“Dopeheads.”

“Speak for yourself.”

K. leaned against the van. His hands felt unbearably heavy.

“Okay, let’s get him to Donetsk A&E. And make it fast.”

He took the syringe from his pocket and gave him an injection. The boy gazed at him mutely. K. closed the doors and waved away the van. He returned to the building and sat back down beneath the window.

He tried to sleep but couldn’t. He was constantly pulled back up to the surface and plunged into the cold autumn night. The hospital windows clapped in the wind. Somewhere a homeless dog had stumbled onto a booby trap and was dying in agony. And there was nobody around to put it out of its misery. There were almost no dogs left in the city. They all got killed scouring the front lines for bodies.

Glass tinkled in the backyard. Fearing the Ukrainian commandos that had cut the throats of three mortarmen posted nearby, Kostya and Dima spread broken bottles around the yard. It was playing a cruel joke on them now. Huge rats would skitter among the shards. The broken-nerved and bomb-deafened stray cats that roamed the city were too afraid to hunt for them.

K. closed his eyes. The dull low sound of artillery would not go away.

Kostya finished frying the cutlets, put them in a bowl, which he covered with a lid, and took them to the woman living next door. She was tall and thin, and her face was swollen due to some complication with her liver. The whites of her eyes had turned yellow. That’s all K. recalled of her appearance. She said her husband was a miner and that he had died. She might have been lying. She had a three-year-old daughter. Dima made the odd lewd remark, but Kostya just laughed it off. He said he was missing his children and that that was why he kept visiting her.

It felt to K. like Kostya didn’t quite understand what he was doing for them. What they really needed was to be evacuated, but the woman would not budge, and Kostya wouldn’t insist. The little one had no idea what was going on. Her mother would try every evening to persuade her that the exploding shells were only thunder. They had to hide from the loud thunder, the loud thunder that never gave them a moment’s respite.

K. snapped back to awareness on the way to the hospital. He walked past the position occupied by the new mortarmen. They fired from the yard, ran into the house for more shells, and carried them out four at a time under their armpits. A row of white sticks was stuck into the ground in front of the mortar to show them which way to fire.

Their faces glowed in flames coughing out of the mortar, and then again faded, swallowed by the wet darkness. They couldn’t get any sleep either. Nobody could. Everybody was haunted by meaningless dreams, the sound of explosions, the chill of autumn and the howling of wounded dogs. The constant, draining aura of death that always lingers.