“What, are those f*cking dog names?”
It’s winter, the girl muttered, winter winter winter winter. Over and over again, ferociously annoyed. Once more. In Japanese, monotonal. How could she not be annoyed? She flung herself down on the narrow bed, not even fifty centimeters wide, and screamed. She noticed a coat lying on the floor. Look at that f*cking dipshit coat, she hissed, the kind of thing middle-class f*cks wear, f*cking a*sholes! If you’re gonna kidnap someone, treat ’em a bit f*cking better, f*cking dicks. Gimme Louis Vuitton!
Her shouting drew no response.
Winter winter, the girl repeated, winter winter winter.
F*cking cold.
Her once carefully arranged hair was a mess. Not having a blow dryer had been one of the first things to piss her off. F*cking Russia, it’s like the f*cking Stone Age. Forget blow dryers, there wasn’t even a bath! They’d ordered her into some f*cked-up little hut full of steam a few times, but that was it. The girl was not familiar with saunas. She assumed it was some kind of torture.
F*cking a*sholes, dicking around with me.
The girl hadn’t lost any weight. She remained as fat as ever, radiating a sense of precarious imbalance in every direction. She bellowed some more. In Japanese. They never understood, not a word. She knew they wouldn’t understand her now either.
She turned to the window. There had been a blizzard in the morning, but by now the snow had largely stopped. Fine flakes pirouetted through the air. An image of a decadent, delicious dessert rose up in her mind’s eye, then fizzled. Something light, sweet, melting…Gone. What the f*ckity f*ck had she been thinking of, anyway? This was intolerable. Just wait. She would crush those a*sholes.
She was on the second floor. Outside, a vista of white extended off into the distance, directly in front of the building, and to the right and left. That was all there was, in other words. Just the ground. The grounds. Exercise grounds. How did she know? Because they exercised there. They were born to exercise. Even when it snowed, in the midst of a blizzard. They hadn’t started barking yet this morning.
This place was huge. There was a whole town inside, if a small one. Closed in. Concrete walls separated the inside from whatever lay outside. Beyond the walls, all sorts of enormous structures massed together. Inside, in the corner, a stand of dead trees.
The town was out there somewhere, to the right. Several white buildings, a very tall observation tower, a paved road pockmarked with holes. The depressions were filled with snow. At the end of the road, way down, past even the concrete wall that marked the compound’s boundary, was a small clearing. There, in that direction only.
The town looked dead, shrouded in snow. To her eyes, at least.
It was being engulfed on three sides, it seemed, by the taiga.
At the same time, the sight of that concrete wall shutting out whatever was beyond it called to mind a familiar word. That land out there, excluded, was shaba. The outside world, the world where the ordinary f*cks lived—or, from the perspective of an unlucky member of the gang, the world past the prison walls. And here she was, doing time. Prison, that was the closest thing to this f*cked-up “dead town.” She could feel it in her skin.
That was as much as she knew. Maybe they had explained the situation to her, but if they had, they’d done it in Russian. It meant nothing. F*cking a*sholes, f*cking around, she muttered at least twenty times a day. F*cking Russia, it’s always always ALWAYS winter here, for like a million f*cking years or a billion years or something this f*cking cold.
Still cursing monotonally, the girl moved to the room with the fireplace.
She could move about freely inside the building. The door to her bedroom wasn’t locked. There was no chain shutting her in. No iron balls chained to her legs. This freedom pissed her off too. Obviously they didn’t take her seriously. But what was she supposed to do? Break out?
F*cking pain in the ass.
She went down to the first floor. She had more or less gotten a handle on the layout of the building. The others were probably pretty similar. They looked like dorms, capable of housing dozens at once. Dorms for stupid f*cks who spent their days doing nothing but exercise. Her instincts weren’t far off. She wasn’t entirely right, but she wasn’t far off. The Dead Town had been created in the 1950s, and until 1991 it had been known by a number. It was one of many such towns whose presence was never marked on any map. One of any number of such spaces that served as bases or military cities. Not only were people outside the party and the military rarely allowed into these areas, but also ordinary people—ordinary Soviets—didn’t even know they existed. That held even for the residents of nearby cities. They were kept secret, and they stayed that way for almost forty years.
Until they lost their strategic value and were abandoned.
The girl was living in the barracks.
The old man who had kidnapped her had always known about this Dead Town. This town whose location, even now, was not marked on maps.
