Speaker 1: The commission was from a London magazine i'd worked with before.
It was a long form piece about six thousand words
and a photo essay, all on the ecological recovery in
the Chernobyl zone. The angle was genuinely good, genuinely surprising
if you hadn't read the science. In thirty eight years
without humans, the exclusion zone had become accidentally the largest
wildlife sanctuary in Europe. Surprisingly, wolves had returned in numbers
not seen in the region since before industrialization. There were
links wild boar, white tailed eagles, and a population of
Puzzwalski's horses introduced as an experiment in the nineties that
had thrived beyond any reasonable projection. The absence of humans
had done more for the ecosystem than any conservation program,
which said something worth saying. The radiation was still measurable,
but it turned out wolves didn't care about elevated background
radiation in the way they cared about being shot, which
they no longer were. This was the piece what happens
to a landscape when people leave it entirely. I'd spent
three weeks reading the ecology literature before I came, and
I had a genuine interest in the subject that made
the work easier. I wanted to photograph a wolf if
I could. I wanted to photograph the zones edges at
dawn with a forest that reclaimed the outskirts of Pripriat,
and you could stand in what had once been a
residential street and find it fully wooded, the pavement broken
by roots, the street signs lost in undergrowth. My counter
clicked up to one point four microcy verts and I
noted it and moved on. That was part of the
job a a SOCCA, you learn not to dwell on
the numbers. The helicopters absorb your attention anyway. There were
hundreds of them spread across the flat ground in rusting rows,
the MI eight and the M twenty six's that flew
over the reactor in the weeks after the explosion, trailing
their water and sand and lead. Some still had their rotors,
some lost them to weather or theft, and sit with
their necks exposed, the stumps of their rotor hubs corroded green.
From a distance, they looked like a parking lot from
a war that finished badly. Up close, crouched between two
of them with a twenty four seventy at f eight.
The scale of the things hit you again each time.
The cockpit windows were still intact on most. When the
light catches them, they reflect the sky. I got the shot.
I wanted a line of five of them, receding into
morning haze, the nearest one sharp and the furthest dissolved
and stood up, and the counter clicked again, and I
checked it. It had climbed to one point nine. Back up,
Mikola said from behind me, not urgently. I backed up
three steps and the reading dropped. He nodded, and we
moved the next row. That was how it went with him.
Information delivered as it became relevant, in the same even
tone he used for everything. The floor on the third
level of the administration building had collapsed into the second.
In the school ampripate, you could touch the desks and
the floors, but not the window frames. Something in the
paint had concentrated it, and everywhere in the zone. Not
the air. Never worry about the air. The air is fine.
The dust was the problem. Don't touch your face, don't
put anything on the ground that you'll be touching later.
He had been doing this for fifteen years. He had
a way of standing slightly ahead of you in any
given space, position between you and whatever direction he hadn't
cleared yet. I'd stopped noticing it after the first few hours,
the same way you stopped noticing the presence of the
cockpit on a long flight. You don't verify the pilot.
You require a pilot, and so there is one, and
you extend the necessary trust, and that's the whole transaction.
The first day was clean, new material, the work running
ahead of the anxiety. We were in Prippier by six
before the zones perimeter opened to the trickle of tourists
permitted in organized groups, and I had the fair ground
to myself. The ferris wheel was the obvious shot, and
I took it anyway, because obvious shots are obvious for
a reason. And then I moved off and angles that
were less obvious. The bomber car Arena, with the cars
still in their positions as if the power had cut midride,
the soles of their wheels rusted to the floor. The
Palace of Culture, with its Soviet mosaic facade still largely intact,
the workers and cosmonauts rendered in tesserae, looking out over
a street empty of everything except weeds growing through tarmac.
