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  “Outside”

  by Artyom Dereschuk

  Yuri - a young man from a backwater Russian town - wakes to find the doors to his crumbling apartment complex welded shut... from the inside.

  Before anyone can make sense of it, something not from this world kills a postman stranded on the other side of the door. And when the town's old evacuation sirens begin to blare, Yuri and everyone else in the building realize an impenetrable door could be the least of their worries. In fact, it could be the only thing standing between them and the otherworldly creatures roaming the now deserted streets outside...

  Someone in the building knows what's going on. Now, it's up to Yuri to figure out who it is, what they know, how these events are linked to their town's past and how to lead everyone to safety - before the threats lurking outside find their way in.

  Book 2 of Russian Horror Fiction Series.

  Follow the author on Amazon, Bookbub, or Goodreads to get information about new releases in the series, or sign up to my newsletter to get an exclusive novella and an early access to my work in progress.

  Preface

  This book wouldn't have happened without the Reddit community of Nosleep.

  The original story was a series of posts written from a nameless protagonist's point of view. A story of a young man who one day found the doors to his apartment complex welded shut while strange beasts started roaming the streets outside. A story which became so popular that it seemed only logical to adapt it into a novel format.

  When I started writing this novel, I decided to change a few things, so that the old readers could find something new for themselves, and the new readers would enjoy the improved and expanded storyline. It seemed like a great idea on paper.

  And, of course, it needed an internal conflict to be a "proper" novel. Internal conflict is, after all, the bread and butter of Russian literature.

  But, as I started working on it, I quickly discovered that the old wisdom still held true: "if it ain't broke – don't fix it." As I was searching for ways to expand the plot and add new twists to it, I was getting lost in my own story – and not in a good way. I was starting to think that I would never finish.

  It was only due to support of people who had read the original story that I've managed to finally finish it. Each time I saw a message inquiring as to how the novel was doing, I was finding myself back at my desk. So, to all of you who were asking when the book would be finished - thank you. This book wouldn't have happened without you – and now you know that I mean it in more than one way.

  I also wanted to thank Galina - for being the only person who stayed with me from the beginning to the end.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1 - The Cricket

  CHAPTER 2 - The End of an Era

  CHAPTER 3 - "Stay Where You Are"

  CHAPTER 4 - Means of Escape

  CHAPTER 5 - A New Path

  CHAPTER 6 - Voices

  CHAPTER 7 - No Sleep

  CHAPTER 8 - Militia

  CHAPTER 9 - Rumors

  CHAPTER 10 - Den

  CHAPTER 11 - Militia’s Finest

  CHAPTER 12 - Attack

  CHAPTER 13 - Despair

  CHAPTER 14 - Believers

  CHAPTER 15 - A Breach

  CHAPTER 16 - Eye-to-eye

  CHAPTER 17 - Gone Girl

  CHAPTER 18 - The Plan

  CHAPTER 19 - The Welder

  CHAPTER 20 - Outside

  CHAPTER 1 - The Cricket

  The unknown, alien sound came from the forest, beneath my windows.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, at that obscure hour where the position of the arrows on a clock doesn’t matter - all you know is that it’s not a time for you to be awake.

  What was that noise that woke me up? I lifted my head from the pillow and tried to look around my room to figure out what it was that got me to open my eyes.

  Nothing. Just silence and pitch-black darkness. Not even an echo. I seemed to have a faint memory of what it was, but I wasn’t sure if it was a part of my dream or something that originated from the outside.

  A distant howl of some animal.

  Too sleepy to be concerned with that question for more than a moment, I put my head back on the pillow. Before my mind went blank, I faintly wondered what kind of animal it could have been - the more time passed, the more I was sure that the sound I recalled was unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was strange to even attribute a sound you don’t recognize to an animal, yet I was confident that my estimate was correct. But before that thought went anywhere it was swept away by my sleepiness and I was sound asleep, completely forgetting about the entire ordeal.

  ***

  I woke up the second time when the alarm went off three times in a row: I had been abusing the "snooze" button too much. As per usual, when I opened my eyes, I was greeted with the familiar pattern of my room’s wallpaper - bleak pink roses on the gray background. The flowers had lost their freshness and looked dreary, and perhaps their background had been crisp white in the past, but decades without refurbishing had drained the wallpaper’s color palette.

  I lazily got out of the creaky bed. The floor covered in linoleum was cold, sucking the heat out of my feet, and my big toe identified a familiar whale-shaped hole in it.

  I stretched and headed for the bathroom.

  You’d never be able to guess that a young man lived in my apartment. The furniture was older than me - perhaps even older than my parents, based on its design. Through the glass panels of the cupboards, I could see displays of china and rows of books which the previous owners bought just for how they looked and which I knew for sure no one had ever read. Both china and books had been a sign of prosperity and culture in the old days. Both of them were pointless on their own, but mandatory to keep up a façade of success for your guests.

  The walls were covered in paintings that matched neither the surroundings nor each other, and in one corner there was a calendar for 2018 - complete with moon cycles for each day. I couldn’t bring myself to replace it, as despite its silliness it reminded me of the last owner of the apartment.

