by John Mason
“I do… I know. Old kravasos is hiding there. Me, I’m hiding here. I don’t like leaving my hiding place. What news?”
“Captain… please give me a moment.”
Tarasov flags Ilchenko to follow him a few steps away.
“Things have taken a turn for the surreal, Private. What’s your view on this?”
“Sir, with all due respect, it’s 2014 now. Do you really believe that one man could have survived here for almost thirty years, all alone? Look at him – he’s more a walking skeleton than human being!”
“His ID card seems genuine. Look.” Tarasov gives the weathered card to Ilchenko. “Plus he claims to know a way to that damned factory. This means we need him, and need to play along. Let’s assume that what he says is true and he was left behind somehow by the Soviet army. What do we tell him? That his country, the mighty USSR, was humiliated and ran like a whipped dog?”
“I don’t know, sir… I don’t know.”
“And then that his country doesn’t exist anymore? And all that has happened ever since? The CIS, the putsch, Yeltsin, Putin, all that shit? Damn, maybe this guy never heard about Chernobyl either! As far as he’s concerned, his commander in chief is still Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev!”
“If we tell him, he will probably have a heart attack and we won’t get to that bloody place. And telling him all that would take so long that we would be sitting here till doomsday. I can’t see any option other than lying to him, Major.”
“Well, Ilchenko, one thing is sure – we can’t leave him here.”
“It’s your call, sir.”
“Yo, Major! Look what I’ve found.”
Squirrel emerges from the cave and gives Tarasov a battered note book.
“What the hell is this?” Tarasov says looking at the cover.
“Uhm… that’s a Homer Simpson sticker, sir.”
“I realize that, Ilchenko, it’s not me who’s been living in a cave for decades. But how did the old man obtain this? Anyway… let’s not waste more time.”
“So what shall we do with him, sir?”
“Put him out of his misery.”
“What?”
Seeing Ilchenko’s scowl, the major smiles.
“Out of the time capsule, I mean. Let’s hope it will not be too painful on him.”
Tarasov steps back to the old man. He is sitting on the ground, staring into the distance, repeatedly murmuring only two words: the column, the column.
“Captain… Igor Vasilyevich, listen up.” Tarasov squats in front of the old man and looks deep into his eyes, slowly, clearly repeating his name once more. “Igor Vasilyevich Ivanov. Listen to me: it is now the year 2014. The war ended twenty-five years ago. The Soviet army does not exist anymore. The USSR is no more.”
“What? Brezhnev is dead?”
“He is.”
“And no more USSR?”
“It’s gone.”
“Thanks to God Almighty! Oh, God has worked wonders, wonders!”
“You don’t know half of it. Now we will bring you home. Home… to Russia.”
“Russia?”
“Wherever your home is, it is time to return now.”
“Did we win the war?”
“Well… some of us were victorious. You will be among them, if you carry out a last order – from me.”
“But…” The old man touches Tarasov’s Ukrainian arm patch. “You are not from my army.”
“I am a major. Ranks did not change. You will follow my orders and guide us to the factory. We will finish our mission. Then we’ll take you to a safe place. You will be transferred home from there.”
“You speak differently… everything is different about you,” the old man says, touching Tarasov’s bulky body armor. “Your uniform is different also… so much better than ours. Oh no! You are not of my army. You are of no use to me.”
“Komandir!” Ilchenko speaks in a forced whisper, but Tarasov feels that his soldier can barely suppress his anger. “Let’s leave him to his fate or just drag him with us. This makes no sense!”
“But he has a point, Ilch,” Squirrel says. “You are not from his army.”
“That’s fucking right, Stalker! How in the hell could we be?”
“Ilchenko, cut it!” Suddenly, an idea comes to Tarasov’s mind. “You are a genius, you know that?”
Tarasov reaches into his body armor’s breast pocket and shows his father’s photograph to the Captain.
“I am one of yours! You see that? That is me! Kunduz, 1988! Look at it!”
The old man looks at the picture, then at Tarasov. His eyes open wide.