I worked for five hours, and Mikola was somewhere nearby
for all of them. I stay somewhere because I wasn't
tracking him and didn't need to. Every time I moved
to a new building or a new section of the street,
I was aware of him in the peripheral way you're
aware of the light when you're not focused on it,
but its absence would register immediately. The Zone authority's accommodation
was a converted administration building at the checkpoint. Two bedrooms,
a shared bathroom, a kitchen with a table, and a
mounted television that received four channels. It smelled of old
concrete and the specific institutional cleaning product that seemed mandatory
in post Soviet buildings. I'd slept in worse. The bed
was narrow, the mattress had a dip in the center,
but I slept well enough in it. Before I slept,
I went through the day's photographs on my laptop, which
was the routine flag the keepers, delete the obvious failures,
make notes on what I still needed. I'd shot four
hundred frames, and maybe sixty of them were worth examining seriously,
which was a good ratio for a first day. I
worked through them slowly. The photograph was from the fourth
floor of one of the apartment blocks unless ya Ukrainki Street.
I shot it mid morning, looking down and west into
the street below and the tree line at its far end.
A good frame, the geometry of the empty street, the
where the trees had started to reclaim, the pavement of
the edges, the scents of the forest waiting at the
boundary of human construction. I'd flagged it already as a keeper.
I zoomed in on the tree line and looked for
hints of the wildlife I was seeking. A shape was
at the tree line's edge, half in and half out,
of the shadows between two birch trunks. I pushed the
zoom to the pixel limit, compression noise, the image breaking
into blocks. But the shape was there, and its proportions
were wrong for a wolf and wrong for a bore,
subtly off, the way a word looks off when you've
stared at it too long. The thing my eye kept
returning to was the height. I looked at it for
a while, then closed the laptop, got into the narrow
bed with the dip in the middle, and went to sleep.
In the morning, Mikola was already in the kitchen with
a coffee made and a map of the day's route
on the table, and I sat down, poured a coffee
and looked at the map. I said nothing about the photograph.
I have thought about this decision many times since I
don't have a clean explanation for it. Something like the
photograph was mine, the shape in the tree line was mine,
and giving it to some one else would make it
real in a way I wasn't ready for at six
in the morning, with a day's work ahead, so I
said nothing. I drank the coffee, I looked at the map.
We left for the hospital at half eight. Mikola told
me to wait at the jeep, the same flast instruction
as every time before we entered a building, and every
time I waited and he was back within five minutes.
I leaned against the jeep with my camera and went
through yesterday's frames and didn't think much about it. The
hospital entrance stood open, the double door frame without its doors.
He went through it and the building swallowed him. Five
minutes ten, I radioed him and got static. Tried again
at fifteen. At twenty I started calculating how long it
would take to reach the checkpoint on foot if his
radio had simply died and this was nothing. At twenty
five minutes, I went in after him. In the ground floor,
the plaster peeled off in sheets, graffiti across every surface,
the flat gray light coming through filthy windows. I called
his name. My voice went into the building and stopped,
absorbed rather than echoed, the silence reasserting itself immediately, no answer.
I went upstairs, second floor clear. I kept calling every
few rooms and getting nothing back. On the third floor,
I stopped half way down the corridor. A sound below me,
too far down for the second floor, maybe the ground floor,
possibly lower, A scraping intermittent, the sound something makes moving
carefully through a dark space. Mickeler had gone down to
check a basement, I thought. I started down the stairs
to meet him and pulled the radio off my belt. Mickler,
I pressed transmit, I'm on the third floor. Where are you?
The chirp of his radio sounded off somewhere far beneath me.
I heard my own transmission echo back from his speaker
the half second delay, and underneath it, just before the
echo died, another sound Micholas's voice, but not words, A
sound a person makes when air leaves them. Suddenly and
without choice, I went down. While descending, I heard a
follow up sound. It sounded like someone had put shaving
foam on their hands and clapped, a visceral, wet sound
that I couldn't piece together, followed soon after by a
metallic crunching at the ground floor. I went quickly and quietly,
without consciously deciding to do either. The chirp had come
from the far end, past the main corridor junction, where
a set of doors led toward an old administration section.
