Page 34 of The Half Life of Valery K

They called it a tan, at the plant. ‘No.’

‘For God’s sake!’ she snapped. She banged the emergency stop button, right by his head. ‘How far away is it? I need to know, Shenkov, I need to know how many fucking ambulances to expect! Should I be diverting people to Hospital Three? Should I be calling in the night shift early?’

It wasn’t beyond the higher-ups to have asked her to try and get something out of him. He hadn’t left City 40 for three years, and he wouldn’t have even now if he hadn’t had a punctured lung. Somewhere nearby, someone would be listening. No one in or out, that was the rule, and this was why. There would come a moment when you felt you had to tell someone.

‘I don’t know, comrade, I’m just a policeman,’ he said, quiet and polite, because even if she was a spy, he didn’t have it in him to start barking. He was tall. Anything but quiet and polite read like he was slinging his weight around, the worst sort of bully. ‘I don’t know who you think I am. I’m certainly not a doctor. I don’t know what your mystery bug is.’

The doctor looked down at him for a long time. ‘And how would you feel if I put you in a ward with the rest of them?’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘You’ve gone white,’ she observed.

‘I’ve just had surgery,’ he pointed out.

He hated how good he was at seeming like he was about to kill someone. He hated how well it worked on even the fiercest women. He saw her decide not to push him, how she came up against the wall in her head that nearly all the women he knew had: don’t go too far or you’re dead.

She punched the emergency button again, and the lift juddered upward. There was perfect silence, and the cheerful lift voice announced that this was the twelfth floor.

‘We’re keeping everyone who doesn’t have this … bug up here,’ the doctor said. She was watching the two new soldiers just beyond the doors. ‘To prevent infection.’

The nurse pushed the bed out into the ward. The linoleum squeaked under the bed’s wheels. Once they were past the soldiers, the nurse squeezed his shoulder, a lot harder than she needed to. It hurt. Her fingertips were sharp.

‘Well done, comrade. You didn’t say a word.’

He stared straight ahead.

The ward was full, but only with patients recovering from surgery. A good few of them were ambulatory enough to be clustered by the window, watching whatever was happening on the ground below. Painfully, Shenkov eased upright and went too. Outside the hospital was a queue of ambulances, right down the road. He went straight back to bed and had to sit still for a little while, trying to stop his mind spinning. If the doctor was right and something had gone wrong at City 40, he had to get back there soon, punctured lung or no. He tried to sleep, because he would need all the sleep he could get, but he couldn’t.

The radios were working again. There were two on now, tuned to the news, one echoing the other in a way that made the newsreader sound like she was in a cathedral. There wasn’t a word about the explosion, or the mystery disease.

He wondered how long mystery disease was going to stand up to scrutiny. His instinct was to think not long, but before he went to City 40, he wouldn’t have known radiation sickness if it hit him in the face.

‘Is there a telephone?’ he asked the nurse who wasn’t really a nurse. His voice came out sounding as though he was made of rock. He swallowed. It was a struggle. ‘I – need to call my wife. She’s pregnant.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She works at the chocolate factory at home.’

The nurse nodded pleasantly to the phone on the wall next to him, as if there was no possible reason to imagine he wouldn’t be allowed to. ‘Of course.’

He dialled the plutonium laboratory. The line was dead. The home phone just rang and rang.

He had to stay in hospital for three days. When he could walk, he got dressed and escaped without a discharge, but that wasn’t difficult. He had thought the hospital was crowded on the first day; now, it was rammed. He called the Lighthouse from a payphone. It was the tenth time he’d tried. Every line was dead, even the security office.

He’d just have to go and see.

He always walked everywhere, but he was only just upright, and he had to get a cab to the station. Down the main road, the traffic was all normal. They waited at a level crossing for a pair of girls with nice coats and prams to go by. He watched them with a tightness in the back of his throat. The doctor had said that that first wave of sick people was all local. Acute radiation sickness; you didn’t get that until you hit at least a hundred roentgen. A hundred roentgen, seventy-nine kilometres away from the Lighthouse. What the hell had they got at the reactor plant?

What had Anna got?

He had to stop thinking about that. If he let himself dwell over it, he would panic, and he would lose even the basic common sense to get himself up to City 40.

The station swarmed with people, so dense-packed that watching them all made him feel as queasy as he did if he saw unexpected footage of a beehive. The ticket queues moved at a crawl. He couldn’t see why at first; all he could stretch to was standing and not collapsing. But once he was nearer the front, it was clear what the hold-up was. The ticket officers weren’t just selling people tickets. They were taking them aside, into little booths. While he was watching, they turned someone away, an ordinary man who looked lost and scared when they told him to go home.

When he got to the front, the officer led him into the small booth and took out a device that hissed and clicked. He waved it over Shenkov twice.

‘What’s that for?’ Shenkov asked quietly. It was a dosimeter, but he wanted to know what they were telling people.