The Undesirables (Sample Chapter)

Chapter 1: The Cellist

And now they were gone.

Karen was so happy not to have to see them anymore that she turned around and walked back to the State bakery. Soldiers were there, standing uncomfortably on their skis, banging their forearms against their chests to keep warm. They weren't just male soldiers. In Stalin's Russia, women could fight, too. Inna's older sister was there, her machine gun slung over her shoulder. Karen smiled and waved as she approached.

"Thank you, comrades, for finally clearing the streets!"

Even though Karen had grown up in New York, her Russian was so good she could often pass for a native, especially since plenty of citizens didn't speak perfect Russian. Although she couldn't quite pass as a full-blooded Russian, her exotic accent, dark hair, pale skin, and haunting eyes left many Leningraders thinking when they first met her that she came from one of the Soviet Union's far-flung republics—from Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan. Karen had gotten her dark features from her father, but she'd learned Russian from her mother, who'd been a Russian ballerina. They'd spoken to each other exclusively in her mother's native tongue until Karen was ten. Then her mother had abandoned her. But Karen's knowledge of the language had not.

The soldiers stopped flapping their arms and eyed Karen. "What are you talking about?" asked Inna's sister.

"The bodies," Karen explained, still smiling. "You removed all the dead bodies."

Inna's sister shook her head. "Why would we do that? We're too busy guarding the food and the trenches to bother cleaning up bodies that stay frozen until spring, anyway."

Karen's smile fell. "So you didn't remove them?"

Inna's sister shook her head. "It wasn't us, Comrade."

Karen nodded and turned to leave. She hurried back to her apartment, carefully counting the city blocks until she reached the fountain where the old woman's body had been. She jerked to a stop. The old woman was gone, too.

Now Karen felt even more confused. The corpse had been there only ten minutes ago. But if the soldiers hadn't moved her, who had?

Then she smelled something delicious. It was like a smell she remembered from New York, an aroma she associated with Thanksgiving or Christmas. Not quite the same—not roasted chestnuts—but similar. It made her mouth water.

Someone, somewhere, was cooking, and not just one person, lots of people. Karen desperately wanted to find out where, find out who. She followed the aroma through the snow. She was no longer careful to follow the route she knew. The scent of cooking proved too strong a lure to resist. She wasn't just hungry; she was starving. Her bread rations should have provided enough calories for her to survive, but the government had been replacing some of the flour with sawdust. As a result, the population was slowly dying.

Karen followed her nose through bombed-out buildings, across streets pitted with shell holes into frozen courtyards and through snowy alleyways. In one of those alleys she finally found what she was looking for. Men and women were crowded around a trash can. A fire burned inside it, and over the fire was meat.

But it didn't look like Christmas. The men and women didn't look like Santa Claus. Their cheeks were drawn, their eyes sunken, their teeth gapped and sharp. They carried pieces of metal pried from concrete rubble or busted street signs. And when they saw Karen, when they turned toward her, they gripped those clubs in both hands as if threatening to use them.

Karen ran. She shouldn't have had the energy to run, but somehow she found it. She was younger than they were, and they couldn't catch up, at least not at first.

She bounded across a street and rounded a corner, her breath puffing steam. She glanced over her shoulder and saw two men still chasing her. She reached the bank of the Neva River, and still the men chased her. She was losing energy fast. Even if she kept running, they would catch her. And no one else was out in the freezing cold, just her and her two pursuers. So she swallowed her fear and raced straight out onto the river's ice.

The Neva was spotted with dark holes where people had broken the ice to draw water. As a result, the river's surface was precarious despite the cold. Every time Karen stepped near one of the holes, the ice began to splinter.

But, as it turned out, starving had one advantage. Karen was seventeen but weighed only as much as she had when she was twelve. The ice didn't break under her. The men pursuing her weren't so lucky. Barely had Karen reached the far shore when she heard a loud crack. She glanced over her shoulder to see the two swallowed by the icy current.

Karen closed her eyes in relief. She knew what would have happened if they'd caught her. They would have eaten her. Where else could they have gotten the meat? Anyone who had meat would've eaten it months ago. And no fresh meat was coming into the besieged city, only sawdust-filled bread. There was a reason the bodies had disappeared from the street. And Karen was no longer happy they were gone.

She wished she had a gun. But at least now she had a shovel. Now she could start a summer garden. Now she wouldn't starve to death.

I hope you enjoyed this sample chapter of The Undesirables. If you'd like to read more, the full book will be available on Amazon from Lake Union Publishing on October 18 (and it's available now for pre-order). 

In anticipation of the book's release, I've deleted the text from the remaining chapters. But I've kept the chapter headings themselves so I won't lose everyone's inspiring comments!