One of them was a jar. I pushed it open
and went through the room. Beyond had been some kind
of records office, filing cabinets along the walls, most of
them open, and empty papers on the floor, A desk
overturned in the far corner. The room's only window was
half boarded, the light coming through in a single gray bar.
Mickela was on the floor. I got three steps into
the room before I stopped. I had been so used
to the color saturation of the place that the bright
reds scattered about gave me pause. It was messy, So
much had happened that I was shocked. There was more noise.
Whatever had done this had done it incredibly fast, but
it wasn't finished. In the distance, I could hear it
still working. It was at the far end of the room,
in the corner where the light didn't reach low to
the ground, not moving. I couldn't tell you what I
was looking at in terms of shape or size, because
my eyes kept failing to hold it, kept sliding off
it the way I slide off things that don't resolve
into known categories. What I can tell you is that
it was large, and that it was still, in the
way that things are still when they're not done. I
did not breathe. I stood in the doorway with my
hands still on the door, and I watched it, and
I did not look up. I stepped back through the door,
one step two into the corridor. I pulled the door
as slowly as I could, put my back against the wall,
and slid down it until I was sitting on the floor,
and stayed there. The understanding came in pieces when your
mind is protecting you from arriving at it all at once.
The chirp his radio going off in the dark, my
own voice playing out of his speaker in a silent building.
The sound he'd made the sound of the transmission had
found him, and so did whatever was with him at
the same moment, and what it did. I stopped the
thought there and started it again from somewhere more useful.
I was on the ground. The exit was at the
end of the main corridor, thirty feet away. I was
going to stand up and walk to it and go
through it and get in the jeep and drive south.
I stood up, walked to the entrance. The frame had
been closed. It hadn't been like this when I entered.
There were no doors. There hadn't been since long before
to day. The frame itself had been deformed, the metal
on both ends bent inward toward each other. The gap
it left perhaps eighteen inches across the courtyard. Light came
through it, the jeep visible beyond, close enough that I
could see the tent in the front left panel. I
put my hands on the frame and pushed, and it
moved perhaps an inch, and stopped. I got my shoulders
into the gap, turned sideways and shoved one shoulder through
the metal, found the other and held. I pushed the harder,
the frame groaning under the pressure, and the groan rang
down the corridor behind me, and I heard it from
the floor I had just come from the sound of
something beginning to move. I pulled back. The metal stripped
a length of skin from my forearm as I came free,
and the groan of the frame was still ringing down
the corridor. Movement sudden and decisive. Wait, finding the floor
with a speed that didn't match the slow movement i'd
heard before. This was a response. I ran away from
the entrance, back down the corridor. My footsteps were loud,
and I stopped caring. The noise had already happened. Distance
was all that mattered now. The stairwell door threw it away,
but deeper into the building. It was the only option
the building was giving me. On the second floor, I
went through the first door. I reached and got behind
the remains of a metal cabinet that had come away
from the wall, and crouched down, pulled my knees in
and made myself as small as I could against the
base board. The building moved around me. Wait on the stairwell.
Then not a displacement in the corridor outside the room,
Something passing the door with a proximity I felt before
I heard it, the air pressure changing slightly, the dust
and the floor nearest the door, lifting in a faint current,
a pause long enough that the urge to look became
almost physical, the need to know where it was. And
I pressed my forehead against the cold metal of the
cabinet and did not look. At some point I looked
at the counter, just something to do with my eyes
that wasn't the door. The number sat at two point eight,
higher than the building's baseline. I watched it for a while.
Then somewhere below me, the sound shifted and the number
dropped the two point six. I watched it drop again
as the sound grew fainter, two point four, two point two.
I stayed still, watched it fall and understood what I
was looking at. It couldn't be ambient radiation from the building.
