Skeletons (5 page)

"And now you," the brown-suited skeleton said to me, in an almost hearty voice.

He lunged at me, brandishing the bayonet. I pulled the old man's broken cane out and fended the blow off. The skeleton dropped the bayonet. As he bent to retrieve it I lay the cane across the back of his head. He went down, tried to rise, and I hit him again. This time he lay still.

The bones of which he was composed crumbled to fine dust, and the faint outline of his body dispersed. Only his glasses and the bit of torn sleeve remained.

"So, the dead can die," I whispered.

This was not the first man I had killed. I had hardened to it long ago. Only the faintest feelings of remorse filled me, despite my sober
preachings
of peace. I briefly thought of the bus driver, of Jon Roberts, the others who had looked at me for salvation. What if they had known of my other lives? What if they had known of the things I had been? Would they have paid such homage to me then?

I didn't know whether to laugh or feel shame. "Must die ..." a voice said close by as a hand slipped around my neck.

It was the old man who had owned the cane. He had come back to skeletal life. He was quite strong, and with momentary panic I saw the glint of the bayonet he had retrieved as he brought it around in front of me to cut my throat. Instantly, I threw my elbows back into his bony chest and threw him off balance.

He let go of my neck and I came around on him with his own cane, beating him to the ground. He threw his hands up in front of his face.

I hesitated in fear, seeing the outline of his features covering the horrible empty skull. But my hesitation lasted only a moment before I brought the cane down again and again until he was still and had turned to dust.

Hearing movement down near the open grate under the stage, I retrieved the bayonet, held the cane close to me, and ran the length of the tunnel until I reached the opening under Lenin's tomb.

I cautiously climbed out of the casket and entered the tomb. The building was empty. Outside, the sounds of battle raged.

I went to the vault door and looked out. Overhead I heard the scream of jet engines and saw three planes fly over in formation. There was a streak of fire and one of them was hit, the wing shearing off. As its mates roared on, the hit plane tumbled to the ground like a broken toy. I heard the thud of its explosion as it hit the ground. A black plume of smoke rose over the city.

I thought of the fields outside the city. I knew that the only possibility of survival was to reach a more unpopulated area. In a flash the question came to me that for the first time shook me to my core:

My God, was this happening all over the world?

My ruminations were interrupted by another pass by the two remaining jets. This time they each dropped a load of bombs, before veering off away from the city. Another streak of fire chased one, but the possible hit was dwarfed by the much louder explosions of the plane's bombs going off, in a line from left to right in front of me, leading right into the middle of Red Square. The ground shook beneath me. I heard a crash as part of Lenin's tomb behind me gave way and collapsed upon itself.

Almost immediately, another squadron of planes appeared and executed the same maneuver. Two of them were hit as they disgorged their bomb load, and one of them screamed toward the earth so close by that I could look into the cockpit of the plane to see the writhing form of the pilot. It was a skeleton. Before the MIG slammed into the center of Red Square behind me, the pilot ejected, shot in a high arc before his parachute brought him to earth to a jerking halt, and settled him gracefully to earth. I saw his dangling skeletal legs as he disappeared behind the Kremlin.

There seemed nothing to do but get out of Moscow. It was clear that, at least locally, the Soviet army was beaten. But the Soviet Union was a huge country. Though the vision of the skeleton rising from the potato field intruded, I could not help but recall again the feel of soil between my toes, the smell of earth....

I made my decision, and began to walk.

Keeping close to the buildings, I made my way east, toward the perimeter of the city. Once I dodged into a doorway when a caravan of army trucks drove by, four in number, the drivers all skeletons. In the open rear of the last truck was stacked a pile of human corpses, some of them on top melting to skeletal remains as I watched, clacking into new life.

I had gone perhaps a half mile when a car, a Soviet-made sedan, screeched out between two buildings in front of me and stopped. The passenger door was pushed open.

I drew back, pulling out my bayonet.

It was a young woman.

“You won't last five minutes on the street. Get in." I got into the car and slammed the door.

"I know who you are," she said.

I sat looking through the windshield and said nothing.

"I watched you in the square, trying to calm the crowd. Not many men would have stayed on that stage.”

“I failed."

She snorted. "In what? Don't you see what's going on? Nobody can stop this. The whole world is going to fall apart."

"Is it happening all over?" I asked.

"Everywhere."
 
She pulled the car out hard into the road, turned it east, stepped hard on the gas pedal. "I know some side roads, there's a chance we can make it to the countryside."

For a moment she didn't speak, but drove. We passed through a succession of alleys, always heading vaguely east. Once I saw a glimpse of the main road, clogged with traffic, puffs of smoke rising here and there from burning vehicles.

"How do you know what's going on elsewhere?" I asked.

"The radio. There was news from Britain, from Spain, from America. The television was working for a while, but then it just started to play martial music. You know the way they do. Then a test pattern came on. Then nothing. The radio was still working when I left, but not much was changed. If we could find a shortwave, there would be more, I'll bet. We had a shortwave, but it broke. We couldn't get parts."

She made a deft turn as another convoy came past. The head truck slowed, the skeletal driver glancing at our car, but then drove on.

"It's the tinted windows," my companion said, smiling. "I'm glad my father got them. He really had no choice, there's no such thing as options in Russia. You take what they have."

"This is your car?"

"My father's.
 
He's dead now, so I suppose it's mine."

"I'm sorry."

"About what?" she said.

"About your father."

