Powerless (The Girl in the Box Book 40) Read online

  POWERLESS: OUT OF THE BOX 30

  The Girl in the Box, Book 40

  ROBERT J. CRANE

  Ostiagard Press

  POWERLESS

  The Girl in the Box, Book 40

  (Out of the Box, Book 30)

  Robert J. Crane

  Copyright © 2020 Ostiagard Press

  All Rights Reserved.

  1st Edition.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, please email [email protected].

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Teaser

  Author’s Note

  Other Works by Robert J. Crane

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE

  Elgen

  Magadan Oblast, Russia

  “Whose grave is this?” Pyotr Orlov asked. No one answered, because the question was asked quietly, under his breath, to no one really but himself. But it was a good question, and one Pyotr was determined to get to the bottom of.

  It was not a traditional grave, as Pyotr would have thought of one. Certainly not of the sort he would have expected to find here, in the ruin of Elgen. Elgen was a Gulag camp site. The remains of it were but ruins; old, decaying wooden barracks with collapsed ceiling beams, a mess of rotten wood like a skeleton's bones sticking out of the Siberian steppes. A dusty dirt road ran through the center. Barbed wire fences with holes the size of trucks in them surrounded the site. A smell of mining dust still hung in the air, faint, even after all this time.

  Elgen had not functioned as a camp in over sixty years. Since Stalin had fallen from power and Kruschev had begun the thaw that trickled the survivors of the worst of the Gulag archipelago out into Russian society again. Pyotr had heard tales of – whispers, really – of the women of Elgen in the nearby villages. That they'd settled there, and still lived there, because once you left the camps, the adjustment to civilized, metropolitan life was perhaps still a leap too far.

  Pyotr cared little for those stories, though, at least at the moment. A more interesting problem waited before him, occupying his attention. He knelt in the dirt before this grave. This...tomb...and marveled at how out of place it was.

  Elgen had a graveyard. The simple facts of the camp's existence, its purpose, its operation, required a graveyard. Dead people were one of the chief products of the Gulag system, after all. One had to find a place to put them. Certainly in some of the camps, the tales bent toward the depravity of cannibalism, perhaps reducing the need somewhat. Perhaps that had happened here in Elgen, too. It was hard to say. Few that remembered those times were still alive. Fewer still who lived them and survived had any desire to talk about them.

  But this was not a typical grave. Not at all. Pyotr had been digging outside the camp some distance, near one of the depleted gold mines, and he'd found...this.

  It was hard to tell what to think of it, truly. Clearly, it had begun its life as a rock. An immense one, no doubt. Boulder-sized. How it had been maneuvered here...well, that was another question. The slave labor of the camps, perhaps?

  Elgen had been a womens' camp. They'd certainly been worked, and worked hard, but moving a multi-ton slab of rock?

  A piece of machinery, perhaps? Pyotr shrugged. This was a mystery that engaged his thoughts, but ultimately the answer did not matter. It was in his way now. A whitish gray piece of stone, and–

  Pyotr peered at the face of it. He'd excavated it thinking that maybe, just maybe, he'd turn up something useful from it. Something to sell to a museum. To help him make his name.

  With a brush, he gently dusted the flat surface of the rock in front of him. Grains of dust flowed from carved grooves in the rock, and he peered at it, dusted it a bit more–

  In Memoriam

  Pyotr sat up straight. It was a tomb, then. With careful brushstrokes, he went back to work. Within minutes, he received his answer.

  In Memoriam

  Aniya Ivanova

  Someone had taken a chisel to this rock, carving the name into it like a cat's claw raking into flesh. “Hm,” Pyotr said, rising. He brushed his pants off, wondering how best to get around this particular obstacle.

  After some thought, he decided to simply hook his vehicle to the rock, to drag it from where it blocked the tomb. “I am thinking dynamite,” Pyotr said. This he did not speak to himself, but to the others surrounding the area. The excavation team, who hung – more or less – on his every word. And executed his will.

  Minutes lat
er, the demolition man, Michail Pavlovsky, stood back, wires running to the rock.

  “Are you sure we should do this?” Michail asked. Michail had a look about him that suggested he was perpetually worried about everything going wrong. A good look for a demolition man. But an annoying one for anyone trying to get things done.

  “We are to catalog the atrocities of this camp,” Pyotr said. “If Russia is to move forward, we must see clearly our past and the places where we have failed. Fallen low.”

  “I meant the dynamite.”

  “Oh. Well.” Pyotr shrugged. “How else are we going to get those boulders out of the way? As the Nike company says, 'Just do it.'”

  With a squeeze of the plunger, the explosion rang over the treetops, drowning out the sound of excavations back in camp. Pyotr's ears rang, and when the dust cleared some minutes later...

  The stone was no more. A pile of rubble, it left behind a hole in the earth, access to the makeshift tomb.

  “How many do you suppose we will find in here?” Michail asked as they approached the dark rift in the earth. It was the remains of a mine, a cleft in the ground wide enough to move some machinery into, but not wide enough to fit a truck, for instance.