From the way it changed, it was something else, something
that moved. I didn't know what to do with that yet,
but I noted it the way I had been trained
to note things as information, not a conclusion yet, and
I kept watching the number until it settled at one
point six. I stayed where I was until the silence
had been complete and unbroken for what felt like a
very long time. Then I stayed for the same amount
of time again. The corridor was empty, and I needed
to move. No plan beyond the immediate There was one
exit I knew of, and it was closed. There had
to be another, one basic architecture of institutional construcuction, and
I was going to find it before the thing below
found me. That was the entirety of my thinking. I
went through each room on the south side where the
external wall would give onto the rear of the building,
checking windows, checking frames. The first three would move it
all the corrosion welding them to their frames as completely
as if they'd been bricked over before. Had a handle
that turned, and I felt the frame shift fractionally before
it stopped, the seal of forty years of weather and
neglect holding it shut. I put my shoulder into it
and it didn't give. Doing it harder would make noise
I couldn't afford, so I moved on the drop from
the second floor. Windows were survivable anyway, two stories to
scrub ground, nothing broken if he landed right, but survivable
meant nothing if I couldn't get through the frame quietly.
Quiet was the only currency I had. The third floor
east corridor, I went carefully heeled to toe the way you
walk when you're aware of every sound your body makes.
And at the corridor's far end, I found the fire door.
The handle turned, I let out of breath I've been
holding since the second floor, and pushed the door open.
The daylight hit me, gray and cold, and the most
welcome thing I'd seen in an hour. An external metal
staircase running down the rear of the building to the ground.
The rear courtyard below, smaller than the front, had a
chain link fence along its edge, and beyond the fence
the tree line the jeepe wasn't there, but the ground
level fence I could climb, and the forest I could
move through until I hit the perimeter road. I stepped
out onto the first tread, second tread, the third. Then
the section beneath my feet pulled away from the wall.
The mounting bolts on the right side had corroded through
at some point in the last decade, and the whole
right flank of the staircase swung outward from the brickwork
with a sound that started as a groan and became
something much larger. Metal pulling from brick, the structure twisting
on its remaining fixings, the groan becoming a shriek that
went through the building and through the ground. I grabbed
the door frame with both hands and hauled myself back
through the opening, my feet scrambling for purchase on the
tilting treads. I got inside, pulled the door shot behind me,
and stood against it, my hand shaking. The staircase hadn't fallen.
I could hear it settling outside the door, the occasional
tick of stressed metal finding its new position, useless and
enormously catastrophically loud. Lord the counter hit three point four
as spike instantaneous. I stared at it three point four
and climbing three point six. The reading I associated with
the way it did when you walked directly toward a
hot sauce. It was moving, coming from the stairwell end
of the corridor, and it was getting closer fast. I
went to the nearest door and dropped to the floor
behind the wall beside the frame, and made myself as
small as possible. The counter of my hand read three
point eight, and I turned the screen face down against
my thigh. The sound came from the corridor fast. This
was direct something that had heard a specific location and
was going to it the fire door. I heard the
handle move, heard the door open, the creak of it,
the shifted staircase, groaning at the disturbance, silence. It was
in the doorway, looking at the staircase with no one
on it. I pressed my back into the wall and
watched the ceiling, trying not to breathe. The door closed.
The sounds moved away from the fire door, back down
the corridor, slower now, the purposefulness gone out of them.
I waited, listen to the movement descend floor by floor,
the sounds diminishing, and then I looked at the counter.
I watched it for a long time, tracking the movement,
reading the position from the changes. Three point eight had
become three point two when the sounds left the corridor,
then two point eight as they went down the stairwell,
then two point four a pause, two point two a
lateral movement. The number rose slightly to two point four,
with outther sounds getting louder, which meant horizontal distance rather
than vertical, the creature crossing the floor below rather than ascending,
Then down again two point zero, one point eight. I
stayed completely still for five minutes while faint sounds moved
through the lower floors and watched the number respond rise
when the sounds came closer to the stairwell drop when
they moved away. It wasn't precise. I couldn't get a
direction from it. Couldn't tell if a rise meant it
was below me or down the corridor, only that it
was closer or further in some aggregate sense. But closer
and further was information more than i'd had. When the
number sat at one point six and the sounds had
been absent for several minutes, I got up off the floor.
