Russian Roulette by Anthony Horowitz Read Free Book Online Page A

surrounded by huge, solid trunks with the sky blotted out and everything silent except for the drip of the rain on the canopy of leaves. The real nightmare was behind me. It was almost impossible to think of my village and the people who had lived there. Mr. Vladimov smoking his cigarettes until the stubs burned his fingers. Mrs. Bek, who ran the village shop and put up with everyone’s complaints when there was nothing on the shelves. The twins, Irina and Olga, so alike that we could never tell them apart but always arguing and at each other’s throats. My grandmother. My parents. My friends. They had all gone as if they had never existed, and nothing would remain of them, not even their names.
    Never tell anyone you came from Estrov. Never use that word again.
    My mother’s warning to me. And of course she was right. The place of my birth had now become a sentence of death.
    I was in shock. So much had happened and it had happened so quickly that my brain simply wasn’t able to cope with it all. I had seen very few American films—and computer games hadn’t arrived in my corner of Russia yet—so the sort of violence I had just experienced was completely alien to me. Perhaps it was for the best. If I had really considered my situation, I might easily have gone mad. I was fourteen years old and suddenly I had nothing except a hundred rubles, the clothes I was wearing, and the name of a man I had never met in a city I had never visited. My best friend was with me, but it was as if his soul had flown out of him, leaving nothing but a shell behind. He was no longer crying but he was walking like a zombie. For the last hour, he had said nothing. We had been walking in silence with only the sound of our own footsteps and the rain hitting the leaves.
    It wasn’t over yet. We were both waiting for the next attack. Maybe the helicopters would return and bomb the forest. Maybe they would use poison gas next time. They knew we were here and they wouldn’t let us get away.
    “What was it all about, Yasha Gregorovich?” Leo asked. He used my full name in the formal way that we Russians do sometimes—when we want to make a point or when we are afraid. His face was puffy and I could see that his eyes were bright with tears although he had made a point of not crying in front of me.
    “I don’t know,” I said. But that wasn’t true. I knew only too well. “There was an accident at the factory,” I went on. “Our parents lied to us. They weren’t just making chemicals for farmers. They were also making weapons. Something went wrong and they had to close it down very quickly.”
    “The helicopters . . .”
    “I suppose they didn’t want to tell anyone what had happened. It’s like that place we learned about. You know . . . Chernobyl.”
    We all knew about Chernobyl in Ukraine. Not so long ago, when Russia was still part of the Soviet Union, there had been a huge explosion at a nuclear reactor. The whole area had been covered with clouds of radioactive dust—they had even reached parts of Europe. But at the time, the authorities had done everything they could to cover up what had happened. Even now it was uncertain how many people had actually died. That was the way the Russian government worked back then. If they had admitted there had been a catastrophe, it would have shown they were weak. So it was easy to imagine what they would do following an accident at a secret facility creating biological weapons. If a hundred or even five hundred people were murdered, what would it matter, so long as things were kept quiet?
    Leo was still trying to take it all in. It hurt me seeing him like this. This was a boy who had been afraid of nothing, who had been rude to all the teachers and who had never complained when he was beaten or sent on forced marches. But it was as if he had become five years younger. He was lost. “They killed everyone,” he said.
    “They had to keep it a secret, Leo. My mother and father managed