S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Southern Comfort

by John Mason

  “But… how can I leave when I must stay here?”

  She translates his words.

  “Marde shayesteyee baraye to khahad bood.” Beghum Madar replies directly to her, not Tarasov who looks from one woman to the other without a clue. Her voice is hard and commanding. “Be harhaal hich marde dighari to ra nemikhahad!”

  The young woman blushes and covers her scar in shame.

  “Be entekhab man etemad kon, dokhtra.”

  Beghum Madar’s last words must have been comforting, because when the young woman looks at Tarasov again, the coldness vanishes from her green eyes. She looks him up and down with a mixture of anticipation and hesitation.

  “Beghum Madar… my mother says you have blood of true warrior,” she murmurs, “and you will stay in my room… because tonight you will make me mother of a warrior.”

  This is not happening to me.

  The girl leads him into a small room furnished only by a thick, woolen mat. Rays of sunlight lance inside through splits in the crude shutters that cover the arched window and reflect off of dust motes as they perform their slow, swirling dance. An opening in the wall, covered by a colorful curtain, leads to a smaller chamber.

  “Rest here for now,” she says. “You will need your strength.” She gives him a cotton towel and a piece of soap. To Tarasov, in his grimy condition, they smell pure like heaven. “Behind curtain, there is a room with more water to wash yourself. Beghum Madar will bring you food. I come later.”

  She shuts the door, and the major hears a heavy lock being engaged. He feels as if he is a prisoner once more.

  5 October 2014, 23:42:58 AFT

  Dark rain pours down. It would be filthy weather to be out in, but Tarasov is resting his head on the desk in the command room, feeing such an exhaustion that he had never experienced before. He wonders why the view outside doesn’t resemble the Cordon. The lush vegetation has disappeared and the barren hills are full of crevasses from which herds of small mutants stream like ants.

  I am back in the Zone. My Zone.

  The thought brings him some relief, though he shudders; it is cold in the command room. Through the rain, the drab apartment blocks of Kiev loom beyond the hills.

  I am home.

  But the watch rosters and maps are gone from the wall, a ragged carpet hangs there instead. Memories from the New Zone flash into his mind.

  I want to be back there. The old Zone has let me down. It is not my Zone anymore and I don’t belong there. I want the New Zone. I want its rage, its darkness, its mysteries.

  The light goes out and the window’s frame blurs, slowly narrowing and assuming an arched shape. He hears a female voice from above.

  I am here.

  Tarasov gives a start. Looking around, he realizes he is in the Beghum’s house, in the Tribe’s stronghold, somewhere in the new Zone that had been once Afghanistan. He relaxes with odd, unexpected relief.

  “I am here,” the female voice insists. “Wake up!”

  Now he sees the girl, a lamp and a jug in her hands, and his heart starts beating fast.

  “What is your name?” he asks.

  “I not tell… yet. Stand up.”

  Her words are authoritative but she speaks with a softness in her voice that Tarasov wouldn’t have expected. Getting up, he sees that she barely reaches up to his chest. As she removes the tattered camouflage shirt from his shoulders, her fingers touch his skin, stirring excitement throughout his body. She stands close enough to let him detect the sweet aroma of female sweat, mixed with a strange scent that reminds him of pomegranates with a hint of wood smoke. She takes a small sponge from the jug and pours a balm-like liquid over his shoulders and chest. The salve emanates a spicy scent, pungent and pleasant in equal measure.

  “What is this?” he whispers.

  “An ointment,” she replies, moistening his skin with gentle strokes. “I prepared it myself from herbal oil and powder of glowing stone.”

  “Glowing stone? You mean, an artifact? A swag?”

  “No… it is from stones of Samal.”

  “Samal?”

  “Guardian of lost valley.”

  “Tell me more…”

  “No.”

  As his coarse skin absorbs the salve, Tarasov is aware of a relaxed sensation in his muscles, as if they are thawing from inner warmth. It is pleasing but strangely unnatural. He feels her touch becoming more and more sensual with every stroke of her hand.

