Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (22 page)

Semyon and the others were huddled tightly between their two vehicles.  He now had to reassess this.  He looked at Abram, who’d shown up with the others, and who had a mask of rage on his face.  Timofei had just started dating his sister, and they had talked about marriage happening in the spring.  Timofei lay dead in the snow, and it was all Semyon could do to keep Abram from rushing the lodge.  “I thought you said it was just one!” Abram all but shouted at him.

“I never said that,” Semyon said calmly.  He peeked over the hood again, up at the window on the second floor, which was still open, and presumably where the first shots had rung out before someone had fired from a first-floor window.  It was too quick of succession to have been the same person.  That meant there
was at least two in there.  “When we first walked up to the door, someone did shout ‘We only came for Zakhar.’  He said
we
.  I assumed it was a bluff.”

“These ba
stards aren’t bluffing!  They just killed my sister’s fiancé—”

“If you don’t calm down, then we will all lose our heads, and we will have lost our advantage.”

“What advantage?  Our numbers?  How do we know there’s not more of them in there than out here?”

“Look around you, Abram.  Do you see any other cars besides ours?” he said.  “There’s Zakhar’s own Subaru in the shed, nothing else.  They may have come here with him, or hiked
from someplace else.  Whichever way it went, there can’t be that many of them, not just to assassinate one man.  Pelletier had no other close friends in Derbent, he could not have found all that many in Chelyabinsk in just two months’ time.”

“You don’t know anything from where you’re sitting—”

“I know a madman is trapped inside there and may call the police at any moment if it means getting clear of retribution from the families.”  Semyon glanced over the hood again, saw nothing.  Besides being riddled with bullet holes, the lodge was innocent and unassuming.  The wind came on stronger, and the snowfall suddenly became heavier.  He looked at Abram and his three cousins: tall and skinny Boris, large and bullish Anton, scarred and intense Kirill.  All four of these men were from the Yelizarov family, which had close ties to the Ankundinovs, the family that Spencer Pelletier had offended most, and the family that would have a final say in his fate if they captured him tonight.

“
I say we just storm the fucking house!” Erik hissed, pulling away from Yulian now and checking the magazine in his Uzi.  The others mostly ignored him, kept looking at Semyon for some leadership.  Like most Russian men at the age of eighteen, Semyon presented himself for compulsory military service, but unlike most, he’d stayed in service until retirement.  Semyon had been in various training programs, including training with American SWAT teams and German GSG-9, the elite counter-terrorism force.  The families had found great use for him throughout the years.

Semyon looked up at the sky.  Another thirty minutes of daylight, no more.  “
We have to move soon, or else we’ll have to leave.  The longer we stay, the closer our man in there gets to calling the police or someone else for help, and we can’t just sit out here and freeze all night, not with this storm coming in.”

Abram looked at his cousins, none of whom moved.  They weren’t even shivering in the cold.  They might’ve been chiseled out of ice.  Finally, Abram looked back at Semyon and said, “What do you have in mind?”

Semyon laid it out for them.

Trembling and close to tears, Kaley came bounding down the stairs with the Colt held in both hands, almost like she was holding a filled diaper that was about to spill its contents onto her.  Clenching it in both fists and squeezing her eyes shut, she’d fired wildly out the window.  She’d told the boy to find someplace to hide, but he hadn’t left her side.  Until she began firing.  Then he bolted for one of a set of twin beds, and was still hiding there as far as she knew.

Spencer
heard her coming down the stairs, and ran over to her in a crouch, waving for her to keep her head down.  “I-I-I did it.”

“I know,” he said, reaching out and snatching the Colt from her hands.  “Not bad.  It’s got them keepin’ their heads down, which is fine for now—”

“S-Spencer?” she said, staring vacantly at her empty hands, where the pistol had been taken away.  “Wh-why don’t we, like, call somebody?  Like…l-like 9-1-1 or something?  Doesn’t Russia have their own k-kind of—”

“If we call an emergency service, I’ll be goin’ to prison, little girl.”

“It’s better than w-w-waiting on these guys to come in here.  They’re not g-going to wait f-f-forever.”

“You’re right, and they’re not just gonna forget me if I get put in the pen.  They’ve got people on the inside that can get to me in my sleep.  No room to maneuver in prison.”  He tucked the Colt in the back of his pants.  “Besides, I made a promise, remember?  I ain’t ever goin’ back to prison.  Not ever.  I’ll eat shit and die first.”

“But what about us?”

“What about y—”

“They’re moving!” she gasped.  A tingle had just shot through her every bone.  People were moving along her spider web; nasty little people, with minds of meddle, kind of like Spencer’s.  “I can feel them! 
Spencer, they’re coming!
”

The monster didn’t question her, he knew enough by now to listen to her every intuition.  Spencer darted across the living room and went right for the kitchen, where he turned the radio back up.
  He flipped through a few stations, until he came to some really aggressive American music, some band Kaley thought she remembered somebody calling Disturbed?  They were playing that song, “Down with the Sickness” or whatever.  Spencer turned it up, way up, then went over to the kitchen window to peek outside.

Kaley went to one of the shattered windows of the little dining room, where the curtains were being pushed around by winds, and snow had collected on the rugs and pinewood flooring.  She was just in time to see one of the black-coated men dashing behind a small shed with a waist-high stack of chopped wood beneath a not-secured blue tarp.  Another black-coated man was moving fast around another open-door shed with absolutely nothing in it, just snow drifting inside and piling up.

“Spencer!” she hollered over the incredibly strident tunes of Disturbed.

“I know!”

“They’re surrounding us!”

“I know!”

“Then why are you doing nothing but turning up the fucking radio?”  She shouted these words in both the lodge and in the bathroom stall at Cartersville Middle School.

