All about the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. survival-horror computer game series: Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, Call of Pripyat, community mods for each, and the upcoming official sequel S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. This is not a subreddit about stalking people nor discussing real-life stalkers!
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My wifeās company is discontinuing their fleet vehicles and making them purchase cars (sucks). They are offering to sell her current car to her for $25k. Itās a 2019 Crosstrek limited with 40,000 miles on it. Has a fair amount of scratches on both bumpers and needs new brake pads. We are in PA, do you think we could do better?
For perspective, we looked at a few new lots (Toyota, Honda, Hyundai) for other cars and gave up quickly because of low inventory and asking over MSRP.
The whirring blades of my MD-902 throbbed against the warm evening air, and I smiled.
From 5,000 feet, the ground flew by in a carpet of dark forests and kelly-green fields. The sun hung low on the horizon in a picturesque array of dazzling orange and gold, and I could make out the narrow strip of the Ohio River to my left, glistening in the fading daylight. This time of year, the trees would be full of the sweet aroma of fresh blossoms, and the frequent rains kept small pockets of fluffy white mist hanging in the treetops. It was a beautiful view, one that reminded me of why being a helicopter pilot trumped flying in a jumbo jet far above the clouds every day of the week.
Fourteen more days, and Iām debt free. That made me grin even more. Iād been working as a charter pilot ever since I obtained my license at age 19, and after years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, I was closing on the final payment for real-estate in western Pennsylvania. With no debt, a fixer-upper house on 30 rural acres all to myself, and a respectable wage for a 26-year-old pilot, I looked forward to the financial freedom I could now enjoy. Maybe Iād take a vacation, somewhere exotic like Venice Italy, or the Dominican Republic. Or perhaps Iād sock the money back for the day I started a family.
āRemember kleineun, a real man looks after his own.ā My elderly
oumaās voice came back from the depths of my memories, her proud, sun-tanned face rising from the darkness. She and my Rhodesian grandfather had emigrated to the US when they were newlyweds, as the violence against white Boer descendants in South Africa spiraled out of control. My mother and father both died in a car crash when I was six, and it had been my grandparents who raised me. Due to this, Iād grown up with a slight accent that many of my classmates found amusing, and I could speak both English, and Afrikaans, the Boer tongue of our former home.
I shifted in my seat, stretched my back muscles, and glanced at the picture taped to my console. Both my parents flanked a grinning, gap-toothed six-year-old me, at the last Christmas weād spent together. My mother beamed, her dark hair and Italian features a sharp contrast to my fatherās sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. Sometimes, I liked to imagine they were smiling at me with pride at how well I flew the old silver-colored bird my company had assigned to me, and that made the long, lonely flights easier to bear.
A flicker caught my eye, and I broke my gaze away from the photograph.
Perched in its small cradle above the controls, my little black Garmin fuzzed over for a few seconds, its screen shifting from brightly colored maps to a barrage of grey static.
Did the power chord come loose? I checked, ensuring the power-cable for the unitās battery was plugged into the port on the control panel. It was a brand-new GPS unit, and Iād used it a few times already, so I knew it wasnāt defective. Granted, I could fly and navigate without it, but the Garmin made my time as a pilot so much easier that the thought of going blind was dreadful.
My fuel gauge danced, clicked to empty, then to full, in a bizarre jolt.
More of the gauges began to stutter, the entire panel seeming to develop terrets all at once, and my pulse began to race. Something was wrong, very wrong, and the sludge inside my bowels churned with sour fear.
āCome on, come on.ā I flicked switches, turned dials, punched buttons, but nothing seemed to fix the spasming electronics. Every gauge failed, and without warning, I found myself plunged into inky darkness.
Outside, the sun surrendered to the pull of night, the sky darker than usual. A distant rumble of thunder reverberated above the roar of my helicopterās engine, and I thought I glimpsed a streak of yellowish lightning on the far horizon to my left.
Calm down Chris. Weāre still flying, so it must just be a blown fuse. Stay in control and find a place to set her down. My sweaty palm slid on the cyclic stick, and both feet weighed heavy on the yaw pedals. The collective stuck to my other hand with a nervous vibration, and I squinted against the abyss outside.
Beep. I jumped despite myself, as the little Garmin on my panel flared back to life, the static pulling aside to reveal a twitching display. Each time the screen glitched, it showed the colorful map detailing my flight path over the ground below, but I noticed that some of the lines changed, the names shifting, as if the device couldnāt decide between two different versions of the world.
One name jutted out at me, slate gray like most of the major county names, appearing with ghostly flickers from between two neighboring ones.
Barron County. I stared, confused. Iād flown over this section of southeastern Ohio plenty of times, and I knew the counties by heart. At this point, I should have been over the southern end of Noble County, and maybe dipping lower into Washington. There was no
Barron County Ohio. I was sure of it.
