The Boy from Reactor 4

by Orest Stelmach

  “This is Volodya,” Hayder said, after climbing inside and sitting beside her. “Volodya will be the driver tonight.” He switched to Russian. “Volodya, this is Nadia.”

  Volodya barked a hello in Russian, turned the truck around, and took off down a path with the lights on. A dosimeter on the front dashboard chattered lightly.

  The forest gave way to the steppe, which yielded to pockets of woodlands. They passed eleven abandoned homes, all made of square logs with thatch roofs. With fifteen kilometers to go, they sneaked through another barbed-wire fence. The roof of the next house they saw protruded from the ground at an odd angle. The home had been bulldozed and buried. “After the reactor explodes,” Hayder said, “they water and bury everything.”

  “Why the water?” Nadia said.

  “To keep radioactivity dust from blowing to the other cities. Government tells people: bury vegetable gardens, bury topsoil, too. But people do not believe anything is really wrong. They think it is just the fire. They say, ‘We won’t get propagandized again.’ So they bury topsoil but eat the vegetables. And keep the manure from the top. They think, ‘Why waste good shit over government scam?’

  “While he tells people in Chernobyl to destroy the farms, Gorbachev goes on television and tells the world there is no radioactive leak. They put dosimeters in the food in Pripyat and show all is good. But government dosimeters are only good to measure the air. You need different dosimeter for the food. The truth is that Gorbachev does not want to mess up the May Day parade in Kyiv. So he does the Soviet thing.”

  “He lies,” Nadia said.

  “He denies,” Hayder said. “The explosion is on April twenty-sixth, but the government does not tell about radioactivity leak until May fifth. That was the end of the Soviet Union and the birth of the free Ukraine. Chernobyl is the single-biggest reason this is the free country. Chernobyl containment cost eighteen billion rubles. Destroyed the economy. Proved the communists could not take care of their peoples. Destroyed the Soviet Union.”

  They sat quietly for a moment as Volodya guided the truck through a patch of brush.

  “You know a lot about the history here,” Nadia said, “don’t you?”

  Hayder let a quiet moment pass between them. “I am from here,” he said.

  “I don’t understand. I thought you were from Crimea.”

  “Born in Crimea, yes. But I am the child of the Zone. My father was the bio-robot. My father was…Robot Hayder. The Soviet government gives order: biological resource are dispensable. The liquidators who work on the reactor call themselves bio-robots. Like dispensable machines. Robot Ivan, Robot Volodya, Robot Hayder…No one tells them radioactivity leak. No one tells them they will die. Some are militia, some are volunteer. My father came for the money. By the time they know the true gig is up, it is too late. My father moves blocks of radioactive graphite in reactor with bare hands. He dies two weeks after explosion. My mother lives in Pripyat. I am born eight months later.”

  Lights shone a hundred yards away over the top of a grove of pine trees. Volodya stopped at the edge of the woods.

  “We get out here,” Hayder said. “Bicycles on the other side of trees. Dosimeter on. Follow me.”

  He bent low to the ground and scampered along a well-worn path to the edge of the clearing. Nadia followed his footsteps carefully, wondering how many particles of cesium were dangling within a foot of her clothing. She burst out of the forest behind Hayder and knelt down beside him on a block of cracked asphalt.

  Two rusty bicycles with headlights bolted to the handlebars lay beneath a tree. In the foreground, spotlights illuminated a giant chimney encased in scaffolding. It rose from a dome a few hundred yards away. The silhouettes of two other smokestacks and a dozen cranes surrounded it.

  “Welcome to the village of Chernobyl,” Hayder said.

  He scanned the reactors and the buildings around them, his eyes blazing with anticipation.

  “The thing people don’t know about the Zone,” he said, wetting his lips, “is once you are here, you want to come back. You need to come back. The Zone…It pulls you in.”

  Hayder loosened his scarf. He turned to Nadia and revealed a V-shaped scar on his neck.

  “Last chance to turn back,” he said.

  Nadia recognized the scar from photographs of children at the Chernobyl Museum. Cancer of the thyroid.

