Katja from the Punk Band (15 page)

Hadn’t even noticed. He wipes them on his jacket but the blood will already be working its way into his own body, invading him, penetrating him.

He has to wash his hands, get that filth off them. Get his soap. Get clean.

And get his gun.

If Szerynski’s men are waiting for him, he’ll be left with no choice but to run and take his chances unarmed — he might even be able to bargain his way out with the vial if it comes to it.

Hurry, hurry.

The counts are running into one another now, tripping over each other and he almost loses his balance as he reaches the twelfth step, has to wave his arms to catch himself and just about plants his foot for the thirteenth step, manages to catch it.

Two. Slow. Steps. Back.

Takes a deep breath.

Heads for The Digital Drive-by.

He had discarded his jacket in amongst a pile of trash a few streets earlier and kept his head down as he approached the arcade. He’d stuffed his protective goggles into one pocket, having to squeeze his eyes almost shut to keep out the light, feeling it burning through him even just from reflections in puddles beneath his feet.

The glare from The Digital Drive-by increases the pain tenfold but he forces himself to glance up every now and again for signs of those who might be waiting for him. And he realizes then that almost everyone in the place seems shifty, like they’ve got something to hide.

He crosses the entrance, notices Misha leaning over one of the booths, her oiled musculature glittering like a string of neon lights as the hand of a long-haired, unreasonably skinny man runs across her thighs. Walks past her, past Fat Rita shouting at a customer, splattering the remains of a half-finished snack onto the glass separating them. Straight toward the back door that leads up to the private area, all the time expecting a hand to grab him, pull him to the floor and stab him through the —

A hand grabs him, spins him around, the sudden glare of lights squeezing his eyeballs, wrapping them in sandpaper, and he puts up his hands defensively.

“Whoah!” a voice says, and the blurry shape before him shifts. “Mr. Kohl, is that you? You okay?”

He recognizes the voice, it’s Lucius, one of the regulars. Not half as good as he likes to think he is but a steady supply of income nonetheless. Kohl pushes his way past the man, hears him say something else but the words are lost amidst the electronic glitter and the fast-swelling pulse in Kohl’s skull. It feels as if his brain is being over-inflated with neon garble and piercing lights.

He presses through the last of the crowds, reaching for the door handle with one hand and his goggles with the other, slipping the glasses on as he shuts the door behind him and slumps against it. Everything dies away again.

He fights for breath, squeezing his temples until the pounding begins to subside, glad for the relative darkness of the stairwell and corridor. It takes him several moments before he can begin the ascent, momentarily forgetting about the possibility of Szerynski’s men waiting for him, and he’s all too aware that he has no weapon, that the gun is lying on the floor of Czechmate. The gun with his prints and Szerynski’s blood.

Szerynski’s blood.

He looks at his hands again, his vision repairing itself enough for him to see the dirty smears across his palms and wrist.

Disgusting.

He climbs the stairs, peering over the landing above as he ascends, ready for the sight of one of Szerynski’s men, ready to turn and flee — soap and gun or not.

Everything seems okay. Quiet. Too quiet?

His mouth is parched — dehydration, which isn’t helping his headache any. He goes to the final door and cautiously enters his private bedroom. He flicks the light on, instantly banishing the shadows lurking in each corner, and there is another surge of adrenalin as he prepares for an attack.

Nobody there, so he rushes to the doorway at the rear that leads into his bathroom. He pops the cabinet over the sink with his elbow and it swings open to reveal a stack of fresh soap, knocks a couple of bars out into the sink and starts the water running. He shoves his hands under it and tears off the plastic coating of the soap, using both bars at once, soaping the bloodstains and bacteria, watching the water go from red to pink to clear, and he’s feeling better already. The panic at being caught is subsiding, the rhythmic movements of the soap across his hands, the knowledge that it is making things better, cleansing him . . .

He shuts off the water, takes his medication bottle from the cabinet, hesitates.

