Dead Man Walking (S.T.A.L.K.E.R story) - Chapter 1

Probably weren't expecting this from me. I've always been a big STALKER fan, but the fanfiction scene there is pretty barren. Still, with the release of STALKER 2, I figured writing something dour and depressing would up my mood. I also wanted to shift back a bit to more somber, cynical writing since I cut my teeth in darker fics like Twisted Reflections and Through the Looking Glass before pivoting to humor once I started writing for RWBY.

This is more of a cynical slife-of-life kind of thing. Right now there is no main plotline. Just snippets of the life of Hound, former Monolithian-turned-loner, as he struggles to survive in the Zone. As such, the stories are generally focused more on introspection and the Zone itself rather than extensive conversations like my other fics.

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The Skadovsk groaned against the force of the howling winds outside, its rusted frame shuddering like a beast battered by the merciless elements. Hound sat at the far corner of the bar, slouched in a chair that creaked under his weight, nursing a grimy shot glass filled with something that had once been vodka. He swirled the clear liquid idly, his gloved hand sluggish and worn, while his other hand rested on the heavy frame of a battered hunting rifle propped against his knee.

The room stank of stale sweat, old liquor, and the dampness that seeped in from the nearby swamp. Even now, the metallic tang of ozone cut through the air, carried in by the acrid wind that heralded the coming emission. Outside, the Zone raged. Crimson streaks of lightning painted the blackened sky, casting skeletal trees and twisted anomalies into jagged silhouettes. The thunder, muffled by the ship's corroded hull, came in bursts that felt like they were splitting the world apart.

Hound's eyes, dark and cold as the Zone's nights, flicked toward the doorway as the last stragglers stumbled in. The rookies were haggard, their cheap suits caked in mud and grime, faces pale with fear as they pressed past the door and slammed it shut against the searing heat of the emission. They stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, eyes darting nervously around, unsure whether to sit or simply stand and endure the contemptuous glares of the seasoned stalkers.

Rookies always looked the same, Hound thought with a quiet sneer. Wide-eyed and desperate, like they expected some legend to take them under their wing. Their idealism wouldn't last a week. The Zone would grind it out of them, if it didn't kill them first.

The Skadovsk wasn't a place for legends. It was a place for people like him - those who had seen too much, lost too much, and crawled into this decaying carcass of a ship to drink themselves into oblivion while pretending they could still make something of themselves. Even now, he could feel the judgmental eyes of the veterans boring into the rookies. Sych at the bar openly laughed, his half-rotten teeth bared as he exchanged some dark joke with Beard, who wiped a filthy rag across the counter. Owl sat perched on a table, lured by the call of alcohol and food, watching everyone with the predatory gaze of a bird of prey waiting for a mouse to slip up.

Hound took another swig of vodka, the burn spreading through his chest like a muted echo of life. It didn't drown out the memories, though. Nothing ever did. The faces of his former comrades in Monolith still haunted him. It wasn't their deaths that lingered - it was their fanaticism, the blank-eyed zeal with which they had marched toward certain doom, obeying voices that came from nowhere. Voices he had once followed without question.

But Hound had learned the truth, hadn't he? Or at least enough of it to understand that faith was a luxury the Zone couldn't afford. He'd seen the "revelations" for what they really were - fractured echoes of something alien and unknowable. The realization hadn't set him free, though. No, it had left him hollow, like a machine without purpose. And so he'd fled north, shedding the identity of a Monolithian like an ill-fitting skin. Hound wasn't even his real name, just another mask to hide behind. From what he gathered, it was a common name in the Zone. They were all hounds drooling over the artifacts like a dog to a bone.

The vodka sloshed as he tilted the glass, staring into its depths as though they might hold some answer. The emission raged outside, the shrieks of wind and the Zone's tortured screams growing louder. Some of the rookies flinched as the floor beneath them trembled. One of them, a kid who couldn't have been older than twenty, looked to the veterans as if hoping for reassurance. None came.

"First time?" Beard called out from behind the bar, his tone as rough as the bark of a swamp tree.

The rookie nodded, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed hard.

"You'll live if the ship holds," Beard continued, though his tone suggested he wouldn't put money on it. The room chuckled darkly, but the sound was hollow. Hound smirked faintly and knocked back the rest of his vodka, savoring the fleeting warmth it brought. The Zone had no room for comfort. No room for hope, either.

The air grew heavier, oppressive. Even within the supposed safety of the Skadovsk, the emission pressed down like a weight on Hound's chest. His breathing slowed, deliberate, as he ran his fingers along the worn stock of his rifle. It wasn't the storm outside that bothered him. It was the stillness within - the waiting, the not knowing if the next crack of thunder would be the last sound they'd ever hear.

