Walking Dead Read Free

Batumi, he's taking Koba and he has an extra, he wanted me to ask if you cared to join them.”
     
“Who're they playing?” I asked, more out of reflex than interest.
     
Koba answered without pausing from his game. “Spartaki!”
     
“We're all going down,” Ia said. “Tiasa and I are going shopping, then we'll meet my boys after the game for dinner. You should come! Yeva should come! She could go shopping with us!”
     
“I'm sure she'd like that,” I said, thinking that it was the last thing Alena would want to do.
     
     
The bed Bakhar and Ia slept in would've been called a super king if it'd been in the UK, just a king if it'd been in the U.S. It sat with its foot to the door, headboard against the wall opposite, with enough space on each side for a dresser. On the left side, as you faced it, was a nightstand, and the lamp had fallen from there. On the right there was nothing, and when I finally could bring myself to look up from Bakhar, I saw his wife, or rather the top of her head, the streaked blonde hair that she paid twice a month to be carefully dyed and styled in one of the salons near the beach. She was slumped in the corner, between what had been her side of the bed and her dresser.
     
Ia had fallen on her knees, or perhaps been forced to them. She was wearing pajamas, a billowy satin top and companion pants, turquoise and violet beneath a pattern of red roses, as gregarious as she had been. The three buttons on her top were missing, though the shirt had fallen closed when she'd collapsed, a comic nod to modesty in the obscenity of the room.
     
The entry wound was behind her right ear, the pale skinblackened and puckered from the point-blank shot. Pieces of her stuck to the wall from the exit wound.
     
They'd made her watch, I realized. They'd made her watch as they mutilated her husband.
     
Then they'd forced Ia Lagidze to her knees, and taken her fear, and everything else, away from her.
     
     
Koba asked me to teach him English.
     
“You're not learning it in school?” I asked.
     
He bobbed his head from side to side, not quite shaking it to say no. His shoulders raised and lowered in time, making him look like a gangly marionette. He was tall for his age, or at least I supposed he was, and very thin, and at the age of seven he already needed glasses, which we both took as a symbol of unity.
     
“Not much.”
     
He kicked a pass to me, sending the soccer ball bounding over the uneven ground of what passed for our backyard. It was summer, and I'd been surprised when he'd shown up, accompanying his sister for her biweekly lesson. This time of year, this time of day, most of the kids his age would be down at the beach, playing in the water or trying to scam treats from the tourists. But the request served as the explanation.
     
The ball took a bounce at the last second, nearly hitting me square in the crotch, but I got my thigh up and managed to trap and land it.
     
“I want to play in England,” Koba told me, by way of confession. “I'll have to know how to speak it.”
     
I tried to remember what it had been like to be seven and fearless and a dreamer.
     
“Sure,” I told him. “If it's okay with your parents.”
     
     
I left Ia and Bakhar in their bedroom as I'd found them, turned the corner, passing the bathroom. Koba's room was on my left, but I didn't need to look inside it to find him.
     
He was lying in the hallway, facedown, just outside his sister's room, one hand extended, as if reaching out to her. His glasses, broken at their bridge, rested a few inches from his head.
     
He'd been shot in the back.
     
Eight years old, and they'd shot him in the back.
     
They'd shot him in the back six times.
     
     
“Yeva says you dance, too,” Tiasa said to me, some six months after she'd begun her lessons.
     
Unlike most of the other kids who took dance from Alena, Tiasa had demonstrated that rarest of all commodities, commitment. Twice a week, rain or shine, she came for