“Honestly? He was frightening.”
“He is. But you remained proud. You didn’t beg him for mercy like many men did before you. You are a brave man, soldier. Besides…” She moves her index finger along Tarasov’s eyebrows. “…you have beautiful eyes. And besides…” Her hand slides down over his neck and shoulders to his chest. “…you are strong. I like you. Do you have a woman, soldier?”
“No… and does all this mean that I will be your man?”
“Maybe,” she replies with an enigmatic smile.
“And after we do this, and I find whatever I have to find, what then? Will I be free to leave?”
“You will be free…” She kneels down at his feet, applying the soothing balm everywhere except his loins. She looks up to his face. Their eyes meet. Her hands, softened and warmed up by the balm, now touch his body where no woman has touched him for a long time. “…but you will not want to leave.”
What is that thing you’re pouring over me, Tarasov wants to ask, in fear of being bewitched by some supernatural act of sorcery, but all he can do is to emit a soft moan. Looking at the girl’s face on which the last evidence of shame has vanished, making way for a barely withheld, wild desire that yet has something pure and honest about it, he moves to caress her. She gently pushes his hand away.
“Lay down now,” she tells him.
Looking up from the mat, Tarasov watches the girl remove her scarf. A rain of dark brown hair falls over her shoulders, streaming down to her delicate hips. She loosens the buttons on her apparel, letting it slide to the ground, then takes the jug and pours the balm slowly all over herself, standing motionless with her eyes closed, letting the viscous liquid flow down on her sinewy body.
Now he sees that her scar doesn’t only cover half her face. It runs down through her neck to her breast, making the untouched, inch-width space between her nipple and the scar look like divine intervention or at least mere luck.
His glance glides below, to where a woman is supposed to be touched in the most gentle way and where her skin, from where even the thinnest of hair had been plucked, reveals scars left by long claws or knifes.
The orange light from the lamp glimmers on her small breasts and hardened nipples. Her lips move in an inaudible whisper, as if praying. The warm oil flows down her body. Mesmerized, Tarasov’s eye follows a drop of oil run down from her aroused breast to her scarred belly, then to her inner limbs and drop down, as if it were the moisture of her flesh.
Then she looks down at him. The reflection of the flame dances in her eyes.
““Will you give yourself to me?”, she says solemnly, as if concluding a mating ritual.
“Even if I had a choice — I could only say yes.”
“Then you are my man now,” she whispers, lying down at his side. She closes her eyes and stretches out her arms, offering herself to him. “And I am your woman. Take me.”
Her voice is barely more than warm breath in his ear. Feeling her lips touch his skin, he closes his eyes, succumbing to the waves of heat engulfing his body.
6 October 2014, 06:08:51 AFT
Tarasov awakes to a loud knock on the door. From under half-opened eyelids, still heavy from sleep, he sees light falling in through the window. It must be morning.
Damn it, let me sleep. If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up.
The knocking gets impertinent. Tarasov stretches his arms and, feeling that the girl is not lying beside him, buries his face into the mattress to detect the smells of sex, oil and sweat again.
“You don’t have to look for me like that. I am here.”
Tarasov opens his eyes and sees the girl standing at the door. What he took for knocking was actually her nailing his father’s photograph to the wooden door.
“It is my surprise to you,” she says. “Because this is your home now.”
“Hey,” he exclaims, jumping up from the mat, “where did you get that photograph from?”
“Driscoll was here. He brought your things.”
She points to the corner where Tarasov’s Vintorez stands propped against the wall, a neatly rolled bundle sitting beside it. His watch lies on top. The exoskeleton stands there too — cleaned, and to his surprise, now bearing the desert pattern camouflage of the Tribe warriors. Moreover, in a much smaller bundle he recognizes a few things that had once belonged to his guide. Even the Heartstone is there. The sight of it, and that of Squirrel’s battered little harmonica, saddens him, but this soon makes way for appreciation. In hindsight, he now fully understands the girl’s words about the difference between Stalkers and the Tribe.
