They reached the mobile lab late in the afternoon, when it was already getting dark.
But when Konrad opened his eyes, gritting his teeth from a headache—
"Idiot," Dmitry greeted him with a bright morning backlight. "Were you drinking again?!"
"Me? Um, no," he mumbled, still half asleep. "We both got shot, and that Corporal guy did something with the artifacts and stuff. Ugh, my head. They must've used euthanasia."
"It's anesthesia, you moron," the Captain laughed, shaking his head.
"And I didn't," Sokolov added with a grin. "Neither."
After checking his ribs, the soldier gave him a satisfied nod.
Meanwhile, Konrad could only blink.
He had one friend in uniform yesterday, and now there were two.
"You didn't tell me you can't hold your liquor, kid," the new one said. And he was at least twice as old as the other. "In case you don't know, you're still in the mobile lab by the swamp."
"No, yeah, I know that," he grumbled, careful with sitting up. "But why was I sleeping, then?"
"Oh, you're up now?" One of the scientists popped in as well. Sakharov? "Ready to go?"
He wasn't wearing his skafander from yesterday, either.
But wait.
"Ready to go where?!" Konrad asked, blinking even harder. "A-are we kicked out, or something?"
"What? No, of course not," the man laughed. "We're still purifying your artifact, and it'll take some time to analyze it, too. Feel free to stay as long as you'd like."
He made it sound like he was only welcome until they finished with his stuff, though.
But that still didn't explain where he needed to go.
"As I said earlier," Dmitry grunted. "My friend Konrad here remembers nothing when drunk."
His eyes widened.
"W-what did I do this time?!"
It should have been one sip. One single sip of vodka as a painkiller.
"Nothing yet," Sakharov said. "That's why I'm asking if you're ready."
Not very helpful.
But the scientist walked past him to open a cabinet, and there were those silly skafanders again.
"You can take the spare suit," he offered. "The Corporal will help you put it on. Then we should head out. Samples are the cleanest early in the morning. And later the zombies would also—"
"Hold on, I still don't know where we're going," Konrad protested, finally awake now.
"To gather samples, of course," the scientist explained. "And measure the psy emissions."
"You have volunteered," Dmitry added, crossing his arms. "Trying to rope the Wolves in, too."
Speaking of whom, they weren't in the lab anymore.
"Stalkers like easy money," Corporal Sokolov smirked. "But when it's about dangerous jobs, they disappear immediately. You don't have to worry, though. I'll escort the professor as well."
"Escort where?!"
"Around the compound," Sakharov said. "A five-minute walk. We already have markers set up."
And despite his protests and confusion, they dressed him up in a big, bulky orange skafander.
The corporal got a green one, while the scientist sported the same design in blue.
"You're not coming?" Konrad asked the Captain, who remained sitting on a folding bed.
"Nah," he waved them off. "It seems I almost died yesterday, so I'll take it easy for now. Also, I have a bunch of rifles and loot to sort through. Yuri and Walther went back for them yesterday."
At night? That was some dedication.
"Here, take one in case of a zombie attack," Dmitry shoved an SG 550 into his hand. "I removed the trigger guard so you can use it with those huge gauntlets, too."
Ugh. So they had already decided everything for him. No questions asked.
And all because he drank some vodka again?!
"I'll get you back for this," Konrad muttered under his nose as they went towards the airlock.
And once they left, his skafander or not, he could immediately hear the strange voices again.
The blue tint in his vision now felt familiar, too.
And across the pond, even more zombies seemed to be stumbling around than yesterday.
"We'll have to take care of those, soon," Sokolov noted, using the suit's internal radio.
"I'll leave that up to you and the Stalkers," Sakharov shot him down. "I'm not a gunslinger, you know. Besides, there's no point until we deal with those psy emissions first."
"Where do they come from?" Konrad asked, careful not to get left behind.
"The emissions?" the scientist said as if only realizing he was there. "Don't know, but it's getting stronger every day. Stalkers call it the Brain Scorcher and say it comes from the Duga."
Right. That huge antenna complex Dmitry mentioned before.
"But it doesn't add up," Sakharov complained. "It's pretty far from here, and the geography should shield us from its frequencies. Yet samples from much closer to it were all negative."
"And are those guys actually—"
"Dead?" the Corporal finished the sentence for him. "Their brain functions are minimal."
"It's almost as if someone wanted to hire a bunch of guards like us," the professor said. "But didn't want to pay them. Or wanted absolute loyalty. And, well—they burned their brains out."
Not the same kind of zombies Stella could create.
But it didn't make him feel any better about it.
"Watch your head. We'll go through that drainage pipe," the Corporal noted. "We have run into some of those zombified Stalkers on the surface before."
At that, Konrad clutched his rifle tighter.
And the real problem was that the voices kept getting louder.
Moans. Whispers.
Not a single word he could make out, but they kept crawling deeper inside his head.
If he thought uninvited telepathy was annoying, this was a hundred times worse.
But as soon as they reached the tunnel—rebar concrete—they faded out again.
"How's the psy-block holding up so far?" the prof asked the soldier.
"Still hearing the voices. But no urge to shoot you in the face," he said, knocking on the shotgun he was carrying. Sokolov was at the front now, with Konrad at the back.
"That's a relief," Sakharov laughed. "We had already lost an intern to these voices."
Yeah, no, none of this made Konrad feel any better.
Especially once they reached the other end of the tunnel.
The whispers returned stronger than ever.
"Looks like the probe is still there," the Corporal noted, pointing at a tripod near a rusting wreck of a truck. "As much as the zombies seem to hate that thing, they didn't steal it this time."
And before Konrad would ask, he heard a raspy moan from behind.
He spun, raising his rifle, and—
"Don't shoot," Sakharov pushed his barrel down. "It would only upset them."
Upset. Those things reminded him of old, soulless, burned-out humans who have already given up on life. Mere shells. A little like him towards the end of his previous life.
Not dead, but sure as hell not alive, either.
And they shuffled a mere fifty paces away from them on top of a small ridge.
Cold eyes stared them down, old, rusted rifles hanging from their hands.
"I'm gonna download the data from the probe, and want you to guard the area," the scientist said. "If they come close, by all means, shoot them. But no provoking. They used to be human."
A chill ran down his spine, but Konrad nodded.
"What data are you gathering, anyway?"
"We're monitoring the signal," Sakharov mumbled. "The strength and changes in its content."
"It's getting worse," the Corporal noted, his gun ready to fire. "And also harder to ignore."