by John Mason
“He’s a dead man,” Zef murmurs.
“What was I supposed to do? Shoot him?”
Nobody replies.
“I couldn’t bear his moaning about artifacts anyway,” Ilchenko finally says. “I could have done you a favor, Major – if you still have the guts for things like that.”
“The soldier has a point. We could have killed him and taken his ammo.”
“I don’t need you to agree with me, monkey-man.”
“I’m with Ilchenko on this one too, Major. It was a mistake to let him go like that.”
Zlenko’s comments come as a surprise to Tarasov. This is the first time the sergeant has openly chastised him. Nor has he seen fear appear on the huge Stalker’s face before, though it is present now.
“What’s wrong with you men? Again: was I supposed to shoot him or what?”
“Yes,” Ilchenko eagerly replies.
Tarasov notes the agreement on the other’s faces. He places his finger on the rifle’s trigger. “Forget about that Stalker. Ilchenko, Zlenko, we search the lab for intel. Zef, keep an eye on that steel door.”
“If you say so, boss,” the Stalker replies, reluctantly.
Keeping one eye on his soldiers and the other on the debris on the floor, Tarasov looks for anything that might hold a clue to the scientists’ fate. He bends down to check on a damaged computer. In this moment Ilchenko fires his machine gun. A computer screen falls to the hard floor, smashing into pieces. The machine gunner shouts out triumphantly. “Yeah! Bullseye!”
“What are you doing, Private?”
“I was taking a screenshot!”
Tarasov wants to angrily reprimand his man, but then decides to leave him be for a moment. With his curiosity prevailing, and not sensing any immediate danger, the major continues reading Sakharov’s notebook.
Compared to Professor Herman’s research output from the Zone, our own measurements indicated a strange connection between how the C-Consciousness affected the Zone and the developments in Afghanistan after the so-called accidents. It is a proven fact that massive nuclear contamination alone is not creating Zone-like environment. Now that we have learned that the artifact hidden under Gholghola acts in a similar way to the C-Consciousness, we might get closer to the explanation. To better understand their similarity, we need to better know their differences.
While the C-Consciousness was an intelligent entity of its own kind and manipulated those who got in contact with it, the local phenomenon doesn’t seem to follow a reasonable pattern. Instead, it appears to influence all creatures by multiplying their level of aggression. Our observations of mutated carnivorous species have proved that this influence develops motoric capabilities in a way to facilitate the success of aggression. In other words, it first turns aggression into the basic instinct, overruling all other behavioral patterns; then develops physical features that give the affected species more chance to succeed with their aggression. It is the strangest form of mutation we have ever observed. We don’t know yet how humans as a highly intelligent species are affected. Probably individuals with a particular tendency of aggression and violence are more prone to be affected. However, appropriate psychological research needs to be conducted to clarify this. We were promised that in a few days the first test subjects will be delivered.
The excavators are still clearing the passages leading into the lower level. We cannot wait until they break through into the oldest catacombs. Currently we are set up in a room that we built between the former Taliban bunker complex and something that might once have been an underground fortification. The excavators are clearing it now. To facilitate our research, we constructed the test subjects’ cages in such a way that they can be lowered below. All we have to do is to expose them to the psychotic influence for a certain period of time and take psi-measurements afterwards. I have no problem with using mutants for my experiments but do have reservations about using human beings, even if they are criminals taken captive by our guards. But for science, sacrifices have to be made.
Pages with long rows of numbers and scientific equations follow. The words on the last page were written by the same hand, but the writing is barely readable, as if put to paper by a gravely unsteady hand.
Our expedition has been betrayed! There was a traitor among us, selling us out to a hostile power. I am an old and weak man – what can I do now? The only way to prevent our research results falling into the wrong hands is by unleashing the research subjects on those who hijacked our expedition… God have mercy on our souls!
The writing ends abruptly at the bottom of the page.
