Part 2. Across the Perimeter

  The “Hawks” were flying low.

  Damian Shurale, the Forrester, squinted up at them, shading his eyes from the dim sunlight that broke through the heavy, smoky clouds and flooded the forest, which lay under evening fog. He narrowed his eyes, following their flight and trying to guess who had decided to send military helicopters over the vast forest in the northern part of the Zone, almost entirely covered by radiation. The “Hawks” circled as if searching for someone, sniffing around, or perhaps covering a route and ensuring safe passage for heavier equipment. From beyond the pale clouds came the steady drone of engines.

  Damian sighed, watching them go. The helicopters themselves were not much of a trouble: he knew that the small glade where his hut stood was not visible from above, even with the most precise optics. He was only slightly worried about those things on earth that they were after. But the sound of engines roared across the sky and disappeared beyond the forest in the north. Sufficiently far away.

  Many years ago, long before the Accident, Damian had trampled every inch of the forests around the city of Weinburg. He was born in the city, grew up there, served in the army, and later found his job in forestry, as a gamekeeper who personally enforced the law and hunted down poachers. After the Accident, the forest had changed. But not so much, not that an old dog like Damian would not adapt.

  Now, many years later, he had settled firmly in this place and lived as a hermit, rarely returning to the outside world. His own long road had brought him here. His bones no longer held the vigor and energy, but he still had some powder in stock. He knew his boundaries, every anomaly surrounding his modest hut amid the desolate swamps—and he knew that no mutant would ever reach his homestead. Not a single ‘trampoline’, nor even the weakest ‘frying pan’ would appear at his doorstep. Only people did. Those whom fate threw into the swamps. Or those who knew exactly why they wanted revenge on the stern old ranger.

  Damian stood for a while longer, gazing at the sky. It’ll rain again soon, he thought. This October is colder than usual.

  At the foot of the hill, two mutant dogs appeared, snorting and glaring at him with their small, red, perpetually angry eyes. Damian was to them what the moon is to wolves—you could howl at it, but never reach it. And all the mutants in the area already knew that.

  He drew deeply from a hand-rolled cigarette of old military tobacco, spat, ground the crumpled paper into the soil, and looked briefly at the sun, or rather the place in the sky where the sun would be, had it not been veiled by the clouds. In recent years, his body often ached—his bones, his old army wounds; once he even had a stroke, and if not for the medicines he always kept nearby, he would have died in his cabin. That was why he liked to look at the sun. For some reason, thoughts of his approaching death awoke a tenderness in him for these landscapes, the gray mornings and evenings of the Zone.

  After waiting a while longer, he turned away and began walking down from the hill, heading deeper into the forest for his daily patrol. It was mostly a formality now, but by force of habit, he observed it strictly. Or maybe he simply needed those daily walks, the Zone’s poisoned air filling his lungs, the sight of the somber woods around him.

  It was quiet. Damian whistled softly through his teeth, shivering from the cold, adjusting his grip on the rifle in his hands. The weapon wasn’t meant for mutants, nor for the rare zombies, wendigos, blind dogs, or rippers that wandered near the borders of his territory. It was meant for people. Only for people. In the Zone, nothing is worse than a human being.

  A path known only to him wound between the trees, sometimes rising over hills, sometimes dipping into hollows. The helicopters were fading into the distance; the last rearguard machines rattled as black dots across the cold sky and vanished beyond the pine tops.

  Something’s coming, Damian thought lazily. If they’re gathering like that… something’s coming.

  The forest was vast. Damian walked through uneven, hilly terrain, glancing at the ancient, eerie trunks of pines and massive oaks, listening to the rustle of aspen and willow leaves hanging over cold, clear ponds. His attuned hearing caught the creak of branches under the weight of a mutant bear settling into a small valley for the winter. The wind carried countless scents—blood, fur, gasoline, faint smoke, and above all, the sharp aroma of pine.

  A ‘trampoline’ pulsed faintly nearby. Damian pulled out his Geiger counter and shook his head in concern. After the last Quake, the radiation had spiked sharply.

  At such times, he should have stayed home, inside his secret lead-lined bunker, built in his younger, more turbulent days to protect against unfriendly visitors and radiation alike. Back then, his moniker, Forrester, was known throughout the Zone and often spoken by therizers who respected his squad as one of the best. Now… now everything was different. That squad was long gone, and he had grown old and almost never ventured into the Zone, nor kept contact with his old companions.

  All the more surprising it was, Damian thought as he climbed a hill and peered through the bushes at the trail leading to his hut, that someone still managed to find the way to his hideout, to try and collect some ancient debt.

