Agroprom Ambiguity

The walk up the road from the Cordon presented Tiger with no problems: though it was a main artery of human traffic in the southern Zone, he seemed to be the only one out and about. That would probably change once he came to the sprawl of radioactive junk mountains and vehicle graves collectively known as the Garbage. There were always a few people around the place, mostly lone stalkers poking about for a low-value artifact in the anomalies which seemed to breed like flies on the ionized scrap heaps. The area had been home to a sizable bandit operation once, but the changing power balance after the Zone's last fit of tremors and Duty's establishment of a fortified checkpoint where the road continued north had marginalized the marauders' influence.

Tiger, for his own part, didn't expect the status quo to last. Borov, unlike his predecessor Yoga, had ambitions far beyond petty mugging and extortion, a defensible base in the gloomy reaches of the Dark Valley to the east and a growing corps of cutthroats and corsairs who seemed eager to follow his lead. Duty, the self-appointed police of the Zone, theoretically had enough men and enough guns to give the bandit kingpin a solid thrashing, but the fools couldn't let go of their obsession with exterminating Freedom long enough to make good on that potential. One of these days the situation would boil over... but until then, the ordinary stalkers among whose ranks Tiger counted himself were the ones feeling the pressure.

The sun continued to sink towards the treeline as the loner took a left at the wrecked Zaporozhets and ambled through one of the smaller vehicle yards, passing between rows of cargo trucks, fire trucks, buses and a few sad-looking Mi-24 gunships. The helicopters brought back memories from his childhood, television pictures of identical machines prowling over the dusty landscape of a war-torn country far away. In the midst of this scene Tiger noticed that he was heading in the direction of the road to the Agroprom Research Institute, though he had made no conscious decision to that effect.

It didn't matter, really.

"...Retarded or something?"

Tiger was right about the bandits. Two of them had ambushed a fellow loner by the railroad tunnel at the western edge of the Garbage and were shaking him down, though apparently without much luck. "I told you already," the exasperated stalker was saying. "I've got nothing of value with me. If you want loot so badly, why don't you cough up for a detector and go search for it like the rest of us?"

"Quiet, asshole!" The bandit doing the shakedown was a youngish punk in a drab windbreaker and tracksuit pants. Bottom of the food chain, Tiger thought. "Bet ya gotta nice stash somewhere, eh? Lemme see yer PDA!"

"Screw you, you parasite!"

"Wanna loose yer balls too?"

The stalker probably would have had a go at these two already if the other bandit weren't holding a battered MP5 to his head. That one looked older and wore a threadbare trench coat. "Cool it, brother," he advised. "Let's not spill blood before it's the right time."

"Gonna do worse if this moron don't cough up soon..!"

"Excuse me."

Tracksuit Pants turned to find Tiger standing close by. "What..!?" he sputtered. "Howdja get there, eh?"

"I walked here," Tiger replied dryly. "Are you collecting road tolls?" he added with a mere phantom of a hint of sarcasm.

"We are as far as you're concerned," Trench Coat retorted warily, Tiger's edge in firepower putting him visibly ill at ease. "You looking to contribute?"

The stalker in the long coat briefly eyed the irate loner with the flared nose and the leather jacket and carefully took out a bundle of notes, his entire pay for guiding Wolfhound and company through the marshes. "Is this enough for the two of us?"

Tracksuit Pants' eyes widened at the sight of the money. "Dude, yer shittin' us..."

"It'll do," Trench Coat cut in quickly. "Toss it over here." When Tiger did so, he flipped through the bundle with his thumb before dropping it into a pocket. "On your way, now," he ordered, backing away from the cornered loner. "And no sudden moves."

Tiger placidly strolled past the slack-jawed Tracksuit Pants and resumed his walk to the Agroprom. There came sounds of hustling and then the other stalker fell into step beside him, cursing under his breath all the while. "I don't believe it," he muttered after a few minutes' travel. "Is your Kalash broken or something? Why didn't you just shoot them?"

"It would cause trouble."

"Those horseflies cause trouble for everyone around here, don't you know? It's about damned time they got some trouble in return!"

"If we shot them, others would come after us." Tiger shook his head. "Borov would make sure of it... And what are you so angry for? You were able to walk away unhurt."

"Yeah, but... They took all your money, man..."

"Money can be replaced," Tiger pointed out. "Most of mine ends up like this anyway."

"Bribes and payoffs?" The stalker made a frustrated noise. "How do you stand it? Handing over your cash to every fucking leech who comes along, just to avoid trouble... There's got to be a point where it becomes cheaper to pay with bullets instead."

"Maybe," Tiger answered neutrally. "My way has worked so far."

"Yeah, well... Nothing works forever. What if you ran into somebody totally implacable, some kind of psycho who wanted to mess you up no matter what?"

The answer was perfectly straightforward. "I'd kill him."

"That's more like it," the other man sighed. He still seemed put out, but his temper had cooled a little. "Well, thanks for getting me out of there. Name's Southpaw."

That he was left-handed had already been deduced from the way his TOZ over-under was slung and the side of his belt on which he carried his Stechkin machine pistol. "Tiger," the wandering stalker answered in kind. "I haven't seen a shotgun modified like that before," he commented, judging it best to distract his companion from the bandit business. "Most people here cut the barrels very short and remove the butt at the same time."

