K. looked back to the silhouettes, still faintly visible against the light evening sky, then towards the village, where their attention was trained.

The small figures of soldiers dashed from one house to another on the edge of the village. They ran, halted, hid behind walls, and again ran forward, moving ever deeper into the village. K.’s gaze landed on one of the houses. A sloping roof, a chimney, dark windows . . . and slowly, silently, as if in slow motion, it was swallowed by fire, shattering into pieces.

“Fuck me,” Tolyan whispered loudly. The figures fell to the ground and froze. K. kept looking down. Logs, bits of slate, and bricks cast out by the fireball hung in their air. The cicadas went silent.

Bleached momentarily by the bright flames, the night instantly cloaked the hospital again with damp summer darkness. The sound of the explosion finally caught up with the flash of light and shattered the silence. It was followed by the deafening, harsh, rhythmic thump of a heavy machine gun. K. shuddered. The figures jumped up and ran forward. Time resumed its pace. K. saw the yellow stripes of tracer bullets flying out of the bushes on the slope, about a hundred metres away. The bright spot of the explosion still floated before his eyes.

A salvo of mortars rang out from behind the hospital, and then twice more. The shells evaporated northward. In the thickening darkness beyond the river, three spots flamed and died.

Keeping his head low, K. returned to the kitchen building. Lena stood at the entrance to the basement.

“Give me the key to the locked wards. We have to do this now.”

“Lena, we need to get out of here,” said Tolyan. “Guys, we need to go.”

Tracer fire shot out from several points at once. They flew past each other, bullets ricocheted from the rooftops and pinged off to the sides.

More mortar fire.

“Lena!”

“They’re cons. What are we supposed to do with them?”

“We need to save them.”

“They’re rotten people.”

“We still need to save them.” The shriek of a runaway patient came from a thicket outside the main gate “Lena!”

In the darkness, only the glimmer of her eyes was visible. She gazed silently at the tracer fire sailing over the village. She jolted at another volley of mortar fire, summoned a nurse, grabbed her keys and handed them to K.

“Hurry. The bus will arrive any moment now.”

K. dashed into the hospital building, turned on the flashlight on his phone and ran upstairs. His footsteps echoed in the corridors and a mortar rumbled outside. On the third floor, K. discovered a serried metal door. He picked out a round key with a triangular hole at the end, like the ones train conductors use. The lock clicked and the heavy door opened. K. went through into a narrow, doorless corridor and entered the ward.

The flashlight illuminated the terrified eyes of patients sitting on their beds—some were seated two or three to a cot. Their pallid, round faces, which had only a little while earlier stared at him from behind window bars, were sharply outlined by the light of the torch. Their eyes glowed like animals caught in a night vision photo.