Yuri adjusts his 3D goggles, eases back the lever on the controller, and the ground drops away as his drone lifts into the sky. He can hear the whirling of the quad propellers fading into the distance. A small torpedo-shaped explosive is attached to the drone and held fast by two clamps, pressed together like praying hands. The drone is skimming low across the Dnipro River as the dawn sky lightens, the water below like hammered steel, swirling towards the Black Sea. This will be the last run of the night’s operation. The rest of Yuri’s unit is throwing goggles, iPad, and drones into their packs, readying to move out before the Russians drones find them.
A noise startles him awake. The walls of the bedroom glare at him as the morning sun pours in. Right. I’m home for some much-needed R & R. He had painted this room egg-yolk yellow the last time he was home. His wife, Ionna, sleeping beside him, had picked out the color. He lowers his eyelids and then he’s rising over the jagged ruins of an apartment building, blackened and broken like a mouth full of rotten teeth. Mashed and flipped cars clog the streets below like refuse washed towards the sea by a ferocious flood.
Ionna wakes and turns toward him and they nuzzle, kissing. Yuri turns on his back, his arm around her. He looks across the room towards the open French windows. The lace curtains tremble in a gentle breeze. A wasp loops inside, bouncing against the bedroom ceiling, its wings making an intermittent buzz. Yuri eyes the wasp with suspicion. He once targeted a Russian command post in an abandoned house. He piloted his small drone through an open window without detection then detonated the bomb it carried, flattening the command center. The recon drone showed the roof blown off and dead bodies strewn about like broken toys. Ionna pulls him over on top of herself and they kick off the sheets. He gently begins rocking his hips as Ionna wraps her smooth legs around him, but he freezes when he hears the buzzing of the wasp again, skipping across the ceiling. Is it one of ours? He imagines the POV of the “wasp-drone” looking down on the bed, viewing two naked targets, and he begins to lose his erection. He refocuses on Ionna’s breathing and starts to move with her again. The “wasp-drone” descends and hoovers ten inches from his left ear, its buzzing deafening. Yuri glares at the wasp. Its yellow jointed legs hang loose. Yuri’s relieved it’s not carrying a grenade, but it is definitely looking at him. The wasp rises and begins making intermittent buzzes against the ceiling as it heads across the room. Ionna kisses his neck and pulls his face towards her, looking into his eyes.
“Where are you?” she says. He smells a trace of her perfume and smiles. He hears a change in the buzzing and turns his head in time to see the wasp swoop back towards the bed and land on his buttock. The wasp stings him three times in quick succession. He gasps, but tries to ignore the pain and maintain his rhythm. The wasp lifts off and moves up to the ceiling somewhere behind him. Yuri turns his head and sees the wasp shoot towards him, swoop down, and disappear between his legs.
“Ouch!” he shouts and rolls off Ionna.
“Honey? Are you all right?”
Yuri sits on the edge of the bed, taking quick, deep breaths.
“Give me a minute. Where’s that drone…ah…wasp?”
“What wasp?”
“The one that’s been flying around in here. Watching us. Didn’t you hear it? It stung me on the ass and flew up my butt.”
“Stop it,” she laughs. “A wasp did not fly up your butt.”
“I’m not imagining things. Look.” He turns around and she touches the red swollen bumps on his buttock.
“It’s a tight grouping. A trained sniper, I’d say.”
Yuri doesn’t acknowledge her joke.
“Let me get something to put on those.” She slides out of bed and glides down the hallway like the trained dancer she is. Now she spends her days designing and building drone components in a workshop filled with musicians and artists all doing their part in the war effort. Yuri scans the ceiling and walls. He looks behind some spattered paint cans and brushes sitting on a folded drop cloth. He searches under the bed, then pulls apart the sheets and blankets in desperation. No wasp. If it’s not here, where is it? He heads to the bathroom.
Ionna comes into the bathroom and turns on the shower.
