The scorched earth was a welcome sight to his eyes…at this point, anything was welcome in his book. More and more frequently the nightmares had been attacking his sleep, putting a plague on his sanity. He'd never been one for dreaming, as he used to say, he «didn't have the time to dream». Growing up just outside «the zone» before it actually became just that, was mundane for him, a routine like millions of others: wake up, say good-bye to the wife and kids, go to work, come home and sleep and the next day it starts all over again. All of that obviously changed once things lit up at Chernobyl…ever since then, he no longer had a wife or kids to wake up to, no more middle class 9 to 5 job. He only had «the zone» and when you were in it, you didnt have time to dream, you learned to sleep with both eyes open and one finger on the trigger, not necessarily fearing what may happen, but fearing what it would mean if nothing did. To all the stalkers it was their pay-off to have the unordinary happen, but what was in the pay-off anymore? Would the money stop the nightmares? Surely, thinking such a thing would be absurd. No, these werent just nightmares anymore, these were full-forced attacks on his mind. Bleeding through his thoughts in brilliant waves, like the cancer that ate through his family when Chernobyl went under. At first he thought that being a stalker was the right thing, the only thing. Then as time passed he could no longer deny to himself (although to all the other stalkers it was purely for the hunt) that he did what he did to make ammends. How could one man live with the guilt he had and not do anything about it? He knew that every time he pulled the trigger, every time he killed another person, it wasnt for the money, or the thrill……it was for revenge. Revenge on those that did this to everything he had, and revenge on himself for not stopping it, not trying everything in his power to save his family. Every bullet fired took him farther away from being a father of two wonderful children and the husband to a beautiful wife, and brought him closer to being a machine that kills people in a 30 km wasteland, a machine that lately has been having nightmares worse than any thing he had seen in the «Big Z». These nightmares had been killing his rest, and his sanity…..