On the night that civilization clutched at its chest, voided its bowels and keeled over, choking in its own blood, Stanislav Kargin had been the man who led the Premier, the Chairman of the Government and his Ministers from their homes away from their families in the middle of the night, transported them through Moscow’s empty streets in a concealed, solar-powered APC vehicle to Kremlin and then secured them in the high-security bunker below.

Protocol had decreed that the highest-ranking official in Moscow at the time would assume immediate extreme powers, in order to enforce marshal law and maintain the peace at all costs, until such time as the crisis would pass. It was an old law, a remnant of the Soviet regime, more of a madcap last-minute measure intended to maintain order in the event of a possible nuclear conflict. As if locking the citizens in their homes and clearing the streets would somehow prevent nuclear atomization or the horrors of a slow death by radiation poisoning when the bombs did rain down.

The Marshal of the Federation, Taras Zarubin, was not in Moscow at the time, as he had been chosen to participate in a NATO exercise in Uzbekistan. The Ministers trusted him to return as soon as he got their message, relayed through sat-radio through encrypted channels. Unfortunately, the Marshal had perished, along with the officers in charge of the exercise, when their armored Black Hawk transport’s engines ceased working and plunged half a kilometers through the air onto a mountain. The General of the Army, Sergei Istomin, was at the time in his vacation house in Volgograd with his family. After the events of that night and the collapse of human civilization, General Istomin went quite mad and turned Volgograd and the surrounding towns and villages into his personal dictatorship. He was killed, 16 years later, by the Batu-Khan himself, his head placed at the end of a spike, which was in turn welded on the Khan’s RV.

As a result, this left General-Polkovnik Stanislav Kargin as the caretaker of Moscow and (from what he later surmised) the absolute dictator of Russia. This last realization took some time to sink in. First, he needed to restore order and cease the looters and the crowds of mad-eyed Muscovites, who found themselves suddenly deprived of heat and light in the middle of winter. As the urban assault vehicles in his disposal seemed to have ceased functioning (and after a quick search, realizing there was not a drop of fossil fuels left in all of Moscow), he commandeered his fleet of half-dozen solar-powered APCs and armed his men and sent them into the streets.

Shots were fired, blood was spilt, skulls were fractured, limbs were broken. It was chaos, but it did the job. Using what little juice was left in the PA systems, Stanislav Kargin informed the population of Moscow that the crisis was soon to be resolved and that they should wait for further orders. Two years later, no further orders were given. In the few instances that Moscow achieved communication with its neighbours and the rest of the Federation, they discovered that everywhere, from Helsinki to Vladivostok to Oymyakon, oil had run out. And with it, so had power. The world had gone dark, this time perhaps for good.

It was during that second winter, as the Moscovites were tearing down advertisement billboards and tearing down the floorboards of government offices to keep the bonefires to keep them warm, as Stanislav Kagrin stood by his wife’s side, who was dying of tuberculosis as if she were some old maid from a Dostoyevsky novel, killed by the lack of the drugs which could have otherwise been procured, that he went mad. He waited for his wife to lay finally still, then chose a handful of good men. With them, he went into the government’s bunker, set up hoses into the ventilation system and pumped a canister’s worth of nerve gas inside, until the screaming was replaced by bloody gurgling and then that was in turn, silenced.

Stanislav Kagrin then gathered his men to his side and informed them thusly:

“It is over. I do not know what happened and I cannot say that I understand, but as of this day, the Russian Federation is no more. Our neighbors have fallen prey to the same disaster. Finland is capped in snow, Chechya is finally laying still. The Americans have ceased the radio chatter on every airwave and from what little we have gathered, Europe is little more than a pitch-black hole now. We are alone. Moscow is all alone.

“I was chosen to assume direct command of the Federation as acting officer until the crisis was ended. From what it appears, the crisis is not to end. Not today, not tomorrow, or ever again. We are alone, gentlemen and our one and only bastion and domain now appears to be Moscow and nothing else. As acting commander of the Federation, I therefore assume complete control of the city and its resources and will choose three of you to be my personal advisors, to be part of my government.

“From this day forward, we are more than just the law or peacekeepers. We are the lords of Moscow. There is nothing beyond the limits of the city, but wasteland and barbarism. We are no longer part of the Russian Federation. To us and to the rest of the world, the Federation has ceased to exist. The people in this city are now our responsibility but they are also our subjects. We will divide this place according to the mandate of me and my advisors. From this day forward, I am reinstating the Czarist mandate of kholop. This will be the punishment for all citizens who defy the rule of law: not death, but slavery to none other but us.

“We will be called monsters, in the days to come. I will perhaps be Stas the Mad, drien perhaps to madness by syphilis that I caught from my dear wife and my advisors will be bumbling lunatics. You will be the faceless, mindless automatons that bloodied their hands in my name and those babbling, frothing beasts out there will be our hapless victims. But for the time being, history is over, gone along with the rest of civilization. Right here, right now, there is no justice. Just us. You may inform the citizens accordingly.”

