Allegiance Burned: A Jackson Quick Adventure Page 22

  The old man takes a step back, off of the path that leads from the front door to the street. He mumbles something that I can’t hear and then he raises the gun above his head, pointing it into the air. Both officers have their weapons trained on him, commanding him to drop the weapon.

  The old man looks back toward the liquor store and calls out, in English, “Run now!!”

  I grip the Tec-9 with one hand and grab Bella’s arm with the other. Running low, like we’re avoiding the whirring blades of a helicopter, we bolt past the old man, Sergei, and the two MVS officers before they know what’s happening.

  As we pass, the old man fires his weapon into the air twice, which is followed by a barrage of gunfire. It sounds like semi-automatic machine pistols. At least fifteen or twenty rounds target the old man. I’m guessing they’re using Stetchkin APS handguns. They’re large capacity and are in heavy use by a lot of militias in the former Soviet states. That means they’ve got another twenty rounds at least that they can fire at us.

  “Keep going!” Sergei yells from behind us. “Start the car! You have the keys.”

  I’m two steps behind Bella when we reach the Opel. She fumbles with the keys. There’s a burst of gunfire followed by the whizzing of bullets zipping past me. Another burst ends with the driver’s side rear window exploding into a spray of glass shards.

  Bella screams, covers her head, and ducks into the driver’s seat. I turn around, spot Sergei running, zigzagging toward us, and return fire with a quick burst above the officers’ heads. I don’t need more deaths on my conscience right now. Thunder rumbles in the distance and a gust of cold wind blows through me.

  Both of the MVS officers are aiming, one handed, at me. They’ve dropped their flashlights and it’s hard to see them other than the brief flashes from the muzzles of the guns. “Get in the back seat, Sergei!” I yell to him when he reaches the car. He passes my peripheral vision and there’s another round of gunfire and he gasps. I turn to see him holding his side, like he’s cramping.

  “I’m shot!” He struggles to find the handle to the door. His breathing is more rapid, his face contorted.

  I return fire again with a short burst and, sidestepping to open the door, push Sergei inside, sliding in behind him before pulling it shut. “Start the car!”

  Bella cranks the engine.

  With Sergei crumpled on the seat next to me, I turn to the broken window and brace the Tec-9 on the sill. Through the scope, I target the officer who first pulled his gun.

  Thump! Thump!

  He falls to the ground, grabbing his left foot, and I target the second officer as Bella puts the car into gear and starts driving.

  Thump! Thump!

  The gun flies from his hand and he leans over grabbing his wrist. Both of them are yelling and cursing at each other.

  “Did you kill them?” Bella’s reflection in the mirror is flashing blue from the police car in the rearview mirror.

  “No. One in the hand, the other in the foot. Both of them will live, but neither of them is coming after us.”

  “What about the old man?” She glances at me briefly before veering to the right at a V in the road.

  “He’s dead. Suicide by cop.”

  “I don’t understand why…”

  “He had nothing to live for,” I tell her. “The love of his life, Rudolf Gamow, is dead. There are three dead bodies in his store. He’s living illegally in the back room of a building inside the exclusion zone.”

  “I get it,” she says. “How’s Sergei?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see him.”

  Bella flips on the cabin light and I can see Sergei’s injury. It’s not bad. The bullet passed clean through on his left side. It almost looks like an artificial wound. “You’ll be okay, Sergei.”

  I yank open my pack and pull out the survival kit. With my teeth I rip open a package containing an iodine soaked towelette. “This is gonna hurt, Sergei, grab onto something.”

  He screams when I press the towelette onto the entry wound and wipe. Bella reacts to his cry by jerking the wheel to the right and then overcorrecting. Sergei and I fall into each other and he moans.

  “Please keep it on the road, Bella. He’s gonna scream again. I’m cleaning the wound.”

  “Okay,” she says, “Okay. Sorry!”

