Author's Note: This particular story is an AU setting; the Brain Scorcher re-activated following the events of SoC
Loners of Yantar
I.
The old man in the black suit sat away from the burn barrel, the rookies in their ridiculous leather jackets giving him their backs as they strummed their guitars and smoked their cigarettes and drank their cheap watery vodka. The old man didn't care; he preferred to go unnoticed; going unnoticed was how he'd managed to stay alive as long as he had. With the rookies safely ignoring him, his swag-bag tucked safely between his back and the wall of a ruined house, he lit a smoke, fumbled for a can of beans, relaxed, with the intention of eating dinner and catching some much-needed sleep. He'd just pushed aside his cigarette and shoveled the first spoonful of cold beans in his mouth when, out of the blue, one of the rookies turned around and said, "Hey, grandfather, come over here and join us!"
"Not your grandfather, boy," he grumbled, "and why would I want to sit with a bunch of bright-eyed greenhorns anyways?" But a voice in his head told him, Wolf would've joined them. He pulled himself to his feet and walked over.
One of the rookies handed him a bottle of vodka to go with his dinner and said, "They say that old men don't last long in the Zone unless it was the Zone that made them old. Tell us something, grandfather."
"What do you want to know?"
The younger man shrugged. "Heard anything interesting lately? Know anything that might be useful to a rookie?"
"Yes, and yes. I've been at this for a good long while, tovarisch. What kind of ghost stories do the little boys want to hear around their campfire tonight?"
One of them, one of the younger ones, perked up and said, "Tell us about Strelok!"
He rolled his eyes. "Strelok. The rookies always want to hear all about the Strelok. I say fuck Strelok! Everything got so much worse after him." The old man took a long pull from his bottle, coughed, continued, "I'll tell you something better than brave, stupid Strelok and his make-believe wishing machine. I will, and you should settle down, because it is a long story. And keep the vodka coming! That's the deal: I'll trade you a story for cigarettes and vodka."
The rookies laughed, but a couple went off to find more of both. The old man in the black protective suit went on.
"Strelok. He was one of the first, you know. Guide and Forester and Strelok, and myself. I was never part of any grouping, though, and I bet you don't even know my name. I like it that way. I came here to the Zone to make money, not to get famous like some kind of idiot. But anyway, I was talking about Strelok. In the old days, everyone knew about Strelok, and Fang, and Ghost, and Guide, and Doc. We all heard about how they could go anywhere, do anything. We all heard about how they found a way to the center of the Zone and came back alive, and how they all disappeared one by one after Strelok lost his brain and went back by himself. Then we all heard about the stalker with no name, the Marked One, the rookie who moved through the anomalies like an expert. We all heard about how he didn't even know his own name, but he knew he was supposed to kill Strelok. Then he finds out he is Strelok, and he goes right back to the center of the Zone where he came from like a big idiot, and I'm sure he is dead this time. That's the most important lesson: The Zone takes what it wants, and in the end, the Zone will take us all.
"Things got worse after that. You see, when Strelok went back to the center, the Brain Scorcher—you children have been told about the Brain Scorcher, da?—the Brain Scorcher was powered down and the road into Pripyat was opened. Stalkers poured in from every corner of the Zone, knowing that there was an untouched bounty of artifacts lying right in front of them; and the military came, too, with their spetsnaz and their big helicopter gunships; and when the Zone had all its eggs in one basket, the sky turned red and we all weathered the biggest blowout I've ever seen. Maybe they felt that blowout in Kiev. Maybe they felt that blowout in San Francisco. But anyway." He drank again.
"After things quieted down from the blowout, and everyone was heading north—you've never seen a grouping of stalkers like we had that day, everyone excited to get rich from the new artifacts, I swear there were Freedom men and Duty men and Mercs holding hands and skipping toward the center of the Zone. I don't know how many got through, or how many had already gotten through before the blowout, but I do know that the Zone has been a lot lonelier ever since the Brain Scorcher came back on. Do you know what a blowout does to a stalker? What the Brain Scorcher does to a stalker? Don't idolize the Strelok, children. Strelok made all our lives so much harder. But I said that I was going to tell you a better story, didn't I? A better story than any glory-chasing fools or make-believe wishing machines. So listen, little boys, and listen well . . ."