CHAPTER 27
In the morgue, situated in an annex off the main hospital building, Grace held a battery-operated floodlight aloft for Brenna, aiming it over the dead while she recorded.
Half of what she was shooting was too graphic for prime time television, but Grace said nothing.
She had final control in the editing suite, and she was in no mood to argue.
Dammit. Just when she thought they were understanding each other, they weren’t.
The facility was everything Brenna had warned her to expect.
The floors and walls were lined with once-yellow, broken tiles.
Corpses cocooned in stiff, blood-soaked sheets were piled closely together, many stacked upon each other.
Atop one pile, a partially-draped corpse with rigor mortis held up a swollen hand in gruesome salutation.
Underfoot, brick-red sludge stuck to Grace’s shoes, crackling each time she picked up her feet.
The air was fetid, a cloying mix of decomposition and disinfectant.
The attendant, an olive-skinned man wearing a threadbare lab coat, leaned against the doorway, idly smoking hand-rolled cigarettes while his visitors stepped over cadavers.
Brenna had lost her priestess quality. She was silent, withdrawn, her movements measured and self-conscious.
Sitting alone in that stairwell after the surgeries, Grace had wanted Brenna in a way that went beyond the physical. Her experience in the operating room had made her feel like someone she didn’t want to be.
However well-intentioned she had been, the fact was that she had overpowered Mariana’s patient, held her down against her will. The woman had clearly wanted to die, not to suffer more. But Grace had become part of the madness that inflicted pain on innocents—all in the name of a greater cause.
Then when she woke to Brenna’s gentle touch and saw the tenderness with which she regarded her, it had felt redemptive, like there was still some decency left in her.
Brenna had felt like salvation, and Grace had wanted to ground herself in that conviction.
It had made her want to bond to her, so they could assure themselves that at some fundamental level they were not alone, not forsaken. Not cruel.
It turned out that what Brenna had wanted was someone else. A man.
“Shit,” she mumbled.
Brenna turned. “Did you say something?”
“No.” Grace motioned her to keep recording. She just wanted to get out of here.
Brenna studied Grace. Giving her head a small shake, she resumed her work, crouching to take a low-angle shot.
Grace’s gaze lingered on the curve of her bottom.
Lord help her, she was still burning—the heady taste and feel and sound of Brenna still pulsed through her like her own blood.
After years on a leash, Brenna had set her loose.
She snorted self-deprecatingly. Ill-used, disappointed, and raw as she felt emotionally, her treasonous body just wanted a reprise.
Be that as it may, it wouldn’t happen again. Grace had offered Brenna her heart and her body, and Brenna’d only wanted half the deal. To fantasize.
Grace wasn’t about to queue up in Brenna’s long line of suitors. Especially not behind some guy named Ari.
A car horn sounded twice in the delivery bay at the rear of the morgue.
That would be Jasha, picking them up. They had to drive down the mountain during the Nationalists’ change of shift, he had told Grace and Brenna when they came up from the OR.
There would be a lull in the artillery barrage while the day team clocked off and the night guys came on.
Since the Golf had one wheel on a rim, and speed was out of the question, they had to time the trip just so.
Their route home would differ from the one they had come up on.
They would cut through a tunnel in Mt. Ottoman, the only high ground held by the Separatists.
The tunnel was part of an unfinished pre-war thoroughfare, now used for both transportation and as a cistern location that supplied citizens of that part of the city with water.
The route would double their travel time, but avoid several sniper zones, and bring them into the city near the old regional army barracks, where Jasha would stop to pick up a new tire and rim for the Golf.
With all that had happened, it seemed unbelievable to Grace that the three of them had only that morning driven up the mountain.
In Kav?ak each exhausting day held the contents of a week, and more risk than a normal lifetime—a normal American lifetime, anyway.
She understood Brenna’s three-day rule now. Each day was already an eternity.
On the road, dusk deepened. The artillery petered out as Jasha predicted, and the countryside was hushed.
Driving without headlights, Jasha concentrated on guiding the damaged car alongside the treacherous drop-offs. Grace sat beside him, silently riding shotgun. Brenna was in the back, staring out the window, her elbow on the ledge, her cheek resting on the backs of her fingers.
If Jasha had noticed the change in the dynamic between them—and he was no fool—he didn’t remark upon it.