I moved to the stairwell, put distance between me and
whatever the lower floors contained, and the fourth floor had
the highest windows and the best view. I needed to
see the building's geography from the outside before I made
any decision about the inside. I went up one floor
at a time, stopping at each landing to read the
counter and listen it stayed at one point six. I
made the fourth floor and went to the window at
the corridor's end, the one facing the front courtyard, and
I looked out. The jeep was there, undisturbed, exactly where
we'd left it. The windscreen was filmed with road dust.
The courtyard was empty. The gate of the courtyard's far
side was open. Beyond it, the axis road ran south,
straight and clear, and twelve kilometers down that road was
the checkpoint and other people. I looked at the entrance
frame from up pier, the book gap, eighteen inches of
deformed metal between me and all of that. From four
floors up, it looked almost manageable. Almost. I looked at
it for a long time. Then I checked my watch.
Early afternoon, the light coming through the window was still full,
hours before dark. Though I didn't know what that dark
meant for my situation, only that light felt like an ally,
and I wanted as much of it as I could get.
The question wasn't whether the gap was passable. The question
was whether I could reach it with the counter low
and enough time to work it slowly with the entrance clear.
Two problems, all of them solvable in theory. I sat
down under the window, with my back against the wall
and the counter in my lap, and I started thinking
about how a pipe had come off a burst radiator
fitting on the fourth floor. I'd found it, working my
way along the rooms, testing floors, cataloging options. A meter
of steel heavy, the threading at one end still intact.
I didn't know yet what I was going to use
it for. I took it anyway. The third floor fire
door was a bust, but there was still one on
the second. I already knew the staircase outside was gone,
but the door itself opened inward. If the drop to
the rear courtyard was clear, there was an escape possibility.
I hadn't fully exhausted. The lock was the problem counter.
At one point six I moved. I made it to
the second floor landing. I went heeled to toe, the
pipe held against my body to stop its swinging, the
counter in my other hand, A steady one point six.
I reached the fire door and stopped, listened, and the
building gave me nothing back, just the tick and creak
of all concrete doing what all concrete did. I put
the pipe's threaded end into the lock housing. The mechanism
was corroded, but not solid. I could feel movement in it,
a give of metal that had rusted into position rather
than being engineered into one. I applied pressure, steady, a
low force of leverage rather than impact. The lock moved
a millimeter, then another. The pipe trembled in my hands
with the resistance of it. Twenty seconds thirty. The lock turned.
I caught the door as it swung inward before I
could move more than an inch. The hinges silent enough
that I I almost didn't need to, but I wasn't
taking any chances. I stood with my hand flat against
the door and I listened. The counter set one point six,
and the corridor behind me was empty. I pulled the
door open six inches and it stopped a solid resistance,
the door pressing against something. I pulled harder, controlled, putting
heft into it, and nothing moved. I could see through
the six inch gap gray daylight. I stepped back to
get the full picture. The floor was warped. Decades of
decay made the floor bulge just enough to jam the door.
I shoved it hard, trying to see if the door
could force the lump down released flecks around it. The
door scraped with a sound like an avalanche, grinding brick
that went on for two full seconds and echoed off
the rear courtyard walls and came back and echoed again.
The counter hit three point two before the echo died.
I closed the door and moved fast, backed down the corridor,
away from the fire door into the first room. I
reached and hid the counter. At three point four three
point six, the sounds came up from below the stairwell,
something ascending with a horrible purposefulness. It went to the
fire door and stopped. I heard the handle move. The
door opened and jammed. The sound moved away slower, this time,
laterally along the corridor outside the long patrol of the floor,
before finally descending. I watched the counter drop in increments,
and didn't relax until it was back at one point six.
When I finally stood up, I went to the window
at the corridors end and looked out, and the light
told me what I already knew. It had changed. The
flat white of the afternoon was gone, replaced by something
lower and angled. The shadows in the courtyard longer than
they'd been an hour ago, The light through the dirty
glass of an afternoon running out, trending toward dusk. With
the inevitability of all things today that had gone wrong,
I worried about my chances of survival in the pitch black.
