The End of Alexei

This is my worst nightmare.

I’m headed down County Road 13 in the back of a 1960 Cadillac Eldorado with a revolver—a fucking revolver!—held to my right temple. Viktor Fedorov, who I had called a friend for fifteen or so years, is the one holding it, telling me to keep calm and that if I don’t make a fuss my kids don’t have anything to worry about. The man driving, Ivan Popov, has a cigarette in his mouth that tincts every time he inhales, which pisses me off, considering he was in on the whole plan, too. But, maybe I should give credit where credit’s due; he isn’t sitting in the back of a car with a fucking gun held to his head. In fact, he isn’t the one who’s going to have to dig his own grave in about ten minutes. In the passenger seat there’s Pavel Semenov, who keeps switching the station between Kool 108 and The Loon, saying “They should play Black Sabbath more often,” as if that’s changing anything.

I look over at Viktor and offer a wan smile. “Suppose this is where our friendship ends, eh?” I joke. “You really love the big boss man that much, do you?”

He shakes his head. “Goddammit, Alex. God-fucking-dammit.” He turns away from me and I hear a click from his throat. “Why did you do it, man? Mr. Bortnik was nothing but good to you. He found you as some sorry fucking kid living on the street and brought you in, all because you had a little bit of the Motherland in you. All that and then you . . .” he trailed off, leaving The Ramones to fill the silence with “Commando.”

Ivan looks over his shoulder uneasily at Viktor, then shoots a glance at me. I see in his green eyes that he was sorry, but I don’t take the apology. Dumb bastard should have been a man and kept his word, like I did. I look at Pavel, whose bald head reflected the moonlight as he stroked his goatee. I shrug my shoulders. Quite honestly, I was looking for a way to put aside my dread. “Want to know why I did it, guys?”

Nobody answers me, but Ivan glances once more, almost begging me not to tell. I continue anyway. “Viktor, do you know what ‘Good Man Bortnik’ has been doing for the last few years?”

Viktor turns to me and the .38 leaves my temple for a moment, then connects again. He stares at Ivan and Pavel, who both know full well, but act like they don’t. He looks into my eyes once more and shakes his head. “Not a good enough reason to kill him, that’s for sure.”

I swallow my fear and regard his naivete. I suck in a deep breath, then say, “It does, really. Want to know what he, Pavel, and—”

“Shut the fuck up, you mudak,” Pavel growls through his dog-like chops, “or I’ll have Viktor shoot you and your whole family.”

“You could,” I agree, weighing my options. The only relatives here in America I had were my mother, my wife, and little Vlad, my six-year-old. They were the only ones I cared about, the rest in Russia could vanish without a trace and I wouldn’t feel much guilt. Hell, how could I feel guilt? The part of me that could feel emotion and critically think would be splattered on the window by then. But Vlad . . . Mother . . . Darya . . .

Yet, I couldn’t exactly stop myself. I repeat, “You could. But after Viktor hears what I have to say, your word won’t mean jack shit.” I laugh at my own quip. “Viktor, ‘Good Man Bortnik’ isn’t the good man everyone thought him to be, you know that?”

“No shit,” Viktor scoffs. “We’re the mob, not the fucking . . . uh . . . blood bank, you know?”

“Right, we aren’t. But most of us are redeemable in the eyes of God, or some shit—I stopped thinking about that shit a long time ago. Bortnik, on the other hand . . .”

Ivan speaks up. “Alexei, quit it. You’re just digging a bigger hole for yourself and your kid!”

A smile creeps to the corner of my lips. “Please, Ivan, my friend. You know he was trafficking kids just as well as me.”

Pavel locks his gaze firmly on Ivan, who turns beet red in less than a second. Viktor takes the .38—the fucking .38—away and asks, “Kakiye?” What?

I turn my face so it meets his and continue, “Sure. I found out from Levitsky after he was told. It took Bortnik five years of letting children have their lives ruined to tell him. We started planning this whole thing that day, along with our friend Ivan right here,” I gesture to him with my head. “And, of course, the guy back there.” I gesture to the trunk, where Nikolai Reznov lays unconscious. “But you already knew that.”

“How long did it take you to plan this shit?” Viktor asks, dumbfounded.

“About five months, which is a pretty long time if you think about it. It took Oswald just a few days to plan out how he was going to kill Kennedy. Well, allegedly kill Kennedy.” That’s it, I think, jokes help ease the tension. “It was never really the plan to let me and Nik take the fall, though.”

“You better shut your mouth!” Pavel yells, pointing a finger at me.