Spencer moved from the kitchen across the living room, still crouching, his gun pointed at the ground
, but she could
feel
his muscles—they weren’t taut but they were electrified; loose but ready—and she could feel the inhuman sea of emotions churning inside of him—anger and outrage at the audacity of others to challenge him, some excitement, a deal of cogitation, a level of awkward prurience, and all with a dash of glee; always with that irrational, demented glee.

“They’re gonna make it inside this place eventually,” he hollered over to her.  “And sooner than ya think!  It’s better if they can’t hear each other communicate, an’ can’t hear us movin’ around!  Now, get up those stairs and protect that boy!”

Kaley looked at him.  Those words had hit her almost as hard as a slap in the face, and with at splash of ice-cold water.  That wasn’t like Spencer at all.  It so stunned her that, for a moment, she forgot about the churning waters all around her ankles, and the things licking and tasting her, testing the parameters of her world, searching for a way through.  “Protect the…?”

Spencer chuckled.  “I ain’t goin’ soft on ya, but I
did
stay here because of that kid.  If I’m goin’ through all o’ this, I wanna protect my investment,” he said while ducking from one window to another.  “And you better not be lyin’!  He better
know
somethin’!  Now,” he said, looking dead at her, “
go
!”

His words broke the spell on her, as Spencer’s words often would do, and
sent Kaley darting across the living room.  Behind her, she heard Spencer singing, but not the words of Disturbed.  “Sometimes I feel I’ve got to—
bump-bump!
—run away, I’ve got to—
bump-bump!
—get away from the pain you drive into the heart of me!”

At the top of the stairs, Kaley stopped, and in
both
of her worlds she felt dizzy.  The walls of the lodge and the bathroom stall breathed, and the water spilling down them seemed to churn and froth, exactly like the water about her ankles.  Something was moving behind the walls, swimming through the water trickling down the stairs.  It whispered on the wind, and muttered into her bones, “
She’s so close now
. 
Keep searching, my brothers
. 
Keep searching
. 
It is possible to get to her
. 
I’ve promised you, and now I will deliver
.”

Back at
CMS, Kaley stood bolt upright in the girls’ bathroom stall, shivering and wondering if she was going insane.

“The love we shar
ed,” sang Spencer, “seems to go—
bump-bump!
—nowhere!”

Shcherbakov had pulled Vasilisa Rubashkin’s pants down around her ankles, removed her cap, shoes and socks.  He used scissors to cut her underwear off, wadded it up, and stuffed it into her mouth before duct-taping her lips shut.  Her eyes were just starting to flutter open and shut, open and shut, open and shut.  Shcherbakov had given her another injection, this one to counteract the first, but it would be a few moments before it took effect.

Working with the rope had taken up the last five minutes of his time.  He had to make sure it was secure. 
The Dyneema rope was tied around her legs and feet in a series of cinched climbing knots—an alpine butterfly bend, a bowline, a double overhand and a double fisherman’s knot.

Once satisfied with the work he’d down on her lower body, he took the rope and looped it around her neck.  Shcherbakov then planted one of his large feet at the base of her spine, and tugged hard at
the rope around her ankles, managing enough slack to tie off a noose and loop it around her neck.  Lying on her stomach, Rubashkin was now bent backward like a bow. 

Shcherbakov stood there for a while, waiting for her to wake up.  He held on to her ankles for a
time, but occasionally slapped her face to speed her recovery along.

When she finally started to come through, Shcherbakov whispered in her ear, “It’s up to you not to
kill yourself.  The rope is around your ankles and neck.  If you lower your neck or your ankles, the noose around your neck will tighten and you will strangle yourself.  In fact, if you move at all the noose will only tighten.  It’s best if you do not struggle or scream or move in any way.”

Rubashkin’s mind would still be addled for a moment, so while those words, and the reality, sunk in, Shcherbakov maintained his hold of her ankles.  Slowly, her breathing sped up.  The room was filled with the sounds of her panting heavily through her nose. 
Elements of the nightmare would slowly seep in—the powerlessness first, then the despair, and finally the sheer terror.

As she became more and more aware, Shcherbakov slowly relaxed his grip on her ankles, and now the lovely young model was in control of her own destiny.
  “That’s it,” he said, in the most comforting of tones.  “That’s it, just relax and focus on staying bent.  You’ll be all right as long as you remain just so.”

Shcherbakov backed away from her, and finally sat down on the handmade leather sofa her short but promising career had afforded her.  The Grey Wolf crossed his legs, and reached into his coat pocket to fetch another
Sobranie, which he lit with the same bear’s-head lighter and then sucked on it long and hard, looking up at the spackled ceiling and some of the artwork along the walls.  Most were fakes, reprints of Rembrandt and Monet.  There were one or two that were originals by some modern impressionists, one of which was her current boyfriend, if the Wolf’s information was correct.  All of them looked quite lovely.  On the table beside the couch was a collection of matryoshka dolls.  He reached and opened one, found another finely-carved doll inside, and opened that one, of course finding another finely-carved doll inside, and another one inside that one, and another inside that one, on and on until he had reached the last doll.  The artist of each doll had done their job admirably.  “You have taste, at least,” he told her.

Whimpers.  The eyes had gone wide, searching all around at the world for answers.  Certainly some of her memory had gone blurry.  With the concoction Shcherbakov had given her,
Rubashkin would have only vague recollection of the last few moments before she went out.  A tall, stout gentleman with a kindly face approaching her, an offer of some help, her bags of fruit, and then…

And
then here she is
, he thought, looking at her.  The shape-shifting wolf had fooled her, too, just like he’d fooled all the others.