the first time this has happened. Wait ‘til you see everything!”

Moments later, a snowmobile with two saddlers in bright down jackets drove into the rear of the crowd. The rider in the back had a carbine. Vitaly commented:

“We got an outpost in case something like this happens. When the living dead gather around the camp, we need to distract them. Today, the Pulkovs are on duty – father and son. The old man’s in his fifties, but he’s got an eagle eye. Look! The show is about to start.”

The zombies seemed uninterested in the snowmobile, even when the senior Pulkov got off and grabbed the carbine. Two shots fired, each hitting a zombie in the head. The back rows of the dead crowd turned around, grumbling angrily. The father took a half-liter plastic bottle out of his inner pocket, opened it, and poured a fair amount of dark liquid in front of him. “Blood,” Myakinin figured.

The dead then switched to the newly available and more accessible target. One by one, the rows slowly turned around and made their way to the snowmobile, gradually clearing the wall from the siege. Soon, it was time for the bait to escape, but the screaming of the dead prevented the observers from hearing that the snowmobile had stalled. The younger Pulkov tried to start it over, but his efforts were in vain. The senior Pulkov stopped shooting, grabbed the barrel of his carbine like a bat, and braced for a hand-to-hand brawl. People on the walls chanted like Colosseum spectators. One of them, a young woman, was sobbing her heart out:

“Pasha, Pasha-a-a!”

At last, they started the engine and hit the road, stopping once in a while, teasing and drawing more and more chasers after them.

“Those brats!” Filippov shouted. “They're both adults, and yet it’s all just a game for them. The kid is showing off for Lenka, the one who screamed the loudest just now. And the old fool loves the attention.”

For the first time this morning, probably, Vitaly looked at Myakinin. He said:

“We'll get going in a moment. Let's stop by my place first.”

Vitaly’s place was the teacher’s room they had visited the other day. Filippov put a map on the table and drew a line between Naryan-Mar and the mainland.

“Here is a winter road to Ukhta. Then, you will get to Kotlas, and from there, to Vologda. After that, you can go anywhere. You might even try getting to Moscow by crawling. The truth is, you should have left yesterday, but you must make it before the meltdown. Stay away from villages, and even more so, from big cities.”

Misha nodded silently, and instead of saying "thank you", said:

“I almost slid down the stairs just now. Your super wall is about to melt. How are you going to reinforce it?”

Filippov was a sharp and fast talker, so Misha did not waste time on gratitude.

“We will put shields all over and get them propped with pipes,” Vitaly pattered as though it was settled. Then he took a dive into the safe and pulled a Makarov gun out, handing it to Misha.

“Here. And take a spare clip. I’m going to give you the ammo in bulk.”

Filippov fetched the promised items, which had been stored beneath a table.

“Here you go!”

Misha hid the bag and the spare clip in the inner pocket of his jacket. Then, he stuck the gun in the belt behind his back.

“No one needs to know you're armed.”

Filippov gave Misha a significant look.

“Now, let’s go!”

Four cars including a minivan drove out the school gates. They were full of armed men, among them the two guests. Filippov turned to Myakinin, who was sitting behind him:

“When we drive the dead away from the camp, we usually bring them to the western part of the town. There are no roads or buildings there. During the summer, it's all just bays and swamps. I had hoped the zombies will fall under the ice like the Teutons on Lake Peipus, but that scum always returns. They have a damn army down there! Here, look at this. We are now crossing Polyarnaya Street. There are hundreds of them here.”

A small group of zombies stood about fifty meters away from the road. The dead turned their heads towards the cars as they were passing by.

“They won't make it. We're moving way too fast,” the driver commented. It was Oleg, the same driver who took them away from the sports school yesterday.

The cars, having made their way through the snow-rolled deep gauge, reached the commercial seaport. The "sea" title was rather conditional, given that the gauge was connected to the Atlantic Ocean by the Pechora River.

They must have brought all the useful vehicles they could find in the town. There were KAMAZ trucks, tractors, bulldozers, lorries of all kinds, a couple of excavators, and one tow truck. The seaport was conveniently located, allowing people to see the dead and have enough time to defend themselves – either by running away or barricading themselves. Even the cars were not parked in the chaotic order typical of Russia. Instead, they were arranged in rows far apart from each other so that there was enough space either for passing through or battling. Perhaps it was the North that taught the locals to approach survival responsibly, or it could have been the inherent fear of Russian men morphing into tidy, pedantic Germans.

Filippov was the first to jump out of the Hover. By habit, he looked around cautiously, then pointed his hands to the right and the left:

“There are a dozen here and seven there. Sergey, Victor, sneak past the cars in case we miss something. Let's get to work, everybody!”

Armed with knives and axes, the men headed towards the roaring crowd as the dead steadily approached the teasing prey. Intending to keep up with the others, Myakinin fought off the dead hands stretching towards him with a rebar, stabbing a sharp end in a zombie's chin. Misha heard one enemy's skull crack. He pulled out his weapon and bounced off in disgust, avoiding the trajectory of dark blood spatter.

“Behind you, at five o’clock!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Myakinin saw movement. It was Filippov. He grabbed the arm that was halfway to capturing him, then crouched down, tossing the body over his shoulder as the starving teeth clenched dangerously close to his ear. Misha picked up the rebar and shoved it into the mouth of the enemy defeated. The body twitched as the snarling evolved into a frightful death rattle.

Myakinin glanced around him. Here and there on the heavy thawed snow, ugly zombies lay dead. Ten meters to his left, Redkin was furiously shredding the prostrate rival.

“Hey, that's enough, you sadist!” one of the men yelled at him. Filippov took a look at Myakinin. He seemed to be grinning.

They killed six more zombies behind the cars, but the remaining ones were far away and still did not notice the men. With no further hesitation, the locals opened one of the garages. As the iron doors rose with little sound, they took out six 20-liter canisters with diesel fuel.

“Your Orange is working just fine, so I suggest you take it,” Filippov explained to Misha. “The tanks are fully loaded. There should be enough fuel to get to Ukhta, but then you'll have to come up with another plan.”

The men threw the canisters into the booth with a loud noise. One of the northerners handed the keys to Myakinin and gave him a pat on the shoulder:

“Say hello to Moscow from us!”

“Start the engine,” Vitaly said, and Redkin threw his word in:

“You’re driving! You owe me for losing the keys to the snowmobile!”

The starter made a few labored dry runs before the engine rumbled. Boxes with food supplies rustled over the floor as they loaded them into the booth. Filippov looked up at Myakinin, who was sitting in the cabin:

“Good luck. Even though I may have not known you for a long time, I can tell that you are a good person – exactly the kind this new world needs now. And it seems to me that you have not seen the real enemies yet. I hope you understand.”

Misha nodded. Redkin slammed the door next to him.

“You should go. The brutes have already spotted us and are on their way,” Filippov said, closing the cabin door. Myakinin shifted into gear and eyed the dead walking in their direction. He was starting to get used to them.

[1] A tulup is a Russian-style long warm sheepskin coat with a collar

[2] Naryan-Mar – a sea and river port town and the administrative center of Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Russia.

[3] "KAMAZ" (acronym for Kama Automobile Plant) is a Soviet (then-Russian) company and manufacturer of diesel trucks and diesels. It has been operating since 1976 (KamAZ).

[4] Baumanka - Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU, Bauman MSTU)

[5] Unty – Siberian traditional fur boots

[6] The Hover (Great Wall Hover, Great Wall Haval H3/Haval H5) is a compact SUV produced by the Chinese company Great Wall Motors since 2005