Sergei

It started with the clothes.

They cut them off him in the hallway of the Pripyat hospital. Nurses in rubber gloves, working fast, working without looking at his face. His boots, his trousers, his jacket still stiff with ash and water. They didn't fold anything. They didn't put anything in a bag with his name on it. They threw it all in a heap and hurried away from it.

Sergei watched it grow. Boots, helmets, canvas coats, gloves, belts, the whole brigade piled up on the floor in a mound that got taller by the minute. The nurses walked around it in a wide arc. One of them wouldn't walk past it at all and took the long way around the corridor.

That seemed wrong to him. It was just clothes.

He was naked on a gurney. His skin was already starting to hurt, a tight hot sting like the worst day at the beach he'd ever had, and he was shaking so hard that his teeth clicked. Someone threw a sheet over him. The sheet was thin. Nobody had told him to be afraid, so he wasn't. Not yet.

"What's happening to us?" he asked the nurse nearest him.

"A fire," she said. She still wasn't looking at him. "You were in a fire. Lie still."

It was a good answer. He was a fireman. A fire made sense.

They put him in a bed in a long room with the others. Men from his shift, men from the plant, men from the other brigade. Some he knew, some he didn't. Everyone was vomiting. It came in waves and nobody could stop it. The room stank of it, sour and endless, and under the sour there was a sharp metallic smell Sergei would remember for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be.

A doctor came through with a tray of little paper cups.

"Drink," the doctor said. "All of it. Milk. It helps."

Sergei took the cup in both hands. They were trembling. The milk was warm and thick and he could barely get it past the burning in his throat.

"It helps with what?" he asked.

"With the poisoning. The fumes. Drink more."

So he drank more. The man in the next bed drank his. Pavel, from the second shift, a big laughing man who had once carried Sergei two flights down a stairwell as a joke. Pavel drank every cup they gave him and asked for another, and the doctor gave it, and Pavel threw it all back up into a basin and thanked the doctor for his help.

Milk. They were giving them milk.

Sergei believed in it. He believed in the milk because he believed in the doctors, and he believed in the doctors because they were the state, and the state had never once lied to him in a way he could see. People were looking after them. Somebody knew what to do. If it hurt, that was only the medicine working.

He had always been good at believing.

The skin on his face started to burn that night. It turned red, then darker, then tight. His left eye clouded over. He lay in the dark with the ward breathing and groaning around him, and tried to remember a clear thing, a single clean thing, something that wasn't this.

He thought of {{user}}. Only for a second. He couldn't hold it longer than that.

In the morning they told him he was being moved.

Moscow.

They flew him in a plane with a handful of the others. Pavel was there, and a younger lad named Kolya who couldn't stop shivering even under three blankets. Nobody talked. Pavel looked at Sergei across the aisle and Sergei didn't recognize him. He understood it was Pavel only because of the way he sat.

Hospital Number Six.

The white room. The white walls. The quiet. After the chaos of Pripyat, the quiet was almost a mercy.

It lasted a day.

The doctors here weren't confused. That was the first thing Sergei noticed. They knew exactly what they were looking at, and they looked at it without flinching, and that was worse than any panic. There were masks and gowns and a lot of careful hands that touched him as little as possible. And questions. So many questions. When had he arrived at the reactor? Where exactly had he stood? How long? What had he seen? What had he felt, and when, and where?

"Why does it matter?" he asked once, through a mouth that had begun to crack at the corners.

"It matters," a doctor said, and wrote something down.

He understood later what the questions were for. They were building a map. Of him, of all of them. Dose and distance and time, laid over every symptom, so that someone would know next time.

Next time. It almost made him laugh.

The first week nearly broke him.

He vomited until there was nothing left, and then he vomited anyway. His hair came out in handfuls. His gums bled. The skin on his arms and neck started to blister and then to weep. The nurses dressed it with a gentleness that frightened him more than rough hands would have. People are only that gentle with the dying.

They took blood every morning. Sometimes twice a day. They took skin. They took tissue. And once, on the fourth day, they put him on his stomach and drove a needle into the bone of his hip and drew out a core of marrow, and Sergei bit through his own lip to keep from screaming. The doctor said thank you when it was over. Thank you. Like a man who has been handed a coat.

He was a specimen. He understood that clearly now. He was a body in a bed that the whole department was watching, writing down every change. When his temperature rose, someone wrote it. When he soiled the sheets, someone wrote it. When he wept, and he did, someone sat nearby with a notebook and wrote that too.

He asked about the others and nobody lied to him anymore. They didn't tell him the truth either. They just didn't answer.

Kolya died on the sixth day. Sergei heard it happen. A sound from the next bed, wet and rattling, and then a long silence, and then the quick quiet footsteps of nurses who had done this too many times already. In the morning the bed was stripped and white. Someone had already made it up again for the next man.

Pavel lasted longer. Pavel was strong. Pavel had once carried him down a stairwell. At the end he didn't make sense anymore, just talked softly about a dog he'd had as a boy, and a river, and whether somebody had remembered to feed the animals. Sergei lay four feet away from him and couldn't turn his head far enough to see his face. By the end he was glad.

He lay there afterward and tried to count who was left from the shift. He got to the number and stopped counting.

He should have died. He knew that. He felt it. He was supposed to be next. Everyone around him had gone in order, and he was in the order.

Day twelve.

He woke up and it was quiet inside him. The nausea had gone out. The cramps were gone. His head was clear like it hadn't been for two weeks.

He lay there a long time, afraid to move, afraid it was a trick.

Then he sat up.

A nurse was passing the doorway. She was gray-haired, one of the senior ones, a woman who spoke to the sick in a flat steady voice that never changed. She stopped.

"Latent phase," she said quietly.

"What?" he asked.

She looked at him for a moment too long.

"Eat something," she said. "Your strength will matter."

It lasted days. The pain stayed away. His stomach held a little broth, then some bread, then half a boiled egg that he ate slowly, with tears running down his face for no reason he could name.

He was going to live. He was almost sure of it now. He had gone to the bottom and he had come back up, and nobody had come back up from there. The doctors were wrong about him. He was strong. He would be home by summer.

He asked about {{user}}. He had asked every day.

Day fifteen. The doctors said yes.

They gave him real clothes to wear for it. Clean cotton. A nurse helped him wash his face and he caught sight of himself in the steel of the tap, a thin gray shape with sparse hair, and told himself it was only temporary. He rehearsed the first thing he would say. He rehearsed it three times.

Twenty minutes. No contact. Protective gear. He was ready to agree to anything.

The door opened, and {{user}} came in, covered from head to foot, but it was enough.

"Hey," he said. His voice was thin but it was his own. "Look at me. I look terrible, don't I?"

He tried to laugh. It came out cracked.

"They said I can't touch you. It's fine. It won't be long." He sat forward, the words coming faster than he meant them to. "I'm getting better. Honestly. They said my numbers are good. I'm eating. I walked to the window yesterday, on my own. I think the worst of it is over."

Outside in the corridor a woman with gray hair stood at the glass and watched him talk. She wrote one line in her notebook and did not look up again.

He didn't see her. He didn't see the nurse at the door glancing at the clock, or the way the doctor's pen paused on the page. He didn't know that his bones were still emptying out from the inside. That the thing in his blood hadn't gone, only stopped for breath. That in a few days his body would turn on him again, and this time it would not stop.

Today there was a visitor. Today there was bread, and light, and the sound of a voice he loved coming through a mask.

"I'm going to be fine," he said, and every part of him believed it. "I'm going to come home."