Exposure, Chapter 2
When Natasha opened her eyes, her very first thought was amazement at how badly her entire body could hurt and yet she felt no urge to scream. Her second thought was the realization that it wasn't that she didn't want to scream- in fact she was screaming as loud as she could- but her throat was so dry that the only noise which came up was the stale whistle of oven-baked lungs.
Every pore of her skin stung like a swelling bug bite, but she could hardly feel the texture of the dirt floor she was lying on. Her face was crusted over with a mixture of dust and old blood- her eyes and ears were caked with it, her nostrils and mouth too.
It was a lonely three minutes before she finally approached the idea that she was alone in this dark space, whatever it was. It was not entirely her fault; her head buzzed every time a thought more complicated than ow crossed a neuron.
She sat up first of all, cradling her head between her knees, her thoughts slamming into the brick wall of whole-body pain as she tried to recollect her memories of last night. Assuming it wasn't still night. Groaning, she threw herself to her feet, swinging and yelling as she careened around the room, until she slammed her face into a wall and her hand brushed something that felt very much like a door handle.
She felt a sudden rush of excitement, wordless but jubilant, as the idea of a door handle began to proliferate amongst the angry red flares of throbbing pain. She didn't stop to panic, not knowing where it is, or if it was locked; it was good enough that there was one. She clung to the thought of an exit as she smeared herself across the wall, banging her hips and elbows into bits of furniture and pricking her palms full of splinters until suddenly her fingers found the handle. Then she wrenched it open, stumbling up the steps she couldn't see, now blinded not by darkness but by the light of the steely gray morning.
The air was good though. It was open, it was moving, smelling woodsy and sour, but living. As she crawled up out of the cellar, she saw a collecting pond, mud, a dripping tap, and crawled towards it, consumed with nothing but her overwhelming thirst.
No thoughts of radioactivity, parasites, bacteria, toxins, industrial waste or anomalies. She crawled straight into the pond and laid there with just her nose above the surface, her eyes rolled back in her head as its cool murk soaked into her clothes and her burning skin. She drank deeply, and didn't stop until she felt so bloated over that it was coming out her nose. Only then did she climb back out of the water, resting at its side, her thoughts slowly recollecting.
As she looked into the water, she realized something was deeply amiss with her face. Not damage- she expected to see burns and scars from last night's hell. All she had to say for her nightmare were a few cuts from sharp branches. She examined her arms in the light, and found no serious wounds; not burns nor gashes, not a mark to be found. Hopeful, she tried to stand up— and her left ankle gave way immediately.
Now she screamed, hugging her leg close to her chest as she twisted on the ground, tears streaming out of her eyes. Her examination of her ankle was less than methodical, hasty and agonied. She saw strips of flesh torn out, the whole area stained red with clots and scabs, thought she saw bone, loose tendons.
Before she even thought to call an ambulance, or scream for help, a part of her interrupted and said, "Help yourself." A part of herself she hadn't heard since she was thirteen in Donetsk.
She wiped away her tears and took a deep breath, examining her ankle more carefully. It was a mess, but less visible tearing than she thought. The wound would have to be sterilized, likely with vodka. Anesthetics would be helpful, but unlikely forthcoming. Given that she could still move her foot, albeit painfully, she did not have a broken ankle.
Sitting up, she took in her surroundings: the cellar to her left, beneath a single story farm house; to her right, a long, low shed that might have been a stable. Beyond them, trees and bushes dotting grassy fields filled with herbs and flowering plants waist high and taller. In front, she could see a winding dirt path obscured with more bushes and grass. But no people.
For which she was thankful, surprisingly. She didn't think much on it, but crawled back into the cellar. Five minutes of limping around the room and running her hands through drawers and boxes she still couldn't see found her with wire, oil rags, and a positively ancient bottle of vodka.