“Or fucking what? Viktor, you gonna shoot me?”

“I don’t know, man, I just don’t know!” He looks scared and very, very uncertain.

Reasonable response. “He sold kids to pedophiles, Pavel! How long did you know, huh? How many years?”

“None! He did no such thing!”

“Oh, Ivan can detest to that! So can Levitsky! He showed us the documents, didn’t he, Ivan? Those monsters had written records of the kids they sold!”

“Viktor, kill that man!”

I see Viktor put the gun at level with my head for a moment, then take it away. He looks at Pavel and opens and closes his mouth: open . . . close . . . open . . . close . . .

“Viktor, chert poberi! Pristreli yego!” Shoot him!

Viktor screams back in Russian, “How long did you know, Pavel? You’re sick! Fucking sick!”

“I did what I had to!” Also in Russian.

Soon we are all screaming, all except Ivan. I yell at Pavel, “They were kids!” and other variations of it. Ivan is only glancing at us with increasing worry as we head down the dirt road to the burial sight of so many of Bortnik’s traitors. Soon enough, Nik starts screaming from the trunk, slamming his feet against the back of the seats in some desperate fit of salvation. Through all the screaming, I see Pavel inching his hand closer and closer to the inside of his jacket, where his piece is stored. Through it all, he doesn’t notice that I keep looking at it.

About a minute in, after Pavel bellows, “It’s ALL about money, you know that!” Ivan lets out a bloodcurdling shriek and the car jolts forward.

I slam my head against the seat, sending a thunderstorm through my head, which is only amplified by a pistol round whizzing past my right ear. An odd spinning sensation hits me, through which Ivan screams “Hold on!” and tries to spin the car out, but to no avail. In the split second I’m being jolted into Viktor’s body, I see a white orb floating in front of the car, a sun in the middle of the forest backroad that hadn’t even been in my peripheral a few seconds before.

Then, darkness.

One one-thousand.

Two one-thousand.

Three one-thousand.

Red light blinks on like a struggling lightbulb, and I adjust my eyes to it. Ivan is groaning. Pavel is gasping. Viktor is coughing. Nikolai is silent. I sit up, pushing myself off of Viktor and see that along with the red light, the trees have been turned into some kind of obsidian-like material, and have died with the loss of their bark. I crawl over to the driver’s side door and jimmy it open, then swing both feet over and—

I find my legs can’t support me and fall to the freezing ground with a grunt. I pick myself up and Pavel, that big bastard, slurs from behind me: “Don’t move, dammit! Let me get out first!”

I wave a hand back at him and take in my new surroundings, hands on my knees. I’m breathing heavily, and intake air that hits my lungs like icepicks every time I breathe. I turn around and see Ivan crawling out of the driver’s seat, blood running down his fade at a tremendous rate. He hits the floor and rolls over on his back, places his hand on his chest. “What the shit,” he gasps. Pavel

finds his way around the passenger side and rests his gun on the trunk, holding the barrel to my navel.

“You stupid bastard, what did you do? What is this?”

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. I settle for motioning around me—around us—at the red sky, black trees, and the maroon ground.

“Answer me!”

He’s afraid, I think. Shit, I am too. “I couldn’t have done this! Did you see that—what was it?—that orb? You think I put some weird light in the middle of the road?”

“Tell me what you did, you bastard!”

Ivan speaks up, his words coming out in short breaths. “Some-thing-in-the-road. Jes-us-it-hurts . . .”

I take a knee and find that the kneecaps of my suitpants are ripped; getting off of my feet is relieving nonetheless, although Pavel is now aiming at my head. If I’m lucky it’ll be straight to the forehead.

Viktor is peeking out of the door at me, on his back with his gun aimed out of the rear window. He raises his eyebrows to me, and I see what he means. I nod, ever so slightly, as not to . . .

KILLERS . . . all of the trees croak. From behind Pavel, one shifts its branches, changing from hundreds sticking in every direction to being pointed directly at his back.

YOU ARE ALL HERE . . . IVAN POPOV . . . PAVEL SEMENOV . . . VIKTOR FEDEROV . . . ALEXEI BORISYUK. NIKOLAI REZNOV.

I freeze at the sound of my own name, staring at the tree behind Pavel, which seems to be growing towards him at a slow but noticeable speed.

PAVEL HAS KILLED FORTY-SEVEN MEN. WOMEN, AND CHILDREN. IVAN HAS KILLED THIRTY-FIVE MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN. ALEXEI HAS KILLED TWENTY-NINE MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN. VIKTOR HAS KILLED TWNENTY-TWO MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN. NIKOLAI REZNOV HAS KILLED FIFTEEN MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN.

