There are few lucky stalkers. There are even fewer happy ones. There are simply no former ones... But many of those who went to the forbidden lands for a new life, a dream, for deliverance from the past, returned from there with a soul scorched to the ground and eternal fear in their eyes. Degraded, broken people who could not stand the test of the Zone. Stalkers call them “burnt out,” and the fate of these former tramps is unenviable. Now only death or a dull, gray existence awaits them with no hope of returning to their past life. Semyon Shelikhov is one of these stalkers who fled from the Zone. Vodka, odd jobs, a damp room in a communal apartment near Moscow, a hopeless future and a constant, debilitating fear that the Zone is already very close and there is nowhere else to run. And then there is the arrest, and strange interest on the part of employees of some secret Center, and the past, which one so wants to forget, reminds itself again. Semyon's existence becomes so unbearable that he decides to take a bold but reckless step...