“Since when are you afraid of the grunts?” Noah asks.
“It’s not about the grunts but… this.” Strelok fishes a small vial from his pocket. “I can’t function without this shit anymore. Only the SBU can provide it. They get it from India or I don’t know where.”
“Strelok, what happened to you? You became a junkie?”
“It’s not a drug, Noah. It’s painkillers.”
“For what pain?” Nooria asks.
“Phantom pains,” Strelok says with a dark smile. “Literally.”
“I don’t understand. You have all your hands and legs.”
“I—I can’t explain. It is as if the Brain Scorcher would still affect me. When it gets dark—the ghosts come.”
The pseudodog sniffs into the air and suddenly begins to yowl. Noah signals Strelok to hold his tongue.
After a few heartbeats of silence, it appears as if the sky would fall on Earth with a shattering thunder.
“Emission approaching!” Noah shouts.
“I felt it coming, but so soon again?”
“Do you think emissions are trains with a schedule, Strelok? Get into the aft room before the mutants are on us!”
Somewhere far a siren begins to wail but is soon suppressed by the rumbling sky.
“The Skadovsk calls,” yells Noah. “God have mercy on anyone caught in the open!”
A thunder shakes the barge, making its hull tremble. The rusty metal plates screech and shriek as if they could disintegrate any moment. Through a crack in the hull, Nooria sees the sky turning red and a huge dark cloud engulfing the sky. Lightning crackles amidst the thunder. The Stalker appears to be incapacitated by the emission. He falls to his knees, pressing his hands on his ears and screams. “Darkness! The darkness!”
With hands trembling, he opens his vial and is about to pour several pills into his mouth when a strong hand grasps his arm and shakes the pills to the barge’s metal floor.
“My medicine!” screams Strelok desperately. He looks up to see who has taken the painkillers from him.
A forceful wave of energy hits the barge. Before it becomes pitch dark, Strelok sees the reflection of a flash in Nooria’s green eyes.
Then darkness falls and the first ghost appears, its arms outstretched as it levitates towards him with squirming tentacles in its face. He fires his rifle at the apparition. It diminishes from his sight.
He is running up a causeway leading to a hill, with abandoned factory buildings to his right and a dense forest to his left.
A thunderbolt flashes, turning the green dim of his night vision into blinding white. He curses himself for approaching the Brain Scorcher deep in the night and during a thunderstorm.
A humming drone creeps into his skull. It sounds as if an enormous generator is nearby, almost resembling a human voice shouting a warning—though it is unclear if it’s warning him to stay away, or alerting its own source of Strelok’s approach.
After a few minutes, he reaches a brick wall. Jumping over a stretch where the wall had collapsed, he enters a compound littered with wrecked vehicles, rusty railway containers and derelict wagons, their wheels and chassis overgrown with weed. Suddenly, everything in his vision turns into grainy amber.
Five columns of eerie blue light radiate in the night sky. A flash of lightning makes five huge antennae appear. It appears as if the blue dim would emanate from their metal structures themselves.
“Die, enemy of the Monolith! Brothers, to battle!”
Through the drone and thunder, Strelok hears the bellowing shouts of Monolith fighters. He ducks and moves to return fire only to realize that his rifle is gone. His eyes open wide with dread when another apparition materializes — a pseudodog running up to him, its snout baring fangs ready to tear on his flesh. Strelok desperately tries to find a weapon in him but finds nothing to protect himself. He screams.
Another apparition appears right in front of him and blocks the ghost’s assault, making it disappear like a soap bubble.
“Glory to the Monolith!”
The Monolith fighters’ blood curdling cries are followed by burst from their assault rifles.
“Kill the intruder!”
Strelok feels the bullets hit him but there is no physical pain.
The apparition waves its hand in a sign for him to follow. The drone, the hail of bullets and the flashing thunderstorm become one vortex of dark noise, echoing in his head and suppressing any thoughts of his own—except the desperate desire to run away or succumb to his enemies, finishing his torture either way.
