Prip'Yat: The Beast of Chernobyl

by Kraus, Mike

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Lucas Pokrov | Yuri Volkov

  Lucas winced as he stepped into the reactor chamber. Without the benefit of his mask, he could feel and taste the radiation almost immediately. The flavor of heavy metals danced on his tongue as he tried not to think about the incredible amount of damage that his body was taking in addition to the damage already done by the black liquid. He moved as quickly as he could in the chamber, trying to stay one step ahead of the creature that pursued him. Venturing directly into the heart of reactor number four wasn’t Lucas’s original plan, but invading the creature’s inner sanctum was the best way he could think of to ensure that the beast came directly to him and left Yuri alone.

  After he had convinced Yuri to leave, Lucas followed him for half a mile down through the passages and watched him running across the power plant construction yard toward Prip’Yat before descending back down into the tunnel system. He told Yuri that this was for his own protection, but in reality he wanted to make sure that the young man followed through on his commitment and didn’t try to come back and help him. Lucas removed the wheel from the hatch before moving back into the tunnel system, ensuring that Yuri wouldn’t be able to get back in even if he had a change of heart.

  Before they parted ways, Lucas left Yuri with explicit instructions on what he should do. “Run through the city and don’t stop for anything until you reach your car. Remove the memory chip from the mask and then throw the mask and your shoes away before you get in the vehicle. If you’re interrogated by the military, tell them that you were going to meet a girl near the city but you heard an explosion and decided to call the whole thing off. Wait forty-eight hours and then get the information from that chip to every news source on the planet.”

  Yuri had expressed significant concerns over whether or not he would be attacked by the creature, but Lucas assured him that the chances of that happening were extremely remote. Lucas wasn’t completely convinced of this himself, but given that he was the one covered in radiation and had hurt the beast, he hoped that it would hunt him instead of going after Yuri. Besides, he thought, that thing is probably nursing its wounds somewhere close by. If he could find the beast while it rested, he had high hopes of killing it before succumbing to the radiation poisoning that was ravaging his body. No better place to look than the reactor chamber full of delicious radiation.

  Lucas held the cylinder in his right hand, keeping his thumb near the trigger mechanism. In his left hand he held his SVD, keeping it at a ready position to distract the beast once it appeared. Lucas could feel his muscles ache more with each passing moment in the chamber and the nauseous feelings in his stomach continued to build. At the level of radiation in the chamber, Lucas knew that he would soon succumb to more symptoms of radiation poisoning. Nausea and vomiting would simply be the start of a quick process that would result in his death within a few hours or less.

  “Of course, I’m not going to make it that long, am I?” Lucas spoke loudly in the chamber, trying to draw the creature in towards him. His voice sounded odd in his ears without his mask on, though he was thankful that he would be able to hear his natural voice before he died. Sitting down on a pile of rubble, Lucas swept his SVD around the room, trying to find the beast he was sure was nearby.

  The high amounts of radiation in the chamber wreaked havoc with his scopes, though, rendering them useless in the dark room. Lucas shook his head and laughed as he raised the SVD and fired a shot in a random direction. It impacted off a wall, causing the room to shudder from the vibration. A snarl followed the vibration and Lucas immediately stopped laughing. He dropped the SVD by his side and pulled out his flashlight, directing it to the location where the snarl originated.

  A large black shadow crawled along the wall of the chamber twenty feet off of the ground. The single red eye of the beast watched Lucas as it moved across the wall, keeping its distance from its foe. Never before had the creature faced an opponent that had successfully wounded it to such a large degree, and it kept a respectful distance from the soldier. Lucas stepped away from his SVD and held his hands high in the air, hovering his thumb over the trigger mechanism for the cylinder. He smiled coldly at the beast as he spoke, his voice dripping with hatred and anger.

  “Well come on! What are you waiting for? Come and kill me!”

  The shadow continued to move across the wall, watching Lucas as he wandering around, tracking the movement of the creature with his flashlight. Lucas felt a spasm in his stomach and nearly doubled over in pain. He began to cough as vomit rose unbidden in his throat, bubbling to the surface and overflowing onto the piles of metal and concrete in the chamber. He felt flushed as well, and a headache that started in the back of his head was traveling to the front, settling behind his eyes. Lucas struggled to stay upright as he wiped the vomit from the corner of his mouth.

  Desperate to provoke a reaction from the creature, Lucas picked up a small piece of rubble and lobbed it at the beast. It impacted on the wall of the chamber just above the creature’s head and bounced to the ground. The shadow’s body shook as it snarled at Lucas, then it came to a halt on the wall. Lucas threw another piece of rubble, this time hitting the creature directly in the head. Though the rubble didn’t do any actual damage, the beast snarled louder and began to quickly descend from the wall. It approached Lucas slowly as it closed the gap toward him. Though it had been provoked by Lucas’s actions, it was still wary of his intentions, particularly since it was not used to having its prey stand up to it in such a manner.

