Only twenty-two seconds left, according to the count I’m keeping in my head.
If I want the KO, I’ll have to set a trap.
Chelovek is annoyed and embarrassed. He wants to hit me. If I offer a tempting bait, he’ll jump at it.
I send a couple quick jabs at his face, popping him lightly on the nose to piss him off even more. Then I hold my fists high, exposing that same right side to his left hook.
Sure enough, Chelovek swings hard for my ribs. He hits me in the same place as before, and this time I hear a pop and I feel the sickening hot burn of a rib cracking.
It doesn’t matter. I’ve already sent a right cross rocketing down toward his jaw. I hit him in the exact spot where the jawbone meets the skull. I can feel the bone separating. I watch the whole bottom half of his face pop out of alignment.
Chelovek doesn’t feel it. He’s already unconscious before he hits the ground. He goes down like a tree, straight and wooden, unable to even put his hands up.
The winners shout in triumph, and even those who lost their bets can’t help howling.
I stand tall in the ring, refusing to acknowledge the pain in my side.
Boris grabs my fist and hoists it aloft.
“Once again, Dmitry Yenin takes the win! That’s six matches now, still undefeated!”
Boris stuffs a wad of bills in my hand, my winnings from the fight.
I don’t care about forty thousand rubles. I won ten times that amount betting on myself. I’ll collect it from Danyl later.
Still, I stuff the money in the pocket of my shorts.
I wince a little as I bend down to pick my hoodie up off the concrete.
Armen is smoking again, while bouncing lightly on his toes to warm up. He’s taken off his hoodie and sweatpants, revealing a truly stunning pair of silk shorts emblazoned with a gold tiger across the crotch.
“Not bad,” he says to me. “Glad I put a whole two thousand on you.”
“Bet Chelovek wishes he did, too.”
“I think Chelovek wishes he never crawled out of his mother’s cunt,” Armen says, snorting with wheezy laughter.
“Good luck,” I tell him.
“You’re not staying to watch me fight?”
“Nah. You got everything you need to win.”
“Really?” Armen says.
“Yeah. Except speed, stamina, and technique.”
Armen stares at me for a second, then bursts out laughing again.
“Get the fuck outta here,” he snorts.
“You got those shorts at least,” I say.
“That I do.” Armen grins.
I head back down the tunnel, walking along the deserted tracks. I hear Boris’s whistle signaling the start of Armen’s match, and the shouts as his backers cheer him on. The noise fades away as I round a curve in the tunnel.
I pass the staircase that would take me back up to street level. I prefer to walk down to the old Park Kul’tury station and go up from there. This is a more direct route, cutting under the Moskva River. Plus, I like it down in the tunnels. It’s dark and quiet. At some points you can hear the vibration and rushing sounds of the trains passing by on parallel tracks that are still operational. Other spots you can hear the river itself running overhead.
I’ve got my phone out so the screen casts just enough light to see the tracks ahead of me. “Major Tom” plays quietly on my earbuds, my steps naturally falling in time to the beat.
Major Tom — Shiny Toy Guns
Spotify → geni.us/freshman-spotify
Apple Music → geni.us/freshman-apple
I shut the music off when I hear a scuffling sound up ahead. Not a rat. Something worse than that.
Fucking junkies.
There’s three of them, two men and a woman. If you can even call them that. They look scraggly and feral, and I can smell them from twenty feet away.
Who knows what the fuck they’re doing down here. They’ve got a duffle bag on the ground in the middle of their little huddle, and it looks like they’re pulling things out of it. Probably stolen from somebody on the subway, or on a crowded street up above.
If they’re smart, they’ll let me pass by.
Two of them have the right idea.
But the third stands up, twitchy and bright-eyed.
“Hey,” he says. “Where you goin’?”
I ignore him, continuing to walk past.
“Hey!” he shouts a little louder in his raspy voice. “I’m talkin’ to you!”
His lank, unwashed hair hangs around his shoulders. He’s wearing a jacket with nothing underneath, so his skinny chest is bare. He’s got scabs on his face and body, and I can tell from the stiff way he walks that his feet are swollen. The effects of Krokodil.
The government has tried to stamp it out a dozen times, but it always pops up again. It’s just so cheap to make. You can cook it in your kitchen with shit bought from pharmacies and hardware stores: hydrochloric acid, paint thinner, and phosphorous scraped off the side of a matchbox.
It’s an imitation of heroin, just as addictive. The only downside is the way your flesh rots away from the injection site, and your brain starts to atrophy inside your skull. Which doesn’t lead to the best decision-making.
Which is why this fucker thinks it’s a good idea to talk to me.
“That a new iPhone?” he demands, eying my phone greedily.
I stop walking, turning to face him slowly.
“You want to fuck off now,” I tell him. I slip the phone into my pocket, so my hands are free. While I’m doing that, I close my fingers around the smooth handle of my switchblade instead.
Without that faint blue light, the tunnel is even dimmer. It doesn’t matter. I’m sure I can see better than the three junkies.
They’re all standing now, fanning out silently so the woman is in front of me, the two men trying to flank me.
“Give us the phone,” the second man hisses.
The problem with fighting these three is that I have no idea what diseases they might be carrying. One scratch from an uncut fingernail and I could get hepatitis.
So as they close in around me, I plan to end it quick.
The guy on the right charges first. I send him right back again with a kick to the chest. The second guy isn’t as lucky. I press the button to flick out my blade while it’s already whistling through the air toward his torso. I stab him right in the liver with medical precision, then jerk the blade back before I get any blood on me. It still splashes down on the toe of my sneaker.
He drops to his knees, groaning.
That takes the steam out of the other two.
The girl raises her hands, blubbering, “We don’t want any trouble.”
“Then fuck off like I said,” I tell her coldly.
She grabs the duffle bag and scrambles off down the tunnel, the opposite direction I was walking.
The guy I kicked looks at his fallen friend, then at me. He runs off after the girl, abandoning the man I stabbed.
I ignore him too, continuing on down the tunnel.
He’ll probably bleed to death, but the thought doesn’t disturb me any more than the knowledge that every butterfly you see will be dead in a month’s time. That’s the cycle of life—junkies die young, from the drugs, the company they keep, or trying to rob the wrong person in a tunnel.
I continue on my way, until I reach the staircase up to Krymskiy Proyezd.