Strelok runs after the apparition. It waves to him once more. Climbing up the derelict wagon he sees that its far end is open, leading into a tunnel. The apparition moves forward. It appears to bear an aura that makes the ghosts that materialize from the amber hue bounce off and disintegrate.
Strelok follows it into the tunnel where the walls appear to close in on him with each step he takes. He knows that wherever the tunnel ends, a horror beyond all imagination awaits. He takes several turns in the maze that is littered with decayed machines, all of them having served the purpose of creating this hell on earth from where any sane man would try to run. Strelok knows he must get to the end of the tunnel, but also that one of the turns he takes will shatter his sanity with pure horror.
It is not his willpower anymore that keeps him running but the apparition’s aura. Strelok feels that the horror outside of it would overwhelm him.
Eyes appear in the shadows and howls blend into the humming drone. Claws of bloodsuckers reach for him, the Monolith’s bullets hit the floor and walls around. The apparition leading him accelerates. Strelok feels his side hurt and can barely breathe. He almost collapses when at last he reaches a hall where huge, cylindrical containers stand. A catwalk leads up to a control panel with a switch. The apparition stops short of it and illuminates the instruments. He will have to make the last few steps alone.
Stepping out from behind the apparition, Strelok feels like entering bitter cold after the warmth of a protective room. The cold that almost crushes him is terror, the goose skin is coming from fear. With limbs trembling and teeth clattering, he enters the darkness, feels his way to the switch and pulls it.
His vision blurs. The catwalk, the rusted containers, the sinister vaults appear to revolve around him. Losing his balance he falls.
Suddenly, the darkness vanishes and he can see clearly again. In a huge hall, atop a heap of rubble and scrap metal, a crystal monolith glitters in the light beams falling in from high above. The air smells burnt and his saliva tastes like metal. He wants to crawl closer to the crystal but something keeps him away from it. Strelok stretches his arm out to reach it, fingers trembling, while the nightmares flicker in his mind as if this would be his moment of death: the truck carrying his body, believed to be dead, hit by lightning, his unknown savior’s face, the Power Plant with the waves of mutants, the hooded shape with the face he could never see—but now he understands the call of the voice that comes from deeper than the deepest vaults. It is calling him.
“Strelok!”
But for the first time he senses no menace in the call. The darkness lies behind and he is again what he used to be before — a man called Strelok who has been marked by the hell he has been through and now, when facing the maze of his nightmares once more, has found his way back to sanity.
Still terrified that once he opens his eyes something terrible will happen, he only dares to rise his eyelids a little but enough to recognize Noah’s untidy home.
Probably no Stalker has ever emitted such a sigh of relief at its sight than Strelok does now. His heartbeat slows down and his strained muscles loosen up.
Then he realizes that it was not the feeling of safety that made him calm down. It was the lack of pain: he feels as if he was a crystal glass filled with morning light.
Strelok feels something warm pressing his forehead. He reaches for it and touches Nooria’s hand. Embarrassed, he lets go of her hands which release their gr
ip as he sits up, rubbing his eyes.
“How long did I sleep?” Strelok asks.
“About fifteen minutes,” Noah observes.
“Good God—it felt as if I had slept for a whole day!”
“How is your pain?”
Strelok looks at Nooria and it seems to him that he must have slept with his head in her lap. His embarrassment vanishes as he feels the refreshment of a long sleep getting stronger, bringing a clarity to his mind he hadn’t felt for a time longer than he could remember.
“It is gone,” he says, baffled.
Noah nods. “This was a short one, thanks God!”
“I didn’t mean the emission—I meant this, this—this is strange. I have never felt good like this, at least not in a very long time.”
“That’s a surprise,” Noah says. “You were screaming and wriggling in your sleep as if tortured by a thousand ghosts.”
“I was.” Strelok slowly shakes his head. “What did you do to me?”
“Nothing.” Nooria giggles. “I just helped you to get out of your bad dreams.”
