About the book: year / The story has nothing to do with the film of the same name "The Beginning" (2010) and was written more than six months ago, when I first tried my hand at a long distance (70,000 characters), so it can be considered my first experience in writing a long form and, quite naturally, it contains many shortcomings and shortcomings. But, an important point, it is dear to me as a memory of the work done, and this is precisely what determines its appearance in the eyes of the stalker community. The main character in it is an ordinary person without pretensions to posing and supermanship, flavored with unprecedented feats and mountains of corpses, and not clutching in a minigun in one hand, and not squeezing a beauty in his arms in the other between firefights. He’s not even a stalker - they simply didn’t exist then, because the Zone had just appeared in the form that we know so well. His profession in everyday life is quite unusual for the world of STALKER. The plot of the story is intended to clearly show that even ordinary people without a military background can demonstrate unexpected character traits in the suddenly deadly world of the Zone.