And yet it shown back at me from the digital landscape, a strange, almost cigar-shaped chunk of terrain carved from the surrounding counties like a tumor, sometimes there, sometimes not, as my little Garmin struggled to find the correct map. Rain began to patter against my cockpit window, and the entire aircraft rattled from a strong gust of wind. Thick clouds closed over my field of vision like a sea of gray cotton.
The blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sucked in a nervous breath.
Land. I had to land. There was nothing else to do, my flight controls werenāt responding, and only my Garmin had managed to come back to life. Perhaps Iād been hit by lightning, and the electronics had been fried? Either way, it was too dark to tell, but a storm seemed to be brewing, and if I didnāt get my feet on the ground soon, I could be in real trouble.
āBetter safe than sorry.ā I pushed down on the collective to start my slow descent and clicked the talking button for my headset. āAny station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, over.ā
Nothing.
āAny station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, requesting emergency assistance, over.ā
Still nothing.
If the radioās dead, Iām really up a creek. With my hand shaking, I clicked on the mic one more time. āAny station, this isāā
Like a curtain pulling back, the fog cleared from around my window, and the words stuck in my throat.
Without my gauges, I couldnāt tell just how far Iād descended, but I was definitely very low. Thick trees poked up from the ground, and the hills rolled into high ridges with flat valley floors, fields and pastures pockmarking them. Rain fell all around in cold, silvery sheets, a normal feature for the mid spring in this part of Ohio.
What wasnāt normal, were the fires.
At first, I thought they were forest fires for the amount of smoke and flames that bellowed from each spot, but as I swooped lower, my eyes widened in horror.
They were houses.
Farms, cottages, little clusters that barely constituted villages, all of them belched orange flames and black pillars of sooty smoke. I couldnāt hear above the helicopter blades, but I could see the flashes on the ground, along the road, in between the trees, and even coming from the burning buildings, little jets of golden light that spat into the darkness with anger.
Gunfire. Thatās rifle fire, a whole lot of it. Tiny black figures darted through the shadows, barely discernable from where I sat, several hundred feet up. I couldnāt see much, but some were definitely running away, the streaks of yellow gunfire chasing them. A few dark gray vehicles rumbled down one of the gravel roads, and sprayed fire into the houses as it went. They were fighting, I realized, the people in the trucks and the locals. It was horrific, like something out of war-torn Afghanistan, but worse.
Then, I caught a glimpse of the
others.
They didnāt move like the rest, who either fled from the dark vehicles, or fired back from behind cover. These skinny figures loped along with haphazard gaits, many running on all fours like animals, swarming from the trees by the dozens. They threw themselves into the gales of bullets without flinching, attacking anyone within range, and something about the way they moved, so fluid, so fearless, made my heart skip a beat.
What is that? āEcho Four Actual to unknown caller, please respond, over.ā Choking back a cry of shock, I fumbled at the control panel with clumsy fingers, the manās voice sharp and stern. I hadnāt realized that Iād let go of the talking button and clicked it down again. āHello? Hello, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot out of Pittsburgh, over.ā
An excruciating moment passed, and I continued to zoom over the trees, the fires falling away behind me as more silent forest took over.
āRoger that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, we read you loud and clear. Please identify yourself and any passengers or cargo you might be carrying, over.ā Swallowing hard, I eyed the treetops, which looked much closer than they should have been. How far had I descended? āEcho Four Actual, my name is Christopher Dekker, and I am alone. Iām a charter flight from PA, carrying medical equipment for OSU in Columbus. My controls have been damaged, and I am unable to safely carry on due to the storm. Requesting permission to land, over.ā
I watched the landscape slide by underneath me, once catching sight of what looked like a
little white church surrounded by smaller huts, dozens of figures in the yard staring up at me as I flew over a towering ridgeline.
āSolid copy on that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot. Be advised, your transponder shows you to be inside a restricted zone. Please cease all radio traffic, reduce your speed, climb to 3,000 feet and proceed north. Weāll talk you in from there. How copy, over?ā My heart jumped, and I let out a sigh of relief. āRoger that Echo Four Actual, my altimeter is down, but Iāll do my best to eyeball the altitude, over.ā
With that, I pulled the collective upward, and tried my best to gauge how far I was by eyesight in the gathering night, rain still coming down all around me. This had to be some kind of disaster or riot, I decided. After all, the voice over the radio sounded like military, and those vehicles seemed to have heavy weapons. Maybe there was some kind of unrest going on here that I hadnāt heard about yet?
Kind of weird for it to happen in rural areas though. Spoiled college kids I get, but never saw farmers get so worked up before. They usually love the military. Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I turned out of reflex.
My mouth fell open, and I froze, unable to scream.