Time was running out. I went back to the fourth floor,
sat against the wall beneath the window, and went through
the exits one more time. Ground floor entrance eighteen inches
of buckled frame impassable without noise. Noise meant it came
that door was closed. The fire exit was out of
the question. Unjamming the door would take time and make
that sound continuously for us. As long as it took
I'd be doing it with a counter, climbing toward for
the entire time that door was closed. The windows and
the second floor was a survivable drop eight feet to
the ground below. But the second floor windows facing the
front courtyard were jammed. I'd have less time to work
on them. And even if I dropped from a second
floor window, it would be into open ground. I did
not think I would make thirty meters. I'd checked the counter,
a steady one point nine. It was upper floor. I
could only assume. Looking for me, I let the fact settle.
Every exit in this building was closed. The light was going.
The thing below me had been stalking all day. I
had nothing that told me it would stop, and the
floor it moved to, slowly working its way up to me.
Nothing except a pattern I'd observed for only a few
hours in building. I'd been inside for the worst afternoon
of my life. The panic had burned through hours ago.
What was left was something quieter, and in some ways worse,
the flat, clear eyed assessment of a situation with no
remaining moves. I was not going to get out of
this building before dark by any method I could think of,
For this wasn't true. There was still a place I
hadn't looked, a stone left unturned. The question was whether
I could face him again. I had known where Mikola
was since the ground floor corridor. I had known, and
I had not gone there. I told myself this was tactical,
for the counter was too high, the creature was too close.
There was no reason to go to a place that
served no purpose except to confirm. But I already knew
this was not entirely a lie. But it was not
entirely the truth either. The counter dropped at twenty past four.
The secondary reading that had been sitting at two point
one for the last forty minutes simply fell away, the
number returning to one point four in the space of
two readings. I watched it for three minutes, waiting for
it to climb again. It didn't. It had gone somewhere
where the building's mass was muffling its signature, the basement,
maybe the far end of the ground floor somewhere that
wasn't between me and the corridor below. Five minutes maybe less.
I knew by now how quickly the number could move.
I braced myself and went downstairs. I moved fast. I
didn't know how long I would get the main corridor,
the junction, the door to the Record's office. I stopped
outside it. The door was ajar. I pushed it open
with the end of the pipe and went in. Mikola
was small. That was the first thing, the thing that
hit me before anything else in life. He had been
a large man, broad across the shoulders, the physical confidence
of someone who had spent decades in difficult terrain. What
was on the floor of the Record's office was no
longer large. Violence had reduced him in ways I won't
describe completely, because it feels repulsive to desecrate the memory
of a great man with such disgusting terms, and because
I think my mind had since edited out some of
what was in that room without my permission, protecting me
from the full inventory. What I can tell you is this.
He was on his back and his face was intact,
which was a mercy, and I could seem clearly enough
to know him. The gray stubble, the lines around his eyes,
the Zone Authority jacket still on his shoulders, or most
of it. His expression was not what I expected. He
did not look frightened. He looked like a man who
had been in the middle of something and had been stopped.
He looked like a man who had known this was
a possibility and made his peace with the possibility a
long time ago. The guilt came in and sat in
my chest like a stone that is still there. The
bag was by the door, a meter inside the room,
placed with the deliberateness that I had come to understand
was Michola's signature. Everything he did was deliberate. I grabbed
it and went back upstairs, and I did not look
at the room again. Counter was at one point six
when I reached the fourth floor rising. I had four minutes,
maybe less. I went through the bag, fast water, rations,
first aid kit, spare batteries same size as my counter.
