Alcohol is a hell of a drug. The pinhead who broke free of his friends was so drunk he was practically horizontal, not so much running as failing to completely fall, but his klaxon was working and he opened his big dumb mouth wide enough to let out all the drunksound that was begging to be free. His war-yodel drew the attention of everyone in the square, and he had that nice, big open V-shaped empty space to charge through, holding his piece of rebar up in one hand like a villager with a pitchfork, heading straight for the gun that had gone skittering away.
The leader of the goon squad shouted an instruction at him, just once, loud enough to be heard over the drunkspeak. Then, goon-prime tipped a finger at one of his men, who raised his rifle, aimed, and blew the Nazi’s head off with an expanding round that sent bone fragments and chunks of brain out in a fan behind him.
One thousand camera-phone eyes captured the scene from every angle.
The first scream—a dude, somewhere behind me—was quickly joined by more. Someone jostled me, then again, harder, and then hard enough that I went down on one knee, Kriztina hauling me back up to my feet with her tiny, strong hands. “Thanks,” I managed, before we were swept up by more running bodies, having to run and push ourselves just to keep from being trampled.
Then we couldn’t hear the screaming anymore, not over the sound-weapons that the cops had switched on. These sonic cannons combined very loud sound with very low sounds with gut-twisting efficacy, literally making you feel like you were about to shit yourself even as your ears shut down. The crowd was virtually immobilized as people froze and twisted and covered their ears. After a pitiless interval, the cannons finally switched off, leaving a post-concert whine ringing behind them, the death throes of our inner ear hairs.
I couldn’t see the cops anymore—too many bodies, the neat V erased by a tangle of people, many weeping or holding their torsos or heads. A loud pronouncement, too distorted to make out.
“What did he say?” I said to Kriztina, making sure she could see my face, read my lips.
“He wants us to go.” Her voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
“I want to go,” I said.
She nodded. We looked around for the rest of our group, but it was hopeless. People were milling about aimlessly, crying or searching for their friends. I pulled out my phone. No signal. In situations like this, the cops are always trying to strike a delicate balance between keeping the internet service turned on (and spying on everyone) and turning it off (and preventing everyone from coordinating). I guessed that they’d decided they had all the data they needed on the protesters to find them later, so now it was time to get rid of them. There were some who weren’t going to be moving under their own power—people who had been hurt in the stampede and were lying on the frozen cobblestones, either alone or, if they were lucky, in the arms of someone. I remembered all those families I’d seen, all those kids.
Some people get overwhelmed by situations like that. I’ve seen it happen and I understand it. I’m not one of those people, though. My limbic system—the fight-or-flight response—and I are on speaking terms, but we’ve got an arrangement: it doesn’t bother me and I won’t bother it. So what I felt was urgency to get gone, but not fear. I felt for the people lying on the ground, but a foreigner who couldn’t speak their language was going to be less than useless compared to someone who knew where the hospital was and how to talk to the paramedics, and that someone would reach them soon enough.
Kriztina, though, was in rough shape. Her face was so bloodless it was almost green, and her teeth were chattering. Probably a little shock, plus the temperature had dropped another ten degrees. “Come on.” I pulled her toward the ring road around the square, toward a road I recognized as leading toward my hotel. It would be safe.
Kriztina let me lead her along for a few minutes, at first with a big group of crying and scared (former) protesters, then in a thinner and thinner crowd as we moved toward the business district and the Sofitel.
Look: I’m a compartmentalizer. It’s my superpower. Part of me had just watched a guy get killed, sorta-kinda because of me, and had been in a stampede. Part of me knew that I’d done something insanely risky that night, something that could cost me my job and worse. Part of me, though, was thinking about the fact that I was responsible for this little sidekick-slash-sister of mine, a hobby that had metastasized into a moral duty, and that she was as keyed up and adrenalized as I was. Neither of our phones was working, and if Litvinchuk held true to form, they’d stay dead for hours, meaning that no one could get through to us or vice versa for the foreseeable, which meant I’d have to keep her out of trouble. I had a hotel room of my own and the turndown service would have left us chocolates to replenish our blood sugar after that intense experience, which was good first-aid protocol, so it was practically medical advice that said we would have to go into my hotel room and get the fuck away from all that danger that she doubtless wanted to drag me back into.
I took her hand in mine as we turned into the Sofitel’s road, and I felt her trembling. I hoped that was cold, or excitement, because trauma was going to be a pain in the ass. The Sofitel had two big Borises out front with semiautos and body armor. They glared at us as we approached. I glared back. Glaring isn’t personal with Borises: they see smiling as a sign of insincerity.
I held out my room key. One of them took it from me without a word and touched it to an NFC reader on his belt. It lit up green. He nodded. “Welcome.”
I began to lead Kriztina through the door, but Boris #2 put a hand on her shoulder and held a hand out, presumably for a key, though I’m guessing a bribe would have worked just as well. “She’s with me,” I said. Boris 2 pretended he didn’t understand. I took the liberty of moving his hand—I’m no black belt, but I’ve always found jujitsu more relaxing than yoga—and yanking Kriztina into the hotel. I wasn’t in the mood for this. The guard shouted at us and followed us in, slinging his gun and reaching for me. I was not in the mood for this. I sent him sprawling on his ass, and by this time, the check-in clerk had come out from behind her desk. She and I had already crossed swords when I’d checked in and they hadn’t wanted to bill the room to the corporate booker, demanding a credit card from me. I don’t do reimbursement, and so I’d just flipped down the seat attachment on my suitcase and opened my laptop and started answering email, studiously ignoring her until such time as her boss’s boss had spoken to my boss and sorted things out. Sitting on the suitcase’s cool little seat instead of one of the lobby sofas weirded out everyone who came in or out of the lobby, as intended, and kept things moving along.
She recognized me right away and, I’m sure, realized that I would be the world’s biggest pain in the ass if she got in my way.
“My friend is coming with me.”
“She must be on the register.”
“No,” I said, and dragged Kriztina past her to the elevators.
She dogged our heels. “I’m sorry, madam, but all guests have to be on the register, it is a regulation.”
“I’ll add her to the register later, when I check out.”
She followed us into the elevator. “Madam—”
“Does the regulation say when guests have to be added to the register?”