Александр Конторович - Predator - Escape from Tarkov

I hurry on, constantly looking from side to side. Another turn, and I don’t have much further to run. There’s the bandits’ checkpoint. Anxious faces look out over the sandbags. Stepping out to one side, Vova nervously holds up his shotgun.

“Quick!” I half shout, half wheeze. “One of you stay here, the rest with me! Let’s move! Don’t take anything but your guns!”

They hover around in confusion, the useless sods.

“Who said they didn’t have enough weapons?” I throw the looted rifle to Vova, then crouch down, pull my backpack from my shoulders, and throw the webbing to someone else. I take two spare magazines for the rifle from my backpack and hand them to Vova, too.

“There’s more where that came from!”

“Fuck me, lads! Let’s get going!” shouts somebody nearby.

Nearly a dozen men come charging after me. We run back to the factory office building fairly quickly, and don’t meet anyone on the way. As we squeeze through a gap in the fence, I point to the window.

“Over there! Keep your eyes open!”

Bristling with gun barrels, the whole crowd bursts into the room with sleeping bags.

It’s empty.

“Take everything you can and get back to the checkpoint fast. Two guys with me!”

I dash out onto the staircase.

“Down there,” I say pointing to the grass beneath the window. “There’s a whole bunch of boxes and cases. Pick them up and get them back to the checkpoint fast. Just the two of you.”

With the rest of the bandits, who’ve already got the taste for looting, I run down into the basement. One of my companions is already chewing on something and another, without stopping, is gulping from the neck of a dark-coloured bottle. Where the hell did they find all that? Impressive.

“Through that door,” I tell them. “You go down about a hundred metres, and there’ll be a junction. Turn left, and you should find a bunch more bodies. I’m sure you know the rest.”

Hollering as they run, the crowd disappears through the doorway. I hope the sheer weight of them will be enough to crush anyone down there.

I sit with my back resting against the sandbags. Inside I feel empty. No thoughts, just nothing. Around me, the happy bandits are babbling away. In all fairness, they have a reason – plenty of reasons, in fact. There’s an impressive pile of all sorts of equipment dumped on the ground, and standing on a bipod with its barrel pointing proudly to the heavens is a light machine gun.

Coming back from the tunnels, the bandits looked like hoarders. Down there, they’d found more than a dozen dead bodies, and only three wounded. Who they finished off quickly, by the by. Now all the kit and weapons they found are piled up on the tarmac waiting for the boss. He appears soon enough, and I hear the bark of orders. Still, he’s not my commander, is he?

I pull the empty magazine out of my rifle and start to fill it with bullets. I should have done that earlier, but somehow I didn’t get round to it.

The boss gets the picture fast. Assessing the state of play, he doesn’t touch the guys I personally gave kit and guns to. The rest of them he sorts out ruthlessly. Some of his men are rearmed straight away, and he assigns a machine-gun team who hurry off somewhere with their new trophy. Only then does he come over to see me.

“Shit, you’re quite a piece of work!” He sits down next to me. “The lads told me what they found down in the tunnels… Fucking hell!”

“Aah,” I wave away his praise. “It’s good to have a job to do. But I did manage to lose a magazine.”

“Yours is a Model 5, isn’t it?”

He gets up, takes only a couple of paces, and comes back with three magazines for me. Just the right number for the pockets on my webbing – there’s exactly four of them. One more in the rifle itself, and I’ve got a hundred and fifty bullets ready to fire.

“With our compliments!”

“Thanks.”

“They call me Gavrish, by the way.”

“Denis,” I say, and then remember a long-forgotten nickname, “Foretop.”

“How do you do?” he says, offering me his hand.

Well, it’s not the worst time for introductions. I place my hand in his.

“You got us some really good stuff there! I’ve sorted it all out – we’ll put your share aside, fair and square. I’ll make sure of it myself.”

“My share’s not much at all, but the chief will send someone for his.”

Gavrish nods his head in understanding. He thinks for a while.

“Foretop, listen. I’ve got an offer for you. What about coming over to us? We’ve got a real need for fighters like you.”

I laugh. It’s a good offer, until he actually sees me in a fight.

“You know my boss. Imagine how he’d like that. There’s a good chance I just wouldn’t wake up one day.”

Gavrish shakes his head sadly.

“I’ll tell you this, though,” I say, changing the subject. “The building where those soldiers were holed up is very comfortably situated. Have you thought about moving? It’s time you spread out a bit. You’ve got the guns, and plenty of bullets.”

“I’ll send some lads out today and get Bald Kolya to come under our wing. He’s got people, but when it comes to guns…” The boss chuckles. “There’ll be ten more, no question.”

“He won’t refuse?”

“I won’t ask. I’ll knock him down a peg if needs be. But you’re right about the factory.”

“Just make sure your lads fill in the hole down in the basement properly. You never know who’s going to pop up from there.”

“I’ll get someone onto it now.”

Now I’ll have a socket to plug my laptop into.

Vova comes over to join us. He’s beaming from ear to ear. He’s already wearing the webbing, the looted rifle on his shoulder and a pistol at his hip. He’s kitted out now, and it’s like he’s grown a little taller.

“Over there. It’s all ready.”

The loot has all been carefully sorted. The guns are in one pile and the kit laid out next to them. To one side stand all the boxes and cases of ammo and food supplies.

The boss looks at his mob.

“Fair’s fair,” he says, nodding in my direction. “He gets first choice.”

The gang express their approval loudly.

Well, then, what have we got here? American rifles. But I’ve barely even got used to Shorty yet. No, I’ll pass. I move on, and hear sighs of relief behind me. Apparently more than one of them had his eyes on a new gun.

Next come shotguns – about ten of all different varieties. But I’ve already got a perfectly good one, so moving on…

Pistols. Here I pause and crouch down to rummage through the pile. No, I don’t really need anything. I’ve got my SIG, and it more than does the job. But I’ll take one anyway – I’ve seen them in the movies. You can switch them to burst fir and they’ve got a huge magazine – thirty rounds at least.

All sorts of webbing. What for? I’ve got one on me, plus the one I collected beneath the staircase. That’s plenty.

Helmets… Wait a second! On one of them I see something like binoculars mounted on a clever little frame. Night vision? That I’ll take.

“By the way,” I say, turning to the boss. “Hold on to those things, and don’t flog them off to the shopkeeper. They’re so you can see at night.”

“Yup,” he nods. “There’s several more of them. Do you need them?”

It’s breaking his heart. You can see it written plain on his face.

“Keep them, they might come in useful. I’ll just have a look at the sights – I’ll have to send one back to the chief.”

I didn’t bother to tell the bandit what I had lying in my rucksack. Greed can grow so fast sometimes it’d put a prize bull to shame.