The Boy Who Stole From the Dead

by Orest Stelmach

  “What happened in Chornobyl?” Johnny said.

  Bobby took a deep breath. “It was about two years ago. I was fourteen going on fifteen. My best friend and I were stealing from the dead. We did that sometimes. When we had to. For the money.”

  “Stealing from the dead? What does that mean? You were robbing graves?”

  “Yeah. But not the kind of graves you’re thinking of. Vehicle graves. Equipment graves. Buried houses.”

  “What?”

  “When reactor number four blew up in 1986, it snowed in Chornobyl and the villages beyond. The wind carried it all the way to Belarus. Except the white stuff wasn’t snow. It was radioactive dust. So the Soviet government evacuated the village and bulldozed everything. They buried cars, trucks, tractors, ambulances. They buried the bulldozers with new bulldozers. They even buried the houses closest to the power plant. Then they set up a perimeter thirty kilometers around the village and called it the Zone of Exclusion.”

  “And you dug this stuff up? Radioactive stuff? What, car parts? Engine parts and stuff like that? Are you serious?”

  “It was called scavenging. And it was a big business in Chornobyl. You see, by the year 2000, most of the radioactive particles were no longer dangerous. Except for strontium and cesium. They’re going to be a problem for another hundred years. They get blown around by the wind. End up mostly in wet areas. Which is why we avoided water.”

  “But if these graveyards were sealed for twenty years, how do you know these two substances—what are they called again?”

  “Strontium and cesium.”

  “Right. How could you be sure the first thing you touched wasn’t covered with them back from the time they buried it?”

  “You couldn’t be sure. You could never be sure. It’s a risk we took for the money. That’s how hard money was to come by. And me and my friend weren’t digging up the graves. The graves were already dug up.”

  “What do you mean already dug up? By who?”

  “Other scavengers. People were scavenging by the 1990s. They didn’t care if there were still twenty different particles that were still radioactive. Who knows how many hot parts made it to Kyiv, got fit on taxis, trucks, and cars. That’s how hard life was. We were scavenging what the other scavengers couldn’t get.”

  “You said ‘we’. ‘We were stealing from the dead.’ Who’s ‘we’?”

  Bobby’s eyes watered instantly. Johnny had never seen the kid show any emotion before. The sight unnerved him. Made him see his client for who he really was. Just a kid.

  “My friend and me,” he said.

  “Who was your friend?”

  “Eva. She was sixteen going on seventeen. We both had the same guardian. Her uncle. I didn’t live with my father. You know the story. He lived alone off the grid. I lived with my hockey coach. Coach was Eva’s uncle. She lived with him, too. He would drive us to a hole in the perimeter fence and we would sneak into the village. When we were running low on money. He drank a lot. And gambled.”

  “So what time of year was this?”

  “It was late fall. Like spring only colder.”

  “And the two of you were scavenging. In the daytime?”

  “Never. Always at dusk. So there was some light to work but not so much we stood out. By the time it was pitch black out we’d be hiking back to the car with whatever we found.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We were in an open pit by the red forest. Farm equipment mostly. We were both thin but strong. We could get deeper into the graveyard and get into tighter places than the other scavengers. I crawled though the hood of a tractor—someone had scavenged the entire engine piece-by-piece—to get to the harvester that was buried beneath it. The harvester still had most of its engine. I thought I could get the starter. Starters are worth good money. But I had to invert myself to get in and I accidentally kicked the piece of wood holding the tractor’s hood up. It closed behind me. Locked me in. I had my screwdriver, my wrench, and my pliers in my pockets, but I dropped the screwdriver and I couldn’t get the latch open without it. I kept banging but Eva was gone. First I was worried I wouldn’t get out. Then I started worrying about her.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “Eva came back. She thought she’d seen someone in the forest and she went to higher ground to get a better look. She had a crowbar. We always took turns going in. Whoever stayed up top had the hacksaw and the crowbar.”

  “So she pried it open?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you got out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then what?”

  Bobby took his eyes off Johnny and stared into space. “Then the gunshots started.”

  CHAPTER 52

  NADIA WOKE UP groggy. She was staring at a chalkboard. A clanging sound reverberated inside her head. Her vision cleared as the fog gradually lifted.

  It wasn’t a chalkboard. It was the sky. A charcoal sky at dusk. She was lying on her back, she realized.

  Her nose detected a faint smell of petroleum. Not gasoline. Oil, she thought. The incessant banging in her head continued. She wondered where she was.

  Nine words.

  The rawboned man from Lviv.

  A purple pill.

  A bolt of euphoria ripped through her. She was alive. She was conscious. She pushed herself upright. Her arms. They functioned. She flexed her leg muscles. Her quads tightened. She cleared her throat. Said her name. She could speak. The man who’d given her the pill hadn’t lied. It was just like Xanax—

  The Zone. She was back in the Zone.

  As soon as she saw the irradiated forest to her left there was no doubt. Nadia knew where she was. She remembered her final exchange with the rawboned man from Lviv.

  Where will I wake up?

  In the front row.

  The front row to what?

  The theater.

  What theater?

  You know what theater.