She laughed, a strained sound. "He was alive this morning. This is the way the world is now, isn't it? He went to visit my mother's grave. Once a week he went. He was there when it happened. My mother killed him when she rose. The two of them were in our apartment waiting to kill me when I escaped from Red Square. We were very lucky to have our own apartment, not have to share it with five or six others. My father was a big government man."

I realized now how hysterical she was. She was trying very hard to hold it in, to be hard, but her hands began to shake on the steering wheel.

"I really am sorry...."

She turned her face to me. There were tears brimming in her eyes. "Why? I killed them, of course. I hit them both with a broom, and then a shovel, until their bones fell apart. They were talking to me all the while, telling me that soon I would be with them again, when Father killed me with the ax he kept in the closet. That was the ax my grandfather used in Stalingrad, in 1942, to hit dogs with, so they could eat them. The Germans almost had them starved out, but they ate anything they could get their hands on to survive. My father must have told me that story a hundred times."

She turned back to the road, taking a turn out of an alley much too hard before straightening the sedan. "You did the right thing," I said quietly.

"Did I? Did you ever kill your relatives?"

I was silent, not telling her that at one time I had.

"Did you ever see what little there was of your life die in front of you?"

Again I was silent.

Suddenly she laughed harshly. "I thought of something funny. If Lenin is alive again, then surely Stalin is, too. And the czars. Won't that make a fine mix? I wonder how they'll handle things. And Peter the Great, too, and Catherine. The two Greats. What a mix, right? Think about it, my grandparents are alive again, too—Stalin had them killed in one of his last purges—"

She broke down, weeping. The car veered dangerously.

She jerked the wheel hard to the right, sending the car into the wall of a building. We hit hard. I braced myself, head down, my shoulder hitting the dashboard. When we had stopped, I looked across to see that the young woman had been thrown forward over the steering wheel, her head hitting the windshield, breaking the glass. There was a run of blood down the front of the windshield, pooling over the hood.

I felt for her pulse, which was weak.

"Coming, Father ..." she whispered.

Her pulse stopped.

I had to push hard to get the passenger door to open at all. The girl's body had begun to stir, her flesh falling away to nothingness. The skull head swiveled around to grin at me.

I pushed at the door with my knee, managing to get it open a crack. I felt the girl's hand on my shoulder.

The door would not move. And now I smelled gasoline.

I tried to roll down the window and it went halfway, then stopped.

The girl reached across with both hands and was tearing at my shoulders, trying to get at my face. When I turned briefly, her head was inches from my own. Her lower body was still pinned by the wreckage, but she was squirming, trying to get free, trying, at the same time, to bite me.

I used my arm to batter at the glass in the stuck window, and finally it shattered, sending pieces everywhere. I pushed my head out and pulled my body free. The smell of gasoline was intense.

The young woman screamed after me. She caught at my legs and for a moment held them in a hard clasp until I kicked back and knocked myself free. I dived out of the car, fell to the pavement, and got up, stumbling away as the car caught fire and then exploded.

The young woman shrieked, then suddenly pulled herself through the window. She was burning like a wax candle. I was reminded of the self-immolation of Buddhist monks. She lay on the ground, then picked herself up and staggered toward me. After a few steps she stumbled, fell, and burned on the ground, shrieking. Abruptly, her bones fell into a pile of dust and the fire was snuffed, even as I heard her final scream fade.

I turned and lurched away as a military jeep roared around a far corner and sped toward the wreckage of the car.

I hid in an alley while a skeleton got out, examined the wreckage, then climbed back in, drove slowly past me, and was gone.

An hour later I was near the edge of Moscow. The National Cemetery lay two miles to the north. I emerged from the shelter of tall buildings and walked through a neighborhood of houses and low apartments. I kept to the shadows. From nearly every dwelling came screams and shouts; figures, mostly skeletal, peered from windows and open doorways.

And now night was falling.

How long had this been going on, then? I had seen the first skeleton drag itself from the earth this morning. Here it was early evening. A mere matter of hours, and already so much destruction had occurred. I welcomed the lengthening shadows as friends and continued east.

As a nearly full moon rose three hours later I found myself in the beginnings of farmland. Moscow, to the west, was lit with fires from horizon to horizon. Occasional explosions, dulled by distance, sounded. Other villages and towns to the north and south were lit by smaller fires, accompanied by smaller sounds. An occasional jet roared high overhead, and all at once a fleet of fifty or more planes sped east, high above me. Their vapor trails made silver etch lines to the luminous moon.

True darkness came. At last I found my hiding spot. An untilled field was bordered by a deep ditch. A shallow stream ran by it, which proved to be brackish. A hedge of early blueberries grew nearby, which only made me realize how hungry I was.

I gathered as many as I could and crawled down into my hiding place, a ledge of hard dirt above me.

A dog sounded nearby: a growl followed by a mournful whimper. I felt suddenly lonely, and more than willing for the companionship of a dog.

"Here, boy," I said gently, raising myself from my hiding place.

It stood not five paces from me—the skeleton of a dog, starkly outlined in silver moonlight.

The skeletal beast howled and leaped at me.

I held my arm up, batted it aside, and quickly drew my bayonet and hacked into it.

The ghost dog huffed once and evaporated to dust. Checking the area around me carefully, I once again settled myself into my hiding place.

So even the company of a dog would be denied me.

Fine.

I would deal with this as I had dealt with everything in life. I would eat what was on my plate.