First your limbs grew weak, then you lost all physical sensation. The body became a numb and burdensome sack. The circulation of the blood grew sluggish until the unnourished muscles of the heart, unable to shift their own weight any more, simply failed to beat. By then you no longer had the energy to care.
People died working at their desks. They died as they walked the streets.
There was a shape to it, a pattern of progression. The speed of it surprised them. A few weeks was all it took before the people started dying. Those died who refused to steal or trade their bodies for food. Those died who shared their food with others. Parents who made sacrifices for their children died before them, and then their children died. Those died who refused to countenance the consumption of the most forbidden flesh. In the end it made no difference because everyone who didn’t escape the hungerland died.
The hungerland was spreading westward, and Kamilova and the girls walked in the same direction. Sometimes they took a lift in a truck and sometimes they got ahead of the hungerland wave. Behind them the cannibal bands were coming. Mobile platoons of mechanised anthropophagi grinding their butchering knives.
Kamilova shot two men with her gun to save the girls. The equations of necessity. Five shells left.
All three of them were growing weak. Kamilova knew the signs.
A cart brought them to Belatinsk one morning, and there they were stuck. Yeva and Galina could walk no more.
‘How far to go to Mirgorod?’ Kamilova enquired.
‘Twelve hundred miles,’ said the post office clerk. ‘Fifteen maybe.’
The only way out was the railway.
‘Sixty-five roubles,’ said another clerk at another window. ‘Third Class. One way. Each.’
Kamilova had money, scavenged from the bodies of the roadside dead. Money didn’t help in the deep hungerland, not unless you ate the paper. She had a sheaf of roubles in her pack. It was not enough.
She sat on a bench by the station in Belatinsk with Yeva and Galina. She had simply reached the end. She didn’t know what to do.
And then she saw the gleaming domed brow and wild flowing hair of Nikolai Forshin, six foot three and swinging an opera cane, come to the station to enquire about the arrival of a parcel of journals expected from the printers at Kornstadtlein.
‘Eligiya? Eligiya Kamilova?’ he called across the road. “Is that you?’
Not all the members of Forshin’s Philosophy League were happy at the arrival of three extra mouths. Some of the wives were the worst. But Forshin decided, boom-voiced disputatious Nikolai Forshin of the purple bow tie and the hard bright visionary eye. Forshin led. Forshin prevailed. It was Forshin’s dacha and Forshin’s crazy hopeless League.
At the dacha there was a clear stream for water, a few scrawny chickens that didn’t lay and a meagre vegetable patch. Potatoes were coming on. It was something but not enough. Not nearly enough. Kamilova gave her share to Galina and Yeva, though the girls didn’t know it.
Forshin’s League was growing fearful. They looked to their defences. There were rumours of gangs in Belatinsk and a trade in human flesh. Starveling packs had already approached the dacha more than once. Stick-people stood in the road and looked. The hungerland was coming, and the walls of Forshin’s dacha were not strong enough to hold it back.
Eligiya Kamilova reaches the end of the road and turns into the track to the dacha.
This is the last return. I cannot do that fruitless walk again. It will kill me.
Forshin himself is standing on the veranda smoking his pipe and watching her come. He is excited. He steps out to meet her, waving a piece of paper in his hand.
‘A letter, Eligiya! A letter from Mirgorod is come! The winds are changing. Rizhin himself has made a wonderful speech. “Times of Enlightenment”, that’s what he calls for. We are invited back! The League is to go home, I’m sure of it. We are to have a meeting this evening to resolve the matter. Come with us, Eligiya Kamilova, and bring your bright wonderful girls. Come! It will be a treat for them. Would they not adore to see the streets of Mirgorod again?’
6
Elena Cornelius couldn’t get a clean shot. The head of the woman sitting next to Rizhin–Secretary for Finance Yulia Yashina, long neck, aquiline nose, grey hair pulled tight back off a long pale face–floated in the centre of the scope’s optic, and behind her Rizhin’s nose and shoulder.
That was OK. Eventually he would stand and come forward to the microphoned lectern to speak. Elena Cornelius could wait.
Marching formations and rumbling military vehicles were passing interminably under the viewing platform. A huge cheer–the kind that used to greet the earth-shaking trudge of the old Novozhd’s platoon of forty-foot war mudjhiks–rose at the sight of atomic bombs on wide flatbed trucks. To Elena they looked ridiculous, like elephantine boiler-plated pieces of plumbing equipment.
The fresh-painted weaponry of the Vlast–battle tanks, mobile artillery and radar vehicles, rocket launchers–was followed by a display of captured enemy war machines looking battered and drab. Then came the March of the Heroes of Labour. Smiling blond men in overalls. Women in skirts and white ankle socks, waving. To pass the time, Elena let her telescope sight climb the endless rising walls of the Rizhin Tower. Since she could not see Rizhin himself, except one shoulder, she scanned the statue instead. It wasn’t stone or bronze but steel, constructed by armaments engineers from the melted-down ships and guns and shell casings of the enemy. In her scope she could see the polished, shaped sections riveted together. The welding scars like patchwork.
She got the eye of the statue in her cross hairs.
Lom had lost time and found nothing. It was hopeless. He couldn’t find her by wandering and randomly looking, not if he had a week. He wondered if he was wasting his time and taking an unnecessary risk by lingering here. He was beginning to feel visible, and if something was going to happen he was probably already too late to prevent it. Elena Cornelius had most likely just joined the crowd to see the parade. But that’s not what he’d sensed when he watched her, and he’d learned to trust feelings like that.
If I was a sniper, he thought, where would I choose? Where would I go?
The only way to find her was to think like she thought. Work it out from first principles. Narrow down the options and make a throw of the dice. It was fifty-fifty: choose right or choose wrong. Except it wasn’t fifty-fifty. How many high buildings looked across Victory Square? How many rooftops? How many windows? There were a thousand options, and all of them wrong except one.
Think it out. Narrow the odds. You’re a lucky man. Things work out for you. Yeah, right.
The criteria were: a clear shot, access to the shooting position, inconspicuousness, an escape route.
The first was useless. It didn’t narrow the field. Any building on three sides of the square would give a clear shot from the fourth floor up. The last was useless too: he had no information. And maybe she didn’t intend to escape. That was possible. So he was left with access and inconspicuousness. Access. That was the key. That had to come first. She’d choose a building she could get into, then look for a shooting position, and she’d only abandon it and move on to the next one if there wasn’t a place to fire from.
But that was no good either. Access to anywhere in the vicinity today was a nightmare. Places were either locked down tight and shuttered, or they had people crowding every window to get a view of the parade. There were police and militia everywhere. Regular sweeps and patrols. There must be a way in somewhere–he knew that because he knew she’d found it–but there was no possibility that he could spot it or guess. Not today.