“Yes… that is you, Sergeant. So someone did survive! I knew it! The whole column couldn’t all have been lost… it could not have been that everyone died...”
For a moment, Tarasov’s mind blackens out. He closes his eyes, falling into a vortex of memories where time, dates and history have no meaning, turning his heartbeat into stormy waves of emotions that threaten to drag him down into dark depths where he would lose his mind, the desire for revenge being the only straw he can hold on to. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself back where he was, stranded in reality – a reality he needs to bend if he wants to keep his sanity.
“Captain, our shoulder flashes have been changed but you should still recognize a major’s star,” Tarasov says, pointing at the small patch on his armor indicating his rank. “I am a major now and outrank you, Captain Ivanov. We did not forget you and your column. Never… Now I am here to bring you home.” He swallows hard and releases his grip. “You must come with us. This is an order!”
A shadow of doubt visits the Captain’s face. “Is Brezhnev really gone?”
“Really.” Tarasov puts his visor on to hide his eyes.
“And he can’t rest in peace from the noise of all the bummers and whores in high heels walking on Red Square,” Ilchenko says, gritting his teeth. “Major… for God’s sake, bring him back to his wits!”
“Captain Ivanov, I gave you an order. Come, we go home.”
“But I cannot go home.”
“Whatever you mean by that can be settled. For now, you will guide us to the factory. I will not repeat my order.”
“No… not everything can be settled. But I will bring… guide you there, yes. I will guide you and take orders from you, if you will do something for me.”
“We have no time for more side missions, sir!” Ilchenko is almost shouting at Tarasov. “If he wants to send you to Kandahar to fetch his lost rifle or to Kabul to find his Party membership card – I beg you to say no!”
“Not now, young man, not now. After I have guided you to the factory. Please. Will you do something for me, Major?”
“What more could I do for you than getting you out of here?”
“It will not need much time.”
“All right. I will, if it can be done quickly. We have a mission to complete, Captain, and I guess you want to get to a safe place as soon as possible too.”
“Thank you! Good! Davay uhodim!”
“Where?”
“You don’t want to get to the factory?”
“Oh… of course. Are you sure that you can…”
“I am. I can.” He takes his heavy staff and starts walking up the hill. “What are you waiting for, komandir?”
Wilderness, 17:11:38 AFT
After a few hours of walking, Tarasov looks at the old man through different eyes. Maybe it’s the reduction of a human body to bones, sinew and muscles that keeps him moving quickly, or just the freedom of movement he has compared to the three companions who carry their heavy kit and weapons, but at times they have had a hard time keeping up with the pace of their new guide. He leads them through crevasses and over ridges on a path they would have never found by themselves. Squirrel occasionally stops to record their progress in his PDA.
“This new path will make me rich, man… I will be the only guide who knows a way to the factory!”
“I doubt that too many Stalkers wou
ld come here,” Ilchenko says, breathing heavily from their recent ascent through a narrow ravine. He stops and wipes sweat from his face.
“You couldn’t be more wrong about the factory, man. Rumor says there’s more artifacts than used condoms in a Kiev night club.”
“Mention night clubs one more time and I’ll just shoot you. Mention cold beer, and I’ll shoot you twice.”
“I wouldn’t care about you shooting me a hundred times if I had a Heartstone.”
“What’s a Heartstone?”
“A very rare artifact. Stalkers say it boosts one’s health like nothing else… just telling you because they’re supposed to be found around here. Sell one to Bonesetter back at Bagram and you’ll be filthy rich. Sell it in the Big Land, and you’ll get dirty filthy rich. Or keep it and it will make you live for a hundred years.” Squirrel scratches his head. “Pity there’s no artifact that would make you dirty filthy rich and live for a hundred years.”
“I’m not sure I want to live for a hundred years. Live fast, die pretty is my philosophy.”
“You’ll have a problem with dying pretty, Ilch.”
“It’s not far now,” the Captain says, standing on the ridge while Tarasov and his companions are still climbing up a narrow crevasse in the hillside.
