Chapter IV: Deadly Anomalies and Bandits

 Diary of Lance Corporal Dimka Torodov, Day 4

The downpour was blinding. I couldn't see two metres ahead of me, barely enough to see the road. I had slept at Butcher's Depot, crashing on a couch. Reminded me of youth days back home, sleeping off hangovers on friend's couches. At the crack of dawn, I had set off to an area called Rostok. The Voyager would keep me hidden from prying eyes, I just needed to behave like a normal stalker. The Flea Market traders had told me that a faction called Duty kept watch at Rostok, and it was sort of a trading hub of the Zone. If there was a place where I could blend in the crowd, it was here.

The rain could help me even further. On a weather like this, who the hell cared about checking every visitor diligently? I would catch pneumonia rather than get caught here. This was all very exciting. I knew I should've remained professional and fixed on the job, but honestly? I was here, at the very heart of unknown territory, the one place in this planet of ours we could not understand at all yet. Hiding in plain sight, pretending to be a free adventurer. The thought intrigued me, despite my loyalty to the unit and organization.

• Well, enough gushing over the possibilities, time to put one foot in front of the other, I thought out loud and continued down the road.

It was a cracked old asphalt road, clearly built before 1986. I travelled past derelict cars, wrecked trucks and trenches with dog carcasses. By the looks of things, they had tried to break through just a little while earlier. Lucky me. On the other side of the trenches was a massive complex of industrial buildings, the entrance to this maze fortified by a bunker and sandbags. I had seen ad hoc fortifications here and there before, but this was different, clearly built after the second incident. Machine gun emplacement stuck out of the bunker, covering the entire road. A veritable fortress. Duty apparently did not mess around.

When I saw their ranks, I gulped. They wore a mix of red and black. Exactly like the ones I had killed at the outpost before. Goddamn, if they spotted me, I'd hang. The stalkers seemed so inorganized that they most likely would never even learn my identity, let alone form a proper response, but these guys looked like they were organized similar to a military unit. Despite this revelation, I kept my calm and waved at the biggest, meanest looking Dutyer. He was a large and tall man in one of those skeletal suits, and he waved back for me to come closer.

• Stalker, the fee to get into Rostok is 1000 roubles for the maintenance of order and protection, the man grumbled and opened his palm to me.

• What, no bad weather discount? Here, have my last roubles then, I said and gave the very last roubles I had to the man.

• This is only 300, you'll still owe us 700.

• Makes sense, I never passed seventh grade. How about this? I do a job for you and you let me pass.

• Sure. There's a group of bandits in Army Warehouses, I'll give you entry into the Bar and you get rid of them for me. Easy task, I know, roughly worth 1000 rubles, the commandant said with a proper fuck you-grin.

I sighed and nodded. I needed to become a trusted member of the community for the mission to succeed, and getting a bit of goodwill from Duty would probably not hurt. Killing bandits would also make the stalkers like me more, which was a plus. From my talks with the traders at Garbage, I learned that stalkers and bandits had a never-ending, bitter conflict. Seemed like something I could take advantage of. Bandits seemed far too volatile to ally with, but the free stalkers were so widespread that making myself trustworthy in their eyes would be great.

Once I had settled my deal with the Duty commander, I went further in. The area was very tightly packed with fences and dilapidated concrete buildings blocking the more overgrown areas. Only way forward seemed to be a hall with open doors. Inside was a single Duty member in a heavy suit, and from the roof hanged three odd plants. From the small shimmering they gave off I surmised that they had to be anomalous in nature. This, of course, meant I would not touch them. The Dutyer on a hanging platform told me to get out of there, I gave him the finger and went on my way. Most stalkers seemed to behave in a rather anti-authoritarian manner, which I tried to copy.

I emerged from the hall back into the downpour. There was now a much open area ahead of me, multiple buildings standing along the open street. From the right, down the road, came a militaristic march followed by some sort of propaganda announcement which I couldn't hear over the rain. From the left, a melancholy yet also calming song came, dulled slightly by the rain. I chose left instantly. Behind some ancient and extremely brutalist concrete buildings I found an uninviting-looking entrance. It led to a staircase where a man told me to come in and not just stand there, and that I did. Downstairs I found a bar that reminded me of the saloons of old West. Loud music, drunk frontiersmen, the air thick with the smell of grilled food, alcohol and tobacco.

The bartender waved me closer and gave me a pint of beer for free, as a sort of newcomers welcoming gift to wash away even a hundred rads. I thanked him and since he seemed like a talkative guy, I begun to ask him things about the surrounding area. Apparently this was the very centre of all stalker activity in the Zone, only real competitors to it being a village down south in area known as Cordon, a ship and train station far north called Skadovsk and Yanov respectively. East of here was an area known as Truck Cemetery, northeast the base of Freedom in Army Warehouses and so on. The sheer multitude of places and details the man spewed on me was dizzing. I managed to gather that there had been two artificial barriers up north, psi-installations called Brain Scorcher and Miracle Machine.