  Her dosimeter chattered steadily. Meeting her uncle suddenly seemed far less compelling than it had in Kiev. But then again, she needed the money, and there was also the boy, her cousin. How dangerous could Pripyat be if they offered daily tours of the place?

  Nadia swallowed but shook her head.

  “You go on?” he said.

  Nadia imagined having a little cousin who looked up to her, and logging onto her brokerage account and seeing a seven- or eight-figure cash balance. “I go on.”

  “Okay. You go on.” The tips of his silver-and-gold teeth shined in the dark. It was the first time she’d seen him grin. “You go on. I have some respectability for you.”

  Hayder disappeared into the forest to tell Volodya he could leave and returned thirty seconds later. The truck rumbled away in the darkness.

  Nadia checked her watch. It was 8:34 p.m. “I have twenty-six minutes. Will I make it to Pripyat in time?”

  “Sure, sure. Three kilometers. I put you on the main road to Pripyat before I go. We meet back here ten thirty p.m.”

  Nadia recoiled. “You go? Go where? You told us you’d take me to Pripyat yourself. To the Hotel Polissya. That I would wait for you afterward in the Chernobyl café. Where there are people.”

  He pursed his lips sympathetically. “Small change in the plan. Very small. Before we go in the truck, Volodya relay message from the business contact. Schedule change. I meet him at nine o’clock now, so cannot go with you. You must go alone.”

  “But isn’t Pripyat a ghost town? Are there any lights there at all?”

  “Sure, sure. Good light on the bicycle, and I give flashlight, too,” he said. “Check cell phone. The coverage good. Is very good.”

  Nadia pulled out her phone. Five bars lit up in green. Hayder did the same and nodded reassuringly. She punched his number into her phone and hung up as soon as it rang.

  “See?” Hayder said. “No worries. Hayder is the stand-up guy. You get lost, any problem, you call me, we work out together. Just like New York.”

  “Yeah,” Nadia said. She eyed the wreckage on the horizon and imagined a team of human robots cleaning it all up. “Just like New York.”

  At the outskirts of the power station, the edge of a cooling pond shimmered in the night. Nadia remembered the skates the boy was wearing in the photo and wondered if he played hockey on it during the winter. Perhaps that was as good as it got for her cousin out here, a topless Madison Square Garden manufactured out of radioactive water, as frozen during the winter as Chernobyl was in time.

  CHAPTER 36

  ADAM FELL TO his knees in the field, gasping. His necklace popped out of his shirt. The locket bobbed before him. He reached out to tuck it back in.

  “No strength,” his hockey coach said.

  The snap of the homemade whip cracked the air. The braided rope lashed Adam’s shoulders and back. It dug through his sweatshirt and T-shirt and burned his skin. Adam’s hands fell to the ground for support before he could grasp the locket. He gritted his teeth, determined not to make a sound no matter how much it hurt.

  “No stamina,” the coach said.

  He snapped the whip again.

  Moisture blurred Adam’s vision. The whip thrashed his spine.

  “No heart,” the coach said.

  He whipped Adam again.

  Tears streamed down Adam’s cheeks.

  The locket. Where was the locket? He focused, grabbed it, and tucked it under his shirt.

  The coach towered over him, his huge potbelly hanging over his waist like a sack of potatoes, rope coiled in his right hand, slapping his left as though counting the se
conds until the next beating.

  “I’ve been training you to play hockey since you were seven. Seven years old! And you are what—fifteen now? That’s eight years. And you still can’t climb that hill? You really are a useless bastard. The son of a scumbag Ukrainian thief and an ugly American whore. How many times have I told you? If you can’t climb that hill, there’s no hope for you. There’s no future for you. And guess what? You’ll never climb that hill.”

  The hill was one hundred meters long and as steep as a snow mountain. The problem with the sprint was that it was a rigged game. The coach made him run with a fifty-meter rubber band around his waist. It was as thick as a man’s wrist. The coach tied the other end of the rubber band around his own belly. When he decided it was time for Adam to fall, he yanked on the band and pulled him back.

  The coach was right. He would never climb that hill. He would never be strong enough to pull the coach with him.

