Metro 2034

CHAPTER 8 Masks

The cage was still where the fat man hat beaten down Sasha. The door was open and the rat was gone…

Well, thought the girl, even a rat has a right for freedom.

It didn’t matter; Sasha had to wear the gasmask of her kidnapper. She believed to smell the rest of his foul breath, but she could be happy that the fat man hadn’t worn the mask when he had been shot.

At the middle of the bridge the radiation suddenly spiked again.

It was like a miracle that she could even move in the giant radiation suit. She bounced around in it like the larva of a roach in its cocoon. The gasmask had been widened by the broad visage of the fat man, but it still stuck to her face. Sasha tried to breathe in as powerful as possible to suck the air through the tubes and filters, but while she looked outside the round glass of the gasmask she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had slipped into a stranger’s body. Just one hour ago this grey demon that had haunted her had been in this suit, and now to get over this bridge she had to enter his world, see the world with his eyes.

With his, and with the eyes of the humans that had banished her father to the Kolomenskaya, who had let them live for all these years because their greed was stronger than their hate. Would Sasha, if she wanted to disappear in the human mass, continue to wear this black rubber mask? Would she have to act like she was somebody else, somebody without a face and feelings? If at least it would help her to change her inner thoughts: all that what she had suffered through, to forget and to strongly believe that she could start over again!

Sasha had wished that these two hadn’t just found her out of chance, she wished that it had been a rescue mission sent just for her, but she knew that that wasn’t true. She didn’t get why they took her with them: Be it for pleasure, out of pity or to prove something to each other. In the few words that the old man had thrown before her, a certain note of sympathy had swung with it, but now he looked after his companion, didn’t speak many words and seemed too concerned to not appear too human.

The other one hadn’t turned to the girl since he had allowed her to come with them to the next inhabited station. Sasha had stayed behind intentionally, so that she could at least observe them from behind, but it seemed that he had felt her look, because immediately he twitched his head but didn’t turn it, maybe so she could keep her curiosity, maybe so she would think that he didn’t notice her.

The powerful built physique of the bold man, with his animal like behavior, which the fat man had mistaken for a bear, marked him as a warrior. But this picture wasn’t just off his physical power. He emitted a certain strength that you could have felt if he had been thin and built small. A man of the likes of him could get anybody to follow his orders and if anybody would dare to refuse his order he would eliminate them without hesitation.

And far before Sasha was able to bring her fear of other humans under control, before she was clear about him or herself, an unknown voice told her, the voice of her inner soul, that she would follow him.

The railcar proceeded astonishingly fast. Homer felt no resistance from the lever, because the brigadier took all the strain. The old man raised and lowered his arms as well, out of decency, but it didn’t cost him any strength.

The compact metro bridge waded with many pillars through the dark, thick water. The concrete had fallen of the iron skeleton at some parts, its legs stood so awry that one of the two lanes had kinked and fallen down.

It had been a totally functional bridge, a standard model, short lived like the new building in the outer areas of the capitol which had been designed on a drawing board.

There was nothing, nothing that was beautiful of it.

Still, as he looked around his surroundings, Homer had to think about the magically retractable bridges of Petersburg or the elegant bridge constructions of the Krymski Most with its cast iron chains.

In the twenty years that he had lived in the metro, Homer had only been on the surface three times. Every time he had tried to see as much as he could in the small time away from his cell. To refresh his memories, to point his weakened eyes at the objects of the city, to push the rusty triggers of his visual memory and to gather as many impressions for the future. Maybe he would never have the chance to get to the beautiful places on the surface, like the Kolomenskaya, the Retschnoi Woksal or the Tjoply Stan, all three where stations that laid far away from other stations. Back then, like many other inhabitants of Moscow he had treated them in with a condescending attitude.

With the years Moscow aged continuously, fell apart, withered away. Homer had the need to touch the disappearing bridge like that girl from the Kolomenskaya had touched the dead man again.

The bridge, the grey edges of the factories, the abandoned beehives of the apartments. To dwell in their sights. To touch them, to feel that they really existed, that everything here wasn’t a dream. And to say goodbye, just in case.