  “Have you done this to men… before?” he asks, swallowing hard.

  “No.” It seems to him as if her voice carries a barely concealed note of shame. “Men are scared of my scar. English is funny language. Men are scared because I am scarred. Is that right word?”

  Now it’s his time to reply with a no. “No. I think beautiful would be a better word.”

  “You lie,” she replies, with the nuance of a smile on her lips.

  “Are you with me because your mother ordered you to… do this with me?”

  “Why?”

  “Uhm… actually, because I wish you were doing this because you wanted to.”

  Now a smile runs across her face, like the smooth oil streaming down on Tarasov’s body. “Before Colonel and his Marines took us in, girls could not refuse if parents chose a man. But now I could have… and did not. I was watching you when I was healing him. You had respect of him.”

  “Honestly? He was frightening.”

  “He is. But you remained proud. You didn’t beg him for mercy like many men did before you. You are a brave man, soldier. Besides…” She moves her index finger along Tarasov’s eyebrows. “…you have beautiful eyes. And besides…” Her hand slides down over his neck and shoulders to his chest. “…you are strong. I like you. Do you have a woman, soldier?”

  “No… and does all this mean that I will be your man?”

  “Maybe,” she replies with an enigmatic smile.

  “And after we do this, and I find whatever I have to find, what then? Will I be free to leave?”

  “You will be free…” She kneels down at his feet, applying the soothing balm everywhere except his loins. She looks up to his face. Their eyes meet. Her hands, softened and warmed up by the balm, now touch his body where no woman has touched him for a long time. “…but you will not want to leave.”

  What is that thing you’re pouring over me, Tarasov wants to ask, in fear of being bewitched by some supernatural act of sorcery, but all he can do is to emit a soft moan. Looking at the girl’s face on which the last evidence of shame has vanished, making way for a barely withheld, wild desire that yet has something pure and honest about it, he moves to caress her. She gently pushes his hand away.

  “Lay down now,” she tells him.

  Looking up from the mat, Tarasov watches the girl remove her scarf. A rain of dark brown hair falls over her shoulders, streaming down to her delicate hips. She loosens the buttons on her apparel, letting it slide to the ground, then takes the jug and pours the balm slowly all over herself, standing motionless with her eyes closed, letting the viscous liquid flow down on her sinewy body.

  Now he sees that her scar doesn’t only cover half her face. It runs down through her neck to her breast, making the untouched, inch-width space between her nipple and the scar look like divine intervention or at least mere luck.

  His glance glides below, to where a woman is supposed to be touched in the most gentle way and where her skin, from where even the thinnest of hair had been plucked, reveals scars left by long claws or knifes.

  The orange light from the lamp glimmers on her small breasts and hardened nipples. Her lips move in an inaudible whisper, as if praying. The warm oil flows down her body. Mesmerized, Tarasov’s eye follows a drop of oil run down from her aroused breast to her scarred belly, then to her inner limbs and drop down, as if it were the moisture of her flesh.

  Then she looks down at him. The reflection of the flame dances in her eyes.

  ““Will you give yourself to me?”, she says solemnly, as i
f concluding a mating ritual.

  “Even if I had a choice – I could only say yes.”

  “Then you are my man now,” she whispers, lying down at his side. She closes her eyes and stretches out her arms, offering herself to him. “And I am your woman. Take me.”

  Her voice is barely more than warm breath in his ear. Feeling her lips touch his skin, he closes his eyes, succumbing to the waves of heat engulfing his body.

  6 October 2014, 06:08:51 AFT

  Tarasov awakes to a loud knock on the door. From under half-opened eyelids, still heavy from sleep, he sees light falling in through the window. It must be morning.

  Damn it, let me sleep. If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up.

  The knocking gets impertinent. Tarasov stretches his arms and, feeling that the girl is not lying beside him, buries his face into the mattress to detect the smells of sex, oil and sweat again.

  “You don’t have to look for me like that. I am here.”