He has barely put away the notebook when a muffled scream comes from the direction Skinner had disappeared in, followed by a quick succession of shotgun blasts. The sound that follows the shots is not something that Tarasov would have expected to hear, though: a bellowing laugh full of malice. Tarasov glances at Zef and the Stalker aims his weapon and takes a step back from the door. He is breathing heavily.
“Maybe he found his buddy after all,” Ilchenko says with a grin.
Zlenko appears. “There’s another room to the right… should we check it?”
Tarasov nods and follows the sergeant. He keeps his weapon at the ready when opening the door, but the small room behind only holds two bunk beds, a table and bookshelves. A half-empty bottle of vodka and an open can of luncheon meat still remain on the table.
“Someone had his breakfast interrupted,” Tarasov tells Zlenko.
Stepping back to the computer room, he has to convince himself that what he sees is for real. It is not Ilchenko’s sinister smile or the machine gun pointing at Zef’s head that seems so surreal, but the sight of the Stalker sitting on the floor and weeping, bashing his head with his fists.
“What the –”
“I… I saw it all again…” Zef sobs. “When we entered the room – it all came back to me. It’s in my fokken head again!”
“Ilchenko, point that barrel elsewhere or I swear I’ll shoot you… what the hell happened to you, Stalker?”
Zef reaches into his exoskeleton’s ammunition compartment. What he pulls out makes everyone’s eyes round with surprise: it is a tiny, blonde-headed doll.
“I can’t bear this anymore. I tried to forget about her. And when that damned Stalker opened the door it suddenly all came back to me… I saw her lying there!”
“Hey Zef, relax,” Zlenko tries to comfort him. “What’s wrong?”
But the absurd scene is too much for Tarasov’s temper.
“Pull yourself together!” he shouts and shakes the Stalker as if he was a malfunctioning machine. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I… I felt that desire again. Oh God, I swear I tried to resist it, I tried so hard, but she was so sweet when I gagged her, it was only supposed to be a kidnapping, oh God the whole fokken thing went shit, and her body was soft like butter, her neck just melted away in my hands, I swear I tried to resist, Jesus how long I’ve tried to forget her but now she came back into my head, oh God…”
They listen to the Stalker’s sobbing words in silence. Zef wipes his nose with the back of his gloved hand.
“That’s why I went to the Zone, to find that fokken Wish Granter, I wanted to ask it to make her go away, but then during those nights in the Zone when you hide in a hole in the earth and wish you’d be one with the dirt, she kept coming back to me… I tried to die by fighting all kak the Zone throw up against me but didn’t. Then I came to this fokken land and for what? She came now back to me and fok all weapons and all bullshit, now I look at her again… she’s fokken all I have and I’ll never get rid of her, oh God, now I don’t even want to… her long, blonde hair…”
“Enough of that shit, monkey-man.” Ilchenko grasps the doll and tears it from the Stalker’s hands before throwing it to the ground and stamping on it. “Killing little white girls, eh? You fucking animal, now I’ll blast your head off!”
Ilchenko aims his weapon at the Stalker but Zef jumps u
p and throws his massive body against the soldier. Before Tarasov and the sergeant can intervene, the two men roll wrestling on the floor, the Stalker’s immense strength against Ilchenko’s willpower boosted by inhuman aggression.
The major realizes that Zlenko, the only man left with his sanity seemingly intact, would be no match for the Stalker’s strength, so barks an order for him to apprehend Ilchenko while he grasps Zef’s neck, putting the Stalker in a choke-hold. Even with his hand to hand combat training, Tarasov knows that, under normal conditions, he would stand no chance against the big South African, but the steel bones of his exoskeleton and the Emerald artifact multiply his strength, making him more than a match for Zef.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” Ilchenko swears, held tight by the sergeant. Zef tries to grapple Tarasov’s arm off his throat, but his resolve is weak and his exoskeleton’s power inferior to Tarasov’s.
“That’s enough. Enough!”
Feeling Zef’s strength wane, the major slowly loosens the grip around his neck. Ilchenko has also run out of steam, and is now on his hands and knees, coughing heavily.