She laid her ankle on a bed of cloth over the dirt, and sparingly rinsed it with the vodka, daubing with another rag and chewing a third to muffle her screams. Cleaned of old blood, she soaked a fourth rag through and clamped it over the wound. She worked the wire at the rag until she forced it through, then twisted the wire until it kept the vodka-soaked rag flat over her ankle. It burned, but not so badly as her skin. She replaced her sock over the impromptu bandage, gingerly put her boot back on, and tested her stance.
It hurt. A lot. But she could walk on it. She would have to.
There were still a few decaliters left in the bottle, so she emptied it, coughing and crying, baring her teeth and grimacing at the steel gray sky.
Yet that still left her with only her worn clothes and a hammer, rags and an empty bottle. No compass, no skills, only a whole body ache and the heavy air, pressing down on her like a blanket of ash. No one around her, neither human nor animal, though she wasn't sure she wanted either.
Washer. He had been there. Dragged her to this place. Thrown her into the door. Saved her life. Several times. Comforting, strong and brave. And yet she had not noticed his absence until now, nearly an hour on.
No— she had. She knew he wasn't there. But she had held herself to the idea that he wasn't really gone, hadn't really left her. He would only be a stone's throw away, just around the corner or over the hill and behind the tree, and all she had to do was idle away until he came back for her. Only now had it occurred to her that she had no hero. There was only her.
Metaphorically. Literally, a man was standing only twenty feet away, ape-armed, slack-jawed and lazy-eyed, staring at her through milky eyes, his skin a dusty gray.
"Grigori?" Contemplation fled, and fear hurriedly took its place. As Grisha lurched forward, Natasha stepped back, froze as her ankle locked up in pain, and collapsed back onto all fours. He staggered up to the edge of the pond, then swayed there in place, eyes intent on the dubiously potable water.
She should run. She knew this. But to where, she did not know. And Grisha the stalker, whatever may have befallen him, was a surer risk than the anomalous woods. Natasha swallowed down her dry throat and crept forward, watching Grisha's face. At the opposite edge of the pond, she could see his eyes twitching, flicking from point to point from second to second, each moving independently. He glanced at her for a moment, groaned, and turned back to the pond.
Gingerly, she swung her legs over the pond, and let them hang in it, the water just below her knees and feet still not touching the bottom. Grisha's eyes hovered on her legs for several seconds- then he grunted and shuffled forward into the water, where he promptly sank up to his waist. Natasha snorted, a sudden smile she didn't expect. Grisha's eyes, already cavernously open, looked as if they were about to shoot from his sockets like bottle rockets. He stared at her face with his head tilted back and his jaw hanging loose, like she was Scarlett Johannsen and she'd just flashed her rack like a pair of highbeam headlights. She kept smiling, at once anxious and desperately clinging to the brief moment of blessed assurance that humanity still remained.
"Y, y, ya znaal tebya," he moaned, wading towards her, dragging his arms through the water.
It took her a moment to put his slurred Russian back together. "Yes," she said slowly, gently grabbing his wrists as his arms broke the surface. "I'm Natasha. The anchor."
Grisha staggered forward and stopped with only a foot between their noses. Perhaps he tripped on some tree root at the bottom of the pond. Now only inches away from him, she realized she could not smell vodka on his breath, as it reeked so heavily from every stalker.
"Yyya znal tebya," Grisha repeated, raising his hands to her face, his thumbs resting on her temples, fingers lining the rear of her jaw. She tried to tug his hands away and met arms that may as well have been cold forged steel. He pulled her closer, noses all but touching as she struggled as vainly as a worm in the beak of a crow, his slurred and fragmented droning filling her ears. "Yyya ne znayu tebya, no ya ne, ne znayu menya..." Not even inches away, she saw that his eyebrows were no longer hairs but charred smears of carbon painted above his sunken eyes, covered with blistered and blackened eyelids, and his skin was not merely pale but translucent, showing no blood at all in the muscles underlying his face. She could see her reflection in his pupils, and saw her gaping mask of terror there before she felt his fingers tighten over her skull, compressing bone with an inhuman strength.
