S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Northern Passage s-2

by Balazs Pataki

  “Come on, boss,” Ashot says with a skeptical smile while he cleans the counter. “Maybe ya wanted to say three kilometers? Not as if I’d believe that either.”

  “Ashot, give me one more vodka,” Mac says. “I’m with you on this. With a good rifle, even a rookie could hit a target at three hundred.”

  “At pitch dark, without night vision, aiming and adjusting range only by the noise the dushman was making in the bushes?” Satisfied with the impression his words have made on the Stalker, Shrink proudly smiles as if he was the sniper himself. “If anyone of you guys do it after him, I’ll analyze you for free.”

  Ashot expresses his respect by giving a whistle. “Maybe it was him who shot that sheriff in me favorite song!”

  “Is this guy in Bagram now?” Mac asks, now much more curiously.

  “He’s up in the lookout tower. Loves to be left alone, you know.”

  Mac is about asking for another drink when Shrink’s radio set starts crackling.

  “Shrink here,” he says taking the receiver fastened to his body armor.

  “Commander, you asked me to keep calling the Asylum but I still get no copy from them.”

  “Keep calling them.”

  Shrink’s face darkens as he puts the receiver back to its holder. “It’s the Stalker manning our communications gear in the tower. Mac, there is a change of plans. I want you and that box-in-bottle find out what’s going on in the Asylum. Can you repair a radio?”

  “Sure, but do you really think the silence is because of a broken radio?”

  Looking genuinely concerned, Shrink drums his fingers on the counter. “I think of their radio being broken because I don’t dare thinking of anything else.”

  15

  Motel 6, South Garey Avenue, Pomona, Los Angeles

  Pete’s night had been a horrible one.

  Every pore in his body was screaming out for stuff. Writhing on his bed with his skin turned gooseflesh and covered with cold sweat, he didn’t even try to sleep. Every minute or so he switched the air-con on and off, pulling a blanket over to warm himself, only to tear it off himself a few seconds later because he was suffocating from heat. Realizing that he had left his notebook in the abandoned house makes him even more upset.

  Time appeared to stand still. He zapped through the TV channels with the voice down for minutes — or was it hours? He walked up and down the room, bashing and kicking the walls, cursing his father, the world, the people who came for him. The window could be opened only ajar and he found himself fighting for breath.

  Then, just like in the car before, the desire to escape was all over him again. If he could only get away, he would find a way to obtain opiates—any opiates at any price.

  He expected the door to be closed. Sneaking down the veranda and the stairs, he arrived at the vacated motel lobby and stopped at the cube ice-making machine, staring at it with an unfocused gaze. The faint blue light in the display window appeared insanely beautiful. Pete served himself one portion of ice after the other until melting ice cubes were all around his bare feet. He stepped on them, wondering why it felt like stepping on glowing coal.

  The main door too stood open, letting the smell of wet asphalt stream into the lobby. Pete looked at the street lights outside, hesitating. He wished he would be able to run but already breathed heavily. Then the call was too strong to resist — somewhere outside there had to be stuff and he had to get it.

  Pete was barely outside when someone blocked his way. He wanted to just punch him and push away, cursing, but the piercing blue eyes of the huge man in front of him made his curse turn into a whimper. I fucking hate you, Hartman was all he could utter. Hartman didn’t care to reply, just shoved him back to the motel where another shadow was coming down the stairs. Pete whimpered once again, this time in fear — the mess of red and white calluses covering the right half of the strange girl’s face appeared to squirm and twist. You must be feeling dizzy, little bother, she said. Taking Pete’s hand she lead him back to their room where she sat down in the sofa, pulling Pete closer to her until he was lying there with his head in her lap. I’m dying, Pete whispered and she replied yes you are. Then Pete felt her hands on his forehead from where she wiped off the cold sweat; her touch was soft and warm on his skin and Pete felt as if it would drain the ache off his whole body. You are dying but will be reborn, she said, caressing Pete’s forehead which perspired no longer, and he felt like sinking into a pool of darkness with redeeming sleep in its depths.

