The Common Sky

Vologda region, Russia · 3 January 2033

The first shot took a white bite out of the windscreen.

Pavel ducked over the wheel. The bus swung left, and Anton caught the rail above the door as the people behind him slid against one another. A glass jar broke somewhere in the aisle. For a moment he could hear only the engine and a woman shouting for her daughter.

“Down,” Pavel said.

Anton was still standing. He dropped.

A second shot struck metal. Pavel pulled the wheel back, but the bus had already crossed the edge of the road. They lurched into the snowbank. Anton's cheek struck a seat frame. The engine strained, stopped. A suitcase burst beside his face.

The woman was still calling for her daughter.

He pushed himself onto one elbow. A red mitten lay under the opposite seat. The hand inside it moved.

“She's here.”

He reached beneath the seat, found a small arm and eased the child towards him. She was wearing so many clothes that he could not tell where to hold her. Her mother crawled forward and took her by the shoulders, saying her name over and over into the wool of her hat.

Pavel's right hand had left the wheel. His sleeve was dark above the wrist.

“Can you move it?” Anton asked.

“The bus?”

“Yes.”

Pavel tried. The engine turned without starting.

From farther down the road came the horn of the second bus, one long frightened note.

That morning Anton had been arguing over which villages should share a council delegate. Then the school caretaker had brought in the temperature readings.

The repair crew could not restore circulation to the residential blocks. Portable heaters kept a few rooms usable, but the building circuits would not carry more. There was electricity at the substation and frost inside the windows where people slept.

They had found two buses and a van. Vera, the clinic nurse, had listed those who needed to leave first. The council clerk brought the residents' paper claims in a blue case, refusing to leave them beneath the leaking office roof. By the time Anton carried the last man downstairs, the light was thinning.

Now the blue case was jammed beneath his knee.

He shifted it and looked towards the driver.

“Stay below the windows,” Pavel said. “Don't get up to look.”

Anton had been about to do exactly that.

The bus stood crooked across the verge, its nose buried, its rear still on the road. Through the lower corner of the windscreen he could see the black back of a lorry ahead of them. He remembered seeing it as they came around the bend. He had assumed it was waiting for help.

Someone was speaking on a radio behind him. Vera, pressed against the base of a seat, gave their location twice. Her voice was level until a man interrupted to ask whether she had seen his wife.

“She is next to you, Yevgeny. Hold her hand.”

The man looked down, astonished.