Page 35 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘We’re checking for contaminants.’

‘Like what?’

‘You think they’d tell me?’ the ticket officer. ‘All I know is that if this goes bananas then I’m not to let you on the train. But it hasn’t, so on you go. Single to Pavliok?’ It was the closest station to City 40. There was talk of opening one centrally, but he didn’t think it would get past Moscow for a long time yet. That would mean letting people in and out. ‘You have to be in the front two carriages. Tiny platform.’

‘Thanks,’ he murmured, and emerged from the booth just in time to see someone else turned away.

It was only half an hour to Pavliok, but he was sore by the time they arrived. He was the only person who got off the train there, for which he was grateful, because he would have collapsed in any kind of crowd. Thankfully, there were cabs waiting right outside the station.

Nearly all the rest of the way was through the forest. As they drove, bits of twig and endless pine needles rained on to the car, and once, a branch banged down right in front of them. The driver had to get out and move it. He came back brushing motes of bark off his hands. A few minutes later, he made an annoyed sound and showed Shenkov his palm. It was angry and red.

‘I must be allergic,’ he said.

Helicopters thunked overhead. Shenkov counted five in the sky as the cab pulled up to the city limits. Inside the Lighthouse perimeter fence, there were bulldozers ploughing up the soil and gathering it into enormous heaps. The administration building was full of people, but not the usual ones. Not labourers. Soldiers. He didn’t recognise a single person. He limped inside, looking for anyone familiar.

‘Are you Shenkov?’ A man was waving from a desk, a phone pinned against his shoulder. ‘Thank God. This place is bewildering. I need you to talk to the scientists from Moscow and draft a progress report for me. They’re on the lake shore.’

‘What happened? Where is everyone?’

‘Everyone?’

‘From the plant – where are the workers and the staff?’

The man froze, and then sighed. ‘You’ll see.’

When he reached the lake shore, limping now, there was almost no water left in the lake, and a crater where the furthest half of the reactor had used to be. The rest was torn ruins – mangled girders and concrete, and now, cement trucks everywhere, pumping in concrete waterfalls from at least twenty points around the lake bank. They had barely made a puddle at the base of the ruin a hundred metres below. There were zeks, too, thousands of them, hurling sandbags down into the gulf. It would take them months to fill it.

He found Anna working in a tent with the electrical equipment hooked up to a juddering generator. She and some of the other physicists were fighting with people he didn’t know, men, dressed like they were straight from the Kremlin. She saw him coming but didn’t stop arguing with whoever she was arguing with – it was something about radiation and contamination, but too technical for him to catch. He slouched forward against a table with a microscope on it. She was alive.

When she did come away, she looked like she might spit.

‘Hello lovely. You look horrifying, I thought you were supposed to be in hospital?’

‘I tried to call. A lot,’ he said, wishing stupidly that she’d look more pleased to see him.

‘They’ve shut down all the phone lines,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Nothing in or out except to Moscow. Why are you even out of bed? You shouldn’t be walking about—’

‘Because people have got radiation sickness in Chelyabinsk, Anna, I thought you were dead!’

‘Christ, keep your voice down,’ she breathed. She took his arm and steered him away, towards the lake, but even then, it didn’t take them away from the crowds of people – workers, Moscow men, zeks in grey clothes, digging over the verges, turning the grass.

The wreckage that was the lake bed was worse than he’d thought. It didn’t look like anything as simple as an explosion from one particular place. The entire marsh had gone up, from here right to the forest; muck and wreckage and everywhere, absolutely everywhere, the silvery corpses of dead fish. It was too cold for them to smell.

‘What … happened?’

‘The investigators are here trying to work that out now. I don’t know. I’ve never even heard of anything like this before, it’s insane.’

‘The Americans?’

‘God knows,’ she said. She glanced behind them, where a man in a black suit had followed, but Shenkov knew a KGB officer from a thousand paces. He had a thrill of unease, the kind he usually gave other people. ‘But, it’s all being dealt with of course,’ she said, a little loudly.

‘How are you? Is the baby … ?’

‘I was at home, indoors.’ Her eyes flicked back to the black-suited man again. ‘Fortunately, it’s been determined that what did look at first like radiation sickness in the immediate vicinity is actually down to spores in the marsh, disturbed by the explosion. There’s some kind of blight. Make you ill but nothing to worry about.’

He had to look away, over the blasted marsh. They had spoken to each other like this in Moscow, during the purges, even over their own kitchen table: like they were both characters in a Komsomol manual about how to be good girls and boys. He thought they’d left that behind out here.

He could see the concrete block that housed the reactor. It was ripped open. He wondered how much radiation they were getting just standing here, how much was blasting through Anna, through the baby. He didn’t even know what it was, not exactly, but in his mind it was an invisible black smoke, pawing at windows and the branches of the trees.