CESTA
KRVE

BOOK 01 · CZECH REPUBLIC → AFRICA

Dobrák

The Good Guy — United Fans / KJV, 1996

POV

Maxmilián — Czech journalist, accidental apocalypse survivor, reluctant hero.

SETTING

Czech Republic → Central Africa. Near-future post-apocalyptic Earth.

RUNTIME

~320 pages. United Fans a.s. / Klub Julese Vernea Praha, 1996.

PITCH

One man, an armored car, and a voice in his head against the end of the world.

BRIEFING

The world ended quietly at first. Jiří Kulhánek's debut novel opens not with the invasion itself but with its aftermath — a Czech man named Maxmilián, formerly an assistant editor at an environmental newspaper called Zelené listy, sitting inside an armored car that is sinking into a tropical bog while two vampires try to dismantle the hull from outside. This is a man who once cared about recycling policy. Now he is arguing with the voice in his head about whether to use thermite grenades before or after the Kinetin kicks in. The apocalypse has a way of clarifying priorities.

Kulhánek published Dobrák in 1996 through the Klub Julese Vernea Praha — a Czech fan publishing collective operating in the gap between the collapse of communist-era distribution and the emergence of commercial genre fiction. The book landed like a grenade in a pond. Here was a Czech post-apocalyptic novel that took its genre completely seriously: meticulously detailed weaponry, a coherent alien cosmology, and a protagonist who was neither a superhero nor a cypher but a specific, self-deprecating, funny, frightened man doing his absolute best. The nickname the novel's title gives him — Dobrák, the Good Guy — is both sincere and a little heartbreaking. He hasn't learned yet that goodness, in this world, has a price list.

ACT I — WHEN THE WORLD WAS STILL RECOGNIZABLE

Maxmilián was in the mountains on a weekend trip when To — It, the Event, the thing with no clean name — happened. He came back down to find the village changed. The innkeeper Kozák, a man he had known for years, meets him first. Kozák is pale, wrong-moving, empty behind the eyes. He tries to bite. Maxmilián kills him with a broken chair leg and runs. This is the novel's true beginning: not the alien ships, not the transformation of civilization, but one specific quiet man committing his first act of violence against someone he once exchanged pleasantries with about the weather. The wrongness of it never quite leaves him.

Over the months that follow, Maxmilián does what the novel quietly insists most survivors must actually do: he improvises, he scrounges, he reads technical manuals, he makes mistakes and survives them by luck as often as by skill. He assembles his weapons, his supplies, his routines. He finds an Alvis Saladin — a British-built six-wheeled armored car, chosen partly for its engineering qualities and partly, he will admit, because "Alvis is an English company and Saladin is a beautiful name." He integrates an AI targeting computer, a Vulcan rotary cannon, a napalm thrower, an optical invisibility system built from amorphous crystals that degrade with each use. He names the vehicle and talks to it. He also finds Jonáš: a nine-year-old boy with white hair who does not speak and never will within these pages. They communicate anyway. Max feeds him, protects him, and accepts without drama that this small silent child is now his responsibility. This is what Dobrák means.

The world Kulhánek has built makes its own terrible logic clear in stages. The mrtváci (the dead ones) are dangerous in numbers — zombie-like, violent, capable of rudimentary communication, moving in packs that can overwhelm anything short of armored firepower. But the upíři (vampires) are something categorically different: faster than a human eye can track, capable of flight, able to regenerate from damage that would destroy anything else, and possessed of an intelligence that makes them hunters rather than prey. Fire works. Napalm works best. Against the mrtváci, a Vulcan cannon is sufficient. Against a vampire, you need the napalm thrower and you need to hold your nerve long enough to use it, which is where the Kinetin comes in. The drug suppresses fear and sharpens reflexes. It also eats you alive from the inside. Max knows this. He takes it anyway.