The old man lived in the Dead Town with the girl. It wasn’t clear whether or not he lived in the same building, but they often sat down together to eat. Perhaps once a week, he came to her room with a video camera. He filmed her. The tape would be used, no doubt, as proof that the hostage was alive and well. This was part of the extortion. Every time the old man turned the camera on the girl, she would spit out, “Hurry up and f*cking save me, old man.” “What the f*ck’s taking so long, you senile dick.” “So you gotta give ’em a million. I’m worth it, right? F*cking rob the bank if you have to. You’re a yakuza, right?”
F*cking a*shole, f*cking around like this. Save your princess.
At the end, after the old man had finished his filming, he always talked to her. For instance, he might say: Japanese “soldiers” are killing Russians, everyone is talking about it.
In Russian, of course.
Seems like your dad really loves you, he says.
Whatever…there’s more money in it if you stay here.
The filming took place once a week or so, probably. She wasn’t exactly counting the days. She never thought she’d be here this long. So after her fourth or fifth day as a hostage, she stopped paying attention—who cared whether it was the fourth or fifth, or even the third day, it didn’t f*cking matter. Later on, she came to find this infuriating. Because she had no way of knowing when her birthday came. She was pretty sure she must be twelve by now, but maybe not. She probably wasn’t eleven anymore, but maybe she was. Or maybe…she was neither?
Maybe…maybe she was caught in between? In a hole without age, without time?
Some things she could count. The old man sat at the same table with her for roughly two out of every three meals. And not just him. There were others living in this Dead Town too, and most of the time they came for the meals. First there was the old lady who worked in the kitchen. She was a grandmotherly type with broad shoulders, big ass, thick glasses. She made all three meals and looked after the girl’s needs. Then there were two middle-aged women with almost identical faces, most likely the old lady’s daughters. And then there was a middle-aged guy, probably the old lady’s son, whose head was completely bald. None of these four seemed to be related to the old man. Not by blood anyway. Neither did the old lady and the old man appear to be married.
Still, here in the Dead Town, they sat down to take their meals together. Not just them, but the girl too. She was just old enough to be the old man’s granddaughter, except that she wasn’t related to him. She didn’t even belong to the same race.
Still, the pseudo family ate together. All six. All the time.
Ukha, smoked salmon, borscht, some kind of boiled dumpling things.
Sour bread.
Pickled mushrooms, again and again. Always these f*cking pickles.
The girl glared across the table at the four or five others.
No one glared back. They were unfazed.
The old man even smiled.
“You all creep me out,” the girl said. “What are you, f*cking ghosts?”
Speaking, of course, in Japanese.
Would you like some more? the old lady asked in Russian.
The old lady didn’t only cook for the girl, and she didn’t only cook for the pseudo family. The old lady spent her time in the kitchen preparing large quantities of food not meant for human consumption. Dog food. This Dead Town, which had been left empty ever since the Russian Federation abandoned it, was now home to a few people and an even larger nonhuman population.
A few dozen dogs.
Kept in special kennels outside.
Left exposed to the atmosphere, in this region of bitter winters, to keep them wild. So that their fighting instincts wouldn’t dull. Often the old lady cooked mutton for the dogs. She had a store of it that she bought in large quantities and kept in an underground freezer. Every other day she would take some out and cook it. Mutton legs, mutton heads, mutton skin, mutton fat. She used just a few spices. Enough to give a slight Central Asian flavor. This, too, was supposed to keep the dogs wild. To keep them from forgetting the odor of flesh.
This way, they wouldn’t hesitate to attack a living person.
The old lady’s “Russian dog food” recipe had been carefully thought out.
The dogs also drank milk, sheep’s milk.
The girl watched from the spacious first-floor room with the fireplace as the dogs wolfed down their meal. Stared at them across a distance of a few dozen meters. The windowpanes were clouded from the heat inside, but she had swept three fingers down the glass and peered out through those three lines. She had used her right hand, moving it in a furious sweep…her fingers held together, a single motion. After that, she stared out without moving, absolutely still. She had known it was time because she heard the dogs barking. She knew the others were feeding the dogs because there was no one in the room. Woof woof. A few dogs started barking. The girl watched them. The middle-aged women were carrying over a giant pot of milk, together. An enormous silver pot that reminded her of school lunch. F*cking lunch ladies, she thought, for the f*cking dogs. That’s why they had to take the pot to the kennel. It would say MILK on the calendar.
The dogs were barking wildly. GIVE IT TO US! they seemed to be saying.
GIVE IT TO US! GIVE US MILK!