I shiver at the facts it states. In my thirty years of life, I had ended twenty-nine others. I could have excused them as business, or it was either me or them, but . . . I had killed them. I had even laid waste to two children, although they had both been seventeen-year-olds perfectly conscious of what they had gotten into, but still.

And the tree. It was right behind Pavel. Inching towards him, almost like some sort of predator. I hear the hammer of Viktor’s heat cock back, and he looks at me for a split second before he steadies his aim.

Then, in one sudden movement, too fast to be seen, the branches all came together and impale his stomach. Blood spatters on the trunk of the car and he looks down, gun dropping from his hand. I take a moment to analyze the scene: Pavel’s terrified face, his blood and some of his guts—his fucking guts—on the black paint, then he looks up at me. I am the last thing he sees before the trees, in another flash, spread apart inside him. The sound is the cracks of hundreds of bones, skin tearing apart, and blood pouring under where he had once stood. Much of it hits my face while I watch his left arm fly back into the forest. I had been in rooms where a guy had his head blown off and I sat there with brains in my hair—my fucking hair—yet I can’t hold it in any longer. My last meal—a tuna fish sandwich, which was actually a pretty good choice for such an occasion—comes up and spills onto my blood-spattered white shirt, my dress shoes, and the ground. My clothes are already beyond ruined before I bend over and let the rest of it come pouring out. As the tears sting my eyes, I hear Viktor scream. Luckily, the scream is getting closer as he staggers backward from what happened.

I wipe my mouth and look to my left. Viktor’s screams have stopped and he’s holding his hair. Ivan is sat down only a few meters away from the car. Their faces are ones of terror, but active terror. Terror that is reserved for moments like when you’re looking at two cars in the same lane coming at each other at sixty miles an hour. That terror. I shift my gaze to the right, and branches from multiple trees, even the bloody ones that had ripped Pavel apart, are wrapping around the car, crushing it. Metal grinds as it’s broken down, glass breaks and flies in multiple directions, the tires pop under the pressure. Finally, the trunk caves in, and out comes a stream of blood. After I saw the first tree kill Pavel, I had assumed that maybe these fucking things would spare Nikolai and I, after all, we had led them here; but we were no saints ourselves. I had taken out plenty of guys here, and there was a chance some of those guy’s souls, consciousnesses, spirits, whatever the fuck, inhabit these killer trees.

The car is taken back into the forest, where more grinding and crushing is heard. No birds or wild animals come out of the obsidian forest, which gives me a chill. Are we the only living things here? I ponder, but not too long before creaking is heard behind me. I spin on my heels and plant my toes flat, not kicking up any sort of dust. A tree has started to put its branches together and lower them, right in front of my hazel eyes, which I trust reflect it all through the pinhead irises. I am frozen, watching it, wondering in a dull way if I would join them after it was done.

Viktor twirls me ninety degrees and shakes me. “Come the fuck on, Alex! Come on!”

He gets me started by twirling around and gripping my collar before I get the drift. I start sprinting, surpassing Viktor instantly. I stop and look back about twenty feet away and see he’s getting Ivan to his feet, one of which seems to be turned around completely. “Vik, don’t!” I yell. “Leave him be, you can still make it!” I have no idea where “it” is.

Viktor stares at Ivan with a question splayed on his face, and Ivan cries into Viktor’s face, “NO-O-O-O! I DON’T WANNA DIE, I DON’T WANNA!”

Viktor looks back at me, and in that split second they’re both impaled from both sides of the road. Their hold around each other breaks and they go limp. Yet, the trees feel it’s right to enact some sort of overkill. I don’t blame them, Ivan was a real bastard and this had been his main schtick since he had been a kid, shortly before I had been brought into the family. So maybe it was right for them to do that. Although my stomach didn’t feel that way. I toss my head to the left and dry-heaved for a few feet, then look dead ahead, rebounding from my slight stumbles.

Yes, it had been right for the souls of the dead men—women and children, too—to right that wrong with another; but it wasn’t right for them to do that to me. Not yet. I keep sprinting, some foliage coming out and trying to sweep my feet from under me, but to no avail, as I’m able to hurdle over them using some of my leftover knowledge from high school track. I reach at the back of my waistband for my Glock, but Pavel had had it, of course. I keep running, running, running. I am alone with my thoughts now, my footfalls only a background noise in this hellhole.

Alone with my thoughts.

I think many of them.

Many are terrifying.

Some of them follow the same helpless and futile track, such as,

This is my worst nightmare.