Orest Stelmach - The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

Stakes marked the vegetable garden beside the house. The ground had been tilled in preparation for seeding.

Nadia didn’t need to remind herself that people in abandoned homes in a black village didn’t hear knocks on their door in the night. She pressed her mouth to the edge of the door. Knocked three times, paused, and knocked three times again. Like Karel had done last year.

“ Pani Hauk,” Nadia said, addressing her formally. “ Babushka . It’s Nadia Tesla. From America. You remember me. I came here with Karel last year. Nadia Tesla.”

Nadia counted to five. Prepared to knock again.

A bolt slid open on the other side of the door. Then a second one. Nadia felt Marko’s hand on her back. He pulled her aside so she wasn’t standing in the doorway. Moved to the opposite side himself.

The door opened.

A familiar voice spoke her name. Rosehips, gravel, and grit. “Nadia?”

Nadia recognized the voice. She stepped to the front. “ Babushka .”

Nadia’s voice faltered before she could finish the word. As soon as she saw the babushka ’s face, Nadia knew she’d miscalculated. The babushka looked sturdy and resilient as ever, but the sparkle was gone from her eyes. In its place was a look of dread.

Footsteps behind them.

Marko whipped around, oar in hand.

The rawboned man from Lviv pointed a rifle at them. It had a long curled magazine at the base. It didn’t look like a weapon a hunter used to kill an animal. It looked like a weapon a soldier used to kill another. Nadia remembered how he’d smiled at her when he’d given her the purple pill. He wasn’t smiling now. In fact, he wasn’t exuding any emotion at all. He simply looked efficient, albeit with a slight limp.

“Drop the oar and get in the house.” His tone was quick and curt.

Marko dropped the oar. Nadia stepped into the kitchen. Marko followed.

Two lanterns lit the room. The babushka stood beside the wood-burning brick oven.

A tall and distinguished man entered the kitchen from the hallway that led to the bedroom. He had a palpable air of entitlement about him, and a hunting rifle with a scope slung over his shoulder. He cast a look of disgust at Marko and then brightened as he measured Nadia.

“Yes,” he said. “Your head will look quite nice among my other trophies. Quite nice, indeed.”

JOHNNY COULD SEE the anguish in the kid’s face. All this time Johnny thought Bobby’s conscience was eating him up about the Valentine killing. But in fact an altogether different event persecuted him. Something that happened two years ago on the opposite side of the world, in a place everyone had heard of but no one wanted to talk about.

“Gunshots?” Johnny said. “Who was shooting?”

“The hunters.”

“What hunters?”

“The hunters that were there to hunt men.”

“What men?”

“Criminals. If a man is in trouble with the police, the Zone is a good place to hide out. No one lives there, except for the squatters. There’s no law. Just the animals. What could be a better place to hide?”

“Who were these hunters?”

Bobby shrugged. “I don’t know. Coach told me later they were powerful men. Men who could do whatever they wanted.”

“And had they done this before?”

“There were rumors but we never believed them. When they spotted me and Eva from a distance they assumed we were scavengers. Scavenging and poaching in the Zone is illegal. A scavenger is a criminal. That made us no better than the other criminals they were hunting. So they shot at us with their rifles.”

“And what happened?”

“They missed. We got away. We ran from the village to Pripyat. It was dark there and we knew the way out of the exclusion zone. We didn’t come in via the main road, though. We came in through the forest. When we saw the car parked behind the cultural center—there are no cars in Pripyat—we knew.”

“There was another hunter waiting for you.”

Bobby nodded. “We turned back, cut into the forest and hiked two kilometers back toward the power plant. There are only two places along the perimeter for a scavenger to escape. One path starts at Pripyat. The other one starts on the other side of Chornobyl, half a kilometer before the main entrance to the power plant. That’s how we got in. That’s how we needed to get out.”

“You and Eva.”

“When we doubled back, we snuck inside the power plant so we didn’t have to cross the cooling pond. There’s an opening in the fence. A person can sneak through. That way you walk along the cooling pond on the inner bank. By the reactors. You don’t have to cross it. But when we looped around toward the far side of the plant, another hunter was there waiting for us with a rifle. She was the lookout for the cooling pond. We caught her by surprise by coming along the inner perimeter.”

“She?”

“One of the hunters was a woman. She pointed her rifle at us and told us to put our hands in the air. She looked confused. She said, ‘You’re not criminals. You’re children. What are you doing here?’ When we didn’t answer, she told me to show her what I had in my knapsack.”

“What did you have in your knapsack?”

“Gear shafts from a tractor. They look like darts made out of iron. When she saw them she got angry. She said, ‘Who put you up to this? You poor things. They’re not going to care. Because you’re scavengers. Don’t you see? My husband and the others. They’re not going to care that you’re children.’ And then she said, ‘Go. Run.’ But it was too late. Eva had pulled a knife out of her back pocket and was charging her, trying to catch her by surprise. It was reckless and stupid but that was Eva’s way. Eva was fast. Very fast. It all happened so quickly. There was no time to think. The woman did what any person would have done if someone with a knife charged them.”

“She squeezed the trigger,” Johnny said.

Bobby nodded.

“And?”

“Nothing happened.”

“It was a squib.” Johnny heard the relief in his own voice.

“When the rifle didn’t fire, all three of us were surprised. None of us understood what had happened. Especially not her. So before she got her senses back, I ran up and shoved her as hard as I could. She wasn’t expecting it. She went flying backward. The rifle fired into the sky as she fell backward—”

“Delayed discharge,” Johnny said. “Not a squib. Hang-fire.”

“As she fell backward headfirst into the cooling pond.”

NADIA AND MARKO stood against a wall in the kitchen. The same picture Nadia had seen last year hung behind them. It was a picture of a boy in skates holding a hockey stick on a frozen pond. It was the same picture her uncle had sent her mother. It was the first snapshot of her cousin, Adam, she had ever seen.

The babushka stood between the oven and a portable cabinet. To her left, the rawboned man from Lviv held his assault rifle pointed at Marko and Nadia. The man they called the General sat in a narrow chair, rifle by his side.

He pulled a radio transmitter out of his pocket. “The game is over. I repeat. The game is over. Report to base camp. We’ll be there shortly.”

Three men answered sequentially in the affirmative.

Nadia and Marko exchanged glances. They’d thought there were three men. But there were five. The two in the house, the one they’d encountered on the street, and two more. They had both scavenger trails staked out, Nadia thought.