Tarasov takes the doll from the dirty floor and gives it to the Stalker, though now Zef is nothing more to him than a carrier for the Stalker’s Striker shotgun: an ugly but lethal tool needed to help him survive. He reaches into his backpack.
“Take a shot of vodka. Calm down. Once we’re back on the surface you can kill each other, I don’t care. But while we’re down here, you keep killing mutants. Is that clear?”
Tarasov knows his hoarse voice fails to hold the power to impress the two men.
The big man was right… I’m about to fail. I can’t control my men anymore. Maybe I should have just let them kill each other.
He glances at Zlenko, afraid of him drawing the same conclusion. The sergeant doesn’t return his glance. Tarasov too draws a gulp from the bottle, taking a swig during a mission for the first time in his life. The warmth of the spirit relaxes his guts, which feel like they have turned into painful knots during the past few minutes.
“Let’s move on.”
The fighters pick up their weapons, avoiding each other’s eyes. Zlenko watches carefully over them. Tarasov removes the magazine from his rifle and replaces it with armor-piercing bullets.
I hope it will not come down to me shooting my own men.
The sound of the magazine sliding into place sounds like a warning.
“Ilchenko, take point. I’ll follow you. Zef, fall in line. Sergeant Zlenko, you watch our six.”
They enter the room where the djinn’s corpse lays, riddled and burnt by the grenade’s countless metal fragments.
“Good riddance,” Tarasov says, stepping over it. Another tunnel opens to their left. From the emergency lights glows a warm orange light that is a relief after the eerie blue haze of the computer room.
Driscoll, the Brothers, the Colonel… damn, how I hated them in the beginning. How I wish they were here with me now. But if they could make it through here, we can make it too.
The tunnel descends for a few meters and leads to yet another steel door, this one standing wide open. Ilchenko quickly looks around before entering the room beyond, and then moves on with the precision of a machine between a row of cages and desks loaded with computers, stopping at a corpse that lies on the ground.
One lamp is turning around on the ceiling with a whining noise that reminds Tarasov of a knife scratching a plate. The noise makes him shudder.
“Another Chinese bit the dust here.”
“And a scientist too,” Tarasov says, checking the body but finding nothing. He looks around, hoping to see something that provides him with a clue.
What were these cages for?
There is an opening in the wall at the other end of the corridor, covered by a gritty plastic curtain.
“Maybe this room was a zoo where they kept monkeys like that son of a…” Turning back to look at the major, Ilchenko finds himself facing the barrel of the major’s rifle. “Okay, okay… just guessing.”
The walls of the long, narrow room are dark and shiny. Tarasov sees the reflection of himself and his men moving along the row of cages, all fastened to the ceiling with heavy chains. One place is empty, the chains leading through two holes in a mechanical trapdoor. They must have lowered that one into the abyss beneath, Tarasov thinks. Then the light of his headlamp falls on another body, poised on his knees and still clinging to the lever of a device fastened to the wall.
“Major… Mikhailo, you are bleeding.”
He looks down at his armor where blood has soaked through all the protective layers. Zlenko’s words making him aware of the pain. Tarasov feels an unsettling sensation, as if the stone sewn into his flesh by Nooria had become animated, but it is not his body rejecting it; the stone seems to move of its own accord. Two seams of cord fixing the neat cut have already burst. He closes the armor.
“Looks like an old wound,” the sergeant says.
“Not the first if its kind,” he replies without any intention of telling more. “And now… let’s see what this switch does.”
He moves the lever upwards. The device clicks to his reassurance. Suddenly a bright light beams up.
“What the hell? Where are we?”
Tarasov is dumbstruck as he sees a huge cavern just an arm’s length from him. The walls reflecting their images are windows through which he now looks down into an abyss. He wants to reply to Zlenko but only manages to utter a surprised gasp as he sees a human form taking shape at the other end of the room. Its mouth arches into a cruel sneer. In the next second the same terrifying laugh booms that they had heard in the level above.
“Screw you, motherfok!”
