Chunk 13

noticing that the flashlight beam was pointed at the floor, and I was staring at the strange creature in the half-darkness, trying to convince myself this was just my imagination.

"His face..." escaped from my lips.

Okamura flinched at the sound of the voice and immediately jerked up his eyeless muzzle, as if trying to see me. I instinctively shone the flashlight on him. Letting out a high inhuman shriek, he covered himself with his hands and tumbled backward onto the bed like a sack. Then with a rapid leap he darted somewhere into the darkness. The beam caught only the crumpled bedding and overturned equipment. IMPACT!

The freshly received hard blow echoed on my teeth. Realizing I was lying on the floor, I jumped up sharply, focusing on the pistol sight. Bam! Some medical device fell. In two movements I lit up the room with the flashlight. He's not here.

"Irma!" Even as I said it, I realized that a second ago I hadn't seen her in the ward either!

Something was struggling right under the bed.

"Irma!!!" I drop to the floor, trying to aim as quickly as possible.

He was eating her or trying to eat her—I saw only the gaping mouth reaching for her face, and Irma's disheveled hair...

I'm aiming and holding my finger on the trigger. But something stops me. Miss—and the charge could blow them both to pieces!

I roll over my back and aim again. No, still the wrong angle!

It seemed I was moving through some kind of gel. As if time itself had slowed down and was now hopelessly lagging behind the pace of my brain's work. I roll over again. Press my toes into the floor. Freeze. Better now. Aiming. The "glove" on my hand is terribly in the way. "You'll miss," flashed through my head, and I shove that thought as far away as possible. Don't think. Just shoot.

Abruptly, somehow unbelievably loud, the shot of the induction pistol rang out in the stunning silence of the empty hospital.

Missed!

I managed to mess up and miraculously didn't kill Irma, slamming the charge into the wall. To hell with that nerve or whatever it is with my arm!!! I pressed the trigger too sharply!

And although the second shot, I'm sure, thundered literally a second later, it seemed to me that I'd been aiming for at least a minute. It became truly eerie. Somewhere in the back of my head settled the certainty that this time I wouldn't just miss, but would inevitably shoot Irma in the head. My finger on the trigger was as if cast from plastic. I've been aiming for an entire eternity. Finally I begin to agonizingly slowly press the trigger...

Shot!!!

The creature's body flew away from Irma like a rag. Hit. Right in the crown. I fired again. The boom again tore the silence, leaving a ringing in my ears.

"Irma!"

She suddenly raised her completely intact, uninjured face to me. It seemed almost a miracle.

"Let's run, half the camp will be here soon!"

It seemed Irma wasn't even wounded. I jumped up, extending my hand to her. She managed to find her multivisor under the bed and quickly got to her feet without using my help. Shouts sounded in the distance.

"Yeah, don't forget anything here..." Irma said this as if we were just late for a shuttle. "Out the window!"

I didn't immediately understand where it was—the window was completely closed with a heavy shutter. Irma calmly shot it out along with the glass with three pistol shots. I threw a blanket from the hospital bed onto the sill bristling with shards. Then I picked up Irma's medical mask from the floor. Found mine, it was dangling from my ear. Flashlight—in hand. Seems like everything. In the corridor army boot soles thundered. We'll make it. And we easily left the ward through the window.

Everything worked out: when the guards were about to burst into the box, we were one hundred percent already out of the line of sight. A few more minutes of fast walking—and we're at Irma's place. But I only felt safe when we were inside and I leaned my back against the locked door. Irma was breathing hard, her hands on her knees.

The first reaction was joy. The joy of mischievous boys who escaped unrecognized from a neighbor whose window they'd broken with a ball. We got away with it! Irma smiled and even winked at me. I suddenly wanted to say something witty about this adventure. Like, not bad, we asked the guy a few questions!

But before I opened my mouth, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization of what had happened.

I killed a person. Illegally broke into a hospital and killed a person there... Yes, he was probably infected with some nastiness or something like that... He didn't even look much like a person... But that didn't change the fact: someone broke into a hospital and killed a patient in intensive care. Blew him to pieces with two shots from an induction pistol. And that someone was me.

"You handled it well," Irma suddenly said.

"Handled what?"

"Well... If you hadn't shot... This... That... He would have..." she shook her head, "it's scary to even think."

