The Next Card

It was the longest day of the year, and Lyuda and Rocky started it early.

She rose from bed before dawn and tied her frazzled hair into a long grey pony tail that nearly reached her waist. Crossing herself in Orthodox custom, she then lit a homemade bees’ wax candle before an icon of the Virgin Mary on her kitchen’s window sill.

Rocky, her 12-year-old German Shepherd, stretched out his back by the kitchen’s door to their garden. He awaited their morning walk through the hospital’s grounds while Lyuda took her pack of Tarot cards down from the top of the fridge.

She shuffled through the yellow-coloured deck to find the ‘Strength’ card which coincided with summer’s solstice. On the card, a white-robed woman with a crown of flowers strokes a lion on his forehead and jaw. She knew the meaning: to be strong by taming of raw emotion. The taming was the tricky part, she said to herself.

Lyuda remembered that she had promised Alina that she would do a reading that evening. The young mother and Marusya, her 2-year-old blonde toddler daughter, were now living on the grounds of the village hospital while her husband, normally an orderly on a ward, served as a combat medic on the country’s eastern front. Like others, Alina had moved there during the village’s occupation and now stayed on.

The occupants had had lists of who from the village was in the military and which houses their families lived in; though they were gone, it was still safer to be at the hospital. The rumour was that the occupants were listening to mobile calls from the front.

‘The Queen of Cups,’ Lyuda thought to herself. That would be the card she would use for Alina when doing the reading. ‘Beautiful, fair and dreamy, but also honest and devoted.’

She wondered what the cards would show on this most powerful day and night. In bygone times on the Kupala day, before the collective farms and Five Year Plans, simple farmers would beckon procreation and prosperity with fire and flowers. Few, like Lyuda, now knew of it.

She and the dog left her cottage. They headed toward the wooded area and small creek at the site’s southern end. The dog paced ahead of her with purpose, checking on holes and crevices in the overgrown grass surrounding the various maintenance and storage sheds, rusty tractors, and decommissioned ambulance vans. With their fading red-and-white colours, the latter reminded her of sad, old clowns.

The site was a bedlam of buildings: the old Soviet-era, four-story hospital building at its centre — like a loaf of mouldy bread; several squat houses for departmental specialties like cardiology or pathology; dormitory quarters for the single staff, some of whom had returned to the site in the last months. It was all less managed than it was random and ramshackle. And, that was without the destruction that had come with the war.

After each of his ‘inspections’, Rocky would pull up and slightly raise his head to the clouds above. The hair on his spine prickled up. He thinks it’s his job now, Lyuda thought to herself.

Each time, Rocky had known before Lyuda or any of her hospital colleagues had. The first time, it was around lunch break. Lyuda was behind the serving counter in the cafeteria, which she had run for the last twenty-three years. It had been a sunny spring day; she could see doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers eating borscht on wobbly plastic tables outside the food serving area.

They all saw Rocky suddenly start to ferociously bark and pace the paved area; occasionally, he would throw his front paws to the sky, as if trying to pounce with his old torso. Then, the staffers saw what the dog had heard: a drone some 50 meters above their heads. Like a digital mosquito, it whirred closer to the concrete water tower that supplied the health facility.

The first shells fell short of the water tower; one salvo ripped apart a doctor’s parked car, leaving it like a smashed watermelon of metal, plastic and glass. The second round struck its target which swayed and then sunk sideways to the ground. Bricks and water swilled.

Blast waves instantly followed and surged through some of the cafeteria’s windows. People fell or dove to the ground. A young nurse had red all down the front of her uniform, and Lyuda could not tell if it was blood or beets. Later, they learned and were grateful it was only soup.

As the staffers saw what was being targeted, they groped to get off the ground and ran for cover behind the concrete of the cafeteria building. The enemy had retreated north from the village three months ago, but its artillery and reconnaisance squads were still within its range. The village was no longer occupied by the young and dumb soldiers from Siberia, but by the threat of sudden steel from the sky.

The second time, Lyuda recalled, Rocky had sprinted to where the newly-built family clinic was near the entrance. He barked and growled at the nurses standing in a cloud of vape outside its front doors. By now, most everyone at the hospital had heard about the dog’s drone-spotting so they ran inside and started screaming at everyone to leave.

As two young panicked mums pushed their prams out the backdoor of the clinic, a mortar round landed with a dull thud about 30 meters away. A drone hovered above. Rocky again raised his canine alarm.

