Work Text:
Strelok’s Journal dates unknown:
The “Bonesaw” and Nevyoske insist I keep a journal now to pass the time when we’re not training. It makes sense, that and if I fall ill with the blight the medics will maybe use what I write to figure out when a person loses their mind… not that we’re all fully sane anymore anyway considering everything that’s happened the last few months…the evac was a mess and all we could do was just shoot [s]anyone[/s]...anything getting caught in or through the concertina wire into the quarantine camps. There’s talk of the admirals collecting volunteers for some kind of op, we’ve got an idea about what it is Dead Hand…so, well almost everyone is kinda volunteering for it, some for glory, some out of honor.
Rumor’s confirmed and sounds like this isn’t going to be the only operation like this as well, one of the comms guys outright said the Atlantic, South Pacific and Mediterranean fleets are doing something similar for
We’ve got a list of who’s going now. Due to overwhelming volunteerism across the fleets the admirals ended up drawing names from a hat from their particular fleet’s. Krustchev’s sending Jennings and Romanov, couple of guys who’ve been around since the cold war and shot at each other during the first afghan war. Despite their age the two of them can probably outfight a platoon of fresh marines… probably CIA and FSB guys. Liaoning’s sending someone from the party intel corps by the name of Chen, haven’t heard much about him, pretty secretive. Shaposhnikov is sending a guy by the name of Riga… rumor has it the Kremlin radio’d in and chose him specifically. Finally the John Paul Jones is sending Nevyoske and me…I don’t remember putting my name in that hat, I’m assuming Nev or Bones had something to do with it, probably. We’re all supposed to report on the Enterprise at 0400 tomorrow, apparently Admiral Pike is supplying the plane to Moscow.
Strelok’s Journal dates unknown:
This morning we assembled on the Enterprise and received a short brief on our mission, fly from here to a Russian installation and receive further orders, despite the thaw in the sea ice it was still chilling to the bone. There was a short ceremony, well wishes, prayers to various gods, and then we loaded into the plane, an Ac-130 refit for extreme long range flight. A few minutes later after we’d strapped in there was a jolt and a feeling of falling, and we were airborne.
and we flew… and flew… and flew… and flew… and now we’re here. Someplace called Yamantau. All iced up and blowing snow everywhere. There were Russians waiting for us at the airfield, it felt like we barely landed safely, they brought us into their bunker and are re-fueling the plane as I write this. Riga got taken away somewhere else, everyone I’ve seen here has that same look.. they’ve all been either at the wire or beyond.. seen what we’ve seen at the refugee camps, or at the very least seen the unedited videos.
An older Russian, Kremenskey, bit of an overweight man, looked too cheery must’ve been a party official assigned here or something and never saw combat or the camps debriefed us and gave us the full details of our mission.
Our job is basically the worst case scenario. We’re to fly from here to an unused reserve airfield 40 kilometers from Moscow, approach the city until the radio traffic is clear enough to understand then sit and monitor radio transmissions coming out of the city. Something’s going on there, but they can’t tell the radio traffic from the howls, with the last government transmission coming from someplace called D-6 on an elf code that translated roughly into “send the disarm codes”.
We’re to sit tight and wait, until no military or civilian transmissions are being transmitted then go in quietly and disarm deadhand, unless the the all clear is sounded that this disease… if it can be called that has run its course and that our job is not necessary. Despite Kremenskey’s cheery demeanor he can be icy as needed, and made it very clear, everyone but Riga is expendable, he’s the only one that knows or has the disarmament codes.
We have enough supplies for two months, filter masks and enough spare filters to outfit a battalion, so that if we do go into Moscow we won’t be at risk for infection. If we’re right and the countdown started we’ll only need half of the supplies… and if we fail, we won’t have a place to go back to.
Streloks journal:
We left Yamantau four days ago and have set up a small camp in an auxiliary airfield to the north west, it provides a good field of view over the city. Komarov is insane he landed the plane under no power to the engines; silence but for the rush of the wind and the thump as we landed. On arrival we picked up some transmissions on the military bands… there’s someone in the kremlin bunker alive and sending out morse…I hope they’re alive and it’s not just a recorded message.
We can see movement near the botanical gardens through the scopes, but nothing that we wanted to touch… end every now and then we hear gunshots to the south where it looked like there was a medical camp near the opera house when we glided over the city. We can hear their transmissions begging for help and extraction, they saw the plane, but we have our orders to remain silent.
Riga decoded the morse this morning, it reads “I’m the last one alive, everyone else turned and I had no choice but to put them down, the electronic locks are engaged and I can’t leave the bunker for another three days. –Lieutenant Volodin”
The medical camp is still asking for help.
[a page appears to have been torn out of the journal]
It’s been four days since Volodin last radioed out, eighteen since we arrived. His last message was not hopeful… as best we can tell through the blizzard the medical camp was overrun seven days ago. Everything is quiet… I swear I hear gunshots occasionally but I’m the only one that picks them out through the wind. It’s now or never, we have to confirm that deadhand was deactivated.
