STALKER Northern Passage

 “S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Northern Passage”

  © 2012 Balazs Pataki. All rights reserved.

  S.T.A.L.K.E.R. logo and all names, characters and locations related to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games: © 2011 GSC Game World and used by courtesy of GSC Game World.

  No similarity between any characters and/or institutions in this publication and any pre-existing person(s), living, dead or zombified and/or institution, pre-existing and/or dissolved is intended and any similarity which may exist is purely coincidental.

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  This is a work of fiction. The views and opinions expressed in this publication are the views of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of GSC Game World and/or individuals affiliated or connected with GSC Game World.

  Cover art by Noah Stacey

  This Smashbook Edition: December 2012

  ISBN: 9781301993253

  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

  Northern Passage

  Balazs Pataki

  Copyright 2012 by Balazs Pataki

  Honor (hon•or [on-er])

  noun

  1. honesty, fairness, or integrity in one’s beliefs and actions

  2. a source of credit or distinction

  3. high respect, as for worth, merit, or rank

  4. such respect manifested

  5. high public esteem; fame; glory.

  Prologue

  May 2012

  Dark Valley —Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine

  Seen from an airliner flying at the safe altitude of ten thousand meters, the Exclusion Zone doesn’t differ much from the lush fields and forests of the vast Ukrainian plains. Only a closer look out of the windows reveals the signs of abnormal features on the ground: forest roads leading nowhere, clearings where none should be, brown patches in the green fields.

  Patrolling over the Zone at a much lower altitude, the pilots of the Mi-24 attack helicopters can make out small buildings at the end of the paths. Weirdly gnarled, leafless trees in the clearings. Clusters of vehicle wrecks.

  Soldiers in the gunships know that the small buildings are abandoned villages and factories, the weird trees the only natural objects remaining amidst fields of physical anomalies, the wrecked vehicles helicopters, trucks and armored personnel carriers massed together to contain the radioactivity their rusty shells emit, even though they were contaminated back in 1986.

  All avoid the center of the Zone: commercial airplanes, helicopters and military patrols alike. It is not to enshrine the memory of the thousands to have lost their lives in the wake of the Chernobyl accident, neither to leave the ghosts of the Dead City of Pripyat in peace, but for the fear of being hit by another emission of destructive energy that has turned the Exclusion Zone into a lethal wasteland of decay.

  The Dark Valley has been named in a way reflecting the creepy nature of the Exclusion Zone. The irradiated marsh to its southern reaches would make good for its name alone and the sinister industrial buildings in the north even more so. Nothing reveals the true heart of darkness hidden beneath the abandoned factory on its eastern edge. Not even the crane standing in its courtyard covered with moss and vines that hang down like curtains from its rusty structure, slowly moving in the chilly wind, making it appear like ghosts in the mist. The dark factory hall holding ominous containers is nothing particular in the Zone. Neither are the bodies strewn around on the floor beyond, or the eerie glow of the emergency light over the staircase leading down to the factory vaults. Although still seeping from the gunshot wounds of one more body in the passageway where stairs lead, blood on debris-littered concrete floor is also a sight as common in the Zone as are mutants and anomalies.

  It is the fear in the face of the man sitting on the floor at the dead end of the passageway that tells all about the darkness ruling over the Valley, even though he is a fearful appearance himself in his fatigue—half hazmat suit, half body-armor, tailored in a way that resembles the pressure suits of fighter pilots. Close to the hood to be within easy reach, a gas mask is fastened to his shoulders. His martial appearance is reinforced by the Beretta pistol holstered on his right limb and the shotgun fastened to his belt pushed to the side. Fear and determination blend on his face as he carves a small notch into the stock of his SGI-5k assault rifle with his combat knife, adding one more to the fifteen notches already there.

  In the Exclusion Zone, anyone wearing such armor is called Stalker and a Stalker with fear on his face when approaching one of the Zone’s underground vaults would be called a sane man. Sane men do fear, but have the willpower to overcome their terror and turn it into a state of constant alertness.

  The dark eyes of this Stalker, set in a pale face under a receding headline and a sharp nose between them, reflect this kind of determination. Controlled fear is written all over his face as he finishes carving and reflects over the Bandits he has killed while penetrating their base in this abandoned factory. Of all his victims, now only remembered by a notch in his rifle stock, he knows only one by name: Borov.

  Peeking over to the door that is the source of all his fears, the Stalker takes a deep breath. Killing more than a dozen Bandits had been a roadside picnic compared to what is waiting for him beyond the steel door, the key of which he had taken a few minutes ago from Borov’s dead body.

  The door has a warning sign on it.

  “Oh well,” the Stalker says to himself. “High voltage is probably not the only thing that’s dangerous to life here.”

  Using the combination written on Borov’s key card, he opens the code-locked door.

  He peeks inside the vault, holding the assault rifle at aim and ready to shoot. He himself wouldn’t know what memory or instinct makes him move like a battle-hardened commando. Right now, his failing memory is no concern. All the Stalker cares about is that no imminent danger appears in the dark corridors behind the door.

  The damp vault smells like rotten earth. His Geiger counter crackles lowly.

  He checks out the corridor to his right. Barely visible in the dim, orange glow of an emergency light, a dead Stalker lies between two green metal lockers. The moldy corpse is still held together by an armored suit of the same variety he is wearing, but the face under the hood betrays that this man had been dead for months.

  This doesn’t bid well, he thinks.

  Turning back, he enters a chamber with a control board and a skeleton with its skull missing.

  See, old buddy? This happens to people coming to the vaults and losing their head.

  With a bitter smile on his face, he moves to the staircase leading below. As soon as he takes the first flight of steps, an echo bellows beneath like someone or something, hitting a huge metal object. A wave of ice runs down his spine. He freezes, and for a moment holds his weapon at aim, ready to shoot. Nothing moves. With cautious steps, he moves down the staircase.

  His anomaly detector emits a single beep. Then his Geiger counter starts crackling. It is not the radiation warning that makes him freeze once more, but the sight of two wooden crates in the hall opening from the staircase.

  Normally, no Stalker would be scared of two musty wooden boxes. But these are moving, as if lifted by an invisible hand.

  Suddenly, two crates come hurtling towards him. One box hits the door frame and scatters but the other one flies directly to his head. If it weren’t be for his quick reflexes causing him to bend over at the last second, his head would be in shambles now.

  Damned poltergeist playing its gravity tricks. I’ll give you such hell if I see you!

  But poltergeists are invisible and it is with extrem
e caution that he enters the room. To his right, he sees a toilet—probably this must have been a resting or changing room for the scientists who had once pursued their shadowy business here. He steps inside, guided more by the subconscious desire of hiding than the hope of finding anything useful there. Water is trickling down the walls covered with green ceramic plates into the rotting toilet caps built into the floor.

  How old is this place? Even in the USSR, people were using sitting toilet caps from the Nineties on.

  A mirror is still hanging over the broken sink, too opaque to reflect much else than the light of his headlamp.

  It’s left to my imagination to judge if I look cool in this armored suit… probably I do.

  A massive rectangular column is standing in the middle of the room. Judging by the brown sliding doors on one side, it must hold an elevator shaft inside. The Stalker peeks out from behind its corner and can barely pull his head back to cover when he sees another box rising from the floor. It is smashed against the elevator shaft. He glances around. The floor is empty, save for a few fragments of concrete that have loosened themselves from the wall.

  On the wall opposite to the elevator’s doors he finds a steel door with a combination lock. It is tightly shut, with no chance to open it unless with the correct code—if it is still working after decades of decay.

  He perks his ears as he hears a thumping noise coming from a far corner of the dark maze of corridors and laboratory rooms. It sounds as if an extremely heavy creature is walking in circles, and faintly but recognizable, the noise of intense fire burning. After a second, the sound of fire recedes. He is about to give a relieved sigh when his ears detect the flames again.

  Oh no—Burner anomalies. I didn’t expect a bed of roses here but Burners blocking my way is just not damn fair.

  His only comfort is that where there’s an alive pseudogiant, and the thumping noise must come from the heaviest mutant in the Zone, there are usually no humans around. Mutants are another thing. Some attack each other, mostly those who still have a trace of the original animal instincts inside their distorted brains – blind dogs hunting fleshes, boars smashing blind dogs. The more sinister abominations are a different matter. Only a chimera would mercilessly kill any other mutant, but chimeras are as silent as they are deadly.

  No. This must be a lonely pseudogiant.

  He mentally curses the trader at the 100 Rads, the Stalker bar where he received this mission, for not having a better close-range weapon in his stock than a TOZ-66 with barrels sawn off and the stock removed. Slinging his assault rifle on his shoulder, he takes the shotgun. It is a woefully inaccurate weapon and reloading it takes time, but in the confined spaces of the undergrounds it is an adequate weapon against mutants.

  Let’s hope I don’t run into a squad of Spetsnaz like I did in the Agroprom tunnels… I’d do more damage by looking angrily at them than shooting with this crap.

  The Stalker knows that on the body of a dead scientist, hidden somewhere in an obscure corner where he hid from whatever had put an end to the experiments, there is the card with the code needed to open the metal door. Looking up the corridors opening from the elevator room, he chooses the one which has at least an orange emergency light still on.

  Cautiously, he peeks ahead. His headlight is too weak to reveal any danger that might lie in the dark space.