Grabs another couple of bars of soap and puts them in his pocket, then goes to the loose board next to his bed, retrieves the gun. He takes a jacket from a peg on the wall, a long, heavy affair with a pimpish fur lining and a variety of pockets. And, just to be sure, he pulls a beanie on over his head, and it’s as he is pulling this on that he hears a noise farther down the corridor.

He squeezes the gun in his hand.

A floorboard creaks and then he hears voices.

They’re right outside.

A floorboard creaks and she hears voices.

They’re right outside.

Is this what he calls love?
Ylena thinks. This love he professes, this protection with which he mummifies her?

She has already changed out of the dress and into a pair of tight latex trousers and a black crop top she can cover easily with the flowing purple fur-lined overcoat she wears over them. She sits at her dressing table, combs her bleach-blonde hair back and pins it up with a set of Chinese needles, applies dark red lipstick and bruises herself with kohl. Splashes herself with perfume.

She looks at her reflection and wonders:
Is this the face of a liar?

Of course not.

She opens the door to her room and steps outside. The corridor is lined with half-moon lights that splinter the illumination upward across the blood-red walls, all the way to the man standing at the end.

Without pausing, she closes the door behind her and walks confidently toward him; he stiffens when he notices her approaching. She smiles gracefully.

“Good evening,” she says to the man.

“Miss.”

“I’m wondering, have you seen Mr. Dracyev? He’s late. He was meant to come for me twenty minutes ago. He told me to wait but . . .”

“Come for you? I . . .”

“He is going to take me for a late-night stroll,” she says, easing her way past him with each step. “I tell him he needs to breathe more fresh air but he is busy, always busy, you know?”

And she’s right next to him, close enough to feel his breath, as she says, “A woman needs attention from time to time.”

And she sweeps past him, continues talking as she backs away toward the doorway that leads down into the lab complex, and he’s coming after her but only half-heartedly, entranced slightly by the intoxicating sway of her hips.

“I’ll go see if I can drag him away from his microscope for just an hour. Will you wait here in case I miss him?”

“Miss Ylena . . .”

“I’ll be as quick as I can. If I can’t find him in ten minutes, I’ll be straight back here.” She hovers by the first step, leg extending through the coat. “Wait for me?”

A bead of sweat glistens on his upper lip. “Ten minutes,” he says, though she’s already halfway down the stairs before he’s finished the sentence, his uncertainty about letting her past muted by the comfort of their control over her.

The atmosphere changes as she descends, the air thickening with chemical spice and the drone of machinery, red walls abruptly changing to stark white. Into the lab complex.

This late at night there is still activity, but it is a dulled reflection of that which takes place during the day and early evening. She is conscious of how loudly the crack of her heeled feet reverberates through the long corridors and passageways. Out of the corner of her eye she glances into each lab as she passes their windows, praying nobody stops her.

She forces her pace to remain calm and steady despite the desire to run, pinning her overcoat around herself. These corridors are hers, these secret routes are all her own, stolen from Dracyev despite his best efforts to keep her caged in their private wing of the building. She has spent countless hours losing herself amongst them and so the route is etched into her as clearly as the patient numbers inked on those here for the experiments.

She hesitates when a small group of men leaves one of the labs, dragging the corpse of something small and stringy behind them, then jogs toward a door opposite when it is safe. She twists the security handle and is hit with a blast of cloying, warm air — the laundry.

She closes the door behind her, moves quicker now because she knows the laundry workers’ shifts only last until midday, past the trolleys full of bloodied garments and the bulky pressing machines, the bottles of detergent and bleach.

She stops before the rear wall, pulls a handle and opens the entrance to a chute. She feels beads of warm sweat rising across her skin as she stares down into the tight black hole before her. Not as big as she remembered it.

She looks around, grabs a large sheet from a pile nearby and wraps it around herself. She tries lifting herself legs-first into the chute but can’t balance enough to get her second leg in, and the entrance is too high to squeeze in two legs at once. It’ll have to be head-first, she realizes.