  I pull out a sewing kit and some fishing line from the med kit. Incredibly, after knotting the end of the line, I slide the line through the eye of the needle on my second try and then inhale as I get ready to stitch the entry wound.

  I slip the needle through his skin and across the wound. Another stitch the other way and tug. The tension closes the wound for the most part and Sergei hisses through his clenched teeth. “Almost done…” I dress the wound with a patch of gauze and medical tape against the flash of a lightning strike.

  “Finished?” he whimpers.

  “Halfway there.” I roll him onto his back.

  Sergei’s eyes are pressed shut, he’s breathing loudly and rapidly through his nose. “Тільки половина шлях?” he asks. There’s a flash outside, followed by a loud rumble.

  “Yes,” I say, “only halfway.”

  Starting with another iodine wipe, I repeat the process on the exit wound. Then I tell him to open his mouth.

  “What?” he asks.

  “I’m giving you a painkiller.” I pull some pills from tiny Ziploc bags. “And an antibiotic.” I drop a ciprofloxacin and two acetaminophen into his mouth and push his jaw shut. “Chew and swallow. Okay, you can turn off the light,” I say to Bella. “Do you know where we are?”

  “No. I’m just driving.”

  It is raining again. Large drops pelt the car, and spray in through the broken window to my left.

  I grab the passenger seat headrest to pull myself into the front seat of the car. “Sergei, spread out your legs. Rest them on my pack. It’ll keep them elevated and help your heart rate.”

  “How did you know how to do that?” Bella asks.

  “Do what?”

  “Treat him,” she says. “Were you in the military? Were you a medic or something?”

  “Nope.” We round a slight curve to the right. “I watch a lot of YouTube.”

  “But you had all of that stuff,” she says. “How did you —”

  “I’ve been running for my life for a while now. I’m on my own. I need survival stuff with me. I kinda need to know how to use it.” The windshield wipers are waving back and forth as quickly as its motor can push and pull them, but they’re no match for the increasing volume of rain falling on us.

  “You’ve done this before? You’ve cleaned and sewn a gunshot wound?”

  “Nope, that was the first time.” As we finish rounding the corner, the dense collection of tall trees disappears and we’re driving into a clearing. Then lightning flashes again, filling the sky and outlining a series of structures in the near distance, maybe five hundred yards ahead.

  “I don’t think we’re going the right way.”

  “Why? How do you know this isn’t the way out?”

  “Because,” another flash of light, followed by a dramatic Boom! and I point straight ahead at the approaching behemoth. “That’s reactor number four.”

  CHAPTER 17

  I’ve reached the saturation point. Really. I’m so drenched and waterlogged that the rain pounding against my head and shoulders doesn’t matter. Bella is standing next me, arms folded in front of her as she likes to do, her hair matted to her head. Still, she looks beautiful. We’re in a parking lot next to some administrative building facing the reactor and its decaying sarcophagus. From this distance, and without the fogged car windows in our way, we can clearly see the large rectangular shell encasing the radioactive reactor. Protruding from the frame is large single smokestack.

  Beyond the reactor in the distance are two unfinished cooling towers. We see them clearly when lightning forks through the sky, reflecting off of the low cloud cover. They must have been under construction wh
en the accident happened, the work never completed.

  “What do we do?” Bella’s teeth are chattering. “We need to find our way out and Sergei is no help.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “We must be pretty far north. Sergei told us he was entering from one of the southern entrances on our way from Kiev. If I remember correctly, the reactors are toward the northern end of the zone. A little farther north is Pripyat, that abandoned town.”

  Another lightning strike flashes above us, followed a few seconds later by thunder. I wonder if the rain falling on us is radioactive or in any way acidic. It’s too late to worry about it. I’ve licked my lips, sniffed in the rain under my nose, and gotten enough of it in my eyes to run a microwave if that’s the case.

  It feels like every pellet stings just a little as it seeps into my pores. It’s like I’m becoming Spiderman after the bite, each beat of my heart sending the venom deeper into my veins. I’m no hero, though. Whatever has changed inside of me, happened long before Chernobyl zapped me. And it’s not for the better, even if it has made me stronger and more impervious to pain.

