The Difference Between you and me, Part
5
By : Ian Clement
‘How long?’
Iakov knelt next to the bodies, unclipping a helmet and
tossing it aside, peering down at the dead face of the man beneath. ‘Difficult to say. These suits are almost completely
self-contained, like mobile coffins’.
Blowing out a breath, he shook his
head, ‘seems to be just entering black putrefaction, the flies can’t get at him
so his own bacteria is doing the job. Two, maybe three weeks old?’.
David nodded, frowning as he looked over the
corpses laid out before us, ‘the Military always makes a point of collecting
their own. Which means that they either did not know about
this squad, or they could not retrieve them.
‘What does that mean
to you, Abram? What is this place?’
I never used to question the past of
those I met.
Not seriously, I mean, I would gently try to expose pieces
of it in conversation but some part of me always insisted on judging people as
they appeared to me now, as they acted to me now, I just assumed that whatever
they had dealt with before was now resolved and no longer an issue.
Stupid.
You couldn’t exist in somewhere like the zone
without acquiring a history that mattered, one which you left behind you like
dirty footprints wherever you walked, only I was never experienced enough to
measure those footprints – to guess at how much blood they might have walked
through, at how many necks they may have stamped down on.
It seemed that
ever since Abram revealed his D.N.R status he had set events in motion; like a
thread quickly unravelling, until the weight of things
I still did not know threatened to crush me, to catch me in an inevitable
crossfire.
Now circumstances were complicated, and I needed to know where
to stand.
We were due to meet
David and Iakov were there to hear the drunken ramblings, and so, even
after
They were an odd couple,
and I had trouble imagining what could have brought two such contrasting
Stalkers together.
Iakov was the most interesting of the two, if only to look at. He was like
an old photograph made flesh, part of the past which hadn’t noticed, or refused
to notice, the changes occuring around it. His
equipment was dated from around the Second World War; an antiquated sub-machine
gun with solid, polished wooden stock, drum magazine, and long, vented barrel.
Secured on the side of his pack was an M91 sniper rifle, the same model
that had served us so well at
If there was one fact that had been drummed into me
by the old men of my town, those who bemoaned what our country had become, it was that Captalism made people
lazy. Every weapon, every new device, was never perfected first time around,
improvements were held back for the future, ensuring a steady stream of dollars
into the manufacturer’s pocket.
The U.S.S.R had no such motives when it
made a firearm, and so had succeeded in making things perfect first time around,
it demonstrated a clarity and sense of focus which many seemed to miss.
I
suspected that Iakov still held this sense of purpose,
his body swelled proudly with it under the huge, ash grey, gold-buttoned gratecoat he wore.
Completing the picture, a mink
Ushanka covered up the better part of his head, it
took me a moment to realise that the gold-crested
emblem on it was the hammer and sickle of the
As to
David, he and Abram had history, I could tell, and the electricity which
crackled between them indicated it was not a good one.
***
‘What does that mean to you, Abram? What is this
place?’
The question rolled around us, lingering in the stale air, and
despite myself I shivered.
Our flashlights sliced through the darkness,
catching the dull, silvery sheen of stainless steel walls and equipment, the
metal distorting our reflections so we appeared as blurred figures with glowing
orbs where our hands should have been.
Dried blood was caked on the dust
covered floor, long, crimson-red streaks of it like blended roses, leading to
the corpses and their final resting places. I panned my flashlight around the
corridor, aiming it through panes of glass and seeing neatly stacked folders,
black, lifeless monitor screens, but mostly all five beams were locked onto the
dead men as though we dared not let them out of our sight.
It felt….wrong
to talk in this place, it had become a silent crypt
with too much unwritten history, too many unknown ghosts. I remember the same
low, creeping panic when I woke up five years ago, hungover, for the very first time. There was a cup on the
floor, leaking cold coffee which I didn’t remember making, shards of broken
glass in my pockets, a note which read ‘on my life’ and was reinforced by an
unfamiliar signature; I was surrounded by objects and sensations which no longer
made sense the next morning.
I swallowed, rubbing at my neck to try and
dislodge the invisible fingers which kept tickling a path across it, and focussed instead on Iakov and his
continued examination of the bodies.
‘Look at this’.
We gathered
round as he rolled one of the corpses over, levelling
the flashlight on the back of its neck, ‘see that?’.
