Feb 19, 2015 20:50
Vasily's back ached, but his spirits perked as he spied rain-washed gray wood ahead. He'd never been so happy to see termite damage. He pushed through the last tangle of dead brambles, and soon the overgrown grass around the cabin was pulling at his ankles. At one time this place had been a repurposed ranger station, before that, probably some Kulak farmhouse, purged during the famine. The area was so overgrown that it was hard to tell, and even this far into the northern Ukraine, more adventurous looters had likely taken anything of note.
The bones of a chain-link fence still stood on the far side of the lot. Beyond, the low vegetation of a scraggly marsh was punctuated in distant square walls and rust-red towers rising from the trees, the bricks being squeezed in the grip of overgrowth until their paint flaked off. He didn't know the details, but apparently it was the corpse of some inscrutable old Soviet facility.
The door hung half-open, and he helped it the rest of the way with his boot toe. The mottled, imperfect dark of the interior held only a few pieces of worthless furniture - exactly as expected.
With audible relief, he sat back so that his pack settled onto the bare, flaking springs of the ancient bed that sagged crookedly against the back wall. It screeched with protest, but he detached the straps and stood up, three rising pops going up his spine as he did.
After a a few long breaths and a cigarette, he began unpacking the bulk he'd tromped twenty kilometers with. He palmed the dust and detritus off a wooden desk in the corner, and settled onto it the black plastic of a shortwave radio the size of a microwave. He plugged some components together, then the whole assembly into a self-contained battery pack (with a breathed cuss of "heavy bastard" wafted towards it as well). With a test click on and off, he was satisfied.
Now he set to arranging his meager living materials. Ordinarily, no sane man would travel this far into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone with such light supplies, but he was the vanguard of his Geologist and Exploration group. He was to establish basecamp and communications, and then be joined by the others one at a time, as they were able to duck the porous Military Cordon. The Soviets hadn't been able to keep the barrier solid twenty years ago; the Ukrainians today couldn't either, and there was money to be made here.
He celebrated by popping open one of his four cans of nameless meat. He ate half of it with a heel of bread and a few pulls off of the little bottle of vodka he'd naturally made room for. He unrolled a sleeping mat onto the rust of the old bed. The knob was missing entirely from the door to the one-room cabin, but he pushed one of the room's wooden chairs in front of it - better than nothing. He sat at the desk, clicked the radio on, and listened to its familiar, almost-inaudible hum of operation. He began picking through the channels.
Mostly squealing and noise. His team's chosen band was silent, no real surprise right now. He poked around the military bands and was happy to note a lack of activity. More squealing and noise, some faint folk music from Belarus, some static, then some even less intelligible Russian pop. He flicked along through a large swathe of empty static, more static, and gave a start when he heard a single syllable of a clear male voice. He began scrolling slowly back across the bands.
It took him a minute to find it. The static gave way to a stern male voice that rolled, distantly, out from the speakers.
"---even, three, three, five. [Chime]. Seven, three, three, five. [Chime]. Seven, three, three, five. [Chime]. Seven, three..."
He furrowed his brow and tuned the knob back and forth carefully. He let it play for a couple of minutes. That ...was the entirety of the broadcast. The man's voice sounded far away but intelligible, and he just kept spooling off those numbers, punctuated with that "ding" between them. He retrieved a book he'd been filling out over his years as an amateur radio operator, and thumbed through pages of scrawled notes about different band ranges, looking for anything about this station: 49m, 6160kHz.
49m got the best reception at night. He thought the kHz number sounded familiar, and he found it: there was an urban legend - not quite old enough to be superstition - among some radio operators that 6160 was bad luck. Nothing concrete, just an agreement not to broadcast or listen on that channel, for reasons never quite specified.
He noted down the station's numbers and went back to scanning, but it tugged at his mind. This place was desolate, and that broadcast was strong enough to be heard clearly. He took another pull from his bottle and continued warbling through dead air.
***
The night did not go uneventfully. Vasily had been worried about all manner of things - wild animals, other intruders, getting caught by the military. So he found himself lying on the uncomfortable bed he'd made for himself, his ears scanning the thumps and scratching from the woods outside the poorly-barred door, clutching the little Makarov pistol he'd brought in his boot.
He lay in the unfamiliar dark, and listened to the grass rustling, the tips of a tree's branch scratching on the collapsing roof, the creak of necrotic springs beneath him, "Seven", said a man's voice, and Vasily's boot went through the bottom of the bed as he scrambled back against the wall. "Three, three, six. [Chime], it continued. "Seven, three, three, six."
"Mother of God", Vasily croaked to himself, his pulse hammering in his temples as his pistol waved at the dark. A green pinpoint shone through the inky depths, coming from the switch on his radio set. He fumbled in his pockets until he could retrieve his lighter and flick it on, extract his leg, and in turn rummage his pack for a flashlight. The man's voice continued to intone at him (seven, three, three, six) as he ungracefully bumped towards the desk, knocking a chair with his knee along the way, and he hastily clicked the thing off. "Give me a heart attack", he concluded, running his fingers through his hair. He twirled the tuner knob once to get it off that damn station.
