Cooldown (Unfrozen Book #1): LitRPG Series Read online

  Cooldown

  a novel

  by Anton Tekshin

  Unfrozen

  Book#1

  Magic Dome Books

  Unfrozen

  Book #1: Cooldown

  Copyright © Anton Tekshin 2021

  Cover Art © Vladimir Manyukhin 2021

  English translation copyright © Boris Smirnov 2021

  Published by Magic Dome Books, 2021

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-80-7619-277-5

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the shop and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is entirely a work of fiction. Any correlation with real people or events is coincidental.

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  Table of Contents:

  In Place of a Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  In Place of an Epilogue

  About the Author

  In Place of a Prologue

  It may sound trite, but every bad story has to start someplace: a point of origin or a zero hour — call it what you like — but after it everything goes up in flames and plummets to the coldest climes of hell for a smoke break with the devil.

  So if I’m going to tell this story in an orderly manner, then I had better start with my death…

  “Listen to me, you’ve got to surrender peacefully!” Goha’s voice again hissed over the radio. “Why insist on going down in a shootout? You’ll just scare the townspeople.”

  “Come off it,” I responded lazily, tinkering with the settings of an old laptop, its screen displaying a low-res feed from the exterior cameras. “Why don’t you just go ahead and offer to whack me for free, like, for ‘resisting arrest’ or something? Nah. I’m not about to make your life that much easier.”

  “Nobody is trying to whack you…”

  “Goha, you know as well as I do that I’ll never make it to the first interrogation,” I reminded my friend of the bitter truth of my predicament. “This way, at least I can make some noise with the boys like in the good old days.”

  “And, what, you’re going to promise not to shoot anyone?”

  “I promise to limit myself only to the ones dumb enough to walk into my line of fire. How about that?”

  “You’re a psycho!”

  “That’s right. I have an official diagnosis confirming it too. In fact, I have two of them.”

  “There’s no helping you! I finally get it now — both why you started this whole mess and why you refuse to surrender. But try to get it through your head: Innocent people could get hurt!”

  “And that’s exactly why we’re going to have our shootout way out here and not in the city center. You boys can even go ahead and use gas here. No one will get hurt.”

  “What about the hostages?”

  “They’re already asleep, they won’t notice a thing.”

  “So there’s no way to resolve this without resorting to lethal force?”

  “No.”

  “Then I can’t help you any further,” Goha said with a note of regret. “This is goodbye.”

  “Say hello to your wife for me,” I said and, after a pause, added, “Sorry that I won’t make it to your housewarming…”

  On the other side of the barricade, my former squad mate disconnected without a further word. Well, sure, I could understand him. For a negotiator, he had already said too much. I hoped he wouldn’t get into any trouble over it. On the other hand, he did his job quite well too — he had kept me on the line, blathering, as long as he could.

  Lost in thought for a few moments, I fiddled with the now-useless radio in my hands, then sighed and tossed it into the lap of the tied-up sergeant who was periodically mooing something through the gag I had improvised for him. He and his partner had been patrolling the area on the lookout for the People’s Avenger, when I found them and borrowed their walkie-talkies. I had tucked both of my hostages behind the thick concrete pillars that supported the cracked vault ceiling to keep them out of harm’s way during the imminent assault. Although… I doubt they’ll ever appreciate my consideration.

  Four heavily-armed assault teams had methodically encircled the abandoned maintenance facility in which I had dug in for my last, decisive stand. Everyone was here for my sake — why, it made my heart swell with pride! They chose not to breach through the main entrance, preferring to use the first floor’s ample windows as their points of entry. Although the windows were positioned high up off the ground, they hadn’t had glass in them since the days of perestroika.

  But I had foreseen this possibility and set up some tripwires in the window sills. Fully armed and equipped, the boys weighed as much as medieval knights out for a fishing trip on a frozen pond, so the window sills shifted noticeably under their weight as they tried to climb over and my tripwires were already stretched taut as it was.

  A series of detonations thundered through the place, kicking up a cloud of dust. Oh, that’s going to cause a real commotion outside…

  For a short while, I was the last thing on anyone’s mind. It was only temporary though — I had armed the booby traps with stun grenades so no one would be seriously injured. Yet they did get a fright and they did get pissed. Well, it’s their own fault. Next time they won’t be so careless. At least now, they will come crawling up to my control room on the third floor with all the proper caution.

