Altar of Bones (4 page)

At the door he turned. “They don’t all die, you know. The
zeks
. If you make your quota and you follow the rules, you don’t have to die.”

He paused, as if waiting for her to say something, but fear froze her throat.
He does know something
, she thought.
He must. Only how could he know, unless Nikolai has talked?

But Nikolai would never talk, because of the two of them he had the most to lose. If she was caught helping a prisoner to escape, she would be tried and sentenced to twenty years in a woman’s camp far away, so deep into Siberia she would never find her way out. But for Nikolai there would be no trial, no sentence. They would simply drag him back here, stand him up next to an open grave, and shoot him.

The sergeant was still standing with the door half-open, letting in the cold, but at last he turned and left.

She waited a few moments longer after the door closed behind him, in case he decided to come back. Then she set the bedpan back down and ran the length of the room, to the last bed on the left, next to the
wall, and the man she’d been aware of with every breath and nerve ending since she’d first entered the infirmary.

H
E LOOKED LIKE
death.

No, no. It was just there was so little light back here, so far away from the lamps and the stove. And he was asleep, that was all. Just sleeping.

Lena snatched up his chart to see what the camp doctor had written when he’d first been admitted that morning.
Nikolai Popov, Prisoner #35672. Fever, some inflammation of the lungs
.

She tossed the chart back onto the bed and bent over him to lay a hand on his forehead. He was indeed running a fever, sweating in spite of the cold, but that was to be expected. He’d had to make himself sick enough to get admitted into the infirmary in the first place, and prisoner lore said you could give yourself a fever by swallowing a dose of cooking salts. Nikolai had joked that anything would be better than taking an ax to his toes.

But a fever could so easily turn into pneumonia.

She touched him again. “Nikki?”

He stirred, and she heard ice shattering as he lifted his head. His sweat-soaked hair had frozen to the trestle board. “Lena,” he said, then coughed. “Is this it? Is it time?”

Lena didn’t like the soggy sound of that cough, but his eyes, she saw, were lucid, clear. “It’s past time. That wretched sergeant. I thought he was never going to leave.”

She looked at her watch. They had less than fifteen minutes.
Don’t do this thing that you are planning, Lena Orlova. Don’t do it…
.

Nikolai tossed back the ratty brown blanket and swung his legs off the bed. He grinned up her. “You aren’t losing your nerve on me?”

“Never.” She found herself smiling back at him as she looked down into his upturned face, so full even now with the dashing bravado that had drawn her to him in the first place. But this time she thought she saw something more behind the dancing light in his eyes.

She wanted to believe it was love.

Nikolai pretended to sag weakly against her as she helped him to his feet. She would say he had typhus and she was taking him to the isolation ward should anyone challenge them. But the blanket-shrouded shapes on the other trestle beds were either all asleep now or pretending to be.

Quickly, she led the way to a storeroom little bigger than a closet. In here, so far from the stove, white clouds wreathed their heads and cold air billowed up from the floor.

The storeroom was crowded: an old desk and chair, stacks of mildewed blankets, rotting file boxes, a set of battered metal instrument cabinets. There was one window just big enough for both of them to squeeze through.

She shifted aside a stack of burlap bags and a box full of moldering newspapers to expose a poster of Joseph Stalin saluting the Soviet worker. She thought she heard Nikolai gasp as she ripped the Great Leader’s face in two, and she smiled to herself.
Maybe you’re not so much the wild rebel as you fancy yourself to be, huh, Nikki?

Behind the poster was a panel loosely screwed in, rather than nailed, and behind it a two-by-three-foot hole in the wall. Lena could feel her watch ticking off precious minutes as she pulled out sleeping rolls made of skins, gloves, fur hats, and a
foffaika
for each of them—coats made of the warmest part of reindeer hides. For Nikolai there were trousers like hers, with wool sewn in as padding, and a pair of felt boots.

She handed these things to him in silence, and he began to put them on over his ragged prison clothes.

She dug out the knapsack she’d stuffed full of dried black bread, hunks of fat filched from the staff kitchen, a wire noose for trapping, a tinderbox, a flask full of vodka, and the few hundred rubles she’d managed to scrimp from her small salary. She gave the sleeping rolls to Nikolai and slung the knapsack over her own shoulder.

Next she took out the snowshoes—thin lengths of sapwood bent into bows and strung with interwoven strips of reindeer hide. Any tracks they left, she hoped, would quickly be obliterated by the falling snow.

Nikolai laughed as she handed him his pair. “You mean we’re actually going to have to walk out of here? What with all the miracles you’ve
been pulling out of that hidey-hole, I was expecting no less than a sleigh and eight reindeer.”