There was a small, olive coloured square
centered directly over the dead man’s spine. ‘Psi-blocker’ David muttered, ‘Military grade, chews directly
into the brain stem’.
Iakov nodded, sweeping
his light over the rest of the corpses, ‘this was an elite unit, as far as I can
tell. Judging by the spread of the shell casings, and the wounds they suffered,
there were no other hostiles. They killed each other’.
Abram drew in a
sharp breath, ‘they had no time to activate the blockers?’.
‘This is not technology which is turned on and
off’ Iakov said bluntly, ‘these devices interface
directly with the neo-cortex and Hypothalamus. They become an essential, working
part of the body’.
I stared down at the corpses in horror, ‘they can
never be removed?’.
David shook his
head, ‘the situation is desperate now, Controllers have adapted to every new
blocker within a matter of months. They do not nest, they learn our tactics,
they cover their tracks’.
He looked at Abram
with contempt: ‘you told him none of this?’.
I turned and glared at my partner, Abram flinched under my gaze as
though I had just struck him, ‘there was no need to exaggerate the threat’ he
replied gruffly, ‘the Controller is just a creature,
more or less’.
‘More or less!’ David snapped,
jabbing a finger at the bodies, ‘did you never question why the Military’s
reward for a live Controller is now so high? Even experimental Psi-blockers no longer work! You are leading us into our
graves!’.
Standing, Iakov wiped his gloved hands on the gratecoat, ‘such debate is pointless. In half an hour a
Blowout is going to turn this quadrant of the zone inside out, we have no time
to find other shelter’.
Ignoring him, I spoke to David ‘there were
zombies in the fog, why?’.
Looking over, David
regarded Abram silently for a moment, as though giving him a chance to answer,
then snorted in disgust when the Stalker simply folded
his arms and turned away.
‘They’ve been doing that for a while now’ he
said, ‘the Controllers figured out that we could trace them by following the
corpses’.
‘The corpses?’ I wondered aloud.
‘No zombie can survive……exist, indefinitely’ he explained, ‘the
Controller abuses them like puppets, but in the end their bodies fail; a shot to
the stomach leaks acid into their organs, a wound turns septic, maybe animals
decide to make a meal out of them’.
He scratched at his stubble,
considering, ‘the Controllers just left them where they fell, and you could
instantly tell when you came across one. Imagine the worst brutality of war,
physical torture, or sick crime, you could hardly
believe they had ever been alive. We used them as a paper trail, tracked down
and wiped out many of the Controllers before they started to adapt’.
‘They knew the fog was deadly to us’ Iakov
continued, speaking absently as he rummaged through the packs of the corpses,
‘whenever they sensed a zombie was close to the end they would find a bank of
fog and send it in, the anomaly reduced them to piles of bones in a matter of
hours, instantly made things harder for the trackers and the hunters’.
‘So how intelligent are they?’ I asked reluctantly.
‘Quiet!’
Abram snapped, ‘I’ve got movement!’.
We fell
silent as he studied the display, ‘single contact, twenty yards, it’s moving east’.
Iakov
cocked his PPSch-41, smiling over at me as though knowing of how I had labelled him ‘it looks like you take the lead, my young
friend. For Mother Russia’.
***
‘The Mary Celeste?’
We were standing in the
middle of a deserted canteen; what was once the stench of rotting food had
become a dull, stubborn aftercurrent, the kind that
etches a place in your mind rather than overpowering it. Plates were led on the
tables, some had overturned and a few were scattered across the floor. Food had
dried and crusted on the intact servings, plastic beakers held solid bubbles in
their water, my flashlight settled on a fork which had speared a lump of meat as
though the owner expected to return any second.
‘A ship which was
discovered abandoned’ Tarn said in a low voice, ‘Sailors found her drifting near
the Portugese Coast; meals half-eaten, beds made but
never slept in, it was as though the crew simply vanished’.
Iakov shook his head, ‘these men did not vanish, they left us a trail’.
He picked out slicks of blood
on the floor, now the colour of rusted metal, and
traced them with his flashlight until they all met. There was a long, thick
track of it leading out of the farthest door, imprinting an unwelcome image of a
murdering psychopath dragging the still warm bodies from the room, caring little
about the horrible, slug-like ooze they left behind them.
