The Boy Who Stole From the Dead (36 page)

“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 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.

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.”

CHAPTER 53

 J
OHNNY 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.”