Dima opened his eyes slowly. Headache made his noggin feel like it was being hammered open from the inside, but he felt something so off that he could not enjoy a small nap right now. Around him, Dimka, Sevka, Dimuha and Vityukha were all out, eyes closed but breathing. The cabin of the helicopter was a mess, things thrown about like it had been caught in a hurricane. Dima looked down on his seat, seeing the Val still clinging to his body by its strap. The Redeemed glanced at the gun, trying to spot any damage, which thankfully was non-existent. Releasing his safety belts, he rose up, the splitting headache getting more and more unbearable.

"Perkeleen perkele, saatanan tunarit.", came an angry whisper from the cockpit.

"Sanyok, I presume by that very pissed-off Finnish that you're alive.", Dima asked.

"Yes. Another happy landing, it seems. Sokolov is alive, I patched him up. Dozing off like a proper army soldier, not a care in the world. How are the lads?", Sanyok replied, just as angry.

"All out. Nobody seems to be too worse for wear, though. Now to figure out a way to get them awake...", Dima pondered out loud.

"Tell another of your shitty jokes, Dimuha is bound to wake up just to smack you silly.", Sanyok offered, no longer angry but amused.

"That may help, but how do we get our siesta-specialist awake?", Dima asked, but before he could continue, a heavy boot struck him in the back of the head, tossed by Sevka who had just woken up.

"One more Spanish-joke and I will feed you all to a burner.", Sevka threatened in a voice not too dissimilar to that of a pseudodog whose ass was just struck by a burner too.

"Fine then, I will not make any more siesta-jokes. Today.", Dima said with a gleeful grin, only to get the mother of all scowls in return.

The two awake Redeemed now set to work waking up the rest in the cabin, with Dima trying, and failing, to wake up any more of the crew with mildly offensive stereotypes. Sevka took the far more conventional route of splashing water on his comrades, and Dima, occasionally after a particularly bad joke. Once everyone was back in the world of the living, Dima stepped outside in order to get his bearings. What awaited him was not that encouraging. They had avoided certain death by a narrow margin, landing behind an anomaly field full of burners and even a Comet anomalies swirling around it. Still, Dima did not recognize this part of Pripyat, and there was a prevalent sound of gunfire all around the ghost city.

However, after a few more minutes of looking for landmarks, he spotted the Yubileiny service centre. Good news was now that they knew where they were, bad news was that they had landed smack bang in the middle of nowhere, with most of the Outskirts between the squad and laundromat. Dima returned to the downed Valkyrie, where Sokolov had exited it to stare blankly at the wreck. Dima stopped near him and let the man grieve in peace, but to his surprise Sokolov grunted in a slightly puzzled tone.

"I thought this thing would be inoperable, but I think I could get this bird in the air. The landing gear is fucked, but belly landings are something of a speciality of mine. Still, it would take some repairs to get this airborne once more, repairs for which I have no tools for.", Sokolov explained as Dima raised his eyebrow.

"Really? Huh. Well to be fair, the hull itself only took some machine gun fire, and there was nothing in the way when we crashed. Still, this thing is surprisingly stern stuff for such a little copter.", Dima wondered.

"Yup. The Institute made some modifications to it, Pellicle artifact extract to cover the hull in case of acid rain, emission-proofing and strengthening of hull with three Spring artefacts mounted inside and placed into an artifact amplifier. The field they generate around the craft protects it from heavy impacts, for example this crash.", Sokolov said proudly.

"There's artifacts inside? Dimuha, you hear that? Go find the-", Dima started, but was cut off by a very disappointed look from the pilot.

"Artifacts! Hell yeah, let's loot them... Ahem, I mean, let us leave state property alone for it is not legal to steal it, and I, as a highly upstanding citizen, would never steal from the state!", Dimuha proclaimed, and the other members of Redemption laughed heartily at this.

"Keep your greedy mittens off it or you will have to walk back to Meadow.", Sokolov growled, and Dimuha made an overly frightened face.

Dima laughed and took out a cigarette, now that a fuel leak was confirmed to not have happened. He offered another to Sokolov, who declined and went back inside to fetch a carbine now that he had been forced to join the ground forces. Dima couldn't quite shake that eerie feeling however, and the crawling night approaching the Zone kept him on the edge. Once everyone had grabbed their stuff, the squad got moving, Sokolov saying his final farewell to Valkyrie. The setting sun painted the sky in light red hue, the mutants coming out of their hiding spots like ghosts of the city's past. Dusk stretched over the city, a blanket of darkness following in its wakr, and the gunfire finally died down.

The squad had made it up to Yubileiny, when Dima sought to contact Boris on his helmet radio. But as he turned it on, it blasted back static at such high volume that it momentarily deafened him. Other suffered the same fate, the cacophony of weird and eerie radio signals, extremely loud static and ethereal whispers making everyone crumple momentarily. Trying to turn the radios off did not help, they would scream at full volume. Dima was struggling hard to realize what was going on, when something appeared from the darkness. It lunged at him, a withered body of roughly humanoid shape, and Dima dodged left, reaching for his gun. The mutant turned towards him with unnerving speed, and in the cone of his flashlight, Dima saw it in all its horrifying glory.

Its torso was torn open from chest to hips, bones jutting out of it like macabre spikes. The creature had a face, but it was not human. Well, not anymore, that is. Its mouth was far larger and wider than a human one, and filled with razor-sharp, oozing fangs. The eyes were dead, with no malice or feelings, just blank whites. The hands were little more than an assortment of long claws, roughly the length of a kitchen knife but far more dagger like. There was a stench of decomposition and rot in the air, and when the creature opened its mouth to scream, the radio blasted out static at a volume of a cannon shot. Dima ripped his helmet off to stop the debilitating noise and fired a burst towards the mutant, hitting it and making it charge. Its claws swiped towards Dima, when another burst came and struck the monster into the back. Millimetres from reaching Dima's nose, the claws disappeared in a cloud of smoke, the creature vanishing in thin air.

The static stopped, radios went silent. Sokolov's carbine was smoking, and the man looked like he had had the worst experience of his life. The squad tried to communicate by shouting, barely hearing each other over the tinnitus. Eventually Dima resorted to hand signals, giving Sokolov a thumbs up and pointing towards Yubileiny with a questioning expression. The others nodded, and they quickly made their way towards the blocky building. Everyone still struggled to hear anything but tinnitus, but little by little, their hearing returned. Dimuha sat down, massaging his eyebrows. Vityukha slammed next to him, his captured rust brown Skat suit clinking as he lowered down fast.

"Jesus and Holy Mother, what the hell was that thing?", Vityukha asked loudly, and even despite this, Dima could barely hear him.

"Nightshade. I thought they were just a rumour, a murmur spread by stalkers looking to spook rookies. Like Dark Stalkers or Osenya. Guess I was wrong.", Sanyok replied.

"You know more of it?", Dimka continued the questions.

"Not much. Zakarov said that the ecologists had hypothesis of such a creature existing, based on documentation captured from X-18, but they did not really believe it. After all, the creature is supposed to be able to create copies of itself that have material fo-... Oh fuck...", Sanyok answered, and his face went pale upon realization.

"You mean, it is not dead?", Sevka prompted, horrified by the notion.

"I don't know. This is the first time I have heard of such a thing. I sure as hell hope-", Sanyok began.

The radios blared open once more, the deafening screaming of static blasting out of them like the screaming of the damned during emissions. It got louder. And louder. And louder.