Released from their cages, the dogs devoured the milk. Clouds of white breath rose from their mouths, drops of white milk dribbled down. F*cking Russians, the girl thought. F*cking eat anything as long as it’s got f*cking nutrients. Middle-class shit dogs.
Too much white. Your breath. Your slobber.
A*sholes.
Such a f*cking cold color!
But she went on watching them through the glass. She kept cursing them in her thoughts, but she was a hostage, what else could she do? She had to watch the dogs. She would watch as they ate, and then she would watch them exercise in the exercise grounds. Exercise. A field day for dogs. Or maybe…they’re practicing for doggie field day, she thought. Their exercise—or maybe their practicing—went on for two hours every morning. And that was just the morning.
The dogs were being trained.
In different ways. They were given different tasks. There were also various breeds of dogs. The only two the girl had seen before were Doberman pinschers and German shepherds. She didn’t recognize most of them. They weren’t like the Western dogs she knew. They looked sort of odd, somehow—their bodies. Most were mid-sized with ears that stood straight up, pretty long hair, muscular hind legs. Their coats were all different colors, and yet they seemed, overall, to make sense together. Ten to twenty of them probably had the same blood running in their veins.
…blood?
The girl began to sense something, a sort of authoritative aura, in the ten to twenty similar dogs. I bet you cost a lot, you shits, she thought, getting angry.
I bet you’ve got good parents.
The dogs barked, and the training got under way. The girl stared fixedly at them, unmoving, as they ran around. Caught somewhere between the dogs’ dynamism and the girl’s stasis was a man, or rather two men, exposed to the same minus-twenty-degree air as the dogs. Two men out there with the dogs on the exercise grounds, directing their movements.
They called constantly to the animals.
The old man most of all.
The old man led. He was training the dogs to fight, to attack. The dogs were fast. When he gave the sign, they dashed off at about forty miles an hour. Ran as hard as they could toward their target and leapt at him, hit him, took him down. The second man was the target. He stood some distance away, dressed in protective gear. The bald man, the old lady’s son. Not that his face was visible. He had a helmet on that covered his entire head. His throat, too, was wrapped in two or three protective layers. That was what the dogs aimed for. Biting, twisting, dragging him down. Ordinarily, such protective outfits only covered the arms and trunk. Because as a rule, war and police dogs are trained to go for the wrists. Their primary goal is to disarm, to “kill” only the target’s wrists. That wasn’t how the old man trained his dogs. His aim was different. He didn’t want his dogs to kill the target’s wrists, he wanted them to kill the target. To lunge at his face, his throat. To maul. To kill.
Again and again, they repeated the simple exercise.
Learning to kill. That was it. As quickly and precisely as possible.
Clearly when one of those dogs got up its speed, it had all the momentum it needed to hurl itself at its target and take him down, rolling and twisting, biting clear through his neck. Those dogs had the force they needed to detach a head from its body.
They were just getting warmed up.
Next they were paired in two-dog attack formations. One dog would aim for the thighs and stop the target; the other would kill it. The dogs were assigned roles in accordance with their personalities. The old man assessed their characters and paired them in shifting teams. A and B. C and D. E and F. C and B. A and F. The dogs were trained in the more sophisticated technique of firearm recovery as well, both singly and in pairs. The old man taught them to recognize the scent of gunpowder. He trained each dog to lunge first at a target’s wrists, as in a standard disarmament, and then, when the gun fell to the ground, to pick it up and carry it straight back to its master in its mouth.
Instinctively, the dogs tended to progress in a straight line toward their targets, or by the shortest possible route. This was an unimpeachable method, at least as far as orthodox attacks were concerned. Hardly a man alive would have the presence of mind to shoot a mid-sized dog barreling straight at him at forty miles an hour—to calmly raise his gun, train his sights on the animal…forget it. And yet sometimes the old man forced them to go against this instinct. At a sign from him, the dogs abandoned their straight lines, progressed instead in a series of Zs. They would bound off to one side, then dash at an angle, then dart sideways again, all the while moving in on the target. This unorthodox attack made it reasonably likely that they would survive even in the face of an enemy armed with a machine gun trying to spray them with bullets.
And all this effort aimed at taking out a single target—a single person, the prey—was only basic training. It was just an energetic warm-up.
Half an hour into training, the old man had the dogs put their training to use.
This was the real stuff.