Zef steps forward, his shotgun spitting lead into the apparition while Ilchenko’s machine gun joins in. The bullets’ impact shakes the humanoid, but it keeps moving closer with each step. It strikes Zlenko in the head, sending him to the floor with a scream, then grabs Ilchenko’s machine gun and, ignoring the pain from the hot barrel, tears it from the soldier’s hands and turns the weapon towards Tarasov. He tries to dodge it but a long, brawny arm arrests him and slings him against the glass wall. Horror overwhelms him as he slams into the glass between himself and the dark abyss outside. Fortunately, the glass does not break, leaving Tarasov merely winded. Zef watches the major slowly slump to the ground, his eyes glowing with rage as he turns towards the mutant.
“You are one ugly motherfok. Come to me, get some!”
Lying on the ground and wheezing from pain, Tarasov watches the Stalker wrestling with the mutant. Zef’s face is distorted from pain and his brutal effort to match the monster’s power as they grapple face to face, the dreadful arms in the Stalker’s hold, a desperate human aided by an obsolete exoskeleton fighting something that was once human, but is now two hundred pounds of muscle obeying the sole instinct to kill.
Tarasov’s rifle has been kicked away, so he reaches for his Glock and switches to automatic mode, dragging himself closer until he is able to fire the full magazine of lethal Hydra-Shock bullets into the mutant’s skull.
Wounded, it gradually falls to its knees with Zef towering over it, still holding its arms, then the Stalker raises his foot and kicks the mutant in the head, breaking its neck.
“Fuck!” Tarasov grunts, panting heavily and spitting out sour saliva.
“That’s my thank-you for giving me back my baby, boss –”
Zef’s mouth gapes open but only a hoarse rattle leaves his lips as the tip of a knife appears in his mouth. He coughs, then blood starts streaming from his throat. Ilchenko’s grinning face emerges behind him.
“The Moor has done his duty… the Moor can go. It’s an urban legend that Shakespeare wrote, but now it’s a perfect time to quote it!”
In trepidation, Tarasov watches Ilchenko pulling his bayonet from the Stalker’s head. Ilchenko licks the blood from the blade.
“I hate racists. All the blood in the world tastes the same. Like… salty oil and metal
.”
Tarasov is helpless with his handgun empty and Ilchenko now aiming his weapon at him. “What have you done?” the major moans.
“I have finished the mission. No more yes, sir to idiots like you. I am smarter than you, better educated than you, and aiming a fully loaded machine gun at you. I am free now. In other words, I am the king of this fucking universe!”
“You are pathetic.”
“If so, why are you the one on his knees? An officer, a fucking major, falls to a private!” Ilchenko leans so close that he can feel the spit the private ejects with every word he scowls. “This is the moment of truth, komandir.”
A shadow falls on Ilchenko from behind.
“Indeed it is, Private… could you take a step back?”
“Last wish granted,” Ilchenko laughs as he retreats, “and what’s in that for you?”
“Not much… only that I’ll have less of your educated brains on my face when Zlenko fires his shotgun.”
Surprise is the last expression on Ilchenko’s face before his head is blown to pieces and his massive body collapses. Smoke still trickles from the barrel of Zlenko’s Benelli as he quickly reloads it.
“I couldn’t make it earlier,” the sergeant says, pointing to his badly wounded face. “The punch was one thing… but that beast threw me against something sharp.”
“Thanks, Viktor… I won’t forget this.”
“I never liked him,” Zlenko replies with an indifferent shrug.
The light is stabbing into the major’s eyes as he stretches out on the metal floor. He carefully touches the wound on his chest. When he removes his hand from under the armor, it is covered with blood.
Which drop will be the last one?
The sergeant sits at his side, his eyes like two black holes. Slowly, Tarasov sits up.
“Now there’s only you and I left, son.”
Tarasov is glad that his visor hides his eyes from the sergeant. He realizes how fond he has become of him and now, in this moment, how he would gladly give his own life if that would help Zlenko survive. He takes some bandages and a medikit from his pack and tends to the sergeant’s wound.