Men like or the Colonel might be brutally cruel, but they seem to have more respect towards certain things than the Stalkers… and Stalkers could be nice, but they’re not called scavengers without reason.
“Hey… that’s great!” Tarasov joyfully exclaims as he straps on his watch. “But out of all this, you are my best surprise.”
The girl giggles. “You don’t have to call me ’best surprise’. My name is Nooria.”
“Nooria,” Tarasov slowly repeats. “At last you tell me. You have a beautiful name.”
“It means: light. And your name is Mikhailo. What does it mean?”
“Archangel, leader of Heaven’s armies, things like that,” Tarasov replies with a shrug. “My mother was very religious at that time. But how do you know?”
“I have been looking through your things.”
He gets up and steps to the door. For a moment he feels like taking the photograph down, but as he looks at the girl called Nooria and her — or by now, their — mattress, which is still in a mess from the intense night before, he leaves it in its new place.
“Thank you, Nooria,” he says. “Thank you for everything.”
“For what?” Nooria replies with a smile. “Say thanks to my mother.”
Tarasov doesn’t know how to reply. Clearly, it was the Beghum who saved his life and who eventually put him up with her daughter, but it was Nooria who had accepted him and, although it feels difficult for him to admit, made him happy. Now, as he looks into her pure, green eyes and sees the happy smile on her scarred face, his suspicions about being used as a buck or being bewitched seem utterly ridiculous — even unfair.
“You don’t have to thank me,” she says, repeating her meaning. “Today you will go away, but you will return to me.”
Her words sound neither like a request nor an order but a statement about something that needs not to be asked, because there is no way for it to happen otherwise.
“Yes, I will,” Tarasov softly replies, and looks at the photograph fixed to the door with four rusty nails. “You got me nailed, Nooria… nailed for good.”
“Tora dost daram,” Nooria replies.
“What does that mean?”
“I think you know already,” she says and turns her gaze away from Tarasov’s eyes.
The Ghosts and the Traitors
Road to Shibar Pass, 10:15:47 AFT
“You are one lucky son of a bitch, you know that?” the Tribe warrior shouts to Tarasov as he drives the Humvee along the bumpy, curving road at reckless speed. When they’d set out on their way to the pass in the vehicle bearing the name MULLAH MOWER, the driver had introduced himself as Lance Corporal Bockman. His face is red from the strong sun. “I’ve only seen this once — it was a rag-head with long blond hair. He came all the way from Germany to join the Taliban. The women admired his looks for a while, but then tore him to pieces anyway. But you… not only did she save your ass, defying the big man’s will, but she even picked you for Nooria!”
“The Beghum must be a very important woman.”
“You can say that about the Colonel’s ex, yes!”
“What?”
“What what? I thought you got that already, partner. She was the Colonel’s woman. Still is, to some extent. The Bhegum’s the only one among us who can take him on. Okay, the Top too, but in different matters…”
“But this makes me—”
“Yes, you can consider yourself the chosen man of the big man’s stepdaughter, whatever degree of kinship that is!” The warrior shakes his head as if he were talking about something that’s hard to believe.
“Now I understand her attitude,” Tarasov shouts back, grinning. Yes, she is used to having things done her way, he thinks. All my bones are aching. “But I can’t complain. She can be cute if she wants to.”
“That’s none of my business, partner… and that’s not what makes her special anyway.”
“She does like doing strange things… But what do you mean?”
“Well, it’s been a while ago… One day we went on a rag-head hunt with Lieutenant Ramirez. Now, Lieutenants are cocky sorts and Ramirez wandered off to check out a cave on his own. Turned out it was crawling with jackals. The beasts tore his armor off in seconds. By the time we dragged him out, he had more poisonous bites on his body than hair on his ass. But the healer fixed him up in less than a day… Tellin’ ya, that girl ain’t natural.”
“Then how come she couldn’t heal her own face?”
