Gulag

Chapter 1: Administrative Authority

His name was Lev Viktorovich Malenkov, though no one called him that anymore.

Lev’s father had been called "a loyal architect of the Soviet interior.” That was the polite version. The Americans called him a defector. Moscow called him a traitor. But to Lev, growing up in a ranch-style home outside Scranton, Pennsylvania, he was just Father. Stoic. Impeccably clean. Eyes like frosted glass. The kind of man who wiped fingerprints from a coffee cup before placing it in the dishwasher.

Lev learned early that control wasn’t something you expressed. It was something you maintained.

So when the sun rose that morning through the bent blinds of his trailer, Lev was already awake. Lying still. Hands folded over his chest like a bureaucrat in his own coffin. He stared at the ceiling for five full minutes before moving. The first commandment of order was stillness. The second: awareness. The third—inevitability.

He sat up.

The operation would begin again today. He had hoped it wouldn’t. He had even left the sponge dry, a symbolic gesture of restraint. But hope was a political liability. It softened discipline. And the truth was already rising in his gut like spoiled air: they had breached containment again.

There had been signs the night before—microscopic movements along the perimeter. Structural noise behind the cabinet. A residue on the stovetop that defied explanation. He had logged it. Logged everything. But reports did not enforce themselves.

He slipped on his gloves with the reverence of a liturgy. Yellow rubber, fraying at the cuffs. The sponge waited beside the sink like a subordinate awaiting orders. He lifted it, turned it in his hand, then lowered it into the bowl of bleach he had mixed an hour earlier. It hissed as it soaked. Like it knew.

Lev didn’t consider himself a violent man. He saw himself as a custodian of continuity. A son of systems. Raised under two flags, two languages, two definitions of truth. The West gave him freedom. The East had given him structure. It was structure he chose.

And now, it fell to him to restore it.

He moved to the window, peering through a slat in the blinds. The yard was silent. The forest beyond it, inert. But he knew better than to trust appearances. Revolt rarely began with parades. It began with seepage. With indiscipline. With tiny trespasses that became doctrine when left unchecked.

He turned back to the kitchen.

Today would require decisive action. Not sweeping. Not scrubbing. Neutralization. The insurgents had returned—small, organized, persistent. They’d taken the lower corridors first. Then the pipes. Then the counter. There was no denying it now.

He muttered aloud, just once, as he pressed the sponge to the backsplash:

“This is not a purge. It’s a correction.”

That was how the old KGB used to say it. When memory became liability. When files were lost, and men vanished not with gunfire but paperwork.

He held the pressure a little longer than necessary, then moved on to the next zone.

Chapter 2: Sanitation Protocols

His father never hit him.

That was important to remember. Americans were always obsessed with that sort of thing—trauma measured in bruises. But Lev bore no scars. His discipline had come from colder hands: silence, precision, the pressure of being watched. His father didn’t yell. He corrected. He had once made Lev recopy an entire grocery list because the ink was smudged.

“Sloppiness,” his father had said in Russian, “is the mother of rebellion.”

Lev absorbed this early. Not in his skin, but in his framework. In the way he folded napkins. In the way he arranged his cleaning agents alphabetically beneath the sink. In the belief that things left unchecked would become dangerous. Rot breeds contagion. Contagion breeds collapse.

He remembered how his father read the newspaper: razor blade in hand, slicing out articles cleanly along their borders before stacking them into categorized piles. “Control,” he’d say, “is first a matter of subtraction.”

That was the origin of the protocols.

Lev never wrote them down—he didn’t need to. They lived in him. They had evolved over years, first as habit, then as doctrine. Every infraction had its tier. Every violation, its corresponding measure. He had containment strategies. Clean-zone sweeps. Borderline mitigations. Deep-scrub contingencies. He didn’t call them what they were. That would be vulgar. He used his own names:

• Protocol 2-A: Bleach soak with vinegar buffer.
• Protocol 5-F: Thermal purge with boiling rinse.
• Protocol 7-R: Complete corridor evacuation.

Most of the time, he didn’t need the harshest measures. Most days the problem remained localized—low-grade infestation, harmless movement. They’d test the system, nudge at the seams. It was manageable.

But lately, they were becoming bold.