"What the hell was wrong with his face?..." I nodded at the ceiling, and Irma immediately automatically raised her eyes, as if Okamura was still sitting above our heads. Honestly, there was not the slightest strength not only to analyze, but even just to think. Tomorrow, everything tomorrow.

"Irma, I think we both need to sleep."

She smiled. For the first time this night.

"How little it takes for happiness, right? Just find yourself some trouble out of nowhere, then survive it and—enjoy..."

"Trouble?" I was surprised by this little word.

"Trouble," she shrugged and smiled. "I grew up in a bad neighborhood. Otherwise I would've found myself a calmer job..."

I opened the heavy door.

"Listen! Don't you dare tell your wife..."

"I'm not stupid, Irma."

"It's just this is no longer expulsion from the Corps. This is a tribunal, if you take all the circumstances into consideration..."

"Into account," I corrected.

"Right," she nodded. "And thank you."

Irma took off my jacket and handed it to me.

"Good night," I was about to leave.

"I want to say 'thank you.'"

"You did," I didn't understand.

"Not for the jacket, dummy."

Irma suddenly came up to me and, standing on tiptoe, kissed me on the cheek. Some kind of long and tender kiss, not like just pecking acquaintances.

"Thank you for saving me."

Confused, I seemed to leave her place silently.

This "saving" instead of "rescuing" surfaced in my head when I was already outside. Interesting, what's her native language? Spanish?

Already walking I absentmindedly pulled on the jacket.

After some time a group of conquistadors appeared in the distance. They were running. Maybe even looking for us. But they were far away, and my home was very close. I covered another fifty meters and applied my key card to my door.

...Relief, powerlessness, and a ton of fatigue all at once. Such familiar and especially warm air. Such dear smells. The horror experienced half an hour ago seemed like a dream. Yesterday's events happened as if not to me... Got out of it—that's the main thing. Got into it up to my ears, but got out. The rest doesn't matter now...

I took off my heavy boots, trying not to make a sound. Wash up quickly and sleep. As quickly as possible sleep. At the far end of the kitchen the exhaust hood light glowed above the stove, so I didn't have to stumble in the darkness. I threw off my jacket and tossed it onto a chair. First at least a gulp of water... Or better—not water...

"Worked hard?" Vira's voice sounded so unexpectedly that I flinched. She was sitting in the corner by the table, and in the half-darkness I hadn't noticed her.

"Vira!" I smiled forcedly. "You scared me!"

"You scared me too: I called you about fifteen times."

"Vira, I just turned off my phone... Problems came up there..."

"Where is 'there'?"

"We were at the biostation. With Irma. I told you about that guy from the bio-company... We needed to clarify some questions, and it took longer than we planned."

I shrugged, hinting that I had nothing more to say.

"I was at the biostation an hour ago," Vira said without taking her piercing gaze away. "And neither you nor Irma were there."

"The words 'clarify some questions,' Vira, mean 'fix a problem.' Not just sit in the laboratory. And we had to run around, so to speak, from the heart. No wonder you didn't find me. Sorry I didn't call."

I hoped that would be enough, and I wasn't going to explain anything more. After all, I wasn't just tired, but had been in perhaps the worst trouble of my entire life. Never before, in any danger, had I ended up on the wrong side of the law. A tribunal—that was always a word from someone else's life. And now I'm the main character of a nightmare. And Vira with her suspicions was some kind of extraneous element that I just didn't have the nervous energy for.

But the "extraneous element" obviously hadn't said everything yet.

"And where did you run?"

I shrugged.

"Even stopped by Irma's place, and..." I bit my tongue to avoid adding "and the hospital," deciding that shouldn't be mentioned at all. To anyone. "And like that half the night: here and there."

"And I was at Irma's too. Banged on her door. And then again—to the biostation. Stood outside the doors for twenty minutes, and again—to Irma's. 'Half the night here and there'—exactly as you said. And then I sat on the biostation doorstep and cried! Maybe you were inside and some crocodile attacked you in that lab of yours! Didn't know what to do... And then decided to wait for you at home a bit longer. Thinking, if you don't come in two hours, I'll go wake up your supervisor. And here you are—you show up! Well, I think, he'll probably explain everything. Maybe something really happened. But you, instead of explanations—you lied!!!"

