Balázs Pataki - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Northern Passage

Sitting on a rock, Nooria presses her hands against her aching knees.

Pain, leave me.

She senses the fatigue in her limbs fade. Then she raises her hand and makes a wave, shaking off the pain as if it were dust in her palms. Her fatigue is gone but the thought of the long road ahead still weighs on her like a heavy burden.

Navigating through the watery paths of Zaton is proving more difficult than it first appeared. Without a weapon suitable to protect herself from the packs of blind dogs and boars roaming the marshland, avoidance was her best and only defense. Luckily for Nooria, their barks and grunts had forewarned her of their presence in time. She could have easily taken on one or two of them, especially that the blind dogs appeared to be the dumber and weaker cousins of the fearsome jackals roaming New Zone, but whole packs were a different matter. Avoiding the mutants was time-consuming, however; she had to wait in cover until they were gone or take a wide detour around them that led her into places where anomalies slowed down her progress. Some she could see, like jets of vapor shooting from crevasses in the ground or grooves shining with an eerie green glow even in daylight, others she just felt. Maybe the invisible anomalies weren’t even there and it was just her premonition that made her stop. In this frontier between possible and impossible, where everything that appears ordinary can turn out to be all but, telling imagined dangers from real proved more and more difficult as she proceeded deeper into the Zone.

The wrecked ships and boats that litter the land made Zaton appear to her all the more alien; they were a reminder of days long gone when this part of the Zone was just a river like any other. Now they appear like the land’s memories of those days, slowly fading away in the decay and rot that the appearance of the Zone brought on everything within its borders, and it seemed to her that their dilapidated hulks echo the pain of the tortured Earth.

Despite all this, Nooria did find signs of human presence. Here and there, she saw campsites with still smoldering fires, telling of Stalkers who spent the last night there. When the sun began to set, she saw a small group of them cautiously marching towards the cranes in the distance that might have been a river port once, then falling in disarray while fording a stretch of water and even hearing one of them screaming kravasos, kravasos! when the water stirred as if an invisible creatures had been circling around them. Then they fell one by one, firing their weapons blind. The sight of two of them being dragged into the reed by the same invisible creatures that massacred them made her quicken her pace and move further from the dreadful scene.

On the ship wreck that was supposed to be the Skadovsk , a bonfire was alight even during daytime, making her guess if it is a beacon for times of danger when sudden darkness might fall. This was where Sultan’s people lurked, however, and she had no intention of running into them too soon.

First I must get back to Doctor’s house, she kept telling to herself. Top will know how to free Mikhailo. Maybe he can even bring in warriors.

Even if much smaller than the wilderness of her far away homeland, the Zone proved vast. When the sun finally set, sending its last rays into a narrow valley spanned over by a bridge high above, she checked the PDA and despaired over the meager progress she made in a day. The valley continued to the east, but her goal was to the south; going in that direction would have involved climbing up a steep hillside and going through a massive ruin beyond it. Proceeding to the east would have meant to pass by a huge anomaly that appeared like a curtain reaching up to the sky, blurring the view beyond and emanating from a long furrow in the earth as if a gigantic knife had cut the earth open. Though not a bit afraid of it, Nooria decided that navigating through either the valley or the ruins would be better done in daylight.

Not far from a derelict barge, she found a makeshift rain shelter that appeared good enough to spend the night. It began to rain after night fell but then, from the north where the Power Plant was, a dark blue cloud grew which soon engulfed the whole sky. It emanated its own light after all others went dark, accompanied by thunder so fearsome that she moved close the nearest boulder and pressed her body against it, hoping that it would protect her from the rage of darkness that seemed to even tear the stars from the night. A sense of hitherto unknown loneliness overcame her, as if left alone in a black void that was about to crush her and Nooria, whose ascendants built statues adorned with benevolent artifacts to keep the very same power at bay that was now unleashed over the Zone, felt fearful and fragile. While the darkness raged, she missed her man more than ever, touching cold stone instead of the muscles of a warrior supposed to protect and fight for her. She screamed ancient words of anger at the darkness, feeling her knees tremble and willpower wane, until a sudden feeling of warmth emanating from her womb gave way to rage.

Dark wind blew her long coat, tore the hood off her head and let her hair fly lose when she shouted “Darkness! I curse you, go away or feel my rage!” Then she felt the wind receding, the thunder diminishing and saw the stars begin to appear again among a layer of grey clouds.

Now, by the morning, all that Nooria feels is slight nausea. What fully awakes her senses is not hunger but the noise of a stone becoming loose close to her hiding place. For the first time, she draws the Sig Sauer P229.

Spending time with Tarasov was a good training. Ducking and staying in cover, she checks her surroundings in the direction where the voice came from. All the bigger is her surprise when a voice comes from behind her.

“ Ruki ver, Bandit!”

“I don’t speak your language,” Nooria replies, careful not to take any threatening stance that her opponent might mistake as a sign of aggression.

“I said, hands up!” comes the reply from the unseen Stalker. It is fluent English but with Russian accent. “Stay where you are, pindos . My gun is pointed at you.”

Nooria feels something hard in her back. A hand pats down her pockets. The Stalker is obviously not doing it for the first time but still makes the mistake to quit searching her when he finds the pistol.

“That’s a nice one!” the Stalker says. “Turn around.”

Nooria does as told and sees a lean face with cunning eyes and a nose green and blue from recent beating.

“I wasn’t armed,” he triumphantly says and shows her the middle and index finger on his right hand that he poked into Nooria’s back, like he would a rifle’s barrel.

It only takes the fragment of a second for Nooria to draw her blade.

“But I still am.”

The Stalker looks down to his chest where the blade’s point is directly over his heart. It would go through the Kevlar plates sewn into his armored suit like a knife through butter.

“Guess we can call this a Zone stand-off,” he says and smiles. “What about talking our way out?”

“We can. I am no Bandit.”

“You look like one. Wearing that long coat and all.”

“I am no Bandit,” she repeats.

“Okay, okay! Why don’t we both just take a step back?”

Nooria warily recoils. The Stalker does the same and raises his arms. She realizes that his right leg is wounded, because the string on his boot is untied to make place inside for a bandage wrapped around his ankle.

“Give back my pistol,” she says, flipping the blade in her hand and holding it ready to throw.

“There’s really no need to kill each other,” the Stalker says slowly laying the weapon on a crate. “See? Your turn.”