Killing myself would be incredibly stupid.

I still had a few years left on my belt... maybe longer, depending on whether I could beat the cancer inflicted upon me by the numerous nuclear tests I've attended in Semipalatinsk.

Maybe the doctors were wrong? Maybe I could survive. There was always a chance, no matter how small.

It was incredibly annoying that the marauders showed up before I could build a detonation mechanism, but such was life.

Perhaps, I had another choice... another way to do things.

"Stop!" I yelled at the men that were trying to push the fertilizer sacks away from the doors. "I have rigged this entire island to explode! All I have to do is let go of this flare gun trigger!"

"What?!" The head marauder froze as his men looked up at me. "You did... WHAT?!"

"There are over a hundred tons of fertilizer bags all around the laboratory and even more that are sitting in the nearby ship in the dock! Ammonium nitrate explodes catastrophically if set on fire. Trust me. You wouldn't want to be here when it goes off!"

The marauder gulped, removing the mask that was covering his face. I recognized him! He was one of the officers that were working on the facility under me. I remembered his name... Koliya Anatoliyevich!

"Dr. Kerenski... we just wanted to..." The bald man muttered.

"I don't give a shit what you wanted. Koliya, I'm going to destroy Aralsk-7. I'm putting an end to my legacy of death and you can't stop me. I don't want to kill all of you too. LEAVE, I can't hold the trigger for a very long time!" I barked. "There is nothing for you here!"

"We..."

"I have cancer, Koliya. I don't have anything to live for. I'm destroying what I've built with my last breath. Leave," I insisted, my hand holding the flare gun trembling.

The ex-Soviet officer gulped. After a moment, he looked at my determined face and at the gun in my shaking hand.

"Fine," he spat.

He yelled orders to his men. They responded very quickly, far too quickly for civilians. All of them had been army men! I gritted my teeth in realization of how quickly the USSR soldiers turned to stealing things... but then again, I also technically stole the fertilizer and had no intention of returning it.

As the hovercraft departed, I stepped to the window and aimed the gun into the wet mud and let go of the trigger. The flare shot out of the window and hissed, sputtering out as it sank under the murky water.

I was standing on the top of a large dingy, the engine humming behind me. A smiling Kazakh captain was telling me something about the harvest being late this year. I wasn't listening.

I was heading for Makhachkala from Tengiz across the Caspian Sea. I felt too ashamed to return to Moscow, felt unwelcome there as the USSR had fallen and a new corrupt regime was rising into power, fueled by violence and greed.

A distant boom resounded from the back. I didn't look behind me, looking ahead into my future that laid across the Caspian waves.

"What was that?" The Kazakh blinked.

I shrugged, not saying anything. Aralsk-7 was no more.

The timer I set to ignite the fertilizer... worked.

I had a small plot of land with a garden, a workshop and a cottage in Eastern Ukraine that was given to me by Nikita Khrushchev for my accomplishments in virology. I would settle there, away from corruption, politics and criminal madness that was hemorrhaging 90's Moscow.

A Ukrainian colleague of mine had told me the news, when I called her up from a rotary phone in Tengiz. Her best friend's family had died in a traffic accident, leaving a three year old girl as a lone survivor.

Perhaps, I could adopt her, teach her everything I knew... start a family of my own?

It was something to do instead of being bored out of my mind in an empty garden.

A new legacy awaited me, one of a peaceful end of my days.

The girl's name was... Yulia Ishenko.

>[ I promised myself that I would take care of her, as if I was her own grandfather. ]