There was laughter, topped only when another man shouted, “And I’ve got the queen bitch herself!”
Picking up the body of Anastasia, and handling it with deliberate carelessness, Sergei stepped over the corpses of the maid and the cook and hopped down onto the ground. The road was illuminated by the headlights of the car, but the forest was thick on both sides, and as the hay carts were brought around back, Sergei carried his bundle past one wagon, and then another, and when a cry went up at the discovery of the Tsar—“Who wants to spit in the face of Nikolashka himself!” Ermakov exulted—Sergei pretended to drunkenly stumble off the rutted path and into a pile of brambles.
But no one called out after him, and no one noticed. Everyone was so intent on defiling the corpse of the Tsar that they didn’t see him disappear, and hoisting the girl over his shoulder like a sack of grain—and how many times had he done that very thing in the fields of Pokrovskoe?—he trotted into the dense and pitch-black woods. Ana groaned, and all he could say was, “Hush, Ana, hush.” She was heavier than he thought she would be, and her body was harder and stiffer, but in all the hubbub and confusion, the Reds might not even notice that one of the duchesses was missing until they assembled all the bodies at the Four Brothers. By then Sergei planned to be miles away, hidden in the one place he knew would provide a safe refuge for the lone survivor of the imperial family.
Chapter 42
Harley had just spent the worst night of his entire life, and he was not about to go through another one like it. He’d broken into Russell’s remaining stores of beer and drifted off into sleep for half an hour here and there, but every time he did, he’d awakened again with a start, expecting to see that old lady from the cliffs, or Eddie, bruised and bloodied, cursing him out for cutting the rope.
Or that mangled guy on the autopsy table in the tent.
As far as he was concerned, St. Peter’s Island was even worse than all the stories and legends he’d ever heard about it. It was one big haunted house, fit for nothing but the dead and anyone else who felt ready to join them. He needed to get off of it while there was still time.
If there was still time.
As soon as the storm abated enough to let a little daylight shine, he’d ventured out of the cave to see if the trawler Kodiak had been freed by the surging tides.
Freed wasn’t the word. Scuttled was more like it. The boat had settled deeper into the cove, and he could see pieces of it drifting away on each icy wave. The groaning he had heard the night before was its hull being scraped on the rocks, its cabin flooding, its masts and doors and gangways being rent by the pounding surf.
As for the skiff—not that he could ever have made it back to Port Orlov in that flimsy thing, anyway—it had been dragged down by the tide and reduced to a pile of splinters and sawdust.
There was really only one option left to him—the RHI that he’d spotted down on the beach below the cemetery, where the Coast Guard must have left it for an emergency evacuation.
Well, if this wasn’t an emergency, then what the hell was?
Trekking over that way again was about the last thing in the world he wanted to do—that black dude with the rifle was never far from his thoughts—but he just didn’t see any way around it. He also knew that if he debated it much longer, he’d lose the few hours of daylight he had left. Earlier, he had emptied his coat pockets—vials, icon, and all—willy-nilly into his backpack, and now he threw in some Power-Bars, a bottled water, and the handgun Russell had been kind enough to leave behind. He’d have liked to take more, but he wanted to be sure he was traveling light. He wasn’t feeling up to par and wouldn’t have been surprised if he was running a bit of a fever. By the time he got back to his trailer, he’d probably be sporting a full-blown cold.
Walking back toward the beach and the stone steps leading down to the inflatable boat, he saw that his tracks from the day before had already been obliterated. Alaska had a way of doing that. Every sign of human life was soon wiped away by nature, and the stuff that lasted at all—like the colony—just wound up being a reminder of how empty, short, and hollow life really was. Sometimes, like right now, Harley thought it might have been a good idea to go and live someplace else, after all. He should have done it the day Charlie had moved his two crazy women into the old house.