A man in a jacket entered the bus. Hands in pockets, he leaned on the handrail.

“So, you will be unaccompanied today. If you’re stopped, no matter what, you’re a construction crew. Clear?”

The men nodded.

“Well, let’s hope there’s no fighting today. Godspeed.”

With that he exited. The convoy of buses and trucks pulled away. The women and children twitched hesitantly, ran, and then stopped and looked helplessly at the departing vehicles.

The priest whipped his sprinkler once more, aiming for the open bus windows and struck K. in the eye.

A grim-faced Fox lit another cigarette and left.

The man next to K. pulled a threadbare cap over his head and sighed with relief.

“Nightmare,” he said, extending a long-fingered, wide-knuckled hand.

His outstretched hand twitched.

“That’s my alias,” he explained. “Nightmare. But you can call me Kostya. And what’s your name?”

K. thought for a moment.

“Doc. I’m Doc.” He shook Kostya’s hand. “You aren’t a tank crewman are you, by any chance?”

“Ha! You almost got it! I drive BMDs—the combat vehicles, you know?”

K. nodded, studying his face. The man had a nervous twitch, it was barely noticeable but constant. He nodded as if in time with the movement of the bus and spoke quickly, swallowing his words.

“That’s good. Can always do with doctors. We need everybody we can get. Even the wounded and the shell-shocked, like me. Everyone.” His smile revealed ill-fitting upper dentures.

“Is it so bad?” K. looked back and saw twenty men in regular street clothes, as though they had been picked up from a bus stop at a factory. The ancient engine rattled and the cabin filled with the smell of sweat and summer dust. It was how schoolchildren are delivered to school or the labourers to the coal mine early in the morning, swinging casually in the bus, indifferently gazing on a familiar landscape, or dozing, making up for the short summer night.

K. looked ahead.

The bus turned into Lenin Prospekt, past a shuttered McDonald’s, and rounded the circus building, where a long line had formed at an aid distribution point.

Kostya craned his neck, looking around with concern.

“Where are we going? We’re supposed to go through Yasinovataya.”

But it had been a long time since they had taken the straight route. That way was barred by several government checkpoints, so a detour was needed. At Kramatorsk, the bus turned southeast.

The city didn’t look like it was on the front line. Shops were open, people walked the streets, there was a long queue of cars at the petrol station. When the bus stopped at traffic lights, Kostya tapped his finger on the glass and said: “Hey look, the incoming fire got them.” A hole made by an artillery shell in the face of a nine-storey building stared back like a malignant pupil.

What had happened to the people living there? Were they alive? K. found his thoughts drifting back to the day before, to the basement. It was an image unbearably hideous and yet unvarnished, pared down to grisly truth.