In the sky beside me, a huge shadow glided along, and its leathery wings effortlessly carved through the gloom, flapping only on occasion to keep it aloft. It was too dark for me to see what color it was, but from the way it moved, I knew it wasnāt another helicopter. No, this thing was alive, easily the size of a small plane, and more than twice the length of my little McDonald Douglass. A long tail trailed behind it, and bore a distinct arrow-shaped snout, with twig-like spines fanned out around the back of its head. Whatever legs it had were drawn up under it like a bird, yet its skin appeared rough and knobby, almost resembling tree bark. Without pause, the gigantic bat-winged entity flew along beside me, as if my presence was on par with an annoying fly buzzing about its head.
Gripping the microphone switch so tight, I thought Iād crack the plastic, I whispered into my headset, forgetting all radio protocol. āT-Thereās something up here.ā
Static crackled.
āDouglas Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, say again your last, youāre coming in weak and unreadable, over.ā āThereās something up here.ā I snarled into the headset, still glued to the controls of the helicopter, afraid to deviate even an inch from my course in case the monstrosity decided to turn on me. āA freaking huge thing, right beside me. I swear, it looks like a bat or . . . I donāt know.ā
āCalm down.ā The man on the other end of the radio broke his rigorous discipline as well, his voice deep, but level.
āIt wonāt attack if you donāt move too fast. Slowly ease away from it and follow that course until youāre out of sight.ā I didnāt have time to think about how wrong that sounded, how the manās strict tone had changed to one of knowledge, how he hadnāt been the least surprised by what Iād said. Instead, I slowly turned the helicopter away from the huge menace and edged the speed higher in tiny increments.
As soon as I was roughly two football fields away, I let myself relax, and clicked the mic switch. āItās not following.ā
āYouāre sure?ā Eyeing the huge flapping wings, I nodded, then remembered he couldnāt see me. āYeah, Iām well clear.ā
āGood. Thank you, Mr. Dekker.ā Then, the radio went dead.
Something in my chest dropped, a weight that made my stomach roil. This wasnāt right, none of it. Who was that man? Why did he know about the thing Iād just seen? What was I supposed toā
A flash of light exploded from the trees to my right and shot into the air with a long finger of smoke.
What the . . . On instinct, I jerked the cyclic stick to one side, and the helicopter swung to avoid the rocket.
Boom. My world shook, metal screeched, and a dozen alarms began to go off inside the cockpit in a cacophony of beeps and sirens. Orange and red flames lit up the night sky just behind me, and the horizon started to spin wildly outside. Heat gushed from the cockpit door, and I smelled the greasy stench of burning oil. The safety belts dug into my shoulders, and with a final slip, the radio headset ripped free from my scalp.
Iām hit. Desperate, I yanked on the controls, fought the bird even as she spun toward the ground in a wreath of flames, the inky black trees hurtling up to meet me. The helicopter went into full auto-rotation, the sky blurring past outside, and the alarms blared in a screech of doom. Panic slammed through my temples, I screamed at the top of my lungs, and for one brief second, my eyes locked on the little black Garmin still perched atop my control panel.
Its screen stopped twitching and settled on a map of the mysterious Barron County, with a little red arrow at the center of the screen, a few words popping up underneath it.
You are here.
Trees stabbed up into the sky, the belts crushed at my torso, glass shattered all around me, and the world went dark.
Copper, thick, warm, and tangy.
It filled my mouth, stank metallic in my nose, clogged my throat, choking me. In the murkiness, I fought for a surface, for a way out, blind and numb in the dark.
This way, kleineun. My
oumaās voice echoed from somewhere in the shadows.
This way. Both eyes flew open, and I gagged, spitting out a stream of red.
Pain throbbed in my ribs, and a heavy pressure sent a tingling numbness through my shoulders. Blood roared inside my temples, and stars danced before my eyes with a dizzying array. Humid night air kissed my skin, and something sticky coated my face, neck, and arms that hung straight up toward the ceiling.
Wait. Not up.
Down.
I blinked at the wrinkled, torn ceiling of the cockpit, the glass all gone, the gray aluminum shredded like tissue paper. Just outside the broken windows, thick Appalachian bluegrass and stemmy underbrush swished in a feeble breeze, backlit by flashes of lightning from the thunderstorm overhead. Green and brown leaves covered everything in a wet carpet of triangles, and somewhere nearby, a cricket chirped.
Turning my head from side to side, I realized that I hung upside down inside the ruined helicopter, the top half burrowed into the mud. I could hear the hissing and crackling of flames, the pattering of rain falling on the hot aluminum, and the smaller brush fires around the downed aircraft sizzling out in the damp long grass. Charred steel and burning oil tainted the air, almost as strong as the metallic, coppery stench in my aching nose.
They shot me down. That military dude shot me out of the sky. It didnāt make sense. Iād followed their orders, done everything theyād said, and yet the instant I veered safely away from whatever that thing in the sky had been, theyād fired, not at it, but at me.