I jumped with
fright as Abram began to hack and cough, spitting out another mouthful of bloody
phglem. He grimaced at the stares of the others and
cleared his throat, ‘no movement, they……*kaff kaff*….th…must have gone to
ground’.
‘Keep an eye on it’ David warned, ‘these creatures are like
ghosts when they wish to be. Lukin, lead on’.
I raised the shotgun, moving it in a slow, constant half-circle as we
crept forward, shining the attached flashlight into every dark and unexplored
corner. Sounds of activity and normality were painfully absent, but those that
did exist seemed to stack up in my brain and threaten to squash whatever nerve I
had left; the constant rasp and squeak of five pairs of combat boots,
occasional, metal clinks of weapons being shifted, and my own breathing which
was as impossibly loud as the air blasting out of a steam-pipe.
We
followed the trail to a closed door, Iakov took up position to the right of it, with
I shoved the door
open and rushed in.
At first I thought someone had struck me, the
invisible psychopath had surged out of nowhere and smashed me in the face, and I
reeled back as surely as if he had come at me swinging a razor-sharp machette. Then it hit me in a wave, the sickening smell of
decay, of death, I threw a hand to my face in desperation to try and block it
out.
Vomit surged up my throat, a thick tide, but I forced myself to
swallow it down, wincing at the acid as it burned a path back to my stomach.
‘Augh….oh God’.
Unseen hands guided me out of the room, I stole a glance back, to prove
that I could stand it, I suppose, and my brain received another flaming iron
stamp for the trouble.
Bodies were piled up against the wall in a heap,
stacked over and on top of each other, a giant confusion of arms, legs,
protruding tongues and wide, staring eyes. Some were dressed in Military
fatigues, others wore suits, still others were clothed in what looked to be
medical or scientific smocks, they all blended together to form a single, bizzare garment which smacked of authority.
Bruises
patterned their necks and faces, some suffered huge, gore-filled rents where
their heads had been caved open by a blunt object, I saw stab wound after stab
wound; sometimes thin and precise punctures, but more often clumsy and staggered
slashes, so many that it seemed some of the victims had been carved into twenty,
separate segments; held together by just the smallest thread of stubborn muscle
or broken bone.
‘Why are they all in here?’ Abram wondered aloud, voice
muffled by the rag he had pressed over his nose and mouth, ‘some kind of
nest?’.
David pulled the door closed, ‘doesn’t
make any sense. Why would a Controller hide these corpses? There must be
something else’.
‘But those outfits’
‘Movement’ Abram announced
quietly, ‘ten yards, straight ahead’.
I slung the shotgun over my
shoulder, drawing the tranquiliser pistol and cocking
it, ‘we can worry about answers later. Let’s just get this over with’.
***
You never really know how unnatural a bullet
is until you catch one with your body.
That they even existed was
frightening enough; objects designed solely to wage war and take life, but you
never really know how much they should not exist until a slug - a single, small,
piece of metal, rips through muscle, blood, and bone, disrupting a natural work
of genius effortlessly.
I didn’t see the pistol until it started to
fire, even then the strobe effect of the muzzle-flashes, turning every movement
around me into stop and start flecks, like a projector film, didn’t help in
making things seem any more real. The second round hit me in the upper chest,
like a smooth, hard punch, and even as Iakov opened up
with his PPSch-41, the barrel spewing flames, I was falling.
Someone
dragged me out of the fight, I groaned at the now burning pain and prayed that
the bullet hadn’t penetrated my vest, somehow it had
never occurred to me that getting shot while wearing kevlar would still hurt like hell. Abram hauled me back into
the canteen, gasping at the effort it took him, then started to speak between
breaths; ‘don't…..trust David, he…..*huh huh*…still…blames me’.
‘Blames you for what?’ I
yelled, unable to hear the words at all over the buzzing in my ears.
He
snatched a glance out into the corridor, as though terrified of being overheard
even in this din, ‘he was…leader…Sovereign. When he….forced me…kill a D.N.R, I
left…*kaff kaff*…
faction..taken out weeks
later, all killed…all but him’.
‘Did you do it?’ I bellowed, ‘what else
have you to tell me?’.
Abram doubled over,
choking violently, and I struggled to determine whether or not it was just a way
of avoiding the question. There were threads of bile hanging from his lips when
he looked up, but his eyes regarded me with a kind of unasked pity, almost as if
seeking forgiveness in advance for every new secret yet to be
revealed.