  Taking one more cautious step, he enters the room ahead. To his right, a container holds something that looks like a green, boiling liquid. He puts on the gas mask hanging on his shoulder. The green liquid emits a weird glow and thick bubbles are rising from its surface. His anomaly detector remains quiet. He scans the walls, here also covered by green tiles and long, rusty pipes running along them. Reaching the light sphere of the next emergency light, he finds a few cylindrical containers with the hazmat sign painted on them. His Geiger counter starts crackling more intensely. Stepping back, he looks around but sees nothing of interest apart from an anomalous apparition in front of the containers. It looks like heat emanated by an unseen, flameless source, blurring the dark corner behind.

  Okay… Nothing here.

  Once back to the elevator room, he decides to try the next room to his right. The blue painting is crumbling from the walls and the brown floor tiles are covered with debris. On the ceiling, another emergency light casts its dim light behind a grill.

  At least no snork will jump at me through those grills.

  A sign on the wall reads, Sanitary area ahead. Entry forbidden. The small room ahead seems to hold nothing of interest, save for another half-dozen pipes behind an opening in the wall behind chicken wire. The Stalker is about to leave the room when he sees another corridor appear.

  From an opening to the right, the strong light of intense fire falls on the faded blue wall. Further down the corridor, another column of flameless heat blurs whatever lies beyond in the darkness. It is no stranger than the fire to the right. Fire casts light, normally, but this light on the wall is moving – as if the fire casting the light is moving in circles.

  The anomaly detector starts beeping. Opening the display, the Stalker sees a green circle about a few meters ahead. A dot signals an artifact right at his foot, next to a wooden crate. Without the detector, he would have stepped on it. Eagerly, he bends down, looks closer and carefully picks up the artifact that glows with fiery red light as soon as he touches it.

  Stone Blood. There must be a Whirligig nearby. Shit. Why do the most dangerous anomalies create worthless artifacts?

  Studying the ugly object made out of pressed together and curiously bent polymerized remnants of plants, soil, and bones, he shakes his head. The artifact is as much beneficial as harmful, speeding up his metabolism but also making his body more susceptible to any wound. It is not even precious, and all the trouble of carrying and selling it at the value of a few boxes of ammunition doesn’t appear worth the effort.

  Besides, my artifact containers are full—I already have two Stone Flowers and a Slime, together with a Fireball to neutralize the radiation they emit.

  He puts the artifact back on the ground and is about to peer inside the room with the fire when a growl comes from the far end of the corridor. It could have been emitted from a human imitating a mutant but from a mutant that was once human as well. Behind the blurry column, a creature appears. It is walking, or rather leaping, on all fours with the remains of a gas mask dangling from its head.

  Snorks! This shotgun better not jam!

  Not perceiving imminent danger from the fire room, the Stalker decides to turn the presence of an anomaly ahead to his advantage. He reaches into a container on his belt and fishes out a bolt.

  “Hey! Snorky!” he taunts the mutants. “Dinner time!”

  The Zone might have given snorks the ability to perform incredible leaps, and sharp teeth that could tear any human opponent into pieces once they manage to kick him off his feet with their strong legs, but left them with barely any intellect. Following only the instinct to hunt the lonely human down, they move to leap over the crates blocking their way.

  The Stalker quickly throws it ahead. The column of heat immediately bursts into a jet of fire, burning the first mutant to death. The second one is luckier, though. The Stalker quickly fires both barrels of his shotgun but the mutant has already torn its claws into his armor. Sharp pain bites into his limbs. He recoils, frantically reloading the shotgun. After receiving two more buckshot shells fired from point-blank range, the snork still jolts for a second, then dies with a last growl.

  The Stalker is panting now, his heart beating in his ears, and knows that with each heartbeat, more poison from the snork’s infested claws might get into his bloodstream. He reaches for the first aid kit on his belt, tears it open and applies antiseptics on his wound from where blood is trickling.

  Shit! Bandage, bandage—

  Moaning with pain, he quickly presses a bandage over his wound. The pain starts receding as the antiseptics’ effect kicks in and in a minute, the banda
ge has at least stabilized the wound.

  Nothing moves in the corridor, only the fire burning in the room nearby. Peering cautiously inside from the door frame that still holds with a gutted circuit board, he sees a pile of wooden crates in the middle and an apparition that looks like a fire column moving around the room in circles. If it is a sort of mutant, it doesn’t seem too interested in attacking him. It lights up a dark corner as it moves around, illuminating the body of a dead Stalker among the debris.

  That moving fire, or whatever it is, looks like trouble— it’s moving in a predictable way, though, and I could reach that body if I wanted to. On second thought, it doesn’t look worth the risk.

  He throws another bolt in the direction where a small space appears between the next anomaly and the wall. Immediately, a column of fire goes up an arm’s length away. He recoils with a jump. Finally, throwing three more bolts, he finds a zigzagging path through the three anomalies, even if it means to jump over the crates blocking the way. No matter how foreboding the next room is, he sighs with relief once he leaves the corridor behind.

  More Burners loom ahead. Repeating the tedious bolt throwing to find his path through, he reaches a chamber where his search proves fruitful: a dead man lies there, wearing the orange hazmat suit of scientists. He is glad that the opaque plexiglass on the helmet spares him the sight of a head that had been decaying for many years. Quickly going through the containers on the protective suit, he finds a note, barely readable and half-eaten by mildew.

  “Excellent, colleague! I’m glad that you’ve received second-level access. At last you will find out what goes on in our laboratory. Your access code is 1243. Chief of Laboratory X-18, Piotr Ilyich Kalugin.”

  Stepping out from chamber, the Stalker removes his gas mask and wipes cold sweat from his face.

  1243? Good God. Who is the bigger idiot? The guy using such a pathetic code or me for not being able to guess it?

  For a moment, the Stalker is confused as to which of the two similarly dark corridors to take, and the barely readable pieces of paper that are fastened to a bulletin board on the nearest wall don’t give any clue. Then the fire emanating from the room lights up the two dead mutants on the far end of the corridor to the left. He takes the one to his right.

  Avoiding more anomalies, he eventually finds a room with lockers still standing to his left and a broken wall section to his right. The anomaly detector beeps like mad, but the anomaly behind the broken wall section poses no danger for a moment. It seems to appear and disappear like a distortion in space, and if it wasn’t for the crumbled wall, it would just snatch and crush him in a vortex of power that would eventually explode and scatter his body parts all around. After a few more avoided anomalies and corridors turning, he soon finds himself back in the elevator room.

  The combination lock still works. With an unpleasant screech, the steel door opens and reveals another staircase.

  Good God, this one’s leading real deep.

  After several turns, the staircase ends in a rubble of debris. A room similar to the elevator room above opens. Swiftly moving down the corridor to his right, he reaches a dead-end – one more code-locked steel door bars his way.

  I’m getting weary of these stupid doors.

  The Stalker decides to take the hard way and track down the source of the thumping steps. Finally, another staircase appears in the small light circle of his headlight. The ground is shaking. He almost feels more than a few hairs on his head turning grey from horror.

  On the left side of the short corridor that appears to be the lowest level of the laboratory vaults, an opening in the wall leads into a huge, wide hall. The metal door that had once been there was removed, or shattered long ago. Inside a mutant is moving up and down, like a lion in a cage. It consists of barely more than a hulk, a short, reptile-like tail and two brawny legs. Its appearance would appear grotesque, ridiculous even if its growls weren’t blood curdling and the head emitting them resembling a squashed human face with the mouth and teeth of a shark.

  Suddenly, the thumping steps cease. Hoping that the mutant thinks to have scared him away, the Stalker sneaks inside. He has almost reached the center of the hall, covered in complete darkness save for a few emergency lights far away from him, when the light of his headlamp suddenly illuminates the distorted face. Flashing its shark-like teeth, it stretches its legs and now towers over him, raising one leg to crush him. The vault shakes as the pseudogiant smashes his leg to the ground. The impact causes the Stalker to drop his shotgun.

  Screaming with fear, he makes a desperate dash for the exit. Once back to safety, he bends forward and leans on his knees, heavily panting.

  I must get into that hall.

  Having caught his breath, he enters the hall once more and takes a few steps towards the metal fence that had once protected a machine resembling a huge generator. Immediately, the lumbering giant starts closing in on him.

  I must lure that beast into grenade range.

  The pseudogiant trots towards him but before it could crush the Stalker with its massive hulk, he is already back to the corridor, pulling the safety from a fragmentation grenade and throwing it into the hall. A groan follows the detonation and the thumping steps continue.

  Peeking inside, his headlight beam falls on a red fuel drum not far from the door.

  He enters the hall and yells. The mutant immediately attempts to charge him through. Swiftly, he kicks the fuel drum into the direction of the door, lets the mutant approach and just before it can reach him, he leaps out to the corridor. By the time he is outside, he has removed the safety from another grenade. He tosses it close to the fuel drum and then jumps to his belly to avoid the wave of the huge detonation. The power of the explosion shakes the underground and the deafening bang mixes with the mutant’s painful roar. Two more explosions follow as the shockwave makes two more fuel barrels detonate. For a moment, it seems that the whole vault is about to collapse.

  The Stalker’s ears are ringing, but the pseudogiant’s steps echo no more.

  He picks up his shotgun from the floor and reloads it. He looks around in the hall, keeping his weapon aimed at the dark shadows of some railroad containers from where something might still jump at him. Looking up towards the emergency light in the corner, an alcove catches his attention. A few metal stairs lead up there and continue in a catwalk along the walls. It looks like a good place for someone trying to hide from a monster. If Stalker lore about the fate of Lab X-18 is true, this was exactly what happened here.