Looking down (or rather, up) at my chest, I sucked in a gasp, which was harder to do that before.
The navy-blue shirt stuck to my torso with several big splotches of dark, rusty red. Most were clean slashes, but two held bits of glass sticking out of them, one alarmingly bigger than the other. They dripped cherry red blood onto my upturned face, and a wave of nausea hit me.
I gotta get down. I flexed my arms to try and work some feeling back into them, praying nothing was broken. Half-numb from hanging so long, I palmed along my aching body until I felt the buckled for the seat belts.
āOkay.ā I hissed between gritted teeth, in an effort to stave off my panic. āYou can do this. Just hold on tight. Nice and tight. Here we go . . .ā
Click. Everything seemed to lurch, and I slid off the seat to plummet towards the muck-filled hole in the cockpit ceiling. My fingers were slick with blood and slipped over the smooth faux-leather pilotās seat with ease. The shoulder belt snagged on the bits of glass that lay just under the left lowest rib, and a flare of white-hot pain ripped through me.
Wham. I screamed, my right knee caught the edge of the aluminum ceiling, and both hands dove into a mound of leaf-covered glass shards on the opposite side of the hole. My head swam, being right-side-up again enough to make shadows gnaw at the corner of my eyes.
Forcing myself to breath slowly, I fought the urge to faint and slid back to sit on the smooth ceiling. I turned my hands over to see half a dozen bits of clear glass burrowed into my skin like greedy parasites, red blood weeping around the new cuts.
āScrew you.ā I spat at the rubbish with angry tears in my eyes. āScrew you, screw you, screw you.ā
The shards came out easy enough, and the cuts werenāt that deep, but that wasnāt what worried me. On my chest, the single piece of cockpit glass that remined was almost as big as my palm, and it
really hurt. Just touching it felt like self-inflicted torture, but I knew it had to come out sooner or later.
Please donāt nick a vein. Wiping my hands dry on my jeans, I gripped the shard with both hands, and jerked.
Fire roared over my ribs, and hot blood tickled my already grimy pale skin. I clapped a hand over the wound, pressing down hard, and grunted out a string of hateful expletives that my
ouma would have slapped me for.
Lying on my back, I stared around me at the messy cargo compartment of the MD-902. Most of the medical supplies had been in cardboard boxes strapped down with heavy nylon tow-straps, but several cases had ruptured with the force of the impact, spraying bandages, syringes, and pill bottles all over the cluttered interior. Orange flames chewed at the crate furthest to the rear, the tail section long gone, but the foremost part of the hold was intact. Easily a million-dollar mess, it would have made me faint on any other trip, but today it was a godsend.
Half-blind in the darkness, I crawled along with only the firelight and lightning bolts to guide me, my right knee aching. Like a crippled raccoon, I collected things as I went, conscious of the two pallets of intact supplies weighing right over my head. Iād taken several different first-aid courses with some hunting buddies of mine, and the mental reflexes kicked in to help soothe my frazzled mind.
Check for bleeds, stop the worst, then move on. Aside from my battered chest and stomach, the rest of me remained mostly unharmed. I had nasty bruises from the seatbelts, my right knee swelled, my nose slightly crooked and crusted in blood, but otherwise I was intact. Dowsing every scratch and cut with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol I found, I used butterfly closures on the smaller lacerations that peppered my skin. I wrapped soft white gauze over my abused palms and probed at the big cut where the last shard had been, only stopping when I was sure there were no pieces of glass wedged inside my flesh.
āNot too bad.ā I grunted to myself, trying to sound impassive like a doctor might. āRib must have stopped it. Gonna need stitches though. Thatāll be
fun.ā
Pawing through the broken cases, I couldnāt find any suture chord, but just as I was about to give up, I noticed a small box that read āmedical skin staplerā.
Bingo. I tore the small white plastic stapler free from its packaging and eyeballed the device. Iād never done this before, only seen it in movies, and even though the cut in my skin hurt, I wondered if this wouldnāt be worse.
Youāve gotta do it. That bleeding needs to stop. Besides, no oneās coming to rescue you, not with those rocket-launching psychos out there. Taking a deep breath, I pinched the skin around the gash together, and pressed the mouth of the stapler to it.
Click. A sharp sting, like that of a needle bit at the skin, but it didnāt hurt nearly as bad as the cut itself. I worked my way across the two-inch laceration and gave out a sigh of relief when it was done.
āNot going to bleed to death today.ā I daubed ointment around the staples before winding more bandages over the wound.
Popping a few low-grade painkillers that tumbled from the cargo, I crawled wriggled through the nearest shattered window into the wet grass.
