“What if they bring the workers in using buses?” he asked, his breathing heavy.
“Then we’ll steal a bus. Force the driver to take us to the border. We’ve got the gun, remember? We’re in charge.”
“Maybe we should have left it for them…”
“Why? This is about survival of the fittest. We need it more than they do.” Mikhail spit to the side as he ran, narrowly missing Evgeny. “You’ll see. This was the right move.”
“What do we do when we get to the border?”
“We’ll worry about that when we get there. In this area, there isn’t a barrier once you’re off the road. We can just walk across.”
“There are patrols. And minefields.”
“Jesus,” Mikhail exploded. “You worry more than my grandmother. Give it a rest, would you? I should just shoot you myself and get it over with,” he muttered.
Evgeny pretended not to hear the last bit, but his misgivings flared from a tiny ember to a brushfire in his gut. Mikhail must have been drunker than he’d seemed at the farmhouse, and now they were fully exposed in a Russian field with nothing more than high hopes and desperation.
The flash of emergency lights faded as they neared the road, the last of the police convoy racing to the scene of the shooting, leaving the surroundings silent. Mikhail looked toward Kursk, the city’s glow faint on the near horizon, and grunted. “There’ll be something as we get closer. We just have to stay out of sight. We’ll hear anything coming our way, so that shouldn’t be too hard.”
Evgeny was too fatigued and befuddled from the alcohol to argue, and trudged behind Mikhail on the shoulder, the only living beings on the road. After what seemed like an eternity they neared a two-story building built from rough-hewn local timber, its restaurant sign illuminated, two beat cars in its gravel parking lot. Mikhail grinned in triumph. “See? What did I tell you? We’re home free.”
“I don’t know…”
“Come on.”
Mikhail strode to the entrance and kicked the door open with a crash. A teenage waitress and two cooks looked up from the TV they were watching with shocked expressions. Both cooks raised their hands at the sight of gun-wielding intruders, and the nearest one sized Mikhail up. “We don’t have any money. No customers – we aren’t even open yet.”
Mikhail covered the distance between them in four steps and slammed the man in the jaw with the butt of the submachine gun. The weapon fired, Mikhail so impaired he’d neglected to remove his finger from the trigger when he struck the cook, and rounds pounded harmlessly into the wooden walls, the explosions deafening in the room. The girl screamed and held her hands over her ears as the wounded cook slumped to the floor, his hand on his ravaged face.
“The cars. Where are the keys?” Mikhail screamed.
The other cook pointed to the cash register. “There. Take it. It’s the red Honda.”
Mikhail moved to the register and scooped up the keys. Evgeny could see that he was debating shooting everyone and called to him, breaking the murderous spell.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Mikhail nodded slowly, as if coming awake, and then they were outside and running for the car. Mikhail stopped where the power and phone lines connected to the building and ripped them from the wall. After surveying the damage with satisfaction, Mikhail slid behind the wheel of the Honda, twisted the key, and started the engine. He backed out of the lot in a spray of gravel and tore off, laughing as he fishtailed before bringing the steering under control.
“Whooh! You see that? What did I say? Easy, right?” he screamed, a manic gleam in his eyes.
“Yeah. But slow down. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”
Mikhail continued speeding as though he hadn’t heard Evgeny. “I should have shot them.”
“No reason to. And the girl was just a kid.”
“Collateral damage. I should have killed them.”
They rode in silence, the road empty until a pair of fast-moving headlights approached from the opposite direction. Mikhail slowed slightly from the breakneck pace just in time to see a pickup truck with state police markings pass them. Evgeny twisted his head and watched as the truck stood on its brakes and executed a clumsy U-turn.
“Oh, shit…” he said.
Mikhail floorboarded the gas as the truck’s roof lights lit up.
The Honda’s four-cylinder engine was no match for the larger vehicle’s turbo diesel, and the truck quickly gained on them even as Mikhail redlined the tachometer. Dark forest blurred by on either side as he fought to keep the sedan on the road in the turns, but on the straightaways the truck pulled within a few car lengths of the back bumper.