Grigori sits criss-cross, reading some more Future Weapons Today to kill time and perhaps broaden his comprehension. His companion has been gone for so long that he's halfway done with the magazine. A gust of wind flips the pages forward, revealing technical drawings of various American-made automatons. Grigori holds the flying pages down with his bare hands before Mother Nature can spoil him.
He feels the ground shake from underneath him.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Hmph. I wouldn't be surprised if the War loosened up a few tectonic plates.
Grigori downplays the odd occurrence and resumes his reading session, but the thumping grows stronger.
Hmph. Radiation must've brought back dinosaurs to the post-nuclear world.
Alarm bells should be ringing in his mangled head, yet he remains calm. The typewritten words have him in hypnosis.
The shaking has become so strong that his eyes rattle around like marbles. Grigori cannot concentrate on the magazine anymore. Agitated, he puts it down and snaps his head up to find a seven-foot man of steel approaching over the rolling hills.
The metal stranger forces him into hiding. Grigori crawls into a nearby ditch and immediately pulls out Future Weapons Today to examine its front cover.
The tin man with his Gatling laser was considered fiction to me. But now . . . he killed Hiram, didn't he? And I'm next. I should run and tell the others. No. He'll just follow me back home and paint the village red. Shit. Maybe I can lose him somewhere, but—
"Greg?" The callout sounds like it's coming from an old radio. "Greg?!"
Grigori perks his ears up, wondering if his mind is playing more tricks on him. The disembodied voice sounds similar to Hiram's, but the static only adds more vagueness. The steel man is getting closer, and all Grigori can do is duck and cover as his countrymen did on October 23, 2077.
His mind commands him to stay put and play the waiting game, but his bodily instinct to run away from the perceived threat persists.
Don't run! His conscience argues. You read about the Gatling laser. One burst from it can cut you in half.
Grigori digs his nails into the dirt.
Don't run, then. Have him put his boot on your back along with a bullet in your brain pan.
"Nein!" He cries out.
The metal stranger backs up in confusion as Grigori charges him rabidly, screaming bloody murder. His fists pound violently on his scratched-up cuirass. Feeling rather desperate, Grigori clambers up the man of steel, struggling to twist his helmet off. A fit of laughter crackles from the suit's comms system.
The death machine laughs at me as I'm in extremis.
Then, a pair of hulking gauntlets grips Grigori by the shoulders and puts him down. Confused, he looks both ways and starts running for the hills, his pants soiled.
"Wait, Greg!" The iron golem facepalms. Does he know who's inside this sick suit? He sighs through his microphone and runs after him in a cumbersome way.
Eventually, Grigori runs out of breath and finds himself dry-heaving over a rotten corpse. The lack of bloatflys swarming it is a subtle sigh of relief. Grigori searches around the disturbing scene for loot. He protects his senses from the acrid air, pinching his nose and covering his mouth with his undershirt.
Could this be Hiram?
The victim appears to be male, age unknown. His body is an unrecognizable mass of reddish-brown, decaying by the second. Whatever clothes he had on him before his death are almost disintegrated.
An item of interest catches Grigori's eye. It looks to be a storage device of some sort covered in stains. He picks it up using a handkerchief and inspects both sides.
Hm. No writing or label whatsoever. How vague. I wonder how much Pre-War tech goes for in the Post-War market. Probably not much, but it's vintage for sure. Nevermind that.
He pockets the knick-knack for himself and lets the corpse rest in relative peace. Heh. Poor bastard could've been me, maybe in a different life where I wasn't so fortunate. That morbid thought covers his arms in goosebumps.
But alas, the man of steel has finally caught up to him. Grigori is exposed. He has nowhere left to hide. The two stare each other down for a brief moment. Then, the metal stranger takes his helmet off, revealing it to be no other than . . .
"Hiram?!" exclaims Grigori.
"Greg!" He waves at him. "Come. Come!"
They talk to one another in broken English for a bit until Hiram suggests something to Grigori. Now that Hiram possesses a piece of experimental armor that can give him abnormal strength, he figures Pasha won't be such a burden to carry back to the village. His unconscious body drapes over Hiram's shoulder plate like a produce sack.
Time for the fun part. Field dressing wild, mutated game. Eviscerating five mutts would go by quicker with Pasha's help, but he's down. Hiram didn't consider the risks of taking this hunting trip beforehand, except Petrov was the one who authorized it in the first place. At least the important parts weren't forgotten, like the hacksaw and skinning knife.
