Powerless (The Girl in the Box Book 40)
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.
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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.