Some of you may know of Elena
Filatova, the Russian girl who, at least until two years ago when the
dispatches suddenly stopped, rode her motorcycle (pictured above with the
ominously ironic KIA on the plate) into Chernobyl and Pripyat every year.
During these dangerous and lonely trips, she'd bring her digital camera to
document the decrepitude of both cities and put them on her original Angelfire
blog.
The spirit of this girl, and the
personality that shines through in spite of the nearly-unemotional clinical
detachment in her running commentary, fascinated me so much that one day a few
years ago I wrote a prologue featuring a fictionalized version of her and put
it away. Picking it up a few months later, I decided this would be a great way
to start an installment of my then-nascent Joe Roman series. By this time, the
late Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy and its unforgettable
anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander took the literary world by storm. And just as a
grown-up Pippi Longstocking was Larsson's inspiration for Salander, a gentler,
more romantic Salander became my template for Valentina Zolatovsky, or Val Zola
for short.
If you've seen the B horror movie Chernobyl
Diaries, then you'll have a pretty fair idea of what Pripyat and Chernobyl
looks like over a quarter of a century after the disaster. But this prologue
for what would become Chernobyl Dreams was written years before Chernobyl
Diaries was filmed. When I put this up on Scribd about two years
ago, it had gotten more of a reaction and more reads by far than anything else
I'd put up. Chernobyl Dreams is to be the third installment of the Joe
Roman series, one that sends him back to a Russia he'd fled twenty years before
when his NYPD mentor and best friend gets shot under mysterious circumstances.
Prologue
The
Russian girl throttling the Kawasaki Ninja knew that to veer off the road was
pure death.
This
was literally true no less so than it is for sharks needing to stay in
perpetual motion to remain alive. To veer off either side was literally to die
for because asphalt does not absorb radiation. The scrub brush on either side
of the deserted highway to Chernobyl
was a different matter: It was steeped in it. But figuratively, the necessity
of remaining on the road was no less real.
Just
23, Valentina Zolatovsky, Val Zola to her few intimates, made the frightful
trek once a year. She would quickly learn to do it during the brief Ukrainian
summer so as to avoid as best she could a toxic snowfall.
Since
age 18, Val had faithfully gotten on her aging rice burner, Geiger counter and
dosimeter in tow, to document on her digital camera what few had the courage
these past 25 years to even contemplate: The uninterrupted disintegration of a
major Russian city due to the fallout of Man’s arrogant stupidity.
Virtually
the only people she’d see in this part of the Ukraine were young army sentries
at the two dozen checkpoints. Every year, at least one leering guard would look
at the shapely girl in black leather and try to con her into stripping to take
a chemical shower. She’d always avoid such a needless intrusion of her privacy
by tartly wondering, for instance, how they’d fucked up to get such a shitty
post. For the first time that didn’t work, she’d have in a leather saddlebag an
additional deterrent in the form of a sawed-off 12 gauge Mossberg.
More
often than not, the bored and lonely guard would ask the girl with two or three
extra pounds packed in her leather pants why she was out here by herself. Their
rotation would not permit personal familiarity much less recognizance but word
spread from one checkpoint to another about the brave or stupid girl on the
Kawasaki that drove every year into the most dangerous No Man’s Land on earth.
Since
she chose to eschew even a nodding acquaintance with even the friendliest ones,
she likewise didn’t wish to share her motives other than to say she was
documenting Chernobyl
and the surrounding area for her blog. This was true but it didn’t explain her
impetus.
Val
Zola’s grandfather Sergei was one of the thousands of firefighters and soldiers
who were sent straight to their deaths. The Soviet government of Gorbachev lied
to these men even as they signed their death warrants and ordered them in
without proper training or PPE. Rushing toward reactor four wearing nothing but
their normal gear, the dying wave of humanity knew precisely what hit them.
They were just never told how deadly the fallout truly was. 30 men had died in
the first few weeks and Grandfather Sergei was one of them.
He’d
died mere days before his daughter Olga discovered she was carrying her first
child. From childhood on, Val felt as if she owed it to him to confront the
imperfectly-muzzled monster that had claimed his life.
The
plight of the Russian firefighters marched to their doom would remind her of
the 343 firemen killed on 9/11. They, too, were unaware of the true scope of
the danger and almost all of them perished when the towers fell with them still
in them trying to rescue the employees.
Those
who’d hastily erected the already crumbling cement sarcophagus over reactor
four were among the first to perish, including the chopper pilots who had
lowered the blocks in place. Even their height and the downwash of the rotors
couldn’t save them.
The
guards at the checkpoint weren’t the only people Val Zola would see in her
annual pilgrimage. Once in a while she would pass an elderly couple in a wagon
pulled by a sad-looking draft horse. They were the stubborn 300 remaining of a
village of 3500 who, well into middle age by the time Chernobyl melted down, had intractably
insisted on remaining on their ancestral farmlands. After forcibly evicting
them, the Soviet government shrugged its broad shoulders and figured it was
easier to leave them for dead than to argue with them.