Strelok gives her a long, inquisitive look. “Will I have those dreams ever again?”
“Not for a while, I think,” she says. “I mean a very, very long while.”
“But how long?”
“Long for you, short for me.”
“Do I still need to take those pills?”
“It depends on you. You can take pills if you want. But now you must decide if you still need them.”
Strelok looks into the green eyes that appear to keep secrets deeper than he had ever tried to solve. When their eyes meet, he sees kindness, wisdom, warmth — but they come from bottomless darkness. He turns his eyes away and shudders.
“You are a witch,” he whispers.
Noah gives him a perplexed look but Nooria just shrugs and giggles once more. “Some people call me that.”
“There are no witches, Strelok,” Noah says. “This is not a fairy tale. This is the Zone! Only asshole mutants, everywhere! She could be a mutant too!”
“No, this is not a fairy tale,” Strelok replies. He looks down to his boots. “This is the most confusing situation I have ever faced.”
“Why so?” asks Nooria.
“Because now I have to make a choice of going back to the Big Land,” Strelok says very seriously, “or stay in the Zone — forever.”
“Stay, Marked One!” Noah says, grinning. “I also stayed here and look how fine I’m doing! If I only had bullets…”
“Do you have a PDA?” Strelok asks from Nooria, ignoring Noah.
“Here.”
Strelok scrolls the map with a concerned face. “Have a look, Nooria. Cordon is at the other end of the Zone… damn far away. Especially with me in this condition.”
“We must get there quickly,” Nooria insists.
“You will need lots of bullets for that trip! There are—”
Strelok interrupts the half-crazy Stalker. “I know, I know, mutants everywhere. Give me a break, huh? It’s not just bullets we need.”
“What else would one need?”
“Not what but who. We need Guide.”
55
Dead city of Pripyat, Exclusion Zone
The sewers remain pitch dark beyond the cones of light emitted by their headlamps, but when Nooria grabs Strelok’s hand and at last emerges from the manhole and looks around in the daylight, what she sees hardly offers relief.
The Stalker had first led her to the south, an area he called Jupiter ehich is full of odd metal structures and derelict buildings. There they followed a railway track eastwards and to an abandoned, tower-like building raising high over the misty landscape. Cautiously entering the cellar through a low, tunnel-like entrance from the nearby waterway, he dug out a container from under the debris which turned out to hold an assault rifle and some ammo for it. A hand-written note on the back of an old document was also there. When Strelok read it, he bowed his head and whispered something about a man called Fang who had apparently been supposed to find this stash; the sadness coming over him was such that Nooria felt compelled to give him a comforting stroke. Pulling himself together, Strelok quickly led her on, crossing the canal and descending into a manhole leading beneath the concrete walls running along the water.
Though Nooria didn’t recognize the rifle’s type, it appeared serious enough to make a reckless man overconfident; but Strelok proved as composed as lurid his earlier behavior had been. They sneaked through claustrophobically narrow tunnels that seemed to run endlessly in the darkness. Nooria, after all a child of the New Zone’s boundless wastelands, followed Strelok with growing discomfort and hoped at every turn to reach an exit and leave the underground passage behind.
It is to her great relief when Strelok at last climbs up a metal ladder, works the iron lid of the manhole aside and cautiously peers outside.
Nooria’s heart sinks when she emerges from the underground and looks around.
Under an overcast sky, derelict apartment blocks loom among alleys overgrown with dry bushes. The wind moving the branches of dead trees makes them appear like ghosts waving a welcome through the gloomy drizzle. The tiles that had once covered the facades have fallen off, revealing spots of drab concrete. Odd saplings grow from the broken windows and broken masonry. On the top floor of a house across the next alley, a tree has grown from a seed apparently blown there by the wind. It appears like a symbol of nature’s victory over this man-made stone desert.