She shouted the last words. A viscous silence fell, boding nothing good. The worst thing was that I couldn't tell her the truth...

Once in Kyiv one of our acquaintances got into a situation. There was some kind of fight, he pulled out a knife and... Even the court recognized it was self-defense! But Vira, however, said: "How can his wife live with him after that! Sleep in the same bed with a murderer!" I even tried to object then, and it made her terribly angry. And once, at the dawn of our relationship, she suddenly started a conversation about war and kept asking with strange insistence whether I'd killed anyone or not. And was very glad I hadn't had to. And now I was afraid of exactly this—to hear the phrase "I won't sleep in the same bed with a murderer"... On the other hand, I'm not obligated to report to her! If I'm guilty of anything, it's only that I didn't call. Nothing more.

"Vira, while you were running around looking for me, I was also rushing around like crazy," it seemed to me at that moment that this could quite well be considered the truth, if you remember how we fled from the hospital. "Sorry I didn't call. I have nothing else to apologize for."

Vira was probably about to cry. In the kitchen's half-darkness her face was hard to see, but the way she was silent and turned away gave her away. She stood up, furtively wiped her nose with a napkin, nervously took my jacket and went to hang it up.

The most insulting thing is that if I'd been guilty of anything, I would never have allowed what happened next.

Vira, stopping halfway to the coat rack, suddenly brought my jacket to her face and smelled it. I understood everything that same second. The smell! Irma had walked around in it for probably a good half hour... Vira turned to me, hunched from offense and anger. From the way her lips were pressed, I understood she was doing her utmost to hold back tears. I wanted to explain everything somehow, but only the idiotic phrase from movies climbed into my head: "It's not what you think, dear"... And I couldn't find what to say.

Virka suddenly approached me so rapidly, as if she was going to hit me, and, standing on tiptoe, smelled my neck. Damn! Of course my neck smelled of Irma's perfume—I'd thought to pull the jacket on myself when I was coming home!

"Virunchik..." I began.

"Bastard!" she threw the jacket in my face.

"You scum! Scum!!!" she beat me with her palms on the shoulders and cried.

I'd always wondered how in movies heroes can't just explain in two words that they're not guilty. But now I couldn't even open my mouth. I tried to hug her, but she wriggled out, running away from me three meters like from some maniac.

"Don't touch me!"

"Vira! I just let her wear my jacket!" I tried to speak as confidently and clearly as possible. "That's all! It was cold!"

"Don't lie to me!"

Vira said this with such offense that I suddenly understood those guys from the movies: it's useless to explain anything at such moments. Crying, she went to the bathroom. Water started running. Vira was washing up, continuing to sob like a child. I sat, not knowing how to behave. For some reason I again remembered how I'd stared at Irma's breasts that time in the corridor, and felt ashamed, as if Virka's accusations really did have some basis...

A sound came. Only at this moment did I realize the bathroom had been quiet for some time. And this quiet sound rang out in complete silence. A quiet "svits—sh-sh-sh," as if said in a high toothless whisper. The kind of sound you get if you press on a plastic bottle with a small opening for spraying.

"Lyal-lyal-lyal-lyal-lyap"—Vira shakes her spray to make sure she didn't imagine it. And then again "svits—sh-sh-sh."

"Gil!!!"

She screamed so loud that a short echo rushed around the room. And she ran out of the bathroom. More precisely—jumped out. Shot out like lightning, with destructive fire of indignation in her eyes, shaking the unfortunate bottle in her outstretched hand.

"Gil!!! Where's my spray?!"

"Isn't that it?" I answered with feigned surprise.

"Where. Is. My. Spray."

She pronounced this with clenched teeth and forcefully pushing out each word, as if it was very difficult for her. I tried to look calm and carefree.

"Oh, you mean the one—with the drugs? And how long have you been hooked?"

Goggling in powerless fury, Vira shortly shrieked and threw the spray right at me. I managed to dodge. The bottle loudly hit the wall.

I don't know what kind of force was needed to throw it, but the plastic bottle cracked and the liquid splattered across the wall in a spreading stain.

"Vira..."

"Shut your fucking mouth!!!"

I flinched. She'd never said anything like that to me. Her eyes radiated some kind of insane rage.

"Vira, calm down..."