  She was here for a reason. Something hammered at her temple again.

  Adam. The link between Valentin and Adam. The reason Adam killed Valentine. That’s why she was here. And Marko. Good God. How could she have forgotten? Marko was here somewhere. And what was that goddamn noise?

  Nadia sprang to her feet. She stumbled. Tripped over something laying beside her. A crowbar. Why was she lying near a crowbar? Beside the crowbar was a flashlight. Nadia picked it up and took three steps.

  Ten feet in front of her lay a pit. The pit was filled with vehicles. Old Soviet cars, buses, military jeeps. It was a cemetery for dead cars. She’d driven past it on a bicycle in the night during her visit to Chornobyl last year. The top layer of vehicles had been stripped clean. Rusty and discolored bodies were all that remained. In some places, however, a second vehicle lay hidden beneath the first one where the cars were small.

  She heard the banging noise again. Now it didn’t sound as though it was in her head. It sounded as though it was coming from beyond.

  More banging. Nadia caught a glimpse of something moving in the pit. The noise and the movement had taken place at the same time. The noise was coming from the pit.

  “Marko,” Nadia said.

  A muffled reply from beneath the pile of stripped vehicles. Nadia couldn’t make out the words but she recognized the voice. She picked up the crowbar and moved to the edge of the pit.

  “Marko,” she said.

  A trunk rattled. The muffled voice sounded again. It came from an old Soviet car lodged beneath a hollowed-out Datsun. Nadia took the crowbar and checked the pit for water. She remembered her lesson from Hayder, the scavenger she’d met last year. Strontium and cesium settled in moisture. Her boots were going to get contaminated. They were probably already hot. But her hands. Her flesh. She could not let her hands touch water. Otherwise she’d absorb more radiation in a second
than was healthy in one year.

  She shined the light into the pit, saw the ground was dry, and climbed through the hollowed-out Datsun. She yanked the trunk open with the crowbar.

  Marko lay curled inside.

  “You all right?” she said.

  His voice sounded raspy. “Sure. Like a day at the spa. Get me out of here.”

  Nadia pulled him out of the trunk. Marko groaned as he straightened.

  “How long were you in there?” she said.

  He checked his watch. “About two. No. Closer to three hours.”

  Nadia crawled out of the pit. Marko barely squeezed through the Datsun. He looked unsteady as he hoisted himself onto the edges of the frame. A woman or a child could negotiate the graveyard easier than a grown man, she thought. She reached out with her hand. He took it. She yanked. He stepped out of the pit onto solid ground.

  A muted rifle shot cracked the air.

  They ducked.

  Metal clanged against metal. A bullet ricocheted among the cars in the pit.

  They looked around.

  “Which direction?” Nadia said.

  “Can’t tell. Sound suppressor.”

  “You see anyone?”

  “Not yet.”

  They swiveled around, backs to each other.

  Nadia spied a glint on the horizon. A man was taking aim with his rifle.

  “There he is,” Nadia said. “Go.”

  They ran.

  A second gunshot rang out.

  Nadia clenched her teeth as she ran, waited for the onset of pain. It didn’t come. She glanced at Marko. He was catching up quickly. The bullet had missed him, too.

  They sprinted onto an asphalt road. Grass, weeds, and small shrubs sprouted from its cracks. The path took them out of the hunter’s line of sight. The forest shielded them. They continued running hard for twenty yards. Then they jogged side by side.

  “Why did they go to all this trouble?” Marko said.

  “Good question,” Nadia said.

  “Why did they kidnap me and lock me in the trunk of a car in a vehicle graveyard. Why Chornobyl?”

  “Why give me a pill and have me wake up here?”

  “Why is a man with a rifle shooting at us?” Marko breathed heavily. “Almost feels like a game.”

  The phrase struck a chord. Nadia remembered Obon’s description of the origins of the Zaroff Seven. “Yeah. The most dangerous game.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Nadia told him about the Zaroff Seven and the meaning of the name.

  “And the Cossack in this story hunted a man?”

  “Correct.”

  “So you think these guys are hunting us?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why? You mean for sport?”

  “Who knows? They think Bobby killed Valentin’s son. It could be about revenge and sport. They knew I wanted answers about Valentin and his son, and their connection to Bobby. The man said if I took the pill I’d wake up and get the answers. It’s as though they are giving us the answers now.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m not sure. But if we stay alive, we might find out.”

  They stopped at a curve in the road.

  “Which way?” Marko said.

  Nadia glanced at the irradiated trees on the right. Remembered her previous travels along the road, the layout of the village.

  “This is the road to Pripyat.”

  “Pripyat?”

  “The city that was built to house the workers at the power plant. A couple of miles away from Chornobyl Village. It’s a ghost town. I was there. There’s a cultural center, a theater, a hotel. A Ferris wheel that was never used. It’s dark and totally desolate. It leads to the opposite end of the Zone of Exclusion, furthest away from the formal entrance. It’s perfect for us.”

  “Escape and evasion,” Marko said. “Rule number one. Stay away from the hay barn.”

  Nadia recalled the rules of survival. “Right. The hunter could have set us up any way he wanted. Why point us this way?”

