Primal Gambit

Chapter 46: Vikhr Stalks His Prey

The night grew colder. Clouds parted as the vibrant moon began its routine ascent through the sky. Most civilians had retreated back into their holes, only to awake and repeat yesterday all over again. The Siberian prowled the streets, filtering clean air into his lungs as he walked with a cold step. All accounts of Arthur Shuke's whereabouts led him there, to one single apartment on the fringes of the Inner City. He felt that the situation had grown ironic; an unrelated mission brought him to one of the only two people he knew in the States.

Early morning conversations in the barrows of the barracks, just hours after missions that had the men questioning their moral compasses left Vikhr to assume that he had stumbled upon Ridley Doerrman's apartment. Doerrman, the expert marksman who despised his job. Doerrman, the man who did not believe in justified revenge or worthy redemption. Vikhr recalled Pittsburgh through his counterpart's harrowing descriptions but never thought he would be tasked with tracking him.

Most men would question the task to stalk someone they had grown a relationship with, but the Siberian wasn't like most men. To him it was simply another job – a mission, one step closer to seeking vengeance for his family. If he had to step on or over old brothers to accomplish the task, he was not going to think twice.

Tonight, he would watch.

As Vikhr came upon the building that towered into the clear sky, he looked towards adjacent buildings that would lend the most opportune vantage point. There was much to learn from the tactics that both Doerrman and Renault had employed during the war and the Siberian considered himself lucky to have been assigned support for the most lethal sniper pair across the ranks.

Throughout the tour in Siberia Vikhr had grown closer to Doerrman than he had to Renault. It had to do solely with their comparable pasts –that they had both lost many loved ones throughout their adolescence, until they were completely alone. The two had come to terms with how each other handled the sadness. In stark contrast to Vikhr's mentality on rage and retribution, the Pittsburgh native turned to putting his love and compassion into another – taking the sadness and manifesting it into something positive. Though the Siberian had a deep respect for Doerrman's ability to alter his emotions, it filled him with a resentment that he could not understand. Why couldn't he do the same?

He moved up the steps and into a nearby hotel complex. The dim neon lights flickered at the top, where Vikhr would arrive in the following minutes. An empty counter gave no resistance into the Siberian's infiltration as he slipped through the barren lobby unnoticed. Sneaking into a nearby service elevator, he closed the gate as the spindly wires yanked him towards the roof. It was as though the hotel was transplanted from another era, emanating an aura that would prove comfortable and relatable to only his greatest grandparents. The sound of the vintage record player that spun in the lobby grew faint – surrounding Vikhr in silence. As the metal creaked he wondered if the hotel was up for foreclosure, if its rooms and halls were empty save for the chance squatting family with nowhere else to stay.

When he was finally on the top floor, the gate tugged aside and harsh wind entered the confines of the elevator. Vikhr wiped dust and grime off his mask as he exited onto the roof, breathing deep and slow with his diaphragm to conserve his filter. Just behind the neon lights that flickered in and out of life was an overturned milk crate along with scraps of bedding and a makeshift tent built from chance linens and metal poles. The Siberian was surprised it had not fallen victim to the wind, blown asunder and destroyed by the blustering, altitudinal gusts.

It had become clear that someone had walked the same path already. Someone unknown to Vikhr and Doerrman and Darwin had been through here. They had entered the Inner City, stalked the couple within their home, and then disappeared into the dead of night like a ghost without a trace. The Siberian was going to do the same, though now he felt that another party was one step ahead of him. For the brute, there was no second best – he had to be at the top of the food chain or he wouldn't be in it at all, having fought and died trying to become the apex predator.

It was built into his genes, branded and seared onto his flesh with the images of his slaughtered family. Vikhr the Siberian would not settle until he knew all the contenders and all their endgames. Then he would do whatever was required to proceed. He would be the victor by the end of it all, anything else and he would rather be dead.

The idea that someone was ahead of him did not sit well. An unsettled nausea coursed through his stomach. He moved forward and took position on the milk crate, removing his rucksack and placing it by his side – extracting both a fresh filter and monocular. In any other situation he would have left a firearm sitting nearby in case he were ambushed and quick access was necessary, though the vacancy in the hotel instilled him with the idea of solitude for miles in every direction.

Once he peered through the monocular that pressed against the glass eye-cover of his mask, it was as though he had jumped through time to another era: one closer to his childhood. Few barred windows were left without drawn shades. Looking in each one seemed like timed reels from an old carousel-driven projector.

From the open windows, visuals of the couple together besieged the wary warrior until tears began to well beneath his eyes. Why he could not have something similar plagued his mind. His interests differed greatly. Being so twisted and twined in the thoughts of revolution sopped up his time like a dry mop being introduced to an ocean of water. For as long as he could remember he was alone, studying war and insurgency – tactics that he would be able to infuse into his own life as he had grown older.

For that reason, upon seeing Ridley Doerrman and the woman he found steadfastness in – Vikhr's mind regressed to his infancy. It reeled so far that the Siberian had trouble keeping hold, recalling vividly his first memories: the last he would share with his family. In his head, they flickered like still images, the husky brute unable to piece them together and form sequences due to his youth.

He remembered the chill of winter just before his homeland sullied into desert. The advanced rate of change, he found later in life, was due mainly to pollution, the testing of new atomic weapons, and a rapid alteration in weather. The changing ecosystem threatened their food supply as the two discussed how they would survive the winter, providing for an extensive family. As part of a small village he recalled a second image: one of his mother and father in their cramped, wooden-walled kitchen.

They talked about supply drops – the father quickly detesting. From the memory, Vikhr felt that his father had a deep-seeded distrust of the Russian government, who claimed ownership over Siberia – often turning a blind eye to the needs of the native Siberian people. While most of the world swirled toward collapse, other areas – including the rural villages of Siberia regressed much faster.

Bits of memory drifted into purgatory as the brute shook his head and returned to now. The couple across the way were not doing anything particularly revealing – looking through old photographs with mugs in their hands. They sat on the couch together, laughing and smiling at one another contently. It was as if nothing was amiss. Their body language released an aura of innocence as though nothing had changed once Doerrman returned from the war, as though they had nothing to hide. How could they be so happy with a strange half-man, half-beast occupying their home?

While the professor wasn't sharing the processed coffee or laughs with them, the Siberian was sure he was there. While they were not giving anything away by glancing over the few good experiences of their youths, the warrior knew they would slip at some point. Perhaps the gaunt man would grow cold in the night and come into sight in search of an extra blanket or shawl – or grow parched upon thinking of the hardships he had faced in Marcotte, heading to the sink to refill a glass of brown water.

It was almost as though Vikhr reminisced with the couple, reveling in the choice parts of his childhood just the same way they were. There on the cold rooftop, behind the neon lights, he would wait. It wasn't enough to destroy a relationship that he had so long hoped to have himself – he needed to steal, what he thought, was the most important thing to him at that moment.

He waited.