— Why didn’t you clean this, you little punk? Place is filthy. Sloppy work.
It was just a pretext. Absurd and false. Mike tried to say something, to explain, but a punch to the stomach cut him off.
He doubled over, gasping for air. Yusupov grabbed him by the hair and slammed his face against the cold dirty wall. The stink of alcohol hit him.
— You think you’re too proud for this, Sokolov? — Gafurov hissed in his ear. — We’re going to put you in your place. For real this time.
What happened next reached Mike’s mind as if through a nightmare in slow motion. They hit him again and again. Pain was familiar by now, but this time it carried something new—an awful, crawling sense of what might come next.
With threats and blows, they forced him down onto his knees in a puddle of dirty water. He knelt there shaking from cold, humiliation, and animal fear in that cramped, foul little space. Gafurov came up behind him, his sour drunken breath hot on Mike’s neck. He grabbed him hard and locked an arm around his throat in a brutal chokehold. The heavy forearm crushed his windpipe, cutting off the air. Mike gagged and fought wildly, but he had no chance. He clawed at Gafurov’s arm, but the grip held like iron. Gafurov bent him forward while Yusupov, having pulled off his heavy Army belt, started swinging. The world in front of Mike’s eyes narrowed fast into a pulsing black point. His lungs burned. His only thought was to breathe—just one breath, one desperate breath. He barely felt the belt anymore, barely felt anything except the unbearable suffocation. At the last second, before his fading mind gave out completely, the attack broke off. Yusupov, drunk and unsteady, dropped the belt from his hand. What saved Mike from something even worse was nothing noble—just a stupid accident.
But by then it hardly mattered. He collapsed onto the filthy floor like a rag doll. They didn’t try to revive him.
Instead they lit matches and held them to his bare heels. The sharp flashes of pain dragged him back toward consciousness. When he opened his eyes, he saw their laughing, liquor-flushed faces.
— Don’t worry, Sokolov, — Gafurov said, straightening his uniform. — We’ll take a break, then the whole car can have a turn with you. It’s a holiday, right?
They walked out, slamming the door behind them, leaving him in the puddle on the floor—humiliated, broken, choking. The threat they tossed off didn’t sound like drunken nonsense in his head.
It sounded like a sentence.
He lay there on the freezing wet floor of the bathroom for who knew how long. A minute, an hour—time had stopped meaning anything. Consciousness came back in slow, painful waves.
The first thing he felt was the raw pain in his throat and lungs. Then the burning in his feet. Then the sickening wetness on his legs and the floor beneath him.
He opened his eyes. In front of him were the dirty toilet, rusted pipes, the dim bulb overhead. In his head he could still hear the drunken laughter and that last line.
“The whole car can have a turn with you.” And behind it, like an echo, the convict’s rasp from behind the bars: “patsy.” Something inside him snapped, like a wire pulled too tight finally giving way without a sound.
Humiliation, pain, fear, despair—all of it had reached some final limit, filled him to the brim, and then suddenly vanished. Evaporated. In its place there was a perfect, ringing, icy emptiness. He stopped shaking.
He no longer felt pain or cold. Slowly, almost mechanically, he got to his feet. His movements were precise, measured, as if he were no longer a person but a machine given a new set of instructions.
He picked up his pants from the floor and pulled them on without noticing the grime. Then he looked into the small cracked mirror above the sink. A stranger looked back.
It was not Mike Sokolov, nineteen years old, from a small town. It was something with dead, empty eyes and a face like a mask. The boy was gone. He had died there on that filthy floor.
His eyes dropped to the small coal stove used to heat water in the rail car. Its door stood partly open, red coals glowing inside. Without taking his eyes from his reflection, Mike slowly removed the soiled underwear he was still wearing.
He balled it up in one hand, stepped to the stove, opened the door. Heat hit his face, but he didn’t react. With detached calm, he tossed the bundle into the fire.
The flames took it greedily, flaring brighter for a moment. It was a ritual. A cleansing. A farewell.
He was not just burning a piece of cloth. He was burning his past, his fear, his humiliation, his weakness. He was burning the young man who had cried from helplessness.
When nothing remained but black ash, he slowly shut the cast-iron door. There was no rage in him now. No fury. No desire for revenge. There was nothing.
Only a cold, clear, absolute certainty about what he had to do. He walked out of the bathroom. His movements were quiet and exact, like a predator’s.
His burned feet felt like they were on fire. But he didn’t limp. The pain was somewhere far away.
It no longer belonged to him. He walked down the corridor past the compartment where his tormentors were laughing and drinking. He didn’t look in.
He didn’t care what they were doing. He had a goal. Simple. Clear.
His destination was Warrant Officer Belov’s compartment. Belov, dead drunk on fortified wine, would be sleeping hard. Mike knew that.
But he didn’t need Belov’s body. He needed what was kept in the metal safe in Belov’s compartment. Weapons.
The issue Makarov pistols, which by regulation were stored with the guard commander. The key. Everything came down to the key.
Mike knew Belov, like a lot of drinking warrant officers, was lazy and careless. He didn’t keep the key on him. He hid it.
Always in the same place. Under his pillow. The door to Belov’s compartment wasn’t locked.
Mike slipped inside as quietly as a shadow. The smell of liquor, sweat, and spilled alcohol hit him. Belov was snoring on the bunk, sprawled out, his chest rising and falling heavily.
He looked like a huge helpless carcass. Mike stepped closer. For a second a thought crossed his mind—take a knife from the galley and cut the man’s throat while he slept.
But he pushed it aside. Too simple. Too quick.
He had another plan. Holding his breath, he slowly slid his hand under the pillow beneath Belov’s greasy head. His fingers found cold metal.
There. He drew his hand back just as carefully, the key clenched in his fist. Belov didn’t stir.
The safe stood under the table. The key turned almost silently in the lock. A soft click…