  ———

  Pete awakes in his own small room where the muted TV is still on. He has no watch but the bright light falling through the window tells him that it’s late morning already.

  His throat feels parched. He takes the Dasani that someone had caringly put on the bed stand; it still tastes cool as he greedily draws on it. A drop of water falls to his chest, making him aware that he is all naked. His clothes, cleaned and by now almost completely dry, are neatly arranged on a chair.

  He quickly puts his clothes on. They smell of disinfectants and washing powder.

  He tries to remember the last night, unsure if all had been for real or just a nightmare. It must have been real because he feels strangely light-headed, without the aches and nausea. Maybe it was just the sleep. It was his best in a long time, though he still finds it hard to believe that he was able to sleep at all.

  Yet it all feels as if something had been taken from him; together with the thought of being virtually a prisoner, this feeling still leaves him in a dark mood.

  He opens the door but almost shuts it again, seeing Tarasov sitting half-naked in a chair with Nooria kneeling in front of him. For a second, he gazes at her amazed—it is the first time he sees Nooria without her raincoat on, and the sight of her loosened, curly hair that coats her back like a silky, chestnut-colored robe down to her waist, impresses him beyond measure. Embarrassed over having interrupted a moment of intimacy, Pete is about to step back into his room but Tarasov waves to him.

  “Come, kid. We’re almost finished.”

  Thinking wild, perverted thoughts, Pete walks up to the couple.

  “Good God!” he exclaims upon seeing what Nooria is doing. “Did you get that from Sancho’s men?”

  Tarasov looks at the wound on his chest Nooria is treating.

  “No petty thug could inflict such a cut on me. How did you sleep?”

  “Restlessly.”

  “No wonder. The Top told me you have a sleepwalking problem. Outch!” Tarasov scowls. “That wound hurts enough without you biting my nipple.”

  “Sorry, I’m just playing a little.”

  Nooria leans closer to the wound she is sewing up and bites off the yarn protruding from the stitch. “Here you go—done. You behaved very bravely.”

  Tarasov gives a long sigh of relief and kisses Nooria’s hand as she stays. She giggles, nonchalantly adjusts the jeans on her hip and wipes off a short piece of yarn from her red sweater. In Pete’s eyes, the strange couple looks as if they’d be way beyond niceties like saying thank you to each other.

  “Tea or coffee?” she asks, making her way to the kitchenette.

  “Coffee. Pete?”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Little brother will get herbal tea,” comes her reply from the kitchenette. “I prepared it myself.”

  “You better don’t contradict her,” Tarasov says with a smirk, seeing the disappointment on Pete’s face. “Sit down. Let’s have a chat.”

  “Tell me first—is she really my stepsister?”

  “Yes, she is—”

  “She looks hot in those jeans and with all that long hair.”

  “—and Nooria being my wife makes me your stepbrother-in-law. That’s our proper degree of kinship. We found it out last night with the Top over a bottle of whiskey.”

  “Geez. Could this family get any queerer than that?”

  “Let’s forget the in-law part. Just listen to me, as your stepbrother—”

  “I want to know more a
bout her. Who is she, actually? And what happened to her face?”

  “To answer your questions I need to tell you your father’s story in a nutshell, although a cartridge shell would be more appropriate.”

  “Tell me one reason why I should be listening to that.”

  “You think I came to see Disney World, huh?” Tarasov asks with a hint of anger in his voice. “Your father saved many good people to put me in debt. Finding and telling you what I got to say is what I have to do in exchange. Better listen up, Pete.”

  “I already know his story,” Pete says with a shrug but sits down. “First he went on a killing spree with his Marines, then mutinied. Sorry if I’m not too proud of him.”

  Tarasov sighs and drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair. “First things first—you’ve been a Marine yourself and know how the drill goes about being the most badass fighting machines in the world.”

