Chapter Twenty - Mudprints

Koschei gestured down while crouching himself. His gesture became more urgent when Alice didn't crouch herself immediately. Crystal was squatting next to the man, her body tilted to the side so that she could see ahead.

Their guide was hiding behind an overgrown bush pushing out of a patch of dirt on the roadside right next to a sidewalk. It covered them well enough, hiding them from anyone out ahead who might be looking their way.

Alice knelt down behind the man. "Did you see anything?" she murmured.

Koschei nodded. "Look at the mud over there."

Alice leaned to the side to see said mud. They had left the apartments a few minutes ago, slipping away with some alacrity and dashing not towards the Zone but skirting northwards along its edge.

They were now along the edge of a four-lane road, the sides lined with shops, a used car dealership, a few offices. The kind of boring stretch of road she might have found on the outskirts of any modern city, only this one's roads were cracked by invasive plants.

They had crossed one anomaly so far, a side road filled with a thick fogback. There was fog in the rest of the city, lingering in the air but quickly fading now that the sun was up, but that fog had been thick, unnaturally so, and it clung to the road it was on without leaving.

Koschei hadn't explained why it was there, or what it did. He did make them cross the road so that they'd go around it.

"I see footprints," Crystal said.

Koschei nodded. "Someone passed by here," he said. "One person, travelling lightly, or a small person. The temperature's not too humid, and it hasn't rained, so the prints are made with the morning's dew."

"You're observant," Alice said.

"I'm alive," he confirmed. Koschei looked ahead again through the bush, eyes narrowed. Alice noticed that he was specifically eyeing the windows of every building out ahead, and their rooftops. Places, she supposed, where someone might shoot at them from a vantage. "We should be good to keep going," he said.

"Where are we going?" Crystal asked.

"The camp we're heading to is a day's walk from here. We'll be arriving by nightfall," he said. "It's along the northern edge of the Zone."

"Anything dangerous between here and there?" Alice asked.

Koschei paused, then shook his head. "No. But just past it, yes. We're taking the safest route. It is not safe, but it is the safest." He shrugged his backpack up, then touched the grip of his rifle, likely without even noticing it.

Standing, Koschei started along the road, stepping so that it was avoiding the mud on the sidewalk. He reached into a pocket and tugged out a bolt with a long piece of string, then he started to spin it. It whistled slightly before he flung it out way ahead, then tugged it back while walking.

"That's to find anomalies, right?" Crystal asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Does it work?"

"Yes," he replied.

"Do new ones show up?" Crystal asked.

"Yes."

"Don't you have a map of where they are? Or like, a mental map of where all the ones you know are?"

"Yes. Do you have any more questions?" he asked, sounding somewhat peeved.

Crystal grinned. "Yes."

"Crystal," Alice said warningly. "Let's not piss off Mister Koschei so early in the morning. Though, would you mind if I ask you a question of my own?"

He nodded, Alice figured that if the question wasn't smart, they might find themselves discovering the next anomaly as they walked headlong into it.

"Are there any threats around here, beyond the anomalies, that we have to worry about?" She asked.

Koshei considered it. "The patrols, they'll come this far, rarely, but it happens. Other Stalkers. They aren't all kind-hearted souls. And Monsters."

"Monsters?" Crystal asked.

Koschei shook his head. "You're out of questions," he said.

Crystal pouted in a way that she probably thought was cute. Alice gave her head a pat for her efforts, then continued to follow after Koschei. They were heading deeper into an industrial area. There was a wall ahead of them, some two metres tall and made of rust-red steel and cement pillars. The top had some barbed wire, but a lot of it had been torn down.

Koschei reached a spot where the cement pillar holding up the wall had collapsed. He reached into a back pocket and pulled out a small mirror, along with a telescoping handle that he clipped onto the back of it. With an expert twist, he made the mirror move left and right in the hole, checking out the other side.

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"We're going to be moving past a large red building," he said as he put the mirror away. "The inside is an anomaly."

"It is?" Crystal asked.

He nodded. "But it's the best and shortest route to the other side, so we'll be moving through it. But first, I want to test your ability to handle it. If you can't, we'll go the long way around."

"What's the anomaly?" Alice asked.

He shrugged a shoulder. "We don't have proper names for them. But this one's called the Hall of Horrors. Or the Mirror Room. It's well known. There were some studies done here."

"People studied the anomalies?" Crystal asked.

"Of course," he said. "But not recently. The scientists had a lot of money to test them originally, but it's all gone now. No results means no funding, or something like that. A lot of them became Stalkers, actually. Some of the best."

"Why's that?" Alice asked.

He gave her a look, as if saying that she was now the one with too many questions. Still, he answered. "Because they go into the Zone to satisfy their curiosity. They aren't here to make it rich. They are led by something greater than greed."

Koschei slipped through the opening in the wall, then waited for them to catch up on the other side.

The space here had a few containers, a small shack next to a closed entrance large enough for big trucks to pass through, and a few abandoned heavy-duty forklifts off near the back. To their left was a small trainyard, a few wagons sitting on tracks with ramps leading up to them for easy unloading. There was a large warehouse building to one side, three or so stories tall, and painted in a dark reddish colour.

"The anomaly is in there?" Crystal asked.

"Yes," Koschei said. "We could go around, but it's longer. Trust me."

That... didn't make sense, geographically, Alice meant. She could see that the warehouse was quite big. It looked like it had storage in it for what might be an entire trainyard. It was large, yes, but the sides were opened. It shouldn't have been hard to just go around.

"Look, there's sciency stuff," Crystal said as she pointed to the side. A small trailer was parked there, and it did, in fact, have some monitoring equipment left around it, some on a few tables. At some point a pavilion tent had been set up, but the tarp covering it was ripped apart by the weather, exposing a bunch of antennas and large laptops to the elements.

Koschei walked them up to the entrance of the warehouse. "We need to go through. Remember, what you see isn't real. No reflections are in here. Just keep focused on my back, and don't scream. What you see in reflections is fake."

Alice glanced at Crystal, their eyes met.

Then they followed Koschei in, both of them very specifically searching for any reflective surface they could find.

It didn't take long to find one, a large stainless steel tank a few metres in the warehouse, its sides polished to a shine.

Alice saw herself reflected there. Her younger self, weaker, without her powers and... and then she rolled her eyes as her reflection was mauled by some mysterious monster.

"What's yours doing?" Crystal asked.

"Tentacle monster," Alice replied.

"Huh. Mine's just sort of... crying? It's kind of sad, actually."

"Are you two purposefully looking at the reflections?" Koschei asked.

"We were curious," Alice explained.

He glared back. "It shows you your greatest fears."

"No it doesn't," Crystal said. "These are like, pretty generic fears."

Koschei didn't seem convinced. "Just focus on my back," he said.

And so they did, the three of them slowly walking through the warehouse. Alice noticed the occasional flash of something, a hint of movement, or maybe the sound of something moving, but when she looked, it was never anything worth the trouble. This was some complex magic, truthfully, but just because it was complex didn't mean that it was effective.

It did, however, make the trip through the warehouse a bit unnerving.

It was a long walk.

Koschei seemed confident that it was the fastest path, but the way he was looking around and the way he held his weapon, ready to kill anything that moved, told Alice that he was a lot more worried than the two of them.

***