Our plan is to enter through the maintenance yard for the Filiyovskaya line, provided it’s passable. Failing that we’ll have to make our way through the city to Vozdvizhenka or Theater station as those are the other access points to the metro-2 we were directed to use…. Riga says he knows of a couple more backups but we wouldn’t be able to use the automated rail cars to get to D-6. We’re going to leave before the blizzard gets any worse since the beasts will be taking shelter from the cold.
Strelok’s Journal:
I need to get this written down while it’s still fresh in my mind. Jennings and Romanov are dead, well we hope they died and didn’t get turned by the disease. We made our way into the maintenance yard and, using a hand car managed to expedite the process but when we actually reached the tunnel access point we found that an engine had been crashed, or crashed into the gates, either way it was impassible with the tools we had so we went to our alternate entrance, a small no name station a few kilometers down the line… We should have known when we cracked the seal on the hermetic doors the rotting air rushing out, Nevyoske and I had smelled this before…I just was hoping it would be different this time… while the entrance was clear further into the station and down stairs there were corpses… some normal others… changed. On the platform I could see more down in the rails in the dim emergency lighting, the tunnel was blocked by a burned out rail car.
We didn’t get much of a choice in the matter, the noises we’d made I guess attacked beasts. As soon as we heard them we made a decision to run back the way we’d came. Surprisingly the machines worked and groaned to life a second time, though in activating them Jennings and Romanov were compromised, bitten I think, they yelled at us to go and ran back into the station to draw attention away. The last time I saw Jennings he was pulling a set of grenades from his vest as a group of the beasts swarmed him then the doors closed.
[part of a page appears to have been removed]
I don’t think I can properly eulogize them. They gave their lives to save us.
Surprisingly we literally stumbled on a survivor camp near the botanical gardens. That fire we saw two nights ago was them burning out the “residents”. Refugees from other countries Finland and Ukraine mostly, gods above I never expected to see Anna again not after Kiev anyway... white hair steely blue eyes and looked like a varlkyie or battle ready angel when she appeared out of the icy fog with that spear like rifle of hers…
Some battalion commander by the name of Anton Motorolla.. he’s kept them together somehow, they hid out in the zone of alienation near Pripyat before making their way towards Moscow, as far as they know no one’s gotten sick, and they’ve all got pretty basic biological protection on, no bites or anything like that…
Anton says that he hears whispers sometimes… as though the dead were talking to him, telling him the best routes to keep from getting into ambushes with the beasts. Says they told him that we were coming and to help us.
We radioed Komarov to let him know what we’ve found, he’s making no promises but is going to try and relay that to the fleet. We’re going to hole up in their camp for a few hours, let it get good and cold before trying to get into the Metro II again, Riga’s picked a station, Marakovskaya, that doesn’t have hermetic seals that should have an access tunnel that runs parallel to the line. If that damned engine hadn’t been there it would have been much easier to use a maintenance line but at this point anything that’s been sealed is probably too dangerous to try to use.
Nevyoske told me to go catch up with Anna… that “those that are still young should have some fun before the world ends”…I don’t know if that fire is still there though, I hope she doesn’t think we just abandoned her and the others in kiev…we didn’t know there were survivors, cou
[writing style changes dramatically]
I took the kid’s book and slapped him on the back of the head. He overthinks things too much. I’ll give it back when we head out for the station.
Strelok’s Journal:
Getting a chance to talk with Anna and spend the night with her again… cleared my mind…grounded me. Probably was stupid of us to do that..but
[writing is illegible for several lines and has been heavily marked over]
What I’m doing here, why we’re all here... To be burdened with something as heavy as to protect the world from weapons created back when men in power were willing to end the whole world to protect their country and people… if even someone makes it out of all this, all this death and destruction the loss of Jennings… Romanov…fuck, even if the rest of us don’t make it, as long as everyone else survives and the whole system is disarmed.. yeah that’d suck but it’d be worth it, a payment in blood and life to make sure the sins of the past die out and a new world climbs out of the ashes. I want to stay here curled up in this bed longer but I’ve got to stand up and help make sure Riga stays alive, at least until deadhead is offline for good.
[several pages have been removed]
Deadhand’s primary systems are offline, but it’s all gone to shit. Riga and I are the only two left alive probably, and we’re probably going to die down here.
We made our way into a service platform through the air vents, thought we were so clever. Just to be on the safe side Chen set up a bunch of claymores off near the edge of the platform, saved us that way.
When we cracked open the side tunnel into Metro II an automated shutter closed over the door, almost got Riga’s hand and would have cut it clean off. Then the claxon started going off echoing off the rail tunnel. Took us a minute to get that off but the damage was done, once we could hear stuff again it sounded like a freight locomotive was running up the line, which motivated us to double the efforts to open up the shutter.