A man like him wasn't supposed to be afraid. And maybe he wasn't, not in the way the rookies were. But there was something in the air tonight, something even the vodka couldn't dull. He shook his head, setting the empty glass on the table with a clink. The sound felt unnaturally loud in the silence that had overtaken the room.

As the emission reached its apex, the crimson light filtering through the warped portholes painted the room in blood. Hound stirred his empty glass, pretending not to notice how the light made the shadows dance like specters. He told himself he didn't care anymore. The past was dead, and the Zone was indifferent. But deep down, he knew the truth.

You could leave Monolith. But you could never really leave the Zone.

Hound closed his eyes, leaning back in his chair as the Skadovsk shuddered with each agonized groan of the emission outside. For a moment, the distant echoes of the Zone's tortured wailing faded, replaced by something softer - a glimpse of golden light. It was a memory, or what he thought was a memory, tenuous and frayed like a spider's web catching the last rays of daylight.

A smiling woman. Her face wasn't clear, not really. The features blurred and distorted whenever he tried to focus on them, like a reflection in rippling water. Sometimes he saw it if he truly focused, catch a glimpse beyond the distortions, but all too quickly the memories faded before his mind could even process the picture.

But the hair...her hair was vivid, bright as the sun, spilling over her shoulders like a river of molten gold. She was laughing, though the sound of it was swallowed by the void in his mind. Was it a lover? A sister? Or just some fragment of a dream stitched together by desperation and loneliness? A woman in the television he'd obsessed over for no reason besides the fact that she had a pretty face and a nice smile?

The image faded, as it always did, leaving behind only the dull ache of something irretrievably lost. Maybe she'd been someone he knew before the Monolith took him, before he became another cog in its unfeeling machine. Or maybe she was nothing at all, just a figment conjured by his fractured mind to fill the void where his past should have been. It didn't matter. The Zone had stripped away everything else, why not his memories too?

He exhaled slowly, his breath misting in the cold, stagnant air of the Skadovsk. Around him, the other stalkers were quiet, their voices stilled by the weight of the emission and the heavy silence it brought. Even the rookies had stopped their nervous chatter, their wide eyes fixed on the scarlet flashes of lightning outside.

Hound reached for the bottle of vodka on the table, refilling his glass with a steady hand. He'd long since given up trying to piece together the puzzle of his life before the Zone. What little he remembered felt like someone else's story, fragments of a world he didn't belong to anymore. There had been a time when he'd tried - desperate searches for clues, questions asked in hushed tones to those who might have known him before. But the answers, when they came, were always the same: blank stares, shrugged shoulders, and the occasional hint of pity.

The pity was the worst.

He'd stopped asking eventually. The Zone didn't care who you were before. It only cared who you were now - and whether you could survive.

"Hey," a gruff voice interrupted his thoughts. One of the veterans, a wiry man with a scar running from his temple to his jaw, leaned over from the next table. "You got a smoke?"

Hound glanced at him, then down at the pack of cigarettes sitting by the vodka bottle. He slid one across the table without a word. The man nodded in thanks, lighting it with a battered Zippo that bore the faded insignia of some long-dead military unit. The ember glowed briefly, illuminating the hard lines of the man's face before fading back into shadow.

"Thanks," the veteran muttered, exhaling a cloud of smoke that drifted lazily toward the ceiling. "Rough night, huh?" Hound didn't respond and just raised his glass in a silent toast; it was about as friendly as one could get in the Zone. The man smirked faintly and leaned back, his chair creaking under his weight.

Rough night. The words seemed absurdly inadequate to describe the unrelenting chaos outside. But then, what was there to say? The Zone didn't care about your feelings, your fears, or your fleeting memories of a life you could barely recall. It would chew you up and spit you out without a second thought, just as it had done to countless others.

He downed the vodka in a single swallow, the burn a welcome distraction from the weight pressing down on his chest. The woman's face flickered in his mind again, unbidden, and he clenched his jaw against the surge of emotion it brought. It wasn't longing, exactly. It was something colder, sharper - a gnawing sense of futility. She was gone, whoever she had been. The man he'd been before was gone too, buried under the rubble of Monolith's lies and the Zone's unyielding brutality.

The emission roared, a deafening crescendo that rattled the Skadovsk's frame and sent a shiver through the floor beneath his boots. Hound stared into his empty glass, his reflection distorted and warped by the curvature of the glass. It stared back at him, eyes hollow and unrecognizable.

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Hound stepped out of the Skadovsk at first light, the air thick with the metallic tang of the Zone after an emission. The world felt...raw, like a wound freshly opened. A faint haze hung over the marshes, tendrils of fog curling through the twisted remains of trees and pooling in the craters where anomalies lay hidden like predators. The silence was oppressive, broken only by the distant calls of mutated wildlife.