ACT II — THE CLAN AND THE COST OF ARITHMETIC

Africa arrives as both destination and test. Max drives south through a transformed Europe, crosses into the continent, and in the desert picks up a trail of bodies — each tied, each deliberately left behind. He follows it because he is, at this point, still the kind of person who follows trails of bodies in the hope of helping whoever left them. The trail leads to Guss's clan: the survivors of a 300-strong assault on a Cizinci (the Foreigners — the aliens) base at Lake Chad. Three hundred became forty-eight in the attack. Forty-eight became fewer as a surviving vampire, following at a careful distance, extracted its toll through the los.

The los is a lottery. Every other day, the clan draws lots. The loser is bound and left for the vampire, which then feeds and falls back, satisfied until the next cycle. Children are included, in pairs — the logic being that the vampire requires a certain quantity of meat to be appeased, and two children approximate one adult. Guss, who leads the clan with minimal gestures and absolute authority — half-Irish, half-African, blue-eyed, eagle-nosed, moving like a leopard, speaking English with a lilt that survives the end of the world — did not design this system because he is cruel. He designed it because it keeps more people alive than any alternative he could find. Max destroys the following vampire with the Saladin's napalm before he fully understands what he has stopped. When he does understand, his reaction is precisely what earns him the nickname the novel is named for.

Guss's clan absorbs Max and Jonáš with the pragmatic hospitality of people who understand that another armored vehicle with a working napalm thrower is worth feeding. But they also, slowly, come to value Max for something the Saladin cannot provide: his refusal to fully accept their mathematics. When Guss explains the Cizinci's apparent purpose — transforming humans into soldiers for some interstellar war conducted elsewhere, human beings as raw biological material for a conflict they cannot see or understand — Max's response is to ask what the plan is. Guss has one: reach the Central African rainforests, find more survivors, build toward something. Max, characteristically, agrees to help. He shares his food stores. He listens to their stories. He is still, at the end of Book 1, recognizably the man who once edited articles about environmental policy. That is both his greatest quality and the thing this world will spend the next novel removing.

ACT III — THE GOOD GUY PROBLEM

The title arrives late, almost casually. Someone in the clan calls him Dobrák and it sticks, and Kulhánek is careful about what he does with it. It is not entirely a compliment. In the clan's framework, a Dobrák is someone whose moral instincts are a liability — someone who will hesitate at the wrong moment, who will expend resources on sentiment, who will make the group less efficient in the name of a standard the group can no longer afford. And yet the clan keeps him. Because a Dobrák, in this world, is also the only proof that the world before still existed, that the standards being violated were once real standards, that something was lost and not merely discarded. Max is their conscience. He hates the role and cannot stop playing it.

By the end of Dobrák, Max is still whole — all limbs present, Jonáš beside him, Saladin operational, the plan intact. The novel ends on something that in context almost feels like hope: the clan moving toward the rainforests, Max integrated into their structure, the worst of the lottery behind them. The moral ledger is not yet in deficit. But Kulhánek has spent three hundred pages very carefully establishing exactly what kind of man Maxmilián is — his instincts, his limits, his relationship with the voice in his head, the things he cannot bring himself to do — so that the sequel can begin the systematic demolition of every item on that list. Dobrák is the novel that builds the man. Cynik is the novel that finds out what he's made of.

Maxmilián ends Book 1 with a clan, a child, a plan, and his nickname. He is still the Good Guy — still surprised by what survival costs, still instinctively reaching for the choice that hurts least for the most people. The voice in his head remains sardonic and usually right. The Saladin's invisibility crystals are degrading. The Kinetin dosage is creeping upward. These are the seeds. Book 2 is the harvest.

BOOK 02 · AFRICA → THE ROAD AHEAD

Cynik

The Cynic — United Fans / KJV, 1997

POV

Maxmilián — now one-legged, missing a boy, beginning to understand what survival costs.

SETTING

Central Africa → South Africa → Return. Continuing the post-apocalyptic Earth.