  To his disappointment, the alcove holds nothing useful. The rotting Saratov refrigerator in the corner is empty, so is the tool box on a table except for some junk.

  Above the box, a photograph is glued to the wall. It shows a group of people, probably the scientists who had once worked there. Though the faces are barely recognizable, they look to the Stalker like a happy party, gathered up in front of their facility on a sunny day that had passed long ago.

  So this is the bunch who built this lab… I wish I could better see the faces.

  Walking cautiously down the stairs, he passes by a rusting metal casing with a locked door. It emanates a low, electric buzz.

  Probably a generator. That would explain why some emergency lights are still on, but I haven’t the faintest idea what could make it still run after so many years.

  Squeezed between a railway container and the stairs leading to a low platform, pipes protrude and connect to the floor like an inverted U, thick enough to offer a man cover. Even so, this refuge didn’t save the scientist lying dead behind the pipes. Any treasure hunter would hardly consider the body wearing an orange hazmat rewarding enough for venturing this deep into the vaults, not even for the Enfield L85A1 lying next to the body, but the Stalker even emits a low cry of joy when the corpse appears in the light circle. Patting down the pockets of the hazmat suit, his search proves fruitful – a small plastic card with a number printed on it.

  For a moment, he considers takin
g the assault rifle with him but then reminds himself of the infamous unreliability of the weapon. Even in perfect condition, the Enfield has a tendency to jam and this one had been lying on the floor of a decaying vault for years.

  Maybe this hapless fellow died because the rifle jammed at the worst possible moment – like rifles usually do.

  Wishing in vain he could at least de-mount the 4x scope, he eventually leaves the Enfield alone and makes his way out of the dreadful hall.

  He is almost at the exit when a giant mutant’s body appears in the headlamp’s light beam. In a blind panic, he fires the shotgun. His guts are still wrenched by fear when he realizes that it is the mutant he had killed before.

  Phew… I’m getting nervous.

  Back at the code-locked door in the small corridor with a few fuel drums and crates scattered on the floor, he is about to type the combination when a noise makes his blood freeze: it sounds like some heavy object is being smashed against the door from the other side. It’s almost as if a giant force is desperately trying to break through, either to escape something even more horrible than itself – or to get at him.

  The noise repeats itself and with each smash, the door bulges for a moment, making dust and moldy paint whirl up from the metal.

  With a throat painfully dry, the Stalker pants in fear.

  A low drone comes from the direction he was coming from. Adding to his dread, he sees the fuel drums slowly go up in the damp air. He can dodge the first one when it smashes at him after a second, but his luck runs out when the second drum hits his shoulders, causing him to lose his balance and moan with pain as he falls against the door. The power inside smashes it at the same moment.

  Fucking lab. Fucking mission. Fucking me for coming here!

  He fires his shotgun at the drum levitating above him, as if the unseen attacker making the objects trash him would still be aiming. The shot pushes the drum a meter away, from where it smashes at him again. He feels blood on his forehead.

  I must get behind that door. I must.

  Kneeling, he types the code on the pad. Immediately, the door unlocks. More eager to escape the unnatural projectiles than scared of whatever is inside, he swiftly enters the room. To his relief, no monster is jumping at him inside the abandoned room that, Judging by the instrument panel fitted to the wall on the far end, must have been some sort of a control facility. Broken machines stand on the decayed floor in ankle-deep debris. They don’t resemble anything the Stalker has seen or heard before.

  The documents I found in Agroprom mentioned oscilloscopes and spectrometers… perhaps this is one of those? A bloody guillotine or a bathtub with a dismembered corpse inside would appear more relaxing than these things… At least of those I knew what those were.

  Separated from the rest of the room by a wire fence, huge containers stand in a corner. All bear the yellow hazmat sign. To the right of the door through which he has just entered, another code-locked door appears in his headlamp’s beam. This, however, is wide open and letting him peer inside a dark hall looking like a laboratory. It is even darker there, with only light beams falling in from above, although this would be impossible to be sunlight. A machine, similar to the broken one outside, is dimly visible.

  Almost relieved over the quiet that promises no mutants close by, he is about to enter the laboratory when his sight reddens and a sudden dizziness creeps into his skull. Ignoring it, he steps inside.

  The light beams come from three neon tubes atop of grey sections on the wall covered with green tiles. High up on the domed ceiling, a spherical object is hanging in the middle, looking like a space satellite from the Sixties. Thick cables connect it with six cylindrical cages standing on the floor, one of them fallen over either by its fittings decayed away or while someone—or rather, something—inside was trying to break free.

  Something still appears to be in the other cages. The Stalker steps closer to the next one but regrets it immediately.

  An oversized human embryo hangs inside, its extremities still undeveloped or not supposed to develop, the torso ending in a vestigial reptile tail. It has the greenish-yellow color of drowned corpses. It is not the size or the deformation, and least the color, that makes him shudder but the deformed face. He knows immediately that should he ever make it out of here alive and live to tell this story, he would have no words to describe the evil radiating from this face.

  The other cages hold more mutated embryos, or rather: embryonic mutants, except the fallen one.

  And I thought the gulags were bad enough.

  Cautiously, he raises his shotgun and enters the chamber to the left of the entrance. It leads up into a smaller laboratory with cages built into the wall, and similar cylinders to those on the floor below, except that these are empty and lined up horizontally.

  Two of the wall cages, however, still hold dead mutants – they are about the size of a cat but their mummified body resembles that of a rat.

  I don’t know what kind of animal was made to turn into such abominations, but the word “guinea pig” wouldn’t come to my mind to describe them: these beasts were not even remotely cute.

  He makes his way over to the stairs on the far end of the domed hall. They lead up to a position overlooking the whole hall, as if someone wanted to witness the development of the caged species from a safe position.

  As soon as he steps on the first stair, he hears a howl from above that is sounding like a wounded beast. Instinctively, he runs back and takes cover behind the fallen cage, firing his shotgun towards the glittering, blurry apparition that floats down the stairs. The glitters look like shiny eyes as it approaches the Stalker. He frantically fires his shotgun.

  The entity howls again. Beams of fire spout from the floor. Moved by his instinct of survival that tells him to run away, the Stalker glances at the entrance—the door which had been wide open when he entered the laboratory is now shut.

  Damn!

  Hoping that his armored suit will protect him from the worst, he tries to dodge the fire jets and pellets the floating apparition with shotgun shells.

  Only four shells left. God help me!

  Aiming the short rifle with his right and feeling in his ammo pocket for his last two shotgun shells, he fires the weapon into the entity as it floats right next to him. Suddenly, it disappears.

  Another low, humming drone starts, as if emitted by the darkness itself—audible dread creeping from the fissures and cracks of the vaults. The floor shakes and the Stalker has to grasp the cage next to him to prevent himself from falling. It doesn’t help him as his vision starts to dim and he falls into a full mental black-out.

  One of his recurring nightmares appears. He is standing outside of the Chernobyl Power Plant, the fence with the sign of irradiation danger softly bulging in the wind, which slowly grows into a roaring gale. He realizes it’s not the wind he hears but the noise of a thousand mutated critters, exactly like those he has seen in the cages, running away from the Power Plant— if it is not the Power Plant itself emitting them like a tsunami of corruption. He raises his carbine and starts shooting at them, more in despair than the hope of stopping them, and suddenly he hears someone calling a name, a god-like voice suppressing even the howling mutants and echoing on in his aching skull.

  Then it is all over. He opens his eyes and glances at his watch. Only a minute has passed.

  The Stalker gets on his feet, groaning, praising his good fate for leading no hungry mutant to his body while he had been passed out.

  The door is open. The power that held it shut apparently vanished with the glittering apparition he had eliminated.

  Cautiously, he climbs the metal staircase leading to the observation platform.

  Even more control panels are fitted to the tiled walls. Their broken instruments and rusty panels have suffered more than the grey plastic of the stone-age personal computers lined up on two long wooden tables, though the opaque glass on the monitors has long been scattered.

  Next to on
e of them, right at the window overlooking the laboratory below, there lies a waterproof case full of papers that look like documents.

  After all the perils the Stalker had to overcome to find these documents, they appear easy to take – almost too easy. He looks closer to make sure they are not booby-trapped. Cautiously, perhaps fearing that touching the dossier would release another monster or some other apparition, he reaches out for it. He has almost touched it when the monitor rises up to the ceiling and smashes at him.

  Damn thing, I’ll give you such a beating once I see you!

  He grabs the documents and descends the stairs. For a moment, he believes that the blurry shape emitting a bluish, fuzzy tint in front of him is caused by his exhausted eyes. It moves, though, and the Stalker fires his last two shotgun shells into it. A painful moan comes out of nowhere. Shouting and cussing, he unholsters his Beretta pistol and empties a full magazine of JHP parabellum rounds inside. Something red splashes as the bullets home, then a growling moan is heard and the blurry entity takes shape of a leg-less mutant that now helplessly falls to the ground, the long arms protruding from the humanoid torso still shaking.

  Sorry for not fighting you by throwing things at you, but if the Zone’s not fair, why should I be?

  To make sure the mutant is dead, he reloads the pistol and shoots two more rounds into the mutant’s head.

