The Kid from Hell Chapter 8 - Coming Home
Back to Giganda
Chapter 8 is short. Maybe the shortest chapter in the book. And it hits the hardest.
Gack pushes through the last thickets and steps out onto a road. It’s raining. Not a light drizzle, a downpour. There’s a stench coming from a ditch where something that used to be a person is rotting in clayey slime. A burnt-out tank sits half-sunk in a quagmire, its flamethrower barrel pointed uselessly at the clouds.
He’s back on Giganda. He’s back in the war.
The Road to the City
Gack walks along the edge of the road toward the city. But “road” is generous. It’s a river of liquid clay. And coming toward him through the mud are columns of refugees.
Dilapidated carts on massive wooden wheels, pulled by oxen so thin you can count their ribs. Women wrapped in shawls up to their eyes, sobbing, cursing, whipping the animals. And on the carts, buried between wet bundles and overturned furniture, pale scrofulous children cling to each other like monkeys in the rain. Dozens of children on every cart.
Not a single man in the entire caravan.
Mud clings to Gack’s boots in thick layers. Rain soaks through his jacket, runs down his neck, streams over his face. He keeps walking. The refugees keep coming. They carry wet packages and worn suitcases, push handcarts, strain with their last bit of strength. Nobody stops.
An old man sits in the mud with a broken crutch on his lap, repeating the same words over and over: “Take me along, for the love of God. Take me along, for the love of God.” Nobody takes him along.
From a tilted telephone pole, a man hangs with his arms twisted behind his back. His face has turned black.
This is Giganda. This is what Gack was fighting for. This is what war actually looks like when you’re standing in the middle of it instead of giving orders from a bunker.
The Van in the Mud
One vehicle is going the other direction, toward the city, against the flow. A military medical van, stuck in the mud. The driver screams something from the cab. At the back, a short military doctor and a young nurse are trying to push, but it’s hopeless. Two people can’t move a van out of Gigandan clay.
Gack walks past. Then he hears it.
“Young man! Stop! I order you!”
The doctor comes running after him, slipping, waving his arms. Behind the doctor charges the driver, squat and brutal, fists like hammers.
“You must help us immediately,” the doctor screams. He’s completely covered in brown mud, and it’s a mystery how he can see through the mud-splattered lenses of his pince-nez. “I will not permit you to refuse!”
Gack just looks at him.
“There’s a plague there!” The doctor points toward the city. “I’m taking serum! Twenty thousand ampoules! Why won’t anyone help me?”
The Moment
And here is where the Strugatskys deliver the entire point of the book in a single paragraph.
Gack looks at this old, feeble, filthy doctor. And suddenly he sees something else. Sun-flooded rooms. Enormous, beautiful, clean people wearing bright shirts. The flames of the Phantoms flickering above the glade.
Earth. He’s seeing Earth. The world he left behind.
It hits like a hallucination. Brief, vivid, gone.
The driver doesn’t wait for an answer. He grabs Gack’s gun by the barrel, rips it from under his arm, and hurls it into the woods. Then he winds up and punches Gack in the face. “Dressed like a prince, you damned bastard.”
The doctor screams at the driver to stop.
Gack’s Choice
Gack staggers but stays on his feet. He doesn’t fight back. He doesn’t chase the gun. He slowly wipes the mud from his face and keeps staring at the doctor.
The doctor grabs his arm. “I beg you. I have twenty thousand ampoules. Please understand, twenty thousand. It’s still not too late.”
They walk over to the van. The driver climbs behind the wheel, muttering. The motor roars.
And Gack, standing between the doctor and the nurse, puts his shoulder to the van and pushes with all his strength.
The motor whines. The mud flies up like a fountain. And he keeps pushing, straining, pressing.
And thinking: I’m home. I’m home.
Why This Ending Matters
No dramatic monologue. No explanation. No redemption speech. The Strugatskys just show you a man pushing a van out of the mud.
But that man walked onto Earth as a killer, a soldier who only understood the world through guns and orders and survival. He spent months surrounded by people who had moved beyond violence centuries ago. He couldn’t understand them. He didn’t want to understand them.
And now he’s back in the mud and the rain and the war. Someone takes his weapon and punches him in the face. And instead of killing the man, instead of walking away, he pushes a van full of plague serum toward a dying city.
That’s it. That’s the whole transformation. Not in words. In action.
The gun is gone. The soldier is gone. What’s left is a man who can help. And for the first time in the entire book, Gack is home.
Previous: Chapter 7 - Breaking Free