Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences (24 page)

“Yeah. Looks like you scared the shit out of them.”

He balked. “Who taught you to speak in such unladylike fashion?”

“You get to ask questions when you’re the one pointing the gun.” She craned her head and smiled, the beautiful façade giving way to the cruel turn of her mouth. “Who do you work for?”

Something about her expression unnerved Vasily. He’d seen his share of rogues in his tenure at the Ministry, but none of them set him on edge quite like the wolfish grin of the woman before him.

A twitch in her eye told him she sensed his discomfort, and she flicked a switch on her gun. “Are you going to tell me or not?”

“I was shooting the Lev. Isn’t that enough for you?” He nodded in the direction of the tracks. “Now, if you please, they’re getting away, and we’ve need of horses, or motorcycles or...something.”

“Didn’t bring your own?”

“I travelled light, to avoid announcing my presence.” He looked her over, head to toe, and grumbled, “I wish you’d done the same.”

She lowered her pistol. “Don’t worry. I live nearby.”

With that, she took off into the woods, away from the rolling fortress. So this was to be it: either try to run to some peasant’s house so he could steal transport, or follow a strange woman into the woods. With a sigh, Vasily slung his rifle across his back and trailed behind her. They dashed between the trees by moonlight, and he tripped over the odd root or hidden rock more than once. When he was finally sure they were truly lost, she stopped. He looked around; unless their destination was an unremarkable clearing in the middle of nowhere, she’d led them astray.

“Great,” he said. “Now the Lev can march on Peter while I play in the woods.”

“Shut up, you inbred farmboy,” she spat.

“Excuse me, but I am not—”

She silenced him by whistling a shrill melody. They stood without speaking while trees creaked overhead, their crowns bowed with frost. Vasily was about to leave when a cabin materialised out of thin air before him, stray reflections peeling from its walls like old paint.

The structure wasn’t any ordinary hut. Dozens of bleached bones dangled from the eaves of the roof, macabre icicles with bits of fur and leather tied to them. The windows glowed with an eerie, green firelight, and the stench of rotting meat permeated the clearing.

“Sweet Mary, Mother of Christ!” he shouted, drawing his revolver.

“I told you not to worry,” she said, making her way toward the door. It opened by itself as she stepped onto the porch. “I said I lived nearby. You coming or what?”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Yevgeniya Babikov. Zhenya for short. Now, I’m tired of you wasting time. Get in here, or I’m leaving without you.”

“Leaving?” Vasily lowered his weapon and followed her to the door. He saw no horses, but then again, anyone who lived in a hut like this would probably eat their horses. He stopped at the threshold. “Where are we going?”

“After the Lev! You’re a thick one, aren’t you, farmboy?” She jerked him inside by his collar.

The interior of the hut was far less pleasant than the outside, sporting thousands of dried bundles of herbs lining the walls. Dusty shelves of greasy jars contained a menagerie of grim trophies, from eyeballs to human hands. Hooks, crusted with blood, hung from the ceiling, and Vasily eyed them nervously. Pale, pink skins lay stretched across the ceiling, nailed to planks, while a spiked, iron candelabra illuminated them from below.

While Vasily’s fellow agents may have been sceptical folks, he had personally met Baba Yaga. This woman was a witch.

“Don’t go fainting on me,” said Zhenya.

“Who the Devil are you?” Vasily asked. He fumbled the cross from under his shirt and rubbed over it with his thumb.

Zhenya chuckled, rolled her eyes and strode to the corner of the room. She banged on a board and it flung open, revealing a recess containing a long, brass lever. “The saviour of Mother Russia,” she laughed, throwing the huge switch.

The stench disappeared with a hum, and the room grew a little brighter. With a tremendous clank, the ceiling overhead flipped over, hiding the skins and hooks as it became a brass sheet. Dozens of hidden panels reversed across the walls, showing gauges, levers, switches and other indicators. Vacuum tubes jutted out from hundreds of hidden compartments, coruscating with incandescent light. The cauldron folded down on one side, revealing a leather-upholstered seat, bristling with all manner of control apparatuses.

Vasily suddenly became conscious of his bulging eyes. “I say again, woman, who the Devil are you?”

She vaulted into the seat, her deft hands wrapping around the two largest levers. “Try to hang onto something.”

The house bucked, the floorboards rushing up to meet Vasily as he was thrown from his feet, barely managing to keep hold of his pistol. He rolled to one side and watched in astonishment while the trees rustled past the window. The house rose fifteen feet into the air. Then it lurched forward, lunging ten feet with a resounding crash. It lurched again and again, until Vasily understood the motions—a steady gait. The house was walking. He knew what he’d find if he could see it from the outside; it would be a witch’s hut, running on a pair of chicken legs.

He managed to get his knees under him. “My God. You’re Baba Yaga.”

“What was your first clue?” She cackled over the clanking of her mechanised house.

His fear became anger as it churned in his stomach. He raised his pistol to her, pulling the hammer back. “All these years. All these years I’ve thought of my parents. Of my childhood. You stole me away from them!”

Her expression changed. “Oh,” she said. “You’re one of the children.” She sighed and flipped a stray lock of blonde hair from her eyes. “I kidnapped you, did I?”

“You left me in London, thousands of miles from my home! By the time I got back, I learned my parents had died in the famine!”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Sounds like I did you a favour, then.”

“The choice wasn’t yours to make!”

“You did all right, didn’t you? Found someone to take care of you?”

One twitch would erase that smile from her face. Four pounds of trigger pull. He tensed, his leather glove creaking in the frozen air.

Professor Fount had seen fit to send him away to the finest boarding schools and personally taken charge of his education. Even though the previous head of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences had always maintained his distance, he groomed Vasily to be their best Russian operator. If not for Baba Yaga, he would have died in the famine, too.

