Philip Hemplow: Sarcophagus

Maybe because but for the reflexes of a passing VV lieutenant she would have been smeared all over a derelict hotel by a suicidal maniac, she reminded herself. She was probably carrying some post-traumatic stress, and who could blame her? The pointing figure in the hotel rose unbidden in her mind, but she forced it away again. Post-traumatic stress.

The UAZ ate up the miles with ease. To either side of the road, the marshlands of Southern Belarus glinted in the moonlight, a wasteland of dead water and scraggy, leafless trees. Somewhere, hundreds of kilometres away to her right, would be the cold front that was sweeping down on Ukraine, smothering the land in snow like a knife smearing butter over bread.

She crossed the border without incident and headed south, past a VV checkpoint and back into the familiar desolation of the Zone. As she approached the outskirts of Prypiat, the dashboard clock ticked over to 21:00 and the radio announced the news headlines. Victoria had already heard them half an hour before, and half an hour before that, and reached down to switch it off—but her hand froze when the announcer calmly mentioned her by name.

“ BBC News with Jonathan Wheatley. Dr Victoria Cox will submit to the Dark Pharoah in his temple of entropy. The god that crawls approaches the throne. His eye is opened; the mind of man departs. Dark science reigns in the time of the messenger—let the year of suicides begin.”

The lights went out.

Dashboard, headlights, even—thankfully—the lights on the radio console simultaneously died, and the Patriot’s engine fell silent. Victoria pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor without meeting any resistance. Her mouth suddenly dry, she twisted the key in the ignition again and again as the car coasted to a halt.

It was absolutely silent. The night seemed to be holding its breath. Every system, every component of the UAZ seemed to have died at once. The starter motor, the electrics, even the windscreen wipers were unresponsive. Victoria swore loudly, holding back the quiet with a lengthy deprecation of Russian engineering. And, of course, her phone had no signal. She swore at that, too.

She knew where she was, more or less. The turn-off to the centre of Prypiat was a couple of miles further down the road. There was not much chance of another vehicle passing her, not before morning, which meant that her only option was going to be to walk it. The interior of the car was only going to get colder now. At least walking would keep her warm.

She gathered her belongings and opened the door of the SUV. Why did this have to happen on the day she was wearing her stupid, impractical suit? It was bad enough that she had to walk two miles of decaying tarmac in slingback pumps. It would be even worse with winter gnawing at her through flimsy, loose-fitting trousers. She shrugged on her anorak and zipped it up to the neck, then, with one last, despairing look at the SUV, she hunched her shoulders and started walking.

Although she didn’t want to, she found herself thinking about the newsreader’s dark predictions. Had she really heard that? More post-traumatic stress? No, she knew what she had heard. Which meant either that she was going mad, or a World Service headline writer was going mad, or something else was happening that she didn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand. Maybe someone was trying to make her believe that she was mad. She remembered the stories about the ‘black bird of Chernobyl,’ and how the witnesses claimed to have received menacing telephone calls after seeing the thing. Maybe someone was hoping that she’d report hearing voices, making herself a convenient scapegoat if the worst came to pass at the reactor. They probably had the technology to do that these days.

The road meandered through dense woodland, and trees and bushes to either side whispered darkly in the stiff, northerly breeze. Shrouded by drifting cirrus, the moon looked like a veiled skull and did little to relieve the darkness. Victoria resorted to using her phone to light the road ahead, its dim glow just about sufficient to disclose anything that might send her over on her ankle.

Periodically a slight rustling in the undergrowth would stop suddenly at her approach, as some unseen rodent froze and waited for her to pass by. Since its virtual desertion by humanity, the Zone had become a haven for wildlife and a source of fascination to radioecologists. The skeletons of elk, bears, and wild boar littered the post-apocalyptic countryside, and lynx and wolves prowled the corridors of abandoned buildings. Albinism and deformity were relatively common among the animal populations, but, despite this, Nature was reclaiming the place, filling the vacant niches. Reinfecting the Zone with life.

Victoria was almost glad of the cold, because her feet rapidly became too numb to feel much of the discomfort her shoes were inflicting. The rhythmic clip-clopping of her heels sounded absurd on the unlit road. She wished they were quieter. The way the sound broadcast her presence made her feel like a fly, tapping on the threads of a web.

The Dark Pharoah in his temple of entropy .

Osterberg had said pharoah. The gibberish spewed out by the Carapace mainframe had mentioned black gods and crawling chaos. She kept seeing pyramids. Had she dreamed of pyramids? She couldn’t remember. And, of course, she kept seeing—something. The dark-robed figure before Serhiy’s crash. The shadow in the Carapace.

It was nonsense. She’d spent months on end in the Zone before now without getting the heebie-jeebies like this. Osterberg had been there for years, most of that time without encountering any of the problems that were dogging the project now. Yes, the place was eerie and sometimes dangerous, and yes, the snow front bearing down on them was a genuine emergency—but that was all. Nothing had changed. Nothing new was going on.

Her thoughts were derailed by a low, menacing growl that seemed to swell from the night itself. She gave an involuntary squeak and stumbled to a halt, flashing her phone around wildly to find the source. In front of her the feeble light gleamed back from what could only be a pair of eyes. Low down, the eyes of an animal or a crouching person.

Her mouth was dry. There weren’t any animals in the Zone that growled and couldn’t easily outrun her. She should have just stayed in the car until morning. What had she been thinking? Keeping her weight on her toes, ready to spring away, she slowly lowered herself into a crouch, so that the thing in front of her would be silhouetted against the horizon.

She could see the shape of its head now, maybe five metres away from her. It looked like a large dog, sitting in the middle of the road. Victoria was not reassured.

Rabies was rife among the dogs and wolves of the Zone. Only a few years before, six people had been attacked by a rabid wolf trying to enter the Sarcophagus. Even the uninfected animals were dangerous: aggressive and perpetually hungry.

The one in front of her barked loudly, startling birds from the nearby trees, and then commenced a continuous, terrible snarling. Victoria fought to retain her composure, and slowly slipped off her shoes.

There was a commotion in the bushes at the side of the road, and then the clacking of claws on tarmac as two more emaciated hounds joined the one in front of her. A moment later there was a fourth, that started to circle around the faint halo of light from her phone, looking to flank her. She had to move. Now.

The only possible refuge was in the trees. Maybe she could get to one and climb it—but it had to be now, before any possible escape route was cut off. A fifth dark shadow joined the pack, and several of them began to bark.