  No more objects start to levitate. With no imminent danger around, he hides in a corner and fishes an energy drink from his rucksack. The vicious mix of taurin, guarana extract and caffeine would not satisfy his hunger but should at least allow him to keep his edge through the way out of the vaults. The beverage tastes of very artificial strawberry flavor.

  Disgusting… but if all goes well, maybe tonight I can flush it down with something better.

  The Stalker allows himself for a little curiosity and starts reading the documents. Lit by his headlamp, the yellowed pages tell the story of secret experiments carried out to study the effects of psychic radiation on living cells, set up in the wake of the 1986 disaster. It’s nothing entirely new to him. The scientific descriptions are beyond his understanding, but the first few pages, describing how and when the secret facility had been set up, make him cuss loudly.

  “Bastards—so that’s what you’ve been doing there all the time!”

  He thinks of all that he has seen here in the Zone – the abominations and mutants in the undergrounds, friends killing each other over a precious artifact and factions over ideologies they have by now almost forgotten over ground, the crows circling in the sky and looking for a new corpse to feast on, the emissions from the Zone’s far-away center when it erupts with waves of supernatural evil and devastates earth and sky alike.

  How I wish this all would come to an end, or if I had power over the world to end this.

  Hearing a noise, he reaches for his rifle and shoves the documents into his map container. Suddenly, a transmission crackles in his radio set.

  “Base, this is Zero Three-Four, we are right above the target.”

  “Roger, Zero-Three-Four. Start the action. Teams One and Two: check the first floor. Team Three: main hall. Teams Four and Five: second floor!”

  He pats the earphone connected to his radio set, as if the transmission could have been caused by a malfunction.

  I can’t believe this, what the hell is the army doing here? All right… let’s sneak out while I can.

  He holsters the shotgun and unslings the assault rifle. Having fished a magazine from his ammo web, loaded with armor-piercing rounds, he reloads his main weapon. Another message comes. This one is addressed directly to him.

  “Marked One! The military has attacked the Bandit base. The entrance to the Garbage is blocked but there is an old road to the south. You can use it, but you want to be careful. Good luck.”

  The Stalker curses in frustration.

  Damn you, Sidorovich! All this shitstorm right when I thought I was already through! Such is life in the damn Zone…

  Hoping that the Spetsnaz commandos, who would surely outgun him, have not made their way down yet into the vaults and block his only exit, he hurries back to the staircase leading back to the abandoned factory. His caution displayed on the way down is paying off – all mutants appear to be eliminated and the positions of anomalies are well-known enough to him to avoid their dangers.

  Once back at the entrance to the laboratory, he stops for a minute and checks his weapon. Its touch is reassuring. The sawn-off shotgun had been barely passable for fighting off the mutants. Now that he is about to be facing hostile humans, his perfectly maintained Swiss assault rifle, loaded with armor-piercing FMJ rounds capable of tearing through the Bulat and Berill armors worn by the Spetsnaz, should be a more than adequate weapon.

  Timing is strange, though… probably that rascal Sidorovich or perhaps that fat trader at the Bar has sold me out to the military. No matter if I complete this mission or the military catches me on his hint: they will profit… damn traders! They always have a life insurance.

  The thought of the trader double-crossing him gives him a sudden idea. Carefully, he removes the first few dozen pages from the document he had found in the lab. The thin pages are easy to take out without tearing into the text typed on them. He puts them into an empty first aid box and hides it under a pile of rubble beneath the stairs. Nobody except for one knowing exactly where it is would ever find this stash, and the waterproof box should protect the yellowed pages from further decay.

  One always needs to think forward, way forward.

  The Stalker hears the faint sound of several heavy boots moving down the staircase. He pats his assault rifle with an almost affectionate touch.

  I’ll need a bigger stock for all the notches I’ll have to carve tonight—if I make it out of here alive.

  He takes a deep breath and, holding his weapon ready, cautiously begins to sneak up the stairs.

  November 2014

  New Zone

  The most fearsome weapon of mass destruction mankind has ever known are not nuclear arms. It was the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan.

  Those to decide about employing nuclear weapons are more or less reasonable minds, and their nuclear arsenal had always been maintained rather for deterrence than actual use. The Mongols however did bring devastation on every land they had conquered and the terror preceding their hordes was just a side effect. From Bamyan to Baghdad, no stronghold withstood their rage and no inhabitants were spared. The victims of atomic bombs still haunt those in possession of such weapons; Genghis Khan’s warriors built pyramids from their victims’ skulls for pleasure.

  The small kingdoms of ancient Afghanistan made a fatal mistake when they decided to resist the Mongol invaders. After the Mongols were gone, their mighty fortresses had been reduced to rubble and the once fertile, now blood-soaked realm was a land of desolation. Moreover, legend has it that it was at the fateful stronghold of Shahr-i-Gholghola where Genghis Khan turned into the monster that history considered him to be; though why exactly this happened is only told by tribal lore, hazier and darker than any legend.

  Yet the fate of this land was sealed in more recent days. Another invader came, this time for a nobler cause —at least in his own understanding, but in the locals’ eyes an invader nonetheless. Those who opposed it obtained nuclear warheads from their brethren across the eastern frontier; no one knows by which means and even less so where the warheads were actually to be detonated, but after they went up in Kabul and devastated what had once been Central Afghanistan, no one really cared about ifs and whys.

  Nuclear fallout was not the only consequence. Soon rumors were spreading of horrible mutations in local fauna and flora as well as mysterious physical phenomena. It was disturbing news for many, but Stalkers in the Exclusion Zone eagerly listened to another Zone apparently being created. The most dashing and desperate made their way there in search of a place free from the infighting and corruption that plagued the Exclusion Zone, no matter of the perils of
irradiated badlands and mutated wildlife, even if it all proved to be meaner than what they had encountered previously. Of course, they also hoped to find the equivalents of the Exclusion Zone’s artifacts: small, mysterious formations worth a fortune in the outside world.

  They were not alone. Tough like cockroaches, remnants of the Taliban—or dushmans, as the mostly Russian-speaking Stalkers called them—survived the self-inflicted nuclear holocaust. Soon, the Stalker pioneers not only had to survive massive, radioactive dust storms and mutant attacks but battle a new human enemy as well.

  Hostile to both, a third force had nestled in the valleys of the western ranges. In the Antonov bar at now-ruined AFB Bagram, the nerve centre of Stalker presence in the New Zone, the craziest rumors circulated about the Tribe. Some Stalkers described them as vicious man-eaters and others as high-tech renegades, with neither description excluding the other. For the dushmans they were simply the devil’s legions.

  Only a few among either faction knew what the Tribe really was: elements of a US Marine reconnaissance battalion who, already disillusioned about how the war was conducted, came under a terrible influence beneath the City of Screams. They revolted and took matters in their own hands, carrying on a war that was supposed to be long over; but as the Tribe itself thought, the fight for honor, courage and commitment never ends and if preserving these values means to cut every tie to a corrupted homeland, so be it.

  Even the greenest of Stalkers knows that radio-activity alone does not create a zone. Hence in 2014, scientists—all of them knowing the Exclusion Zone inside out—had ventured to the New Zone in order to find out what had caused such phenomena.

  They perished. The Ukrainian military, desperately trying to contain the Exclusion Zone ever since it was created, picked one of its best men to lead the team that was sent to rescue the scientists. They failed, and when their commander emerged from Shahr-i-Gholghola’s catacombs he found himself the only survivor. Keen to prevent a corruption worse than the Exclusion Zone from spreading, he kept what he learned in that accursed place to himself. He stayed with the Tribe which he had befriended, hiding in the New Zone where the secrets of the catacombs, known only to him and the Tribe, would remain safe.

  Or so Major Mikhailo Tarasov thought.

  1

  East of Shahr-i-Gholghola (City of Screams), New Zone

  The deer, one of the few non-carnivore mutant species, might have been a graceful creature just a few minutes ago. With a pack of jackals sinking their fangs into its still steaming intestines and tearing bloody chunks out of its flesh, it will soon become just another pile of bones littering the wastelands. The rays of the rising sun still can’t reach the bottom of the stony defile where they dragged their prey.

  Suddenly, the pack’s alpha raises his head and sniffs into the wind. Detecting something hostile approaching, he lets out a snarl. Following his command, the other jackals leave the deer carcass alone, no matter how hungry they might be. The muscles of their massive bodies tremble from tension under the long fur as they wait for the alpha to point out a new victim.

  On a sandy ridge not far from them, a shape appears among the rocks. The sun, still low, shines directly into his face. He raises a hand to protect his eyes against the strong light, like anyone would do after the long hours of night— or one who had spent too much time in the catacombs under the ruins of Shahr-i-Gholghola. Aptly named, the City of Screams looms on the southern horizon atop of a hill, still half-covered by the dark fog that had descended at dawn.

  If they could think in terms of species, the jackals would see him as human, or humanoid if taking into account the size of the unnaturally strong muscles on his body. But the mind of jackals only knows two priorities: killing, and avoiding being killed. The alpha follows his first instinct, and emits a sharp yelp. Howling, the pack storms towards the figure on the ridge.

  Jackals are ferocious, but smart as well. When he gets closer to the prey, the alpha barks up, warning his pack over an adversary that might be stronger than them. If jackals had a sense of time, the alpha would know that this was the first occasion when he ever had to bark this warning.