The window above the desk was not boarded properly, and he gazed out at the gray shapes of the marsh beyond while his breath returned. The moonlight highlighted the muted, silvery edges of trees and cracked pavement, and he became cognizant of a red tint that grew and waned. He furrowed his brow, but couldn't see anything through the plywood crack.
With flashlight switched off to avoid attention and the pistol jammed in his coat pocket, he creaked open the door and slipped out onto the little covered stoop beyond. There he stood and watched a red light in the sky pulse lazily on, and then languidly off again. This was the first electric light he'd seen since stepping foot in the Exclusion Zone, and it was coming from a tower at the old Soviet facility beyond.
He had been sure that entire facility was only home now to chipmunks and wild dogs. Nobody official had been out here in years, and the power cables that ran along the road were down in the gutter as often as they were still despondently hanging between poles. Maybe someone had a generator? He couldn't hear anything.
Well, he sure wasn't hiking the kilometers over there to see, and he decided he didn't want to know. He stepped back into the cabin and eased the door shut. He eyeballed his radio and the bottle of vodka that sat beside it, and decided to take a pull and a listen. "Seven, three, three, five", intoned the man. Vasily clicked it off again, shook his head and settled heavily down on the protesting springs, his head on his pack.
***
When Vasily awoke it was still dark. It was clear, because there was no difference between his eyes being closed or open. A moment later a faint pink tinge illuminated the far side of the room, then receded again. A light drizzle must have begun, as he heard drip-tapping on the roof and the leaves outside.
He slowly rose, trying to avoid the squall of the springs underneath him, and snapped on his lighter again. He didn't know why he woke, his watch read 3:35 AM, and he could neither see nor hear anything to explain. He unrolled a poncho and draped it over the radio, then pulled it a few inches farther away from the imperfectly sealed window. As he did, his shirt button tapped the on switch - he felt it, and was already scrambling with the underlit poncho as the man's voice rolled out clear as day:
"Seven, three, three, six. [Chime]"
Vasily cursed and flicked the thing off. Sonuva...
He stiffened, and then let his thumb off his lighter. His ears perked anew, and there it was: Crunch, swish, crunch, swish - those couldn't be anything but footsteps outside. He froze, and tried to breath silently, which made him all the more acutely aware of the draw and exhale echoing in his eardrums. ....crunch, swish. He stared hard at the wall, as though that would reveal something.
No way could that be his team, they weren't due until tonight. It couldn't be military, if it were, the house would already be engulfed in a spotlight and there would be amplified hollering from an APC, they weren't subtle. Maybe the Spetznaz were, but he'd never even seen one of them, and he could hardly imagine special forces being involved in policing a safety cordon.
Maybe an animal. In fact, yeah, probably so, sound can be deceiving to a human ear, and who else would be out two hours before dawn? He thought about going out to shoo it off, but decided that staying put was his best option. If it were a bear or a wildcat, he wanted a wall between them. He took a swig from his bottle.
He tried to triangulate where the sound of footsteps were traveling, and he peeked through a spot where the boards had separated with age, leaving a musty gap between them. His eyes were hard and round like an animal's as he scanned the grayscale overgrowth, but damn if he could see anything. The drizzle picked up.
He stared hard at a tree, twenty feet beyond his crack. It split into a Y, and there was a knot just above that crotch. But that wasn't what had his attention, not really. Immediately before the tree, the rain ...split. It fell to the left, or it fell to the right, and it left a shadowy gap in the thudding rain as though a shape were there. As though a figure were there. The hair stood up on Vasily's neck and a raging headache suddenly lanced from his temples to his brainstem, and he flung himself back into the wooden desk chair.
Vasily pulled the desk chair away from the door and sat in the dark, for minutes that dragged out forever, his eyes screwed shut, his pistol on his lap as a talisman more than anything.
***
In the morning he got on the radio and told his crew that they were setting up basecamp elsewhere, not saying a damn thing over their tired protests. As he exited with that double-sized pack stooping his shoulders again, he paused. To his left, he could see the tree with the Y-split, looking as mundane as you please in the cold morning rays, but a glint caught his attention.
Not believing that he was actually doing this, he trod over to the gnarled thing and poked at the hollow knot over the split. The glint had been a barely visible little piece of chain. He tugged it, it resisted. He tugged until it gave, and a gold pocketwatch tumbled out into his palm. He turned it over a few times, then clicked it open with a grubby thumbnail. On the inside cover was pasted an ancient black-and-white photo of a Slavic woman, with the edges tinged in rust that could only be one thing. The watch itself was stopped, clearly hadn't been wound in decades.
The date window was seized at 7, and the hands were stopped at 3:36. Vasily considered it for a minute, then reached up and shoved it right back where he found it.
He trudged through the branches that whipped at his face. While he would go on to make three more expeditions into the Zone in the coming years, he never once returned to the ranger cabin. He only talked about that night while extremely drunk, earning him the nickname "Ghost": but only among the exploration and radio enthusiasts who'd never been to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.