This was so far from the man who had saved me, trained me, that
I found myself questioning if such a person had ever existed at all.
‘Flash and clear!’ David yelled from the corridor, several seconds later
there was a deafening explosion and burst of light, ‘go, go, go!’.
I moved to assist but Abram grabbed a hold of my
arm, forcing me to look back at him, ‘He will kill you…if he knows it will
damage me’.
Cursing, I slammed a hand into his shoulder and knocked him
back, rushing out into the corridor to back up David, and Iakov.
Tarn was stood in the corridor, hand clamped
tightly over a wound on his right arm, and held up his free hand, wincing, as my
flashlight beam panned over him ‘I’m alright, just…need a second. Help the
others’.
Brass casings littered the floor, gleaming as the maglite beam skidded across them, I
levelled the shotgun and raced to the other end of the
corridor. There was a senseless thrash of activity in the farthest room; the
blur of moving limbs, what sounded like a distressed animal, and the thick,
gutteral curses of both David and Iakov.
They were wrestling with a figure dressed in
dirty, ill-fitting clothes, there was a mass of greasy,
tangled hair which kept whipping back and forth, and the grunts and screams of
someone struggling for their life. The Beretta 92FS which had been unloaded at
us clattered to the floor, and David succeeded in wrenching the attacker’s hands
behind their back and securing them with cable-ties.
‘Who are you? Why did you shoot at us? Answer
me!’, the figure surged forward as if going to bite
him and David darted back, slamming a fist into their jaw. The fight dropped out
of them then, and this insane hermit crumpled to the floor, lying still long
enough to be illuminated by our combined flashlight beams.
‘Probably a
vagrant’ Iakov announced, ‘easier to kill them now’.
Allowing the PPSch-41 to slacken, he reached inside his gratecoat and drew an old revolver, cocking the
hammer.
‘Wait!’ I snapped, ‘at least let me try to talk to them, find out
what happened here’.
He looked at me with some degree of amusement,
‘very well, if you wish to play…..detective, I am sure we can spare a few
minutes’.
Looping the shotgun strap over my head, I knelt down and
heaved the body up to a sitting position. Their clothes were splattered with
dirt, dust, food-stains, the stink of sweat was overwhelming, although somehow
not entirely unpleasant either. Carefully, I pulled the matted hair away from
their face, exposing about the last thing I had expected.
‘It’s a girl’
I murmured.
‘Congratulations’ David said sarcastically, tapping his foot
on the floor impatiently, ‘just ask her what the hell she’s doing here. And who
killed those workers’.
I hesitated, just drinking it in for a
moment.
There were places in the zone that might be considered beautiful,
twisted though that may sound. When you see driving rain hitting a gravitational
anomaly, the drops of water dancing around inside it, or some mutated plant
struggling to survive, it grants you just enough to carry on for a while more.
We didn’t really grow up around beauty anymore, or at least not as most would
understand the word, but some bedraggled measure of it was always
there.
She was beautiful, at least, to me.
‘Hey!’ I said, then,
louder ‘hey! Wake up!’.
She stirred groggily,
eyes flickering, then, as though suddenly realising
where she was and what had happened, lurched back into life. I staggered back as
she bucked and writhed, snarling and spitting, while Iakov and David laughed at my cowardice.
‘I think
she likes you, Lukin’.
Ignoring him, I fixed
my attention on the girl; ‘stop that! We’re not going to hurt you! We’re not
going to hurt you!’.
Abruptly, she stopped
fighting and stared straight at me, her eyes glazing over, before starting to
judder and sob. Unsure, I remained crouched while she doubled over and cried, it was a sound of utter helplessness which pulled at
my heart. Taking a breath, I started forward again, like a gamekeeper
approaching a wild and unpredictable animal, and slowly laid my hand on her
shoulder.
She flinched but didn’t pull away, ‘it’s alright’ I said
softly, ‘I won’t hurt you’.
‘Lie’ a small voice
croaked, ‘always lie’.
I frowned, ‘who are you? What are you doing
here?’.
She shook her head, expression
invisible behind that knotted tide of hair, ‘he doesn’t lie…..not like you. He
could have lied to me…but he didn’t’.
David murmured something to Iakov and he nodded agreement.