But
the peasants refused to die and still refuse to this day. They were almost the
perfect living embodiment of Nietzsche’s
maxim, “Whatever does not destroy me makes me stronger.” Their meager harvests
were irradiated because the soil was and they knew it. But not only did the
gamma and X-rays not kill them, they’d acclimated themselves to it just as
their hardy forebears adjusted to climatic and political change. In a way, they
were immortal.
Val’s musings on immortality put her
in mind of a landmark she’d passed about back at the 86th kilometer
marker. It was a giant stone egg, imported from Germany. She supposed it symbolized
the never ending cycle of life, the eternal promise of renewal. It was an odd
place to put such a monument, at one of the least populated and deadliest spots
on earth this side of the Arctic. It sat in
the middle of a killed field, the soil too toxic even for the most insistent scrub
brush normally peculiar to the Ukraine.
It might as well have been a 65,000,000 year-old dinosaur egg unearthed by
paleontologists. In light of its bleak venue, the ovoid monument was more like
a cenotaph to life: A memorial to something that now no longer existed in the
area.
Presently, her Kawasaki took her to the outskirts of the
real victim of the meltdown: The city of Pripyat.
Chernobyl was
only marginally involved in the disaster like Woodstock was only marginally involved in the
festival named after it.
Pripyat was the thriving Pompeiian city
from which many of the reactor’s scientists, engineers and technicians came.
Through old clippings from Pravda,
microfiche and reproduced articles on the internet, Val had read everything she
could about that day. Ignorant of the enormity of the danger, the people of
Pripyat stood atop the roofs of their large apartment buildings even as the
first bright clouds of fallout were beginning their fatal sweep.
Valentina killed the throttle of the
motorbike as she approached what was Pripyat’s year-round amusement park. Its
giant Ferris wheel stood idle as if an expensive plaything left abandoned by
the child of a god or giant. Lovers, Val imagined, young men and women feeling
spring enliven their blood, their hormones responding to the promise of love,
held hands and kissed in these now rusty cars.
On a previous visit, Val had walked
into one of the long-vacated apartments. Behind the front door was a fishing
rod and, on the wall to its left, a 1986 calendar with April 30th circled
in faded red ink. The apartment had obviously been rented by a man, typically
someone who’d worked at Chernobyl.
Elsewhere, Val would see evidence of
the paralyzed plans made by good Soviets for the annual Labor Day celebration
on May Day. Now in Pripyat’s kindergarten, she saw more signs of the
never-arrived festivities and the long-forgotten Soviet propaganda that went
hand in hand.
A warm dry wind stirred sun-bleached
leaflets with pictures of famous and not so famous Soviet leaders and heroes.
Now stripped of its once mandatory relevance, the propaganda had met the same
fate as the Ferris wheel, fishing rod and every hearth and home in Pripyat. It
was as if Chernobyl
was the sleeping sickness that would spread and kill off the ailing
giant that was the Soviet Union. In a little
over three years the once proud superpower of Eastern
Europe would begin losing territories like a leper shedding
extremities.
Val
was careful to only walk into buildings in which the windows and doors were
left open. Edifices are tailor-made for trapping radiation and, knowing this,
the evacuated citizenry and the Red Army made opening the windows and doors
their final order of business before their delayed but hasty exodus.
As
she was about to pass through the school’s front walkway, Val then locked eyes
with a wolf.
She’d heard
stories of the local fauna hideously mutated by the radiation warping their
genes. Zoologists for the most part dismissed these as lies, hoaxes or rumors.
But it would be fallacious to assume that so much radiation spewed out over a
quarter century wouldn’t play havoc with the genetic code of every living
thing.
Val knew of an
American cardiologist who made his own annual pilgrimage to the area to perform
free surgery on children throughout the Ukraine. The genetic deformities
most often seen were atrial septal defects or holes in their hearts and thyroid
cancer. But Val Zola saw on that same documentary horrific abnormalities such
as a toddler whose brain grew outside of her skull and was protected only by a
sack of skin.
Why should the
fearless animals, to whom Man was a stranger, be any different?
Consistent with
what she’d read and seen with her own eyes in years past, the wolf, a large,
gray male with a head the size of a watermelon, looked nonplussed at her abrupt
appearance. Since their top predator, Man, was only a rare interloper, they
hadn’t cultivated any fear of humans. Only the smaller species of birds took
flight at her presence.
The wolf’s mouth was distinguished by some hanging,
bloody skin tissue and Val didn’t know if was the aftermath of a kill, an
injury or a genetic deformity. It didn’t matter at the time because
the lupine predator stood between her and the Kawasaki Ninja carrying her
sawed-off 12 gauge.
Both woman and
wolf locked eyes in a moment as frozen as the entire city of Pripyat. Then the large animal licked its
bloody chops, turned to its right and loped away. Val quietly but deeply
inhaled before getting back on her bike.