  Out of habit, he crouched down, grunting as he pulled out his field binoculars. The trees offered good cover; the bushes and his camouflage gear concealed him completely. Only an exceptionally skilled sniper could pick him out. Adjusting his bandolier, he carefully unstrapped the rifle from his shoulder, lay down on the damp grass, and, with a practiced motion, loaded the rifle, never taking his eyes off the two figures in black cloaks creeping across the clearing near his house. One tugged at the locked door, while the other looked around, keeping his weapon ready. From the hilltop, they were clearly visible.

  Damian lay down flat for a better aim. He worked the bolt, bracing against the stock marked with twenty-one white notches carved over the years. He caught one of the Worms in his sights, the one trying to pick the lock. The ranger didn’t use modern optics or laser rifles; he trusted his old, proven weapon and his own eyes. They hadn’t failed him before, and didn’t fail him now. He held his breath, counted the seconds, squinted, and squeezed the trigger at just the right moment.

  The first Worm slammed his forehead against the door and slid down, leaving a bloody smear from his shattered skull. The second reacted instantly, raising his rifle and firing with unexpected accuracy at the bushes just a few meters from Damian. Forrester was genuinely surprised—since when did they start tracing bullet trajectories so precisely? Before, they’d spray bullets into a ravine on the far side of the clearing, turning their backs to the shooter. Maybe, he thought, they’ve started teaching ballistics in the cultists' camp…

  He hurriedly cleared the barrel, inserting a fresh cartridge and snapping the bolt. He rolled to the side, dropped to one knee… and cursed. The shooter in the clearing had taken cover behind a woodpile, having correctly guessed where the shot had come from.

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  He had to stick his head out. Damian cautiously bent a branch aside, stepped toward the path while turning his head, but really keeping his eye on the woodpile. Making short dashes, he crept along the forest’s edge, carefully circling the enemy. He froze, trying to look as conspicuous as possible. Commanders had scolded him in earlier days for such antics, but with inexperienced kids, the trick used to work. Damian waited until the cultist couldn’t hold back—and he didn’t: he popped up and sent an irregular burst. Forrester managed to duck and bring the rifle to his shoulder. Only one shot cracked; the Worm screamed, but hid behind the woodpile, and suddenly, while Forrester was reloading, tumbled out of there in a roll, got up on one knee and began spraying wildly from a pistol.

  Damian dodged, flattened himself against the ground. The Worm apparently had not expected a result—while the ranger was working the bolt, he dashed toward the tree line. He ran very fast; Damian even thought he might make it.

  He did not.

  The rifle’s crack sounded first, the Worm’s legs gave out, and he fell, convulsing and gasping, letting out a poorly contained scream of pain. Damian stood up and caught his breath. He looked around just in case—last time there had been a sniper hiding in a nearby pine’s branches, and he caused quite a lot of trouble before Forrester took him out. But no, the forest was silent. Damian went up to the body lying in a pool of blood by the house, checked that it was dead. Then he approached the second man. Despite wounds in his arm and leg, the Worm kept crawling toward the woods and, while Damian crossed the clearing, managed to reach the bushes and fall into a shallow ditch. The ranger flipped him over. The Worm snapped his teeth like a well-trained dog and lunged, raising the pistol.

  “Well, what a stubborn one you are,” Damian grunted, knocking the weapon from the weakened hand with one motion and twisting the arm behind his back, then delivering a blow to the solar plexus with the other. The Worm choked, groaned, and dropped the dagger he had been about to draw from its sheath.

  Damian didn’t waste time. He tightly bound the cultist with the rifle’s leather strap, thoroughly emptied his pockets, taking out bandages, pills, a piece of bread, some sausage and two flasks—one with water, the other with vodka. Plus a packet of some clearly narcotic junk, several spare magazines for a pistol and a rifle, two combat knives, three fragmentation grenades, and a hand-drawn map that very clearly showed the route from the swamps to the secluded hut, the very route the killers had used to get here.

  “Interesting,” Damian said. The Worm’s legs twitched; Damian had to bang him on the head and secure the lower limbs with the strap. “So, you little prick? Are we going to talk? Because we need to talk, we really need to.”

  He did not gag the cultist for that purpose, so the Worm managed to spit in his face. He missed and only splattered his own protective suit. Damian stared into his empty, reddish eyes, at his gray skin over cheekbones, at his thin, pale lips, and the light stubble of a boy of maybe twenty-five at most.

  “Uh-huh,” he said angrily, drawing a knife and pressing it to the Worm’s throat. “You saw what happened to your buddy? The same will happen to you. Only worse, longer, and more painful. Mu-uch worse. So who hired you after all? How did you find the road here? Why did you need me in particular?”

  The Worm didn’t answer at once.

  “You’re playing with fire, Forrester,” he croaked at last. “You think you can always get away with everything? No, you can’t hide forever. There’ll be someone to deal with you; you won’t be safe in your hut. The vendetta isn’t over; we won’t stop until we get you and what you’re hiding…”

  “I know. But right now, I have the advantage. Because you’re tied up and unarmed, and I’m just about to start slowly peeling your skin off. With this knife.”

