Final Winter

Adrianna powered down the laptop and then looked outside. It was a sunny afternoon and there were children at play on the lawn outside her window. About half a dozen children, maybe six or seven years of age, playing with a couple of large rubber balls. They were laughing and yelling and bouncing into each other, and she smiled at their energy and youth. How wonderful. How purely joyful, to see them at play, and she looked at them…

And thought of something else.

Adrianna thought of these children, their parents. How much love their parents had for them. How much work their parents did to feed and clothe them and keep them safe. How they had chosen this comfortable suburban condo complex as their own little shelter, to keep their loved ones — My God, with such hope, dreams and love invested in those tiny little bodies — safe from the ravages of the outside world.

Safe. So safe.

And she thought of what it would be like, in just a few weeks, when the illness came, for she had no doubt this place would be one of the blighted ones.

At first it would start like any other respiratory illness. Fever, chills. Then labored breathing. Frantic phone calls to the doctor’s office. The doctor’s office crowded. The ER overwhelmed. Patients lining up outside for treatment. Television and radio reports, breathless and shrieking in their reporting of what was going on in New York and DC and Los Angeles and elsewhere…

These poor children out there. Would they die in their perfect little bedrooms, choking to death, with their parents watching them? Or would they wander through their pretty condo units, wondering why mommy and daddy weren’t waking up, and why wouldn’t somebody feed them or take care of them…

What would happen to them?

She knew what would happen. She knew because she was going to do it.

Adrianna looked again at the laughing children.

Odd, when you got right down to it, it was easy to plot and plan for years and years to take your revenge. But when she looked right at those pretty faces, the faces of the children who would play on the sidewalk outside, or ring the doorbell at Halloween, she had to ask herself, could she do it? Could she kill them, just like that?

Adrianna snapped the laptop cover shut.

Of course she could.

In a war, there was always collateral damage.

Just like mama and papa.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Vladimir Zhukov stood in the motel parking lot outside Bellingham, Washington State, sipping a cup of coffee, hating the taste but knowing he needed the caffeine to stay awake. He would have preferred to have a cup of tea, ah, now that would have been something. A nice freshly brewed pot of tea in a samovar, pulling the little toggle, letting it settle in a china cup. Drink it in the old way, a cube of sugar tucked inside your cheek, my God, how many cups of tea he had swallowed over the years, back at the Institute, back when…

He sipped at the coffee. Back when things made sense. Back when things worked. Back when he was privileged, was someone, was part of the elite, the nomenklatura, the ones who would work very, very hard to protect their Fatherland and their Party. Which was what he did, all those long years of studying, everything from molecular cell structure to Marxist theory, climbing up that long, rugged path to be someone, to be respected, to devise weapons to protect everything he held dear…

And to be betrayed. By Gorbachev and the rest of the lackeys who had rolled over on their backs and spread their legs, like whores or whipped dogs, begging for mercy, begging for hard currency credits from the West so they could buy Sony or Chrysler or any other damn thing. And he… he had left, had peddled his wares to various shit-holes around the world, knowing in those dark places in his soul at two a.m. that he was a veteran, like one of those Japanese bastards hanging out in an island jungle decades later, never knowing the war was over.

Well, that was the truth. The war might have been over for everyone else, but not for him, not for Vladimir Zhukov, he who had the same last name as the famed Marshal of the Soviet Union, Giorgiy Konstantinovich Zhukov, who had led millions of Red Army soldiers to crush Hitler and destroy the fascists…and whose own people, decades later, would allow the Germans to reunite and become one again. And who would later toss in their lot with the capitalists, with the West, with those who would have crushed them if the spirit had moved them.

He looked around at the buildings, the roadways, at all the hustle and bustle of what appeared as progress. Some progress.