About when we cracked it open is when…. It arrived. Looked like a mashed up pile of corpses in a rail car… but they were all moving.. screaming.. calling out in pain, and then it crawled off the rails onto the platform. Chen didn’t give it much of a chance when he set off the first set of claymores, blowing it in half. That just doubled what was after us. So he set off the next set and started shooting, screaming for us to get going while he drew it’s attention and started making for the way we’d entered the station, setting off more and more claymores as he moved. Could still hear him shooting and blowing stuff up behind blast door and shutter for a while till we got to the automated train and started heading to D-6 proper…
Thought we were home free, the doors in were within sight and Riga opened it up no problem, the codes were right and everything, and then something jumped on Nev.. it looked like a spider growing out of someone’s skull, could hear him screaming.. turned around and saw it on him, he just grabbed me and tossed me inside the airlock and kicked the door closed. Riga had to drag me away… I’m calmer now..but…I just… The last thing I heard him was him shouting for me to live and not lose what I’d gotten back with Anna…
I don’t think I can do that..not anymore. Riga put in the codes, everything’s showing disarmed, but there’s a problem with the reactor two levels down. Riga said he can’t get it to shut down from the control room like it should. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t an older design whose safety systems tended to cause explosions, which would reactivate and set off the secondary systems for deadhand, the ones that are designed to prompt a reaction in case the bunker gets hit directly regardless of system readiness, making everything that happened be for nothing.
On the plus side we found a bottle of whiskey in Volodin’s desk, unopened reserve from the Kremlin’s private label. A toast, to the fallen, to the fate of humanity, ourselves.. to the admiralty who we’ve failed…to anna...
Strelok’s Journal:
Riga figured out a way to shut down the reactor, found a manual on the damn thing in the desk at the monitoring station. We can do a manual shutdown of the core and it should cool down over
[handwriting changes]
Yes, I can shut down the reactor but it involves removing parts of the biological shielding, it’s a one man operation and will give a man a lethal dose of radiation. This isn’t for glory or to make a name for myself, just to keep the world as intact as I can, and someone needs to make sure that those civilians off at the plane get taken care of.
-Commander Riga Rosenberg
[handwriting changes]
He locked me out. Hit me with a steel pipe dragged me into the emergency elevator jammed the door and locked me out. The crazy bastard, he thinks he can do it himself... guess I should stop moping and head to the surface... or at least wait to hear him tell me he did the job.
It was only ten minutes, didn’t take too long to manually deactivate it, Riga sounds alright but he said he took a dosimeter and it’s hit red within a few seconds of cracking the case to get at the control rods… something about the Kremlin never planning to shut it off. He’s sending me up first and will meet me topside wearing a lead lined suit to keep me safe from him…may as well see Komarov off.
[This page been cut from the journals, laminated front and back with clear packing tape and a biohazard sticker placed on it there are several black stains in the paper that have tested negative as infectious]
Riga’s dead… the thing controlling Nevyoske killed him… it followed us out…somehow…I had to..I don’t even really.. know what happened..when I really started making sense, head’s still swimming. The area around me’s on fire, Riga’s on fire and Nevyoske’s on fire, my mask was cracked and half full of…something, it was black and mucously, like the stuff oozing from nev’s face… and the…stump where the skull of the thing on him was.
I’m probably infected now.
I’ve washed up as best I could, as best I can tell the thing controlling Nevyoske had him jump us.. he stabbed Riga in the neck, and went for me and I shot him…and set everything on fire?...I don’t understand where all the fire came from. I’ll try to be a clinical as possible since there needs to be a report that gets to the fleet about this type of beast.
It’s a parasitic type, from what I can tell this creature was human, probably an adult, however it has shed most of the original infectee’s muscular vascular and skeletal system and consists of a skull, the spinal column and several whip-like appendages all surrounded by a thick layer of black mucus.
Method of attack seems to be stalking and ambush, choosing to drop down from above to catch its prey by surprise and then appears to burrow thinner secondary tendrils into the victim’s spinal column, possibly to completely hijack their body. The entity seems to retain at least some skills of the new host.
Method of destruction is the same as with most other blight beasts, destruction of the skull and brain.
Unknown how quickly you have to save someone that’s been attacked, Neveyoske’s body expired when I killed the parasite.
Gonna tape this page up…give the journal to Anna and send them off… can’t go back and risk them and the fleet… Nev and Riga had a journal on them too.. maybe the fleet will get a decent report out of the three of them.
I can see the plane now… anna’s waving.. but I feel like.. you know how right before you get really really sick you can kinda feel it in the sinus’s, I feel like that, and I can hear whispers like I’m losing my mind. It sounds like Nevyoske…riga…everyone. They’re telling me to go, to leave this cursed land.
I won’t risk that. If I am infected I’d risk everyone on the plane. I told Anna, the seems to understand, but she looked so sad.
Komarov and the other survivors will be leaving on the C-2 we arrived on, the skies parted and the radio was strong and across thousands of miles we got clearance for them to evacuate to the Enterprise for decontamination and observation.
I’m…going to..I will climb the Ostankino Tower and stand guard over this tomb of a city. Anton calls me a hero… I am just a coward afraid that I will doom everyone we’ve saved.