Raindrops kissed my face, clean and cool on my sweaty skin. Despite the thick cloud cover, there was enough constant lightning strikes within the storm to let me get glimpses of the world around me. My helicopter lay on its back, the blades snapped like pencils, with bits and pieces of it burning in chunks all around the small break in the trees. Chest-high scrub brush grew all around the low-lying ground, with pockets of standing water in places. My ears still rang from the impact of the crash, but I could start to pick up more crickets, frogs, and even some nocturnal birds singing into the darkness, like they didnāt notice the huge the hulk of flaming metal that had fallen from the sky. Overhead, the thunder rumbled onward, the feeble wind whistling, and there were other flashes on the horizon, orange and red ones, with crackles that didnāt sound quite like lightning.
The guns. Theyāre still fighting. Instinctively, I pulled out my cellphone, and tapped the screen.
It fluttered to life, but no matter how I tried, I couldnāt get through to anyone, not even with the emergency function designed to work around having no service. The complicated wonder of our modern world was little better than a glorified paperweight.
Stunned, I sat down with my back to the helicopter and rested my head against the aluminum skin of the craft. How Iād gone from a regular medical supply run to being marooned in this hellish parody of rural America, I didnāt know, but one thig was certain; I needed a plan. Whoever fired the missile could have already contacted my charter company and made up some excuse to keep them from coming to look for me. No one else knew I was here, and even though I now had six staples holding the worst of my injuries shut, I knew I needed proper medical attention. If I wanted to live, Iād have to rescue myself.
My bag. I need to get my go-bag, grab some gear and then . . . head somewhere else. It took me a while to gather my green canvas paratrooper bag from its place behind the pilotās seat and fill it with whatever supplies I could scrounge. My knee didnāt seem to be broken, but man did it hurt, and I dreaded the thought of walking on it for miles on end. I focused instead on inventorying my gear and trying to come up with a halfway intelligent plan of action.
I had a stainless-steel canteen with one of those detachable cups on the bottom, a little fishing kit, some duct tape, a lighter, a black LED flashlight with three spare batteries, a few tattered road maps with a compass, a spare pair of socks, medical supplies from the cargo, and a simple forest green plastic rain poncho. I also managed to unearth a functioning digital camcorder my
ouma had gotten me for Christmas a few years back, though I wasnāt sure I wanted to do any filming in such a miserable state. Lastly, since it was a private supply run from a warehouse area near Pittsburgh to a direct hospital pad in Ohio, Iād been able to bring my K-Bar, a sturdy, and brutally simple knife designed for the Marine Corps that I used every time I went camping. It was pitiful in comparison to the rifle I wished I had with me, but that didnāt matter now. I had what I had, and I doubted my trusty Armalite would have alleviated my sore knee anyway.
Clicking on my flashlight, I huddled with the poncho around my shoulders inside the wreck of the chopper and peered at the dusty roadmaps. A small part of me hoped that a solution would jump out from the faded paper, but none came. These were all maps of western PA and eastern Ohio. None of them had a Barron County on them anywhere.
The man on the radio said to head north, right before they shot me down. That means they must be camped out to the north of here. South had that convoy and those burning houses, so thatās a no-go. Maybe I can backtrack eastward the way I came. As if on cue, a soft
pop echoed from over the eastern horizon, and I craned to look out the helicopter window, spotting more man-made flashes over the tree tops.
āGreat.ā I hissed between clenched teeth, aware of how the temperature dipped to a chilly 60 degrees, and how despite the conditions, my stomach had begun to growl. āNot going that way, are we? Westward it is.ā
Walking away from my poor 902 proved to be harder than Iād anticipated. Despite the glass, the fizzling fires, and the darkness, it still held a familiar, human essence to it. Sitting inside it made me feel secure, safe, even calm about the situation. In any other circumstance, I would have just stayed with the downed aircraft to wait for help, but I knew the men who shot me down would likely find my crash site, and I didnāt want to be around when they did.
Unlike much of central and western Ohio, southeastern Ohio is hilly, brushy, and clogged with thick forests. Thorns snagged at my thin poncho and sliced at my pant legs. My knee throbbed, every step a form of self-inflicted torture. The rain never stopped, a steady drizzle from above just cold enough to be problematic as time went on, making me shiver. Mud slid under my tennis shoes, and every tree looked ten times bigger in the flickering beam of my cheap flashlight. Icy fear prickled at the back of my neck at some of the sounds that greeted me through the gloom. Iād been camping loads of times, both in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, but these noises were something otherworldly to me.
Strange howls, screeches, and calls permeated the rain-soaked sky, some almost roars, while others bordered on human in their intonation. The more I walked, the softer the distant gunfire became, and the more prevalent the odd sounds, until the shadows seemed to fill with them. I didnāt dare turn off my flashlight, or Iād been completely blind in the dark, but a little voice in the back of my head screamed that I was too visible, crunching through the gloomy forest with my long beam of light stabbing into the abyss. It felt as though a million eyes were on me, studying me, hunting me from the surrounding brush, and I bitterly recalled how much Iād loved the old
Survivor Man TV series as a kid.