  Pyotr put on his helmet and clicked the light. It penetrated into the dark, revealing blackness beyond for twenty, thirty feet. They would have to step over the remains of the boulder that had sealed the tomb, and it might, perhaps, be a bit of a squeeze. Sticking his head in, though, he shone the light around before leaping in. “I don't know. It's large, though. Hard to believe it could contain just one, a space this big.” He swept his head left to right. Cleanly excavated walls suggested that yes, this had once been a mine before it had been turned into this grave.

  “It stinks in here,” Michail sniffed, boots clicking as he descended behind Pyotr. He held a hand to his nose, as if to block the musty, rotten scent. Pyotr didn't bother to tell him it wouldn't help.

  It was tough to tell exactly where the stench was coming from at first, then Pyotr narrowed it down. The space was little more than a room carved out of solid rock, the work of starved prisoners forced to dig for their very lives. Pyotr had grown calloused to the darkness that surrounded these camps by now; when he was younger, the horrors of the Gulag had...well, horrified him.

  Now he strolled casually into a tomb that seemed an obvious product of the Gulag and it bothered him little. Strange for a Gulag prisoner to get a tomb, actually. Not even the guards rated those. A hole in a graveyard with barely a headstone to account for their passing, that was the usual way. Hell, in winter they didn't even get that. They'd get unceremoniously left in the snow, and the wolves and other agents of nature would take care of the rest.

  “What is that?” Michail asked over his hand. The fool seemed to be trying to stuff it up his nose.

  It was fetid and rank in here, Pyotr conceded. He trained his eyes and his light upon the center of the chamber, the only focal point of interest in the otherwise circular, near featureless chamber.

  There was...a lump against the far wall.

  Pyotr moved closer. The chamber's rock ceiling grew nearer to the earth, so he ducked low. Was it a rock?

  Something clanked as he got closer, and Michail gasped.

  “Chains,” Pyotr said, running his boot over the metal again. It clattered.

  “Oh, good,” Michail said. He did not sound like he was okay with any of this, or that any of it was good.

  The chains seemed to run right to the lump, and as Pyotr shone his light on it, he stooped to look closer. It almost appeared to be...

  Pyotr held in a gasp, for fear of sounding like Michail, that old grandmother.

  “What is it?” Michail did not bother to hide a gasp. His light shook, making a shadow of Pyotr across...

  “This very definitely is a grave,” Pyotr said. “And this...is the corpse.”

  And it was a corpse. Desiccated, dry skin had turned dark and papery thin over the years in the ground. It was drawn, dusty, as if still in the middle of decomposition. It appeared mostly intact, though. And was that...was it chained to the wall? No. It was chained to another boulder, perhaps blocking access to the deeper mine. Hm.

  Michail shuddered behind him, making a sucking sound with his mouth. “So revolting,” he whispered.

  “What did you think we would find in here?” Pyotr turned, favoring him with a look of sweet amusement. It was fun to, as the British would say, 'Take the piss' out of Michail. “A living human be–”

  Pressure on his arm made Pyotr look down, though.

  Something...was touching him. Was...gripping him.

  Something...alive.

  “Help...me...” whispered the desiccated corpse, speaking through surprisingly white teeth glimmering in the dark of the tomb. Pyotr could not help himself. Of course he screamed. And screamed and screamed, for quite some time.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sienna Nealon

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  Two Months Later

  “Right arm or left arm?”

  The nurse stared at me through thin, prescription glasses that distorted her eyes slightly. It was probably not enough for a normal human to notice the astigmatic curve behind her enlarged black pupils and green irises, but focused as I was on her, as she waited for my reply to the question, I saw it. Along with the five or six freckles on her pale cheeks that the concealer couldn't quite cover, and the couple of stray hairs she hadn't bothered to pluck in her right eyebrow.

  “Left,” I said, taking a deep breath and rolling up my sleeve to make way for the needle.

  I was being watched by six men with guns. They were kind enough not to train them on me, but they had them at low rest, ready to fire quickly. Could I take them out more quickly than they could fire?

  Maybe. But if I did it, it'd be the end of me, because there were twenty more in the antechamber beyond, and it'd quickly become a firing line with one purpose: wiping me out.

  So I held fast, took another breath, and the nurse with the unconcealed freckles and the glasses tapped her syringe a couple times to make sure there were no bubbles of air hidden within...

  Then she popped the syringe into a vein in my arm and injected the full dose of suppressant.

  “I should have had you sit,” she said as she finished.

  “I don't recall lightheadedness being a side effect,” I said, keeping a pretty solidly grim face. This was not the greatest day of my life already, and the last thing I needed was to pass out in front of all the armed men.

  “You'd know better than I would,” the nurse said, capping the needle and putting it away. She'd been summoned specifically to inject me, and presumably now would take the bloody needle somewhere that it could be safely disposed of. Like the streets of San Francisco, maybe. She pressed a cotton ball into the injection site – because it was not healing on its own – then slapped a bandage across it.

  “I guess I would,” I said, watching the distortion of her glasses fade almost imperceptibly so that I could no longer detect it. Her freckles became harder to see, too, as the suppressant took hold. The eyebrow hairs were still totes obvious, though.

  The nurse showed herself out, leaving me in the antechamber alone with the men with guns. “So...come here often?” I asked.