  Rusty hinges creaked behind them. Three huge men in overalls shuffled out the back door of the Korosten Porcelain Factory. They carried pails as wide as tractor tires to the field and placed them in front of three wooden blocks. The first block went up to Adam’s knees, the second to his hips, and the third to his chest.

  Adam knew the routine. He did it three to five times a week. He quickly ripped off his tattered sneakers and pulled off his torn socks.

  The coach removed a stopwatch from his pants pocket. “Five…four…”

  Damian scampered to his bare feet and faced the column of pails and boxes.

  “Three…two…one…Begin!” The coach squeezed the stopwatch with his left hand.

  Adam jumped. As soon as he landed on the first box, he bent his knees and leaped onto the second. He did the same to land on the third. Once on the highest box, he spun in the air 180 degrees and reversed course. When he landed on the ground, he spun again and repeated the process.

  “Five minutes on,” the coach screamed. “One minute off. Total exercise time: thirty-five minutes!”

  Thirty-five minutes? The coach was trying to kill him. He’d always been brutal, but now he was insane. It had started after he got back from visiting his father in Chernobyl on Sunday. It was as though the coach knew he would be leaving soon forever. The coach had taken him in years ago as a favor to his father. He’d promised to turn Adam into a professional-caliber hockey player. But now it was as though he didn’t want Adam to go away. If he did leave, the coach wanted to make sure he did so in a casket.

  If the coach was planning to kill him, he might have to kill the coach first.

  “You won’t last thirty-five minutes,” the coach said. “Makarov would have lasted thirty-five minutes. Tretiak would have surely lasted thirty-five minutes. You? You won’t last thirty-five minutes.”

  After twenty-five minutes of jumping, Adam shook off a dizzy spell. His lungs were ready to burst. His legs were spaghetti.

  He was moving at a snail’s pace. Each leap required maximum concentration and effort now. But he wouldn’t quit. He wouldn’t give the fat bastard the satisfaction. He’d rather die than quit.

  He leaped for the second block. Landed flat on the edge of the square. Bobbled. Wavered. Held his position.

  “You want to know why you won’t last?” the coach said. “Because you have no heart. Because you have no soul. You’re the product of a radioactive cesspool. If I were a betting man, I would never bet on you.”

  Adam took aim for the third block. He bent his knees. Swung his arms back and jumped.

  His toes kissed the block. His heels came up short. He teetered, reached out for an imaginary handle—

  There wasn’t one. He tumbled down into the pail of sizzling charcoal rock below him.

  The coal burned his feet. He rolled to one side. The rocks singed his arm. He rolled to the other side. The rocks scalded the other arm. He kept rolling until he fell out of the bucket and collapsed on the grass.

  The coach convulsed with laughter. “You look like the village idiot taking a bath. Better than television. Much better. Thank you, boy. I knew there was a reason I was training you all these years. Put your shoes back on. Puck-handling drill in two minutes. Two minutes. Prepare yourself!”

  Adam caught his breath during the first minute. With sixty seconds left, he staggered to his feet and walked around the field, trying to shake the blood out of his arms and legs.

  That evening, Adam slept beside the chicken coop of the coach’s house, not in the barn, where he usually did. He stole three apples from the neighbor’s cart and ate them instead of his usual dinner of buckwheat bread and cheese.

  It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what the coach tried to do to him. Adam had the necklace.

  The necklace held the locket, the locket held the future, and the future was his.

  CHAPTER 37

  LIGHT SPILLED FROM Nadia’s bicycle onto the narrow road to Pripyat.

  A pothole.

  She pulled on the handlebars to the right to avoid it. Her dosimeter screeched. Nadia yanked the handlebars farther to the right. The bicycle swerved. She teetered and tottered. Pedaled to stay upright. The dosimeter hushed.

  The bicycle turned in a circle. Nadia regained her balance. Ended up right back where she had started. The dosimeter screeched again. She cursed and pedaled through it. The dosimeter quieted down.

  Her headlight was aimed ten feet in front of her, a compromise that let her see the road and some of what lay ahead. She weaved around the ubiquitous potholes, sticking to the right side of the road, avoiding the column of grass and weeds growing down the middle.