  The beast stepped down off of the wall of the chamber and stood staring at Lucas, sniffing the air. Unable to know the exact range of the device he held, Lucas resolved to hold out on using it until the last possible second. His body continued to shudder and he felt his temperature rise as his fever worsened. His vision began to blur from the headache and he had to struggle to remain upright against the onslaught.

  The beast slowly began to circle around Lucas, drawing closer, but still acting warily. Lucas saw its single eye swivel to look him over from foot to head, then it appeared to be staring directly at the device in his hand. Upon seeing the device, the beast stopped dead in its tracks and smelled the air again, then it began to back slowly away toward the wall. Shocked by this, Lucas looked at the device himself as he realized that the creature must have figured out what it was.

  But how? The only possible reason for the creature knowing what the cylinder was is if this was the very same creature that Iosif and his team had encountered in China. They didn’t kill it. That’s why the explosives were added. The field just weakened it so that it appeared to die.

  “How the hell did you get from China to Ukraine?” Lucas spoke again, distracting the creature from looking at the cylinder. As it trained its eye on Lucas, he lowered his arm and slipped the cylinder into his back vest pocket. He reached into another and pulled out a grenade and held it aloft. Lucas screamed at the shadow as he pulled the pin on the grenade with his thumb and then lobbed it in the general direction of the creature. The beast leapt onto the wall, scurrying high out of range of the grenade as it bounced along and exploded, showering the chamber with dust and metal fragments.

  In the confusion, Lucas reached back into his vest and pulled the cylinder back out and held it behind his back out of view of the creature. Seconds ticked past as the creature divided its attention between Lucas and the remnants of the grenade. “Come on you sorry bastard, take the bait…” Lucas muttered to himself under his breath. His request was granted just a moment later when the beast began to descend the wall again with its mouth open as it bared its teeth at Lucas in a manner eerily reminiscent of a demented smile.

  That’s it, keep on coming. The creature’s claws tapped on the rubble as it moved toward Lucas at a steady pace. Even in the glow of the flashlight, the creature appeared completely black in color, with no patterning or texture to be seen beyond the faint outline of fur across its body. For all intents and purposes, it appeared to
be a shadow, albeit a shadow with substance, form and deadly intentions.

  A wave of pain hit Lucas in his gut and he fell to his knees, coughing and choking as vomit once again came forth from his mouth. He looked up at the creature, now only twenty feet from him, and struggled to his feet again. Lucas’s hand slipped as he pushed himself up and his flashlight tumbled away, rolling away down a slope in the chamber. Lucas tried to ignore the pain in his chest and stomach as he stood again, facing the creature who now appeared only as a red eye moving steadily closer toward him.

  When the eye finally stopped moving, Lucas could swear that he heard the creature’s breath just inches away from his face. A deep rumble came from directly in front of Lucas, and he knew then that the beast was no more than an arm’s length away. Lucas brought his arm around from his back, revealing the small glowing lights on the surface of the cylinder. The beast’s eye widened as it noticed the cylinder in Lucas’s hand, then it snarled and began its leap forward to attack. Before the creature could move more than a few inches, though, Lucas shoved his thumb into the indent on the top of the cylinder as he closed his eyes and whispered.

  “This is for Iosif.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Yuri Volkov

  A mile away, running through the woods as the faintest rays of sunlight began to break over the horizon, Yuri stumbled and fell to the ground as the thunderous explosion echoed across Prip’Yat and the surrounding area. Yuri closed his eyes tightly, trying not to imagine what Lucas’s final moments must have been like.

  Now safely away from any radiation hotspots, Yuri pulled off the mask that Lucas had given him. He threw the rubber boot liners to the side and turned the mask over. On the inside of the mask, near the left ear speaker, he found the small indentation again. He pushed the indentation and twisted his finger, rotating the mechanism and freeing a small slot to open. Inside the slot sat a memory chip no larger than a thumbnail, painted black with gold connectors at one end.

  Yuri slowly pulled the memory chip out of the slot, rotating it in his fingers as he stared at it. It contained the entire video and audio log of Lucas’s mission, from the camera and microphone embedded in his mask. The only proof of what had occurred at Prip’Yat was contained on the chip, a fact he found difficult to comprehend.

  Once he eventually got back home, he wasn’t sure what he would tell his parents or his aunt. His appearance was disheveled and he was covered in dirt and cuts, though that was the least of his worries. His sole focus was on getting the information on the memory chip out to the world, no matter the cost. If he couldn’t stay and help Lucas avenge Dimitri’s death, he would have to ensure that the world knew of Lucas’s sacrifice along with the atrocities committed by the shadowy beast.

  Obeying Lucas’s instructions, Yuri hurled the mask as far away as he could, watching as it bounced down a hill into a group of trees and brush. He did the same with each of his shoes, doing his best to touch them as little as possible during the process. After retrieving a bottle of water from the trunk of the car and using it to rinse off his hands, Yuri climbed into the driver’s seat and gripped the wheel, taking a moment to catch his breath before he started the engine.