The line of sight was bad, the silver moonlight obtruded through the clouds so that the old man sensed his surroundings more than he perceived them. But that wasn’t too bad: He was used to replacing reality with his imagination.

If it mattered, Homer just thought about what he saw right now. Forgotten legends that he had appointed himself to create and the mysterious disappearance of daylight that had busied his imagination for the last hours. He felt like a child on a field trip: he sucked in the sights, the obscure silhouettes of the skyscrapers into himself; he continuously turned his head from one side to the other and loudly talked to himself.

The others didn’t enjoy the journey as much. The brigadier who silently stared into the direction they were driving only looked from time to time when he had heard a sound from underneath the bridge. His attention was directed at the point where the rails dug themselves back into the ground.

The girl behind them held the scavenged gasmask with both of her hands. He could see that she didn’t feel well on the surface. In the tunnel Homer had thought that she had been tall, but the moment that they had stepped outside she was small as if she had retreated into an invisible house of a snail and even the wide radiation suit that she had taken from the body didn’t make her taller. The fascinating things you could see from the bridge didn’t seem to interest her and most of the time she looked at the ground.

They passed the ruins of the station Technopark. It had been built hastily right before the war.

The poor state it was in was not the doings of the bomb attacks, but the teeth of time.

Then they finally approached the tunnel.

Compared to the bleak darkness of the night the tunnel entrance emitted absolute darkness.

Homer’s suit seemed to him like a real armor and he himself felt like a medieval knight that entered the cave of a legendary dragon.

The sounds of the nightly city remained at the doorstep, exactly here Hunter ordered them to step from the railcar. Now you could only hear the careful steps of the three companions and the few words that echoed from the tunnel segments. The tunnel sounded strange. Homer heard the closeness of the room, as if he had climbed into the inside of a glass bottle.

“It’s closed here.” Hunter seemed to want to enforce their fears. The shine of the lamp exposed the resistance: a hermetic door towered in front of them like an impenetrable wall. Where the door met the rails it shined and the massive corners of the door raised themselves out of brown shreds of oil. Old planks were laying on a hill. Dried firewood and to coal turned pieces of wood were there as if there had been a campfire not long ago. The door was being used, without a doubt, but seemingly only as an exit.

No bell or other signal was to see on this side.

The brigadier turned to the girl: “Is it always like that?”

“Sometimes they come out and drive to us on the other shore. To trade. I thought today…” She seemed to want to distance herself in time. Had she known that there was no more entrance, or had she kept something from them?

Hunter hammered the grip of his machete against the door as if he wanted to operate a giant metal gong. But the steel was too thick and instead of the dull echoing sound he had hoped for it created only an empty clanking sound. Probably nobody would have been able to hear it on the other side even if somebody was still alive there.

No answer. No miracle had happened.

Past all reason Sasha had hoped that the two would be able to open the door. She hadn’t warned them that the entrance to the big metro had been closed out of fear; they could have chosen another way and left her where they had found her.

But nobody waited for them at the big metro and to break through the barricade was impossible.

The bold one searched the door for a weak point or bent key holes, but Sasha already knew that you could only open it from the other side.

“You stay here,” he commended them grimly. “I’ll look at the barricade at the second tunnel and search for any vents.”

He was silent for a moment and added: “I’ll come back.” Then he vanished.

The old man gathered a few twigs and planks and made a sparse fire. He sat down at the doorstep and started to fumble in his backpack. Sasha sat down next to him and watched him out of the corner of her eyes. He made a strange spectacle, maybe for her and maybe for himself.

After he had brought a torn, dirty notebook out of his backpack he threw a distrustful look at

Sasha, distanced himself from her a bit and lowered his head into the pages.

Immediately he jumped up with astonishing speed and looked it the bold one was really gone. Slowly he sneaked ten steps to the exit of the tunnel and only after he didn’t see anybody there he leaned at the door, put the backpack between him and Sasha and sunk into the book.

He read restlessly, mumbling something she couldn’t understand, removed his gloves, reached for his water bottle and put a few drops onto the book. Then he continued to read.