"Do you know what it's like to live with headaches?! Do you know what it means every damn day on pills?! Do you know what it means every morning to hope there won't be pain, and then feel the light start eating your eyes?! Then drink this stinking chemistry that for an hour and a half makes your head gel instead of brain! So the next morning you wait for pain again!!! You don't know what it's like—to have some incurable nastiness and live with it!"

Knocked off balance by her attack, I only understood now. Involuntarily I ran my thumb over the numb pads of my index and middle fingers.

"You were using it for headaches..."

I didn't ask, I told her this. I delivered my guess as soon as it belatedly reached my frightened consciousness. Vira suddenly went soft, as if someone had splashed a bucket of water on the fire that blazed in her. She nodded, climbed onto a stool and, pulling her legs up, rested her chin on her knees.

"It helps," she nodded. "From the first day. Not a single attack, not even a hint. My head is always clear and bright. In any weather. No matter how much I slept or how much I ate, understand? And there's no hint of migraines."

"How long have you been using it?"

"Almost a month," she said. "One girl in the courses... She also had migraines, and..."

"Vira," I approached and squatted in front of her. "This pollen is very dangerous..."

"It seems to me, Gilel, you're confused about girls," she interrupted.

"About what?"

"About girls. Perfumes, jackets. In your lies. And you've grabbed onto my poor spray now like a lifeline. 'Drugs'! This is as much a drug as your coffee."

"You don't understand. That corporal..."

"Don't jump off topic!" Vira's eyes flashed furiously. "This is about you! On Earth I'd probably already filed for divorce..."

I couldn't restrain myself—the next phrase burst out of me before I thought:

"But here it's not Earth, and you keep quiet as a mouse."

The sound of the slap tore the air like a whip crack. Purple spots flashed in my eyes. I wanted to stand up, but the floor swam under my feet, and I had to grab onto the countertop—her slap turned out to be so stunningly strong. Salty taste in my mouth... Obviously she split my lip.

"If it's not Earth—then you can do anything?!" Vira jumped up so that the poor stool flew two meters. She went to the door, pulled the first sweater from the wall cabinet, pulled it on herself and started nervously putting on shoes.

"And where are you going?" I asked.

"What's the difference! To your Irma—I'll scratch her eyes out!"

"Virka, don't even think about it," I spoke deliberately calmly, but the thought that she'd really show up at Irma's in the middle of the night horrified me. "The whole colony will laugh at us. There's no reason for jealousy!"

"You don't say!" Vira finally managed the boots and grabbed the door handle. "I'll figure it out myself!"

She opened the door and had already stepped over the threshold when I deliberately rudely said after her:

"Be here by ten to eight."

She froze as if I'd kicked her from behind. Offended by such audacity, she was picking something hurtful in response. But I continued:

"Because Elza needs to be taken to daycare, and if I'm late, they can kick me out of the mission. And then this Friday they'll send us back to Earth, to our dear Kyiv. Oh, by the way! When we return, it'll be the year two hundred twenty-two there! No job, no friends, no apartment, because the Corps was paying the loan for it and now, of course, will take it! Only debts and your headaches will remain!"

I waited for a reaction. She stood just as frozen. And then she turned sharply, looking at me no longer with offense but with hatred.

"Are you—buying me?! Buying me with your stinking conquistador salary?!"

And she came back into the apartment, slamming the door behind her with a crash. That's all her: after such angry accusations it would be logical to slam the door from outside. But then she'd have to go through with it—to our lately hated Kyiv apartment. So Vira will have a tantrum, scratch my face, but of course won't let me get kicked out of the Corps.

"Vira, I'm just reminding you that we have obligations and that you have nowhere to go. And that I didn't cheat on you, just forgot to call."

"And I'm reminding you that I'm your wife! That it was you who asked me to marry you, it was you who chased after me for six months until I agreed to go on a first date. It was you who was with me for seventeen hours when Elza was being born! And it was I who agreed to come here with you to the edge of astronomy!" she decisively wiped away a tear, furiously sniffled and raised her voice even more. "And now on this stupid planet you can't even get divorced, because I'm your appendage! I have nowhere to live except with you, I can't fly except with you! It's not provided for! What kind of damned colony is this where two people can't even just have a fight!!!"

From the last words somewhere in the depths of my subconscious it was as if a distant lightning flashed. "Exactly!" flashed through my head, but then the thought blurred like a drawing in sand near the water. And the harder I tried to catch it, the more phantom-like it became... What "exactly"? Why is this important?

