Page 33 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Turn on the radio, turn on the radio,’ the man in the next bed said to the nurse. ‘Maybe it’ll be on the news.’

The radio didn’t work. ‘Piece of shit,’ the nurse said, with feeling.

There was another one further down the ward, but that didn’t work either. Over the general concerned hum, someone yelled that a heart monitor had switched itself off, and wouldn’t come back on again.

Shenkov woke up entirely. He had snapped awake before, but he had still been hazy, and everything had still felt far off. Now, he could feel every centimetre of himself, from the snick of his eyelashes when he blinked, to the little ache of the blanket’s weight on the third finger of his left hand, over the old break. He sat up as much as he could and reached for the light switch. Click, click. Nothing. He let his arm drop and looked outside again.

People hadn’t just stopped their cars. The cars had stopped. A few were just being coaxed back to life now, but most of them refused, and people were getting out, helpless. The traffic lights had all gone dark.

‘Some kind of power surge,’ one of the nurses decided.

‘The heart monitor still won’t turn back on!’

He wondered what kind of power surge took out cars. The general gist of the speculation around him was to do with the Americans, but there was no reason for the Americans to do anything peculiar to a boring factory city in the middle of nowhere, seventeen hundred kilometres from Moscow. Chelyabinsk had no military significance. Its largest industry was tractor-building.

‘Unless something’s happened to Moscow,’ the man in the next bed said, uneasy. His eyes flicked over Shenkov. ‘You’re KGB, right? I saw your coat when you came in. Is something going on?’

‘In Moscow?’ He hadn’t been there for three years. Like always, thinking about it gave him an awful ashamed pang. He felt like he was blaspheming, just speaking its name. ‘I don’t know.’

The man looked more worried than ever. It was what Shenkov hated about the grey coat. Everyone thought that it made you omniscient. From a policing point of view, that was helpful, but from a personal one, he struggled with it. Everyone thought he was lying when he said he didn’t know things. He had a nasty feeling that even his wife believed he spent his whole life hoarding interesting secrets from her like an egomaniacal dragon. The coat was like a code wheel, one that translated things even when you didn’t want it to. I don’t know became I’m not telling you.

He wanted to say so, but no, honestly would only become it’s terrible, don’t ask me again.

He wondered if it really was terrible, or if it was just the complicated consequence of a confused moth bumping into the wrong part of a power line. On the road now, the few people whose cars were still running nosed through the rest of the stranded traffic. Someone enterprising had already put a huge sign in their back window – one rouble to the station!!!

‘Look at that,’ he said to the man in the next bed, and felt relieved when the man smiled. The man had fadedly red hair just like Sergei’s.

As soon as he thought of that, he had to look away.

They got the heart monitors working again, or some of them, the unease subsided into a generally intrigued hum, and Shenkov slept well into the following morning. He hadn’t done that since he was a trainee, and it left him feeling disorientated. He was awake for a long time before his hearing came back, and it was only incrementally that he became aware the ward was much louder than it had been yesterday. There were beds everywhere now, and more being wheeled in. A nurse, not the good one who swore but the terrifying Ukrainian, tapped the foot of his bed as she passed.

‘We’re going to have to move you upstairs. We don’t want you getting sick.’

‘Sick – with what?’ he asked, still groggy. It must have been the morphine. He’d had nightmares, but now he was awake, he couldn’t remember what they’d been about. He only had an after-image of cold sunlight and grey ground and faded red hair sprayed over the earth.

He thought desperately about domestic disturbance by-laws before his brain could rush off and reconstruct the dream. Undue noise after eight o’clock at night …

‘There’s quite a bug going round,’ the nurse said, nodding down the ward.

There really must have been. All the new people looked queasy and shaky, and a good few of them were being sick in plastic bowls. Everything stank of disinfectant and stomach acid. Another orderly hurried through and helped the nurse move the bed.

The corridor was even louder. As they were coming out, a doctor was persuading a young woman to sit down. There were blisters across her face, like bad eczema, so bad that her skin was peeling. His heart lurched. He twisted as much as he could to see, but then they were past and in the broad lift. Two soldiers who had definitely not been there yesterday were standing on either side, holding guns, and there were more, a lot more, near the far end of the ward. Shenkov was in time to see one of them snatch a camera from someone and dash it onto the floor in a shower of glass and plastic.

Fuck.

Just as the lift doors were closing, a doctor dived through.

‘You’re Konstantin Shenkov? They brought you in from City 40 – didn’t they? You were air-lifted.’

The doors closed and a cheery mechanical voice said, going up.

His chest tightened. A stab of pain let him know exactly where the broken bone was, and where the surgery had been. ‘No, there’s been a mistake there. I’m from Chelyabinsk.’

She ignored him. ‘Was anything strange going on when you left? Were they getting ready to test – something?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He glanced at the numbers lighting up above the lift doors. Three, four. There would be more soldiers at the top, and he was far beyond second chances these days. One word and someone was going to take him out to the back courtyard and shoot him, Anna would have to have the baby by herself, and fifty-fifty she’d drown it in the bath because she was acres too clever to just sit in an apartment and look after a baby alone. The whole bargain was that she had them and he looked after them. She couldn’t communicate with someone who didn’t know what a neutron was.

‘Have you seen burns like that before?’ the doctor pressed.