“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 wel
l-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 but 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 n
ot 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, “I 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.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Northern Passage s-2 Page 4