"Are you listening to me or not?!" Vira shouted, noticing my absent gaze.

"Yes... What did you just say? Your last words... You were saying something about childbirth, about eternal love, about perfumes... And after that? What did you say after that?"

Vira seemed to be trying to read in my eyes whether I was mocking her or not.

"Vira?"

"I said you're a psycho," she pronounced this surprisingly calmly. "We're having the most serious fight in all the years we've been together. You came home in the middle of the night, you lied to me, you smell like another woman, I'm about to leave you—and you? You're somewhere else! You zoned out and didn't hear a damn thing, although I'm ranting at you here so loud I'll go deaf myself soon!"

"Vira, listen... Something very strange is happening. Maybe it's connected to the pollen you were using to treat your headaches..."

She raised her hand as if trying to block the flow of words from my mouth with her palm.

"Leave. Alone. My. Pollen!" Vira chopped off in a hoarse, slightly tearful voice. "How do you manage to twist everything like this! It's you who was fooling around somewhere with another woman! And I was just treating my headache! And don't confuse things!"

"No, Vira, I'm not about that..."

"And I am about that! And that's enough performances for today!"

I drew breath again to object, but didn't have time.

"You won't let me leave, then you leave. If you stay, I'll lock myself away from you in the toilet," she headed toward our bed with an exhausted gait.

*

...The night was quiet. The sky would soon start turning gray. The first pre-dawn chill was getting under my jacket. Sleep, after the fight with Vira, was gone as if by magic, but the fatigue hadn't gone anywhere. I walked along the path with my eyes half-closed, and it felt good. Yes, you could probably wander like this till morning. I'd even say, for my own comfort, sorting everything out in my head one more time... Ah, to hell with it! Nothing to sort out—just walk. Like in childhood, when you could wander around without any purpose.

...And imagine yourself a shuttle above the unknown surface of an alien planet.

...Or—close your eyes and try not to deviate from a straight line, subconsciously expecting to hit your forehead on some tree.

I squinted even more and felt my eyes burning with fatigue. No, this way I'll probably fall asleep while walking...

"Exactly," Vira's voice said in my head.

"What 'exactly'?" I responded mentally.

"What kind of damned colony is this where two people can't even just have a fight?!" Vira was asking.

But of course! I even stopped. Here it is—that thought that slipped away.

On the Corps entrance exam they learn everything about us. Psychological portrait, intelligence level, decision-making ability, actions in extreme situations, sociability, type of thinking, temperament—

everything! And after that—only after that—some special commission analyzes everything again, making a conclusion about factor "B." It's logical to assume that factor "B" is this kind of super-thoroughness. When you've selected the hundred best, and then filtered out ninety through some super-complex criterion. This would mean that in the Corps everything is weighed to the smallest details, to nuances, to the tiniest particulars. But, it turns out—no! In this mission they overlooked perhaps the most important thing—family relationships! They didn't take into account our other halves, about whom they know absolutely nothing!

Then what kind of criterion is this factor "B," if for them it's more important than anything else?! So important that they're ready to make any mistake, but only—not miss this factor of theirs! No thoroughness at all! This is something that only matters to them. To the private military company "Conquistador Corps." Something more important than this colony and even than the mission's success. And of course—more important than our lives.

"Hey!!!" a sharp shout was followed by a short whistle.

Everything inside me went cold. What do I tell them? That I fought with my wife? Like this, in the middle of the night? And what was I doing before, where was I? I won't get out of this... Or will I? I slowly turned my head toward the sound.

They weren't shouting at me, just calling to each other—two stormtroopers. But they were most likely looking for me. I carefully looked around. It seems no one's noticed me yet. And I quickly lay down right on the lawn. Safer this way, but for how long... If they find me like this, explaining everything with a fight with my wife will be even harder. And you can't lie on the cold ground for long. Now it became clear that walking around the camp was a completely idiotic idea. I cursed myself for completely forgetting about the patrols looking for suspicious people after the shooting in the hospital.

Need to get home. I rolled onto my side, considering a possible route. Turns out I'd managed to walk quite far. Just then I heard distant metallic buzzing—as if someone had started a sawmill in the middle of the night. For about a second I still had a tiny hope it was something else,