  A bright light appeared in the sky and Yuri shaded his eyes, surprised that dawn had arrived so quickly. When he lowered his hand, though, he saw that the light was not from the sun, but from the spotlight of a helicopter, one of a dozen that were flying toward Prip’Yat and Chernobyl. One of the helicopters had broken off from the main group and was headed toward him and the sound of the rotors soon filled the air, along with a stern voice speaking through a bullhorn.

  “Step out of the car now! Keep your hands high and do not reach for a weapon!”

  Yuri gulped and slipped the memory chip under the rubber lining of his car’s cup holder before he stepped out of the car. Showtime, he thought. Obeying the order from the helicopter he slowly raised his hands above his head and did his best to put on the face of someone who was shocked to be faced with a military helicopter in the wee hours of the morning. The helicopter landed a short distance from Yuri’s car and two soldiers in standard camouflage gear stepped out and ran toward him, keeping their rifles low but at the ready.

  One of the soldiers spoke harshly while the other circled his car with a Geiger counter. “Who are you? Why are you here? Were you in the city?”

  Yuri stammered purposefully, blinking in the bright lights of the helicopter. “Wh-what? I’m Yuri! Please don’t hurt me! P-please! I’m just here to meet my girlfriend!”

  The soldier rolled his eyes and stepped back to confer with his partner. “What do the readings show?”

  The soldier with the Geiger counter pointed at the device. “Everything looks okay. He’s higher than he should be, though.”

  The soldier who had been addressing Yuri approached him again, glancing down at his shoeless feet. “How long have you been out here? Where are your shoes?”

  Yuri thought quickly and began stammering again. “Oh no, you’re going to kill me aren’t you? I just wanted to try a little bit of the stuff before she got here! I was walking out in the grass and took off my shoes and just wandered around some! Please don’t kill me!” Though Yuri had never used recreational drugs before, many of his schoolmates had, and he did his best to emulate their after-school behavior as he spoke.

  The soldier addressing Yuri shook his head disapprovingly and was about to say something else when his radio squawked. “All units to the plant! Code red!” Upon hearing this message he looked at his companion who nodded at him and started to head for the helicopter. The soldier spoke to Yuri again as he backed away. “Get the hell out of here, junkie! And stop coming out here or the radiation will eat you alive!”

  Yuri felt a wave of relief wash over him as he nodded in response. The soldier followed his partner back on board the helicopter which took off and banked steeply away toward the power plant. Yuri stood and stared at the helicopter until it was a speck in the distance before coming to his senses. He jumped back in the car, dug the keys out from underneath the seat where Dimitri had stored them and jammed them in the ignition. As he drove down the field and out toward the road back to his home, he pulled the memory chip out and held it aloft, clutching it in his hand like it was made of pure gold.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Excerpts transcribed from selected BBC news broadcasts

  Three days after the event at Chernobyl

  “New information is coming to us tonight from the ghost city of Prip’Yat which, as you may recall, suffered from a reported earthquake three days ago. Reports indicate that this tremor was not actually an earthquake, but was the result of the detonation of a high explosives device inside the sarcophagus at the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant. We are working to confirm this report with our journalists in the field.”

  -----

  Four days after the event at Chernobyl

  “Military-grade video footage provided to us from an anonymous source shows us the astonishing tale of an entire covert operations mission that took place inside Chernobyl and the neighboring town of Prip’Yat. Multiple independent analysts have confirmed that said video footage, which is widely available on the internet at this time, is not a forgery, though the contents of said video are both disturbing and gruesome. The video and audio shows a team of two Russian covert operations agents moving into the Ukrainian city of Prip’Yat on a mission to investigate reports of a disturbance in the area. We have compiled a series of clips from this video to give you a brief summary of the mission, but we must warn you that this footage is extremely graphic.”

  -----

  Eight days after the event at Chernobyl

  “Thus far, attempts to find the only presumed survivor of the mission, a civilian youth known only as ‘Yuri’ have failed. Family members of Yuri have come forward to say that their son vanished in the middle of the night, and they are unsure whether he ran away to avoid media attention
or whether he was taken in for interrogation by government officials. Attempts to get comments from officials within the Russian and Ukrainian governments have been met with silence. This is undoubtedly due in part to the strain both governments are feeling as they scramble to contain the public relations disaster and mass hysteria that has unfolded.”

  -----

  Twenty-five days after the events at Chernobyl

  “Independent research teams have been dispatched to Chernobyl in an attempt to study the environment of what is now being referred to as ‘The Beast of Chernobyl’ in an effort to understand the origin of this new species. Environmental groups have also seized upon the beast as a symbol for their movements, denouncing nuclear energy as the food source for what they call ‘an abomination on the earth.’ Said groups in countries across the globe are pushing for independent investigation of their country’s nuclear weapons stockpiles and power plants to determine whether the creature discovered at Chernobyl was an isolated case, or the beginning of a trend.”

  -----

  Four months after the events at Chernobyl

  “The BBC is working to investigate reports of disturbances at nuclear facilities throughout the UK and Western Europe. We have been working with colleagues and reporters in the field in several other countries who have experienced similar disturbances and we will bring you updates as soon as we have them. For now, we urge our viewers and listeners to remain calm, continue your routines and avoid panic.”