RUNTIME

~320 pages. United Fans a.s. / Klub Julese Vernea Praha, 1997.

PITCH

The path from Good Guy to Cynic is paved with choices that were right and hurt anyway.

BRIEFING

The sequel arrives one year later and wastes no time. Cynik is the novel in which Kulhánek collects on every debt the first book incurred: the lottery's logic is tested to its limit, the Kinetin dosage climbs, Max loses a leg and a boy and his remaining illusions about what kind of world this is, and by the end he has acquired a new nickname that the title announces in advance. "Cynic" sounds like a diminishment. It isn't. The novel's argument is that cynicism, properly understood, is what goodness looks like after it has been tested by reality and survived — not intact, not unchanged, but still functioning, still making choices, still distinguishing between what can be tolerated and what cannot. Max by the end of Cynik is harder than he was. He is also, arguably, more honest.

Kulhánek deepens his world here in ways the first book only gestured toward. The Cizinci remain mysterious — their ships, their purpose, their departure — but the human wreckage they've left behind has had time to organize. Ruffus's fortress, with its mind-controlled soldiers in silver headbands, is the novel's central new element: a human faction that chose collaboration and built something from it, something that must be reckoned with and then somehow repurposed rather than simply destroyed. The apocalypse is old enough now to have its own politics. Max, who started as a man with an armored car and no plan beyond survival, finds himself becoming an architect of something he cannot yet name.

ACT I — THE PRICE OF SINGHAIA

The clan's journey through Africa runs into the problem that almost destroyed them before: a vampire survives an encounter that should have ended it. Singhaia — one of the clan's best warriors, someone whose competence has been established across the first novel — is captured. The clan uses her as bait and decoy, as the brutal tactical logic of their situation demands. When Max finds her, her hands and feet have been destroyed by restraints. François, the clan's elderly French doctor whose word on medical matters is simply final, delivers the assessment with the calm of a man who has long since used up his capacity for horror at physical damage: she will lose the right hand at the wrist, the left hand will keep the palm but lose most of the fingers, the feet may follow. She is alive. In the clan's accounting, she is also finished — she cannot fight, which means she is a liability, which means she belongs to the collective the way a slaughtered animal does.

Max refuses. This is not surprising — it is precisely what the first novel established him as doing. What is different in Cynik is that he refuses with open eyes. He does not pretend Guss's mathematics are wrong. He asks, instead, what the price of an exemption is, and he pays it. The transaction is left partially opaque — what he gives up sits between the lines — but the cost is real and comes from the Saladin's finite resources and Max's finite credibility within the clan's power structure. He takes Singhaia into the vehicle. He feeds her. She heals, slowly, into something that is no longer the fighter she was and is not yet whatever she will become.

The gap between Max and the clan widens in this section. Guss is not wrong, and Max knows Guss is not wrong, and Guss knows that Max knows. What they are disagreeing about is not arithmetic but humanity — about whether there is a point below which a group of survivors stops being a community and becomes something else. Guss's answer is: survival first, philosophy later. Max's answer is: I will pay the price, I will not pretend the price doesn't exist, and I will not stop paying it when the accounting tells me to. This is the novel's central conversation. It happens in fragments, across hundreds of pages, and neither man fully convinces the other, and they remain allies anyway.

ACT II — THE FORTRESS AND THE HEADBANDS

Ruffus was a military commander who understood, early, that the Cizinci were not going to be defeated by conventional resistance. His solution was collaboration — not surrender, exactly, but a negotiated arrangement in which he provided human bodies in exchange for weapons, protection, and a degree of autonomy. The silver headbands his soldiers wear are the physical expression of the deal: devices that suppress fear, suppress independent thought, suppress everything that makes a soldier unreliable and replace it with perfect obedient function. His fighters are extraordinarily effective and completely controllable. They are also, in any meaningful sense, no longer people in the way they were before the headbands went on.