“What do you mean by ‘not far’?” Tarasov asks him, nervously looking at his watch as he toils up the last few meters. “The day will soon be over.”
“About three hundred meters, Major.”
The Captain points forward as Tarasov at last reaches the ridge. Panting heavily, leaning with his hands against his knees to give his back a minute of rest, he looks in the direction that is shown. Just a few minutes march ahead of them stands a high wall made of concrete slabs. Beyond the wall, the auspicious buildings of a ruined industrial site loom. But what he sees between them and the factory fills him with frustration.
Breathing heavily, Ilchenko and Squirrel finally catch up with them.
“That’s great,” the Stalker says looking at the factory. “We could have just stayed at Hellgate. Shit!”
On the open rocky ground between them and the factory, deadly anomalies sizzle. They slowly move and burst out in fountains of fire when contracting, as if they were trying to deny any path leading through.
“And now?” Tarasov asks.
“And now we go to into the lair. Vperyod, to the factory!”
Carefully keeping a safe distance from the anomaly field, they follow the Captain to a low knoll covered with thorny bushes. At one point he stops, reaches into the bushes and moves the thorny branches aside. A large hole lies beyond, big enough for a man to climb inside.
“Here lives old kravasos.”
“Only one bloodsucker, then?
“And his family.”
A nasty curse is all that comes to Tarasov’s mind.
“All right… we rest here for a few minutes. Ilchenko, Squirrel - weapon check.”
“Yes, we better rest now,” the Captain says. “I will show you the way.”
Tarasov notices that the Captain’s speech is improving. Maybe if I talk to him more, he will fully regain his speech, he thinks. Maybe his memory too.
“But you have no weapons, no armor, no light. Nothing at all, Captain.”
“My staff never runs out of bullets. It also keeps the bloodsucker away.”
“How do you keep a bloodsucker at bay with a wooden staff? By beating it, or what?”
“You will see.”
“And what is this?” Tarasov asks taking the note book from his vest pocket. He ponders through the pages. It is full of neat handwriting and, to his surprise, even a few drawings appear among the notes.
“Oh, you took it… you can keep it. I don’t understand. It’s about a country called ‘Zone’. I found it a few days ago at an abandoned campsite.”
What Tarasov finds in the notebook pages surprises him. Several pages with notes and text about the old and the new Zones, mutants, probably of those its owner encountered here. Judged by the first entries, written in very bad Russian, the book’s owner must be very young, a kid even, who liked playing video games.
“Damn! After playing Call of Duty so many times it amazes me how inaccurate an AK-47 is in reality. Anyway, at last it’s time to get into the real stuff!”
Tarasov smiles. Hello, Mac, he thinks. Nice to meet you.
The notes he can decipher tell of missions, fights with mutants, expeditions with rookies, experienced Stalkers, and claims the owner has been everywhere in the Zone whilst under the protection of Uncle Yar, whom he had joined on his trip to the south in search of a new bonanza of artifacts. Tarasov smiles when a few familiar names appear – Sidorovich, the Barkeep, Loki from Freedom and General Voronin from Duty. On one of the first pages, he discovers a note mentioning his own base in the Old Zone. It is written in rudimentary Russian, mixed with words in a language he doesn’t understand but guesses to be Spanish.
“Day 3, 2014. S. warned me not to perform what Sidorovich asked me. He said that the Cordon base has new commander and it is not longer the… un completo desastre (¡Maldita sea! ¿Por qué esta maldita PDA no viene con un diccionario incorporado?) and that no matter how much Sidorovich promises to pay I should not attempt to steal those documents. I better skip this task.”
Praising the young Stalker for his wise decision and cursing Sidorovich’s shady business deals at the same time, Tarasov keeps on browsing through the pages. The language and vocabulary of the notes improves from page to page. Some early notes have been written entirely in the Stalker’s native tongue, but in the end the notebook tells of a steep learning curve in using the Russian language. A note around the middle of the notebook tells of an ill-fated trip to the CNPP.
