I Was the Last Journalist Allowed Into Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone Creepypasta

I wanted to photograph a wolf if I could.

I wanted to photograph the zone's edges at dawn, where the forest had reclaimed the outskirts of Pripyat, and you could stand in what had once been a residential street and find it fully wooded, the pavement broken by roots, the street signs lost in undergrowth.

My counter clicked up to 1.4 microsieverts, and I noted it and moved on.

That was part of the job.

As a soccer, you learn not to dwell on the numbers.

The helicopters absorb your attention anyway.

There were hundreds of them spread across the flat ground in rusting rows.

The Mi-8s and the M26s that flew over the reactor in the weeks after the explosion, trailing their water and sand and lead.

Some still had their rotors.

Some lost them to weather or theft and sit with their necks exposed, the stumps of their rotor hubs corroded green.

From a distance, they looked like a parking lot from a war that finished badly.

Up close, crouched between two of them with a 2470 at F8, the scale of the things hits you again each time.

The cockpit windows were still intact on most.

When the light catches them, they reflect the sky.

I got the shot I wanted, a line of five of them receding into morning haze, the nearest one sharp and the furthest dissolved, and stood up, and the counter clicked again, and I checked it.

It had climbed to 1.9. Back up, Mikola said from behind me, not urgently.

I backed up three steps, and the reading dropped.

He nodded, and we moved to the next row.

That was how it went with him.

Information delivered as it became relevant in the same even tone he used for everything.