Preface: this is (obviously) a work of fiction. Unless something has vastly changed about the world at large, there aren't alien-spawned zones of demarcation across the Earth's surface. I plan to add onto it over time. As you may be able to guess, this is largely based off Roadside Picnic by the brothers Strugatsky, later reinterpreted in the film and video game Stalker. I've taken the things I enjoyed about their mess of extraterrestrial oil slick and asked myself; if this had happened in America, some enterprising schmuck would be making all the money while the renegade Stalkers would still be dying in droves.
I hope you enjoy.
I'm writing this because I've been stranded.
I found an IBM Selectric Typewriter in the second story of what I think was, at one point, a small-town newspaper publishing joint. It's hard to read the signs on the outside of the building and I suspect that eventually, the things I'm writing here will become illegible as well. So, in turn, will whatever I used to be or whatever I am right now. But this typewriter looks great. Sure, it's old, but it looks like it did when it rolled off the factory floor in upstate New York. It might even look better.
As I look out the window, I see a Chevy Silverado. It grins up at me. I grin back. I wish I could have a cigarette, but the air here is toxic, and must be filtered through my special suit hood. Dust is on everything I can see aside from this typewriter and the Chevy. All the moving machines here, in fact, appear to be in perfect condition. It must have been something to do with the general aura that the visitors left behind. Must be what makes everybody crazy and dead when they come in here.
I guess it could be worse. I could always be writing fiction. Then I could just be telling you whatever the hell I wanted, and making it up as I went along. But with that in mind, I should conserve what sanity and time I have left. Maybe it will let you know how I came here.
Earlier today I was prepping for ZE: or zone entry. We were zipping on our hazard suits in a high-school gym right outside the liminal edge of the local zone. One of the local Rangers, a real hardass, was making his Big Impression on the troops before we went in for our weekly scavenging run.
"Gentlemen!" spat the Ranger. "I will only say this once. You are about to enter an alien world. If this is your first time, you may not be aware of the hazards here. There are very real, very existential risks here. I'm talking about a million ways to die." He glared at the grasshopper, some upstate dropout who looked too old to be gawking like that.
"I've seen men fall out, and my guy, it is not pretty." he began to strut as he revved up his big warning. "You may notice crystalline structures on the sidewalks that appear to be reaching for something. IF you do not want to become them," he continued, enunciating the 'if,' "you will remain in the vehicle until I tell you to disembark. You will return to the vehicle when you hear the whistle. While you are in transit, you will listen and follow everything I tell you to do via the headset. If we hit exit point and you are not on board the vehicle," he smirked now, probably remembering one of the poor souls who had disobeyed a command in the past, "you will be walking out. Nobody has survived walking out. All stranded personnel are effectively considered zoned"
Zoned. It had that nightmarish quality of doom. Zapped, wasted, totaled, lost. A new way to die, an unknown danger that human instincts had no experience against, and no will or ability to resist.
"While you've passed your initial examinations and simulation tests, it's worth remembering that all of this is still very new. Some older folks argue that the zone even changes over time. What you've got to remember is that you don't know what you don't know. And I know it sounds trite, but if you see something, say something. Do your best to keep the coms quiet otherwise."
I knew the whole spiel. The Ranger worked for Zone Exploration Limited, and their life insurance contract required that this speech be given every session. Years ago, when I started, they even had a Q&A session afterward. That'd been dropped as a requirement as ZEL grew in power and influence.
Back in the parking lot, I'd taken a few nips from my flask and finished the half-smoked joint in the car's ashtray. They tell you that going into the zone buzzed is dangerous, but old-timers know that it keeps you sane. I'd known a Mormon who'd taken the job after being kicked out from his Collective with a pregnant wife and two kids. He didn't even drink coffee. Two months in, on an essentially trivial run, he jumped from the caravan while it was still moving; now his remains were known as the Young Crystal, after his last name. I never met his wife or kid. Boy or girl, they must be almost four years old by now.
My mild buzz helped fog out the remaining drone of the Ranger's insurance speech. "Last of all, do not interfere with any remaining man-made artifacts. Those you can get outside the zone. We're only here for the things we can only find in there."
He didn't specifically say aliens, alien artifacts, or anything to do with non-Terran life. ZEL officially doesn't believe in aliens. Of course, everyone and their mother learned that they existed six years ago when forty-nine known zones appeared across the surface of the earth in a bizarre ringlike formation. Nobody saw them while they were here. Their remnants appeared across every continent, with the first curious onlookers posting strange videos online within hours. The only thing that informs us of their brief presence is in the zones that remain and the things they left behind.
