#MY BASEMENT FUCKIN FLOODED AND I LOST HALF MY BOOKS

[localgraverobberr]

[tangentmoth]

It’s all you’ve got inside your head; you better get up and leave instead...

(Hey cool, I managed to make another lyric from 30 Seconds to Mars’ Echelon fit for a tagline.  Rad!)

Greetings, fellow Stalkers!  Tangentmoth is back with another chapter of Scorch the Skies, which fills in the gap between Clear Sky and Shadow of Chernobyl (from the POV of the various NPCs we met along the way).  Man I am KILLING IT this week.

Where we last left off, the stragglers back at the Clear Sky base were not having a great day.  But what about our valiant men of Duty?  Deadly anomalies, dangerous mutants, anarchists and bandits: none will stop Duty on its triumphant march toward saving the planet!

...right?

Chapter 2: The Bad Death of General Krylov

As told by Gormov, Duty technician.

Same old Hundred Rads.

Place never changes, and thank God for it.  Whole Zone’s going to pizdetz faster’n ever, blowouts firin’ off like the end of the fuckin’ world, took out all our power and most of our comms for three whole days.  The Loners all fucked off back to wherever like they always do, told us there wasn’t any deal with the General now on account of he was dead.  Good riddance to ‘em, far as I’m concerned, you can’t trust them for anything, no discipline whatsoever.  We lost at least six of our men to bandits sniping us from the rocks while we tried to to cut around their shithole base on our way to the main road and another twelve because all the anomalies on our maps aren’t where we marked ‘em anymore.  But we came through and will you look at this place?  Power’s on, same old Big Lander metal on the radio, same old shitty static on Barkeep’s TV, Barkeep’s trying to get you to side-hustle for him just like always, even that fucking Bandit’s still in the same corner trying to sell people his bullshit intel.  I’d shoot that fuck if he wasn’t, like, practically the Hundred Rads Mascot.  Same old place alright. 

Fuck it’s good to be back in Rostok.

Anyway, yeah, you heard right.  Colonel Voronin’s taking over, though I guess it’s General Voronin now.  But Krylov’s as dead as it gets.  Most fucked up thing I ever saw.  

We were holding a base at the old Agroprom Research Institute complex, down in the Garbage.  Been down there?  Yeah, it lives up to the name.  Nothing but rocks, bandits, and ARS in those hills.  And shit tons of anomalies, can’t forget those.  No place anyone in their right mind’d choose for a base, but the General had a thing going with the military way further south in the Cordon, and they won’t come up as far north as Rostok unless they’re airdropping Spetznaz in.  Besides, we’re Duty.  It’s our job to take on the worst places and put ‘em to order.  

Agroprom looked good on the surface.  Fortified, all the walls mostly intact, there’s live utility lines to hook into, plenty of towers to set sniper watch from.  Once we swept the Bandit rats out we had a pretty solid setup.  Only trouble was, there was this bigshot Loner, Father Valerian, who had an idea he was gonna organize all the Loners into an actual faction.  How the fuck do you organize Loners?  It’s like herding cats.  Anyway, he’s got eyes on Agroprom too.  The General was a good man, though, knew how to work with people, and to be fair to the Loners they’ve got good eyes and good ears.  So Krylov makes a deal with this Valerian - the Loners get half the complex, and in return they help us with pest control.  Worked out pretty well, until…

Well.  Until one of our privates decided to have himself a look in the basement.

Kid comes scrambling back up the stairs, shrieking like a firebell, bleeding out the side of his neck.  You know there’s only one thing makes those wounds.  He must have caught it out of the corner of his eye and yanked back just in time.  If that Bloodsucker’d gotten any closer to the kid’s carotid he’d have had himself a nice little afternoon snack.  But Mitya and Kolobok get the private patched up, pour a bottle or two of vodka down his throat, and he’s more or less fine.  Nothing like your first Bloodsucker to get your attention, eh?  

Anyway, the attack gets reported to the General, who sends a team down to clean out the tunnels.  Except not a single one of them come back.  Not a single. One.  And it’s not just us, either, we talked to the Loners and turns out they’d lost half a dozen down there, give or take.  The ones who did come back up came back addled, so we knew there had to be more than just bloodsuckers down there.  There was actually a nutty rumor on the Loner side of the base that there was one pack of two or three Loners who were living down there for a few weeks before they lit off North for the great Unknown, but I’d sooner believe in Ded Moroz, after what I saw later.