  “I call it brainwashing.”

  “During the Bush war, he struggled with the idea of fighting with one of his hands tied to his back. He believed that a brutal enemy can only be beaten by displaying the same brutality.”

  “I know where the story goes. He lost it and massacred a whole village. It’s been all over the news back then.”

  “Did you ever reflect on why it was on the news?”

  “Why should I have?”

  “Because that ambush was to provoke your father’s Marines into fighting back with full force, and staged such way that a news crew could record it from a perfect angle. It started with setting a nurse school on fire and… let’s say, abusing a girl who stood up against them. It was that girl who warned your father’s men about the bad guys. The village was destroyed in the fight. Once your troops left, the bad guys came back and littered the ruins with bodies of civilians they had killed themselves, arranged in a way to look even more disturbing on TV. That news crew paid them well—and then paid with their life too when they fell out with the terrorists over money. All that was witnessed by a shepherdess who managed to escape. It wasn’t easy, but with her help I found proof of all this.”

  “That may be so, but then they revolted. Marines! You get that? Jesus, what a fucked up war. Marines never ever revolted. They are the semper fidelis, for chrissakes! It makes me sick to think of my father being part of that! Afghanistan—fuck that place.”

  “Your father was between hammer and anvil, so to say. On one hand, he was faithful to his country and on the other, he knew that his country demanded an impossible victory from him. In his eyes, achieving victory for America was impossible because America itself prevented him from dealing with the enemy the proper way.”

  “This doesn’t give me anything.”

  “In his opinion, the war could have been won only by being fearsome and brutal because that’s the only language they understand. But he saw that whenever your soldiers behaved like that they got punished—for painting obscenities on bombs, pissing on the bodies of killed enemies, burning their bodies and ’holy’ books… As he said, to be invincible one must be feared—kill one man, terrorize a thousand. But in that war, whenever his country killed one man she apologized to ten thousand. He said, America is more afraid of judgment than her enemies and that war proved him right—in the end it was judgment that defeated his country. I’m not saying that subscribe to his point of view entirely but merely repeat his words.”

  “You Russians were less squeamish during your own war there but still got your ass kicked. How about that, huh?”

  “First, I’m not Russian but Ukrainian. Second, our ass wasn’t kicked. We were on the brink of victory when you Americans, in all your naivety, thought that anyone fighting the USSR must be a good guy and delivered Stinger missiles to the dushmans. It compromised our airborne operations which proved very, very effective until then and—” Tarasov waves. “Oh never mind, I got carried away. Shortly after that incident, your father’s unit was sent to clean up a place called the City of Screams. It’s a ruin in the middle of nothing, called that because the Mongols massacred there a whole town several hundred years ago—”

  Nooria enters with two mugs of steaming coffee and tea, then leaves without a word. Pete sniffs at the beverage that has a dark brown color and smells of herbs. Even the vapor carries a calming effect.

  “But what’s really dreadful is what lies below the ruins,” Tarasov carries on after sipping on his coffee. “It’s a node of the Noosphere or so I believe, something that we have in our own Exclusion Zone, but this one is about pure evil.”

  “The—Noosphere?” Pete asks and wrinkles his forehead.

  Tarasov reflects for a moment. “It’s something to all humanity like a signal is to cell phones. We don’t understand its nature. Just like an ordinary user wouldn’t know much about cell phone signals. Anyway, in the New Zone, it reduces people and animals alike to their primordial instinct of aggression and mutates their souls and bodies into mere tools of such destructive instinct. It was bound by an ancient power that the bad guys destroyed in 2001. The rest is history. Your father and his best men were exposed to this evil but it did only partly overcome them. It pushed them over the edge though and they revolted, but were too disciplined and too loyal to each other to start killing each other.”

  Tarasov’s face darkens as he recalls his own experiences in the catacombs.