As Hiram struggles to wield the saw in his pneumatic gauntlet, he hands the knife over to Grigori, and they begin hacking and slashing away at the deceased dogs. Blood splatters decorate their plain clothes. Hiram pulls the guts out from the cavities while Grigori surgically removes the organs and separates the hide from the meat.
An hour passes. Their glistening red hands are put to rest.
Grigori throws all the medallions of dog meat into the burlap gore bag. Some of the blood manages to seep out and drip down his back. He shrugs it off. They take their gracious, though smelly, bounty and head home.
About midway through the trek, they end up taking the wrong turn. Grigori drags his feet across the dirt trail as it wears down the treads on his shoes. He notices a dense fog consumes them. Visibility is zero. Hiram messes with his helmet, thinking it must have some sort of mounted light. He gives the helmet a few bangs, and sure enough, the fog light flickers on. He chuckles at his genius.
They continue walking with confidence in their steps, expecting the village's outer walls to pop up at any moment. However, as time goes on, and the trail grows longer, so does their skepticism. Everything sounds louder in the middle of nowhere, even their crunchy footsteps. Grigori grows tired of hearing them.
Listening to his cadence puts him in a trance. The fog turns to static and drowns out the sounds of nature. The borderline between reality and delusion is thinning. Polesia is vanishing, and a new realm is coming to replace it. The Void; a nebulous place once internally contained in Grigori's scrambled mind manifests itself in the real world.
A chain link gate blocks their path. Upon further inspection, the metal appears to be charred or spray-painted black. Grigori can't distinguish the two. Red signs are zip-tied to the gate, but they're in Russian, thus Grigori is unable to read them.
Despite this setback, Grigori imagines the unthinkable. The Cyrillic letters shuffle around like playing cards, then transmogrify into perfect German, all with the power of telepathy.
Trespassers will be shot!
Beware of Watchers!
That last forewarning stumps Grigori.
He pushes the ominous barricade open. It lets out a terrible screech. Grigori spots a few houses through the fog, along with a large structure standing off in the distance. He approaches the first set of houses cautiously and discovers they're abandoned. The idea of searching them puts him off, so he continues exploring the ghostly village.
Grigori is so fixated on the distant structure that he walks blindly into a rickety fence wrapped in barbed wire and hurts himself. His yelp echoes through the dry cornfield. He eventually finds a way to climb over the fence unscathed and plunges into the tall corn stalks heedlessly. The lanky plants bend to his stubborn will.
He's almost at the village's landmark.
Right as Grigori is about to take another step, something big scurries right past him. Immediately, he draws his pistol and aims where he last heard the rustling. Whatever who or what it was, they're gone now, leaving Grigori on edge. He intends to keep his pistol out for the remainder of his stay in the supposed Void.
Once Grigori clears the cornfield, he takes a deep breath and exhales miserably.
Before him is a barnhouse. It's completely covered in soot. He checks around the barn for any openings and comes across a pair of stable doors secured by two crossing chains. They won't budge, and there's no padlock in sight.
There's also a symbol etched into the wood, right above the chains; a skull with the word "Zona" on its forehead, and just below it, two barbed wires intersecting like olive branches.
What does it mean?
Grigori faintly hears sickly moans and groans coming from inside the barn.
The chains miraculously come undone, and the stable doors open up to a sea of burnt corpses. They resurrect from the Underworld, their movement sluggish. The humanimals stick their arms out and slowly creep towards the armed smoothskin. He empties a full magazine into the undead horde and staggers a few. A series of muzzle flashes light up their rotten faces.
Click!
"Huh?"
Grigori pats down on his empty ammo pouches and panics.
Crawlers, sprinters, and lungers reach for Grigori to steal his youthful life for themselves.
Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us! Avenge us!
Grigori turns away from their constant chants and attempts to escape the cursed farm. He avoids running through the cornfield and heads straight for the fence line, his arms flailing, when a protruding rock trips him. He falls to the ground and scrapes his elbow.
Assuming a supine position, Grigori watches in horror as the humanimals trample over one another, eager to feast on his untainted flesh.
An aggressive humanimal charges towards Grigori and kicks him in the head. His vision goes black.
"Greg?" calls an angelic voice from the real world. "Greg!?"
