The second berm had a similar hatch without a bar. Arkady crouched as he entered because he felt how tight the space was. His lighter produced a weak glow, enough for him to see that he had stumbled into an army bunker. Command bunkers—capsules of buried reinforced concrete like this—had been built all around Moscow, then mothballed when the nuclear holocaust didn’t arrive. Elaborate venting and radiation monitors surrounded the hatch. On a long communications desk were a dozen phones; two of them he recognized from his own service as radio-frequency phones, artifacts of the past. There was even a high-speed Iskra system, phone and code modem intact. He lifted a receiver and got an earful of static, but was astonished that the line was alive at all.

He returned to the yard. There was too much water to make out individual tire treads. He walked the periphery without finding any other tracks except to the road, and he had come that way. It struck him that since the truck and tractor tires weren’t smeared with lime, the overflow was recent. There was no flooding anywhere else.

In the reflection of the fire the overflow was molten gold, though Arkady knew that in daylight it would look like watered milk. He guessed the pit was about five meters square. He sank the hoe; it was at least two meters deep. An object bobbed to the surface that resembled a cross-section of sausage; it rolled to show the circular jowls, cone ears and snout of a pig, a face made smooth and hairless by corrosive lime, then rolled and sank again. Feathers and hair lay pasted on the scum. A stench deeper and more profound than simple rot pervaded the mist.

Arkady reached into the middle of the pit with the hoe and hit metal. He hit metal and glass. As he walked back and forth along the pit he traced the outline of a car beneath the surface. By now he was breathing in shallow gasps not only because of the smell. He thought he heard Jaak inside the car; he was beating on the roof of Julya’s Volvo and screaming. Not that the sound escaped the pit, but Arkady could feel it.

He pulled off his jacket and shoes and dove in. He kept his eyes closed against the lime and felt his way down the side window to the door, found a latch and pulled without success because of the pressure of the water. He broke the surface, breathed and dove again. The motion of his dive disturbed the pit and unseen things rose, poking, prodding, as if trying to nudge him from the door. The second time he came up for air, the surface was crowded with the sweetmeats of the bottom, overwhelming with the smell of death.