  And the smell. The musty, earthy smell of old people. Cozy and familiar, like a pair of boots you’ve been wearing for the past year. It was everywhere. I got used to it and couldn’t sense it anymore, but whenever I returned home after going somewhere for more than a week the scent would greet me again with newfound crispness.

  I entered the bathroom - a small room where, between the bathtub and the sink, you barely had any place to stand. The toilet was in a separate, even smaller room. Perhaps the architects had believed that it was more practical that way and gave each other a pat on the back, but I believed such confining design to be a crime against the people. I had just enough space to do everything I needed to do in a bathroom—but not an inch more. The Soviet architects had calculated the living space with inhuman precision to make the building as cheap and affordable as was possible. An honorable goal with a questionable means of achieving it.

  I lazily brushed my teeth and stepped outside. While passing through the corridor, I stopped for a second, listened to the sound coming from the guest room, and then shook my head.

  The sound of white noise and the chirping of a cricket - interwoven, like milk and coffee in a cup of latte - were idly coming from the guest room. The same sound I’d been hearing for the last 7 months.

  "Not today either" - I sighed and headed for the kitchen.

  I put an old ceramic kettle with some unidentifiable flowers painted its side onto the stove, and a few minutes later it started whistling, letting me know that the water was boiling.

  Perhaps it would be practical to microwave some food in the meantime, but I had conditioned myself to coffee so much that I just couldn’t do
even the most basic tasks until I had some. Only when I poured the boiling water into my cup did my brain ease up - like a junkie before taking his shot of heroin.

  With a cup of coffee in my hand, I approached the window. It was already sealed shut with the duct tape in preparation for winter - an old Russian way of dealing with the cold when you don’t have a double-glazed window. I pressed the loose end of the duct tape down to the window frame to put it back in place, grunting when it defiantly popped back up and then looked outside.

  Forest. Trees of every size as far as the eye could see. I let out a sigh of relief at the sight of all that boundless nature.

  I lived in a small and very old apartment complex on the far outskirts of a small town. Honestly, calling it an apartment complex was a stretch - it was only five stories high, no elevator, and it was built out of concrete panels all the way back in the sixties. It had no attic, so people who lived on the last floor constantly had to worry about rain ruining their ceiling. It had, however, extremely poor sound insulation due to the thin walls so you never felt home alone, and a basement which connected to a sewer system - which smelled horrible in spring.

  In Russia, these kinds of buildings are called "Khruschyovka" - named after Khruschev, obviously. I understood the appeal of a low-cost, easy-to-construct building, but I was always confident that there wasn’t a single soul in the entire country who’d miss them. In the fifty years since their construction, they should’ve been demolished and replaced with something better, something newer. As it was, the buildings had long since outlived their usefulness and were no more than a health hazard. Usually, only the old people lived there, since it was the house they received long ago and never moved out.

  At least the view from my balcony on the third floor was great - it overlooked the forest, which technically was the border of our town, so no ugly grey boxes of buildings in sight. Just a boundless nature, which, as I had been told, stretched for thousands of kilometers in that direction. An entire ocean of dark wood that curved beyond the horizon.

  In a way, I lived on a beach. Pretty sweet if you don’t account for the things that sometimes wash ashore.

  Even back then, looking at the forest felt like staring into the abyss—the abyss of civilization, the darkness beyond its edges. The greenery had that soothing effect on me, but I also couldn’t fathom how much unexplored land was right outside my windows. People had always wondered about what dwelled in unexplored depths of the world’s oceans, but few of them had wondered if something could hide in the shadows under tree branches.

  There wasn’t a day when I didn’t want to sell the apartment and move out of town, or maybe even out of the country. But whenever I raised the topic with my mother - whom the apartment belonged to - she’d bulge her eyes at me. "As if someone’s waiting for you there, Yuri" - was her most common reply.

  She couldn’t even fathom how I could reject the apartment that I’d basically received for free.

  It once belonged to my grandparents. They received the apartment for free from the government long ago, when the town was founded in the sixties. The higher-ups of the Soviet Union, for whatever secretive reason they had in mind, needed this particular spot of Siberian wilderness conquered and populated, and were more than happy to give out the living space to anyone who’d agree to assist the state with that undertaking.

  If I had to guess I’d wager that they’d chosen the location for the town based on how remote it was - deep enough within the biggest forest on the planet that no spy plane would be able to even find its way there. After all, it used to be one of those towns that weren’t on any maps, a place that held the secrets so great they warranted the construction of the entire new community. Even its name – Novoyarsk[1], used to have a number assigned to it to signify that it was not just another town, but a special facility closed to any outsiders: Novoyark-23.

  With the fall of the USSR, however, thousands of people suddenly found out that the secrets their entire lives were built around were deemed a waste of subsidies by the new authorities, and ever since then the town slowly started fading out, with its secondary facilities not sufficient to maintain the town’s reason to exist. People started fleeing the town, especially the younger generation, while the older generation remained behind.