  The Worm flinched. But he didn’t avert his eyes.

  “Brave fellow,” Damian said approvingly. “But who needs your bravery? It’s just the two of us here; your partner’s dead. No one will see or know how brave you were, how you didn’t betray your superiors and died with pomp for the Worms’ bright ideals…”

  He wasn’t one to throw words to the wind. The Worm was silent, breathing hard, looking up at him from under his brow. Damian shook his head. Bravery must be measured exactly in grams, strictly in proportion to the level of danger and the importance of the information carried. Therefore, the information was very important, important enough that the cultist was ready to die under torture without revealing the secret. Damian rose and checked all the Worm’s pockets once more.

  “Then here’s the thing,” he said indifferently. “Now I’ll go inside. I’ll open the hut, descend into the bunker, block the entrances and exits so radiation doesn’t get in during the Quake. And I’ll sit there all night. And you’ll stay here. Tied up like a hunting sausage, alone in a huge grove in the middle of an anomalous shield through which only mutants might get. There are many of them in the area, you’ve noticed, haven’t you? You’ll lie here all night, and during the Quake you’ll lie still, and the Quake is soon. Look at the sky! Know what it’s like? Know how exposed people go mad and die in terrible torments? And in the morning, there’ll be only a bound, brainless zombie left, and then blind dogs, wendigos, and boars will come and happily have a free breakfast.”

  The Worm’s face changed noticeably and went even more gray.

  “I’ve said my piece, Forrester,” he managed with difficulty. “I won’t betray my brothers.”

  “What brothers, for Christ’s sake?” Damian snapped, stamping his foot. “Don’t you get it? They aren’t your brothers—there’s only one thing you all have in common: you all burned your brains, hanging out in the radioactive woods and getting high on junk! You sit there under radars and emitters your whole life, who wouldn’t go mad? And you still protect them! What brothers? Tell me honestly: what are you fighting for? Why are you ready to endure torture and not give up a secret that has nothing to do with you? For what?”

  “You wouldn’t… understand. We’re different. We’re not like you. You’re the marauders of the Zone.”

  “And you? Its saints? Righteous ones? What’s your idol, your totem, that makes you play at being suicidal lunatics armed with rifles? Get high, stab your veins, sniff hash, and then throw yourself onto the firing line, like you did today? Huh? And how, in hell, is it related to me?”

  “The… Flux,” the cultist breathed out barely audibly.

  Damian bore his eyes into the boy. Of course. Not surprising.

  “What? What about it?”

  “Erimand… He waits there. For the loyal ones. The ones who follow him… Will find eternal life there.”

  Forrester sighed and shook his head.

  “Do you think I can help you find your eternal life?” he asked mockingly. “There is no road to Flux. Everyone knows it.”

  “You… know the road. You… are the enemy of Erimand.”

  “And who told you that?”

  The Worm remained silent, breathing hard, growing paler, and looking at him with hatred. Damian sighed.

  “My advice: take the offer,” he said with compassion. “Tell me who hired you to kill me and why, and I’ll let you go. Then you can flee the Zone, go around, somewhere toward Heisenville… Or become a therizer, if you want. Free. Not a cultist.”

  Instead of answering, the Worm spat in his face again. Damian dodged. He tried to hold back his anger. Deliberately slowly, he raised the Worm’s pistol, cocked it, and fired, punching a hole through the hand. The fingers twitched painfully, blood bubbled between them, the Worm screamed, and began to writhe in convulsions.

  “Fuck you!” he howled. “Fuck you, freak! We… we’ll still get you…”

  “I doubt it,” Damian repeated. “The Quake is soon.”

  The Worm fell silent, gritting his teeth against the pain, looked at the sky, then glanced fearfully at Forrester. Damian sneered, turned away, and walked to the house, kicking the pistol into the dirt as he went. He counted seconds as he crossed the road, passed the old woven fence, and the woodpile, damp from the morning rain. In his wild youth, he’d had to resort to such tricks, and now, while rummaging in his pockets, searching for a key, unlocking an old rusty decoy lock, and typing the code into a new, safe-grade one, Damian counted the time. The Worm was a tough nut to crack. Only when Damian opened the door into the dim half-dark of the entry hall did a voice call from behind:

  “Forrester!..”

  A weak voice. No longer the voice of a firm, fanatically devoted martyr of his group. It was the voice of a boy lost in the forest who had suddenly realized he’d entered the Zone, which shows no mercy to the weak.

  “Hey, Forrester! Come… here. Let’s talk.”

  “That’s better,” Damian muttered, closing the door again, turning and approaching the Worm. “Let me bind you up.”