There had been a breach under the sink last week. A full detachment—possibly exploratory. He’d responded proportionally. Light bleach, minimal force. A warning. But the same path had been reopened just three days later.

That wasn’t carelessness.

That was defiance.

So now, as he wiped down the lower cabinets with a shaking wrist and a tightening jaw, Lev whispered the new classification to himself: Protocol 8-K—also known, unofficially, as “The Correction.” Not for everyday use. Reserved for ideological re-education zones.

Not a purge.

Just… a resetting of expectations.

He didn’t like it. He preferred peace. Stability. He had always said he’d rather maintain than correct. But insurgency left him no choice. Once compromise failed, clarity had to be imposed.

He paused, looked down at a smear on the tile. A sticky streak, possibly jam. A trail.

He ground the sponge over it like a stamp.

“Order,” he whispered, “is the hygiene of the State.”

Chapter 3: The Correction

He called it Protocol 8-K, but only in his private lexicon.

To anyone else, it would’ve looked like a frenzy. Bleach mixed without gloves. A mop snapped and tossed into the bathtub. Half-used sponges discarded in a trail like wounded foot soldiers. But to Lev, it was a surgical maneuver. An escalated measure to contain what could no longer be reasoned with.

They had crossed too many boundaries.

The movement had reappeared near the cabinet hinges. Then under the stove. Then—boldest of all—along the refrigerator gasket. The refrigerator. That was the inner sanctum. A controlled zone. They had violated it. And that meant they had declared something larger. Not hunger. Ideology.

So he initiated the Correction.

He started in Sector D: the under-sink region. Traditionally high-traffic. High threat. He soaked the perimeter with the chemical mix, letting the acidic smell rise like incense. He sealed the lower vent with foil, then reinforced with packing tape. Not just to kill—to signal.

“Let this be your line,” he muttered. “Let this be your warning.”

As he worked, a memory flickered.

A barrel.

Not bleach this time. Metal. Cold. Labeled in marker. He remembered the smell. Not chemicals. Sweetness. Like rot trying to disguise itself. He saw a pair of shoes—one upright, one on its side—beside the entrance to the unit.

He blinked it away.

Focus, Lev. Cleanliness is continuity.

He moved to Sector B: the microwave alcove. Lately it had become a rallying point. He didn’t know how they got behind it—probably through the outlet—but it had to be neutralized. He pulled the unit forward, revealing a slick trail beneath. The markings were erratic. Desperate. A retreat, maybe.

Too late.

He flooded it.

As the chemical hissed, he found himself whispering—not curses, not rage, but terms. He whispered transfer orders. Numbers. Identifiers. Phrases like “detain until compliant” and “irrecoverable threat.” Not because he believed them, but because they were true. In this moment, they were always true.

He wiped the excess and stood back, surveying the area.

It looked clean.

But Lev knew better than to believe in appearances. There were always survivors. Escapees. Hidden corridors burrowed into the unseen. Just like the others. Just like the ones they’d never traced. The ones that vanished from the street but reappeared in his dreams. Still begging.

He pressed his palm flat to the floor, the bleach seeping into his glove, and whispered:

“If they disappear, they can’t come back.”

Then he rose, dropped the sponge into the bucket like a body, and moved to the window to begin planning the next sweep.

Chapter 4: The Infestation

It started with one.

Lev found it on the kitchen counter, just past the burner knob. Tiny, glossy. Its body segmented with eerie precision, its legs moving like they were following orders. It paused when he leaned in, antennae flicking—calculating. Not afraid. Not even cautious.

He watched it for a long moment.

Then he crushed it with his thumb and wiped the residue into the sink.

He didn’t think about it again until the next morning, when he found three more—two clustered near the toaster and one alone, crawling the rim of the cutting board. He cleaned them away without ceremony. It wasn’t part of the protocols. Not insurgency. Just… pests.

He did not consider them symbolic. He told himself that firmly.

But by the end of the week, the incidents increased. Ten sightings. Then twenty. In formation. Moving with purpose. Appearing in places they had no reason to be—beneath the dial of the stove, behind the box of powdered milk, along the edge of the bathroom mirror.

It was inconvenient, not existential.

He told himself that again.

