Orest Stelmach - The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

“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 squatter’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.

Nadia and Marko walked for ten minutes to distance themselves from the hunter. They turned left at a cluster of brush and crept up to the side of the road again. Nadia peered around a tree trunk in the direction they’d come from.

The man was still there. Nadia had counted their steps so she would know how far to double back. She guessed they’d put two hundred yards between them and the hunter. His silhouette was framed by the arc of the power plant lights. She and Marko would be much darker from his perspective, but they would still be visible.

She told Marko the plan. They squatted side-by-side, waited for the hunter to turn their back to them, and raced across the street. Once they were in the woods, Nadia took the lead. She shined her flashlight to get oriented. Turned it off. She continued to do so every fifteen steps or so, aiming the light downward. Dense evergreens provided thick cover. The hunter on the road was behind them now. There was no risk he’d see the flashlight’s glow.

Marko followed close on her heels, oar in hand. They were experienced hikers. They both knew the distance they needed to cover. Marko trusted that once they retraced their steps through the woods, Nadia would know the way to the black village. He bounded with confidence. Didn’t ask questions. There was no need to. It was as though they were communicating without speaking.

They emerged on a trail with two tracks wide enough to accommodate a car. Weeds, grass, and small shrubs covered the middle. It had been a dirt road for vehicles, Karel had told her. Now it was a path for bikes and motorcycles.

They marched for three quarters of a mile until they came upon a cluster of abandoned homes. Farther down the path they came upon a small gray house with a thatch roof. The windows were blacked out but a light shone under the front door.

Nadia had been inside the house last year. This was where Karel took her to meet her uncle before he died. It was here that she met Oksana Hauk, the babushka who took care of her uncle and managed the house.

Nadia suspected the babushka was still inside. Some residents of Chornobyl had returned to their houses even though law forbid anyone to live in the Zone. They loved their homes, lives, and properties. This is my home, the babushka had said. My health is my business.