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

“Why are you so cynical, Marked One?”

Strelok nervously looks around and sighs.

“Look at this,” he says raising his assault rifle. “And this.” He pats his armored suit and the gas mask fastened to his shoulder. “They protect me. But this is where I survive.” Strelok points at his head. “If I started to think about what a nice place it was, if I cried boo-hoo over the fifty thousand people who lived here, a third of them children, and all this misery—I’d just have a bottle of vodka and shoot myself. Would that change a thing? That’s why try not to give a damn.”

Nooria bows her head. “You have a good heart. I like you.”

The Stalker takes his binoculars to survey the area ahead.

“Look, that building at eleven o’clock was a school. Now it’s little snorks being educated there. I don’t see anything suspicious but one can never now… We must be very cautious here.”

Strelok moves on but after a few steps turns back to Nooria. “Do you really like me?”

“Yes.”

“Then keep watching my back.”

They make their way through a gate in the fence to their right and then, across the space between the wings of a two-story, U-shaped building, around a low structure that might have been a greenhouse once. Nooria treads as cautiously as she can, yet a piece of glass that lies unseen in the grass breaks as she steps on it. Strelok signals her to freeze.

A long growl echoes in the school building. Before they realize that the echo is actually several mutants answering each other, the first snork already appears on the roof. It looks around and leaps down in a long arch, followed by several more. They roll on the ground as they touch down and start moving around the courtyard, apparently without a clue. But when Nooria peeks over the low wall of the greenhouse, she sees them sniffing the air in search of prey.

Finding nothing, they move back to their lair one by one. Their growl sounds hungry and disappointed.

Strelok jerks his head as a sign to move on. He only dares to talk when they have crossed another set of climbing bars and slipped through the fence, leaving the mutant-infested ruin behind them.

“Phew,” sighs Strelok. “Thanks God for November rain… in summer, when one’s soaked in sweat and smells like a dog after spending days in these suits, those beasts can smell a man from a hundred meters!”

“Is it still far?”

“We’ve arrived,” Strelok says. “Guide is living in one of those tall buildings over there with the Vine anomaly in between. Feel like climbing?”

Nooria looks in the direction where Strelok is pointing. Growing from a crater between two towering apartment blocks, twisted vines stretch out and run up the grey concrete walls like long strands of wet hair sticking to the skin. If the horribly mutated tree—if it had ever been a tree—wasn’t foreboding enough, the bright cloud of green, almost solid gas travelling along the vines certainly is.

“Climbing?” Nooria skeptically asks. “Even if it supports our weight, anomaly would kill us! Do we really need to climb?”

“Just kidding,” Strelok replies and gives Nooria a mischievous smile. “We’re not in a video game, are we? No, no… come, we’re almost there.”

They reach a wide open area that might have been a town square once, but now more resembling a sparse forest between the apartment towers from where they are approaching and a large building with a mural on its corner. Wrecked cars litter the overgrown square, as if an immense power had lifted a rusty bus and a truck and smashed them to the ground, separating the driver’s cabin from the chassis. A white Zaporozhets is buried axle-deep into the ground.

In front of the building with the mural and in the middle of a low pool that might have been a fountain once, a blackened statue towers. It resembles an immensely strong man holding something in his arms, delicately formed yet appearing so heavy that the muscles on his massive limbs bulge as he tries to hold it upwards.

“See the River Port? Yes, that ruined, long building with the small tower on the roof. That’s where we’re going.”

Strelok moves on. Then he slows his steps, looks at the statue and sighs.

“Yes, it happened right here… I left my lucky shooter behind for a friend,” he pensively says and pats his rifle, “and was only armed with a shitty carbine. Monolith had us under crossfire, there, from that port building and their snipers from over there, that tall house with the large iron letters on its roof… We were running like hell to the choppers sent in to evacuate us, and then out of those bushes came a huge Monolith fighter, shouting his glory to the Monolith! nonsense. My carbine jammed, he was already aiming his rifle at me and for a moment I thought, ’oh God, will his gorilla-face gas mask be the last thing I see in my life?’ but then couldn’t see anything because Mikhailo jumped in and took the bullets for me. Next moment the Monolithian was dead, I think Alex Degtyarev was who finished him off when he came running up our right flank, there, after knocking sense into a shell-shocked Spetsnaz medic… He and Colonel Kovalsky dragged Mikhailo to the nearest Mi-24 and I remember, they hit the hatch with his head in the process and he was cursing at them like a sailor, even with his chest covered with blood—” Strelok chuckles. “Yes, it happened right here, at the Prometheus statue.”

“It was Operation Fairway,” Nooria says. “He told me about it.”

“Yes. Luckily for us, the Monolith was already weakened at that time. We killed scores of them, then Duty and Freedom patrols foraying into Pripyat did the rest. Guide told me he once saw them fighting a Monolith squad together. Hard to believe, eh?”

“Why is Guide hiding in such a dreadful place?”

“He’s obsessed with all things Monolith. The river port had been their stronghold before we kicked their asses. Guide is looking for anything that can help him to understand them better. If you ask me, he’s compensating for not reaching the Wish Granter… All right, it’s time to tell him we’re coming.”

Strelok takes out his PDA. “Guide, do you copy?”

He waits a few heartbeats before repeating the call but no reply comes. Nooria is already thinking about coming so far in vain when Strelok’s PDA beeps.

“I’m busy. Leave me alone.”

“Guide, it’s me,” Strelok speaks into the device. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it. I’m moving in with a friend. Do us a favor and don’t shoot at us, all right?”

“Marked One? What the hell?”

“We’re inbound from the cinema. Watch over our approach.”

“Prinyal,” comes the Russian roger-that.

Strelok moves out. The square between their position and the river port is covered with dense bush and the odd pine tree, their roots having forced the stone plates that had once covered the square to bulge and turn up from the ground. They are about to walk through a hole in the barbed wire fencing the port building when the Stalker’s PDA beeps again.

“Stay put. Small squad approaching from your nine. Hundred meters.”

“Monolith?” Strelok asks under his breath.

“Negative. Bandits. Keep low.”

Strelok puts his finger to his lips, signaling Nooria to duck. Now they can hear the faint chatter of the approaching Bandits.

“—so I was kicking his head till he was dead, mwaha!”

“And what was in his stash?”

“Closer,” they hear Guide’s whisper in the PDA, “slow down, guys, please slow down.”

“I had hoped for a dirty magazine but a can of rotten meat was all I found!”

“That sucks, tipa , that really sucks!”