There were riots, of course, as soon as the news came out, but they petered out on their own with the minimum of violence. After all, deep down inside, the citizens of Moscow had accepted their fate, after two years of starvation, of lawlessness, of dark and silent winters. The idea of a madman dictator barely phazed them, in light of these events. If anything, it rallied them together, gave them a sense of purpose. There was a semblance of order now, someone at the helm. Sure, sometimes people went missing in the middle of the night and were seen paraded with their heads shaved, chained to each other as they were paraded down Kremlyoskavya Avenue, but these men and women were then sent off to work the fields of the annexed cities on the outskirts of Moscow. It was the toil of these few that put food in the plates of the Moscovites and kept the order, unlike those know-nothing anarchists that sometimes mustered enough gunpowder or stole explosives from military storages and tried to bomb bridges or take down the Kremlin. These people disturbed the peace, they threatened the regime and would rather have Moscow go hungry than suffer the tyranny of Kargin. And what was so bad about Kargin? The old men asked, huddled around oil-drum hearths. He put food on our tables, he cleaned up the streets, he brought order and he got the tap water running again! What’s that? Freedom? The right of choice? Elected governments? That’s your belly talking, boy. It’s way too full and the gas is clogging up your brain.

Sometimes, people fished bodies out of the Moshkva river (so what) other times, families would go missing and nobody would ask questions (they’ve always lived here). Every couple of nights, someone would be running down the streets, banging on doors, asking for someone, anyone to open up, to help him because they were coming and everyone knew who they were (sorry, can’t help) and then there would be a gunshot and the screaming would stop and people would just go back to sleep. Moscow was an interesting place, under Kargin. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than anywhere else.

Until the summer came and the nuclear reactor in Liubertsy failed. There were no artificial lights in Moscow anymore, but there were food storages, with freezers the size of 18-wheeler trucks. There was no airconditioning anymore, but there were water purification facilities across the Moskva, that made the water fit for drinking. Suddenly, the citizens of Moscow found themselves going hungry and thirsty and the anarchists did not seem half bad. And for all his Purges and all his speeches, Kargin could not have maintained order, not on a populace with empty bellies. It was not long before the rumbling of the bellies and the pounding in their skulls drove the Muscovites to thoughts of rebellion. It came as no surprise to Kargin, when one of his advisors was killed by a sniper’s bullet (perhaps the last one in all of Russia by now that wasn’t in the hands of his men). The gun was perhaps old and shoddily maintained, otherwise it wouldn’t have veered in the air, missing him by that fraction that killed his advisor.

It was the middle of July, four years into the apocalypse and the streets of Moscow smelled like rotted napkins and rotted meat, when the prophets came to visit. By that time, the revolution had gone quiet, the bullets had run out and gun powder was in short demand. So the anarchists had taken the guns they had pried from the dead soldiers and filed their end to make crude, heavy spears, while Kargin’s men had ransacked the rusted hulks of cars and welded engine parts to make jury-rigged cannons, using rusted shards of metal and glass held together with wire, for ammunition. With these weapons, they bombarded the streets, the only evidence of their deployment the sounds of the screaming wounded and the lucky few that had died. The survivors were hung in the Krasnaya Platz, their screams a poor deterrent.

The prophets came to Moscow from the North, news of their coming spreading like wildfire among the populace. They came with the starved and the sick of Klyabovo and Lobnya at their side, a tide of the huddled and the sick and the tired, riding on mounts that trotted like horses, with faces that were too human for comfort, armed with weapons made from bone and muscle and cartilage. They crossed the borders of Moscow during the infighting, led by a blind man, his body ravaged to the point where he was little more than bones draped in skin. And where the blind man came, he would heal tetanus with a touch of his hand. With his spit, he would close wounds and with his bile, he would heal tuberculosis and the diseases that had crept up from the tainted Moskva. To the starved populace, he offered choice meat, offering to them some of his fattest mounts, which died without protest. To allay the thirsting, he had his most devout followers link hands and melded their bodies to create a fine mesh, which purified the water coming upriver. The sacrificed sang praises to his name even as they drowned. It wasn’t long before the rest of Moscow followed.

Kargin went to meet the prophet, as soon as he heard that he came down to the Kremlin, to heal the sick and the dying among his men. And the blind man, he walked up to Kargin as he went to grasp his hand, placed his palm on his chest, breathed in and said:

“There is something growing in your chest, hungry and indestructible. I can make it go away.”

And Kargin, who had suffered in secret for months, denying the aid of doctors for fear of the news of the tumor that was eating him getting out, suffering wracking bouts of cough that brought up black and red from between his clenched teeth, who could feel the very thing stirring inside him, writhing in his chest took the man in right away.

And the prophet (whose name became Bog, in honor to the old gods) found for himself a place in the Kremlin, uniting Moscow by virtue of the miracles he had brought to bear to its citizens. At his suggestion, the surrounding towns were stripped of their crops and his followers were buried in them, their bodies turning into tendrils of flesh and masses of bone that saturated the ground, growing orchards of bone and meat, that yielded exotic, alien food stuffs to the people of Moscow. Bog the Prophet then convened with the few technicians under Kargin, to whom he showed the secret of creating weapons out of living things. It was barely a year before the alleys of Moscow were saturated with this new, living strain of life that the prophet had brought with him. As for Kargin, he had been cured: the lump of dead malignant cells that had been nesting inside his chest was no longer aggressive and hungry: it had instead, been taught to co-exist in him, to grow and to expand and it was not long before it made its way out of Kargin’s body, a beautiful dancing poplyp that sang with the voice of a small child.

A great, red age had dawned for Moscow, that now beat to the rhythm of a myriad hearts. When news of the Mongols came, all of what was left of Russia trembled. All of it, except for Moscow. It only breathed in quietly and then laughed a long, hoarse laugh.