Page 86 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Clean,’ Valery murmured. ‘Very clean, I should think.’

‘We need to cover this over,’ Shukov said. ‘Somehow.’

‘With what?’

Someone else was awake. ‘Let me see.’

It was one of the young men who had been scratching. ‘Watch yourself too,’ Valery said. ‘Remember?’

‘I’m not a kid,’ the young man snapped, ruffled. ‘Shut up.’

Damn.

‘Hey,’ Shukov said. ‘Watch your mouth.’

The young man couldn’t reach Shukov, so Valery ended up as proxy. The young man caught the back of his neck and slammed him into the wall. He just caught the edge of the splintered hole and, over the bang of the impact, felt his skin tear, and then almost instantly he was soaked in blood.

The bang woke up the women nearest to the wall.

‘Sorry,’ Shukov called quietly.

Valery touched his face and regretted it, because his hand came away bloody and of course there was no washing it off. The slice went so deep it had nearly reached his teeth. He couldn’t feel it much, though. Perhaps it was because he’d got quite good at shutting his brain off from the things his body wanted. A distant part of him noted that this was, however, bad. He’d be lucky not to die of an infection.

The blow to the wall had splintered off a whole new chunk of plywood. It thumped on to the floor of the carriage, leaving the hole big enough to climb through.

It was a month later that Valery talked himself on to cleaning duty in the camp administrator’s apartments. Usually it was a job for the infirm, but the administrator had heard from the guards on the train that he was a doctor, the science kind, and he wanted a tutor, so cleaning was the reward; a sure ticket away from general labour in the mines, which would kill you in a season.

It had earned Valery plenty of resentful looks in the barracks. He ignored them. He wasn’t on talking terms with anyone anyway, not after the train, and he was perfectly content with that. He didn’t even miss talking to Shukov. Shukov had tried to make up with him three times, increasingly desperate. Maybe it was just righteous bollocks, maybe he was just railing against human nature, but Valery felt sicker each time, and shrugged him off.

In the cleaning cupboard were an amazing number of household chemicals with a great many more uses than tackling limescale.

Valery worked out the proportions, then made the necessary mixture in a big bottle full of nails. He kept it until the early morning, just tucked into the corner of his bunk. It was straightforward. Anyone would think it would be difficult to walk around a labour camp with a bomb, but that depended on who you were. Valery was pretty sure that he could have walked through with a sub-machine gun and everyone would have assumed it was for an art project.

It was still dark, four o’clock in the morning, and the guards tended to unlock the barracks at least an hour before everyone had to be up, because the cleaning units had to come in and take the night-soil barrels away, and all the usual dull life admin of a crowded room with fifty men in it.

The same fifty men from the train.

Valery got up quietly. He was on the top tier of the bunks, so he had to climb past two other people to reach the floor. He slid past the cleaning unit as they came in. They were the old men who had survived the train. Both had proven, when it came to it, to be sprightly.

Three guards were milling outside, blowing on their hands. The band of hot summer had come and gone in only a fortnight. They were high in the north of Siberia now, and the air was already sharp at night. Winter was coming down from the Arctic. When it came, the old hands said, the frost would be two fingers thick on the windows.

‘Oh, morning, 745,’ one of the guards said. Contrary to Valery’s expectations, none of them were vicious people. Mainly they were just tired and despairing, like everyone else. Sometimes one of them did something nasty, locked someone in a shed for a few days, but it wasn’t savage. They were still human. ‘It’s early. I know you’re an eager beaver but you can’t get started quite yet.’

‘I’m not,’ said Valery. ‘Would you step behind me? Thanks.’ He slung the bomb back into the barracks.

It exploded vastly. The windows blasted outward, east and west, and the doors shot open, though they were too solid to blow off. The heat of the fireball was intense, and the roof collapsed. Smoke poured up into the clear sky, orange from the glow below. There wasn’t any fuss or screaming; it had been too fast and too final for that.

Very slowly, the guards stepped forward, not quite around Valery.

‘What was that?’ one of them said at last. He sounded shocked. He was grey with ash.

‘Shall I take myself to the administrator or should you?’ Valery asked.

‘Let’s … go together, shall we,’ one of the other guards said, in the careful way of someone dealing with a madman. He put his hand on Valery’s shoulder to steer him in the direction of the administrator’s office, but very lightly. All around them, klaxons were keening into the night, and the emergency floodlights banged on around the perimeter.

‘He did what?’ the administrator said, after the guards had explained. He was absolutely blank. ‘How?’

The guards all glanced at Valery. ‘Well. He is a scientist,’ one of them said, as if scientist was code for magician.