"Yeah," Southpaw agreed, "but I thought something like a coach gun was a better compromise... Did the trimming, sight bead and screw-in chokes myself. Used to be foreman in a machine shop, see. The future was looking good until the owner bankrupted the place trying to support an affair." A wry chuckle escaped his lips. "Been here almost four months now. Haven't struck it rich, haven't gotten cooked or crunched either. Guess my luck's about even... How about you?"

"The same," Tiger said vaguely. "You came to the Agroprom to sniff out some Stone Flowers?"

"Not today." Southpaw scratched his ear. "Actually, I thought I'd mosey over and see what I could score at the dig."

"Dig?"

"You didn't hear? I almost missed it myself," the sinistral stalker admitted. "Seems one of those ecologist guys from Yantar showed up in Rostok yesterday and hired some of us neutrals to come out here and sniff around the underground tunnels."

"Tunnels," Tiger repeated. When Duty had their base here, they'd hired a mercenary to flood the buried complex. "Have they been drained?"

"I don't think so," said Southpaw, "but I gather the scientists are interested in something down there... Dunno what it could be, though. Everyone tells me the whole place was gutted ages ago."

Tiger nodded. "There's nothing left worth carrying away."

"Yeah. I figure that if they aren't going to call in the military to clear the place, they probably just want to collect samples or run an experiment." The leftie looked around as the pair came to the top of a rise. "Almost there."

"Weird... Place seems awful quiet."

Quiet in more ways than one. While Southpaw had been tipped off by the stagnant atmosphere about the area and the lack of any lookout from the prior stalker party, it was the absence of that inexplicable awareness of others which alerted Tiger. Now, walking along the tracks which ran towards the eastern complex, its brick chimney looming high in the twilight, the stalker began to suspect that the place was simply deserted. "Are you sure it was here and not the southwest facility?" he asked in an undertone.

"Pretty sure." Southpaw cocked his head. "Could have mixed it up, I guess."

"Try your radio again," Tiger suggested.

"What if they still aren't taking calls?"

"Then we look for them."

"Nothing here."

"Nor here." Tiger swept the AKMS' muzzle over an expanse of crumbling wall, following the beam of the light lashed to its fore-end with a length of twine.

"This place gives me the creeps," Southpaw complained. "I hope there aren't any bloodsuckers around."

It was the right habitat for those fearsome mutants, but even they couldn't elude the stripe-haired stalker's extra sense. The suckers were absent, it seemed. "There's nowhere left to search inside," he stated. "Let's check the back door."

"The what?"

"This used to be a stalker base. The gap in the collapsed wall on the west side was called the 'back door' because mutants and the odd bandit would attack through it."

"Gotcha." Southpaw glanced back over his shoulder. "The place is kind of like a fort, isn't it?"

That had been the belief of those who once settled here, Tiger remembered. For a time, their belief had paid off... Then what? A change in the wind brought a better fort within their reach: the Rostok factories where the Hundred Rads bar and Duty headquarters were now dug in beside the aptly named Wild Territory, a maze of concrete and steel teeming with anomalies, mutants and worse things. "It is," he concurred. "A fort without a garrison."

"Why'd they leave, anyway?"

"Duty was relocating and they were tired of fending off the swarms of dogs... There were also more and more zombies wandering down from Yantar."

"Zombies? I've been out here a few times, but I've never seen one."

"You wouldn't. The old path is buried." Aiming his light around the corner of the end building, Tiger spotted a flash of green fabric. "I see a body. Come here, slowly."

Southpaw did so, adding his headlamp to the meager illumination of the scene at the back door. "Shit," he hissed. "They're all dead!"

It didn't take long to reconstruct the scenario. The advance party had been six in number. Five of them lay crumpled around a maintenance hatch leading to the underground, one of several on the Agroprom grounds. The round steel aperture had been welded shut by the old Duty guard and the stalkers had not succeeded in opening it before they met their end. It appeared to Tiger and Southpaw that the sixth stalker had fallen behind the others and then, without apparent provocation, gunned his companions down. "I don't get it," said Southpaw, inspecting the killer's empty RPK-74. "He just opened up on his own buddies?"

"So it seems." The attacker had finished his work by discharging two bullets from a Makarov, one into his PDA and one into the underside of his chin. The dead told no tales, and this one's effects would tell none either. Letting the shattered pocket computer fall from his hand, Tiger gingerly reached out and lifted the corpse's gas mask. What he saw prompted a sharp intake of breath through clenched teeth.

"You know the guy?"

"His name was Razorback," the long-coated one explained. "He used to work the Limansk side of the Red Forest, just outside the Scorcher's range."

"So was he, you know... unstable?"

"Not that I know of."

"Well, then... Maybe a controller got them?" The idea put Southpaw even more on edge.

"I don't think the average controller would be able to take this many stalkers by completely surprise." Something on the dead man's right arm caught Tiger's attention. Turning up the sleeve of his suit revealed a black mark burned or tattooed onto the skin: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

"What's that?"

"I'm not sure." Most stalkers heard about it sooner or later, about the apparent initialism which occasionally appeared on the arms of corpses. Most of the marked ones were loners, but Duty and Freedom had both reported a few cases. Perhaps other factions had experienced the phenomenon as well, but Tiger knew of no specific incidents. "Let's camp in the top floor for the night," he suggested, rising to his feet. "It's too dark to find anything more."

"Yeah," Southpaw said reluctantly. "Don't know if I'll sleep much after this, though."

Tiger could sympathize with the sentiment, though it was by now a remote one for him. "I'll stand first watch," he volunteered. "In the morning we'll deal with the bodies."