КНИГИ КИРИЛЛА ПОТЁМКИНА

21. SHADOW IN THE FOREST

(Location: Forest around Facility «Zarya». Present day.)

The memory faded instantly, like the imploding screen of an old CRT television. Colonel Gromov opened his watering, inflamed eyes.

The scorching African heat was replaced by the damp, piercing cold of the Russian forest. Instead of red, suffocating dust underfoot — wet moss and rotten pine needles.

But the sounds… the sounds terrifyingly resembled those from the distant past. Wheezes, groans, and the screams of dying men.

And also sounds like operating machinery.

Below, in the deep excavation pit, a true hell raged. Igor Gromov heard tearing metal squealing, as animated construction equipment, possessed by invisible demons, methodically ground up the remains of the FSB Spetsnaz. Voronov’s inhuman roar, amplified manifold by the facility’s speakers, reached him:

— «Gro-o-omov! Do you see this?! Co-ome and take it!»

The colonel slid powerlessly down the rough pine trunk straight onto the freezing ground.

— «I see it, Andrey. I see it all,» — he whispered into the void.

Yes.

He had returned the debt. Now it was he who had saved his life.

Twenty-three years ago, Andrey Voronov tore him from the clutches of death. Today, Igor Gromov settled that account. He didn’t let the sniper pull the trigger. However, by saving his old friend, he seemed to have completely killed the human inside him. And unleashed something terrifying beyond measure.

That Andrey Voronov, whose furious scream was now shaking the construction site, had nothing to do with the young Captain «Iron Felix» from the African jungles. That captain always saved his own, regardless of any obstacles and orders. This shapeshifter-general, right before Gromov’s eyes, without a shadow of a doubt, fed his compatriots to his insatiable «Aegis». To his monstrous brainchild…

Or… to the ghost of his daughter that had put down roots in his tormented brain.

— «I spawned a monster,» — Gromov uttered, addressing the indifferent shadows of the trees.

The screams below gradually died down. The Spetsnaz ceased to exist. General Voronov had won his first, bloody victory.

The colonel cast a brief glance at his assault rifle. He could still, probably, go down into the pit. And at the cost of his life, try to stop this madness.

«No. I will lose. He will destroy me. He will grind me to powder. Now he won’t recognize a brother. He won’t see his ‘Gorynych’. To him, I am just a traitor. An accomplice of those who decided to kill him. He is truly possessed… He is mad.»

Igor Gromov took a deep breath and, with visible effort, stood up. He swayed.

The realization of the mistake he made — perhaps the most terrible and monstrous in his life — pressed him to the ground, as if adding tens of kilograms to his weight. The colonel wanted to cramp, to bury his head in this rotten, freezing moss, in his native soil, which he had probably just condemned to death with his own hands.

— «The road to hell…» — the former Lieutenant Gromov muttered in confusion. That same Gromov who once didn’t give up his comrades under the brutal torture of the «cannibals». The one who survived there in the pitch-black hell of the jungle to spite all the gods.

He looked around. A fit of self-flagellation promised nothing constructive. He had absolutely nowhere to go. In the FSB, a swift tribunal or a bullet to the back of the head awaited him for botching the operation. The path to the crazy Voronov was closed forever. And the desire to help the general had dried up.

He, Colonel Igor Gromov, Lieutenant «Gorynych», officially turned into a ghost at this second. Into a third force. Or into total nothingness. Into another victim of the Fog of death, which had already begun to slowly devour his great country.

— «Live, Andrey,» — Gromov slung the assault rifle over his shoulder with a familiar gesture. — «Live… for now. But if you cross the final line… if you become worse than those African cannibals… I, believe me, will return. And then I will have to take my debt back.»

He spoke these words, already intuitively sensing a sinister prophetic truth in them, the paradigm of his further existence.

The former colonel, the former head of security, the former best friend turned around and silently dissolved into the thicket of the night forest, walking away both from the construction site and from Moscow, sick to his stomach of its under-the-rug intrigues.

It wasn’t for him… Not for him.

Gromov shook his head and picked up his pace.

At that moment, from the depths of the pit, as if someone had lit a gigantic pipe, the first, timid tongues of white steam began to crawl out. Mixing with the smell of gunpowder, diesel, and fresh blood, the Fog crept into the world.

Into a world that had gone completely mad.