  Hayder told her to avoid all vegetation, especially the moss. Water infuses moss, and cesium hides in water. She’d probably driven over a small patch and sent the dosimeter into a frenzy. So what? Her tires were already hot. Bicycles that entered the Zone stayed in the Zone. It was the rider you had to worry about. Hopefully, this rider was destined to leave the Zone.

  Chernobyl’s red forest pressed in on the narrow road from both sides. A quarter moon illuminated their dense canopies and irradiated coral trunks. Power lines crisscrossed above her head. In a clearing along the forest’s edge, cars, trucks, and ambulances protruded from the ground where they’d been buried.

  Nadia passed the first block of apartment buildings. The thought occurred to her that her uncle might live there. Logic dictated she keep her eyes on the road, but she couldn’t resist. She aimed her headlight at the apartment complex and stole a glance. Dark windows against a white-and-orange facade, terraces with wooden banisters. It might have been a glimpse of urban slumber, as opposed to a nuclear apocalypse, until she looked again.

  The windows were black holes: all the glass had been removed. The banisters dripped with mildew. Trees sprouted around the perimeter of the building and rendered the first two floors invisible. A branch from a taller specimen disappeared into a window on the fifth floor. Her uncle didn’t live there. Only ghosts were sleeping inside.

  Nadia fixed the light back on the street and exhaled. There was no trace of life in Pripyat. What did she expect? The population was zero. The atmosphere reminded her of a black-and-white movie from her childhood where the last man on the planet searched for another survivor.

  She arrived at the city center at 8:54. Three sets of buildings framed the main square. Trees, shrubs, and grass protruded randomly from cracks in the asphalt. A sign above the building on the left said RESTAURANT. Beside it was the CINEMA. The building in the middle was the CULTURAL CENTER. Beyond the building stood a Ferris wheel. It was frozen in time, its yellow chairs reaching hopelessly for the moon. Nadia headed toward the building on the right, as Hayder had instructed.

  Halfway there, a light flashed on the hotel’s first floor. It flamed like a cigarette lighter and went off just as quickly.

  It was Damian. It had to be. He was signaling that he was waiting for her.

  When she arrived at the hotel, Nadia laid her bicycle on a clean stretch of asphalt. The front doors were chained shu
t. The glass, however, had been removed from all the windows. There was no light inside. Why didn’t he keep the light on inside?

  Nadia climbed through a window. Her feet found a perch on top of a radiator. As she jumped to the floor, a cloud of dust gagged her. She suppressed a wave of panic. Took three steps into the lobby and turned on her flashlight.

  Strips of wood and Sheetrock on the floor. Debris everywhere. An elevator shaft, door removed. Two light switches turned up in the on position. A high-powered rifle was aimed at her head.

  “Don’t make a sound,” the man with the rifle said quietly in coarse Ukrainian. He was hiding behind a desk. “Turn off your flashlight and get down on your knees, real, real slow. Do it now.”

  Nadia clicked off her flashlight. She looked down. An infrared beam blazed a path from the rifle to her chest. She fell to her knees. Was this her Uncle Damian? Why would he be pointing a rifle at her?

  The room was silent. The man with the rifle didn’t say anything. He didn’t lower his rifle’s aim. The infrared beam streamed over Nadia’s head.

  An animal growled. It sounded like the raspy exhalation of a wild cat. The growl came from behind her. The animal sounded poised to pounce.

  Footsteps. Two high-pitched roars in rapid succession.

  A muted shot rang out. The animal whimpered. Hit the floor with a thud.

  A powerful lantern battery shone at Nadia from the hunter’s perch. She shielded her eyes with her forearm and turned away.

  A giant lynx lay behind her, gorgeous silver-and-gold fur with spectacular black ears. It looked like a sleeping baby. Its lungs filled and contracted. A dart protruded from its skin. There was no sign of blood.

  “You haven’t seen my face,” the hunter said. “Go. Now.”

  Not Uncle Damian. Nadia climbed back out the window and ran to her bicycle. She pedaled furiously, paying no heed to the dosimeter. Halfway to Chernobyl village, she stopped and called Hayder. She got his voice mail. She left him a message that her meeting was over and she would be at the Chernobyl village café at 9:30. She was supposed to meet him across the street from the café at 10:30. She would be an hour early.