  It proves unnecessary. By the time the jackals hear it, they are already on the run. The alpha loudly growls and barks at the figure, just to keep his standing with the pack. Then he too flees, ignoring the deer carcass from which he could have taken the juiciest, fattest parts.

  The figure steps to the carcass. The wind blows his ragged leather coat open and an old body armor appears beneath, its red and black Kevlar plates held together by thick wire. Once it might have matched his size perfectly, before it became too small to cover the bulging muscles on his chest, arms and limbs. His face still bears the features of a Caucasian man but the muscles on his face and his skull have also became disproportionately big, fitting the size of his massive body. If the alpha jackal, who now looks back at him from a safe distance, had any understanding of the matters of humans—even if this one is not entirely human anymore—he would recognize in the red and black Kevlar plates of the ruined armor the colors of Duty, a group of humans founded to get the world rid of mutants like them. He might also see the long leather jacket as the signature outfit of Bandits, meaning either that Duty has failed, or he himself decided to leave them and become a renegade. However, no one could tell how this human became what he now is.

  He kneels down and, using his hands, starts tearing out meat chunks from the carcass, greedily chewing on what the jackals have left behind.

  Watching him from not afar, the alpha licks its drooling snout. The pack gathers around him, staring at the half-human who is devouring the prey that they had so well deserved. Not even the alpha would approach this figure, who might have the worst, or maybe the best, of humans and mutants united in his disfigured body. Not as if there was a way for them to find out. Jackals are smart, but don’t know the difference between good and evil. This is probably the only thing they have in common with many humans.

  As he leans over his feast, a small Orthodox cross falls from under the leather jacket, hanging on a golden chain. The half-mutant, or half-human, pushes it back behind the Kevlar plates as to not disturb him in devouring the next bloody chunk of meat.

  Another shape, similar to his, appears on the ridge. He looks up, with a sinewy meat chunk in his mouth, and signals the other one to approach. This one is clearly a mutant, despite the rags barely covering its hulk which might have been a Zone Stalker’s armor long time ago.

  A drop of saliva falls from the alpha’s snout. He swallows hungrily and yelps. Then he and his disappointed pack move towards the rising sun in search of another prey.

  2

  SBU Headquarters (Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukraini/Security Service of Ukraine), 33 Volodymyrska Street, Kiev

  Captain Dmitry Maksimenko had once been the most handsome officer in the Ukrainian special forces. Not that it mattered much for his comrades, but all the more so for the female cadets in officers’ school, who enjoyed any lecture given by the tall and brawny soldier with striking blue eyes, be it in the classroom or an unused chamber close to their dormitory. Now, with a mutant’s claws having disfigured his torso where once a perfect six-pack was, and one of his striking blue eyes lost to a mercenary’s knife and its empty hole covered by a black patch, Captain Maksimenko’s only charm is his impeccably ironed uniform and spotless shoes with hard leather soles, which loudly echo at each step he takes in one of the SBU headquarters’ endless, white-painted corridors.

  No matter of his once-great looks, Captain Maksimenko drew most of his charisma from being the commander of a famed spec-ops division of the SBU, call sign Search Two. Even a fraction of what he was allowed to disclose about his missions to the secret laboratories in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was enough to make Spetsnaz rookies shudder and female cadets get moist.

  But now, as he stops at the end of the corridor in front of a white, bullet- and fire-proof door, he nervously looks into a window and looking at his reflection,
checks his tie and bird-nest officer’s cap. His hand on the copper door knob, he takes a deep breath as if he were about to enter a mutant’s lair. Then he clears his throat and opens the door without knocking.

  “Captain Maksimenko here to see Colonel Kruchelnikov.”

  Either it’s the effect of the still steaming coffee in the elderly secretary’s cup or the faded remains of the captain’s virile beauty, she smiles at him. With her fat finger, she adjusts a strand of dyed blonde hair behind her ear. In the reflection of a glassed-in cabinet behind the secretary’s desk, Maksimenko sees that she has the orange and blue interface of Odnoklassniki open on the screen, the Russian version of Facebook.

  “You are to go in at once, Captain,” she replies and jerks her head towards the door on the other side of the room. The strand of hair again starts misbehaving.

  For a moment, Maksimenko wonders why a man like Colonel V.M. Kruchelnikov, the commander of all of Ukraine’s special forces from embassy guards to elite Spetsnaz units, doesn’t have a better-looking secretary. But then it comes to his mind that the SBU’s prettier female employees have more challenging, and probably more pleasant jobs to do than sitting behind a desk and chatting.

  Maksimenko’s heels clack as he performs a perfect salute in the colonel’s office.

  “Dobroho ranku, tovaryshu polkovnyk! Captain Maksimenko reporting as ordered.”

  Colonel Kruchelnikov is standing at a window overlooking Volodymyrska Street with the heavy Friday morning traffic below.

  “Shut the door, Captain,” he replies. After a minute he adds, “Sit.”

  Maksimenko has an uneasy feeling as he sits down in the leather chair in front of the colonel’s oversized oaken desk. He stares at his superior’s back, broad shoulders and gray hair, cut down to stubs. The noise of the street below is muted by the bullet-proof window glass. All he can hear is a faint, scraping and screeching noise of a metal spoon squeezing a lemon in a cup of tea.

  “I guess you know why I wanted to talk to you, Captain?” the colonel asks.

  Maksimenko clears his throat. “My promotion is overdue.”

  “Indeed. We haven’t forgotten what you did during Project Truth in 2012, before Strelok messed everything up.”

  The colonel is still standing with his back to Maksimenko, stirring the tea. The screeching sneaks into the captain’s brain and he can barely suppress the feeling of ants crawling along his spine. He would sooner prefer the roar of an attacking bloodsucker.

  “It was… an exciting mission,” he says.

  “By any means, you should be a major by now.”

  “I… based on my years of service…”

  The colonel turns around and gives the captain a piercing look from his cold grey eyes.

  “Sorry to say that promotions are not as easily given as some half-renegade officers think.”

  Maksimenko swallows before asking his question. “Does the Service doubt my loyalty?”

  Kruchelnikov’s mouth eases into something like a smile. “I was meaning Degtyarev and the promotion he gave to a certain… anyway, I didn’t approve of it but that’s none of your business.”

  “If you allow me to mention it, sir, I thought maybe I was assigned to desk and training duties because of my injury… but I am still a crack shot using my right eye! First I was left out from the siege of the CNPP, then Operation Fairway too, while another captain…”

  His superior abruptly interrupts him. “I get your meaning but you’d better be thankful for missing out on those operations. Rest assured, the Service still counts on you. That is, unless the time spent as a lecturer in officer’s school have softened you too much for a new assignment.”

  Maksimenko protests. “No, absolutely not!”

  “Indeed, I heard that your lectures about… hardness and deep penetration tactics were quite popular with female cadets. Now, if you’re for once willing to lubricate your way up the career path instead of female cadets’ clits, maybe your time has come.”

  “I am listening,” Maksimenko replies with a blush.

  Colonel Kruchelnikov takes a red folder from a folder in his desk and shows a photograph to Maksimenko.

  “He is your objective.”

  Taking the picture from the colonel’s hairy fingers, Maksimenko tilts back in his chair. The colonel notices his surprise with amusement. “It seems you know this man, Captain.”

  “Everybody knows him, sir. He’s a hero… a legend actually!”

  “Keep your enthusiasm low. Seen from our perspective he’s a loose cannon. He did perform valuable services but that’s in the past. Frankly, trusting him was one of the biggest mistakes this Service has ever made.” The colonel opens a small wooden box on his desk. “A Cohiba, Captain?”

  “Thank you, sir,” Maksimenko says accepting the cigar. “With pleasure, sir.”

  “Do you like cigars?”

  “I actually do, sir. But—with all due respect, I think Major Degtyarev might be better qualified for this mission than I am.”

  The colonel moves around his desk and lets himself half-way sit on it.

  “Top brass wants to leave Degtyarev out of this,” he says fishing a box of matches from his pocket, “and I couldn’t approve more. Personal connections cloud proper judgment. It happened to him in the past but won’t happen in the future. Not during this operation.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Besides,” Kruchelnikov adds lighting his own cigar, ”Degtyarev has been assigned to an undercover operation.”

  Kruchelnikov ignites another match. Maksimenko moves closer to reach the burning match but it remains an inch too far from him, as if the colonel would hold it deliberately away. Maksimenko stiffens in this awkward position. The colonel leans closer and lowers his voice.

  “Your target went off the radar but you are to find and bring him back. You probably guess it’s about intel he refused to share with us.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin looking for him, sir.”

  “You can start by offering a few days of extra leave and a little cash to your grunts or anyone who leads him to you… but that will not likely help you much. For God’s sake, your file says you’re a resourceful officer, Maksimenko. Could the Service be wrong about you? Find him.”

  Maksimenko stares at the match, now halfway burnt, its small flame licking the skin on the colonel’s palm and fingers. Not as much as an eyelid stirs on Kruchelnikov’s face.

  “I—I think I know of a way to do that,” he whispers.

  Colonel Kruchelnikov’s thin lips jerk into the triumphant grin of a wolf closing in on its prey. He pats Maksimenko’s arm.

  “That’s my boy.”

  His hand holding the match moves an inch closer. Before it extinguishes between his burnt fingers, the last flicker of the match lights up the captain’s Cohiba.

  A bitter taste runs down Captain Maksimenko’s palate as he draws on the cigar.