"Kto menyaa? Kto tebya? Kto nas? Kto nass?"
It did not fade to black. Fully conscious, oxygenated and awake, she was terribly aware as she kicked, pulled, flailed and writhed in his immovable grasp as he slowly crushed her skull, staring into her own reflection as his questions reverberated in her head— Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? Who are we?
There was no hate on his face, only a childlike, wondrous, homicidal curiosity. This was Grisha, but not him; merely a stranger before, now an alien. Caught in the vise, trapped by her naivete, she prepared herself to accept death— and met herself in Donetsk. Orphaned and alone. Only a child's wits and a girl's strength when all that was human had been sold for bread.
"We are human," she croaked, feeling something warm and thick squirt from the corner of her left eye and something else crack in the right side of her jaw. "We are alive."
She felt the pressue suddenly slacken, though Grisha still held her off the ground. He stared at her as empty eyed as before, but she thought she saw his jaw close slightly, as if suddenly he had discovered enlightenment.
"Myi zhivoi..."
Then a crack split the air and his face exploded over her, splattering her with a hail of bone fragments and liquefied brain matter. A moment later, his arms dropped and she fell to the ground, the sky spinning in front of her eyes as she curled up on the ground, clutching her throbbing head.
Someone grabbed her shoulder and rolled her on her back, shouting her name and shaking her. Her vision trembled, shifting between dark and light as blood rushed back into her head; she nodded vaguely whenever it sounded like a question, her muscles weak and compliant.
Eventually the noise resolved into individual words, then a sentence, and then the man stopped talking and simply lifted her by the collar and pushed her towards the farmhouse. "Go inside. I'll take care of it."
She stumbled to a stop, turning and squinting at him. "It?" she asked, still not fully certain she knew the stalker.
He nodded towards Grisha's headless body, sprawled over the edge of the pool. "See if there's anything inside, we must move soon."
"Who…"
"Goddammit woman, are you dense? Your bag is gone, your crew is dead, and there's bandits at the embankment. I need a survivor, not a ditzy reporter who makes her living on asking pointless questions."
Yep. This was Washer.
She didn't nod, but sprang into motion (though it was more like a dazed lurch), her confusion silenced by her instincts and Washer's authoritative insults. The front door was unlocked, and she quickly moved through the first floor, pulling open drawers and picking up anything that looked sharp or metallic, or edible.
Which came to a sum of one rusty kitchen knife and a tushonka from 1972 when she was standing again in the main hall before the stairs to the second story, which were caved in at the 7th step into the locked understairs closet.
—
Washer worked efficiently over Grisha's body, checking his backpack and stripping off his useful gear. He had only been in the Zone for six weeks, hadn't acquired much of use nor value. A thousand rubles of cash, some soviet maps, a couple D batteries, a half-eaten sausage, and his PMM with two loaded magazines. Shotgun missing, no detector, nothing remotely helpful, besides his expired Ukrainian passport and a swiss army knife.
It didn't matter he and Grisha weren't particularly close. He was the boss, and Grisha followed his orders. They bantered around the campfire, but kept their cards close to the chest, split their profits and occasionally bought each other vodka. He was just another stalker.
And all the same this was brutal work. Grisha might not have been a close friend, but he was still a man. To die in such abject indignity, incapable of cognition, trapped in your own mind, released only by a bullet to the brain. There would not be a body in a casket, if ever there was a funeral for him. There was no one to write a letter home to; if there was, she would never get his letter. The only one to witness his passing would be Washer, as he stripped down his corpse for supplies and petty cash, like a vulture that happened to pity his meal. His body would eventually fill the belly of some hungry mutant, and he would become a part of the Zone forever— as if he hadn't already been its prisoner.
It wasn't theoretically difficult to leave the Zone, not any more difficult than sneaking in. Hell, if you were willing to eat the prison sentence, just walking up to a checkpoint with your hands up would get you a free ride back, courtesy of the Zone Containment Force. And yet, no one left.