Grigori squints his eyes from the blinding fog light.
Hiram takes off his helmet. "We're home," he proclaims, giving Grigori a radiant smile.
Grigori looks around disoriented. The layout of the clinic's den hasn't changed since his first visit. Fate has him here once more to recover from his last misadventure in the Wasteland. He got lucky the second time, waking up in a cozy bundle of blankets instead of rising from a shallow grave. His ability to run from certain death should be studied.
What the hell happened?
"Wait for the commissar," advises Hiram. He moves around the confined den like a bull in a china shop, ducking his head through the doorway. The commissar opens the front door and sees Hiram shuffle carefully down the narrow hallway. Doctor Rostov just so happens to have fragile family antiques hanging on the walls.
"Comrade Commissar, sir!" Hiram clicks his heels together and executes a snappy salute.
"Don't kid yourself, Hiram. We're not in the Army anymore." Petrov returns the gesture out of respect for his loyal comrade anyway.
"I miss having a chain of command. I'm afraid most of our comrades don't have the legs to climb the ladder of order."
"Polesia may seem lawless, but I'm sure the government and the military have things under control elsewhere, like the Moscow Metro."
"Eh, I'd rather not speak for other parts of the Union. Who knows what remains of Moscow."
"One of Rusakov's men is a Stalker who claims to be from there. I believe his name is Artyom. He mostly keeps to himself."
"Why not talk to him and learn his story? He'll feel more welcome here, and you'll gain a new friend."
Petrov blows his nose with a dirty handkerchief. Allergies. "Maybe later. Besides, I need to debrief Mister Dyatlov."
"Of course. While you do that, I'll stow my armor in Anton's root cellar."
Petrov has one more question for Hiram before he leaves. "So where'd you get it?"
Hiram looks down at his knightly figure. "The suit? At the hunting grounds. The previous owner was already dead, and his body served as lunch meat for the wild dogs. His rotten remains stuck well to the suit's interior, but I powered through and got everything out, even the residue. It was a sanitary matter." He shudders in disgust.
"Wow! I bet that armor can crush a rocket-propelled grenade into a hockey puck. The wearer should mind the impact though. Still, you can drive a hard bargain with any trader who's worth their salt when military-grade hardware is on the table. Look at 5.45 cartridges, for instance."
"The suit's not for sale!" declares Hiram. He struts out of the clinic with his nose held high, holding the five-pound helmet in his sweaty hands.
The commissar turns into the den and catches Grigori helping himself to a cup of black tea.
"Grigori," Petrov announces his presence to him. "I-I'm glad you came back in one piece."
"Me too!" Grigori takes a quick sip of his cool drink.
"Uh, how'd the hunting trip go?"
"There were a few close calls, but the important thing is we're alive."
"Yes, certainly." The commissar nods considerably, then clears his dry throat. Grigori already has an extra glass filled to the brim for Petrov. He accepts the thoughtful drink and toasts with Grigori. They chug their hot beverages in no time.
Petrov burps softly before speaking. "Listen, uh, Grigori. I saw what happened to Pasha, and Hiram explained to me the severity of his injury. As soon as I felt the weight of Pasha's life in my hands, I had Doctor Rostov take him under his professional care. He drew blood and gave him a handful of antibiotic shots. None of them seemed to work. They were never going to work because he did not have the means to treat rabies."
"Does this mean Pasha is—"
"Dead? Yes. Doctor Rostov knew he couldn't save him, but he had hope in his pragmatic soul. I saw the change in his eyes. For once in his life, he wanted miracles to exist. He begged for one to happen on that operating table, but it never came. We kept watching Pasha's heart rate steadily decline in beats per minute until he flatlined. Pasha was part of the Wasteland no more. If only his death were a figment of our imagination."
A tear rolls down his rosy cheek.
Why am I crying over that brute? He wanted a warrior's death and got what he asked for! No, that's not true. He wanted to die a martyr and sacrifice himself by throwing his body into a fiery torrent of bullets and explosions. Unfortunately for Pasha, he never got to live out his epic fantasy. He did, however, lay his life down for Grigori and Hiram. His comrades live and grieve because of him. That's enough to be a martyr in my eyes. Still, it's sad to see his life end so abruptly for no apparent reason. He didn't have to die to a bunch of rabid mutts, and I'm partly to blame.
As they say: the bold die young, and the old die alone.