Not so fun being out in the woods at night. Especially alone. A twig snapped somewhere behind me, and I whirled on the spot, one trembling hand resting on the hilt of my K-Bar.
Nothing. Nothing but trees, bushes, and rain dripping down in the darkness.
āThis is stupid.ā I whispered to myself to keep my nerves in check as I slowly spun on the spot. āI should have went eastward anyway. God knows how long Iām going to have toāā
Creak. A groan of metal-on-metal echoed from somewhere to my right, and I spun to face it, yanking the knife on my belt free from its scabbard. It felt so small and useless in my hand, and I choked down a wave of nauseas fear.
Ka-whump. Creak. K-whump. Creak. Underbrush cracked and crunched, a few smaller saplings thrashed, and from deep within the gloom, two yellow orbs flared to life. They poked through the mist in the trees, forming into slender fingers of golden light that swept back and forth in the dark.
The soldiers . . . they must be looking for me. I swallowed hard and turned to slink away.
Ice jammed through my blood, and I froze on the spot, biting my tongue to stop the scream.
It stood not yards away, a huge form that towered a good twelve feet tall in the swirling shadows. Unpolished chrome blended with flash-rusted spots in the faded red paint, and grime-smeared glass shone with dull hues in the flashes of lightning. Where the wheels should have been, the rounded steel axels curved like some enormous hand had bent them, and the tires lay face-down on the muddy ground like big round feet, their hubcaps buried in the dirt. Dents, scrapes, and chips covered the battered thing, and its crooked little radio antenna pointed straight up from the old metal fender like a mast. I could barely make out the mud-coated
VW on the rounded hood, and my mind reeled in shock.
Is . . . is that a car? Both yellow headlights bathed me in a circle of bright, blinding light, and neither I nor the strange vehicle moved.
Seconds ticked by, the screech-thumping in the background only growing closer. I realized that I couldnāt hear any engine noises and had yet to see any soldiers or guns pointed my way. This car looked old, really old, like one of those classic Volkswagen Beetles that collectors fought over at auctions. Try as I might, I couldnāt see a driver inside the murky, mold-smeared windows.
Because there wasnāt one.
Lightning arched across the sky overhead, and the car standing in front of me
blinked. Its headlights slid shut, as if little metal shades had crawled over the bulbs for a moment and flicked open again. Something about that movement was so primal, so real, so
lifelike, that every ounce of self-control I had melted in an instant.
Cursing under my breath, I lunged into the shrubs, and the world erupted around me.
Under my shoes, the ground shook, and the car surged after me in a cacophony of
ka-thumps that made my already racing heart skip several beats. A weather-beaten brown tow truck from the 50ās charged through the thorns to my left, itās headlights ablaze, and a dilapidated yellow school bus rose from its hiding place in the weeds to stand tall on four down-turned axel-legs. They all flicked their headlights on like giants waking from their slumber, and as I dodged past them, they each blared their horn into the night in alarm.
My breaths came short and tight, my knee burned, and I crashed through thorns and briars without thought to how badly I was getting cut up.
The cheap poncho tore, and I ripped it away as it caught on a tree branch.
A purple 70ās Mustang shook off its blanket of creeping vines and bounded from a stand of trees just ahead, forcing me to swerve to avoid being run over, my adrenaline at all-time highs.
This canāt be happening, this canāt be happening, this canāt be happening. Slipping and sliding, I pushed through a stand of multiflora rose, and stumbled out into a flat, dark expanse.
I almost skidded to a stop.
What had once been a rather large field stood no taller than my shoestrings, the grass charred, and burnt. The storm above illuminated huge pieces of wreckage that lay scattered over the nearly 40-acre plot, and I could just make out the fire-blackened hulk of a fuselage resting a hundred yards away. The plane had been brought down a while ago it seemed, as there werenāt any flames left burning, and I threw myself toward it in frenzied desperation.
Burned grass and greasy brown topsoil slushed underfoot, and I could hear the squelching of the cars pursing me. Rain soaked me to the bone, and my lungs ached from sucking down the damp night air. A painful stich crept into my side, and I cursed myself for not putting in more time for cardio at the gym.
Something caught my left shoelace, and I hurtled to the ground, tasting mud and blood in between my teeth.
Theyāve got me now. I clawed at the mud, rolled, and watched a tire slam down mere inches from where my head had been. The Mustang loomed over me and jostled for position with the red Volkswagen and brown tow truck, the school bus still a few yards behind them. They couldnāt seem to decide who would get the pleasure of stomping me to death, and like a herd of stampeding wildebeest, they locked bumpers in an epic shoving match.
On all fours, I scampered out from under the sparring brutes, and dashed for the crumpled airplane, a white-painted DC-3 that looked like it had been cut in half by a gargantuan knife blade. I passed a snapped wing section, the oily remains of a turbo-prop engine, and a mutilated wheel from the landing gear. Climbing over a heap of mud, I squeezed into the back of the ruined flight cabin and dropped down into the dark cargo hold.