  Tarasov opens his eyes and sees the girl standing at the door. What he took for knocking was actually her nailing his father’s photograph to the wooden door.

  “It is my surprise to you,” she says. “Because this is your home now.”

  “Hey,” he exclaims, jumping up from the mat, “where did you get that photograph from?”

  “Driscoll was here. He brought your things.”

  She points to the corner where Tarasov’s Vintorez stands propped against the wall, a neatly rolled bundle sitting beside it. His watch lies on top. The exoskeleton stands there too – cleaned, and to his surprise, now bearing the desert pattern camouflage of the Tribe warriors. Moreover, in a much smaller bundle he recognizes a few things that had once belonged to his guide. Even the Heartstone is there. The sight of it, and that of Squirrel’s battered little harmonica, saddens him, but this soon makes way for appreciation. In hindsight, he now fully understands the girl’s words about the difference between Stalkers and the Tribe.

  Men like or the Colonel might be brutally cruel, but they seem to have more respect towards certain things than the Stalkers… and Stalkers could be nice, but they’re not called scavengers without reason.

  “Hey… that’s great!” Tarasov joyfully exclaims as he straps on his watch. “But out of all this, you are my best surprise.”

  The girl giggles. “You don’t have to call me ’best surprise’. My name is Nooria.”

  “Nooria,” Tarasov slowly repeats. “At last you tell me. You have a beautiful name.”

  “It means: light. And your name is Mikhailo. What does it mean?”

  “Archangel, leader of Heaven’s armies, things like that,” Tarasov replies with a shrug. “My mother was very religious at that time. But how do you know?”

  “I have been looking through your things.”

  He gets up and steps to the door. For a moment he feels like taking the photograph down, but as he looks at the girl called Nooria and her – or by now, their – mattress, which is still in a mess from the intense night before, he leaves it in its new place.

  “Thank you, Nooria,” he says. “Thank you for everything.”

  “For what?” Nooria replies with a smile. “Say thanks to my mother.”

  Tarasov doesn’t know how to reply. Clearly, it was the Beghum who saved his life and who eventually put him up with her daughter, but it was Nooria who had accepted him and, although it feels difficult for him to admit, made him happy. Now, as he looks into her pure, green eyes and sees the happy smile on her scarred face, his suspicions about being used as a buck or being bewitched seem utterly ridiculous – even unfair.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” she says, repeating her meaning. “Today you will go away, but you will return to me.”

  Her words sound neither like a request nor an order but a statement about something that needs not to be asked, because there is no way for it to happen otherwise.

  “Yes, I will,” Tarasov softly replies, and looks at the photograph fixed to the door with four rusty nails. “You got me nailed, Nooria… nailed for good.”

  “Tora dost daram,” Nooria replies.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think you know already,” she says and turns her gaze away from Tarasov’s eyes.

  The Ghosts and the Traitors

  Road to Shibar Pass, 10:15:47 AFT

  “You are one lucky son of a bitch, you know that?” the Tribe warrior shouts to Tarasov as he drives the Humvee along the bumpy, curving road at reckless speed. When they’d set out on their way to the pass in the vehicle bearing the name MULLAH MOWER, the driver had introduced himself as Lance Corporal Bockman. His face is red from the strong sun. “I’ve only seen this once – it was a rag-head with long blond hair. He came all the way from Germany to join the Taliban. The women admired his looks for a while, but then tore him to pieces anyway. But you… not only did she save your ass, defying the big man’s will, but she even picked you for Nooria!”

  “The Beghum must be a very important woman.”

  “You can say that about the Colonel’s ex, yes!”

  “What?”

  “What what? I thought you got that already, partner. She was the Colonel’s woman. Still is, to some extent. The Bhegum’s the only one among us who can take him on. Okay, the Top too, but in different matters...”

  “But this makes me –”

  “Yes, you can consider yourself the chosen man of the big man’s stepdaughter, whatever degree of kinship that is!” The warrior shakes his head as if he were talking about something that’s hard to believe.