Ten dogs were assigned a four-story building, one of the many in this deserted Dead Town, and the command was given. Take it. The dogs scattered in all directions, rehearsed the motions of herding people into the building, cornering them. The dogs scaled the stairs, sprang through doors and windows, in and out, all the while barking. They moved in a sort of formation, in collaboration, like three sheepdogs guiding a herd of several dozen sheep. They acquired the ability to “cleanse” a building within a set time frame.
They practiced jumping. The old man had them wait at attention along one of the roads that crisscrossed the Dead Town. A car came driving along, and they jumped on top, jumped over. Or they ran around it. They forced the driver to slow down, jumped onto the hood. This, ultimately, was their goal. To block the windshield, obscure the driver’s view, make the driver lose control.
To cause havoc in urban environments.
To do battle in the cities.
Here in the Dead Town, they were learning. Little by little.
The old man handled the dogs so masterfully it seemed, looking on, as though he were not merely training the dogs, but honing their intellect. Little by little. Gradually each dog came to understand its particular specialty. If a ladder stood leaning against a wall, the dogs darted up it. They also learned to climb trees. They would wait in the foliage, keeping still, biding their time, until their prey came along, until a person walked directly underneath, and then they would pounce, they would attack.
This morning, they were learning to carry burning branches, torches. For seven days now they had been engaged in this task. Learning to be arsonists.
The dogs learned “subversive activities.”
All at once, the twenty-some-odd dogs froze. They turned and faced the same direction, growling. In warning. An intruder had appeared on the field. The old man commanded them, with a single clipped word, stop. Don’t attack. A few of the dogs kept growling, so the old man called them by name.
“Asha, down! Ptashko, down! Ponka, down!”
Each dog obeyed instantly as its name was called.
“Aldebaran!”
One last dog, scolded, fell silent.
Now all the dogs were crouching on the ground, staring at the intruder, at the girl who had put on her coat and come outside. She stood seven or eight meters away from the old man.
“What, are those f*cking dog names? Call ’em Pooch or something,” she spat.
In Japanese.
Easy, stay there, the man ordered the dogs in Russian.
They understood.
What the f*ck are you doing? I came to watch you, a*shole. Playing around with your dogs. Don’t f*cking stop, she said in Japanese.
Well, well, this is a surprise, the old man said, walking over. What is it, little girl? Are you interested in my dogs?
Don’t f*cking come near me, gramps, said the girl.
If you like dogs, the old man continued, maybe later I’ll show you the doghouse.
It’s f*cking winter out, you senile dick.
There are puppies.
I f*cking told you not to come near me. Don’t f*ck with me.
But the girl made no move to leave. The old man was right in front of her now, standing still, ready to talk. To have a conversation, in Japanese and Russian, that would communicate nothing. The girl glared up at the old man. The difference between their heights was about the size of an adult dog, foot to shoulder.
You’re quite an interesting little girl, the old man said.
Yeah, f*ck you too. You’re probably calling me a brat in Russian, I know. Whatever, senile old dick, the girl replied. Someday I’m gonna f*cking kill you.
The old man grinned. Smiled. For real.
“Huh?” the old man exclaimed suddenly. He wasn’t talking to the girl. He had looked away, sensing something. His face was turned up now, he was gazing up into the air, just as the girl was gazing up at him. The four-story building. The deserted building where the ten dogs had been training, learning to herd, to corner. A silhouette on the roof. A dog in outline.
The dog stepped quietly, calmly to the edge.
He was gazing down, it seemed, at the old man and the girl.
Slightly larger than the other dogs, he lacked their youthfulness. That much was clear even at a distance. But he had something else in its place. Authority, a commanding presence. That, too, was clear even at this distance. “Belka,” the old man said.
The dog didn’t respond.
He’s old, really old, the old man told the girl. Same as me. But he’s not deaf.
Once again, the old man called to the dog, somewhat louder. “Belka, why don’t you bark?”
This time the dog replied. Uuoof. Just once, quietly. To the old man and the girl.
By then the girl was looking up at the roof too. All of a sudden, she was pissed. She felt as if the old man had ordered the f*cking dog to bark at her, and it had. She was furious.
“Hey, gramps,” she said, ignoring the dog. The old man sensed the forcefulness of her tone. He turned to face her. She looked him straight in the eye and continued, “I f*cking hate you more than anything. F*cking Roosky. Drop dead.”
Drop dead, she said. In Japanese. Shi-ne.
The old man paused, as if he were reflecting on what she had said. And then he repeated the sounds of the Japanese word she had spoken.
“SHE-neh.”
“Senile dick. Don’t f*cking converse with me.”