  ”Anyway, what they ultimately did was the only way to win a war in Afghanistan. Picking a loyal ally, giving it its own little land and ruling over the rest together. It doesn’t go without going native, and that’s what happened to your father and his men. It seems they’ve found a new homeland there and consider it the only place in the world where they can live with their honor intact. In the Tribe’s understanding, loyalty to a corrupted country run by self-righteous bureaucrats, lawyers and activists was corrupting their honor to which they had pledged.”

  Sergeant Major Hartman’s voice comes from the bathroom where he is singing the Yellow Rose of Texas, very cheerily and horribly out of tune. Tarasov and Pete share a grimace.

  “Strange understanding of honor,” Pete eventually says.

  “For the Tribe, it’s like religion and they deserve respect for that.”

  “And who are you, Mikhailo? By what I saw last night, I guess you’re some KGB assassin.” Pete looks into the bottom of his mug where the tea has left a strange, thick sediment. “You sure this stuff is safe to drink?”

  “Nooria’s concoctions usually are. Just don’t ask her what’s inside.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “She wouldn’t tell, just mumble something about herbs and artifact powders. They don’t call her a witch for nothing, you know?

  Pete looks puzzled. “What? Artifact powder? What the hell’s that—artifacts?”

  “You’ll see. Back to your question — there’s no KGB anymore. In my country, it’s called SBU now. I used to work for them occasionally, but now I’m just a Stalker. This stands for many things: scavenger, trespasser, adventurer, loner, killer, robber, of which I’ve been everything except for the last one. Before that, I was the commander of our troops securing the Exclusion Zone around the Chernobyl NPP.” Seeing Pete stir, Tarasov laughs. “Don’t worry, I’m not radioactive! To cut a long story short, not so long ago I was sent on a classified mission to the New Zone, as we Stalkers call what’s left of Afghanistan. One thing led to the other, and I would’ve been killed by your father’s people if it hadn’t been for Nooria’s mother — and ultimately, for Nooria.”

  “How romantic.”

  “Maybe from hindsight… anyway, the shepherdess who witnessed the set-up that framed your father was Nooria’s mother. The abused girl warning your father’s unit was Nooria.”

  “Got to admit I find her very peculiar.”

  “What’s your guess, how old is she?”

  Pete shrugs. “Don’t know. It’s difficult to judge age by such Middle-Eastern faces. My guess would be something between seventeen and twenty-five.”

  “Correct. I
n terms of years, she’s twenty-three. In terms of lore and wisdom, she might be a thousand or even more.”

  “Now you’re exaggerating. That’s fantasy, dude.”

  “You’ve probably noticed the tattoo on her forehead. The only similar one I’ve ever seen was on a wall painting in a room that’s been sealed for almost nine hundred years, and probably built another nine hundred years before that.”

  “Gosh! Okay, maybe I’ll let her call me her 'little’ brother even if I’m two years older than Nooria.”

  “Yes. The girl who is now washing up our tea cups bears the wisdom of—”

  The bathroom door opens. Hartman enters with the vigor of a wild elephant, still wiping his upper body with a towel.

  “We still got some coffee left?”

  “You’re late for that, Top. Nooria has even finished doing the washing up.”

  “Too bad for me. Anyway, there’s plenty of drive-thru’s on our way. Let’s get our gear and shove off!”

  “What exactly is that Meat Market where we’ll go?”

  “You’ve been always wondering where we get our supplies from. Today you will see.”

  Nooria arrives from the kitchenette, holding her curved blade and pulling it from its jeweled scabbard.

  “Mikhailo, are you finished talking to Pete? I need to cut his hair. My brother must not look like a sister.”

  “You will not touch my hair with that weapon of mass destruction!”

  Pete is about to jump up from the sofa when the Top grabs his shoulders and pushes him back to his place. Nooria starts cutting Pete’s black hair, ignoring the cusswords he utters under his breath.

  “I always wanted to have a baby doll,” she says with a chuckle. “Now I have a baby brother. Don’t move, Pete! My knife is very sharp.”