But it had not been her choice to make.

Zhenya’s voice snapped him back to the present. “Go ahead, then. Shoot me and go back to being a farmboy. You can do that, can’t you?”

“How will shooting you return me to my parents?”

“What did I look like when you met me?”

Old.

Frightful.

The same smile, though.

Vasily looked her over. He could imagine her hands growing into the talons of the crone, her now-beautiful nose crooked in age, her pert lips withering like rotten fruit.

She smiled. “I haven’t kidnapped you yet, but I will. One day, when I grow old, I’ll go back and take you from your parents. I’ll travel through time, because that’s what I do.”

His fury renewed, and he grit his teeth. He knew it was unreasoning. He had to think of his training, but he had lost his childhood. The trigger itched under his grip. “I never got to see them again, you know. What a perfect reason to kill you.”

Her expression softened. “Yes, and if you do, I won’t be here—in our present time— to save Saint Petersburg. Neither will you. There will be no Agent Vasily Zinchenko of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. There will be a young boy whose name will go forgotten, just another death in the all-too-common famine of the Russian wilderness. And the Lev will gain control of the country, and eventually all of Asia. You weren’t kidnapped. You were recruited.”

He shook his head. He didn’t want her to make sense.

“I’m sorry. I wish there was another way for you, but this is what fate has written. Do you think it was an accident that you found your way to me?”

He lowered his weapon and dropped to his knees. She joined him, and took his face into her hands. She was so beautiful. The most incredible eyes he had ever seen…

“Tell me your name,” she insisted. “Tell me of the day we met so we can get on with the task at hand.”

As they travelled, he told her every last thing in exacting detail: where he was from, how she’d lured him into the woods, of his meeting with Doctor Sound in the early hours of the London morning. He left out as much sensitive Ministry information as he could, but if he wanted to make it to this exact moment, she would have to know as much as possible.

“Vasily Zinchenko,” she said. “It’s a nice name. Not a farmboy’s name at all.”

“How ironic. And where are you from?”

“About thirty-one years in the future. Other than that, I can’t tell you,” she said with a wink. “I’d hate it if you decided to return the favour and kidnap a little girl.”

“So you grew up and built a time machine? What are you, some kind of genius?”

“I stole it from the Americans. Great at baseball. Bad at guarding Air Force bases.”

When they crested the next hill, a war zone greeted their eyes. Explosions, cannon fire and the crackle of rifles filled the air. A regiment of the Tsar’s men had engaged the behemoth, to absolutely no avail. The Lev tank laid waste to all before it with dozens of guns. As Zhenya’s hut raced down the hill toward the action, Vasily knew it would be too late for the Tsar’s soldiers. He saw them torn apart as they tried to flee on horseback, and he said a silent prayer for their souls.

“If you can move through time, why can’t we go back and stop the Lev from gaining that monster?” asked Vasily.

“I would if I could, but the old witch went back and locked the time jumps into the system when I stole the stupid thing. The horrible bitch also made it look like this house.”

“You’re talking about yourself?”

Zhenya shot him a sidelong glance. “She thought I’d use it to make money.”

“And would you?”

“What can I say? She knows me pretty well.”

“When are you headed to next?”

“Fourteen years from today. I’ll land somewhere near the Podkammenaya Tunguska River.”

He frowned. “There’s nothing there.”

“Then I’ll take a vacation. Maybe bed one of the Tungus. I bet some of those hunters are great fun.”

Vasily blushed. This woman reminded him of a Ministry operative from New Zealand, Agent Eliza Braun. When she would be partnered up with him, he lacked any idea how to speak with her, and he often pretended his English was bad so he could avoid conversation. While Braun enjoyed a bit of fun in her work, Vasily was all business.

With a half dozen leaps, their hut had closed the distance to the tank. Up close, Vasily already regretted tagging along for the ride. There was nothing his rifle could do against its iron sides, and the plethora of guns bulging from the beast did nothing to calm his nerves. He saw several of the cannons swing in his direction. He hit the deck as the house took a flying leap to its left, sending him rolling into the far wall. Explosions turned the night orange as shells peppered the trees around them.

“You’re going to have to board it!” shouted Zhenya.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to have to
what?”

“This thing doesn’t have any weapons! You’re going to have to jump aboard! And do, you know—” she said, gesturing wildly with one hand while driving her time-traveling hut with the other, “Secret agent…stuff.”

Vasily staggered to the front door and whipped it open, watching as the black pines blew past. His stomach flipped—fifteen feet to the ground seemed a lot further when the ground went shooting by like that. He took a long swallow and calculated the distance to the upper deck of the monstrosity. Ten deadly feet hung between him and the freezing iron tank.

Cannon fire streaked across their eaves, and Vasily was forced to grab hold of the door frame as Zhenya executed a swift dodge.

“Step on it!” she screamed at him.

“Step on what?” He shook his head. He couldn’t feel more mortal in that moment: cannons on one side, a death-defying leap on the other. Now he was supposed to step on something?

“It’s an expression. From my time, not yours! Now get over there, farmboy!”

The cannons were reloading. This would be his only chance. He was a secret agent, damn it, and this was for the Queen. They’d trained him for this sort of thing—

Well, not
this
sort of thing, but close combat.

He backed up against the far wall, slung his rifle and looked to Zhenya. “If you could get me a bit closer, that would be just ducky!”

“Just what?”

“An expression from my time!” he snapped, holstering his pistol and rifling through his shoulder bag. He finally grasped what he sought—the Mountaineer: a fierce-looking pistol with a barrel the size of his forearm. He just hoped the clankerton Blackwell’s work was as fine as her smile.
“Just get me closer to the damn tank!”