Page 28 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘He was healthy?’ Valery repeated, confused.

‘Indestructible.’

‘How long has he been gone?’

‘Four days?’

‘Four days,’ Valery echoed. ‘And we found him yesterday. It takes six hundred roentgen of radiation to kill a person. So in three days, he got six hundred roentgen from somewhere and at some point he also made it to a hospital and left again. That level of radiation is – people never get that, unless they’re working in a physics lab and something spills. Have you any idea how he could have … ?’

‘No,’ they all said at once.

Nanya was watching him closely now. ‘Are you thinking that there’s something dangerous in these woods that neither you nor we know of?’

‘I don’t know,’ Valery said. ‘Unless there’s an old reactor out here, broken open, I can’t think of anything that would give you six hundred roentgen in one go. Is there anything like that? You’d know, it would be huge.’

‘No. Who has the body?’

‘The KGB.’

There was a long silence.

‘Right then.’ Nanya clapped her hands, which sent a small plume of flour into the air. ‘I’ll let you all get on, can’t have you entertaining old ladies all day.’

The three of them hurried away before she had to ask again.

After he’d spoken to the blacksmith – a giant with a reedy voice and four scornful cats – Valery took samples from the well, from the allotment soil, the corn, from the bones of the pig carcasses hanging up in the seasoning shed, swabs from the burnt bricks of the chimney stacks, and then from anyone who agreed to let him take blood. To his surprise, people lined up; just to see what he was doing, he thought at first, but no one seemed to mind giving a sample.

He was on the fifth person, a woman about his age, when he saw that the very tip of her little finger was missing. It gave him an unhappy stir and a memory-echo of the scalpel clunking through the mouse’s tail, but he put it aside. But then someone else had it too, a girl with thyroid cancer so clear that the tumour was thickening her throat. It must have been leukaemia, or something else that was affecting their bones, making their fingers brittle. He fought to keep his expression normal.

‘Can I ask how long you’ve lived here?’ he said to the girl.

‘Oh. Nanya brought us – what, three years ago? After they all died from the famine,’ she said, waving vaguely. They must have been such a presence at the front of her mind that it hadn’t occurred to her that he might know who they had been or how many.

Three years. He tried to smile. ‘Right. Thanks.’

Someone called for her, a woman hanging out sheets on a long laundry line, with a baby strapped on her back. The baby had no eyes.

10

Radiation Sickness

Part of him had suspected it would happen, and so he wasn’t shocked to see that there were soldiers with torches mending the holes in the perimeter fence when he got back. It was six o’clock in the morning; it would be three hours before they opened the checkpoints. He stood under the trees and watched them, trying to decide what to do. He didn’t have his papers and the soldiers had been firm in the assertion that they would be happy to shoot anyone who tried to approach the fence anywhere other than the checkpoints, but he was not dressed like someone who lived in the woods, and some of them might even have seen him enough to recognise him. On balance, it should have been worth a try, slowly, with his hands up.

He couldn’t do it. Even thinking about it made him start to panic, not because the soldiers at this perimeter were definitely going to shoot him, but because the soldiers at all the other perimeters he knew would have. It was a hard-wired reaction now, and he couldn’t push past it any more than he could force his own elbow to bend the wrong way.

The second he decided he wasn’t going to try, his whole skeleton relaxed, and all the tiredness he hadn’t been feeling since that stupid clash with Shenkov rolled over him. He sank down at the foot of the crooked oak, his back against the trunk. All at once, he saw how spectacular the morning was. The sky was indigo at the crown, but mauve at the hems, shot through with smoky orange clouds that looked for all the world like, beyond the horizon, the Urals were on fire. One of those muddy geysers went off, a long way away. Behind him, the forest whispered, leaning over the rags of mist among its roots. Twigs and leaves pattered down, always. He fell asleep listening to them.

The silver watch said that he had been outside for seven hours when he woke up. When he went to the Lighthouse checkpoint, he showed the soldiers his staff card and explained that he’d done a typical Mad Scientist mental manoeuvre and forgotten the time last night collecting samples. Yes, he had been in the woods all night. They waved the dosimeter at him, and it went off. Yes, he had slept under a tree; sorry.

‘It’s just the mud on your boots. Get that off and then in you go. Shower straight away.’ The soldier gave him a wry look. ‘Try not to forget the time again? We get paperwork.’

After a shower and a change of clothes, and an excruciating visit to the security office in which he hid behind a door to avoid Shenkov and then got the prisoner book stamped by a trainee, it was a relief to get back to the familiar antiseptic smell of the lab. The students had just come in with their first catch of fish, so the sink was full of dead perch. Silvery scales were everywhere. Some of the other researchers were annoyed, but it seemed like a good, ordinary, domestic problem to come back to. He tested the blood samples from Nanya’s village at his own microscope while he listened to everyone else bicker and laugh.

He ran the samples once, had to go outside for a little while to calm down, then ran them again to be sure, and then took the results straight to Shenkov’s office.

‘Find your mistake?’ Shenkov said when Valery came in. He nodded to the spare chair, which Valery had begun to think of as the Chair of Doom.

‘Nope, because there wasn’t one.’ Perhaps it was just having spent the morning bent over the microscope, but a tight headache was crouched in the front of Valery’s skull now. Even the small bump of sitting down made it hurt more. It wasn’t the pleasant luxury headache he’d had on the first day here, either. It was winding itself up to be savage.