  In the meantime, the long-awaited, snow-white Range Rover, with its sparkling chrome details and blazing light bar on its roof, finally appeared on the horizon. With a honk at the patrolmen yawning at the cordon, the SUV rolled into the parking lot and came to a stop in a disabled parking place. A good location — at once not too far from where I was holed up and safely in the cover of some nearby garages. If I hadn’t festooned the perimeter with cameras, I’d never even see him there to begin with.

  As I had assumed, Colonel Rybachenko had decided to personally witness the death of the People’s Avenger — me, that is. I had made business difficult for him lately, having eliminated too many of his regular “customers.” Moreover, he couldn’t help but be concerned for his own skin — there wasn’t a single person in town that didn’t remember how, driving drunk one night, he had hit two local girls with this same Range Rover.

  Now as then, he didn’t bother emerging from the comfort of his air-conditioned cabin. A coordinator in a light bulletproof vest quickly raced up to the driver-side
window and reported the latest developments. The assault had already begun, so the colonel would soon make his appearance for the nightly news. After all, at a certain level, you earn your next rank and promotion by putting in the hard work of showing up and appearing before the cameras. Backbreaking labor, what can you say…

  I waited for the coordinator to step away from the car and head back to the makeshift tactical HQ, before picking up the simple black and white Siemens cell phone. The number was already dialed; all I had to do was press the rubber call button.

  “Hello, you have a collect call from ‘the other side,’” I hissed without taking my eyes off the grainy camera feed. “Ksenia and Olga Lisitsyn want to have a word — remember them?”

  There was a prolonged beep in the phone, followed by several intermittent ones, as if the call had been ended — and at the same time the stream from my camera wobbled and blurred in large ripples. My ears registered the solid boom a half second later, but the building around me didn’t even shudder. Built to stand for centuries, what did it care about a manhole blowing through a car parked outside?

  Now all that remained was to disconnect the external hard drive with my most vital data and place it into the pre-prepared glass vessel. In our day of rabid technological advancement, a hammer could no longer ensure that the data on the disk would be destroyed for good, so I turned to acid, pouring it liberally over the hard drive. It’s true that this method was hazardous to both health and the environment, but it was also reliable.

  I screwed the lid tight on the container and placed it carefully under the table. After that, the laptop went for a short flight through the third floor window onto the asphalt where it shattered to pieces. The forensics guys also need to have something to do, so let them put it together again. By the time they succeed, all that’ll be left of the HDD would be a milky goo. This was much more reliable than battering it with a hammer.

  And now I could welcome my guests with a clear conscience. So as to make sure that they would have no doubts about how dangerous I was, I confiscated the service Makarov from one of the patrolmen, leaving all the cartridges in his pocket where they would be out of harm’s way.

  However, I never made it away from the window, which looked out onto the blank wall of a five-story apartment block. A burning pain shot through my chest, knocking the air out of my lungs and violently pushing me backward. I grabbed at the wound automatically, in a vain attempt to still the wild pain, took an awkward step and, without comprehending how, suddenly found myself supine on the floor.

  Hadn’t I double-checked all the angles the day before? I had made sure that there was no line of sight into my control room’s single window — neither from the apartment block’s roof, nor from the ground. The bullets should have gone either into the floor or into the ceiling. And the only way to perch on the smooth wall of the apartment block was by gripping the drainpipe with your cheeks, which is very inconvenient for shooting.

  Well, this hole in my chest hadn’t come out nowhere. The sniper must have been on rappel… But it didn’t matter now anyway.

  I tried to remove my hand so as to let the blood pour from me faster, but I found that I could not move a finger as if something was holding it down. Wheezing and hacking up scarlet clots, I somehow turned my head to the side and saw Lydia sitting next to me, clamping the wound with both hands. Even though I could no longer speak, I could still address the ghost that had entrenched herself in my mind:

  “Enough! Let me go…”

  But she only shook her head violently, stubborn as ever… Even death couldn’t change her.

  Growing heavier with every passing moment, my eyelids finally closed for good, but my ears still worked, conveying a hasty, shuffling to my oxygen-starved brain. It was the stomping of boots pounding up the stairs, conveying the tactical team to my location. You boys are too late, the sniper beat you to the punch and you’ll have to buy him drinks later.

  As for me, it’s time for me to take a rest.