  My grandparents were among such people. I knew that many older people were bitter about the state of our town—with younger people leaving every day; it was hard to maintain the town’s economy, which in turn prompted even more youngsters to leave. But my grandparents didn’t care about that. They’d lived a good life, they’d built our town, and they saw it as somewhat symbolic that its time was running out just as they were getting old. They’d spent their last years trying to cultivate kindness in people, and I remembered that as a kid I liked spending my time with them.

  Unfortunately, my grandfather had passed away five years ago. My grandma didn’t stay around for too long after that, and passed away two years later. Since I was too young to inherit anything, the apartment was given to my custodian - my mother. Many of my relatives weren’t pleased when they had seen the will, as they believed that since they were around for a longer time than me they had more rights to the apartment. But my mother didn’t object to such a gift of fate and allowed me to move in once I turned eighteen - even though at that point the apartment was already mine, anyway.

  Get an apartment at eighteen, get a job at a local radio shack a year later. Many people would kill to be in my position. Yet as I was thinking about the day ahead, about the leaking pipes in my toilet, about the 4-hour drive to the nearest town, I wasn’t feeling very grateful for it.

  They say gratitude is a perfect counter-measure to depression…

  It seemed to be cold and windy outside: the wind was shaking the trees across my window, tearing off the yellow leaves. In a few more weeks, they’d all fall and rot, transforming the forest into a sea of dead grasping fingers, desperately reaching for the grey sky in a silent and pointless prayer for the sun. With that thought, my mood only got worse. I was not looking forward to the day ahead.

  So, at first when I heard the sounds reaching my ear from the guestroom I thought that I was making it up. That it was actually my daydream getting all too real.

  But then I listened and my eyes went wide. I was not imagining it. It was not wishful thinking.

  The sounds of white noise and cricket singing had gone silent. Instead of it, I could hear a repeating buzzing sound - loud and obnoxious, meant to wake you up if you fell asleep on your post. Meant to warn you that in ten seconds, there was going to be a message, so you better get your pen ready and listen close.

  The radio in the guest room was receiving a transmission - and I happened to be home just in time to hear it.

  I knew the frequency it was set to by heart. I was sure that I’d be able to remember it even on my deathbed. 4625 kHz. The frequency of a local number station. The station which the military used to transmit encrypted messages. Codenamed "Cricket" for the sound it had been broadcasting for the past fifty years.

  The last transmission was 7 months and five days ago, at 13:47. Just a usual set of numbers and letters, spelled by a monotone, bored voice. I didn’t manage to crack the code they’d broadcasted - even if I managed to pinpoint the exact encryption method by using grandpa’s numerous books on the topic, I’d still need to know the encryption key which only the people the transmission was meant for had. But it didn’t matter to me: learning the government’s secrets was not the end goal. It was about the thrill of discovery, about being on the right frequency at the right time. About reliving the good old times when me and grandpa were scanning the radio noise, teasing my childish imagination with images of the unknown.

  And after 7 months of silence, the radio station came back to life. Only, where earlier it was whispering its secrets, now it was basically screaming. The buzzing sound was over - sooner than usual, and somewhere, on a base hidden in the endless forest around our town, a man started
speaking.

  I threw the cup into the sink, heard it reproachfully crack and spill its caffeinated blood. I didn’t care about it - I had to make it in time.

  I burst into my guestroom and there it was - my grandpa’s radio. A giant wooden box with dials yellowed from time and the chrome letters of its name losing their gloss.

  In front of the radio lay an old notebook. Its pages had turned yellow thirty years ago, but aside from my recently started log of transmissions, its pages were clean. Just like the radio, it stood the test of time and succeeded.

  I didn’t catch the beginning of the transmission and was now kicking myself for lowering my guard. The buzzing noise I had heard before was a warning to the listeners that something was about to be transmitted, letting the receiving end prepare for the transmission. My only hope was that they’d repeat it one more time.

  "...One! Seven! Eight! A-P-F! Four! Seven! Sunset-Sixty-Five! Zero-Zero-Zero!" - the man on the radio was shouting the numbers and letters into the mic. His voice, usually calm and withdrawn during the earlier transmissions, was now tense, almost on the verge of hysteria. He was shouting as if hoping that the sound waves of his voice would strengthen the radio wave, make it pick up the haste and break the speed of light, arriving at its destination before it even departed.

  "Wait a sec!" - I desperately cried out to him as if he could hear me. With a trembling hand, I swung the journal open on a random page, not caring about the consistency of my notes, and started desperately looking for a pen. "One-Seven-Eight, A-P-F..." - I was whispering the cryptic code to myself, trying to remember it while I was looking for a pen, but the damned thing was nowhere to be found.

  In desperation, I flung the drawer out of the table and onto the ground. Still no pen, but at least I spotted a pencil flying out of it along with other bits of grandpa’s stuff. It was old, and its wood had black spots where it soaked in the oil decades ago. But the good thing about pencils was, as long as they were at least a few centimeters long, they could write.