"Does Hiram know?" asks Grigori. His question puts Petrov's weeping on a brief hold.
"No, not yet," murmurs the commissar. He uses his shirt sleeves to wipe the tears away. "I thought you'd take the news of Pasha passing better than those who knew him personally, no offense. That's why I told you a stranger about someone's death is easier on the heart than confronting a loved one with a grief-stricken face."
"So, are you going to inform the village? They'll know soon enough."
"Well, now that I've got that off my chest, I think I'm ready. Since Pasha won't be needing his Valve anymore, I'm officially passing it down to you. His hunting rifle is yours to keep for as long as you want."
"Thank you."
"Stop by my place in the evening. I want to go over all the goods you and Hiram managed to loot from the hunting grounds. From there, we can start calculating our defense budget. I'm a bit hesitant about planning another trip for the scav team so soon, but time is of the essence. A turf war is bound to erupt in Polesia, and this village will be in the middle of it."
"I understand."
Gennady Petrov excuses himself with a salute, leaving Grigori Dyatlov to his own devices. The latter pulls out Future Weapons Today and turns to where he left off.
Spanning two pages, a cartoonish panorama illustrates what Mister Gutsy (an Army model of a civilian robot maid) can do in a combat-enriched environment. It can hover over landmines without setting them off, burn sword-wielding Crimson Dragoons into ashes with a flamethrower, and melt snipers into piles of glowing goop with a plasma gun.
Grigori hopes never to cross paths with that multi-armed bucket of bolts.
This next infographic breaks down the sentry bot, a heavily armored automaton attached to a wheeled tripod. Its arms can accept an arsenal of general-purpose weapons like 5mm miniguns, fusion-powered Gatling lasers, and high-velocity missile launchers. Thick tungsten armor protects three major components: the optical receptor, the combat inhibitor, and the central processing unit.
During the Liberation of Anchorage, a single sentry bot had about the same amount of firepower as a full American strike team, according to a war correspondent from the Capital Post. For every sentry bot destroyed, approximately forty-nine Chinese commandos were killed. Because of its prowess in providing infantry support, the sentry bot was placed second highest on the PLA's target list, the main battle tank being top priority.
Grigori skims through the rest of the magazine until he reaches the end of it. There's an additional page right before the back cover advertising RALPHIE the Robot's Incredible Odyssey! In the foreground, a mustached general and a young boy face away from each other. A spherical robot with whip-like radio antennas hovers in between them.
Grigori does a double take.
At the bottom, the same robot is taking a lonesome road to a small town on the horizon.
It can't be.
Grigori tosses the magazine away like it's poison.
He paces around the den to try and control his frayed nerves, but his subconscious exhumes a dead memory.
One by one, little pieces fly off the heap of scrap. They gather at the base, O-rings, bolts, widgets, pilot lights, vacuum tubes, and antennas. The hodgepodge of miscellaneous junk vibrates on the ground and disperses into the air. Chunks of scrap metal melt into molten steel. The stream of industrial lava pours into a sphere mold and cools into a solid ball of aluminum-magnesium-titanium alloy.
Next in line are the vacuum tubes, blasting off as space rockets in orbit and docking to the sphere. The widgets teleport themselves inside the sphere to form its power core. The O-rings hermetically seal the two hemispheres together, the bolts thread into their holes, and the antennas attach themselves to the back of the sphere. Lastly, the pilot lights twist into their sockets, shining a yellow bug light into my horrific eyes.
Was I hallucinating a misconstrued hint?
"It wasn't the chieftain who performed a lobotomy on you but a robot surgeon."
Is that the commissar I'm hearing?
"Surprised? Why else were you dreaming up a metal sphere stalking you, huh?"
"I-I don't know. To be frank, I didn't want to believe you."
That's what I should've told Petrov back at the swamp, but I was afraid of confronting him. There was no one else I could trust but him. Still, I took his word with a grain of salt and never gained closure from it. Now, however, the pieces are starting to come together. It feels strange wanting to enact revenge on a heartless, soulless, spineless machine.
I don't know how I'm going to find that exact one in the Wasteland, but when I do, I'll make sure it stays grounded for good.
A/N: Feel free to leave a comment and/or review. I like to read what others have to say. It helps me as a writer know how readers are receiving my work. Any suggestions, concerns, critiques, or compliments are appreciated!
P.S. This fanfic was made by a human.