Artifact hunting. The bread and butter of a stalker. It sounded simple: find the strange, glowing trinkets birthed by the Zone's anomalies, sell them to traders, and live to repeat the cycle. So many rookies thought it was an easy way to fortune, and so many ended up as extra supplies stripped from their lifeless bodies. Hound had seen it too often - eager fools stumbling into a springboard or wading too close to an electro anomaly without so much as a detector to guide them. The Zone didn't tolerate ignorance, and it never forgave mistakes.

Hound slung his hunting rifle over his shoulder and checked his gear. Bear Detector (best he could afford)? Check. Lead-lined container for artifacts? Check. Enough bandages and medkits to patch himself up if things went south? Barely, but it would have to do. The boots on his feet were falling apart, the soles worn thin from too many days trudging through muck and ash. But a replacement pair would cost more than he made in a week unless this hunt turned up something special.

The swamp greeted him with a chorus of croaks and chirps as he stepped off the ship. Every step was calculated, deliberate. This place was alive, watching. The ground was uneven, riddled with puddles of stagnant water and the occasional patch of dry land, dotted with tufts of sickly grass. To an outsider, it might have seemed like an unremarkable wetland, but to Hound, every inch of it screamed danger. The subtle shimmer in the air ahead? An anomaly waiting to tear him apart. The faint buzzing in his ears? Radiation thick enough to make his teeth ache.

He activated his detector, the device emitting a faint beep as it came to life. The signal was weak - no artifacts nearby, but he wasn't expecting to find one this close to the Skadovsk anyway. No, the real prizes were deeper in, where the anomalies grew more unpredictable, and the Zone's grasp was stronger.

As he trudged forward, memories of other hunts came unbidden. The metallic taste of adrenaline as he sprinted out of a gravitational anomaly's pull. The sickening crunch of a fellow stalker crushed in a springboard trap, his screams cut short as his body folded like paper. The rare, exhilarating moments of triumph when his detector's beeping reached a fever pitch, leading him to a glowing artifact nestled in the heart of danger.

Other memories surfaced. Hunting down Stalkers across the red forest and the CNPP, the prayers of his 'brothers' as they worshipped the Monolith, the tearful pleas from Stalkers as they begged for their lives before he mercilessly gunned them down, staining his boots with their blood.

He shook his head. That time was behind him. This was his life now. Hunt for artifacts, sell them for a pittance to men like Owl or Beard, and scrape together just enough to keep going. There was no end to the cycle, no way out of the Zone that didn't involve a body bag or something worse. But it kept him alive. And as long as he was alive, he didn't have to think too hard about the past.

The detector chirped softly, snapping him out of his thoughts. The signal was faint but growing stronger as he moved forward, his boots squelching in the mud. He slowed his pace, his eyes scanning the area for anomalies. The air shimmered slightly to his left. Thermal, most likely. To his right, a patch of ground seemed unnaturally smooth, devoid of vegetation. A springboard, then. He adjusted his path accordingly, stepping lightly and keeping his detector in one hand and a bolt in the other.

The beeping grew louder, faster. Hound crouched, his breath steady as he approached a shallow crater half-filled with murky water. The artifact was here - he could feel it. But so was danger. The Zone never gave without taking something in return.

He reached into his pack threw the bolt, tossing it into the crater. It clinked against the rocks before vanishing into the water. Nothing happened. He tossed another, further in. This time, the air rippled, a faint shimmer revealing the edge of an electro anomaly. He marked its position in his mind, then skirted the edge of the crater, his detector guiding him closer to the artifact.

Finally, he saw it: a faint, pulsating glow beneath the water. A "Jellyfish," judging by the color and size. Useful for filtering radiation out of the bloodstream and a common artifact usually kept by Stalkers instead of sold to make their lives easier. Not the most valuable find, but worth enough to keep him going for another week or two. He crouched at the edge of the water, clenching his gloved hands before reaching for the artifact. His fingers brushed against it, and the detector screamed.

A flash of light. A crackle of energy. The electro anomaly flared to life, arcs of electricity lashing out with deadly precision. Hound threw himself backward, the artifact clutched tightly in his hand as the anomaly erupted, sending waves of heat and light into the air. He hit the ground hard, the breath knocked from his lungs, but he didn't let go. The Jellyfish was his, and he'd be damned if the Zone was going to take it back now.

He lay there for a moment, staring up at the sky as his heartbeat slowed. The detector was silent again, the anomaly calming as quickly as it had flared. Slowly, painfully, he sat up, inspecting the artifact in his hand. It was intact, its glow steady and mesmerizing.