Max conquers the fortress — it involves the Saladin's weapons at full capacity and Kinetin at a dosage that Max notes, with the flat affect of a man who has made peace with his own recklessness, is higher than he has used before. What happens after the conquest is more interesting than the conquest itself. Max looks at the subjugated population, at the former commanders of the headband soldiers, and decides not to kill any of them. "They were good leaders," he concludes, with the pragmatism that is slowly becoming his defining quality. "They'll make good subjects." He takes the fortress as an asset rather than a trophy, which is exactly what Guss's larger plan requires, and which is exactly not what a Dobrák would do. A Dobrák would worry about the morality of using mind-controlled soldiers. A Cynik calculates what they're worth in the context of what comes next.

Losing Jonáš happens between the fortress and the chaos of a fight Max cannot win from inside the Saladin. He is hit with tranquilizer darts while separated from the vehicle — a moment of pure vulnerability that the novel has carefully avoided until now — and in the scramble that follows, Jonáš is gone. Max loses a leg to a vampire during the same vulnerable window. He gets the prosthesis. He does not get Jonáš back. What he gets instead is information: "Jonáš isn't dead. They have him." The antecedent of "they" is a cliff that the novel simply steps off of, leaving the reader to stare down.

ACT III — THE WOODEN GOD AND THE ROAD TO THE STARS

The agreed meeting point is a GPS coordinate in central Africa. Max waits seventeen days for the new moon. Singhaia is already there — she came early, recognized the Saladin from a distance, nearly shot Max anyway when fog confused her, and then saw his scars and stopped. She has a baby girl, approximately six months old. The baby has features that resemble Max's. Singhaia has named her Džounasin — a feminized, Africanized version of Jonáš — because the baby came into the world in the shadow of the boy's disappearance and Singhaia understood, without being told, that Max would need this connection. It is one of the novel's quietest and most devastating moments: a woman with damaged hands holding a child whose name is a tribute to an absence, offering it to a man with a prosthetic leg who has just driven back alone from the southernmost point of his journey.

Guss returns with three survivors. Three, from the thirty-two adults who constituted the clan when Max first met them in the desert — and they had already been reduced from three hundred by then. The South African mission, seeking neutron weapons capable of affecting the Cizinci's infrastructure, cost the rest. Guss delivers this information with the same minimal gestures he uses to communicate everything, and the novel does not linger on grief because Guss does not linger on grief. The Cizinci, apparently, have left — Cizinci odlétli — but their absence is not peace. It is the absence of the largest threat, which means all the medium-sized threats are now the primary threats.

The wooden god happens because Singhaia tells Max that every tribe needs a god. Max takes two days to carve a crude figure from a log. He is, he admits, not talented at this. At the ceremony, he names it Ten druhý — The Second — which is the name he has always used privately for the voice in his head, and which he now makes public and sacred without asking the voice for permission. The voice's reaction is outrage. The clan's reaction is complete ceremonial seriousness. It is the funniest moment in two novels, and also somehow not funny at all: Max has taken the part of himself that he cannot integrate and externalized it as an object of worship. The clan receives its god. They go their separate ways. Max drives north, alone, toward Europe, toward a proper prosthesis, toward more Saladins if he can find them.

The final line belongs to Guss: "The stars will redden with our enemies' blood. The Path of Blood can begin." Ten druhý's last question — what if the Cizinci don't have blood? — is the novel's final admission that the cosmic scale of the problem remains completely opaque. They are heading toward it anyway.

Max drives north alone — toward Europe, toward a proper prosthesis, toward more Saladins. Ten druhý rides with him, furious about the wooden idol, last heard demanding to know what happens to the plan if the Cizinci turn out not to have blood. Max tells him to be quiet. The road to the stars has begun in the most mundane possible way, and Jonáš is still out there, and Džounasin has her father's face, and Singhaia is at the fortress with a doctor who can help the baby breathe. This is what passes for a happy ending when you have earned it the hard way.