“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 throat 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.
“Y
ou 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!”
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.�
�
Drying up more blood with the towel, the Stalker repeats his earlier question. “What am I charged with?”
“Nothing, apart from being a once great guy who became a failure.”
“Guilty as charged. Kill me now, save your Service the efforts and me the dreams.”
“Maybe tomorrow. Today you’re still needed.”
“No charges then?”
“Stop asking that stupid question.”
“Than what was all this overkill about?”
“You were difficult to find. Besides, I have to lubricate my field skills — they are a little rusty after two years in the Big Land. Sorry about your nose.”
“I think it was Dasha who broke it, eventually—damn, does it hurt—what’s her real name, anyway?”
“Never mind.”
“Suits her well.” Strelok sniffs on his nose. “You got something for me?”
With an ear to ear smile, Maksimenko fishes a vial from his pocket. Strelok greedily reaches for it but Maksimenko keeps it away from him.
“First things first, Marked One.”
“Let me guess—once more, the SBU lost some super-important documents and I’m to get them from a mutant-infested secret lab?”
“No.”
“Sidorovich being infected by a deadly virus? Please do tell me it happened. I won’t move as much as my little toe to find his antidote.”
“The trader’s doing well.”
“Another of your invincible Spetsnaz squads got stuck in an anomaly field?”
“That did happen recently but Lieutenant Priboi took care of the situation. You know, the new commander at Cordon.”
“Preventing Freedom and Duty from slaughtering each other, let’s say by sniping their latest commanders?”
“Yesterday’s joke ain’t funny today.”
“Damn, too bad. Last night I was dreaming about an upgraded Vintorez rifle. Long scope, integrated silencer and all. Then perhaps I’m to help you find someone? A Stalker knowing too much and up to no good?” Wiping blood from his nose doesn’t prevent Strelok from giving Maksimenko a grin. “Like myself?”
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Northern Passage s-2 Page 5