Game Over by Andrew Klavan

front of me.”
    The Traveler nodded thoughtfully as he walked. His spectacles frosted over as the mist from his breath rose up over them. With his watch cap pulled down over his bald head and his scarf pulled up to cover his chin, he looked kind of comical, Rick thought. Just a pair of misted-over glasses in a big overcoat. Like the Invisible Man or something. Even so, Rick could almost feel his dad’s powerful mind working through the problem.
    â€œThis is definitely worrying,” the Traveler said after a moment. “I think your theory that your dreams are giving you a glimpse inside Kurodar’s mind is a good one. Baba Yaga . . .”
    â€œThat witch woman.”
    â€œYeah—Baba Yaga is the name of a witch from old Russian fairy tales. What you may have been seeing is an image from a story that scared him when he was a child. Those images stick with you even if you don’t want them to.”
    â€œRight, right,” said Rick eagerly. “Like that movie The Ring I talked you into letting me watch when I was, like, ten. I still have nightmares about that. Probably Kurodar heard some scary fairy tale when he was a kid and now Baba Yaga lives inside his brain.”
    â€œShe seems to act as the keeper of his secret thoughts.The things he remembers but doesn’t want to remember . . . Was that what she showed you?”
    Rick blew out a long breath that sent the frost swirling up around his face. “I only remember some of it. Really ugly stuff. And it wasn’t just images either. It was like I was there.” He actually shuddered as he walked. “All around me, there were dead people. So many dead people, Dad . . . and they weren’t, like, soldiers from a war or anything either. They were just regular people, like us. Men, and women and children . . . just lying there on the ground like . . . like they’d been tossed away, you know? Like no one even cared about them. And the way their bodies looked. It was like they’d been starved to death. And tortured. And there were living people, too . . . guards. Standing around. Laughing. Laughing at the dead.” Rick shook his head, trying to clear the horrors from his mind. “The guards had caps on. Bars on their colors. One had a star on his chest, I remember . . .”
    His father’s voice came amid a puff of frost over his scarf, under his misted glasses: “Must’ve been the gulags—the prisons in the Soviet Union. The Communists slaughtered their own people in the tens of millions. Starved them. Tortured them. Enslaved them. And Kurodar’s father was one of their key officials. A KGB agent rounding up anyone who might criticize the regime. He must’ve been particularly brutal. When the Soviet Union fell, Kurodar watched as an angry mob beat his father to death.”
    â€œWow,” said Rick. “I get it. So it’s, like, maybe Kurodarkeeps these images hidden down inside Baba Yaga’s table so he doesn’t have to think about what his father was.”
    â€œYes. And what his country was.”
    â€œYeah,” said Rick. “I wouldn’t want to think about that either.”
    They were approaching the building that housed the entrance to the underground facilities. The horrifying images were still floating through Rick’s mind, as real as reality. He stopped outside the building and his father stopped. Rick turned to the older man—looked at that comical pair of misted glasses between the watch cap and the scarf.
    â€œWhy’d they do it?” Rick asked him. His voice was hoarse and soft. “To their own people. Why’d they do it, Dad?”
    His father tugged the scarf down onto his chin so he could speak more clearly. His voice was, as it almost always was, calm and clear. “They wanted to make the world a paradise,” he said.
    Rick was about to answer. He was about to say: “It wasn’t paradise. It was hell . .