Prologue

Zone has no owner, it has its rules

It shows no mercy, to both wise and fools.

It has no God, it gives no hope

It gives to kind, last rites and rope.

It's a Hell on Earth where demons thrive

But people kill, to get inside.

People kill, to leave this place

People die, for a chance to stay.

For those, outside, they dream of horrors

We live inside, horrific borders.

We live, we thrive, just like those demons.

Here, our lives, they have a meaning.

Zone has no God, it has no Devil

But it has us and its enough

We are in Hell or maybe Heaven

Gates are here, in front of us.

The Zone has many rules and none of them would make much sense to you, living on the Outside. For example here, you would never hear, "I'm sorry for your loss". Only silence would be the answer. The most empathetic action you would receive is an open flask and a nod.

People here don't expect to live long and happy lives and even the most optimistic person at most would hope to die inside of a 'blender'. It's the most painless and quickest way to die in The Zone and the cleanest. Your body would be torn apart in a second by countless gravitational pulls, all centred on you, leaving nothing but a red circle outside of its perimeter.

You have nothing to worry about, 'blender' will not leave you alive and crippled. It has enough force to rip metal and concrete to shreds, nothing to say about your bag of bones and shit. It will be like a wet paper towel, so fragile and weak.

It hasn't always been that way. Sure, The Zone was harsh and unforgiving but it wasn't outright murderous and hostile like it is right now. In the past Zone had some sense of order and life. We had our own settlements, some even big enough to house 3000 - 4000 people at a time. Such large places were few and far in between of course, but there were countless tiny villages scattered across The Zone. People in those villages would have conflicts with their neighbours one day and bartering sessions the next. So you could say there were politics and trade going even in this shithole. We had trade caravans going from village to village and from one town to the next, bringing people much-needed supplies in exchange for artifacts and mutant parts. On rare occasions, they would bring stuff from the outside and sell it for untold riches.

With trade, we had an economy or at least some semblance of it. People living here would trade using shiny, the tiniest, most common and most insignificant artifact in exchange for food, weapons or any other things they might need. But even that artifact might cost some poor bastard his life. Something to think about the next time when I buy an extra banana clip.

With the economy, we had our own government. Gangs and different factions were that government. They would wage wars for the said artifacts or territory, sometimes for regular folk. It was like we had our own warped and twisted kingdom in the middle of 21st century Earth. Periodically, "kings, presidents and prime-ministers" would organize expeditions deep into The Zone hunting for valuables and pay a lot of money for some poor bastard to jump into anomalies fishing for them or pay with his life and freedom intact.

Life in the Zone wasn't all doom and gloom in all honesty. Some people even managed to live a life there without firing a weapon even once and a lot of people didn't have to risk their skin to afford the next meal. That job was for the stupid, for ambitious, for greedy or plain unlucky.

I was one of the unlucky and stupid. You see when you have money and not much time to spend it, you tend to do stupid shit. Some of it on such scale that you might as well read about Caligula and be informed. While Caligula has made his people fight against the ocean and ram the waves, I decided that I wanted a tour in The Zone. In hindsight all I could say, "thank you, whoever you are that brought me here before the Second Eruption."