The next stop was
the local fire department. In the first hours after the meltdown of April 26th
1986, the local firemen were the first responders, the ones who’d arrived in
advance of the 650,000 “liquidators”. As with the firefighters, policemen,
soldiers and helicopter pilots, the “liquidators” were issued inadequate
personal protective equipment, training or an adequate briefing on the dangers.
They were hurled
into the mouth of an invisible beast they’d never fought before, a neutron bomb
detonating for 48,000 years that left the buildings intact but leaving no one
alive. Many going into the 3000-30,000 roentgen inferno were fried on the spot.
400-500 roentgens over five hours is fatal to humans (ironically, roaches can
tolerate up to 100 times that much).
And the emergency
personnel never really knew what hit them because the meltdown was still a
state secret. In fact, the people of Kiev were ordered to continue with the
Labor Day celebrations until they, too, began dropping from radiation sickness
a full week after the meltdown. Even the people of neighboring Pripyat weren’t
evacuated until two days after the beautiful, shiny cloud had blown into the
city like a deadly amoeba. The Soviet government of Gorbachev’s glastnost
wouldn’t even admit there was an accident until Swedish nuclear reactor workers
were found to have radiation on their shoes.
30,000-40,000
people died either directly or indirectly because of the fallout. The
government’s official death toll was an absurd 300.
Val’s grandfather and
29 others had been among the very first to fall. In keeping with protocol and
common sense, the bay doors were left wide open. Many, many firemen never made
it back and neither did their engines.
Large vehicles such as
fire trucks are typically the most radioactive objects in the region.
Instinctively, she glanced at her Geiger counter. Even standing 50-60 feet from
one fire engine (amazingly, even after 24 years, the tires were still
inflated), she was getting a reading of 763 microroentgens or about three
quarters of a milliroentgen, which is 1/1000th of a roentgen. It was
actually a minor exposure (a typical baseline city reading is anywhere from
10-16 microroentgens) but as Val was wearing no PPE, she didn’t wish to take
any unnecessary chances.
Besides,
she knew that with every step she’d take toward the engine, the microroentgens
would very quickly spike into milliroentgen territory and the greater danger
would be not to her but her new digital camera. Radiation plays hell with hard
drives.
She
got out her Canon Powershot SX20 and squared it as she began taking pictures of
the engine and the plain cinderblock firehouse just adjacent. From
virtually any angle and at her distance, it was impossible to see inside the
engine. But Val gave it no thought-After all these years, who or what could
still be inside?
She
moved on and took some more pictures of Reactor Four that so quickly killed her
grandfather while keeping a very respectable distance (from even a kilometer
away, the fallout leaking from the crumbling sarcophagus measured several
hundred microroentgens or almost a full milliroentgen). She’d been here enough
times to know and had been warned by her scientist father who’d gotten for her
the government permit that got her this far that if she were to walk right up
to number four, she’d glow in the dark like the magic trees and would be dead
in a week or two.
Calling
it a day, Val Zola mounted her Ninja and sped away from the Chernobyl reactor, through the necropolis of
Pripyat, past the peasant village, past the egg and all the way back to the
Ukrainian capital of Kiev.
Once
in her studio apartment, she set right to work uploading her captured images to
her computer’s hard drive. She minutely examined every image, sometimes
comparing them to older ones with identical subjects to see what changes had
occurred.
At
first, she didn’t see any changes out of the ordinary. The usual rate of
disintegration, the flora’s shy but inexorable encroachment on manmade
structures and vehicles. Then Val observed the pictures she’d taken of the fire
engine. As when she was looking right at it, the reflection of the trees and
buildings confounded any view of the truck’s interior. But she noted a circular
white object against the driver side window.
The
glass was spider-webbed from some impact but she couldn’t tell either then or
now if it was struck from within or without. She zoomed in on the picture that
offered the best view of the round, white object. Using her photography
software’s enhancement tools, she cleaned up the pixilation as best she could
to no avail. There weren’t any details out of which she could divine any sense.
Val
Zola then played a hunch and decided to blow up and enhance the only picture
she’d taken of the front of the engine. Then horror dawned on her, neurological
lightning charging the top of her head.
There,
in the front of the white, round object, were two barely discernible black
holes and, between and below them, another. And, beneath the roughly
triangular-shaped hole, what looked like teeth.
A
human skull.
Below
the skull that rest against the driver side window was the suggestion of a tie
and around it, what appeared to be a dark suit. She blew up and enhanced the
image taken from the passenger side window and could barely see through the
reflection of the fire station on the window what could be interpreted as a
bullet hole in the side of the skull.
Whoever
had died in that fire engine wasn’t a fireman and he certainly didn’t die from
radioactive fallout. Like 99% of us, Val Zola’s first instinct was to alert the
authorities. But this was the most radioactive place on earth, a region that
would remain uninhabitable for, best case scenario, 300 years.
Who
would investigate it?
It
was perhaps a short term mercy that Valentina Zolatovsky couldn’t see in the picture
of the engine’s passenger side another reflection, this one coming from behind
the fire station.
She
would’ve seen another man in a coat, looking right at her.
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