“At last I turned my head toward Katya, not even sure yet what I meant to say or do. But she knew what I was thinking better than I did. ‘The way I look at it,’ she said, ‘we have two choices. Assuming that we’ll be in the remembering business past this evening, we can remember some awkward, unsatisfying groping in a trailer the size of a coffin, with the smell of shit in our nostrils and the chance of getting shot hanging over our heads, the main effect of which will be to make us feel embarrassed and frustrated for the last few hours of our lives. Or you can go on imagining the six children and the white house with the picket fence and the incredible sex and whatever the hell else it is that’s kept you going these past two years. If it were me I’d go for the fence thing, but I’ll leave it up to you.’
“And then, before I could reply, she raised her head, and said through the communicators we’d socketed: Or we could have what’s behind door number three. A moment later I, too, heard the farmer’s footsteps as he came up the walk to his truck.
“Luckily, he did not check the trailer. We felt the truck begin to move; we traveled in silence; then, all too soon, the truck stopped again. The farmer called to the guard, barely slowing, and we were pressed against the doors of the trailer as the truck started up the hill. It leveled, then stopped. The accordion creak of the parking brake; the car door; then the farmer’s footsteps. A knife-blade of light cleft the trailer door.
“I was ready, and knocked him out with the butt of my rifle— not, I hoped, too hard. We put him back in the car and pushed it out of the sight of the guard towers. Then we went into the stables and slopped kerosene over everything that looked flammable. The horses were thoroughly spooked by this time, and when we released them they galloped away, alerting the guards. We heard a siren and saw floodlights through the window, but, to our relief, there were no shots. Soon we could hear people running and shouting all around us.
“‘Our life expectancy just doubled,’ she said. ‘From the towers, we’ll just be another couple of idiots running around trying to catch the horses.’ So we stood by the door, lit the straw with the flamethrower, and ran to watch from safety.
“The stables crackled, like the warning rattle of a snake, and seeped out smoke at every pore, and then at last put on a wreath of flame, like a woman tossing a red cape around her shoulders. And for all that I knew the futility of what we did, no other moment in my life has been as satisfying.
“‘Will it spread?’ I asked her, as the cry of fire went out.
“‘I don’t give a damn,’ she said bitterly. She was immune to the destructive joy that had seduced me. ‘Piotr wanted a fire, so there’s his goddamn fire. Whether the Guardians have to rebuild their library or not is all the same to me. Let’s get the generator and go find Piotr some roommates.’
“In the confusion, no one challenged us as we found and burned the generator. The searchlights went out all around the hill. We went down in darkness, to where the long narrow barracks lay side by side like rows of corn.
“One of the horses had found its way down the hill, and men in uniforms and nightshirts were trying to trap it in the narrow space between two barracks. It was an admirable plan, and might have worked, if only they could have agreed which aisle they meant to drive the poor thing into. Every time they thought they had him, he would find a way out, darting between two shoulders just in time.
“The prisoners, hearing the footsteps and hoofbeats and cries, must have thought the last extermination was upon them. A wailing would start in one barracks and be taken up at once by others, like an old song that everyone knows. Now and then an irritated Guardian would go along the rows, rapping a stick against the wood and then against the tin, to quiet the cries, but each time they only started up again. In such an uproar, no one would notice the two of us; but prisoners flowing from an open barracks would be seen at once.
“We stopped, pretending to gawk at the fire, as Katya checked the map on her drydisk. ‘There,’ she said at last, pointing up the row of barracks. ‘It says Terminal Isolation Cells.’
“‘What’s that?’
“‘Something bad enough that being shot in an escape would be an improvement. Let’s go.’
“One guard had remained by the door of the square building, but she easily persuaded him that he was wanted in fire fighting. When he was gone, we shot the padlock off the door with a silenced pistol she had brought for just such purposes. Its sound surprised me: louder and more mechanical than the cat-sneeze sound effect you hear in the movies. I kept flinching, afraid of ricochets, so I had to keep shooting and shooting to hit the lock. But when I finally hit it, it flew to bits; it was a twenty-ruble padlock, nothing more. We were both surprised to find such token security; as I recall, she remarked that she’d seen bicycles better protected… until we opened the door, thrusting in our guns like policemen in a video.
“The smell of urine, feces, and decay was overwhelming. The building was packed solid with cubical cages, a metre on a side. They were piled three high, and filled the building wall to wall, so there was no corridor by which to reach the cages at the back. In each, a naked prisoner sat huddled, a food dispenser pressing into his arm. The muscles even of the ones in front were visibly atrophied, and in the cages at the back we could see corpses, rotting in the same position they had crouched in when alive.
“For a time we both stood mute. Then, feeling that something had to be done, I started toward the nearest cage. But Katya held me back. ‘Pavel, we can’t let those people go,’ she said. ‘They couldn’t walk across the room, much less make it out of here. And it would take days to move the cages around to get to them all. Pavel, there’s… is there nothing we can do?’
“‘Burn it,’ said a voice from the cages. We jumped, whirling around to see who had spoken. The prisoners’ condition was so bestial, we had not imagined them capable of speech. But one of them nodded his head, all the gesture that he could make, and said again, ‘Burn it all.’
“I had the flamethrower. But I was paralyzed, imagining the fire creeping from cage to cage. It would move slowly; nothing but the men themselves was flammable among the tin and steel. Each one, unable even to cover his face, would watch his neighbor’s long matted hair bloom yellow as he awaited his own turn.
“If Katya had turned to me, if Katya had given one of her sharp commanding nods, I would have done it. But she, even she, could not command such a horror.
“‘Then give it to me,’ the man said, ‘and I’ll do what needs doing.’
“Silently, not even needing to look at each other, we agreed. He could do it. He knew.
“I put in a new clip and aimed the pistol at the simple cage lock from above. But I could not fire so close to the man’s unprotected flesh, could not find an angle that did not risk a ricochet into arm or face or thigh.
“Finally Katya closed her hand over mine, and slipped her slender finger into the trigger guard, where mine, thick and clumsy, trembled against the steel. She squeezed once, firmly. The cage door burst open, and the man spilled out, uncurling. He should have been left to unfold on his own, as you give the hatched butterfly a chance to dry its wings; but there was no time. She helped him prop himself up against the side of the cage, and I put the flamethrower in his hands.