Fear creeps under Nooria’s skin like chill from drizzle. Her fear is mixed with sadness, however. A ragged curtain still hanging in a broken window; the rusted lid of the manhole with Cyrillic letters and the number 1972 on it; a street sign over an entrance filled almost knee-deep with rubble; the decaying blue and white tile work on a façade nearby that was supposed to soften the drab appearance of the building—the few still visible signs of ordinary human life that had thrived here stir compassion in her heart as she feels the dead city’s haunting memories descending on her.
It is the sight of a playground with rusty climbing bars where the traces of red and blue paint are still visible, that makes her eventually sigh with deep sorrow.
“I have never seen a sadder place.”
Lost in her thoughts, she moves toward the playground but Strelok grabs her hand and pulls her back.
“Okay, listen to me carefully. Here’s a few rules. First, do not touch or even go close to anything metallic here. It’s still radioactive and you aren’t much protected in that rookie suit. Stay on the paved road. If we have to leave it, do not lay down. Earth is contaminated. If you have to take cover, crouch but try not to kneel. Avoid touching the ground. Last but not least, watch out for any movement in the windows, on the roofs—everywhere. If the radioactivity doesn’t kill you, a Monolith ambush or sneaky mutant will. Stick to me and keep your eyes peeled.”
The Stalker checks his rifle, rocks the safety from off to on and gives her a wink, though his eyes appear sad as well.
“Welcome to Pripyat,” he adds. “If it appears haunted now, imagine how it is at night.”
Holding his rifle ready to shoot, Strelok peeks through the bushes on the corner of the house and signals Nooria to follow. Their process is more sneaking than watchful walking as they move ahead for a hundred meters, cross a street and leave behind the shell of a one-story building to their right and a huge, fallen tree to their left. There is the rusted wreck of an UAZ at the intersection. Strelok stays away from it but his Geiger counter emits a low crackle of warning nonetheless.
“Look,” Strelok breathes pointing at two buildings connected by a gangway. “This was a hospital.”
“Are people living there?”
Strelok shakes his head.
“But someone is walking there, talking to himself.”
Strelok immediately ducks. He aims his weapon to the source of the voice he must be hearing now too—it is coming from a human because only humans speak in words. But no human would emit w
ords of barely discernible, deep moaning while slowly staggering ahead, one arm outstretched as if in sleepwalk. Neither would any human have the long extremities of the figure appearing in the gangway or the ragged overall darkened by gore.
“Move to the left,” he whispers, ”through that passage.”
“What was it?”
“Move!”
Nooria does as commanded while Strelok slowly follows her, backwards in a crouched walk and ready to fire. He relaxes his stance only when joining her on the other side of the building.
“Izlom,” he says, ”that’s what it was. A kind of undead… wouldn’t call it a zombie. Zombies are brainless too but carry weapons and shoot at you, growling strange words—”
“Then they are like kuchis.”
“What? Kuchis?”
“In my language. Tribe calls them ragheads and Stalkers call them dushmans.”
“Dushmans?” Strelok snorts. ”Oh, I see… fitting parallel between them and the zombies.”
“And what’s that?” Nooria asks and points to a spot where between two high buildings a round, tall metal structure is partly visible.
“The Ferris wheel,” Strelok indifferently observes.
“It looks like a big iron flower.”
“You know, it’s a—a big wheel that turns around,” Strelok adds, noticing that Nooria doesn’t get it. ”Those yellow things looking like petals to you are gondolas where people could sit and adore the beauty of their beloved city.”
He wants to move on but Nooria holds him back.
“Why are you so cynical, Marked One?”
Strelok nervously looks around and sighs.
“Look at this,” he says raising his assault rifle. “And this.” He pats his armored suit and the gas mask fastened to his shoulder. “They protect me. But this is where I survive.” Strelok points at his head. “If I started to think about what a nice place it was, if I cried boo-hoo over the fifty thousand people who lived here, a third of them children, and all this misery—I’d just have a bottle of vodka and shoot myself. Would that change a thing? That’s why try not to give a damn.”
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Northern Passage s-2 Page 37