S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Southern Comfort (67 page)

“
Fuck!
”

Skinner’s voice and the gunshot following it bring Tarasov back to his senses. He grabs the Stalker’s shoulder and drags him away from the door.

“Don’t come closer,” he shouts to the others. “Back up the stairs, move!”

“Let me fucking go,” Skinner shouts, trying to wrestle himself free from Tarasov’s grasp. “It’s Vaska from the Asylum! I must help my friend!”

“It’s just a fucking mutant trying to scare you away!”

The Stalker’s heavy body suddenly becomes lighter as
Zef

joins Tarasov in his efforts.

“Hold him,” Tarasov shouts when they reach the staircase, taking a grenade from his ammunition belt. Nooria’s defiled corpse becomes clearer with each step he takes toward the door but, overcoming his horror, he leaps forward and tosses the grenade into the next room. A painful howl follows the explosion. Then all falls quiet. The apparitions disappear.

“I saw Vaska…” Skinner bemoans as
Zef
eases his choke-hold. “He was my best buddy… I believed him dead but I saw him… first he was in a fucking cage, and then bound to an operating table with fucking pipes and catheters screwed into his head…”

“It was just your imagination,” Tarasov explains, but his own voice is trembling too. “The mutant wanted you to run away in fear. It’s over. Vaska is fine!”

“How can you be sure of that? We must find him! Maybe he is still alive somewhere in here…”

“There’s no one here except fucking mutants, you asshole,” Ilchenko shouts and aims his machine gun at the Stalker. “Stop this moaning, you’re making me nervous. Very nervous!”

“You haven’t seen what I saw.” The Stalker stands up and looks at Ilchenko, his eyes molten with rage. “You haven’t seen those cages. I saw them, just a moment ago. They are for real. I’m through with you! I’m going to save my friend!”

“Skinner, if you want to live, stay here!”

“I’m a free Stalker, not a soldier you can order around. To Hell with you and your mission!”

Tarasov pushes Zlenko’s rifle down as the sergeant aims it at the departing Stalker.

“Skinner! We’re all together in this! Come back!” he calls.

“Fuck you,” the Stalker shouts back as he disappears into the darkness beyond the steel door.

His three remaining men look at Tarasov.

“He’s a dead man,”
Zef
murmurs.

“What was I supposed to do? Shoot him?”

Nobody replies.

“I couldn’t bear his moaning about artifacts anyway,” Ilchenko finally says. “I could have done you a favor, Major – if you still have the guts for things like that.”

“The soldier has a point. We could have killed him and taken his ammo.”

“I don’t need you to agree with me, monkey-man.”

“I’m with Ilchenko on this one too, Major. It was a mistake to let him go like that.”

Zlenko’s comments come as a surprise to Tarasov. This is the first time the sergeant has openly chastised him. Nor has he seen fear appear on the huge Stalker’s face before, though it is present now.

“What’s wrong with you men? Again: was I supposed to shoot him or what?”

“Yes,” Ilchenko eagerly replies.

Tarasov notes the agreement on the other’s faces. He places his finger on the rifle’s trigger. “Forget about that Stalker. Ilchenko, Zlenko, we search the lab for intel.
Zef
, keep an eye on that steel door.”

“If you say so, boss,” the Stalker replies, reluctantly.

Keeping one eye on his soldiers and the other on the debris on the floor, Tarasov looks for anything that might hold a clue to the scientists’ fate. He bends down to check on a damaged computer. In this moment Ilchenko fires his machine gun. A computer screen falls to the hard floor, smashing into pieces. The machine gunner shouts out triumphantly. “Yeah! Bullseye!”

“What are you doing, Private?”

“I was taking a screenshot!”

Tarasov wants to angrily reprimand his man, but then decides to leave him be for a moment. With his curiosity prevailing, and not sensing any immediate danger, the major continues reading Sakharov’s notebook.

Compared to Professor Herman’s research output from the Zone, our own measurements indicated a strange connection between how the C-Consciousness affected the Zone and the developments in
Afghanistan
after the so-called accidents. It is a proven fact that massive nuclear contamination alone is not creating Zone-like environment. Now that we have learned that the artifact hidden under Gholghola acts in a similar way to the C-Consciousness, we might get closer to the explanation. To better understand their similarity, we need to better know their differences.

While the C-Consciousness was an intelligent entity of its own kind and manipulated those who got in contact with it, the local phenomenon doesn’t seem to follow a reasonable pattern. Instead, it appears to influence all creatures by multiplying their level of aggression. Our observations of mutated carnivorous species have proved that this influence develops motoric capabilities in a way to facilitate the success of aggression. In other words, it first turns aggression into the basic instinct, overruling all other behavioral patterns; then develops physical features that give the affected species more chance to succeed with their aggression. It is the strangest form of mutation we have ever observed. We don’t know yet how humans as a highly intelligent species are affected. Probably individuals with a particular tendency of aggression and violence are more prone to be affected. However, appropriate psychological research needs to be conducted to clarify this. We were promised that in a few days the first test subjects will be delivered.