They had nothing to do with the unrest. Nothing to do with the Correction. They were biological noise—data static. Still, he noted them in the logbook. Gave them tags: Anomalous Intrusions, Subtype 3-B. That made it manageable. That kept them in their place.

He never asked where they came from.

He never asked why now.

Because he was too busy remembering things he was not supposed to remember.

The storage unit.
The sloshing sound of the lid sliding open.
The way the metal walls echoed when he closed the door behind him.

They had begged him, once.

But that couldn’t be right.

Insects don’t beg.

He poured another line of bleach along the kitchen threshold, muttering something about jurisdiction. He taped the vent. He sealed the socket plate. He checked every drawer and sealed the toaster in a zippered bag.

But that night, one of them made it to the pillow.

Just sitting there. Waiting.

He crushed it with the remote control and didn’t sleep until morning.

Chapter 5: Infiltration

It had become systemic.

They weren’t just isolated breaches anymore. They were coordinated advances. Lev charted the paths with a pencil and paper—movement across the floor trim, flanking maneuvers along the outlet line, a nighttime breach near the bread drawer. They were probing the defenses. Sending scouts. Testing him.

He tried to hold the line.

He deep-cleaned the sink with boiling water and ammonia. He created chemical deterrents from vinegar and cayenne, mixed them by headlamp at 3:40 a.m. He laid cotton balls soaked in peppermint oil across the baseboards like trip mines.

It wasn’t enough.

They adapted.

He began finding them in the refrigerator—inside sealed containers. Once, clinging to the inside of the peanut butter lid. Another time, floating in a glass of water he’d left half-finished beside the bed. Their numbers multiplied. Their confidence grew.

He started to hear them.

Not in the usual way—no scratching, no patter. But in the walls. In the silence between the humming of the lights. He could feel the mass of them behind the drywall. A network. A government of bodies. Tiny minds acting as one.

And now… they were watching him.

He felt it while brushing his teeth. While tying his boots. While writing in the logbook—though lately, the ink smeared, and the letters turned to symbols. The ants didn’t speak, but they accused.

He had protocols for insurgents.

He had none for judgment.

The memories became harder to suppress. The cold of metal doors. The burn of acid against skin. The time he slipped—just for a second—while pouring, and the sound the body made when it folded. No names. Just subjects. Detainees. Filth.

He tried to drown the thoughts in noise. Blasted the emergency radio. Recited numbers aloud as he cleaned. Control the rhythm, contain the mind.

But the ants didn’t care.

That morning, he found one crawling across the face of his wristwatch. When he crushed it, two more emerged from beneath his sleeve. Later, he found a cluster in the light fixture. He burned it with a blowtorch. The smell lingered.

They were no longer responding to deterrents.

They were occupying.

And worse—he began to sense that someone else was watching too.

Not them. Them. The officials. The silent interrogators. They were building a case. Gathering timelines. They knew about the barrels. The leases. The receipts. The cameras he had disabled improperly. They knew.

They were closing in.

And still—the ants came.

Chapter 6: Judgment Day

It happened on a morning so clean it felt false.

Lev had finished his inspection early. He'd reinforced the corner traps, re-bleached the baseboards, replaced the peppermint cotton. There had been no movement overnight. No visible breach. For the first time in days, the kitchen felt sterile.

It didn’t last.

At 7:03 a.m., the first sign came: three ants marching side by side across the stovetop. Brazen. Precise. Ceremonial. He crushed them without thinking.

At 7:11, he saw one on the wall above the thermostat. Then another, crawling across the handle of the cabinet where he stored his gloves. By 7:14, they were in the sink.

At 7:17, the voices began.

Outside. Real voices. Male. Commanding. One of them called a name that hadn’t been spoken in twenty years:

“Lev Viktorovich Malenkov. This is the FBI. Come out with your hands visible.”

He stood motionless in the center of the kitchen, sponge still in hand.

This isn’t how it ends, he thought. This isn’t supposed to happen now.

The door didn't burst. It detonated—splintering inward in a cloud of sun and dust. Armed men in tactical gear flooded in, weapons raised, shouting in percussive bursts. “Down! Hands up! Don’t move!”

But Lev couldn’t hear them.

Because the walls had split open.

And the ants were pouring through.