  “Now I understand her attitude,” Tarasov shouts back, grinning. Yes, she is used to having things done her way, he thinks. All my bones are aching. “But I can’t complain. She can be cute if she wants to.”

  “That’s none of my business, partner… and that’s not what makes her special anyway.”

  “She does like doing strange things… But what do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s been a while ago… One day we went on a rag-head hunt with Lieutenant Ramirez. Now, Lieutenants are cocky sorts and Ramirez wandered off to check out a cave on his own. Turned out it was crawling with jackals. The beasts tore his armor off in seconds. By the time we dragged him out, he had more poisonous bites on his body than hair on his ass. But the healer fixed him up in less than a day… Tellin’ ya, that girl ain’t natural.”

  “Then how come she couldn’t heal her own face?”

  “Once you have acid sprayed on your skin there’s no skin left to restore, is there?”

  “I guess not. Anyway… it was strange too that she only told me her name this morning.”

  “That’s good for you. Because if she hadn’t told you her name, it would have meant that you failed to impress her. You’d have ended up back in the Pit by midday… and no woman would have saved your ass then!”

  “Do you have many such weird customs?”

  “More than you could ever imagine.”

  For several minutes, Tarasov watches the barren mountains, remembering the previous night and that same dawn, when Nooria had explored every inch of his body in the candlelight. “How did you get this big scar on your chest?” “That was a snork.” “What is a snork?” Something very bad and smelly.” “And this?” “That was a boar.” “You are very ugly, you know? We make a nice couple, soldier.” He remembers her giggles when she called him as ugly as herself. He tried to convince her about how wrong she was about herself by kissing her scar, only to be pushed back to the mattress for another round of pleasuring her.

  Oh dear. Will I ever see her again?

  “Can I ask you something? The two prison guards, Hillbilly and Polak… why do they refer to each other as ‘brother’?”

  “They go way back, ages. The ‘brothers’ were among the first retainers of the big man, way before the nukes went off. Originally they’d been military police. Guess who they were after… Anyway, for one reason or another, they’d hated each other’s guts in the beginning. Then,
during a patrol, they got themselves into a really bad clusterfuck. Those who made it out alive started to call each other ‘brother’, and the two of them have been best buddies ever since… especially nowadays, when they are the last ones still alive from that band of brothers.”

  “I see… And what about you? You are not one of the Lieutenants, nor a Hazara boy,” Tarasov casually remarks to the Lance Corporal. “You must also be a newcomer, or how to say. What brought you here?”

  “California ain’t what it used to be no more,” Bockman replies. The grin leaves his face. “Life is safer here… Anyhow, when I heard about the Tribe, I heeded the call.”

  Tarasov is taken by surprise. Not even Degtyarev and the SBU, and even more so, not even the Stalkers in the New Zone, had heard much about the Tribe.

  “Heard about the Tribe? How? Where?”

  “Now listen up, partner… just because the Beghum asked me to take you to the Pass, you shouldn’t think we’re friends. Clear enough?”

  “Enough.”

  “We’re cool then. Yippee!”

  “Hey, what are you doing? You are driving straight into an anomaly!”

  “Oh yeah!” Electrical emissions crackle outwards and explode under the Humvee with a row of sharp, crashing thunder, but to Tarasov’s astonishment nothing happens to the vehicle.

  Lance Corporal Bockman gives him a triumphant smirk. “State of the badass art… pimped by yours truly!”

  Shibar Pass, 11:10:39 AFT

  Tarasov watches the dust cloud disappearing behind a hill as the Humvee returns to the Tribe’s stronghold, far away beyond the canyons and mountains to the west, and opens his PDA.

  The map shows a valley to the south of his position where the ruins of Bhegum Madar’s village supposedly lie hidden amongst the overgrown vegetation. The valley appears mostly green, just like on the display, but the digital map fails to reveal the red and blue, pulsating areas that look to Tarasov like dense anomaly fields. The path marked on the PDA tells him to find the village first, and from there guides him to a trail leading up to a plateau overlooking the valley.