CHAPTER 9
Yekaterinburg, Russia
If there was any group of people in the world who Katerina would have joyfully rounded up and shot, it was travel vloggers.
In the good old days, she would probably have been allowed to do that, too.
She couldn’t imagine the KGB having any patience with people like Hi I’m Vlad from Vladivostok and I’m Going to Take You on the Adventure of a LIFETIME!
! Smash That Subscribe Button!!! There had probably been a special cell with a sloping floor and a drain at one end for those people.
Probably using more than one exclamation mark would have been enough to get you deported to Kazakhstan.
But now you weren’t allowed to shoot people for being irritating.
Now, if you were police, you had to spend a lot of time fishing vloggers out of stupid places where they weren’t meant to be, and you weren’t allowed to shoot them even a tiny bit.
She’d bet anything that the police in Moscow didn’t have to deal with this nonsense.
But if your city was only a hundred and fifty kilometers away from a massive nuclear facility that had been the stage for several spectacular disasters, you were flooded with the kind of people for whom a minibreak to Chernobyl was too tame.
“It’s another missing travel moron,” the dispatcher had said over the radio half an hour ago. “Actually, several travel morons.”
“If I have to drive to Lake fucking Karachay again and fish out the vomiting tourists and explain that it’s fucking radioactive, I will make them eat plutonium,” Katerina had said, teetering right on the edge of hurling her badge out of the window, sending a nice envelope of anthrax to the superintendent, and moving to Halkidiki.
“It’s much closer, don’t worry,” the dispatcher said soothingly.
“It’s just the salt mine. Five lads posted something online about going down to explore three days ago and they were supposed to be there for no more than twenty hours.
They’re just students,” he offered, in a tone that was only half hopeful she wouldn’t collapse the entrance of the mine and call it case closed.
“Their parents have all reported them missing and one of the mothers is on the Something Committee, so the boss wants you to go straightaway.”
“Outstanding,” Katerina snarled.
So now, she was driving up to the gates.
The salt mine had been abandoned years ago, and what had once been the parking lot was now just an empty, open space, ringed with barbed-wire fencing.
The ground was all salt; it crunched and squeaked strangely under the tyres.
She rummaged through her bag for a flashlight, and a spare battery for the flashlight, because she liked horror movies and had resolved never to be the subject of one.
She shivered as soon as she opened the car door. It was cold, even for December; even through her heavy jacket and the furry winter police hat. Above her, though, the sky was clear, and the stars were brilliant. It was really not a terrible night to be out here.
Not far away was exactly the kind of car you would expect irritating travel vloggers to have.
It was an elderly Lada, in that horrifying shade of brown that used to be the only colour available: one they had clearly bought because they thought it was fun and retro, rather than what it was, which was a death trap.
Her mother used to have one, and had spent a lot of time telling everyone what a marvel of engineering it was, which was technically accurate: it was marvellous to have built something that looked like a car from old stockings and scaffolding.
She shone the flashlight into the window. No, they hadn’t all conveniently died inside. Balls.
The gates of the mine had been locked together with a chain; now the chain was broken, the severed link winking bright. She nudged one of the gates open and trudged through.
“Hello?” she called into the tunnel. “Police. I’m here to . . . urgh . . . help you.”
Her voice echoed. She waited, but no second voice came back. Carefully, to keep her steps from echoing too loudly and covering over any other sound, she held the light up and went deeper into the tunnel.
The walls were incredible. They whirled kaleidoscope patterns in red and white, or blue and gold.
She’d read about it somewhere; there was a mineral in the salt that made the colours.
Everything was salt: the walls, the floor.
The air tasted of it. She was instantly thirsty.
It was warm too, not even that far from the open tunnel mouth.
After about twenty metres she pulled off her hat and tucked it in her jacket pocket.
After forty, she had to take off the jacket.
What was making that heat? It was bizarre.
Outside, it must have been minus twenty.
She called again, and again her voice echoed around and around.
The tunnel branched up ahead. She swung the torchlight over the floor, looking for footprints.
It was hard to see; the ground was powdery salt in some places, and in others the salt had formed in strange, alive-looking stalagmites, some small and new, others old, making pillars right up to the ceiling.
All of it swirled with those incredible colours.
She’d had no idea it was like this down here.
Grudgingly, she felt a little bit grateful to the stupid vloggers. She would never have seen it otherwise.
Her light flickered, and at the same time, the radio in her belt made the whistling, crackly sound it did if she walked too close to the television at work.
Something in the flashlight was wrong. Something was spiking out of the little hatch that protected the battery, something white and crystalline. She dropped it, and the light went out. Pitch-black.
She snicked her lighter. The tiny light fell over the torch on the ground. It was bound up in spikes and weird arcs of . . . salt.
“What?” she said aloud, and then yelled when exactly the same thing happened to her radio with a howl of dying circuitry.
Only one thing destroyed electronics like that.
To destroy them so quickly, there had to be a lot of it, too.
A lot: even at Chernobyl, people had been able to use electronic devices for about fifteen minutes before they fried.
How long had she been here—five minutes?
Unprotected. That same fifteen minutes at Chernobyl had been enough to give all those people leukaemia.
She backed away. God Almighty, what had they stored down here?
It could be anything. They were only two hours away from the Mayak facility, where they made plutonium, where they had been making plutonium for seventy years, and spilling God knew what in the process—
The flame of the lighter caught on something on the left. A person.
No.
A statue about the size and shape of a person. Salt. Frozen mid-step, as though it was trying to run.
Five statues. Littered around them were salt-ruined phones and cameras, even a drone with a logo on it: MOST HAUNTED PLACES! LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, FOLLOW.
She ran back to the car. Getting out into the open and the roaring cold felt like reaching safe ground, though of course there was no way to know that.
She wrenched the car door open and started the engine, almost expecting it to be dead and to open the bonnet and find spikes of salt inside, but it started, and cooperated as she skidded out of the parking lot. She pulled the car radio off its hook.
“Dispatch, this is Car Twelve at the salt mine, I—”
“That was quick,” the dispatcher said. “Any sign of them?”
“Their car is there.” She stared at the road. What was she supposed to say? “I think—I think I’ve found bodies.”