  3

  Junkie den somewhere between Imperial Highway and Firestone Boulevard, South Central Los Angeles

  In a decrepit house smelling of trash and decay, a lonely candle burns. Only the hands of the man scrawling into a tattered notice block are visible in its light. The barely legible scribble tells of despair, the shaking fingers of drug deprivation.

  I need more pain.

  Darkness outside as if the world were gone. I’m alone while Nelly sleeps. I can’t.

  Darkness keeping me imprisoned, dragging on day by day trapped in myself with my body as my shackles. Life has taken my sight and soul, let me live in hell.

  Nelly is sleeping. She’s leaving me, cheating on me with her dreams. She has to, can’t blame her for it. She’s happier in her dreams. But I—I can’t sleep, can’t dream. Keep my eyes open – filth and dirt is all I see. Close my eyes—nightmares is all I get. Nelly is dancing, singing, flying in her dreams. She is dreaming of being an angel now. I don’t mind her cheating on me with angels. I love her. She may be gang-banged by an army
of angels or God itself if that pleases her, I don’t care. I am not jealous anymore. I love her and envy her for her freedom.

  That’s all I got out of my life; a mother dead, a father a monster, I’ll get over them and myself too, don’t give a fuck about anyone including me—especially me. Time goes so slow when all I have to do is sit around and wait to die. I’m like an animal trapped, trying to move away, one leg in the trap, cutting into my flesh with only the pain reminding me that I am still alive. I need that pain.

  Nelly needs to fly and reach the skies. She only made one mistake: hooking up with me. But now she is free in her dreams of rainbows in a sky washed pure by rain.

  Rain, rain, rain. It goes into the sewers and into the ocean. As a little kid I always dreamt of swimming in the ocean. I don’t want to swim the ocean anymore, not fighting tides anymore. I just want to die. Or have at least a taste of it—for a starter.

  Where is Sancho? When is that motherfucking son of a bitch of a latrino hauling his chili-shitting ass here? Fuck fuck fuck! It’s almost midnight and he was supposed to be here hours ago! Damn border nigger. DAMN PIG. PIG!

  Okay, okay— soon. Soon he will be here. He must come or—I don’t know.

  Father always told me, life is a hard game to play but he didn’t tell me that I was gonna lose it anyway. I need the pain. I need to know I’m still alive, my willpower a lose circuit in my brain. How long I have tried to kill it away?

  If only I could start it over. If only my fucking eye was a restart button for my life, I’d poke it till I go blind and feel my way out of myself. But I need to know I still live. I need the sting, the sweetest kiss I’ve ever knew. Nelly knows it. She understands, and that’s the only thing we ever fought over. But she is sleeping now. Guess I’ll have to scratch messages on the window which no one will ever read with raindrops flowing on the glass, could be God’s tears but to me they are Gods own vomit pouring on this abandoned street and me watching it. Long time we gave up on each other, God and me.

  I can’t bear this any longer.

  WHEN IS MY FUCKING FIX COMING?! Screw you, Sancho! SANCHO!

  Come. Please, come soon my friend. Por favor.

  4

  Close to the City of Screams, New Zone

  Not long ago, a battle raged among the ruins of the City of Screams. Probably no one would come to this place for a long time, save for mutants and crows to feast on the decomposing bodies which still litter the rocky hill. The half-mutant Stalker, however, came here for a reason different than food.

  The main entrance, dug out with months of heavy labor, had been blown shut. It was at night when he crawled out through the tight passage on the northern side of the hill. On his return, he would have never found it again if it hadn’t been for his sense of smell. The stench of moldy walls and damp tunnels was overpowering, carried in the fresh, pure wind blowing from the mountains to the west.

  Nothing was to be found beneath the ruins. It was looted before, and what wasn’t looted was useless junk. But loot was not on his mind when he squeezed his body through the tight entrance. He himself couldn’t tell what had made him to enter that place once more. For hours or even days he had scouted the bunker system, descending all the way to the deepest levels through air shafts that not even the bravest human would have dared to enter. But where his human half would have made him run from the perils and claustrophobia, his new instincts stepped in. He rejoiced at the sensation of not being blind in the gloom like a human would; his sight got gradually used to the dim that his oversensitive eyes had turned the darkness. His reason of being there only became clear to him when he stumbled on a humanoid figure, resembling himself except for the size. The wounded mutant first moved to attack him but then reconsidered. Maybe it was because of the truly non-human feature of mutants of not killing another one of their own species without good reason, or from the shotgun-inflicted wounds making it incapable of delivering a deadly attack. He had no reason not to use one of his medikits to patch the mutant up and lead it back to the light; neither had he any reason to doubt that humans, if approached in a cautious and peaceful manner, would offer him help.

  Being close to the humanoid, he become conscious of one more mutant feature. When he approached it and was about to take a pull from his field flask, he sensed the mutant’s thirst. After sharing his water with it, he sensed a feeling that could go for gratitude. He realized that if he dumbed down his thoughts to the essential, the slow-witted mutant could understand him and vice versa, he could perceive its thoughts as well. He attributed this rudimentary telepathy to his companion being humanoid, and was sure that the more sophisticated a mutant is, maybe the closer to humans, the more sophisticated such mental communication could be. The human in him rejoiced of the thought of sharing this discovery with other humans—it offered more insight into mutant nature than the scientists could only dream about.

  However, when they were closing in on the roadblock before the Stalker base at Ghorband and a dozen automatic rifles and shotguns opened fire on them, all his hopes were shattered. His protégé had taken the worst of the brunt and seeing it die the night after in a cave where they took shelter was hard on him.

  When death came to his companion, at the time when a human would have probably shared the location of a secret stash or muttered cheesy last words about his lost love or mother, the mutant’s thought went back to the beginning of the life it could remember; while what and who it was before becoming a mutant remained obscure, it was clear where its life as a mutant had started—and it wasn’t the City of Screams. What he concluded from the hazy thoughts was alarming for his human and comforting for his mutant half.

  The mutant didn’t mean much to him, but his loneliness and the disappointment did. The New Zone can despair even a well-equipped and resolute group of humans; how more dreadful it is to someone who is not only alone in its wilderness but stuck between the world of mutants and humans as well.

  He knew that with his body becoming halfway, and his perception almost fully that of a mutant, he could understand more about the New Zone’s non-human dwellers than anyone else. The human part of him longed for other humans who, although more incalculable than mutants with their moral weakness, treachery, greed and cruelty, at least offered a chance to react to less evil approaches in the same way—to friendship with friendship, helpfulness with helpfulness, love with love. No matter how the experience at Ghorband had devastated any such hopes, something inside still kept telling him that there was still a way to find his path back to humans, somehow making them overcome the fact that he was now very, very different from them.

  It was a long night, and at dawn a dust storm was ravaging in the wilderness, even prolonging the hours of darkness. But by the time he could leave the cave he had made up his mind. The night and dawn were long enough to go through the stations of life – first being bullied in school for speaking the wrong language, then fighting the same children who bullied him and were now hostile soldiers in a bloody civil war, his homeland being united with the country from where it was once torn away for the sake of greater politics and only to be looked upon suspiciously and once more bullied for being different, even if he approached them as his brothers. His wounds acquired during the fight were less important to those people than the accent which he spoke their language, no matter that it was his mother tongue too.

  Disappointed with the bitterness that victory had yielded, let alone the rise of people who justified their power with a war in which they never shed their own blood, he recalled a Ukrainian mercenary’s words spoken at a long-forgotten campfire. Soon, he made to his way to the Exclusion Zone, first trying to carve out a living from artifact hunting like all Loners, then joining the ranks of Duty. First, it appeared a bunch of men similarly minded: longing for a reason to live, and having scores to settle with life, all the calamities of which they project on their enemies – be it mutants, anomalies or Stalkers from hostile factions. The human enemies were very much like Duty b
ut looking at the same things from a different angle. He didn’t waste much time thinking about which point of view was wrong or right; a hostile fighter was an enemy good enough for the single reason of being called a hostile. Such cynicism can wear off soon, though, and he soon found himself fed up with being told what to do and whom to shoot at, and when word came of a New Zone having happened in what was once Afghanistan, he was among the first to defect.

  Although the wasteland was bigger and the mutants meaner, the newly arrived Stalkers were of the same lot he’d met and got bored of in the Exclusion Zone. No wonder that in the word S.T.A.L.K.E.R. no letter stood for something positive – like, for example, S for sidekick, T for trusty, A for ally and so on. When eventually a Duty officer calling himself Captain Bone arrived and took matters into his own hand at the Stalker base at Bagram, he had enough of the New Zone as well.

  The only way to escape now was stepping over his moral boundaries and he soon found himself at Captain Bone’s mercy over killing one of his men. Then, out of the New Zone’s cobalt-blue sky, a squad of Ukrainian Spetsnaz arrived, following their very own agenda. He had assisted them because their priorities temporarily coincided with his own. He helped them survive an attack be the dushmans, the remains of the Taliban. Turned half-mad by badly cured radiation sickness and a primordial hate of everything that wasn’t on their side, they tried to wrestle Bagram from the Stalkers. Then he assisted their leader, a spec-ops major who appeared very self-confident in the beginning and ended up a broken but wiser individual in the end, to get into the catacombs beneath the City of Screams.