  “The storm is moving away from us,” Bella says. “Should we just keep heading north and try to find our way out?” She wipes some raindrops from her face. “Or should we turn around, now that we know we’re north of where we should be.”

  “If we go back, the MVS is likely going to find us. I don’t think we can go back that way.”

  “All right,” she says. “Let’s try to find our way out, even though we really have no idea where we are and the GPS on my phone doesn’t help. For all I know, we’ll end up in Belarus.”

  “Wait a minute.” I could kick myself. “I’ve got a Garmin in my pack. I just have to punch in GPS coordinates.”

  “Are you kidding me, Jackson? We could’ve used that about twenty minutes ago.”

  “Yeah,” I shoot back, “I was kinda busy stitching up Sergei. Cut me some slack.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Bella huffs. “Now that we have some guidance, we can find our way out of this hell hole.”

  I jump into the front passenger seat and reach around to the back. The pack is underneath Sergei’s legs, but I’m able to reach into the top compartment and pull out the Garmin and a handful of shot shell. He’s asleep or unconscious, his chest heaving up and down. I punch the MENU button on the left side, then cycle through to find our current coordinates.

  51.390704 LAT 30.094278 LONG

  “Great,” she says. “Now we know where we are. Jackson, we need to know where we need to be.”

  “It needs to know where we are to help us figure out where to go. “Belarus won’t work, as much I’d like to head that direction. I’m still on an American passport and don’t have a visa for Belarus. Sergei may not have his passport either.”

  “We need to get back to Kiev, right? Why don’t we just head there?”

  “I’ve got to map us to a point that’s not directly south before we head back to Kiev,” I explain. “Or as I already said, we head right back to the MVS. I’m scanning the map for a town west of here. East won’t work. There’s a river we can’t cross.” Another flash of lightning sparks in the sky, but it’s dimmer, farther off in the distance.

  “I found it,” I say. “We’ll head to Ovruch. It’s two hours west of here.”

  “That’s a long way,” Bella protests. “We’re not going that far. About halfway there is the P02 highway. We’ll catch that and then head south and east all the way into Kiev.”

  I punch in the route and the Garmin tells us to turn right and then right again almost immediately. “In about one point three kilometers, we’re going to turn left. That’s maybe two or three minutes from now.”

  My eyes are focused on the color screen of the Garmin, watching our coordinates change and our position on the road move incrementally when Bella accelerates rapidly, pushing me back against my seat.

  “We have company,” she blurts. “Somebody is following us. A couple of somebodies. And they’re gaining on us.”

  ***

  Bella’s not following the GPS. She’s trying to outmaneuver the twin MVS patrol cars speeding behind us. As soon as she pressed on the gas, they flipped on their blue strobes atop their cars. Now they’re running beside each other, the one on the left is trying to pull even with us.

  “Which way do I go?” she asks. “What do I do, Jackson?”

  “Keep your eyes on the road. I’ll handle it.” I slap open the revolver’s cylinder and start thumbing in shot shell.

  Bella takes a quick turn to the right without decelerating enough. The rear tires spin out from behind the Opel, screaming on the wet asphalt, and she corrects by spinning the wheel to the left. Somehow, she regains control of the car, but the inertia slams my body into the door, while Sergei falls into the space between the front and back seats, crying out in pain and cursing in Ukrainian.

  “Keep us on the road!” I pick up the pistol from the floorboard at my feet, find a couple of the shot shells, and load them. I’ve got five shots. “I’m going to give us some distance,” I jump into the back seat.

  The clouds are clearing again, and the moon peeks through enough for me to see the cars pursuing us. Both of them are white Toyota Priuses. Priuses!! There’s a pair of officers in each car. I pull myself out of the open window behind Bella, lay on my side facing backward toward the cars.