‘Who doesn’t lie?’ I
asked patiently, ‘is there someone else here?’.
'You leave him alone!’ she shrieked into my face, nearly splitting my
eardrums, ‘we’re the dangerous ones, not him! Leave him alone, leave him
alone!”
Sighing, David rubbed at his eyes wearily, ‘are you
satisfied? She’s insane. Why else would she be down here?’.
‘Movement!’ Abram spoke
up from outside the doorway, ‘twenty yards, due east’.
‘Leave him
alone’ the girl pleaded in a weak voice, seemingly to no-one but herself,
‘leave him alone, leave him alone’.
Iakov reached forward, grabbing her arm and jerking her to a
stand, ‘if she does know who this person is then she may make good insurance’.
‘Eighteen yards’.
All eyes, including
the girl’s, were fixed on me.
When you get down to it everyone wants to
be important, but nobody wants to be important. Being important has a
pleasant vacantness to it, a false title which allows
you to walk taller with no attached weights. Being important means that events
have fallen to you to come up with the best solution, to be responsible for the
lives of other people, and very few ever come through it intact.
‘Lukin…’.
‘I know’ I said
quietly, ‘I take the lead’.
***
‘On three. One, two…’.
The lift doors screeched apart, it was a
teeth-grating sound, like sand crunching between the gears of an ancient
machine.
‘Lukin, come over here’.
I moved to stand beside David, watching the flashlight beam as he sliced
it into the shaft below. About fourty feet below us
was the cab, just to the left of that a maintenance ladder, solid steel rungs
gleaming as the light played off them, ‘there is an access hatch on top of the
cab’ David said quietly, ‘with this crowbar you should be able to prise it open easily enough’.
I expected to feel
horrified as I realised what came next, to grimace as
my heart lurched or my stomach plummeted, but there was none of that. Surrounded
by all this polished metal, all the preserved neatness, my extreme emotions had
been drained away. I imagined those dead workers arriving every morning, their
boredom and frustration, fears and desires, quickly leeched away by spending any
ammount of time in this place, all becoming as
efficient and unwavering as machines.
‘I go alone, don't I?’.
There was a brief flare of light as Iakov struck a match, lighting a cigarette, then wafted it out. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness,
just a hovering ember, but the strangely deliberate way he had carried out the
action already gave me my answer.
‘Yes, that is the way it must be’ David
said eventually, ammo belt chinking softly as he shifted uncomfortably,
‘without the ability to manipulate your mind the Controller will still be a
threat, however. I have seen these creatures use weapons before, they are not
strong, but……’.
He shrugged, ‘…a strong finger
is not needed to pull a trigger’.
I took a deep breath, drawing slips of
Iakov’s fusty tobacco into my lungs, ‘a dead
Controller is useless, I know, but I would feel better going down with more than
a tranquiliser pistol’.
‘Give me your
shotgun’.
Instinctivly, I drew the weapon
closer to my body, ‘what, why?’.
David simply
stretched out a hand, ‘please’.
Reluctantly, I passed it over.
Working the pump-action, he ejected the cartridges into a waiting hand,
then dropped them into a pouch of his flak jacket.
Producing new ammunition from a different pocket, David began to reload the
weapon, speaking as he did so; ‘these are bean-bag rounds, used for crowd
control. They will not kill, just hurt like the devil’.
I nodded,
accepting the weapon back, ‘thank you’.
‘I’m…….coming with you’.
Abram stepped forward with the words, and David stared at him as though
unsure of whether to be amused or offended, ‘I cannot allow it, you would be a
danger to Lukin and to yourself’.
There
was an odd, gargling wheeze, it sounded nothing like laughter should, ‘Pride?
No…..I….*kaff kaff*,
not…pride, not anymore, I know…..when get back…Haven….I’m D.N.R, good..as dead, David……knows
that’.
Anger flared on the other man’s features, he closed the
distance between them, his huge, armoured form
dwarfing Abram’s near crippled body, ‘very well…..no weapons, if you accompany
Lukin then you do it unarmed’.
If this
ultimatum was supposed to cause him to hesitate then it had the opposite effect,
Abram disarmed as casually and quickly as someone undressing for bed; looping
the AK-47’s strap over his head and lowering it to the ground, unfastening his
belt pouches and allowing them to fall, then drawing his boot knife and tossing
it away with a harsh clatter.
