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.
“That’s enough. Enough!”
Feeling Zef’s strength wane, the major slowly loosens the grip around his neck. Ilchenko has also run out of steam, and is now on his hands and knees, coughing heavily.
Tarasov takes the doll from the dirty floor and gives it to the Stalker, though now Zef is nothing more to him than a carrier for the Stalker’s Striker shotgun: an ugly but lethal tool needed to help him survive. He reaches into his backpack.
“Take a shot of vodka. Calm down. Once we’re back on the surface you can kill each other, I don’t care. But while we’re down here, you keep killing mutants. Is that clear?”
Tarasov knows his hoarse voice fails to hold the power to impress the two men.
The big man was right… I’m about to fail. I can’t control my men anymore. Maybe I should have just let them kill each other.
He glances at Zlenko, afraid of him drawing the same conclusion. The sergeant doesn’t return his glance. Tarasov too draws a gulp from the bottle, taking a swig during a mission for the first time in his life. The warmth of the spirit relaxes his guts, which feel like they have turned into painful knots during the past few minutes.
“Let’s move on.”
The fighters pick up their weapons, avoiding each other’s eyes. Zlenko watches carefully over them. Tarasov removes the magazine from his rifle and replaces it with armor-piercing bullets.
I hope it will not come down to me shooting my own men.
The sound of the magazine sliding into place sounds like a warning.
“Ilchenko, take point. I’ll follow you. Zef, fall in line. Sergeant Zlenko, you watch our six.”
They enter the room where the djinn’s corpse lays, riddled and burnt by the grenade’s countless metal fragments.
“Good riddance,” Tarasov says, stepping over it. Another tunnel opens to their left. From the emergency lights glows a warm orange light that is a relief after the eerie blue haze of the computer room.
Driscoll, the Brothers, the Colonel… damn, how I hated them in the beginning. How I wish they were here with me now. But if they could make it through here, we can make it too.
The tunnel descends for a few meters and leads to yet another steel door, this one standing wide open. Ilchenko quickly looks around before entering the room beyond, and then moves on with the precision of a machine between a row of cages and desks loaded with computers, stopping at a corpse that lies on the ground.
One lamp is turning around on the ceiling with a whining noise that reminds Tarasov of a knife scratching a plate. The noise makes him shudder.
“Another Chinese bit the dust here.”
“And a scientist too,” Tarasov says, checking the body but finding nothing. He looks around, hoping to see something that provides him with a clue.
What were these cages for?
There is an opening in the wall at the other end of the corridor, covered by a gritty plastic curtain.
“Maybe this room was a zoo where they kept monkeys like that son of a…” Turning back to look at the major, Ilchenko finds himself facing the barrel of the major’s rifle. “Okay, okay… just guessing.”
The walls of the long, narrow room are dark and shiny. Tarasov sees the reflection of himself and his men moving along the row of cages, all fastened to the ceiling with heavy chains. One place is empty, the chains leading through two holes in a mechanical trapdoor. They must have lowered that one into the abyss beneath, Tarasov thinks. Then the light of his headlamp falls on another body, poised on his knees and still clinging to the lever of a device fastened to the wall.
“Major… Mikhailo, you are bleeding.”
He looks down at his armor where blood has soaked through all the protective layers. Zlenko’s words making him aware of the pain. Tarasov feels an unsettling sensation, as if the stone sewn into his flesh by Nooria had become animated, but it is not his body rejecting it; the stone seems to move of its own accord. Two seams of cord fixing the neat cut have already burst. He closes the armor.
“Looks like an old wound,” the sergeant says.
“Not the first if its kind,” he replies without any intention of telling more. “And now… let’s see what this switch does.”
He moves the lever upwards. The device clicks to his reassurance. Suddenly a bright light beams up.
“What the hell? Where are we?”
Tarasov is dumbstruck as he sees a huge cavern just an arm’s length from him. The walls reflecting their images are windows through which he now looks down into an abyss. He wants to reply to Zlenko but only manages to utter a surprised gasp as he sees a human form taking shape at the other end of the room. Its mouth arches into a cruel sneer. In the next second the same terrifying laugh booms that they had heard in the level above.
“Screw you, motherfok!”
Zef steps forward, his shotgun spitting lead into the apparition while Ilchenko’s machine gun joins in. The bullets’ impact shakes the humanoid, but it keeps moving closer with each step. It strikes Zlenko in the head, sending him to the floor with a scream, then grabs Ilchenko’s machine gun and, ignoring the pain from the hot barrel, tears it from the soldier’s hands and turns the weapon towards Tarasov. He tries to dodge it but a long, brawny arm arrests him and slings him against the glass wall. Horror overwhelms him as he slams into the glass between himself and the dark abyss outside. Fortunately, the glass does not break, leaving Tarasov merely winded. Zef watches the major slowly slump to the ground, his eyes glowing with rage as he turns towards the mutant.