Absorption by John Meaney

revolver bucked, simultaneously with the crash of sound. Krymov dropped like a stack of dead sticks.
     
    ‘Please, sir—’ Vadim Sergeiev was on his knees in the snow, tears on his face. ‘My son wrote an essay on Darwinism at school, that’s why he’s in trouble and I need the money to, to ease his way . . .’
     
    ‘To bribe a teacher?’
     
    Contradicting Lysenkoism meant turning against a doctrine beloved of Josef Stalin, the genetic basis for the agricultural plans designed to bring food to an ever-hungrier people.
     
    ‘Technically, but my son’s ideas could produce actual crops that—’
     
    Again, the crash and the recoil came together.
     
    ‘It’s only a few years,’ said Dmitri to the two cowering survivors, ‘since we were a feudal society that was almost fully illiterate. Within a decade, fifty per cent of the proletariat will be able to read and write.’
     
    ‘Yes, comrade.’
     
    ‘We agree,’ said the other. ‘We didn’t mean to go up against the state. It was just that we were hungry and—’
     
    Two more bangs, one bullet each. Two more corpses splayed and tangled on the snow.
     
    ‘Freedom of the people,’ said Dmitri, ‘is inevitable.’
     
    Then he pocketed his revolver, and transferred the heavy scissors to his right hand.
     
    ‘Scissor economics,’ he added.
     
    Only dead things were here, piles of bone and cooling meat, no longer bearing minds to appreciate his humour.
     
    He took the little finger of each left hand, leaning down to force the blades through bone, then put all four trophies in his pocket along with the scissors. From their wallets he took the dead men’s money - pitifully little, apart from Krymov - not from greed but because whoever found the bodies would rob them anyway, so why should he not benefit?
     
    After all, he was the one who had just carried out his part in purifying the proletariat, was he not?
     
    That’s right.
     
    His internal voice mocked him, while far off in the distance he could hear a nine-note sequence that sometimes haunted him, particularly when he remembered the village and his fifteenth birthday; and if that bastard Krymov weren’t already dead, Dmitri would shoot him now, because no one should mention his mother, no one should even know.
     
    He fired again, and the Krymov-thing’s coat leaped; the dead meat inside did not.
     
    Wasting bullets.
     
    And causing noise. Moving back into shadow, he made his away across the tracks, away from the station proper. He would take a roundabout route home, checking behind him all the way - he was a professional, unlike those idiots - and check that no one was inside his rooms before putting his four treasures in the secret part of his pantry, along with the others.
     
    Not that he was intending to eat them, though they were stored so close to food.
     
    Mother.
     
    That was a thought to push away, to force from his mind.
     
    No.
     
    But sometimes - like now, when the dark shadows twisted in their diabolic ways, off beyond the edge of his vision - the other voices came back too, the voices of traumatized innocence remembering the before-times.
     
    Mother, and the taste like bacon.
     
    Whimpering, he pushed on. Snow was falling heavily now, hiding his tracks, cold on his face, because he could not be crying. That had been leached from him four years before, when hell descended on a starving world.
     
    Most of the village had perished, and there had been no food, no other food; and those who survived shared the secret they could never talk about, not among themselves and never to strangers.
     
    He had never eaten her fingers. It seemed important to remember that.
     
    I’m sorry.
     
    All around in the night, snow caked Moscow’s grand old buildings, creating beauty.
     
     
    At the same time in Zürich, Gavriela was trying to insert her front-door key into the lock. It took several iterations of zeroing in by feel, and then she had success - except that, as she pushed