There are a couple of these things that we look for. One is a Mandolin. The best way I can describe it is the old joke about the World's Smallest Violin. While they're technically invisible, white light passes through them, they seem to leave a shadow the size of an asterisk (*) that looks like the body of a stringed instrument. Another one is a Casing. These look like white, dusty .22 caliber bullet shells, and sometimes they have a visually identifiable glistening substance inside of them. The emptier ones are more valuable.
I could go on for hours about the various artifacts that you can find out here, but they're more interesting to the egghead scientists who make flying cars, artificial intellects, and perpetual motion machines. But there are scarier things in here than the inert artifacts we can drag back home and crack open for fresh science. There are bigger things than the Crystal Sickness and the Curious Dust. I know this because I ran across a few on the way to being stranded.
The Ranger repeated his rules yet another time. Keep your mask on. Stay scanning and don't stare at anything too long. If you hear music or the voices of people who weren't present, e.g. your dead granny, press your thumb-pad to alert the mission leader. Stay away from any swirling lights. Never leave the truck unless it's fully stopped at a remote post. And when you leave the truck, always remain within visual range of your buddy.
We had been required to read a short pamphlet that ZEL published just for us boy scouts. That was the joke we made: no women joined the forward operating functions of ZEL. Only the boy scouts: young, dumb men who couldn't or wouldn't be drafted or find relevant work. It's said that this was once different, but that was before my time. Rumors went up the command structure of an ax-faced redhead who split open from the inside when millions of blue-eyed spiders with human teeth swarmed out of her womb. This was, of course, all conjecture. ZEL denied that anyone who followed their regulations would be killed or even harmed by the potentially lethal voodoo of the zone. But there were known unknowns and unknown unknowns. And the Ranger's speech, every time, told us to the contrary.
Who in their right mind could say what foul hell was lurking in that strange, occasionally sapient mist?
The night before I had been hammering homemade grapa with Gabriel Ceausescu in his trailer a few miles south of that very high school. Gabe was a fun-loving asshole with more money than sense who liked to make homemade hooch in a still out back. He lived in a trailer, he said, because he liked to stay on the move. Spent the last couple of years moving between the dirty south and the high west, and happened to be in the whitest, trashiest part of Northern Illinois for a spell. We'd gone to college many years ago, before these Zones even existed, and he had heard that I was in the area, working yet another contract.
"What I don't get," he said, "Is why you don't do something less fucking dangerous. You could teach the kids, handle computer infrastructure, write books. Something that doesn't render you into human paste or victimize you like an innocent child in a Russian novel."
He knew why I didn't do any of those things. I hated kids, I hated computers more. Writing, that was something I enjoyed. Two packs of Winstons, a bottle of highland Scotch, and an IBM typewriter, not unlike the one I'm hammering these notes out on right now, and I could pass hours and hours telling stories about werewolves and vampires. But it wasn't the sixties, and writing didn't pay for shit. Zoning for ZEL, now that made you a wicked penny. Of course, it made the bean-counters and button-pushers in their downtown offices much more than it made for me. Who cared?
"I guess I kind of like the danger." I responded. That was a lie. Every time I passed that thin, soap-bubble wall into the dusty space that lurked beyond, I was spooked to all hell. It turned my guts into tapioca. I imagined spiders the size of a man and centipedes the size of a bus lurking behind every tumbling brick wall. For all I knew, alien clowns gazed out from those sewer gratings. "And I guess I'm good at it."
That part was true. At my stage, I was the third-oldest zoner in our 'battalion'. It's a young man's game of course, and I was only twenty-nine. But the oldest guy was thirty-five and had exactly one white hair on his head. The rates of attrition were astronomical. Two weeks ago, I had been the fourth-oldest. Did that mean I was the third-best?
Obviously not, because I'm stuck here, telling this story to you.
"So then, mister never-die, what kind of unimaginable horrors lurk inside the Zone?"
I really didn't know. Obviously there was the crystal sickness. The curious dust, not like the otherwise non-interactive dust that floated throughout the air, was another hazard. It liked eyes; namely, eating them. If you saw it you were probably too late. If it blinded you, and you ran screaming back to the convoy, one of your buddies would have to shoot you before you got too close, and the mission would be over anyway. No mandolins, no casings, no floater poles and no septahedrons would be coming back and we would've risked all those nerves and all that time for nothing.