The excavators are still clearing the passages leading into the lower level. We cannot wait until they break through into the oldest catacombs. Currently we are set up in a room that we built between the former Taliban bunker complex and something that might once have been an underground fortification. The excavators are clearing it now. To facilitate our research, we constructed the test subjects’ cages in such a way that they can be lowered below. All we have to do is to expose them to the psychotic influence for a certain period of time and take psi-measurements afterwards. I have no problem with using mutants for my experiments but do have reservations about using human beings, even if they are criminals taken captive by our guards. But for science, sacrifices have to be made.

Pages with long rows of numbers and scientific equations follow. The words on the last page were written by the same hand, but the writing is barely readable, as if put to paper by a gravely unsteady hand.

Our expedition has been betrayed! There was a traitor among us, selling us out to a hostile power. I am an old and weak man – what can I do now? The only way to prevent our research results falling into the wrong hands is by unleashing the research subjects on those who hijacked our expedition… God have mercy on our souls!

The writing ends abruptly at the bottom of the page.

He has barely put away the notebook when a muffled scream comes from the direction Skinner had disappeared in, followed by a quick succession of shotgun blasts. The sound that follows the shots is not something that Tarasov would have expected to hear, though: a bellowing laugh full of malice. Tarasov glances at
Zef
and the Stalker aims his weapon and takes a step back from the door. He is breathing heavily.

“Maybe he found his buddy after all,” Ilchenko says with a grin.

Zlenko appears. “There’s another room to the right… should we check it?”

Tarasov nods and follows the sergeant. He keeps his weapon at the ready when opening the door, but the small room behind only holds two bunk beds, a table and bookshelves. A half-empty bottle of vodka and an open can of luncheon meat still remain on the table.

“Someone had his breakfast interrupted,” Tarasov tells Zlenko.

Stepping back to the computer room, he has to convince himself that what he sees is for real. It is not Ilchenko’s sinister smile or the machine gun pointing at
Zef’s
head that seems so surreal, but the sight of the Stalker sitting on the floor and weeping, bashing his head with his fists.

“What the –”
 

 
“I… I saw it all again…”
Zef
sobs. “When we entered the room – it all came back to me. It’s in my fokken head again!”

“Ilchenko, point that barrel elsewhere or I swear I’ll shoot you… what the hell happened to you, Stalker?”

Zef
reaches into his exoskeleton’s ammunition compartment. What he pulls out makes everyone’s eyes round with surprise: it is a tiny, blonde-headed doll.

“I can’t bear this anymore. I tried to forget about her. And when that damned Stalker opened the door it suddenly all came back to me… I saw her lying there!”

“Hey
Zef
, relax,” Zlenko tries to comfort him. “What’s wrong?”

But the absurd scene is too much for Tarasov’s temper.

“Pull yourself together!” he shouts and shakes the Stalker as if he was a malfunctioning machine. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I… I felt that desire again. Oh God, I swear I tried to resist it, I tried so hard, but she was so sweet when I gagged her, it was only supposed to be a kidnapping, oh God the whole fokken thing went shit, and her body was soft like butter, her neck just melted away in my hands, I swear I tried to resist, Jesus how long I’ve tried to forget her but now she came back into my head, oh God…”

They listen to the Stalker’s sobbing words in silence.
Zef
wipes his nose with the back of his gloved hand.

“That’s why I went to the Zone, to find that fokken Wish Granter, I wanted to ask it to make her go away, but then during those nights in the Zone when you hide in a hole in the earth and wish you’d be one with the dirt, she kept coming back to me… I tried to die by fighting all
kak
the Zone throw up against me but didn’t. Then I came to this fokken land and for what? She came now back to me and fok all weapons and all bullshit, now I look at her again… she’s fokken all I have and I’ll never get rid of her, oh God, now I don’t even want to… her long, blonde hair…”

“Enough of that shit, monkey-man.” Ilchenko grasps the doll and tears it from the Stalker’s hands before throwing it to the ground and stamping on it. “Killing little white girls, eh? You fucking animal, now I’ll blast your head off!”

Ilchenko aims his weapon at the Stalker but
Zef
jumps up and throws his massive body against the soldier. Before Tarasov and the sergeant can intervene, the two men roll wrestling on the floor, the Stalker’s immense strength against Ilchenko’s willpower boosted by inhuman aggression.

The major realizes that Zlenko, the only man left with his sanity seemingly intact, would be no match for the Stalker’s strength, so barks an order for him to apprehend Ilchenko while he grasps
Zef’s
neck, putting the Stalker in a choke-hold. Even with his hand to hand combat training, Tarasov knows that, under normal conditions, he would stand no chance against the big South African, but the steel bones of his exoskeleton and the Emerald artifact multiply his strength, making him more than a match for
Zef
.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” Ilchenko swears, held tight by the sergeant.
Zef
tries to grapple Tarasov’s arm off his throat, but his resolve is weak and his exoskeleton’s power inferior to Tarasov’s.