Roadside Picnic

Everything around him was white hot, and he was dizzy from the cruel dry heat, the exhaustion, and the unbearable pain of his skin blistering at the joints; it seemed to him, through the hot haze that was enveloping his consciousness, that his skin was crying out to him, begging him for peace, for water, for coolness. The memories, worn to the point of unrecognizability, were crowding each other in his swollen brain, knocking each other over, blending, tumbling, mingling with the white hot world that was flaming before his half-closed eyes, and they were all bitter, and they all evoked self-pity or hatred. He tried to fight the chaos, to summon from the past some sweet mirage, a feeling of tenderness or cheerfulness. He squeezed out the fresh laughing face of Guta from the depths of his memory, when she was still a girl, desired and untouched, and her face appeared, but was immediately blanketed by rust and then twisted and deformed into the sullen face of Monkey, covered with coarse brown fur. He struggled to remember Kirill, that sainted man, his swift, sure movements, his laugh, his voice, which promised unheard-of marvelous places and times, and Kirill appeared; but then a silver cobweb exploded on the sun and Kirill was no more, and Throaty's unblinking angelic eyes stared at Redrick, a porcelain container in his big white hand … The dark thoughts festering in his subconscious knocked down the barrier his will tried to create and extinguished the little good that his memory contained, and it seemed that there had never been anything good at all, only ugly, vicious faces.

And during all this time, he never stopped being a stalker. Without realizing it, he recorded somewhere in his nervous system the essential information: that on the left, at a safe distance, there was a jolly ghost over a pile of old planks—it was quiet, exhausted, and so the hell with it; on the right there was a slight breeze, and a few steps later he saw a mirror-smooth mosquito mange, with many arms, like a starfish—far away, no danger—and right in its center, a flattened bird, a rare sight, since birds did not often fly over the Zone; and right by the path there were two abandoned empties—apparently Buzzard had dropped them on the way back, fear is stronger than greed. He saw all of this and took it into account, and Arthur had only to stray a single foot from their path for Redrick's mouth to open and the hoarse warning to fly automatically from his throat. A machine, he thought. You made a machine out of me. The broken rocks at the edge of the quarry were getting closer, and he could see the fanciful designs made by rust on the cabin's red roof.

You fool, you, Burbridge, Redrick thought. You're clever, but you're a fool. How could you have trusted me? You've known me for so long, you should know me better than I know myself. You're getting old, that must be it. Getting dumber. But what am I saying, I've been dealing with fools all my life. And then he pictured Buzzard's face when he discovered that Arthur, his sweet Artie, his one and only son, that his pride and joy had gone into the Zone with Red after Buzzard's legs, not some expendable punk. He pictured his face and laughed. When Arthur turned his frightened face to look at him, Redrick went on laughing and motioned him on. And then the faces crawled across his consciousness again like pictures on a screen. Everything had to be changed. Not one life or two lives, not one fate or two—every link in this rotten, stinking world had to be changed.

Arthur stopped at the steep descent into the quarry, froze in his steps, straining to look down and into the distance, extending his long neck. Redrick joined him. But he did not look where Arthur was looking.

Right at their feet the road into the quarry began, torn up many years ago by the treads and wheels of heavy vehicles. To the right was a white steep slope, cracked by the heat; the next slope was half excavated, and among the rocks and rubble stood a bulldozer, its lowered bucket jammed impotently against the side of the road. And, as was to be expected, there was nothing else to be seen on the road, except for the black twisted stalactites that looked like fat candles hanging from the jagged edges of the slope, and a multitude of black splotches in the dust, as though someone had spilled bitumen. That was all that was left of them, it was even impossible to tell how many there had been. Maybe each splotch represented a person, or one of Buzzard's wishes. That one there was Buzzard coming back alive and unharmed from the basement of Complex #7. That bigger one over there was Buzzard getting the wriggling magnet out of the Zone unscathed. And that icicle was the luxurious Dina Burbridge, who resembled neither her mother nor her father. And that spot there was Arthur Burbridge, unlike his father and mother, Artie, the handsome son, their pride and joy.