There was a third thing I was going to tell Gabe. Even though the Zone was scary and dangerous as all hell, it had a certain glamer to it. Like a spooky movie that kids watched because it was spooky. Maybe it was the reason battered wives kept going back to their shit-eating husbands: it was dangerous, and that danger would somehow keep you safe. It's warm under the wings of a dragon.
I hope that explains the why of how I got here. Maybe it would do some better to give more details as to the how.
We were all sitting in the back of the truck on a couple of wooden benches as they rolled down the derelict road in that had once been a middle-class suburb. Dressed to the nines with our service pistols, army surplus boots, jackets, hoods, air filters and everything else you would need to survive for the next few precious hours. In the center of the truckbed was a cylindrical object the size of a whiskey barrel that the eggheads at ZEL claimed could keep the curious dust away from the convoy. Whether it worked or not was a matter of conjecture.
As we rounded a weaving street, we saw the soap-bubble reaching up into the overgrown trees. The zone itself was semicircular, or maybe more like a kidney bean. It did not seem to grow: it was not hungry for anything that lived beyond its borders. This one stretched across several miles of suburban tract, an abandoned farm, some miles of rail-yard and a decent chunk of the business district of what had once been a respectable town. Now it was nearly all abandoned.
A couple of old retirees still lived outside the bubble's borders, but no one could stay inside for long. The unfiltered air would kill you in a minute, as it had the rabbits, deer, dogs, and cats within. Those old fogies would stare at you with blind eyes, hearing the trucks rattle through what had been a decent neighborhood and smile at the stupid young boys going down to get killed. All of them were blind: it hadn't been this way at first, but something about living and sleeping and eating so close to that soap-bubble from hell destroyed mammalian optic rods and cones. Maybe that meant that the Zone's radiation spilled outwards, corrupting and destroying everything near it. Maybe it was wider than we were aware; perhaps growing. Still, they stayed. Still, we went in.
Dick, a black guy from Little Egypt in his early thirties, was seated next to me. He enjoyed making small talk before we went inside. "Did you hear about the Indian guys? A couple of farmers were tending their crops too close to a zone near Gujarat and some kind of appendage reached out and pulled them inside."
"I bet some fanatic made up the story to post it online." Besides, who would be dumb enough to farm crops nearby one of these things?
"All we get out here is rumor and faith, brother. You know digital technology doesn't work in there. Even chemical photos burn to a crisp. The only thing it seems to like are made out of sheet metal." This was a really bizarre aspect of the Zones: they didn't like chemical imprints of any kind, nor apparently even signage. Everything written down or printed seemed to slowly break down into meaningless word-sludge over time.
Even the neon signs that once lit up the sides of these businesses were slowly becoming warped: perhaps the work of the Dust. Most of the electric equipment was gradually becoming covered in a sort of spiny ivy that didn't like being touched. It made a crackling, hissing noise when disturbed. But vehicles? They worked just fine.
"So what you're saying," we passed over a bump that interrupted my train of thought. The roads were getting worse and they would never be repaired. "What you're saying is that we'll never have any type of proof either way."
"Exactly. Even analog footage, cassette reels, those would get eaten up by whatever the hell has screwed up the air and water in there. Maybe you could do a wax cylinder recording." This I doubted. The malice that haunted these places, if it would eat signage, would probably erase all traces of human life or any record of its history. You certainly didn't want to buy up residential property in the area. Maybe that's why these blind old coots couldn't move out: everything had been wrapped up in their mortgage and no child willing to take them on in the greater world.
It was now we could see the bubble's edge. Saying that 'it loomed' is silly, but it did. Like a giant zit on the face of the Earth, one of the abandoned sheet-metal and tar-paper shacks cutting directly into it. Soon, we would be cutting into it too. The weird light, actually the Illinois summer sun, would gain its strange glimmer, sometimes appearing to blink. The porous - or was it crystalline? - remains of carbon-based life would be littering the streets. The grass was stunted, brown, but perversely still growing even beneath this crown of Hell. There would be a dryness to the filtered air. Geiger counters would get wonky to say the least. Whispers would lick at the back of your ears – dead relatives? Alien warnings? Your future self? It didn't do you any good to ask.
The caravan didn't stop when we reached the border. And inside we went.