  “Because he wants us to make a run for the hay barn.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s got a buddy there waiting for us.”

  “Then we better go the opposite way.”

  Marko shot her a glance. “You want to run toward the hunter?”

  “We’re going to loop around behind him.”

  Forest surrounded the road on both sides. Nadia veered left into the woods. Marko followed. Darkness fell upon them. They slowed to a march.

  “Twenty minutes for our pupils to adjust,” Marko said.

  “We don’t have twenty minutes. I’ll shine the light every ten seconds so we can see straight. How many guys did you see?”

  “One old guy. Looked like a Russian aristocrat. The ex-military guy who saved our bags in Lviv. And the driver. Basketball player with the eighteen karat mouth. They called the old guy General.”

  “Those two picked me up in Kyiv.”

  “They must have put me in the trunk first.”

  “Okay. We know the score. There’s three of them.”

  Nadia knew that the forest sprouted in groves in and around Chornobyl. She was certain they were somewhere between the power plant and Pripyat. Soon the grove would end and the reactors would appear on the left. The only question was how far away they’d be.

  The second rule of escape and evasion was speed. They needed to put as much distance between themselves and their hunter as quickly as possible. They took long strides, but every two minutes they veered off course to divert the hunter from their tracks. They left behind a complex and circuitous path. This was the third rule. Camouflage one’s tracks.

  Rule number four concerned scent.

  “We have to worry about dogs?” Marko said. “Hunters use dogs.”

  “No,” Nadia said. “A hunter loves his dogs. Think of the moisture, how much radiation they’d pick up. They’d be dead in a month.”

  Wolves howled in the distance. Something large rustled to the right. Based on Nadia’s experience last year, it might have been a boar, one of the poachers’ favorite targets. More than one had ended up in a Kyiv restaurant over the years. There were also a variety of wild cats and previously extinct species. Man’s absence had prompted the Zone to become one of the largest wild preserves in the former Soviet Union.

  Nadia kept waiting for a light to flash behind her. The hunter would surely be following. But it never happened.

  They emerged unscathed at the edge of a field. Two smokestacks towered above six nuclear reactors half a mile away.

  Sweat covered their faces. Nadia felt invigorated. The pace was comparable to her jogging speed. Her lungs filled and contracted. Marko appeared to be laboring.

  “Let’s run to that boulder and take a break,” she said.

  They stayed low and ducked behind the far side of a three-foot tall rock.

  “We need to get past the power plants to a path the scavengers use,” she said. “But to get to it, we have to cross the cooling pond.”

  “As in radioactive cooling pond?”

  “Yes. It hasn’t been decommissioned.”

  “How the heck are we going to do that?”

  “Rowboat. They keep them on both sides of the pond.”

  “But what if the boat tips over?”

  Nadia glared at him. “Next question?”

  “After we get across, then what?”

  “We keep going to the black village first. It’s close. A kilometer away.”

  “Black village?”

  “Some houses were left standing. Some squatters came back to live there. Our uncle was one of them.”

  “But he died.”

  “His live-in housekeeper didn’t. She has bicycles. It’s the squatte
r’s favorite mode of transportation. And she has a gun.”

  Marko’s eyes widened. “Now you’re talking.”

  They jogged around the power plant. From their vantage point, the road to Kyiv was north of the plant. The plant’s entrance was on the west side of the road. They were approaching from the south. A fence surrounded the reactors. There were six of them. Reactors five and six were only partially built. Reactor four was the one that had exploded. It stood entombed in a metal sarcophagus.

  Light spilled from the power plant to the field. It illuminated their path enough for Nadia and Marko to see rocks, stones, and puddles. The cooling pond ran along the front of the power plant and wound its way north beyond the reactors. Nadia guided Marko to the far corner of the plant. Two rowboats were tethered to a steel buoy.

  They climbed into one of the boats and rowed toward the opposite shore. Marko sat with his back to their destination. Nadia rowed looking forward. After an initial awkwardness, they fell into a rhythm. Water lapped the sides of the boat. A five-foot-long catfish swam by them. The pond was famous for its population of mutant catfish. The scientists who wanted to decommission the cooling pond had no idea what to do with them.

  When they arrived at the opposite shore, Marko stepped out of the boat onto an embankment. He lifted the oar out of the boat and placed it on shore. Then he helped Nadia climb onto solid ground.

  “What’s with the oar?” Nadia said.

  “Rule number five.”

  “Never leave a tool behind.”

  “You never know when it’ll come in handy.”

  They hustled through a patch of evergreens. Light from the power plant shined from behind them. Nadia emerged onto the street. Marko crept up beside her.

  A man with a rifle stood with his back to her, twenty-five yards away. He was looking left at the main road in front of the power plant. As though he’d expected them to sneak in along the inner perimeter of the power plant, not via the cooling pond. It was the six-foot-six driver. He gradually turned in a circle to keep a lookout in every direction. His line of sight started to align with the forest—

  They darted back into the woods. Nadia motioned for them to continue along their original path. If one of the hunters was in Pripyat as she assumed, and the second one was covering the main road, that left only one man unaccounted for.