‘We…….s-s-started this…together’
he rasped, ‘finish it….same way’.
I couldn’t look at him, because I
knew the expression that would be staring back at me. Desperate for my forgiveness, to see some small piece of
understanding for his lies. Our roles had been suddenly and horribly
reversed, he had saved my life and now wanted me to salvage his, if I died at
the hands of the Controller, alone, his possibility for redemption would be gone
forever.
What infuritated me the most was that
I couldn’t deny him that chance.
David looked between us, ‘it’s your
decision, Lukin’.
I nodded, only able to
dredge up Abram’s words again, ‘started this together, finish it the same
way’.
Coiling the shotgun strap over my head, I started on my way down
the ladder, boots snagging and slipping on the narrow rungs. I felt like a giant
clumsily trying to use a piece of Doll’s house furniture, even when I finally
touched down on the roof of the cab it rasped and flexed beneath me, everything
had become a thin and flimsy stage prop.
Sliding the crowbar from my
pack, I wedged it beneath the emergency hatch and wrenched back, still working
on it as Abram touched down beside me. I spoke without looking up, carefully
measuring my words when they threatened to echo up the shaft, ‘If this
abandoning your weapons, following me into a Controller’s den, is an attempt to
prove you are still……courageous, then I am far from impressed’.
Grunting, I bore down on the crowbar with all my strength, the hatch
held for a moment then released it’s hold on the cab
with a hollow krunk.
I slipped inside
and fell the four feet to the bottom of the cab, clicking on my flashlight and
panning it around the interior. The doors were still closed, I edged forward and
pressed my ear to the cold metal, holding my breath as I listened for footsteps,
the rythmic tapping of a long nail, voices, anything.
Abram touched down behind me, his breathing a thin, almost inhuman
rattle in the darkness, ‘Lukin…..we….we need to
talk’.
‘I have nothing to say to you!’ I whispered harshly, ‘It is
you who brought me out here, after all your lectures of being prepared, when you
knew you were not fit for the task!’.
‘I had no
choice!’ he choked, ‘I…..*kaff kaff*….know that…d-does not make it right, but we…we are the
same. I know…’.
He stopped for a moment,
breathing rapidly as though the effort of speaking like this was exhausting,
‘…why you came here, I understand. We…are the same, just…different ends of
s-spectrum, I am what you wo…*kaff kaff*…would become, if….if you stayed long enough’.
‘I am nothing like you!’ I hissed, jabbing a finger out blindly and
feeling it connect, ‘I still know who I am, what I need to be. You are only
concerned with yourself, you do not care who suffers as long as you continue to
exist, and that is poison to any soul’.
‘You…you don't remember’
he gasped, ‘your….your wounds, Bloch treated but….infected….there was fever.
The…the t-things you told me, why you came here, we…we are same’.
‘More lies!’ I spluttered, although there was no certainty in my voice
anymore, ‘I will not be manipulated by you, not again!’.
‘No…no…truth’ Abram wheezed, his hand
gripping my shoulder, either as a support or reassurance, ‘Your mother…..dead, br-brain
aneurysm, your….your father…*kaff kaff*…uh…..a Doctor….he…he is why you came here’.
That was all my mind needed, I could never trust it to support me or
cushion me, all it needed was some small link, real or imagined, and the needle
jammed in the record groove; repeating the same part over and over, repeating it
until the words blended into one long, ceaseless stream of noise, then it became
difficult to know how much was memory and how much was fantasy.
My father
was a Doctor, that was certain, I remembered him
treating patients, perscribing medicines, but after my
mother died I find it near impossible to separate what he was and what he
became. Many things could be overlooked in his profession, it was still a
concern not to find a reputable Doctor but rather one who would not kill you
through incompetence or lack of hygene, and so there
were still patients even as his world, and mine, quickly unravelled.
Following the passing of my mother, he
lost any medical impartiality, he began to see death
not as a natural conclusion of disease, accident, or old age but rather a living
and sentient being, one who harvested us like wheat. I remember him bringing me
to the surgery; a dismal place lit by a single, overpowered fluorescent bulb
which washed out the colour of everything around it,
the patients led on an old, oak dining table, the top of which was covered by a
white vinyl sheet. Surgical tools were laid across a small fold-out table, next
to those was a large, steel bedpan; home for any diseased organs or foreign
objects which were extracted from the patient.