After a short time he suddenly started to clean his hands on his legs, angrily put his hand on his forehead, touched his gasmask for some reason and hastily continued to read on. Infected by his excitement Sasha let herself be distracted from her thoughts and moved closer, the old man was too busy to notice her.

Through the glass of his gasmask she could see the sparkling of his bleak green eyes which mirrored the light of the fire. From time to time he emerged from the book like he wanted to catch his breath. He abandoned his book, stared fearful at the round part of the nightly sky at the end of the tunnel, but nothing had changed. The bold head had vanished indefinitely. And as soon as he realized that he powered through the book.

Now she knew why he put water on it. He was trying to open the pages that were stuck together.

Seemingly he only succeeded with peril, once he even screamed as if he had cut himself. One page had been torn.

He cursed himself and then he realized how carefully she had watched him. Embarrassed he straightened his gasmask but he didn’t say a word until he hadn’t finished reading.

Then he ran to the fire and threw the notebook into it.

He didn’t look at Sasha and she understood: There was no use in asking. He would just lie to her or say nothing.

There were other things that caught her attention. She guessed that the bold one had been gone for a whole hour.

Had he left them like unnecessary ballast? Sasha sat down next to the old man and said silently: “The second tunnel is closed as well. All the vents in the area are walled off. There is only this entrance.”

The man looked at her but his thoughts were somewhere else. It seemed that it cost him a lot of strength to concentrate himself to hear what she just had said. “He is going to find a way. He feels it.”

He was silent for a minute and asked more out of politeness: “What’s your name?”

“Alexandra,” she answered seriously, “And you?”

“Nikolai…” he started and gave her his hand, but before she could shake it he pulled it back again cramped. It seemed that he had decided differently. “Homer. I’m Homer.”

“Homer. Strange nickname,” answered Sasha, sunken in thoughts.

“It’s my name,” alleged Homer stiff and firmly.

Should she explain him that as long as she was with them these closed doors would remain closed? If the two men would have gone on their own the door could have been open.

The Kolomenskaya didn’t let Sasha go. She punished herself for how she had treated her father.

She had tried to flee, but now the chain was strained and she couldn’t break it. The cursed station had brought her back once and it would do it again.

She had tried to chase away her thoughts and visions like bloodsucking insects. They always returned, circled her and crawled into her ears and eyes.

The old man had asked Sasha something but she didn’t answer. Tears came out of her eyes and once again she heard the voice of her father: Nothing is more valuable than a human life.

Now she knew what he had meant.

That what had happened at the Tulskaya was no longer a riddle for him. The explanation was much simpler and terrible then what he had thought. And now after he had deciphered the entries of the notebook a worse story began: The diary led him on a journey of no return. Now that he had held it in his hands he wouldn’t be able to get rid of it, no matter how long it burned on the fire.

Also his distrust for Hunter had been given more fuel by the irrefutable evidence even though Homer had no idea what he should do with it. What he had read in the diary contradicted what the brigadier had said. He had lied and he was aware of it. Now Homer had to find out what his lies accomplished and if they even made sense. It all depended on it if he would continue to follow Hunter and end his journey with his heroic epos or with a massacre without any live witnesses.

The first entries of the diary dated back to the first day when the caravan had passed the Nagornaya without any problems and closed in on the Tulskaya without encountering any resistance.

“We’re now at the Tulskaya. The tunnel is silent and empty,” reported the radio operator. “We are a making good progress which is a good sign. The commander expects that we will be back tomorrow.” A few hours after that he wrote worried: “The Tulskaya isn’t guarded. We sent a scout. He disappeared. The commander has decided that we are going to enter the station as a team. We are readying ourselves to storm the station.” Again a bit later he wrote: “It’s difficult to understand what is going on… We talked to one of the inhabitants. It’s bad. Some kind of disease”. Then with he wrote with more clarity: “Some inhabitants of the station are infected with something… Some kind of unknown sickness…”

It seemed that the members of the caravan had tried to help the infected at first: “The medic doesn’t know how to treat it. He says it is something like rabies… Unimaginable pain, people lose their minds and attack others”. And right after that: “Once weakened by the disease they are more or less harmless.