They would cook one's brain inside out, leaving a husk behind. This clicked in my head as I remembered the poor sods I had ran into in my travels. If there is a worse way to go, I don't want to know about, I thought. The things were apparently shut down by some Strelok bloke years ago, and recently had been reactivated, and the redeactivated by some other chap named Boris Unforgiven. Sounded like a pompous prick to me, who names himself Unforgiven? Either way, there was a proper gold rush going on in the Zone, stalkers streaming up north to get to the best spots, but it seemed that the Zone was fighting back the best it could, new mutants spewing forth from every hole.

I found it all very interesting but also overwhelming, and soon I had to thank the man for the info and finish my drink or otherwise all the stories would burst out of my skull, probably violently. With a little more knowledge under my belt, I picked up my rucksack and travelled northwest, through the badly maintained buildings and depressing hallways, to the other side of this settlement. There, a Dutyer gave me some info on the terrain ahead, apparently it was absolutely chock full of mutants, anarchists, bandits and anomalies. And most importantly, some kind of cult was constantly trying to push through there. I thanked him and walked down the very same decades old asphalt I had arrived on to Army Warehouses. The weather did not improve one bit on the way there, but at least I did not feel like any word I said could give my real identity off here. The moments spent in Rostok had been tense, and now, surrounded by the deadly yet enchanting and intriguing Zone fauna and flora, I felt relaxed, for the first time in the Zone.

This feeling of relaxedness passed as soon as I ended up stepping into the proper area of Army Warehouses. Gunfire echoed over the rolling hills and meadows, and explosions occasionally thundered over the landscape. Unknown mutant bellows carried from afar, and screams of pain, fear and anger sent shivers down my back. On my left was a hill with odd heat exhaustion effect, as if it was so hot out here that the air became distorted. Out of curiosity, I approached it slowly and flinged a bolt into the largest distortion. A scorching hot wave of heat struck my face, thankfully the gasmask kept my eyebrows from getting burned. A pillar of red and yellow fire reached towards the sky, maybe five metres tall. I watched it burn in amazement and awe. The anomalies before had seemed dangerous and otherworldly, this one meanwhile was magical and simultaneously, threatening. I stepped back from the immense heat.

Flinging my bolts ahead of me even more fervently now that I knew what the local anomalies were like, I made it back to the safety of the road. It was partially blocked by BTR-80s and old, washed-out boxes. Inside one I found some supplies and most importantly, hollow-point ammunition for my rifle. War-crime time, I thought to myself, even though such things did not exist here anyway. Made me wonder if there was some nutcases with chemical weapons, but at least most people would have gasmasks to counter some of those. A series of gunshots interrupted my ponderings. They were coming from up the hill, where a small run-down cottage was located. I loaded a magazine of hollow-points into my gun and sprinted up the hill, AKS-74U prepared for anything.

From the alarmed cries and curses I deduced that it was indeed the group of bandits up there that I was sent to dispatch. I crested the hill very slowly, keeping my one eye on the ACOG at all times. A bandit was skinning some sort of mutant ahead, while anothet one was laying on the floor, sobbing and pleading for help, clearly wounded. My rifle barked once, and the skinner's chest bursted violently. I moved closer and looked at the wounded bandit, still pointing my gun at him, unsure what to do.

• Hey man, please don't shoot, I'm just a rookie, I haven't done anything! Please, I need a medic, please!

I hesitated. I was a soldier of course, but being a soldier and killing a wounded man in cold blood were two separate things. He was a bandit, yes, but who was I to tell who were the bad guys and good guys in this strange place. Still, if I helped him, he could just as easily backstab me and hunt me down. What to do, what to do?

• Fine. Give me your weapons and PDA, and I'll give you a medkit. Then I give you ten seconds to get the fuck out of my sight, and if I still see you, you're dead meat, I said finally.

The bandit obliged. I gave him a medkit, he struck a needle in his arm for morphine and threw his pitiful Makarov to me as well as his battered and bloody PDA. He looked at me once more, gratefully, and begun running off. I watched him go, feeling uneasy. I was still uncertain what I had witnessed here, and I sure as hell wasn't sure if this wasn't going to bite me in the arse. Still, the mission was complete, the bandits lay dead and with any luck, I could fetch a nice price for their gear. One more day in the Zone had passed, and I was still alive. I looked back at the road, going back to Rostok would be the most logical option. But at the same time... I really wanted to see what these anarchists were like. Out of some odd sense of curiosity, I acted against my insticts and begun to walk further north, further into Army Warehouses.