There was a constant, keen
draught, holes in the walls and around the window had been plugged with dirty
old towels and chunks of insulating foam, but did little to keep the room from
being barely above freezing.
That day, an overweight man was laid out on
the operating table, a sheet covering his body to just below his neck. Rolls of
fat padded the bottom of his jaw, cushioning a face which was now as pale as
whale blubber, a faint grimace twisted his mouth, the look of someone who was
waiting for an overdue train or had been caught out in a sudden downpour with no
umbrella.
‘Do you see it?’ my father asked quietly, as though conveying a
vital and almost dangerous secret.
I looked again, noticing new details;
the tourniquet which consisted of two worn out leather bands, tightened by a
clockwork looking turn-screw. Long, steel forceps designed to probe deeply into
a bullet wound, a cauterizing iron which was almost identical to a fireplace
poker apart from the flat, paddle like end.
None of this was abnormal,
however.
As though becoming impatient, he continued; ‘Death, Lukin. It’s right here, you can
feel it, can’t you? I plug every gap I can find, bring in a portable heater, but
this room remains cold despite all of that, because he is always here’.
I have no idea why I spoke, perhaps to try and defuse his intensity, to
bring this down to a normal conversation, ‘wh…what
does he want?’.
My father sighed, I felt him
sag against me as though the sigh had taken some measure of his resolve as well,
‘for my scalpel to slip or my nerve to snap. It is not enough that he took your
mother from us, because that one event made him part of our lives, made him
truly aware of who I am and what I do, now he will
never leave’.
His grip slackened and, after what felt like a long time,
I quietly left the room.
The bottomless sadness he had felt after my
mother’s death was an emotion I could share, but what he carried now was sadness
grown into itself, curdled into something dark and
threatening. There were no vices, no alcohol or cigarettes which propped up
other grieving men, just this addiction, this obsession
with mortality.
What frightened me most was that after a while I thought
I could feel it, some invisible spectre
trailing me everywhere I walked; willing me to fall and snap my neck, for my
heart to spasm or my mind to rupture, and all the power, all the control I had
ever felt in my life bled away in a matter of weeks.
Two Weeks With A Stalker was passed between a group of friends at
school, it wasn’t until they were all finished with the novel that I started to
read, I had little interest in the subject but any escape from my current life
was welcome. Kuzmin’s writing lurched between
melodramatic and academic, but even this unbalanced tone couldn’t hide the
excitement, the danger, of the lives these men led.
I made a pact to that
ever present spectre, I swore that he would never
control me the way he had controlled my father, and that no matter the life I
led I would neither feel nor fear his influence.
I would become a
Stalker, and I would survive.
‘I…I have lied’ Abram said quietly,
‘I…..*kaff kaff*…I lied
when…told you…father wanted…better life for me. He was p-punishing…me’.
‘Punishing you?’ I murmured.
‘When he found out….diabetic,
ugh….just…reinforced his anger. Believed I killed my mother…his wife….because I
was…’.
Abram coughed violently, using sheer
bitterness, aggression to force the next words through his stripped throat,‘I was too weak!
I….could not push…my way out of her, and she…she died because of it. Protected
me…but just another name for punish, thought I t….too weak…for the world’.
‘That’s why you came here’ I clarified, ‘to show he was wrong’.
I heard Abram uncap his canteen and drink from it, making a low noise of
pain as the liquid burned a path through him, ‘Used to send…letters…augh…every…..
every week, let
him know….he was wrong. Haven’t….written one now…for…I don't…I don't know….long
time’.
We stood in silence for a while, the cab growing increasingly
more claustrophobic as our ghosts crowded in there to join us; tapping us on the
shoulders, whispering into our ears, urging us to throw ourselves in front of
mutants and onto bullets to try and exorcise them for good.
‘You’re
right, after all’ I sighed, ‘what is a lie, a hidden weakness, when you can
finally……stand up to someone who still holds such power over you. I cannot
imagine, I will not imagine, what I might be capable of in this place, just to
keep proving that part of my father is not sewn inside of me’.
‘So,
what…happens now?’ Abram said slowly, as though the unveiling of our demons
would trigger some mystical event or endow us with strengths we never knew we posessed.
Smiling
slightly, I lifted the crowbar in my right hand, ‘on
three’.