Page 4 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Because of the poison in the ground,’ the driver said.

Valery didn’t know what to say to that.

Coming up on their left now were the skeletons of burnt-out houses. The roofs were just blackened sticks, and all that was left of the structures were the stone chimneys. Chimney after chimney, set at angles to each other. The houses would have been wide-spaced, with big gardens – for crops maybe, and animals. Grass and weeds grasped at the ruins. In another few years, they would cover them, and nobody passing by would know what the oddly shaped hillocks had been.

‘It was a bomb,’ the driver told him. ‘You know, an atom bomb, from the Americans. Destroyed everything. All one night. Boom.’

Valery looked up. ‘This damage is too widespread for a bomb.’

‘Why are the houses burnt, then?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said unhappily. On the right, a blasted church soared by, scraps of gold still winking on its broken domes. Beyond it was an old brick factory, the rafters poking through the roof like ribs.

‘I’m telling you. Bomb.’ The driver made a bomb noise and opened his hand to sketch a mushroom cloud. ‘Yup. We’re coming into proper rust country now.’

Valery wondered what that meant.

Apart from those brief open stretches where the burnt towns were, most of the way was forest. Valery had lost the ability to think about anything much except the feeling of violin strings tightening around his lungs, and visions of whatever gutted place lay waiting at the end of this endless road, but he did see that the trees were dying. They were silver birches, but instead of a tall stand of perfect white trunks, the forest was cluttered with trees that listed, trees that had fallen, trees that had shed all their leaves and shrunk to skeletons. They made holes in what should have been a dense thicket. He could see through it in places, sometimes to swampy stretches, sometimes to glimpses of more burnt villages. Whatever the cause, the driver was right about poison in the ground: the land here was sick.

They must have been going uphill, because the birches gave way to pines. Then, even if he had been comatose, he wouldn’t have been able to miss it. The birch trees had been unhealthy, but the pines were dead. The whole woodland had turned a weird rust colour. The road was a line of red, dead pine needles; the trees were gingery ruins, and everywhere the trunks had cracked, so badly that it couldn’t have been safe to drive beneath them. Even going at eighty kilometres an hour, there was a skitter of falling needles on the roof.

This was right for radiation damage; maybe there had been a bomb, but it would need to have been the bomb to end all bombs. And he would have heard. No; actually, he wouldn’t. They got no proper newspapers in Kolyma. Half the Soviet Union could have been vaporised for all he knew.

Whatever had happened – was happening – it would kill people just as thoroughly as pines. Maybe they were using zeks to clean it up.

They couldn’t be giving every single incoming zek his own personal taxi, though. The two thoughts, radiation clean-up labour versus private taxi, chased each other round his head like two horribly mutated cartoon characters.

The taxi sped on, and above it the dying forest groaned.

Long before they came to any proper buildings, there was a fence. It was metal netting topped with barbed wire, and it stretched out for as far as Valery could see in either direction. It was broken only by a manned checkpoint, with barriers that swung up and down. The driver pulled up too fast and the wheels skidded. It must have been a regular trick of his, because the soldier in the booth only gave him a wry look.

Valery rolled down his window and handed over his new papers. The guard studied them with no expression. His eyes flicked up to Valery, then down again, then handed the papers back.

‘Welcome to Chelyabinsk 40, Dr Kolkhanov.’

Chelyabinsk 40; but this was not Chelyabinsk. That was ninety kilometres back the way they’d come. He’d seen the road signs. And there were not forty Chelyabinsks.

The taxi driver went at normal speed now. He had to, because right after the checkpoint they were in a town. A clean, freshly built town. There were people on the pavements and gleaming speed-limit signs. Valery leaned against the window to see out properly, completely discombobulated. All along the road on the way here had been those ominous drive fast signs, the burnt buildings, deserted land, but here were ordinary people doing ordinary-people things; people with perambulators stopping to talk, kids rushing across the road in school uniform, workers in blue and white caps just starting to cluster outside cafes. There was even a theatre, with pretentious columns outside. On the other side of the road, beyond a row of pretty birch trees – almost healthy, these ones – a tanker was beetling by, cleaning the tarmac. Everything was immaculate.

As well as road signs, there were other signs, bigger. Some of them were billboards set up by traffic lights, some on the sides of buildings. They were bright and colourful, and full of the delicate images of atoms.

glory to soviet science!

our friend the atom!

anything you hear here, stays here!

And then one more, a huge poster on the side of a block of flats. In lovely blues and greens, all simple lines, it showed two scientists leaning over something that glowed.

we are kyshtym! we are the shield!

He had no idea what that meant. Whatever it was, all the colours looked over-hopeful in the grey day. It must have been afternoon by now, but he couldn’t find the sun. Only low clouds, and the same fine rain there had been in Sverdlovsk. Further off, it was mist. The taxi’s wipers squeaked.

It was only a few more minutes before they came to another fence, and another set of gates. This set was even heavier than the first, and beyond the checkpoint, where another soldier scrutinised Valery’s papers again, everything was concrete, and every car – shining black and brand new – was identical.

And then they were at the side of a lake, pulling up to a tall building that looked like a prison, and his heart slung itself under his tongue. The people coming in and out were in lab coats. Valery slid down the seat a little way, feeling giddy. Scientists; radiation. God almighty, he was here to be a test subject of a human radiation trial. No wonder no one had told him.

He should have run away at those bloody traffic lights in Sverdlovsk. But oh no, he was too easily confused and too tired, and now he was going to get a dose of intravenous polonium stuck in his arm and dissolve like an idiot.