Vasilisa the Brave - Chapter Three

Sneaking out of the city should have been difficult. She heard all sorts of things, about patrols rolling across the exterior, trucks and tanks on the lookout for monsters and Stalkers, guns on the walls, helicopters and advanced aerial surveillance.

Pripyat was... no longer a great place to live in, but for all the chaos and grief that the Zone had caused, it had also attracted a lot of attention from the government, and that meant a lot of investment in the city. The walls were a large and obvious sign of that, towering cement barrier, obscuring the world beyond the city, making the dawn arrive later and the night approach faster as they blocked out the sun.

They were the only horizon that she had seen in years.

She expected that getting past them and into the Zone beyond would be nigh-on impossible. A herculean task, even.

Instead... it was easy.

Vasilisa had some things from her father, including a map. It was creased and well-worn, with a few notes written in the margins and across the front of it in her father's tidy handwriting.

While her father worked for the Office of Zone Exploration, he would sometimes be tasked with hunting down criminals. Smugglers and Stalkers, people who snuck in through the darkness into and out of the city.

He'd marked some of their favourite exit ways on this old map.

She was only slightly worried that these might be watched, but the truth was... disappointingly simple.

Her father had told her once that there was a bounty on catching Stalkers and the like, but the bounty was far higher if they caught someone returning from the Zone. So, these entrances weren't watched all that closely. Worse, those who found a passage out of the city kept it to themselves. If they reported it to the soldiers, then the army would be the ones catching Stalkers and the bounties they represented.

Those who worked around the city kept the exits they knew of to themselves.

The one Vasilisa chose was in the eastern end of the city. Her dad had written three whole lines about this one.

Old city sewer
Check bush
Red-line grate

The old city sewers weren't something she was very familiar with, but Vasilisa had ridden past them a few times. The building was right up against the walls in what had been the more industrial sector of the city before all of that was abandoned.

The site had a fence running all around it, but it was only two metres tall, and there were already crates and piles of refuse stacked up against it, making it easy to vault over.

There were three large buildings, all big and square, with watery rust stains down their sides.

Vasilisa couldn't help but feel like she was a breath away from running into a patrol of guardsmen who'd ask her what she was doing here. It was forbidden. It was wrong.

She swallowed hard and continued. The site was empty. Only crushed cigarette boxes, a few cracked bottles of kvass and walls covered in graffiti both young and old greeted her.

She wandered the site for an hour before discovering the space her father must have been talking about in his notes. A large cement water cistern, open to the air and long emptied except for a pool of stale water. A huge pipe lead into the cistern, with a stained old cloth over the grating covering the entrance.

Vasilisa found her way into the cistern, aware of the protesting metal of the catwalks. She moved to the grating, then tugged it open on rusty hinges. There were signs that there had been a lock on the grate once, but it was long gone.

Pulling around her backpack, she found a flashlight and flicked it on. The torchlight wasn't all that strong, but she was happy that she had it. It illuminated enough of the pipe to see by, and enough to know that she didn't want to step in the gunk in its centre.

The mud had some boot prints in it. She wasn't an expert judge of these things, but they didn't seem young.

The pipe continued for some ways, then reached a junction. She hesitated before seeing a streak of red paint across the top of the pipe on one side. She turned the torch off then squinted into the darkness. The red paint glowed. It was faint, very faint, probably not enough to actually navigate by, but still, enough to know which way was which.

Vasilisa continued to follow the path laid out by someone much cleverer than herself until, finally, after what felt like many hours of walking, she arrived at the end of the tunnel.

It opened up into a swampy field she was entirely unfamiliar with. Vasilisa hesitated on the inside of the pipe, behind another grating which had been crudely cut open by a torch, leaving an opening just large enough for a grown man to squeeze into.

She jumped out after looking every which way and spotting no one. If someone was looking at the entrance, it was from an angle she couldn't see, or using a camera or somesuch. She made sure her hood was on and her gun close.

The mud she landed in squelched underfoot, and for a moment she was worried she might sink into it. The area was nothing but mud and tall, reedy grass growing atop mounds of dirt. Further out were cracked cement walls, and beyond that, a few hundred trees that looked thin and weak.

She turned, looking back the way she'd come.

The wall of Pripyat towered in the distance, lost to either side as it wrapped around her home.

It was a lot rougher on the outside, with great big cracks across its surface, and sides that had never been repainted since the days where the wall was erected.

She shouldered her pack and started to stomp her way through the mud. She didn't want to leave too many tracks, but it was probably more important to get out of the swamp first.

It wasn't all that large, not really, but it felt strangely huge. Bigger than it seemed, maybe. She was pretty sure this wasn't an anomaly, not yet, but... well, she was outside of the walls, much closer to the fringes of the Zone than she would be within the city.

The air was thick with the smell of damp earth, and a wind blew in that sent shivers down her spine as she crossed the swamp. Finally, she reached the edge, where dirt gave way to old, cracked concrete. The swamp might have been unnatural, now that she looked back on it from a slight height. The place was too square, too even on the edges. A dumping space for sewage? She wasn't sure.

Scraping her boots off on the roots of a tree that had broken through the concrete, she tried to remove any lingering marks the space might have left on her.

Next... next she needed to make it to the Zone.

A glance up and at the sky told her that she didn't have much time left. Nightfall would be on her within a few hours, at most.

Licking her lips, Vasilisa glanced at the walls of Pripyat again, then pushed on and away from them.

The sparse woods gave way into an industrial sector. Old factories with chimneys rising above, a few large warehouses, a walled-off area filled with storage lockers, a faded sign listing out prices for them.

Vasilisa moved along the edge of an old, abandoned road, going as quick as she dared while keeping an eye on everything. Every creak and moan of the wind made her heart flutter. This was a dead space, abandoned, no longer meant for people.

Her heart leaped in her chest as she caught movement ahead, but it was merely a thin fox, slipping out of cover, glancing around, then moving on after eyeing her wearily for a moment.

She heard a distant snap-crack. A gun, fired way off to the east.

Her heart was still racing as she crossed a large, grass-filled ditch and came up behind a wall of slabs, with rolls of barbed wire above. There were cracks in the wall large enough for her to squeeze into, but first, she peaked through.

It was a lot for a warehouse, with a loading area for trains just beyond. A few wagons were sitting there still.

She looked around for some time, waiting for her breath to still, for her heart to stop beating so hard. Then she snuck through, moving to the corner of the warehouse and peeking around.

Nothing. Not yet, at any rate.

Vasilisa moved across the yard, up a ramp, then she paused. There was a way through to the other side, by moving through some old train cars and leaping the fence beyond.

But then... The sky was darkening.

So, instead, she found her way into one of the cars and shuffled some old crates around, just enough to create a nook behind them, where no one would be able to see her.

She needed somewhere to spend this first night, and this was as good as anything.

***