  The one to the left is almost even with our rear tire. As I take aim, both men in the car lock eyes with me and panic. I fire once at the front left tire and the driver slams on the brakes.

  Miss!

  He overreacts and loses control of the car. It weaves back and forth, sideswiping the car behind us before spinning out into the high grass on the right side of the road.

  One down. One to go.

  The second car is right behind us, with a fresh dent along its driver’s side. The driver’s riding the edge of the road and I can’t get off a good shot from this position, so I duck back inside the car and climb into the front seat.

  “Please put your belt back on,” Bella pleads and I oblige her, snapping the buckle. “I’m gonna speed up again and turn at the next intersection.”

  Bella accelerates again, trying to find some space between us and the Prius.

  “Turn right. That’ll give me a clear shot.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she asks. “This is not an action movie, Jackson.”

  “I’ve done this before and it worked.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “Just focus on the road. You’re doing a great job.”

  She nods and glances in the rearview mirror. “Good thing this is an automatic,” she chuckles nervously. “I never learned how to drive a stick.”

  I push the button to lower my window. Standing water from the rain sprays up past the side view mirror as the front tires plow through it. “There’s an intersection up ahead.”

  “I see it.” She leans into the wheel, squinting past the beads of water on the windshield. She grips the wheel and I loosen my belt enough to twist and brace my right arm on the door.

  Bella takes her foot off the accelerator, taps the brakes, and spins the wheel to the right.

  The back half of the Prius slides into view from right to left, exposing the right rear tire.

  Pow! Pow! Two quick blasts aimed down and to the right explode into the tire when the driver slowed to make the turn with us. The tire explodes and the car wobbles before flipping left side over right, tumbling into the intersection and following us before crashing into a culvert on the other side of the road. Bella speeds up and I pull my arm into the car, untwisting myself from the seatbelt.

  Her eyes are wide, a big smile plastered on her face. “Did you see that car flip over like that? I thought it was going to slam onto the back of our car.” She laughs nervously, bouncing in her seat.

  “I saw it.” I pop the pistol into the glovebox at my knees. “Now we need to figure out where we are.” The Garmin screen glo
ws with our coordinates. 51.091671 LAT 29.585544 LONG

  “I know where we are.” She slows the hatchback to a crawl. “We’re in a graveyard.”

  The hulking shells of Soviet-era trucks and helicopters surround us. Row after row of rusted metal, parked as if it were an abandoned military dealership. The emptiness of it puts a knot in my stomach.

  “Pull the car in between those two trucks,” I point over to the right. “We need to hide for a second while I figure out how to get us back on track.”

  Bella turns to the right and slows to a stop. She puts the car in park and shuts off the engine.

  My focus returns to the Garmin and I punch in Ovruch. The screen repopulates with directions to the west and the highway that’ll take us back to Kiev.

  “Do you hear that?” Bella asks.

  “Hear what?”

  “Silence,” she says. “Total silence.”

  She’s right. I close my eyes and listen. Aside from Sergei’s heavy mouth-breathing, there’s nothing; no gunfire, no engines revving, no sirens, just silence.

  It figures. The first peaceful moment I’ve had in the last couple of days, and it’s in the middle of an irradiated graveyard at the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

  ***

  It’s three o’clock in the morning when Bella pulls the car into the parking lot in front of the Hyatt Kiev.

  “We don’t have rooms,” she points out.

  “Not a problem. We’ll manage.”

  Sergei is sitting up in the back seat. His face looks almost translucent, but otherwise he appears okay. The two bottles of water we gave him after a fuel stop have helped his energy.

  “This is where we say goodbye,” I tell him.

  “You’re leaving me here?” he asks, his eyebrows knitted.

  I reach into the glovebox and pull out the pistol. “Yes, him and ten thousand dollars.”

  “But he’s hurt,” Bella says, glancing back at him. “He needs to get to a hospital.”

  “He’s not going to a hospital,” I say and then turn to face Sergei. “You’re not going to a hospital, right?”