A Killing Winter

Chapter 42

For a couple of seconds, I froze, and I was in the hospital, beside Chinara as she screamed for the morphine to dull the bite of the tumours devouring her.

I was yelling down the corridor, ready to kill whichever uncaring attendant had slipped out for a few drags of a papirosh. I was lying beside her, holding her while her nails, made brittle and thin by the drugs, splintered and cracked as they dug into my arm.

She’d howled over and over again, unaware of anything but the fire consuming her, the noise from her throat sounding as if a wolf had made its way down from the mountains and was roaming the hospital in search of food…

Syrgak burst through the door, his mouth open, streaming with blood, white stumps of shattered teeth glinting through a crimson mask.

‘Boss, the bitch, she just –’

He stopped at the sight of the vor, flames flickering from his jacket, blue flashes from the grill sparking against his body.

I tugged on the chain with the last of my strength, felt the plaster finally give way, lost my balance, tumbled back against the table. I swung the chain over my head, building up momentum, took aim, then released my grip. The metal reeled out across the room, the sharp spikes that had held it in place embedding themselves in Syrgak’s face.

He gave a high-pitched gasp of surprise, then a howl of anguish as he tried to dislodge the spikes wedged deep in his right eye and cheek. He whimpered over and over, a keening wail that made me sick to my stomach, calling to his mother to help him.

I threw up, uncontrollably, emptying my guts. And I remembered how Chinara would vomit after each treatment, her body shaking with the retching that overwhelmed her, how I would hold the bowl up to her mouth, and wipe the rank sweat away from her face.

Syrgak had both hands covering his eyes and cheek, working out just how ruined his face was.

I still had one hand cuffed to the table, but I used my free hand to pull the leg chain towards me, making sure it didn’t touch the water on the floor. I grasped it about a metre from the business end, and got ready to swing it once more if Syrgak came over to finish me off. The adrenaline was hurtling through me; one of these two shitheads must have butchered Shairkul, Yekaterina, Gulbara – and who knew who else?

But if I killed Syrgak, the trail died. And this wasn’t just about avenging the dead women.

I gripped the chain tighter, picturing how the heavy steel links would coil around Syrgak’s face, and I realised I wanted to flog the sooksin and flay every inch of skin off his worthless hide.

Once he’d told me what I needed to know.

Syrgak let out a bellow of pain and rage as his fingers told him he’d never be a male model, and he glared at me with his one remaining eye. Unless he was armed, it was a stand-off – at least, until one of us was overwhelmed by pain.

I thought of Saltanat lying dead and butchered upstairs at the hands of these two, and began to wonder if revenge wasn’t enough of an ending. Fuck catching the big guys.

That was when the door swung open again.