“Once you have acid sprayed on your skin there’s no skin left to restore, is there?”
“I guess not. Anyway… it was strange too that she only told me her name this morning.”
“That’s good for you. Because if she hadn’t told you her name, it would have meant that you failed to impress her. You’d have ended up back in the Pit by midday… and no woman would have saved your ass then!”
“Do you have many such weird customs?”
“More than you could ever imagine.”
For several minutes, Tarasov watches the barren mountains, remembering the previous night and that same dawn, when Nooria had explored every inch of his body in the candlelight. “How did you get this big scar on your chest?” “That was a snork.” “What is a snork?” Something very bad and smelly.” “And this?” “That was a boar.” “You are very ugly, you know? We make a nice couple, soldier.” He remembers her giggles when she called him as ugly as herself. He tried to convince her about how wrong she was about herself by kissing her scar, only to be pushed back to the mattress for another round of pleasuring her.
Oh dear. Will I ever see her again?
“Can I ask you something? The two prison guards, Hillbilly and Polak… why do they refer to each other as ‘brother’?”
“They go way back, ages. The ‘brothers’ were among the first retainers of the big man, way before the nukes went off. Originally they’d been military police. Guess who they were after… Anyway, for one reason or another, they’d hated each other’s guts in the beginning. Then, during a patrol, they got themselves into a really bad clusterfuck. Those who made it out alive started to call each other ‘brother’, and the two of them have been best buddies ever since… especially nowadays, when they are the last ones still alive from that band of brothers.”
“I see… And what about you? You are not one of the Lieutenants, nor a Hazara boy,” Tarasov casually remarks to the Lance Corporal. “You must also be a newcomer, or how to say. What brought you here?”
“California ain’t what it used to be no more,” Bockman replies. The grin leaves his face. “Life is safer here… Anyhow, when I heard about the Tribe, I heeded the call.”
Tarasov is taken by surprise. Not even Degtyarev and the SBU, and even more so, not even the Stalkers in the New Zone, had heard much about the Tribe.
“Heard about the Tribe? How? Where?”
“Now listen up, partner… just because the Beghum asked me to take you to the Pass, you shouldn’t think we’re friends. Clear enough?”
“Enough.”
“We’re cool then. Yippee!”
“Hey, what are you doing? You are driving straight into an anomaly!”
“Oh yeah!” Electrical emissions crackle outwards and explode under the Humvee with a row of sharp, crashing thunder, but to Tarasov’s astonishment nothing happens to the vehicle.
Lance Corporal Bockman gives him a triumphant smirk. “State of the badass art… pimped by yours truly!”
Shibar Pass, 11:10:39 AFT
Tarasov watches the dust cloud disappearing behind a hill as the Humvee returns to the Tribe’s stronghold, far away beyond the canyons and mountains to the west, and opens his PDA.
The map shows a valley to the south of his position where the ruins of Bhegum Madar’s village supposedly lie hidden amongst the overgrown vegetation. The valley appears mostly green, just like on the display, but the digital map fails to reveal the red and blue, pulsating areas that look to Tarasov like dense anomaly fields. The path marked on the PDA tells him to find the village first, and from there guides him to a trail leading up to a plateau overlooking the valley.
He unslings the Vintorez from his shoulder. When he was reunited with his gear that morning, he’d found that someone had cleaned and applied a strange, antistatic substance to the gun metal that repelled even the finest particles of dust. Now, switching the safety catch off, Tarasov starts walking towards the valley, his eyes ceaselessly scanning the surroundings.
Jackals yelp from a short distance. Hiding behind a rock, he observes them fighting over something that looks like a body. Indeed, it had to be some kind of food: the mutants were so intent upon it that they remained unaware of his presence. The major cautiously raises the rifle. Two jackals become startled as he hits the first, and even the last one runs away after the second victim falls too. He fires again. The yelp abruptly ends.