Lena held her finger up to her lips, but she was smiling again. Then she pulled out one last thing: the poorly cured sheepskin that she’d wrapped around the knife she’d stolen from the cook, who was always so drunk on homemade vodka someone could have walked off with his head and he wouldn’t have noticed.

It was a
kandra
, a Yak knife with a wickedly hooked, double-edged blade, and Nikolai whistled at the sight of it. Lena started to give it to him, but at the last instant stuffed it into the waistband of her own trousers instead. Then she tied the sheepskin around her hips with a long piece of stiff rope.

She looked up at Nikolai from beneath the rolled brim of her fur hat. “Are you ready?”

He gave her a cocky salute, and in that moment she loved him more than life itself.

T
HE WINDOW WAS
frozen shut, but Nikolai broke the glass with his elbow. Lena crawled over the sill first and dropped to the ground, terrified she would hear a guard cry the alarm. A sudden movement by the front gate sent her heart lurching in her chest, but it was only the ghostly silhouettes of the wolves.

Once away from the infirmary, they kept to the deep shadows until they reached the latrines. It was snowing harder now, great wet clots of flakes. The sergeant had been right about a
purga
coming. The cold weighed heavy now and had a metallic smell.

A searchlight beam swept past them, and they flattened against the rough latrine wall.

Lena studied the wide-open expanse of the
zaprethaya zona
—noman’s-land. It stretched between the edge of the camp buildings and a perimeter barbed-wire fence piled six coils high. The area was constantly raked by a pair of searchlights mounted on the guard towers to the right and left of them. Anyone who set foot in the forbidden zone, whether prisoner or a free worker such as herself, would be shot on sight.

It was Nikolai who had first noticed a place where the fence didn’t follow the contours of the ground. A dip here behind the latrines made a gap big enough so they could burrow under the wire. And Nikolai had figured out the searchlights went dark for forty-five seconds when the guards changed shifts.

Now, though, bright yellow pools of light crisscrossed the smooth, white snow. Lena looked at her watch through the ice crystals on her lashes.
Past midnight. Oh, God
…They were too late. The guards must already have changed shifts while they were still in the storeroom, and now they were trapped out here. Unable to go on, unable to go back—

The searchlights went dark.

Nikolai was already running. Lena followed in his footprints, jerking the smelly, half-cured sheepskin jacket from around her waist, letting it comb the ground behind her to smooth out their tracks and camouflage their scent from the dogs.

Too long, it’s taking too long
.

Any second the searchlights would come back on, machine-gun fire would cut them down, and their bodies would be hung on the front gate for the wolves to eat.

She didn’t realize Nikolai had stopped until she smacked into him, hard enough he grunted and nearly stumbled into the rolls of barbed wire.

He signaled her to go first. She crawled through the gap on her belly, shoving their bulky gear ahead of her, all the while her mind screaming,
Too long, too long
. She was taking too long. The searchlights would flood over them, there’d be shouts, bullets …

Then she was free at last, on the other side of the wire. She scrambled to her feet and looked back. All she could see of Nikolai was his head, thrusting up out of the snow. He wasn’t moving.

For a moment she thought he’d frozen at the sight of a guard, but then she realized the hooked barbs of the wire had snagged the back of his coat. He shook himself, pulling, pulling, but he couldn’t get loose. Little pieces of ice tinkled down the coils of wire. An instant later, Lena heard the snap of a cartridge being levered into the breech of a gun.

“Halt!”

H
ER HEART
nearly stopped with fear.

“Mother of God, don’t shoot,” she heard an old man’s voice whine from over by the latrines. “I’m not escaping. In truth the only part of me running at the moment is my poor bowels.”

Lena tried to rip Nikolai’s coat free of the barbs, but it was still stuck fast.

“Can’t it wait till morning?” the other, younger voice said. The one with the gun.

“In a word … no.”

“Well, hurry it up then.”

Lena jerked on the coat again, harder, and finally it snapped free with another crackle of ice.

“Hurry. Why is it always hurry, hurry, hurry with you people? The State gave me twenty-five years in this paradise, so why should I rush things—?” The old man’s voice cut off abruptly as the frozen snow around them exploded into a yellow glare.

The searchlights were back on.

Nikolai burst from under the fence at a dead run. He grabbed her arm, pulling her along with him. Out of the corner of her eye Lena could see a bright arc of light sweeping toward them over the snow, getting closer, closer. Fear shrieked through her. They weren’t going to make it—

The night suddenly exploded into a fury of howls and snarls and snapping teeth. The wolves had at last gone after the body of the dead
zek
. The searchlights swung around to flood the front gate. The guards in the towers fired. A man screamed.

Lena stumbled, almost fell, but she didn’t look back.