  It was his disillusionment, his hatred of human treachery and egoism that made him abandon the small group and follow the tracks of one of the few friends he had, maybe proving to himself by his own sacrifice that people can stay loyal to each other despite the direst odds. His efforts were in vain, however, and by the time he emerged to the surface after hours or days of going through hell, he was alone. He was frightened of his own visage when he saw his reflection in a waterhole. Whatever evil lays beneath the ancient desert citadel, it had partly turned him into a mutant. His senses were sharper, his body stronger, but his mind in despair.

  When the dust storm was over and he could leave his refuge, a look over the New Zone bathing in the new day’s light—the sandy plains to the south, the snow-capped mountains to the west and north, the jagged hills with deep green valleys to their feet to the east—had been enough for him to make up his mind. He knew he belonged here, and there was no other place to go for starting his life over. It was here in this deadly but beautiful wilderness that he had to find a new meaning for his life: to purify this land from humans. Not by his own hands and murder, but their primordial flaws: hatred and greed.

  The mutant in him said: humans are easy to fool. All they need is a good excuse for hating each other.

  The human in him replied: if we hate each other, we will kill each other.

  And he himself summed it up: I will fool you all into killing each other.

  His ego however, squeezed between his mutant and human self, kept whispering a question: what about you? He ignored the question or perhaps it was the wind that made him not hear it, blowing his ragged leather coat and swirling up dust in his steps as he set out on his way to the east.

  He knew that in order to fulfill his plan, he would need a veritable army of mutants.

  5

  Florencia gang territory – South Central Los Angeles

  On a dark corner somewhere in the ganglands between Imperial Highway and Firestone Boulevard, illuminated only by a half-broken neon sign flickering every few minutes, a girl is standing next to a black Jeep Liberty. Wearing a long brown Gore-Tex coat with the hood pulled over her head, she looks upwards into the rain, letting the raindrops splash on her face, seemingly oblivious to the chilly wind and the three men who have been darting suspicious looks toward her from the other side of the street for the past five minutes. She continues to ignore them even when they cross the street and slowly walk up to her.

  “Look at that, mano,” one of them says, “who do we have here?”

  “A little girl and a rented car,” another replies glancing at the car’s license plate and the Alamo bumper sticker. “A lost tourist, here? I don’t believe my eyes!”

  He rubs his eyes and forehead that bears a tattoo reading FLORENCIA. The visible part of his neck over the black leather jacket shows the same tattoo in much bolder letters.

  “Hey puta, you lost?”

  The girl still stands with her face against the rain, her back against the car. She doesn’t look at the three men who now form a semi-circle around her.

  “No. I am not lost,” she calmly replies with a strange, melodic accent and licks a thick raindrop off her lips as if it were the sweetest thing on earth.

  “Then what are you doing in our street?” the first man demands, raising his tone. “Think you’ll grow tall if standing in the rain like that?”

  The other two laugh and high-five each other.

  “Don’t be too hard on her, mano,” says the third one, who is the shortest of the three and bears a long scar on his cheek. “She might just give us what we want if we ask her nicely.”

  The tattooed man steps closer to her.

  “We don’t like strangers here. This is our street. You can only stay for a price.”

  “And what would price be?” she asks.

  Now all three thugs laugh. “What do you think? On your knees, puta!”

  Now she looks at them, but the hood is still covering most of her face. “Please, leave me alone. I want to enjoy rain.”

  “I’ll give you such a rain on your face… ¡Una lluvia blanca!” The tattooed one laughs. “Esta es una jeva súper buena, manos!”

  “There is not much rain where I come from,” the girl quietly says. “Please, let me just enjoy it.”

  “Where do you come from, huh? Nevada?”

  “I am from Tribe.”

  The tattooed one looks at his companions. “Tribe? You ever heard about them?”

  They shake their heads.

  “Anyways, this crazy girl is beginning to annoy me,” he snorts. “No puta walks into a street owned by Florencia and leaves without paying a price… especially if she’s hot like this one!”

  “You are right, tattooed man,” she says, “ˇI might burn you.”

  “We shouldn’t do this,” the short one interjects. “We are to stay put until Sancho is finished doing business with that junkie.”

  But lust has overcome the tattooed one. He takes one step closer to the girl and unzips his pants, grinning.

  “Mano, shut the fuck up and hold her down!”

  A collapsible knife appears in his hand.

  “Your last chance to keep your face pretty,” he says. “Kneel by yourself or we’ll make you.”

  The two men step closer to grab her. The broken neon sign lights up for a second and casts a flickering blue light on the girl’s face. Aghast, the short man who was about grabbing her right arm takes a step back.

  “¡Hija de su!” he yells. “Look at her face! What scar is that?”

  “I don’t need no mamacita for a cogida,” the tattooed man says opening the knife. “¡El primer turno es mío, manos!”

  “Your knife is very small,” the girl calmly says. She appears to smile under her hood.

  “Ahora me estás encabronando,” the tattooed man snarls and stabs towards her chest.

  The stab cuts into empty air as the girl ducks with lightning speed. The neon light flashes on a curved blade in her hand and her attacker falls to his knees with a yelp of pain. His knife falls to the ground as he grasps at his stomach. Blood is streaming between his fingers.

  A drop of blood trickles from his mouth as he whispers, his eyes wide open from surprise and pain. “Maldita bestia… ¡Vete a la chingada…!”

  A curse is the last that escapes his lips as the girl, still ducking, thrusts the blade upwards and slashes his th
roat in another quick, arched movement.

  During the few seconds that it took for their leader to get killed, the two other thugs stand petrified, staring at the girl’s blade that now glimmers with a red glow.

  Now they too move in. The one to her left draws a Beretta from his belt but not quickly enough to have time to fire the pistol. The girl swiftly steps aside and her glowing blade flashes once more in the neon light. The Beretta falls to the ground, together with the hand still holding it. Ducking once more, she evades the swing of a baseball bat. The short thug wielding it freezes and a heavy rattle comes from his mouth. Then blood begins to stream down his neck to his chest where the blade went in so deep that only the hilt stands out.

  The girl removes the blade, leaving her last attacker to collapse. She kneels down to the body of the now handless man who still writhes on the ground in agonizing pain.

  “Me duele demasiado,” he yelps. “¡Me quema!”

  She replies with a smile. “Sorry, but I don’t speak that language.”

  “It burns, burns! It hurts too much!”

  “Of course it burns,” she replies, tenderly closing his eyelids. She keeps her hand over the thug’s closed eyes while slowly pushing the blade into his heart. “I told you so.”

  The girl waits a few minutes until the body’s hands and legs stop jolting, then pulls the glowing blade from the dead man’s chest and wipes it clean in his leather jacket. Hiding the weapon under her coat, she stays and holds her open palms forward to let the rain wash the blood off her hands.

  A faint whizz comes from the car as the driver’s window goes down. A hand reaches out and tosses the wrapper of a double quarter pounder with cheese to the ground.

  “Damned LA, crawling with all this cholo street gang scum,” says a hoarse male voice inside. “The big man should’ve sent Lieutenant Ramirez here, not me. You all right, Nooria?”

  “No need to worry, Top.”

  “If I’d been worried about you for a second, those whackos would’ve been dead before crossing the street,” the man inside the car says. Then he adds in a fatherly fashion, “Don’t catch a cold out there!”

  “We have to wait long?”

  “Hope not. By now Mikhailo should have found the house where the big man’s son is supposed to be.”

  6

  Rundown residential area, Baseyna Boulevard, Kiev

  The evening before, the pair of silk stockings, the short dress and the black lingerie might have been a woman’s deadly arsenal of sex appeal. Now, strewn around the floor of a shabby apartment in a drab, Stalin-era house, they are just an untidy mess. Even so, they tell of an owner who might be a well-paid young woman with a more sophisticated taste than most of the girls filling Kiev’s night clubs on a Saturday night. Even the obviously fake Luis Vuitton bag that lies next to the bed looks stylish and well-chosen to the rest of the outfit. All this looks as if a better-off but very intoxicated girl had ended up in a place way below the standards what she had gone for if sober.

  The twenty-something girl in the bed, who is resting her head on the chest of a rugged-faced man, doesn’t seem to care. She lies there with eyes half-closed, her face telling of her being satisfied in every possible way, enjoying how the man caresses her head, playing with her long, red-brown hair, though his wrinkles and baggy eyes tell of an exhaustion other than bodily.

  The girl stirs. She reaches for the blanket and pulls it over herself, covering her pierced belly and stunning breasts where the early morning chill has hardened the nipples. Then she cuddles closer to him, stroking his robust chest with her long fingernails.

  He looks at his wristwatch which is the only thing he’s wearing and yawns. He reaches for a small vial, opens it and lets half dozen pills to his tongue. Then he gets a half-empty bottle of vodka from under his pillow and draws a long swig. He sighs; a minute later, his face becomes more relaxed.

  “What does this mean?” she asks, letting her fingers run up to a tattooed word on his right forearm, made up from seven letters with periods in between.

  “What do you guess, Dashenka?” he asks back. The words might be tender, but his voice is that of someone being mentally far away.

  “Is it about you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then,” she says gently caressing the tattoo, “I’d say— it means Sexy, Tender, Adorable, Lustful, Kinky, Erotic and… Racy.”

  The man laughs dryly. “Kinky?”

  “I noticed gas masks in your closet,” she replies. “I guess you collect them? You wear them when no one else can see you, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And all the things you did to me last night? That was more than kinky, actually…”

  “You asked for it.”