A bumpy, broken tarmac road leads into the forest. On the roadside, a blue sign stands with white Pashtu and Latin letters. The latter have all but disappeared, blasted away by many bullet holes, but the number 2 is still visible.
I hope that is the correct distance to the village.
Keeping close to the low mud walls lining the road, he cautiously moves on. The trees have grown so high that their foliage intertwines above the road, forming a kind of tunnel. Rays of light seep through and illuminate the dense vegetation.
Tarasov sees a vibrant spot ahead, as if the cracks in the tarmac emanate steam. Approaching within a couple of feet, he notices that it’s not the only occurrence: the whole road looks like a landscape of miniature volcanoes.
Small but lethal, Tarasov thinks as he tosses an empty pistol shell into the closest anomaly and watches it evaporate with a fizzing sparkle. He switches on his detector and bright lights appear on the green display, indicating many anomalies. It also indicates one green dot deep inside the anomaly field.
Too far. Damn it, I could use another artifact.
He sees a single whole mud brick lying on the ground near to a wall and, guided by sudden inspiration, kicks more bricks from the dilapidated wall before throwing them in the direction of the indicated artifact to form a path. Cautiously stepping on it, he makes his way through the anomaly field and finally reaches the spot where a small spherical object gleams in one of the cracks. The Geiger counter’s ticking gets faster as he crouches down to pick the artifact up, the indicator reaching almost into the yellow area.
I’ll need to ask Nooria if she knows more about this one.
The Geiger counter’s indicator drops back to a safer level when Tarasov puts the artifact into the container on his belt and, after a few leaps, he is out of the anomaly field and free to move on.
The undergrowth becomes more dense as he proceeds until the road narrows into a path. Tarasov ducks as something moves not far from him and he raises his weapon, waiting. The bushes rattle again, as if something large and heavy has moved behind them. A little distance away, a mutant appears, and for a moment Tarasov and the hind look into each other’s eyes. Spooked, the creature gracefully leaps back into the forest, leaving Tarasov to sigh with relief before pushing on once more.
After a protracted period of more watchful sneaking, an ochre ruin appears. Once it must have stood directly on the road, but now high bushes hide most of it from view. Looking around, Tarasov sees the ruins.
The village at l
ast.
Ruined Village, 13:46:02 AFT
Tarasov is creeping deeper into the ruined village when he hears a noise so strange that at first he doesn’t believe his ears. All the same, he stands still, listening, but hears only the beat of his heart and the Geiger counter’s slow ticking. But then the sound comes again.
No way. It cannot be.
But when the sound arrives a third time, there seems to be no doubt: it is the faint noise of someone crying.
Damn, this place is creepy.
A glance at his radiation meter assures him that the area would be too dangerous for anyone to enter without a protective suit and helmet. But the crying is there, somewhere deep among the overgrown ruins.
I better check it out instead of turning my back on it. This place reeks of danger.
Following the cry, he reaches an opening in the forest that must have once been the central square of the village. The wreck of an American truck stands in the middle of the area, its tires having rotted away long ago, the bullet-riddled windows opaque with dust and age. The absence of Tribe-like decoration tells Tarasov that it must have been destroyed during the Bush wars.
I can probably skip checking this one out.
His compass tells him that the trail to the plateau should be close. Turning to face that direction, Tarasov hears the crying getting stronger. A human figure suddenly appears in a dark hole that was once a window, passing by so quickly that he wishes he could rub his eyes under the helmet’s visor. The crying is louder, clearer, and Tarasov realizes it is a child sobbing. Unable to bear the sound of the disconsolate voice, he takes one step closer… and sees a man standing by the next ruin. He is about to call out, but then notices details other than the long white gown that the silent stranger is wearing and his grey beard. The major falls back a step as he realizes that the man’s eyes are missing, together with the top of his skull. The beard grows red from the blood that now pours out from his wounds. Gasping, Tarasov ducks and raises his gun, as if he could hit an apparition with a translucent body.
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