I sit and wait for night. Not because I can see like an owl, but because nobody else will have that advantage either. And I do know where I’m going. As I say, my visual memory is pretty good. So, step by baby step, or even crawling, I’m out of here. On my way towards home and as far as possible from this dump.

To be honest, I even snoozed for a while – my nerves weren’t up to the waiting. When I awoke, it was already dark enough outside to hide the neighbouring building. I really had no idea that it could ever get this dark in the city. One way or another, there was always light somewhere. Even when there were power-cuts, somebody always found a light of some sort. But now it was absolutely pitch black! No fires, no lights. It was even a little frightening.

Then there were the sounds. The sounds of Tarkov used to be completely different. Now even the sound of the wind on the windows sounded strange. Somewhere there’s a creaking noise of some sort. Apparently someone forgot to close a door. Then there’s the rustle of all sorts of rubbish blowing in the breeze. And no sound of footsteps of car engines whatsoever.

Still, I need to move. I won’t last long here with almost nothing to eat. And if I start gutting apartments like Makar’s gang, I’ll always be in danger of coming across someone better organized in the business. Then I’ll be back to carrying the beam again, and even that’s not the worst that could happen. Best avoided.

I decide not to leave via the balcony. What do they make doors for, after all? The lock is simple as. I wisely decide not to close it, and instead wedge the spring latch with a piece of paper to stop it snapping shut. I shove more paper in the crack between the stile and the jamb so the door won’t swing open in the breeze. Not straight away, at any rate. Do I need a place I can run to in case of danger? I do indeed, and now I have one.

It was kind of awful in the stairwell. The whistle of the wind sounded very different from the way it did in the apartment.

Carefully pushing the door to the street ajar, I listen for a while to what’s going on… No, nothing I could feel for now.

* * *

The street gives me a chilly greeting, and I mentally congratulate myself on getting hold of a leather jacket. Keeping my eyes (or rather my ears) peeled, I run to the next building. Another street, this time wider than the last. I glance around. My eyes are growing accustomed to the dark, and I can begin to make out the silhouettes of the buildings and the nearby trees. Still quiet for now. I choose my moment and quickly cross the street, coming away from the wall of the apartment building.

Nobody calls out or reacts in any way to my appearance. Great.

And off we go…

Dawn found me not so very far from my usual haunts. There was no point whatsoever in heading for any port, and obviously I wasn’t planning on going home. A meeting with Makar’s errand boys was all I needed to make my happiness complete. But I could always visit my little hidey-hole. And there was the basement office. Clearly no one had busted that open yet. The uninviting sign – “Sanitary Service Solutions” – made it all too obvious there was nothing worth looking for in there. A paper pusher’s paradise, no more. At least, that’s what’s obvious to someone who’s never been there before. Whereas I have. I can’t say I was a regular visitor, but I did pop in from time to time. True, I don’t have a crowbar, but I do have an axe. And some knowledge of the internal set-up of this particular building. If I’d been a little smarter before, I’d have managed without a crowbar. But that’s the thing with good ideas, they don’t always come exactly when you need them.

Anyway, I don’t need to break down the door. Let it stand. There’s another way in, from the opposite end of the basement. To get in there, you don’t need to break anything. The area inside is reasonably clean, or at least contains an unexceptional amount of the sort of junk and dirt that builds up in all places like that. Also, a fair amount of daylight gets through the little windows, so my progress through the narrow corridors is reasonably quick.

And what is it I’m looking for? There it is – a dark metal box fixed in the wall. At first glance, it appears to be just the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a place like this. In fact, that’s exactly what it is – installed here way back when. However, while once upon a time in the age of a long-forgotten empire it contained only telephone switchboards, nowadays… Well, yes, it’s an old communications cabinet for the local telephone network. This is where they used to put them all, before they moved them out onto the street to make servicing easier. Or rather, they installed new, more modern ones outside and left these old things to rot. It was only some considerable time later that some clever sods started to use this one as a way to connect illegally to phone lines. The extensions inside were never fully disconnected – that would have required extra work from somebody… Then there were all sorts of different organizations occupying the building, and the vast majority didn’t work at night. That’s when you could use their phone lines to connect illegally to the internet. To be absolutely clear, the lines were used by hackers sitting in the very offices I was trying so hard to get into. Although back then, they referred to these “pioneers of the internet” by a very different name.

Time passed, and the hackers grew up a little, found some money somewhere, and gradually abandoned their old habits. It was getting more dangerous, too. The government started making pointed hints. The guys in the office found a more respectable and lucrative activity – money laundering. Obviously, no actual money was brought or stored here. Here was where they cobbled together the laundry systems, enthusiastically and on a grand scale. Tarkov’s customs regime meant there was no end to the amount of dirty money that could flow in.

The wire-filled cabinet remained, nonetheless. And nobody, not even the old hands in the office, ever suspected that all that was separating them from the rest of the basement was one metal wall of an old communications cabinet. I, on the other hand, knew all about it – I’d dragged the wires there myself, or at least helped out. It was just one of any number of odd jobs I’d done back in the day. I’d even been a warehouse hand for a while, and fixed and soldered enough mechanisms to make your head spin. Why on earth hadn’t I remembered earlier?

The wall of the cabinet led, as you might expect, straight into the office storeroom. Once I was inside, it took a while to get rid of all the dust and junk I’d gathered on the climb through. I’ll have to think of a way of cleaning up in there for the future.

It was dark in the office. The electricity was turned off. Strange somehow, but it seems like someone’s choosing where to cut the power and where to leave the lights on. Never mind, there’s enough light from the windows to find my way around for now.