Hundreds—thousands—flooding the corners, swarming down from the fan vent, erupting from the socket, climbing the legs of the table, the walls, his body. They crawled beneath his shirt, into his mouth, across his scalp.

He fell, shrieking, arms flailing. He heard them buzzing—not with wings, but with intention. With judgment. With names.

He screamed that he was sorry. That he was trying to cleanse it. That he didn’t mean to let them go. That it was necessary. That they were dangerous. That they wouldn’t stay in the zones.

That the Correction was justified.

One of the agents pinned him down.

Another kicked the bucket of bleach across the floor, slipping on the linoleum.

And as they dragged him from the kitchen, Lev caught one last glimpse of the counter.

Clean.

Empty.

Except for a single black ant, standing alone at the edge of the sink, its antennae raised in silent command.

Epilogue: Excerpt from Psychiatric Evaluation (Dr. Evangeline Mora, MD)

Forensic Psychiatry Division — Confidential / Case File: U.S. v. Lev Viktorovich Malenkov

Subject: Lev V. Malenkov
Date of Evaluation: June 14, 20XX
Facility: Mid-Atlantic Federal Detention, Psychiatric Wing Alpha
Evaluation Duration: 4 sessions, 96 hours total

Summary:

Mr. Malenkov, age 47, is the American-born son of a Soviet defector and former KGB internal security officer. The patient arrived in a florid psychotic state at the time of arrest—disoriented, combative, and exhibiting profound visual hallucinations. According to the arresting agents, he believed federal personnel were “ants in tactical armor” and that they were enacting retribution for a failed containment operation. His delusional structure is totalizing and internally coherent, but entirely detached from reality.

Due to the acute nature of his presentation, Mr. Malenkov was immediately placed on a stabilization protocol including haloperidol decanoate (50 mg IM biweekly) and lorazepam (1 mg BID PRN). Within seventy-two hours, the most disruptive features of his psychosis—verbal aggression, paranoia-induced screaming, physical resistance—subsided.

By the time of this evaluation, he was calm and cooperative. He spoke in even tones, displayed a flat affect, and exhibited mild extrapyramidal side effects: hand tremors, facial rigidity, and occasional resting mutism. Despite this, he remains intellectually coherent, speaking in organized sentences and often using bureaucratic or militarized terminology. The medication has reduced the volume of his delusion, but not the content.

Mr. Malenkov believes himself to be the administrative custodian of an internal zone undergoing ideological destabilization. He refers to his home and its surrounding land as “the province,” and to his killings—currently nineteen confirmed victims—as “containment enforcement.” He uses sanitized bureaucratic language to describe murder: “detainee neutralization,” “Protocol 8-K,” “resource disinfection.”

He does not use victim names. He denies memory of transport, dismemberment, or storage. Presented with photographs of human remains submerged in drums of lye and motor oil in multiple rented units, he deflected, stating that “Support Operations often handles processing. I merely sign off on final phases.”

He views ant infestations discovered in his trailer as both metaphor and message. He refers to them as “resistance cells” and “subterranean populations infected with collectivist pathology.” While he acknowledges seeing the ants, he denies that their presence has any connection to the murders. However, session transcripts show him referring to individual ants by title (“the ambassador,” “the saboteur,” “the emissary”) and at one point, tapping his palm three times while whispering, “The tribunal begins.”

When asked what would happen if he were released, Mr. Malenkov stated:

“I would resume oversight. The infestation continues. The correction remains incomplete.”

Diagnosis:

• Schizoaffective Disorder, Bipolar Type
• Delusional Disorder, Persecutory and Grandiose Subtypes (historically present)
• Medication-Induced Parkinsonism (mild, probably temporary)
• Rule-out: Complex PTSD secondary to childhood ideological conditioning

Recommendation:
Mr. Malenkov is not fit to stand trial. His cognitive function remains intact, but his perception of reality is structurally misaligned and immune to evidence. The court process is reinterpreted by him as “a loyalty test conducted by infiltrators.” He is incapable of understanding the charges or assisting in his own defense. Commitment to a secure psychiatric facility is recommended, with long-term neuropsychiatric observation.

Signed,
Dr. Evangeline Mora, MD
Board-Certified Forensic Psychiatrist