  “And you enjoyed it.” She takes a box of Eve Slims from her bag and lights up two cigarettes, putting one into the man’s mouth. “Stalker—is that your nickname?”

  “It’s more like a life sentence,” he replies exhaling the smoke.

  “You are a mysterious man… but that’s all right. I love that.”

  “You’re lying,” he says with a sudden cold in his voice.

  The girl frowns. “Why would I lie to you?”

  “Because you’re a fucking prostitutka.”

  All tenderness vanishes from the girl’s pretty face. She jumps off the bed and begins to swiftly collect her clothes.

  “And you’re a jerk! How can you treat a woman like this?”

  “Get out of here, kurvo!”

  Cursing, the girl quickly gets dressed, grabs her fake Louis Vuitton handbag and hurries to the door where she turns back to face him once more. She looks humiliated and sad.

  “You still owe me five hundred for swallowing it!”

  “Poshli!,” he shouts back angrily.

  Her brown eyes are now flashing with anger. “I won’t leave until you pay my price, baistrukh!”

  The man gets up and takes a wallet from the floor. “Here’s your fucking money! Get it!”

  He tosses a bundle of paper notes into the girl’s face. The money rains to the ground. Greedily, she gets to her knees and starts collecting it.

  “That’s right, that’s right… seek it baby! Why don’t you smell it? You look like a dog sniffing for bones… want more?” He tosses even more money around. “Get it, doggie! Get it all! Almost three years in the fucking Zone, living in the dirt on food even a dog wouldn’t eat, killed hundreds, dug up secrets, sold them to the Motherland – and this is what I get!”

  He screams with his face red from rage and kicks an empty vodka bottle. It flies to the wall where it breaks, covering the dirty carpet with glass splinters around the girl who is still picking up bank notes. “Look at me, bitch! Look at me! I was a master! I had guns! Missions! And now only booze, whores and cockroaches in this shithole! That’s what’s left of me!”

  He holds his forehead, gasping for air and recoils to the bed where he finally sits down, burying his face in his hands and sobbing.

  The girl looks up from the floor and then gets to her feet. Quickly, she ties her lose hair into a long ponytail and wipes off her ruined make-up that is now mixed up with tears from humiliation. With her hair removed from the face and neck, her skin reveals marks of a recent beating.

  She has already opened the door when she turns back and looks at the sobbing man.

  “You are too low for me to rip you off,” she says. “You aren’t okay, you know that? I’ll tell all the girls how fucked up you are. Here, fuck your money…”

  She takes a five-hundred hrivnya note from the bundle of money she picked up and puts the rest onto the table. Carefully, she puts the ashtray on the notes to prevent the sudden draught from blowing them away.

  “You poor, pathetic bastard,” she says stepping out of the apartment, “you don’t deserve me. No, not even a prostitutka. You are a low-life. I’ll go to my church now and light a candle for you. May the Bogoroditsa give you a good death. Schastliva, Stalker!”
r />   He hears her making a phone call as she walks down the corridor outside, but she is too far now for him to make out what she’s talking about. The sound of her stiletto heels echoes as she descends the stairs, then dies off.

  The man staggers to his feet and closes the door. He rubs his hands; the open door let the November chill inside.

  He lights up a cigarette at the window and looks out to the empty street to have a last glimpse of the body that he had owned until his latest uncontrollable outbreak of rage.

  He opens the window.

  “Dasha!” he shouts, leaning out into the chilly air outside. “Come back! You are right, yes, how about that? I am pathetic! I don’t deserve to live but I do! I ought to be dead long ago but I’m not! Ask your damned Bogoroditsa how this can be! Dasha! Come back!”

  No matter how far he leans out and where he looks on the deserted street below, the hooker called Dasha is nowhere to be seen.

  He hears a knock on the door and releases a sigh of relief.

  “Wait! I clean up the splinters and let you in, wait a minute!”

  He quickly starts picking up the pieces of the broken bottle. The knock on the door intensifies. He curses as a splinter cuts his palm. Carefully avoiding the mess on the ground, he steps to the door and, with an instinct for precaution, looks through the peeping hole. It’s the girl standing outside, appearing nervous.

  “Dasha, dorogaya, how good that—”

  The door is barely ajar when it swings full open, hitting him in the face and sending him to the floor. A sharp pain pierces into his skull and for a moment he sees nothing but stars dancing behind his eyelids. Glass splinters break under heavy boots. Four strong hands grab and turn him backside up and then quickly cuff his hands. He is manhandled and forcefully seated on the bed. With eyes still blurred from pain, he sees two heavily armed Spetsnaz commandos towering over him.

  “What are the charges?” he mumbles.

  Dasha enters the room, her face now looking down on him with such a scornful look that would make any man feel like a pile of dog crap. She steps aside to make way for an SBU officer wearing a black raincoat over his uniform. An eye patch covers his left eye.

  “Hello, Strelok!” Looking around in the messy room, the officer slowly shakes his head. “What a damned shame to see you like this, Marked One.”

  “Your damned bloodhounds broke my nose, Captain Maksimenko!”

  “That’s what usually happens to unusually long noses poking into the Service’s business.”

  “What am I charged with today?”

  Dasha steps forward. “Can I have a word with him, komandir?”

  “Suit yourself,” Maksimenko courteously replies and moves aside.

  “This is for abusing women in general,” Dasha says and gives Strelok a big slap, “and that’s for raising a hand on me in particular.” The second slap makes the man called Strelok yelp with pain.

  “That’s enough, Agent Fedorka!”

  “Komandir, dealing with this lowlife was both below my dignity and above my pay grade!”

  Strelok wobbles his head. “Below pay grade? Oh, that’s why you charged two thousand up front and then another five hundred for the lousiest blowjob I ever had!”

  “Fuck you!”

  Dasha, or better Agent Fedorka raises her hand to slap him once more but the captain quickly grabs her hand before she could strike Strelok’s devastated face once more. “Is that true, Agent?”

  “Of course not, komandir! He’s lying! All his money is on the table, I didn’t even touch it!”

  “Wrong answer. The captain asked if your lovemaking skills really suck, Dashenka,” Strelok says with a grin on his bloodied face. “Confirmed.”

  “He is a liar, komandir!”

  “You call me a liar, suka?” Strelok says trying to move his shoulder close enough to his nose to wipe off the blood. “I just happen to keep a lie detector in that cupboard over there. Looks like a Geiger counter and is one actually. Captain, take a measurement of the money on the table and then of Dasha’s purse. If the Geiger doesn’t tick higher, she can call me a liar.”

  Suddenly, Agent Fedorka’s pretty face turns pale. She quickly fishes her wallet from her bag and tosses it to the floor, stepping away from it.

  “Don’t worry, dorogaya, it’s not even remotely dangerous. Captain Maksimenko, why does your agent take me for a complete idiot?”

  Agent Fedorka gives him a murderous glare but Maksimenko shows her out of the room.

  “We’ll need to have a chat about this later, Fedorka. Go, get yourself patched up in the operation car,” he tells her. “On behalf of a grateful Motherland, thank you for your sacrifice.”

  Maksimenko turns to the two commandos.

  “And you, Vlasov— wipe that grin off your face or I’ll get you posted to the Exclusion Zone for the rest of your contract time!”

  “Yest, komandir!” the apparently senior Spetsnaz quickly replies.

  “Release him. I’ll handle Strelok myself from here on. Wait for me outside.”

  With one of his hands held to his still bleeding nose, Strelok sways to the bathroom and splashes water to his face. Keeping a close eye on him and with one hand on his holstered Fort-15 pistol out of precaution, Maksimenko reaches for a towel lying on the bed. Before tossing it to Strelok, he smells at it.

  “Envy by Gucci,” he says deeply inhaling the scent emanating from the fabric, “and a bit of moist pussy. Excellent mix.”

  “You bet,” Strelok replies, sobbing and wiping more blood from his broken nose.

  “Does she really suck in… performing her duty?”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “You lucky bastard. Did you really beat her?”

  Strelok bows his head, shunning the captain’s eye.

  “You’re one lucky son of a bitch, Strelok. Had this happened with her off duty you’d be worried about more than just a broken nose. Fedorka has a black belt in kyokushinkai karate—”

  “That explains her sporty body. Good God, one has to love those thighs!”

  “—and what kind of jerk have you become to beat women, anyway?”

  “I only hook up with girls who have a hang for it. She was begging for it, I’m not kidding!”

  “Strelok, Strelok… what happened to the Marked One?”

  Strelok looks into the tiny bathroom mirror and closes his eyes.

  “If you had been where I’ve been and seen what I’ve seen, you would know. First thing I remember from the Zone is somebody saying over me ’at least death would have saved him from the dreams’. It didn’t. I am tired. My body is worn out. My soul is tired and worn out. I lost myself to the Zone or the Zone has lost me, I don’t know anymore.”

  “Boo-hoo,” Maksimenko says and mimics a sob.

  Strelok laments on. “Sometimes I just want to explode from all the pain eating me up inside. Especially at night when I find myself alone. Sometimes that designer stuff you feed me helps me to contain it. But sometimes—I just explode.” He stares at his bloody hand and then makes a fist. “Sometimes I just get into a frenzy. I’ve become a Zone myself with my own emissions. Dasha was right—I’m all fucked up!”

  “The radiation on those bank notes—” Maksimenko starts asking but Strelok finishes his sentence.

  “—was a nice trick, huh?”

  “Strelok, Strelok. You sly dog.”