He heard a scream from the farmhouse, and despite his best efforts, couldn't be bothered to run as he made his way to Natasha.
—
He found her covering her mouth while staring at a long-dead skeleton in moth-eaten clothes, sat in a chair with its skull propped up on the barrel of a rusted Mosin rifle. He ignored her gibberish and whimpering, and turned her towards him, pressing her forehead against his, nostrils flared.
"Miss Palinchak, we need to have a discussion."
"I'msorryI'msorryI'msorry—"
"First, you are no longer a human being."
She reminded him of a fish as she blinked in confusion.
"You live in a world where you have no intrinsic value. You are only as valuable as you are useful to someone, and to many, you are useful as either a mark or a slave."
"But we can buy them... off..."
"I tried to locate your satchel from last night's campsite. It, along with that entire house, is no longer there. Our collective cash amounts to less than three thousand rubles. Before you call for a rescue chopper, even if you did have a cellphone, there are no signals in the Zone. Anomalies, psychic fields, whatever it is, they don't work. Even if they try to send a rescue team, they will likely never find you."
"But we can still go back to the village, go to the checkpoint— I still have my passport!"
"You forgot the bandits. Remember Leech? Your smooth move of paying him off? He's got backup. At least a dozen tracksuits on the embankment, and more moving north, looking for you."
"But I don't have any cash, I'm not... oh shit."
"He still thinks you have a motherlode. When he finds out you don't, you're fucked (literally), and I'm fucked metaphorically."
"But aren't you friends?"
"Friends in the same way as a wolf and a dog. Similar animals, very different behavior."
As Washer paused for a breath, Natasha realized exactly what he was going to say. What the purpose of all this banter, counter and questioning had been.
"I'm stuck here. Just like you. Just like Grisha."
"For the time being, yes."
"And unless I want to be sucking glow-in-the-dark dicks till the end of days, I'm going to have to be you. In a sense. But with a vagina."
Washer tried to keep a straight face.
"You know, you're being more reasonable than I expected for a tourist. And a woman."
Natasha glared at him. "I was born in Donetsk, Mister Laundryman. I grew up with unpaid Soviet parents. I don't think coming back to my home country counts as tourism."
Washer stepped back and scratched his head. "This does not add up. Pretty woman. Born in Donetsk. Poor childhood. Comes from Britain. Squeals at dead bodies. Tells me she is strong. Wears heeled boots. Something is missing."
"I've picked up some civilized habits."
"Stupid habits. Can you shoot?"
"I live in Britain. Can't own guns."
"You are not helping the case for 'why I should bother with this useless wreck of a human being who will probably die in the next twenty four hours.'"
"Well..." Natasha blushed at the idea as it crossed her mind, biting her lip as she tried to look Washer in the eye. "I, uhh, could... y'know..." She glanced down at his pants, and wondered how she had not completely lost her mind yet.
"Sounds good, but only if one: we're alive long enough to share a sleeping bag, and two: if you don't mind shriveled stalker dick. The radiation here is not good for the skin." He stepped back and headed out the door, shaking his head. "Meet me at the barn when you're not babbling. Try not to trip over yourself."
Natasha nodded, starting after him. She glanced at the skeleton and his rifle, and impulsively grabbed the rifle away. The skeleton crumpled inwards, the jacket pockets jangling as the bag of bones hit the floor.
She held the rifle close to her chest, more familiar than she had known. The smell of the rust, like fresh blood, filled her nostrils. The patterns of mottled orange oxide alternated with streaks of dark gunsteel, bound in a laminated wood stock, reeking still of immortal cosmoline, summoned her memories of happier and harsher days, when she had been expected to be more than herself, when merely being alive was a meritorious accomplishment.
Her father, a Red Army soldier like his father and his father's father before him, had a saying he liked to parade around with old friends and new, army and civilian. "Old rifles never die... they just rust away."
The cosmoline memories called her, and she could not help but follow.
—
