Nikolay and the Antichrist. by Pseudo-Murakami

Nikolay and the Antichrist
by Pseudo-Murakami

The Antichrist came on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate. I remember because the radio was playing an old jazz standard—one of those songs that sounds like it has been waiting in an empty room for decades. The announcer’s voice cracked halfway through the news bulletin, as if he’d suddenly realized that words were inadequate tools.

Humankind did what it always claimed it would do in such moments: it united. Committees formed overnight. Secure rooms filled with men and women who spoke in acronyms and nodded gravely. They decided resistance required symbols as much as force, and so each nation sent something like its distilled self.
America sent a square-chinned veteran from Delta Force, a man who treated silence as a language and spoke it fluently. Britain contributed an SAS operative who moved through corridors as if he’d been born in them, polished, ironic, already bored. France offered a Foreign Legionnaire who looked uncannily like an actor from an old film—handsome in a tired way, cigarette always unlit, as if the idea of smoking mattered more than the smoke.
Russia did something different.
They went north, past the places where maps stop pretending to be precise, to Polar Owl prison. It was a white place surrounded by white space, where sound died quickly and time behaved strangely. There they unlocked a cell that hadn’t been opened in years. What was done to him was more than solitary imprisonment, it was akin to being buried alive.

Nikolay stepped out wearing a striped navy undershirt, thin as a bad joke against the cold. He had the posture of someone who had already lost everything important and therefore felt light. His eyes carried a mild, incurable contempt for authority, like a childhood illness that never quite went away.
“So,” he said, looking at the officers, “end of the world again?”
On the transport plane he told jokes no one laughed at. Cynical jokes. Deadpan jokes. Jokes that sounded like confessions if you listened too closely. Someone whispered the rumor—everyone knew it already—that Nikolay had sold his soul to the Devil during a winter operation that officially never happened. Never happened as calling the top man a traitor on the radio and taking him out with the bang that also never happened.
Nikolay heard this and shrugged. “Taking him out was the soul well spent.” They shivered.
The team gathered without ceremony. No flags. No speeches. The bunch of celebrities in their clandestine trade eyed each other as poker players that have heart of others but would not jump as puppies of meeting other top dogs. Just a long table, lukewarm coffee, and a sense that reality had loosened its grip slightly. They were flown to a place that did not officially exist. Even now, I won’t describe it—not because I’m afraid, but because the place itself seemed allergic to being remembered.
There was a portal there. It didn’t glow. It didn’t roar. It simply was, like an open question suspended in the air. On the other side waited a world that had made a different set of choices.

The mission was simple: close that portal. Starve the Antichrist of whatever kept feeding him strength.

The minions came in waves, though “waves” is the wrong word. More like recurring thoughts you can’t quite get rid of. Creatures stitched together from bad ideas and worse intentions. Teeth where eyes should be. Limbs that moved half a second too late.

They fought.

The American moved with brutal efficiency. The Brit improvised with dry elegance. The Frenchman fought as if remembering something bittersweet. Nikolay fought like someone correcting a mistake he’d made long ago.

Near the portal, time began to smear. Nikolay took a hit meant for no one in particular. He looked down, mildly surprised, as if noticing a stain on a shirt. His insides were suddenly outside and entangling his legs. It was inconvenient.
He took a blade—deliberate shape like from a pirate movie with the stripped handle composed of the stack of plastic plates of different colors—and cut the bowels that needed cutting to free his legs.



“Losing weight isn’t that hard after all,” he muttered with a smile of defiance.
Pain registered somewhere distant, like weather in another city.
He walked toward the portal holding a small device in his hand. A nuke, compact and unromantic.

The Antichrist spoke then, his voice gentle, almost friendly.
“Why bother, soldier?” it said. “You, Nikolay—I’ve heard—you sold your soul to the Devil. What is there left to gain?”

Nikolay stopped. Spat on the ground.
“I sure sold the soul to the Devil.” Said Nikolay, “Not my own soul, though.”

He spat out a mouthful of blood, winked to Brit who sat back to the wall with his broken legs spread wide. The Nikolay’s bright blue eyes smiled. Only the eyes.  With sparks. Then he stepped forward and took a silent dive into the portal. The explosion was not loud. It felt more like a door closing somewhere very far away.

Afterward, the world resumed its bad habits. The radio played jazz. Politicians promised to fix what their predecessors ruined, students cheated at their assignments, spouses cheated too, shoppers shoplifted, cops looked the other way, all lied, no one cared. People went back to forgetting important things.
Sometimes, late at night, I think of Nikolay. Light as air. Free of authority. Finally, off duty.

And for a moment, the room feels less empty.