One more hunt survived. One more step in the endless cycle. Hound slipped the Jellyfish into his lead-lined container and pushed himself to his feet, his knees protesting the effort. The Zone wasn't done with him yet.

Hound stood for a moment, his breath visible in the chilly morning air, watching the faint glow of the artifact fade within its container. The Zone hummed around him, a constant reminder of its presence, alive and relentless. This was his life now. This would be his life until it ended. There was no escape, no grand plan for something better beyond the invisible borders of this cursed land.

He'd heard the stories, of course - rookies and even seasoned stalkers fantasizing about leaving the Zone behind. They'd sit around the fire with their half-full bottles and cracked cigarettes, spinning tales about what they'd do with their riches. A cabin in the woods. A quiet house on the edge of a lake. A luxury apartment in some far-off city, filled with comforts and peace, far from the radiation, the anomalies, and the constant threat of death.

Some bragged about lovers back in the city, sweethearts who were undyingly loyal and just waiting for them to come back with a fortune for them to start a new life. A rare few even mentioned pregnant wives, acting as if going to the Zone was some noble calling for their family could live in comfort for years to come.

But those stories never rang true to him. He couldn't picture himself in them, couldn't imagine a life beyond this endless cycle of hunting, selling, and surviving. What would he even do outside the Zone? He didn't remember if he had anyone waiting for him. No family, no friends, not even a face to attach to the hazy memories that haunted him. The Zone had taken his past, stripped him of everything except the present. And it would take his future too, in time.

He adjusted the straps of his pack and began walking back toward the Skadovsk. The swamp felt quieter now, though not safe. The Zone was never safe. Every step was measured, deliberate, his eyes scanning for the slightest hint of danger. A ripple in the air, a shift in the ground, a shadow moving where it shouldn't. He'd been in the Zone long enough to know that it didn't let its inhabitants grow complacent. The moment you thought you understood it, the Zone would remind you who was really in control.

As he walked, his thoughts drifted back to the others; those who dreamed of escape. Maybe some of them made it out. Maybe they reached the borders with their packs full of artifacts, traded them for enough cash to start a new life, and disappeared into the world beyond while laughing at those still knee-deep in mud and radiation. But most didn't. Most ended up as corpses in the muck, their dreams sinking with them into the unforgiving soil.

Hound wasn't bitter about it. He wasn't jealous of their dreams or angry at their naïveté. He just...didn't care. The Zone was all he knew, and all he had left. The idea of leaving it felt as foreign as the world outside. It wasn't just the danger or the challenge that kept him here. It was the finality of it. The Zone didn't care who you were, what you wanted, or what you'd done. It didn't judge, and it didn't forgive. It simply was. And Hound found a strange kind of peace in that.

He didn't expect to live long enough to see an old man's death. The Zone would take him, sooner or later. Maybe he'd step too close to an anomaly, misjudge the pull of a gravitational field or the range of an electro. Maybe a mutant would tear him apart, its claws rending flesh and bone like paper. Or maybe a bullet would find him, fired by another stalker with fewer scruples and more hunger. It didn't matter. The Zone didn't promise a tomorrow, and Hound had stopped expecting one.

By the time he reached the Skadovsk, the sun was climbing higher, its pale light cutting through the haze. The ship loomed in the distance, rusted and broken but still standing, a refuge for the desperate and the damned. Hound adjusted his pack, feeling the weight of the artifact inside. It wasn't much, but it was enough to keep him going. Enough to buy a little more vodka, a few more rounds of ammunition, and maybe a replacement for his worn boots.

He climbed the ramp and stepped inside, the familiar smells of sweat, booze, and stale air washing over him. The bar was quieter now, most of the stalkers either out hunting or nursing hangovers in the corners. Beard looked up from his spot behind the counter, his expression unreadable, "Back so soon?" he asked, his voice gruff but not unkind.

Hound shrugged, pulling the container from his pack and setting it on the counter, "Found a Jellyfish. It's yours for the right price."

Beard nodded, reaching for the container and inspecting its contents. He grunted in approval and counted out a stack of rubles, sliding them across the counter. Hound pocketed the money without a word, already calculating how far it would stretch. Not far, but far enough.

Minutes later (and with a new pair of boots), he poured himself a shot of vodka from the bottle on the counter, the liquid catching the light as it filled the glass. He downed it in one go, the burn a familiar comfort. Around him, the murmur of voices rose and fell, the conversations of stalkers who still clung to dreams of fortune and escape.

Hound didn't join them. He didn't need to. He had the Zone, and it had him. One day, it would take him entirely. But until then, he'd keep walking its paths, hunting its treasures, and waiting for the moment when it decided his time was up.

It wasn't a life. But it was enough.

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Next chapter will be up whenever. Like I said, this is less plot-focused and more for just scratching the STALKER itch.