I didn’t go into the main office, as there was no chance of finding anything interesting there. There’s a high turnover of workers here, so very few people have time to settle in properly. But the managers’ offices, where I was usually entertained on my visits, might well have something worth searching for.

Standing in the doorway of Vitya’s office, I survey the scene in despair. It’s as if every law enforcement agency in town, followed by the tax inspector, has had a go at turning the place upside down. If they were originally after documents then it looks very much like the tax inspectors, frustrated at not finding what they were after, just grabbed every little thing they might be able to flog to make up for their losses. The wide open cupboards, desk drawers strewn across the floor, and safe door hanging on its hinges all indicate that the offices were not just abandoned in a hurry, but evacuated like they were on fire. Hmmm, not quite what I was expecting to find here.

I trawl through the office rapidly, but apart from a few packs of cigarettes and piles of paper everywhere, all I find is a single unopened bottle of vodka. That’s it. Still, Vitya wasn’t the only manager, was he? There are other offices to take a look at. But they weren’t much different from the first one, perhaps a little less messy.

I found a few boxes of chocolates, some unopened bottles of cognac, and a couple of cans of beer. Apart from that, just a bunch of useless junk. On a coat stand, I found a bag with a laptop in it. The computer was quite old, but appeared to be in working order. On the other hand, the battery level was very low. Shit, does it mean all that effort to get in here was for nothing?

Vitya was nobody’s fool, and I had every reason to think he’d have some useful supplies. Instead I’d found yet more chaos and destruction. Cursing everything, I head back into the main office to see what I can find there.

I’d have been better off not looking. I go back to the boss’s office and flop down in his magnificent leather chair. At least that survived the attack. I take a slug of cognac and eat a couple of chocolates, which slightly improve my foul mood.

Shit, so what do I have in the way of reserves. Enough to live on for two or three days, and that’s already something. I also have a roof over my head. I doubt very much that anyone will try to break in here any time soon. I should pile all this junk up against the entrance door just in case – I’m not planning to use it, in any event. I’ll be coming and going through the cabinet. It’s safer that way.

Hang about! I jump out of the chair. What about the leisure room? Vitya always had one. They used to keep the servers in there. Then, when all the hacking business was over, he turned it into a shag pad. How did they ever get such a big bed through the door? In pieces, obviously. Now then, the door should be somewhere round here. I find it quickly enough, but it takes me a whole lot longer to work out how to open it. I didn’t want to break it down. Who knows, I might need it sometime? Finally, the bookshelf shifted slightly and silently turned on its hinges. There it is!

Yup, it was a shag pad alright, and a pretty fucking fancy one at that! (If only I could bring that girl here now…) There was a stack of clean bed linen, and several packs of condoms. Vital supplies in the present situation, obviously. Where have all the ladies got to, I wonder? That guy Makar has a few, I guess. I saw bras and other, hm-hmm, items of ladies’ toilette hanging on a line to dry. I doubt very much that it’s Makar’s thugs who wear that sort of thing. On the other hand, how the hell should I know?

There’s a vast flatscreen TV taking up half the wall, an en suite shower room (with no water), and that’s it. Nothing else, unless you count all sorts of gels and creams, and a razor with a packet of blades. Well, at least I’ll get the chance to shave – I’m beginning to look a little wild. No more luck with washing, however, as there’s still no water. I’ll even have to go outside to piss if I don’t want it to start stinking in here.

When it comes down to it, I now have a well disguised lair and a sumptuous bed with a fair supply of clean sheets, a razor, and all sorts of creams and gels. That’s it. And the condoms, lest I forget. Made in France, too. Valuable goods, if only I had someone to fence them to.

Hang about! Fencing… Associations began to form in my brain. No, not a plan to take the condoms back home to France (although it’s not like I’d turn down the opportunity), but something much more important and real.

Wandering the streets with the gutting crew, I saw several looted shops. And at the time I began to have some doubts on the subject – it seemed like those stores had been stripped out rather too quickly.

How long were we sitting at work completing our urgent project, without any contact with the outside world? Around two weeks. And in that time, had everyone cleverly worked out that they needed to leave town? Far from all of the flats that we gutted looked as if they’d been abandoned in a hurry. And that means people were evacuated. Probably in a reasonably organized manner. So where did the police go? That’s an interesting question.

So, the shops were looted, and that was clearly done when there was already no effort by the police to stop it. In other words, not during the official evacuation, when they’d have been even more eager than usual to keep peace and order.

It would take at least two full days to evacuate a city of this size, if not more. But we were working at the Spa for nearly a fortnight! And then I spent a bit longer at home, watching the news on TV. Idiot. Just at the time I should have been hightailing it out of there. Yeah, well… There I was, listening to the newsreaders’ fairy tales. Then there was Galperin with his escape plan, and my sleepless night on the stairwell landing next to my tripwired flat…

I remember the first looted shop. By then, they’d had time to strip it bare. You’d guess that the man those two guys in uniform shot was a looter running a little late. But, wait! That was the second shop I came to. The first one greeted me with battened down doors and steel shutters on the windows. Say what you will, but something doesn’t fit. All the other shops have been turned inside out, but that one they leave completely intact. At least, from all I could see it hadn’t been touched. Didn’t look like it had been abandoned, either. I follow the twists and turns of my memories. Wasn’t there a sign above the entrance? Something like “Proprietor – A. A. Ogryzko”. Or was it A.V.? Does that make any fucking difference? The shop hadn’t been raided, and that’s all that matters. That means the owner had somehow managed to survive, at least till that moment. And, who knows, he might peek out from behind the shutters one day.

At any rate, I now have an objective – to establish a good business relationship with him. It is a shop, after all. Which means there should even be some food there. And in exchange I’ve got a rich stock of condoms.