Wham. No sooner had my sneakers hit the cold metal floor, and the entire plane rocked from the impact of something heavy ramming it just outside. I tumbled to my knees, screaming in pain as, once again, I managed to bash the sore one off a bracket in the wall.
My hand smeared in something gooey, and I scrabbled for my flashlight.
It clicked on, a wavering ball of white light in the pitch darkness, and I fought the urge to gag. āOh man . . .ā
Three people, or what was left of them, lay strewn over the narrow cargo area. Claret red blood coated the walls, caked on the floor, and clotted under my mud-spattered shoes. Bits of flesh and viscera were stuck to everything, and tatters of cloth hung from exposed sections of broken bone. An eerie set of bloody handprints adorned the walls, and the only reason I could tell it had been
three people were the shoes; all of them bore anklebones sticking out above blood-soaked socks. It smelled sickly sweet, a strange, nauseas odor that crept into my nose and settled on the back of my tongue like an alien parasite.
Something glinted in the beam of my flashlight, and my pulse quickened as I pried the object loose from the severed arm that still clung to it.
āHail Mary full of Grace.ā I would have grinned if it werenāt for the fact that the plane continued to buck and roll under the assault from the cars outside.
The pistol looked old, but well-maintained, aside from the light coating of dark blood that stained its round wooden handle. It felt heavy, but good in my hand, and I turned it over to read the words,
Waffenfabrik Mauser stenciled into the frame, with a large red 9 carved into the grip. For some reason, it vaguely reminded me of the blasters from Star Wars
. I fumbled with a little switch that looked like a safety on the back of the gun and stumbled toward a gap in the planeās dented fuselage to aim out at the surrounding headlights.
Bang. The old gun bucked reliably in my hand, its long barrel spitting a little jet of flame into the night. I had no idea if I hit anything, but the attacking cars recoiled, their horns blaring in confusion.
They turned, and scuttled for the tree line as fast as their mechanical legs could go, the entire ordeal over as fast as it had begun.
Did I do that? Perplexed, I stared down at the pistol in my hand.
Whoosh. A large, inky black shadow glided down from the clouds, and the yellow school bus moved too slow to react in time.
With a crash, the kicking nightmarish vehicle was thrown onto its side, spraying glass and chrome trim across the muddy field. Its electro-synth horn blared with wails of mechanical agony, as two huge talon-like feet clamped down on it, and the enormous head of the flying creature lowered to rip open its engine compartment.
The horn cut out, and the enormous flying entity jerked its head back to gulp down a mass of what looked like sticky black vines from the interior of the shattered bus.
At this range, I could see now that the flying creature bore two legs and had its wings half-tucked like a vulture that had descended to feed on roadkill. Its head turned slightly, and in the glow of another lightning bolt, my jaw went slack at the realization of what it was.
A tree trunk. Itās a rotted tree trunk. I couldnāt tell where the reptilian beast began, and where the organic tree components ended, the upper part of the head shaped like a log, while the lower jaw resembled something out of a dinosaur movie. Its skin looked identical to the outside of a shagbark hickory but flexed with a supple featheriness that denoted something closer to skin. Sharp branch-like spines ranged down its back, and out to the end of its tail, which bore a massive round club shaped like a diseased tree-knot. Crouched on both hind legs, it braced the hooked ends of its folded wings against the ground like a bat, towering higher than a semi-truck. Under the folds of its armored head, a bulging pair of chameleon-like eyes constantly spun in their sockets, probing the dark for threats while it ate.
One black pupil locked onto the window I peered through, and my heart stopped.
The beast regarded me for a moment, with a curious, sideways sniff.
With a proud, contemptful head-toss, the shadow from the sky parted rows of razor-sharp teeth to let out a
roar that shook the earth beneath my feet. It was the triumphant war cry of a creature that sat at the very top of the food chain, one that felt no threat from the fragile two-legged beings that walked the earth all around it. It hunted whenever it wanted, ate whatever it wanted, and flew wherever it wanted. It didnāt need to rip the plane apart to devour me.
Like my hunter-gatherer ancestors from thousands of years ago, I wasnāt even worth the energy it would take to pounce.
Iām hiding in the remains of the cockpit now, which is half-buried under the mud of the field, enough to shield the light from my screen so that
thing doesnāt see it. My service only now came back, and itās been over an hour since the winged beast started in on the dead bus. I donāt know when, or how Iām going to get out of here. I donāt know when anyone will even see this post, or if it will upload at all. My phone battery is almost dead, and at this point, Iām probably going to have to sleep among the corpses until daylight comes.
A dead man sleeping amongst friends.