  Chapter 1

  To my surprise, the welcoming party on the other side didn’t consist of horned demons, eagerly rubbing their shaggy paws, nor melancholy angels with drooping wings. And not even Lydia, who has been waiting for me longer than anyone else. My host on the other side turned out to be a withered old man dressed in snow-white clothes. There was something incongruous about this attire for a heavenly servant, and it took me some effort to observe that what made it odd was that it was an ordinary jumpsuit, albeit one made of some unfamiliar cellular material.

  The old man looked at me sternly, as if I had interfered with his monthly quota for harvested souls, and then remarked to no one in particular:

  “He is coming around now. In a few minutes, he should be completely ready.”

  What?!

  I peered dully past the old man, trying to get my bearings. God forbid I’d been resuscitated! My head refused to obey my eyes — in fact, somehow I didn’t even feel that my head was there at all — but as far as I could see, there was nothing around us, except for smooth, snow-white walls, which I had initially taken for stereotypical posthumous fog.

  I looked sideways as far as I could and caught a glimpse of the edge of the bed I was lying on. It was the same white as my pajamas. They must have defibbed me back after all… But how had they managed it with a wound like that?

  “Stay still, young man!” the old man shook a long knobby finger at me. “Breathe evenly, your sensitivity should return soon.”

  Surely this strange Asclepius was very mistaken — it was as if he didn’t know who his patient was. Any other, more circumspect doctor would be praying that I remain as still as a plant for as long as possible. With a patient like me, he could easily find himself coming to on a resuscitation table himself.

  However, this would have been the case in better times. At the moment I felt like a meat popsicle on reheat in the microwave. A sharp tingling pain swept across my muscles, gradually dissipating into a sore aching and leaving behind singed nerve endings. It was almost like the feeling of pins and needles followed by frostbite. The cutting pain contorted my body and made me want to howl like a wolf, but I held on, refusing to beg for anesthesia.

  As I finally regained control of my neck, I tore my head up and off the hard bed with almost a creak. Once the fireworks faded from my eyes, a look around the room left me with more questions than answers. There was nothing in here except the old man and the bed with me in my pajamas — not so much as a simple doorway in one of the walls. What was even more astounding, however, was the absence of any life support equipment! And yet who was the doctor just talking to?

  Sentience continued its painful reconquest of my body, booting up my hibernating subsystems one after another — my hands prickled, my stomach rumbled, my sinuses popped from the muscular spasms. I lay back, taking a good look at the wide medical restraints across my wrists, and focused on calming my ragged breathing, as the old man had advised.

  After a bit, the pain began to ebb, but my body still felt as weak as if I had lactic acid flowing through my veins instead of blood. Were these the side effects of severe anesthesia? Or some sort of therapy? I am breathing on my own, after all, and I’m not sputtering blood, nor wheezing. Miracle of miracles…

  About five minutes later, my tongue, which had been turning indolently in my mouth as if I’d been eating syrup, came back to life.

  “Where…?” is all I could manage.

  “It’s not important!” snapped the old man, bringing a small glass with a straw to my lips. “Drink this.”

  It wasn’t much of a toast, but the thirst I felt was clenching my throat tightly enough to make my larynx squeak.

  Either the water in the glass was distilled or my taste buds remained disabled because the liquid had neither taste nor smell. Still, I felt instantly better after drinking, and my head almost stopped spinning. It was too bad the old man did not have a second drink to offer me. Apparently, he hadn’t counted on me feeling so much better so
quickly.

  While I was drinking my fill, a respectable-looking man in a business suit entered the room simply and casually — right through an entrance that suddenly appeared in the wall. And I do mean “appeared” since it had not been there a second earlier. A vertical slit formed and abruptly expanded outward revealing a featureless corridor on its other side. At the same time, there was not even the trace of a door sash or frame.

  I had already come to terms with the notion that I was in some other world, but when you see such alien tricks out of the blue… You can’t help but think: Have I lost my last marble or am I just pumped full of something extra potent?

  Meanwhile, the man gracefully sat down on a semicircular section of floor that rose to the occasion, seatback and all, cleared his throat and addressed me in an articulated baritone:

  “Hello, Clem.”

  I couldn’t help but wince: It wasn’t that I was sick of hearing my name, just that lately, those who spoke it typically wanted me dead. What can you do — such is the downside of the popularity that comes with being the People’s Avenger.