Page 16 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘You’re just giving a zek a car?’ Valery said, confused.

‘The cars only have thirty kilometres’ worth of petrol in the tanks and all of them have trackers in them,’ Shenkov said, quite gently. ‘Try to run and I’ll find you in half an hour. Don’t, though; I hate this weather.’

A drizzling rain was pattering at the window behind him.

‘Fair enough,’ Valery said.

Shenkov shook Valery’s hand in both of his, which felt like the subtlest of reminders that he could have crushed it if he liked. ‘There’s your pass.’

Valery had to show the pass first to the soldier at the facility perimeter, and then again to the soldiers at the city perimeter. They took note not only of his papers, but of the facility Land Rover he’d borrowed from the car park at the Lighthouse, and of the hundred and twelve wildlife traps in the back. They told him politely that the curfew was at sunset, and they would shoot anyone trying to access the gates after that.

It was a relief to drive out over the marsh beyond the fence to the forest. The road was only a little higher than the pools and the tufts of thick marsh grass, and it was beginning to flood in places, gleaming even in the mist. He hadn’t driven himself for years and he had forgotten how much he liked it. The Land Rovers were fabulous things, too; brand new, with powerful engines and gearsticks that took the perfect amount of push to shift. He pulled in just under the shade of the trees, and then stepped down and away from the car. Old leaves and twigs cracked under his boots, and without the mumble of the engine, the quiet had roots that delved right into the earth.

Mainly, the trees were silver birches. From a distance, they looked all right, but up close, they had scars. Most of them had lost their branches at some point a few years ago. They were regrowing now, but there were jagged stumps and torn bark where the old limbs should have been. About a quarter of them were dead; they were only standing upright because there hadn’t yet been a storm heavy enough to fell them. Valery gazed around. That was all to be expected, but something about the woods felt odd. He couldn’t trace what. Perhaps it was only the shush of so many leaves, after he had spent so long out of sight of a single tree. He closed his hand around the silver pocket watch, which was still going; it felt, already, like a talisman from home.

There were birds. That was a good sign. He could see nests and, scanning the forest floor, tracks from little mammals. And big mammals; there were deer round here somewhere. He went down on his knees – they cracked – and turned over a chunk of soil with a knife. Ants – good – and fragile roots where shards of grass were growing.

It was only when he started to walk around, setting out the traps, that he noticed the view through the trees north to south was much clearer than the view east to west. It was so marked that he went in circles for a while, puzzling, and even then he didn’t understand until he’d finished with the mouse traps and walked back to the car, on the edge of the woods, where the air was open.

The wind blew from the south; from City 40. The trees had lost their branches only on the windward side.

He turned back to see into the forest again. The windward side. If the radiation was coming from ground contamination, from the water table, the wind shouldn’t have had anything to do with it.

Standing so still now, he could feel the stopwatch ticking.

6

The Mouse Room

In the morning, he got up early to avoid Dr Resovskaya and the boiled eggs. He had a lot of catching up to do, if he wanted to be up to date with all the new science. There was a stack of existing research to look through, so he took a sheaf of files to read over breakfast. The first was compiled figures about strontium deposits in soil animals. The data was wonderful; Resovskaya had five years’ worth, and it was enough to trace the effects through a dozen generations in some cases. Ants, it seemed, were radiation-proof; the worm population, though, had declined by ninety-nine per cent in comparison with the control group she’d kept in normal conditions.

Poor worms.

Nowhere had she detailed the true radiation readings of her research quadrants; just the difference between them. Usually, that would have been a stunning oversight in a radiation study – it defied the whole point.

Resovskaya wasn’t a third-rate academic, though. She was a proper genius. It had to be on purpose.

A wet bang went off outside and he jumped; so did everyone else, but then they all laughed when they saw it was just another of those strange marsh geysers, going off about two hundred yards beyond the lab’s broad window, where the lake shore gave way to the wetlands. Some ducks had had a shock too, and whirred off just in time to be sprayed with falling mud.

Valery went back to the soil animal study, rubbing the back of his neck. He was so rickety that being made to jump had twanged one of the nerves that cradled the base of his cranium. Still, his fingers felt stronger now, so the breaks must have been getting better. Once he was healthier, there was nothing stopping him doing some real exercise here. The idea of running, even just on a treadmill, had a dreamy allure.

At the window, some of the students clustered to play geyser bingo and a little cheer went up when another mud fountain poofed up further out into the marshes. It was funny, that; normally you needed proper heat underground for that sort of thing. A geologist he was not, but he would have sworn they weren’t near the edges of any tectonic plates out here.

Someone touched his shoulder, which made him gasp, and lifted the prisoner book out of his breast pocket, where he had completely forgotten about it. Shenkov leaned down over him and signed today’s eight o’clock box against the table edge, bringing with him the woody scent of his cologne and a freshly ironed shirt. He said nothing about it, and went to join the coffee queue. Valery had to sit there digging his fingernails into his own shoulder. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had come up that close to him for no pressing reason and, shamefully, it was sending blood prickling right up and down his arm. He kept his eyes down, hating the idea that Shenkov would see it.

There were fifty mice in the woodland traps the next day. He collected them up into the laboratory’s Land Rover and drove back feeling guilty.

‘Do we have any anaesthetic?’ he asked Dr Resovskaya.

‘Anaesthetic, why?’

‘For the animals.’

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘No funds for that kind of thing.’ She half-laughed when she said it, and her eyes went over his face. Everyone else, of course, was clean-shaven, and there had been a razor in the package she’d sent up to his room. He had only used it selectively. He preferred looking like a floppy poetry-writing liberal to showing the scar across his jaw. If it showed, people would ask how he got it.

There was a particular clunk that was a scalpel cutting through the end of a mouse’s tail. After he had three pieces of tail and three distressed mice huddled in their box full of lettuce, he had to stop and pull off his mask and glasses so he could press his hands over his eyes. He wasn’t alone in the lab, but other people pretended not to notice. He leaned against the table and faced the wall, waiting to stop feeling so raw.

‘So how did you end up in the gulag?’ someone asked.