If you live in the Noble County area in southeastern Ohio, be careful where you drive, fly, and boat. I donāt know if itās possible to stumble into this strange place by ground, but if so, then these things are definitely headed your way.
If that happens . . . pray that they donāt find you.
Do you have experience with inventory cars? Are these completely new vehicles with the latest hardware for the respective model?
Having an old car ready to junk, last Friday, I shopped around online and reached out to a dealership that was close enough to visit and used their online portal to reserve a car. I figured I'd have the whole process done by Monday as I was literally just looking at available inventory and didn't want to bother haggling over the price for a 1-3% savings. So, I reserve the car, fill out all the paperwork, upload my ID, and get an email confirmation that a Sales rep will be in touch. Saturday comes around, I get some emails about Memorial Day sales (this is in the US), and a dealer sales rep contacts me. I reply back that I'm ready to schedule a test drive, good for a call, and I can stop by the dealership. Out the door price guarantee was all set using the dealers site. I got no response. I called the sales rep and left a message, and never got a call back.
On Monday, around 8AM the sales manager sends out an email and asks how my experience was and they are eager to work with me and asked if I liked the car all via email. I reply back within 10 minutes of getting the message and inform him nobody ever got back to me, I never test drove a vehicle, and that I was still interested in getting something scheduled. I wait until about 12pm and call. No answer, so I leave a message. I got no response.
I send out a follow up email on Tuesday and ask what the problem is regarding communication. I get no response, so I call the manager again. I leave a detailed message with all the info I provided in this post above and add to it verbatim "maybe your systems send out automated messages via email that nobody is checking? I've also tried calling but haven't gotten a call back, so I'm getting the impression your aren't interested and if that's the case I'll just look at another dealership."
Well, after that voicemail, I got a call back within an hour, and it was the sales manager. When I answered the phone, I barely got a hello. I was greeted with "This is , from , and I don't send out automated emails. I write my own emails. My sales rep should have been in touch. I don't deal with used vehicles either, I only sell new vehicles. You can speak with our Used Vehicle Sales Manager. I'm putting you on hold..." Then the used sales manager comes on the line, also sounds very curt, and asks if I am still interested in the car. I reply yes, and we schedule an appointment for yesterday at 10AM.
Overall, I didn't like the interactions so far. But whatever, I figured I'm just making a purchase, I'll ignore it. That is until my wife and I take the day off, go in at 10AM, and wait around for the sales rep. Nobody greeted us at the dealership, maybe the sales guy was running late, but they should have let us know. We let the receptionist know (I assume that was her job) we were there. We stayed for about 20 minutes, and then left.
We ended up going to another dealership yesterday and it was a night and day difference where the sales team was enthusiastic, no pressure on making the sale, upfront about all costs, and in the end, they made the sale.
So, if you made it through this essay of a post, I pose the question... what's up with the first dealership? They had a motivated buyer, it would have been an easy sale, but instead they failed at communication efforts, were rude over the phone, and ignored us when we actually went in person. Very odd. I guess they didn't want the sale??? As for the second dealership, we had the the complete opposite experience and bought a car from them instead.
So I have struggled and struggled with finding an existing tune for this car that would win on the highest difficulty. After spending a lot of credits and trying several tunes I gave up!
I decided that the lightest AWD extremely powerful car in my inventory was most likely going to be the best car to go with because this track is just absolutely tiny.
So the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 Evolution ā86 was ultimately the car I won with. I tried several other cars including the Audi Pikes Peak and someoneās recommended build using the ā17 GTR.
Those cars just didnāt work for me!
Anyways this car drifts effortlessly and it engine brakes and brakes easily while in a drift so you can still easily hit your apex.
This car can also be used for the PP600 World Touring Car 600 Dirt Tire event at this track just reduce the power a little bit.
Also youāll notice that I have the restrictor set to the 70% and even reduced the power a little more on top. Thatās to give you a nice flat power curve. You could win this event with the low turbo at 100% honestly but this gives you quite a bit more power and still gives you a very easy to control power delivery.
The gearbox settings are specifically made for this track. On a much large track even if you like this vehicle Iād probably move over to the Audi Pikes Peak if you have it.
Lastly the car will drive on Tarmac very easily using the same settings so it will decimate PP700 and PP730 on mediums.
When on tarmac at high speeds if you start to drift on accident DO NOT FREAK OUT!!! The car will NOT SPIN OUT. Just carefully and slowly real the car back in.
Today my steering column failed and the dealer advised that I also need the rear wheel bearing and front wheel bearings.
The steering column OEM is $800+ tax and the bearings are like $200. These prices are parts only - the vehicle is a 2012 Mazda with over 200k km...
My wife suggested I buy a new vehicle but I've read there are a lot of inventory issues.
Are there currently any hybrids or good value gas vehicles that are in stock or have low wait times(1-2 weeks). Ottawa area if that helps.
Any help appreciated