Partway down the mountain, Jasha pulled over, tires crackling on the stones as the car rolled to a stop in a spot where the mountain sheltered them on one side. A vast cemetery spread out beneath them. Jasha glanced at Brenna in the rear view mirror. “Quickly.”
She opened the door. Bent at the waist, she scurried across the road with the camera and crouched among the boulders.
Makeshift crosses, rough boards with pointed tops, and even occasional Stars of David marked thousands of graves, dug so closely-together that the dead lay shoulder-to-shoulder.
The earth mounded over them was fresh, dark, bare—and extended out of sight.
Down the slope, black-shrouded mourners floated like ghosts among the markers and open graves.
Distant strains of Albinoni’s Adagio, drifting across the burial grounds like a low-lying mist, added to the haunting scene.
Wait a minute. Music? “Jasha? Is that—?”
Jasha nodded. “Famous Kav?ak cellist,” he said, naming him. “He plays for mourners now, instead of opera hall.”
Ten thousand people had been buried in this cemetery since the beginning of the war, Jasha said, many identified only by where their bodies had been found.
Since funerals were targeted by snipers and artillery, interments all took place at night now.
“Sometimes, the mourners have to jump inside the graves to take cover.”
After the supply of coffins in the city was used up, people were buried in armoires, or coffins made from rough planks nailed together.
Now the dead, transported to the cemetery in hand carts, were simply wrapped in sheets and placed directly into the ground.
The Nationalists had confiscated the German-made digger capable of carving out a grave in eight minutes, so now all the holes were dug by hand.
“It takes two men all day to dig one grave,” Jasha said.
“They are exhausted, weak from hunger. Always cold.”
Brenna returned as silently as she left, got in, and closed the door with a muted thump.
Jasha pulled away.
The terrain flattened, and Jasha drove into the city through a circuitous maze of Separatist-manned barriers and blockades. Everybody knew him, ribbed him good-naturedly about his missing tire, and saluted him through.
He stopped in front of a pair of iron gates displaying a large ‘UNPROFOR’ sign.
Before the siege, the barracks behind the gates had housed the regional militia.
Now, they were home to the Ukrainian peacekeepers assigned to protect the city’s core.
The armed guard at the gate, a dark, muscular man of about thirty-five, stepped up to Jasha’s window, his AK-47 casually pointed at him from waist level.
Jasha exchanged words with the soldier, and he opened the gates.
Jasha drove sedately through, the bare rim grinding the road.
In the back seat, Brenna tugged her camera bag onto her lap and dug through it.
In no apparent hurry, nonchalantly surveilling every quadrant of the barrack compound, Jasha glanced at her in the rear view mirror. “How are you doing?”
“Fishing. It’s at the bottom of the bag.”
“Let me know,” he said, and calmly rounded a corner.
Grace looked from one to the other, wondering what they were talking about.
“Got it!” Brenna said. She peeled off her jacket, unzipped a secret flap in the lining, and rapidly slid a black, palm-sized piece of electronic equipment into a small interior pocket.
A micro digital video recorder, the latest in technology.
Her hands working swiftly, she grasped the lapel of her jacket, screwed the lead with the pinhole camera into the back of one of the ordinary-looking black buttons at the front, threaded the microphone down one sleeve, and re-zipped the lining.
“Done,” she said.
Thirty seconds later, Jasha pulled up in front of a garage door, shut off the engine, and held an open palm out to Grace.
Grace pulled the wallet out of her pocket and gave him the whole thing, abandoning any pretense of knowing how much things cost, or controlling the cash flow.
Jasha rifled through the bills, extracted several high denominations, and handed it back.
“Get a receipt, why don’t you,” Grace mumbled.
Jasha snorted, pulled the door handle, and stepped out. He leaned over Brenna’s window and tapped the glass.
She cranked it down and handed out her shoulder camera.
“Meet me here,” he said. “One hour, if you live. Longer, if you don’t.”
Grace shot a glance over the seat. If she lived?
“Ha-ha, Jasha. Keep my camera safe. Otherwise, don’t come back. After any amount of time.”
Jasha’s shoulders were shaking as he walked toward the large white doors with it under his arm.
“Come on,” she told Grace. “Let’s go stick our necks out.”
Grace got out of the car and followed Brenna. “Where are we going?”
“Shopping.”
They walked rapidly along the lee of the garage and crossed diagonally to a separate, less-isolated building. A warehouse, she judged. Loading bays, steel entrance door, no windows.
They clattered up six metal steps, passed an armed soldier, and tugged the door handle.