“Yuri! What are you doing!” Yuri is stooped over the toilet bowl poking around in the water with a paint stirrer.
“I’m looking for that wasp.”
“Don’t be gross!” She pulls off her T-shirt and steps into the shower.
Yuri sits on the edge of the bed engulfed in a fog of cigarette smoke, listening to the shower run. Usually they fly 12-hour shifts, dusk to dawn. The infrared cameras on the “Vampire drones” makes it possible to see the heat signatures of a soldier’s body or a tank’s warm engine. Yuri’s drone skims over torn-up farmland and along the edge of a wooded area near a disabled Russian tank. Its turret lies flipped over in the dirt, the work of an American Javelin. The rain has gathered in the turret, where a mangy dog drinks. Its body glows on Yuri’s screen, its eyes angry red dots, and as the drone goes overhead its ears perk up. Yuri brings the drone down within fifty feet of the ground and speeds along a trench. His eyes burn and he’s getting nauseous from the flashing of the video. He’s close now. His chest tightens and his mouth goes dry. He checks the altitude—just right. Too high and the grenade he’s carrying goes off in the air, too low and the soldiers will have time to run or throw it out of the trench before it goes off. He sees the heat signature of a soldier lying still in the shallow trench. He takes a deep breath and lets out half. The soldier slowly turns his head until he’s looking up at the drone. Yuri looks right into the man’s eyes as he releases the grenade. He watches it drop silently into the trench between the soldier’s legs. Yuri clenches, as if the grenade has dropped into his own lap. The Russian soldier scrambles to rise up as the grenade explodes. Yuri stubs out his cigarette in a shower of sparks in the ashtray and walks over to the open window. A wasp nest hangs beneath the gutter overhead. Ionna comes into the living room wrapped in a towel, drying her hair.
“Do we have any insect spray?”
“Under the sink.”
A moment later he dowses the nest and quickly shuts the window.
“Shall we go down to the café and have some breakfast?” says Ionna.
Yuri single-mindedly shovels his syrniki into his mouth, staring into space all the while. He washes down the pancakes with a gulp of coffee. Not so long ago, he had met some real estate clients in this very café. He’d taken drone footage of their penthouse suites and rooftop pools. The spiraling footage made the apartments look fabulous against a cloudless blue sky and the Black Sea. The kind of work he did paid enough for him and Ionna to buy their apartment in the historic center of Odesa. He never imagined the Russian fleet would one day lob rockets into those high-rises or that his drone piloting skills would put him on the front lines pushing the Russian invaders out of his country.
“How was your breakfast?” asks Ionna, nudging him back to reality.
“I’m sorry.” He smiles and the lines crinkle near his eyes. “It was delicious. I’m just a little scattered, thinking about going back to my unit tomorrow.” He idly adjusts the two blue strawflowers in the vase on the table as a dark cloud dips in front of the sun.
“I understand. I miss you already. Do you feel at all rested?”
He shakes his head and lightly traces over her hand with his fingertips.
“I wish I could do more,” says Ionna.
“You’re doing plenty. You build ’em. I’ll bury ’em.”
“But they keep coming.”
“Yes, but once we get the long-range stuff happening, we’ll cut off the Russian army’s supplies. When they get hungry enough, they’ll go home.” A few drops of rain fall as Yuri and Ionna leave the cafe.
In the apartment Yuri opens the window. Five dead wasps lie on the white sill. Their black and yellow bodies are curled and twisted in death poses that are all too familiar to a drone pilot. Two of the wasps are on their backs, legs skyward, heads strained to the side as if they’re searching for an explanation. He sweeps the carcasses off the sill with his hand and they fall like ash to the sidewalk below. He watches two gulls fight savagely over a scrap of bread high up against the pewter sky. Yuri smells the pungent storm blowing off the Black Sea as the gulls’ prophetic cries pierce the stillness, a defiant warning. Yuri shuts the window as a hard rain starts to fall.
Photo by Red Shuheart on Unsplash