I registered this and kept moving. A printed map of
the zone folded Micheler's handwriting across it in annotations I
couldn't read in the low light, and the Zone Authority
tablet in its rubberized case. I opened it, still charged
Michla's staff loggin already open. Counter at one point eight
camera network first Begauseu's the first icon I saw. I
went to the hospital exterior feed jeep there, courtyard, empty gate,
open road south, all of it still there. Then I
went to the archive, dragging the scrubber back through last night,
and at two seventeen I found three frames before the
camera angle shift. Those three frames was enough. Wrong proportions,
wrong number of apparent limbs moving across the courtyard toward
the forest in a way that wasn't natural locomotion in
any sense. I recognized Counter at two point zero. I
kept moving through the tablet documents folder one item, a
series of files, photographs and text documents, all created at
different dates over the past decade. I opened the most
recent text tight in Ukrainian, the translation app rendering it
in broken fragments as I scrobbled. If you are reading contingency,
I read fast. The translation app losing words, catching others
does not come up while the light is held. Confirmed
across eleven years, Counter at two point two, still reading
to not go, basement goes there when fed full, Counter
returns the baseline. When below I looked at the counter
two point four, and climbing baseline means below slow, no noise.
The translation dropped out for two lines and came back
for the last one. I looked at the window. The
light outside was the deep blue of ten minutes before
full dark. Not gone yet, but it was the last
of it. The document said not to look at the
basement door. Mickeler had been studying this thing for eleven years.
He knew its geography the way I knew the layout
of my own flat, because it had become part of
him through repetition. But the warning about the basement door
was specific, a place it goes when full. However, it
wasn't full. It was trying to be looking for me
the whole afternoon. The last place I hadn't looked was
in there, my last glimmer of hope, in the most
dangerous place imaginable. I had to time it right, making
sure the thing was a longer corridor and a middle
level searching. I made it back to the ground floor
counter at one point six. The buckward frame was visible
at the far end of the corridor, the gray rectangle
of the courtyard light coming through the gap, the jeep
beyond it, the road south beyond that everything I'd been
trying to reach all day forty feet away, and I
turned my back on it and walked the other direction.
The corridor felt longer this way, every step taking me
further from the light and closer to the end of
the building I had been avoiding since the morning. The
basement door was at the corridor's end, wooden swollen with
decades of damp, standing slightly ajar a darkness beyond with
steps going down. I stopped six feet from it and
looked at the counter one point six steady. I locked
at the basement door and breathed to compose myself. Then
I looked at the wall beside it. I almost missed it.
It was below eye level, set into the exterior wall
at ankle height, perhaps half a meter square, one of
those access points that exists in old institutional buildings for
coal delivery or drainage management, or any of the dozen
unglamorous functions that buildings require that nobody thinks about. The
metal plate was black with algae, the edges furred with
decades of damp growth. The hinges corroded to the same
dark color as the stone around it, so that the
whole thing disappeared into the wall unless you were crouched
and looking directly at it. The mechanism was a simple
latch that flips up and releases. I put my fingers
on it. The metal was rough, corroded, wet, and cold
enough to sting. I lifted it and it moved, not much.
The corrosion had fused it partially, but it moved, the
latch scraping upward with a sound that was small, but
present in the corridor silence. I stopped breathing, listened counter
At one point four, I lifted the latch the rest
of the way, and the plate shifted inward a centimeter,
the seal of decades breaking with a soft exhalation of
stale air. I locked at the basement door ill ajar,
the darkness beyond it unchanged with a latch undone. I
pulled the hatch open. The sound it made was not small.
The hinges had been still for god knows how many years,
and they said so loudly, a grinding metal shriek that
went up the corridor and into the stairwell and through
every floor of the buildings simultaneously. I felt it in
my teeth. I yanked the hatch the rest of the
way open, because stopping halfway was worse than slowing down.
At this point, I pressed myself against the wall, looked
at the counter, and watched the number. It went from
one point four to three point eight in one breath.
And then from below the basement door came a sound.
I had no category four, the rushing scramble of something
with mass, and it was coming up. I went through
the hatch head first, no room for anything except forward
on my stomach. The bag dragged behind me, the frame
of the hatch catching my shoulders. I wrenched through it regardless,
stone scraping my back through the jacket, the cold outside
air hitting my face as my hands found frozen ground
behind me. The basement door hit the corridor wall as
something came through it at speed, the impact shuddering through
the building's frame and into the ground beneath my palms.