“I reached that damned crystal dick and it messed everything up & now that mechanic of Freedom is my only hope. Damn this wish granter shit!!! Damn the Zone! Now it turned my most secret wish against me. Fuck this - I can barely walk and this crap is weighing me down but I would be an idiot to leave it here for the fucking Monolith, or the next moron who comes up here to make a wish & gets screwed up like me.”
Later notes tell about the journey of the kid and Yar to the new Zone, posing as tourists in Uzbekistan, buying their way into the new Zone and finally to Bagram. To his disappointment, the language of the last notes returns to Spanish, giving him no clue as to why the kid left Bagram or where he went. He turns to the Captain.
“Captain Ivanov, where and when did you find this? I hope it was not on a corpse.”
“No, no. I heard someone coming and hid. Next morning I found it.”
“You’re ready to enter a bloodsucker’s lair armed only with a staff, but a Stalker scares you?”
“A – what?”
“A human.”
“I know bloodsuckers. But about men – one can never know.”
“You have a point about that,” Tarasov replies and turns to his companions who are lying on the ground, exhausted. “Hey, you two! Ready to go?”
“Must we? I’m dog tired,” Squirrel whines. “It’s getting dark now. Let’s make camp and continue tomorrow!”
“I guess it’s pitch dark in that lair anyway. Let’s move.”
Ilchenko and the Stalker grumble with discontent as they get up, but follow him to the cave entrance. The Captain, however, grabs Tarasov’s rucksack, halting him.
“We need fire first.”
He takes a small pouch from the pocket of his duster. Carefully, as if handling a great treasure, the Captain unfolds the dirty linen and removes a pair of broken eyeglasses. He plucks a few branches from the nearest brush and starts collecting sunshine in the glass.
“Hey grandpa, if you don’t mind – I have something better.” Squirrel kneels down and, using a lighter, gets a small fire going in a second.
“Nice… very nice!” The Captain says admiring the lighter.
“You can have it if you want to,” Squirrel generously says.
The Captain wave
s it off.
“I played with that when I was a little child. Now I have better fire.”
He takes a small, black object from his knapsack and fixes it into a nook at the point of his staff. Looking closer, Tarasov’s eyes open wide. It is a black stone, shaped into the form of a blade as if crafted by cavemen. The Captain holds the chopped stone into the fire. After a few seconds, it glows, illuminated from inside and emitting a small sphere of light.
“This is my torch,” he says, giving Tarasov a proud smile from his toothless mouth.
“I have never seen an artifact used like that before,” Squirrel says in awe.
“You like it, young man? Good! I like it too. Bloodsucker does not like it.”
The Captain wraps the Talib turban’s end over his mouth and steps inside the lair. Tarasov follows him. As soon as he is inside, an unbearable stench hits his nose: the stink of rotten meat, dry blood and animal feces.
“Gas masks on, rebyata!”
Bloodsucker lair, 18:27:30 AFT
Tarasov finds his night vision equipment has been rendered useless by the unnaturally bright glow emitted by the Captain’s artifact. He reluctantly switches on his head lamp and gives a sign to Squirrel and Ilchenko to do the same.
I hate such tunnels, he thinks as they proceed in the narrow cave shaft. No space for flanking or maneuvering, only backward and forward.
“Ilchenko, keep your shooter’s barrel out of my back,” Squirrel whispers.
“Maybe you should move quicker, you lame duck?”
The Captain turns to them and puts his finger on his lips. “Quiet! Bloodsuckers have bad eyes but sharp ears,” he whispers.
“We do know that, Captain. But we should hear them coming – they try to scare the shit out of their prey with a howl before they attack.”
The Captain frowns. “Then you haven’t met a bloodsucker here, Major.”
“Squirrel! Why didn’t you say anything about this? You’re supposed to be our guide, after all!”
“Sorry, man, but I supposed you already knew everything!”
Damn it, Tarasov thinks, of course, that’s what Degtyarev mentioned during the briefing.
“Shit! Sneaky bloodsuckers are the last thing we need. All right, one more reason for you two to stop teasing each other. Let’s move on!”
