tissue breakdown and lack of clotting spotted Karel's skin. Blood smeared his chin and rouged his cheeks. When had he died? He was still warm, but he had mentioned infections, and a fever could burn in a body for an hour or more. He had probably lived on nothing but water and morphine for weeks. Actually, Arkady thought he might have lived a minute ago.
Why would a peacefully expiring man kick off a slipper? Katamay's mouth relaxed a little and let the tongue peek out. The satin pillow between his hands was spotless. Arkady broke his rule and turned the pillow over. The opposite side was soaked with blood only starting to brown. Blood from two sources, it seemed, mouth and nose, and what a brief struggle that must have been.
Arkady became aware of Dymtrus Woropay standing on the other side of the crazy chairs. Woropay held a cardboard box that looked heavy with bottles and flowers and trailed the sort of tinsel used to decorate at the holidays. Arkady also saw what the scene looked like to Dymtrus: Arkady standing over Karel Katamay with a bloody pillow.
'What the fuck are you doing?'
'I found him like this.'
'What the fuck did you do?'
Dymtrus dropped the box and let the bottles explode. He swung himself directly over the fence on the other side and bulled through the crazy seats. Arkady put the pillow between Katamay's hands and moved away.
Dymtrus snapped the gate chain. He knelt by the couch, touched the dead man's face, picked up the pillow.
'No! No!' He got to his feet and bellowed, 'Taras!' His voice went around the plaza. 'Taras!'
Arkady ran.
He ran for his motorbike, but another figure closed fast from the side, parting the grass with his arms, striding from paver to paver: Taras Woropay on skates. Arkady jumped on the bike and started it. He told himself that if he reached the highway, he would be safe. Dymtrus threw something shiny. A shopping cart. Arkady outraced it and was back on the plaza, headed for the road, when his rear tire popped and took Arkady to the ground. He rolled free and looked back at Taras on one knee with a gun. A good shot.
Arkady was on foot. When he was a boy and his father took him hunting, the general would shout, 'Run, rabbit!,' because shooting a standing rabbit was so little fun. 'Wave,' he'd tell Arkady. 'Damn it, wave.' Arkady would wave, the rabbit would bolt and the old man would drill it.
Dymtrus followed Arkady into the school, by the hanging chalkboard. Arkady tripped in the dark over gas masks on the lobby floor. They flopped out of the crate like rubber fish. He moved by memory as much as sight, heading for the kitchen in the back of the building. White tiles lined the kitchen walls. A dough bowl the size of a wheelbarrow stood on its legs. All the oven doors were open or broken off. The back door, however, had been boarded up in the last week. We should have rehearsed, the comic in him said. He looked out a window at chairs set on the ground for staff to use while smoking. He considered breaking the window with a loose oven door, until he saw Dymtrus waiting behind a birch. Arkady returned to the lobby and looked out the front window. Skates off, Taras was stepping up to the door.
Arkady went up the stairs two at a time, kicking bottles and debris aside. Taras was inside, at the bottom of the stairwell. Arkady knocked a loose bookcase down toward him. Copybooks fluttered down. Taras didn't have to shout to his brother where Arkady was. Anyone could hear.
Second floor. The music room. A piano leaning like a drunk against a loose keyboard. The tub-thumping sound of a drum accidentally kicked. All the notes a xylophone could make when stumbled into. A one-man band. Heavier feet on the stairs. Dymtrus. The next room was a flood of books, desks, children's benches. The door frame next to Arkady's head split open before he heard the shot. He javelined a bench down the hall and knew he had caught someone when he heard a curse. The last room was a nap center of dolls asleep on white beds. Arkady gathered a mattress around himself and dove through the glass of the window.
He landed on his back between seesaws, rolled to the trees and crawled under a thorn bush, feeling a prick or two, also aware of blood running down the back of his neck and into his camos, but there was no time to take inventory. In the moonlight he saw the brothers scanning trees from the broken window. He thought he might get away. He would have at least the time it would take them to go the length of the hall, down the stairs and out the front while he went the opposite direction. But they were athletes. Dymtrus stepped up on the sill and jumped. He hit the mattress and rolled off. Taras followed suit, and they were close enough for Arkady to hear their breathing. Close enough to smell a mixture of vodka and cologne.
They signaled to each other and separated. Arkady couldn't see where to, although he suspected they would go only a short distance and double back right to where he was. If he did get to the far woods, he could head west to the wild Carpathian Mountains or east to Moscow. The sky was the limit.
The woods were so loud. The electric shriek of crickets and cicadas. The invisible luffing of trees in the breeze. A man could just sink into the sound. Dead, he would.
A rock, a brick, something hit the wall of the school. Immediately, Taras, one arm hung low, hurt, ran forward and around the side of the school. One on one, Arkady took his chance. He emerged and moved to the quarter that Taras had deserted.
He had been suckered. Dymtrus was waiting behind a big enough tree this time, but Arkady tripped in brambles, and the shot that should have taken off his shoulder was high. By the time Dymtrus had advanced to see, Arkady was on his feet again, weaving downhill between trees.
Arkady had no plan. He wasn't headed to any particular road or checkpoint, he was only running. Since the Zone was uninhabited, apart from the staff in Chernobyl and the old folks in their black villages, he had a lot of running to do. He heard Taras's shouts catching up. The brothers were behind him, one on either side. One problem was that moonlight was not real light. Branches materialized to slap his face. Roots insidiously spread. Radiation markers seemed to multiply.
He glimpsed a Woropay closer every time he dared look. How could they be so fast? The ground pitched forward, and they were herding him through deeper and deeper bracken. His feet grew heavy, clutched by mud, and he saw ahead a trail of silver water.
It was a small swamp ringed by armless, rotting trees, reeds, the plop of frogs. In the center, the hump of a beaver dam and, topping that, a diamond-shaped marker.
Arkady moved back to firmer ground. He found no stones. A branch he picked up turned to dust. Weaponless, he met the charge of Taras, threw him over his hip, and stood to face Dymtrus. Dymtrus fought like an ice-hockey player: grab with one hand and pound with the other. Arkady took the hand, twisted and locked it behind Dymtrus's back, then ran him into a tree. He kicked Taras in the head when he returned. He hit Dymtrus below the belt. But Dymtrus clutched Arkady's knees as he dropped, and Arkady couldn't put enough force behind a punch into Taras's head. Dymtrus climbed up Arkady. Taras hit back with the gun. Dymtrus held Arkady's arms so Taras could swing the gun at a steadier target. The next conscious moment, Arkady was being turned over on the ground. Shooting him was too easy; they could have done that when they first caught up.
Dymtrus said, 'I brought the pillow.'
He pulled the pillow out of his tunic and sat on Arkady's chest while Taras knelt and held on to Arkady's arms. Dymtrus breathed hard through the saliva that draped from his mouth. The blood on the pillow was still damp.
Arkady's eyes sought the moon, a treetop, anything else.
Dymtrus said, 'You'll go like Karel went. Then we'll put you in the water, and no one will find you for a thousand fucking years.'
'Fifty thousand.' Alex Gerasimov came out of the trees. 'More like fifty thousand years.'
In Alex's hand was a gun. He shot Dymtrus in the back, and the big man collapsed as dead as a slaughtered steer while his brother sat back on his heels in surprise. Taras brushed the hair from his eyes and had started to form a question when Alex shot him. A cigarette burn through the heart. Taras looked down at it and kept falling until he spread out on the ground.
Alex picked up the pillow.
They carried the bodies back.
Alex said the swamp and hillside were too hot; the militia would either leave the Woropays or drag them out