Hidden behind a tree line about 1500 meters away, three young men looked at the cracked screen of a mobile phone and saw the small crater that their first attempt had made. They clicked the small adjustment wheel on the side of the mortar cannon to change the angle of its inclination and they fired again. This time, the mortar landed 20 meters away from the clinic building.

On the mobile’s screen, the young men spotted a man in a white lab coat near the building they had been ordered to destroy. The man — perhaps, a doctor — was angrily waving his arms and yelling at the sky, as a dog ran around him.

One of the soldiers clicked the wheel again. His colleague dropped the shell down the mortar’s firing tube. The shell crunched into the earth about 10 meters shy of the building, as the mortar team ‘walked’ the weapon’s fire toward their target.

The man on the screen picked up a rock and threw it at the drone. Then, he ran and Rocky ran after him. The soldiers laughed and clicked the wheel again.

This time, they selected a high-explosive shell. The other shells had been to calculate the correct azimuth and distance; this one was designed to blast and kill.

‘Where the metal meets the meat’, the team leader said to his colleagues and then fed the weapon. Within seconds, four hundred steel fragments — each improbably dense and heavy — ripped through the clinic’s rooms. They shredded its internal walls and medical equipment.

Afterwards, Lyuda had taken in the damage. It was the details of destruction that stood out. How the mundane became the miserable. A bag of charred potatoes in what had been the nurses’ tea room. A sign for Covid-19 vaccinations outside the entrance collapsed to the ground. A patient’s torn and scattered file; his hypertension written down in a doctor’s scrawl.

The hospital’s director, Iryna Pavlina, later credited Rocky for saving the seven lives of the people who had been at the clinic that morning. The dog, she said, was their very own air defence system. Whenever Rocky roared at the sky now, people knew violence and vengeance was likely pending.

Suddenly, the dog burst forward and rapidly ran through the patch of forest. Lyuda looked ahead and saw Alina and Masha, holding hands near the creek. They had squatted down and the little girl was placing something in the creek’s current. A crown of daisies, Lyuda saw. The old tradition of finding one’s fate.

The dog dove into the creek — a furious burst of barking and flying water. When she saw Rocky, Alina knew to instantly grab up her girl to her chest and flee as fast as she could. One of her Adidas fell off and she unsteadily hobbled as she ran.

The drone — an airborne tarantula of technology — lowered and then buzzed the mother and daughter. Then, it sped ahead of them and descended to head height. It faced off with them. Alina stopped and ran in another direction.

‘Fuck you, you bastard,’ Alina screamed at the menace as it stalked them.

The drone quickly zig-zagged away from Alina and Marusya and pulled up. It vertically rose some ten meters and hovered in place over a small clearing. Surgically scanning. A small red light blinked from one of its plastic tentacles.

The dog ran into the clearing and started leaping skywards, trying to somehow snatch the drone with his bared teeth. Rocky jumped with all the force he had; he landed badly on his chest. Winded, he leapt again and again.

Lyuda reached the clearing.

‘Keep running, Alina,’ she yelled out. ‘Rocky — no!’

A wired grenade — Lyuda saw — was attached to the drone’s undercarriage. It’s deadly intent served to still her. Yelling at the dog, though, served no purpose, she realised. She saw her young friends run out of sight and was relieved.

The machine started to slowly circle the clearing. Spittle flew from the enraged dog’s jaws.

A soldier from another country toggled the drone’s controls. He was two kilometres away from the clearing and three thousand kilometers away from his own village where toilets were a luxury; his finger was above the grenade’s red release button. On the control screen, he saw a grey-haired babushka calmly moving closer to the angry German Shepherd.

The soldier chewed on tough, dried meat from the ready-to-eat meal that was his shitty breakfast. He remembered the good food his grandmother would take off the table and give to her own dog at Christmas.

‘The animals saved Jesus so we re-pay them,’ she had told him as a young boy.

‘Stupid superstitions,’ he said to himself now. ‘Waste of food.’

The speed and vodka he’d taken last night were wearing off.

The soldier didn’t think he would ever be home for fucking Christmas again.

Lyuda watched the blinking drone lap the clearing again. It’s rotors buzzed. Banal, consistent, deadly.

She drew a deep breath and started to whisper to Rocky. Lyuda patted the dog’s mane while filling her other hand with dirt.