He found the first crash site ten miles into the Zone.
The Hind landed face-first into a small lake at the edge of the swamp.
This one never sent out any distress signals, so Alex expected losses.
But to stumble upon dozens of corpses before he got anywhere near the wreck?!
Now that was strange in and of itself.
These weren't even transport choppers. They didn't deliver units to the frontline. They should have had a crew of three, with a fourth member in the lead flight. That made it thirteen in total.
So what the hell had happened here?
"10:32 Zulu. Investigator: Major Degtyarev of the SBU Main Directorate," he talked into his dictaphone. "Sector 4-North, western bank of Lake Yantar. Visual contact confirmed on target."
He walked closer, careful not to step on anything considered important.
But this place was already a mess.
"Subject is a Mi-24P with the marking 'Bort 22'. Airframe submerged nose down into the soft ground. No signs of gunfire, but there are visible chemical burns and a strong acidic smell."
He could establish that this wasn't the flight leader. The escape hatches were still intact as well.
All in all, there should have been three bodies still inside.
But he had only found two.
"Lieutenants Smolyak and Drapei confirmed KIA, still strapped in," he gritted out. "The Black Box is missing. More signs of chemical burns on their skins and the helicopter's interior."
The only question was whether it happened after they went down, or if that was the cause.
He climbed off to look around, circling the wreck, but nothing else stood out.
Well, if not that huge, octagonal concrete bunker on the other side of Lake Yantar.
Had he found a bullet hole on the wreck, he would have assumed someone from there shot the heli down. But even if they had nothing to do with it, they might have seen the crash happen.
Or, at the very least, someone could have explained all these corpses nearby.
He wanted to approach and interrogate whoever he could.
Too bad that only ten paces in, a rifle bolt clicked right behind him.
"If you're not a zombie, hands up and turn around, nice and slow," a voice demanded.
"If I'm not—what?!" Alex scowled, arms flying up regardless.
"I said, nice and slow," the warning repeated, but a new voice was already arguing.
"Calm down, Corporal, zombies aren't this coherent."
"Corporal?!" the Major repeated, spinning around to stare down the barrel of a shotgun.
Fuck.
"Zombie or not, he's not showing up on my PDA."
Right. That stupid thing.
He knew he'd need it if he returned here, but the order was so urgent—
"My battery was low, and it turned off," Alex explained, pointing at his belt. "It's right there."
It has been some time since he got it from the military's local fixer, to 'coordinate efforts'. They met during the initial investigation into the missing CNPP personnel.
But to think they would still be around?
Facing him now was an older man with a balding head, a helmet-less green hazmat suit, and—
Yep. A semi-auto shotgun.
Behind him, another person in white struggled to talk him out of shooting Alex in the face.
He could only hope he was winning, but his bulky helmet muffled his voice too much. It looked like he planned for a walk on the Moon, rather than in the swamp.
But half a minute later, he offered his hand.
"I'm Professor Hermann, and this is Corporal Sokolov. Are you military?" he asked.
And, well. He could have admitted that much.
"Major Degtyarev." He omitted his unit. "Looking for survivors, but—what happened here?"
"Zombies," the Corporal spat into the mud, still aiming the damn rifle at his face. "And you strolled around right as if you were one of 'em."
Ugh. Even after confirming he wasn't, he wouldn't drop that freaking thing.
And Corporal? The lowest-ranking personnel on his list were a sergeant.
"We did find a man late in the evening," Hermann noted, but Sokolov shut him up.
"We don't know who this guy is," he growled. "The uniform means nothing. Only bandits turn off their PDAs. And soldiers without one would shoot us without question, too."
"I told you, it has run out of battery, it's on my belt," Alex pleaded, beginning to sweat.
And it was a cold, cold, early winter morning.
"Okay, let's calm down, Corporal," the professor said. "That's an easy thing to test. Take it off his belt and use my battery bank to boot it up. Then we'll see if it's his, or—"
"I can't lower my gun; you do it," the man scoffed, and they reached an impasse.
"Well, I can't plug it in with this bulky gauntlet, either," Hermann pointed out.
And had that barrel not brushed against his nose, Alex might've laughed at that point.
But they were serious.
Heck, seeing all the dead bodies, he'd better have been as well.
"How about this?" he offered, hands still rigid in the air. "Mister Professor will disarm me. Unhook the AK from my back, and there's a pistol in my holster. Then I do the plugging."
"Copy that," the Corporal grunted, and they were finally going somewhere.
Once his PDA booted up—after who knows how long—the barrel was finally gone.
"Sorry, Major," Sokolov mumbled. "You didn't look like a veteran Stalker to me."
Yeah, because he wasn't.
But that one time he visited the Zone sure seemed to matter.
"It's all right," he waved him off, recovering his weapons. "So have you found someone?"
"Roger. Captain Tarasov, by his dog tag, but he was out cold. And his face—"
"Pretty ugly burns," Hermann mumbled, his visor fogging up from the inside. "If I had to guess, they flew straight into a Fruit Punch anomaly. It's rare, but they do float on occasion."
"We recovered the guy and his black box, but couldn't break the encryption yet," Sokolov added.
Well, yeah. Because that thing wasn't made for civilians.
Or whoever these guys were.
"So there was a survivor," Alex sighed, pulling out his dictaphone again. "Captain Tarasov, presumed alive, Black Box recovered by, um—a group of researchers."
Now, he finally had something.
Although he'd rather not record anything about that Fruit Punch thing or whatever yet.
"Can I talk with the survivor?" he asked next. "Or is he still unconscious?"
The professor in the full space suit waved at the bunker he had noticed earlier.
"He was still sleeping when we left this morning, but we stabilised him," he stated with confidence. "Feel free to drop by, Major, and we'll hand over the telemetry, of course."
Good. Great, even.
Save from that earlier hiccup, things were smooth sailing now.
He might as well have tried his luck with something else, too.
"I know it's a long shot, but have you also seen a man called Dmitry Bandera?" Alex asked, not expecting much. "He had also gone missing a few days ago, and we suspect he might have—"
"Oh, Dmitry?" Hermann yelled. "What a great guy."
What? No way.
"He was a great shot," Sokolov nodded along. "And took out half the zombies you saw earlier."
"Is he still here?!" the Major asked, unable to hide his excitement.
But that would have been too much luck right off the bat.
"No, he left to disable the Brain Scorcher. And by the looks of it, he had already succeeded, too."