a central plaza wide enough to hold the city's entire population on May Day, Revolution Day, International Women's Day. There would have been speeches, national songs and dances, flowers in cellophane presented by neatly pressed children. Around the plaza were the broad horizontals of a hotel, restaurant and theater. Tree-lined boulevards spread to apartment blocks, wooded parks, schools and, a mere three kilometers away, the constant red beacon of the reactor.
Arkady sank back into the shadows of the office. He had never thought his night vision was particularly good, but he saw calendars and papers strewn on the floor, fluorescent tubes crushed, file cabinets facedown around a nest of blankets and the glint of empty vodka bottles. A poster on the wall proclaimed something lost in faded letters: confident of the future was all Arkady could make out. In camouflage fatigues, he himself was fairly hard to see. The pinprick of a match being struck drew him closer to the window. He'd missed where. The buildings were blank, streetlamps broken. The forests pressed increasingly closer, and when the wind died, the city was utterly still, without a single light, without the progress of a car or the sound of a footstep. Around the city there was not one human intrusion until the orange bud of a cigarette stirred directly across the plaza in the dark mass of the hotel.
Arkady had to use a flashlight in the stairway because of the debris—bookcases, chairs, drapes and bottles, always bottles, and everything covered by a chalky residue of disintegrating plaster that formed a cavern's worth of stalactites and stalagmites. Even if there had been power, the elevators were rusted shut. From outside, a building might seem intact. Inside, this one resembled a target of artillery, with walls exploded, pipes ruptured and floors heaved by ice.
On the ground floor, Arkady turned off the light and went at a lope around the plaza. The hotel entrance doors were chained together. No matter; he walked through missing panes of glass, turned on the flashlight, crossed the lobby and maneuvered as silently as possible around service trolleys piled on the steps. On the fourth floor, the doors were open. Beds and bureaus materialized. In one room, the wallpaper had curled off in enormous scrolls; in another, the ivory torso of a toilet lay on the carpet. By now he smelled the sourness of a doused fire. In a third room, the window was covered by a blanket that Arkady pulled aside to let moonlight creep in. A box spring had been stripped to the coils and set over a hubcap as a makeshift grill and pan that was filled with coals and water and a ghostly hint of smoke. An open suitcase showed a toothbrush, cigarettes, fishing line, a can of beef and a plastic bottle of mineral water, a plumber's pipe cutter and a wrench wrapped in rags. If their owner had been able to resist a peek out of the blanket, Arkady never would have seen him. He spotted him now, moving at the edge of the plaza.
Arkady went down the stairs two at a time, sliding over an overturned desk, stumbling on the crushed maroon of hotel drapes. Sometimes he felt like a diver plunging through the depths of a sunken ship, his vision and hearing magnified in such faint light. As he hit the ground, he heard a screen door slap shut at the far end of the plaza. The school.
Between the school's two front doors was a blackboard that read APRIL 29, 1986. Arkady ran through a cloakroom painted with a princess and a hippo sailing a ship. The lower rooms were for early grades, with blackboard examples of penmanship, bright prints of farm children with happy cows that smiled amid blown-in windows and desks overturned like barricades. Footsteps pounded the floor above. As Arkady climbed the stairs, a display of children's art fluttered in his wake. Pictures of students sitting neatly in a music room led to a music room with a shattered piano and half-size chairs around broken drums and marimbas. Dust exploded
Arkady sank back into the shadows of the office. He had never thought his night vision was particularly good, but he saw calendars and papers strewn on the floor, fluorescent tubes crushed, file cabinets facedown around a nest of blankets and the glint of empty vodka bottles. A poster on the wall proclaimed something lost in faded letters: confident of the future was all Arkady could make out. In camouflage fatigues, he himself was fairly hard to see. The pinprick of a match being struck drew him closer to the window. He'd missed where. The buildings were blank, streetlamps broken. The forests pressed increasingly closer, and when the wind died, the city was utterly still, without a single light, without the progress of a car or the sound of a footstep. Around the city there was not one human intrusion until the orange bud of a cigarette stirred directly across the plaza in the dark mass of the hotel.
Arkady had to use a flashlight in the stairway because of the debris—bookcases, chairs, drapes and bottles, always bottles, and everything covered by a chalky residue of disintegrating plaster that formed a cavern's worth of stalactites and stalagmites. Even if there had been power, the elevators were rusted shut. From outside, a building might seem intact. Inside, this one resembled a target of artillery, with walls exploded, pipes ruptured and floors heaved by ice.
On the ground floor, Arkady turned off the light and went at a lope around the plaza. The hotel entrance doors were chained together. No matter; he walked through missing panes of glass, turned on the flashlight, crossed the lobby and maneuvered as silently as possible around service trolleys piled on the steps. On the fourth floor, the doors were open. Beds and bureaus materialized. In one room, the wallpaper had curled off in enormous scrolls; in another, the ivory torso of a toilet lay on the carpet. By now he smelled the sourness of a doused fire. In a third room, the window was covered by a blanket that Arkady pulled aside to let moonlight creep in. A box spring had been stripped to the coils and set over a hubcap as a makeshift grill and pan that was filled with coals and water and a ghostly hint of smoke. An open suitcase showed a toothbrush, cigarettes, fishing line, a can of beef and a plastic bottle of mineral water, a plumber's pipe cutter and a wrench wrapped in rags. If their owner had been able to resist a peek out of the blanket, Arkady never would have seen him. He spotted him now, moving at the edge of the plaza.
Arkady went down the stairs two at a time, sliding over an overturned desk, stumbling on the crushed maroon of hotel drapes. Sometimes he felt like a diver plunging through the depths of a sunken ship, his vision and hearing magnified in such faint light. As he hit the ground, he heard a screen door slap shut at the far end of the plaza. The school.
Between the school's two front doors was a blackboard that read APRIL 29, 1986. Arkady ran through a cloakroom painted with a princess and a hippo sailing a ship. The lower rooms were for early grades, with blackboard examples of penmanship, bright prints of farm children with happy cows that smiled amid blown-in windows and desks overturned like barricades. Footsteps pounded the floor above. As Arkady climbed the stairs, a display of children's art fluttered in his wake. Pictures of students sitting neatly in a music room led to a music room with a shattered piano and half-size chairs around broken drums and marimbas. Dust exploded
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