I pulled my legs free and scrambled upright, and I
ran at the rear of the courtyard, a trailing fence
to my left, the building at my back making sounds.
I was not going to stop to interpret. I hit
the corner of the building and came around it into
the front courtyard. I didn't slow down, legs already burning
the gate ahead of me and the jeep between me
and it. I got to the driver's door and got inside,
pulled it shut, and the sound the door made as
it closed was enormous. In the silence that followed, I
sat with my back against the seat, chest heaving, and
I listened to the silence while looking at the counter.
Three point one dropping two point eight two point six.
I looked through the windscreen at the hospital entrance. The
courtyard was empty, the gate opened beyond it, and the
Axis Road running south into the dark, and the sky
above it the deep blue of dusk, the last light
still hovering, the only thing stopping it from carrying on
the chase it had stayed inside two point zero one
point eight one point six background. I put the key
in the ignition, the engine turned over and found no purchase.
I waited one second, jaw clenched, and turned it again.
It caught, and I had it in first before it
had finished. Deciding to run the gate the Axis road south,
I took one last look at the building behind me,
and I did not look at it again. A kilometer out,
I reached into the bag for the counter, my hand
found the tablet. I pulled it out and turned it over.
The screen was dark. A crack running corner as a
corner across the glass. The rubberized case compressed on one
side with a hatch frame and caught it. As I
came through, I pressed a power button. Nothing. I put
it on the passenger seat and looked at the road.
Michola's document the camera footage with three frames. It had
captured eleven years of annual records. The proof that any
of it had happened, that a man had spent the
better part of his adult life managing something in a
building in the zone was gone. The checkpoint lights appeared
at eleven kilometers. I watched them come and did not
think about what I was going to say, because the
empty seat would say it before I could. I drove
through the barrier and stopped the jeep, leaving the engine running.
The zone authority officer came out, the young one. He
came to the window and I put it down. He
looked at me, then at the passenger seat where Michela
should have been. He looked at the tablet for a moment,
then he looked at me. I had nothing to give him.
No footage, no proof of anything except the raw strip
of my forearm and the fact that I was here
and Micheler wasn't the zone author He stepped back from
the window and unclipped the radio from his jacket, raised
it without taking his eyes off the empty seat, and
began speaking to it quietly in Ukrainian. I sat in
the running jeep with a cracked tablet on the seat
beside me and nothing else, and I let him. They
did not find Mikola. The search lasted four days. Two
additional zone authority officers a dog that wouldn't go past
the ground floor entrance and had to be led away.
The official conclusion came eight days after I drove through
the checkpoint structural collapse, flooring stability on the upper levels,
and the victim conducting a professional assessment of a compromised building.
It happened in the zone. The paperwork acknowledged the absence
of a body, including a clause on debris field scale
and search limitations. The hospital was close to future visitors. Within
the week, his own authority website was quietly updated. The
building was removed from approved itineries, pending a structural review
that everyone understood would never happen. I was interviewed twice,
same room, same two officers, and I gave the same
account both times. I signed my name twice at the
bottom of the same form. I was eventually flown home.
I filed the Peace Iran in February. The ecological recovery angle,
the wolves, the rewilding. The ferris wheel photograph is because
you always run the ferris wheel. The Palace of Culture
at dawn, the mosaic facade at the first light. The
apartment blocks on Lessier Ukraenki Street have the birds trees
growing out past the first four windows. The piece was
six thousand words and I wrote it in eleven days.
I knew why it came so quickly, and I didn't
look at that reason directly either. The response was good.
The editor emailed us say it was the most read
long form piece in two years and asked whether I'd
consider a follow up. There was appetite, she said readers
wanted more of the zone. I told her I felt
I covered the subject. This was true in every sense,
but I didn't explain it to her.