She pulls the sheet in tight around her and climbs into the chute. It is only just wide enough for her to get her shoulders through but she manages it, freezes when she hears a noise. It could be one of the machines switching its automated routine; or it could be the door to the laundry opening.

Ylena twists herself, jerks once, twice, forcing herself into the increasingly claustrophobic passageway, finally is in far enough that her weight shifts and she suddenly slides downward far faster than she would have liked, and her hands are caught at her side, trapped within the sheet, and she’s diving headfirst toward the metal covering at the end of the chute and all she can do is turn her head to one side, turn it, just as she hits the plate, crashing out, out of the chute and dumped onto the cold, hard concrete outside.

And the force of hitting the ground is like someone has fired a cannonball into her stomach, unable to focus for several moments, thinking she tastes blood in her mouth. She groans in pain as she unravels herself from the sheet, rolling across the dusty, litter-strewn ground.

She struggles to get her breath back, eventually sits up. The moon is full and bright overhead, the sparkling pain in her neck adding a few more stars to the sky.

She stands, checking herself over — merely bruised.

Across a small courtyard is the gate the laundry trucks use for access, one of the few original ones left from before Dracyev moved in his operation.

Although a padlock and chain hold the two parts of the gate together, there is almost a one-foot gap between them, easily enough for a slim ex-gymnast to squeeze through.

She touches a hand to her mouth and realizes there is blood there, must have bitten her tongue. She spits the blood out, wipes her lips.

Heads for the gate.

So it is a case of straight across town, bursts of speed, dragged along in Katja’s slipstream until he has to tell her the next turn to take to get to The Digital Drive-by and Nikolai’s senses are already tingling with electron buzz as they get near.

He points at a vacant lot across which people in various states of intoxication stagger around and toward the blistering splinters of neon lighting that marks the arcade.

“What if he’s not there?” Nikolai asks her.

“Where the fuck else are we meant to look?” she points out. “You said this was his arcade, right?”

Nikolai nods.

“We need to get the vial back, Nikolai. Something is obviously going down here that is over our heads, but have no doubt that if it comes down to it, we’ll be made scapegoats for everything.”

“I know but . . .”

And she lifts the gun out of her pocket, the gun that killed Szerynski. Hides it again.

“Katja . . .”

But she’s already gone, striding across the lot, stepping to one side to avoid a pair of men struggling with each other’s clothes. He chases after her and grabs her as she is about to walk through the entrance.

“Wait, wait. What if he sees us?”

“What if? He doesn’t know who the fuck we are, remember?”

Uh huh.

“But what if he does know?”

“How could he know?”

“I don’t — ! We don’t know what might be going on here.”

And he has to grab her again to stop her going in. She lashes out, stripping her arm away and almost striking him with the guitar again.

The look she gives him, it stuns him long enough for her to disappear into the pixel-crowds within. Nikolai chases after her, eyes everywhere, just waiting for Kohl to spot him.

It’s busy inside but things are dropping off, the gamers who will have been stuffing coins all evening finally running low, the users’ drug-highs wearing off and the groupies already stuffed into the booths, parting their sweat-beaded thighs for their favourite players. It’s like the place’s battery is just about to fail.

He pushes his way past a kid with a wild afro that he thinks he recognizes, tries to keep up with Katja, keep her in his sight, and each time he moves past another player, there’s that spark of recognition and the fear that they’re going to stop him.

Spots Katja up ahead, sweeping past Fat Rita’s booth and her hand is over the pocket with the gun in it. She turns back the way she came, almost collides with him, the guitar dropping off her shoulders and she has to catch it.

“I don’t see him,” she says. “There must be somewhere else — private rooms?”

“Upstairs,” Nikolai answers before his better sense might have stopped him.

“Show me.”

He looks through the crowds at the door that leads up to Kohl’s private area, but before he can say anything else she’s already passed him, heading straight for it. He chases after her, is glad to spot Misha lurking by one of the booths and not standing in front of the door they are heading straight for. They slip past and into the darkness at the rear, and Katja, she just shoves the door open and steps through.