Read Online Russian Roulette by Anthony Horowitz - Free Book Online Page B

around, I came across a shrub of bright red lingonberries. They were past their best but I knew they would be edible. We used to make them into a dish called
kissel,
a sort of jelly, and I stuffed some of them into my mouth. They were slightly sour, but I thought they would keep me going and I placed several more in my pockets.
    “Yasha?”
    As I returned to the hut, I heard Leo call my name. He had woken up. I was delighted to hear his voice and hurried over to him. “How are you feeling, Leo?” I asked.
    “Where are we?”
    “We found a shed. After the tunnel. Don’t you remember?”
    “I’m very cold, Yasha.”
    He looked terrible. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t pretend otherwise. There was no color at all in his face and his eyes were burning, out of focus. I didn’t know why he was cold. The one thing I had managed to do was to keep the hut reasonably warm and he was still tucked underneath the makeshift covers that I had put on the bed.
    “Maybe you should eat something,” I said.
    I brought the open can of herring over, but he recoiled at the smell. “I don’t want it,” he said. His voice rattled in his chest. He sounded like an old man.
    “All right. But you must have some tea.”
    I took the mug over and forced him to sip from it. As he strained his neck toward me, I noticed a red mark under his chin. Very slowly, trying not to let him know what I was doing, I folded back the covers to see what was going on. I was shocked by what I saw. The whole of Leo’s neck and chest was covered by dreadful diamond-shaped sores. His skin looked as if it had been burned in a fire. I could easily imagine that his whole body was like this, and I didn’t want to see any more. His face was the only part of him that had been spared. Underneath the covers he was a rotting corpse.
    And at the same time, I knew that if it hadn’t been for my parents, I would be exactly the same as him. They had injected me with something that protected me from the biochemical weapon that they had helped to build. They had said it acted quickly and here was the living—or perhaps the dying—proof. No wonder the authorities had been so quick to quarantine the area. If the anthrax or whatever it was had managed to do this to Leo in just a few hours, imagine what it would do to the rest of Russia as it spread.
    “I’m sorry, Yasha,” Leo whispered.
    “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I said. I was casting about, trying to find something to do. The fire, untended, had almost gone out. But there was no more wood to put in it anyway.
    “I can’t come with you,” Leo said.
    “Yes, you can. We’re just going to have to wait. That’s all. You’ll feel better when the sun comes up.”
    He shook his head. He knew I was lying for his sake. “I don’t mind. I’m glad you looked after me. I always liked being with you, Yasha.”
    He rested his head back. Despite the marks on his body, he didn’t seem to be in pain. I sat beside him and after about ten minutes he began to mutter something. I leaned closer. He wasn’t saying anything. He was singing. I recognized the words. “Close the door after me . . . I’m going.” Everyone at school would have known the song. It was by a rock singer named Victor Tsoi and it had been the rage throughout the summer.
    Perhaps Leo didn’t even want to live—not without his family, not without the village. He got to the end of the line and he died. And the truth is that, apart from the silence, there wasn’t a great deal of difference between Leo alive and Leo dead. He simply stopped. I closed his eyes. I drew the covers over his face. And then I began to cry. Is it shocking that I felt Leo’s death even more than that of my own parents? Maybe it was because they had been snatched from me so suddenly. I hadn’t even been given a chance to react. But it had taken Leo the whole of that long night to die and I was sitting with him even now, remembering everything he had been to me.