So now we’ve got ourselves a mess.  We can flood the tunnels, but the valves are all down in the basement.  Nobody wants to go downstairs, not even Inquisitor, our big-game hunter.  Said he preferred to do his hunting aboveground.  Meanwhile the freaks in the tunnels know we’re here now, so they’re coming upstairs.  Milutin and Fyoki were manning the gate and they swear they saw a huge black bloodsucker jump on another one of our guards and just disappear into the treetops with him.  The General’s not big on wasting Duty lives, and you can’t order Loners to drink vodka, let alone go underground to end up bloodsucker food.

Then all of a sudden, one day, this big guy--and I mean BIG guy, must have been two metres, face like the evil robot from that old movie--comes strolling into camp.  He’s got this weirdo outfit on, glacier-blue camo that barely fits and a green flak vest and this ratty leather overcoat that looked like he looted it off a Bandit, but he says he’s a Merc, and after a couple days he up and volunteers to do the job for us.  Perfect solution, right?  If he succeeds, we’re good to go.  He dies, well, no great loss, and we don’t lose any of our own.  Tell the truth, none of us expected him to actually succeed, but this guy must have been something else because it went off without a hitch.  We gave him some gear and some cash as thanks, I fix up his Vintorez, he stalks on over the hills and far away, and our base is safe for operations. Or so we thought.

See, what none of us were counting on was the blowout.  That big one.  It fucked everything up.

I was on survey with the General, trying to take stock of the damages to the facility.  It was...a day after the blowout?  Two, maybe.  I don’t know.  Those things fuck with your head.  Time gets weird.  You know?  At any rate, he’s got me with him, because I’m the tech.  I don’t know shit about architecture or infrastructure maintenance, mind, but I’m the closest thing we’ve got.  

We’d sealed up the entrance to the basement levels with an old steel door we cut from one of the labs in the building.  What the hell they were doing here I don’t know, something to do with agriculture’s my guess but fucked if I know. The door was rusty but still sound, at any rate.  Well, when we got down there to make sure the shaking hadn’t damaged it, we saw Sergeant Nalivayko standing outside the door.  Just...staring at it.  Eyes big blank zeros.  

Then he started screaming.

Screaming and screaming, holding his head, his ears, like he was trying to hold his brains in.  Saying ‘it’s inside, something’s inside me!’  I didn’t know what the hell he was raving about, I thought the blowout must have sent him mad somehow.  Except...then I started to hear something too.  Ever been too close to a grenade when it explodes?  That ringing in your ears after?  Like that.  But it didn’t stop. 

That’s when I started booking it the hell back up the stairs.  Suppose I ought to be shot for cowardice, but so far nobody seems to care.  I made it up to the first landing, and when I looked back down…

Nalivayko was still down on his knees screaming, but General Krylov was still perfectly calm.  I still don’t know why he did what he did.  He was a good man.  A hard man, but this is a hard place.  At first I thought he meant to go in there and kill whatever it was behind that door.   But then I remembered there should be nothing behind that door...nothin’ except god knows how many cubic fucktons of water.  

I yelled down at him...shit, I don’t know what I yelled.  I couldn’t hear past that ringing noise.  Maybe he couldn’t either, because he went right on ahead and opened the door.  Soon as he does, all that water starts pouring into the stairwell...but it was all wrong.  It was glowing.

Like I said.  The blowout.  It shook stuff up, and not just the ground...it moved all the anomalies around.  Ever seen the ones they call “fruit punch”?  Looks like a glowing puddle of bubbly water, but it burns like industrial strength lye.  Dozens of them must have sprung up in those basement tunnels, and they’d gotten into the water we filled the place up with.  General Krylov and poor Sergeant Nalivayako melted to death in that stairwell like...like the fucking Nazis in Indiana Jones.  Fuck.

We left Agroprom the next day, and whatever the hell still lives there.  I’m not sorry a bit.  Rostok’s Duty’s place, always has been.  We can do our jobs from here just as well, and I get better parts for my repair shop since everyone comes through here to trade with Barkeep.

So I say fuck the Garbage, and fuck Agroprom.  The Bandits want it? Great.  Let ‘em have it.