The worst thing is…” Exactly at that point the pages were stuck together and Homer tried to wet them with water so that he could separate them again. “The light hurts. Nausea. Blood in their mouth. Coughing. Then they bloat and turn to…” The word had been painted over carefully. “We don’t know how it is transmitted. Through the air? Through contact?” The entry was now already from the next day.

The return of the group had been delayed.

Why hadn’t they reported what they had found? thought Homer. Instantly he remembered that he had already read the answer. He turned back some pages… “No connection. The telephone is dead. Maybe sabotage. One of the exiled, out of revenge? They had realized it before we had arrived. At first they had chased the sick into the tunnel. Maybe one of them has cut the cable?”

At that point Homer ripped himself away from the letters and stared into the dark room without seeing anything.

If they cable had been cut, why hadn’t they returned to the Sevastopolskaya?

“Even worse. Until it breaks out a week passes. What if more…? Until death another week or two. Nobody knows who is sick, nobody knows who is healthy. There is no cure. The disease is absolutely deadly.” On the same page the radio operator had made another entry which Homer already knew: “Chaos at the Tulskaya. No way to the metro. Hanza isn’t letting anybody through. We can’t go back as well.”

Two pages ahead he continued: “The healthy shoot at the sick, especially at the aggressive ones. They have herded the infected into a cage… They resist, want out.” Then the most horrible sentence: “They are tearing each other to pieces…”

The radio operator had been afraid too, but the iron discipline of the group had prevented it from turning into panic. Even in the midst of a deadly fever epidemic the brigade of the Sevastopolskaya held their ground.

“Have the situation under control. The station is sealed and we have a new commander.” And then. “Who dies next?” read Homer. “They are all alright but not enough time has passed.”

The search troop of the Sevastopolskaya had reached the Tulskaya, but had been stuck there as well. “Our orders are to stay here until the incubation period has passed so that we don’t endanger anyone… we might be staying here forever.” The radio operator noted darkly: “The situation is without hope. We can’t expect help from anywhere. If we demand more men from the Sevastopolskaya we lead them to their doom. There is nothing but to endure it here… How long?”

So the mysterious guard at the hermetic door of the Tulskaya had been put there by the troop of the Sevastopolskaya. That was why the voices had been familiar to Homer: It had been people with whom he had freed the Tschertanovskaya from some monsters just a few days back!

By passing voluntarily on returning they hoped to spare their own station the epidemic…

“Mostly from human to human but apparently also through the air. Some seem immune to it. It has started a few week ago and some are still not sick… But there are becoming more and more. We are living in a morgue. Who dies next?”

The chased writing looked like a hysterical scream at that sentence. But then the radio operator had calmed down again and continued normally. “We have to do something. To warn the others. I am going to volunteer. Not to the Sevastopolskaya but to repair the broken part of the cable. We have to reach them.”

Another day passed when the author had probably argued with the commander of the caravan and other soldiers.

A day where his despair had grown stronger. What the radio operator had tried to explain them, after he had calmed down again he had written down in this diary: “They don’t understand! The blockade has lasted for a whole week. The Sevastopolskaya is going to send a new troop and this one won’t come back as well. Then they are going to go mobile and storm the station. But whoever gets to the Tulskaya enters the risk zone. Someone is going to infect himself and run back home. That is the end. We have to keep them from storming the station! Why don’t they understand…?”

Another try to convince the leader turned out to be a failure, like the others: “They won’t let me go. They have gone mad. If not me then who? I have to flee!”

“I now act like I agree with them to wait here longer.”

Then one day later he wrote: “I let myself be assigned for guard duty at the gate. At sometime I said that I would find the place where the cable had been cut and just started running. They shot me in the back. The bullet is still inside”.

Homer turned the page:”Not for me. For Natasha and Seryoschka…” Here the feather had fallen out of the weakened fingers of the author. Maybe he had added this later because there was no more room or because it made no difference where he wrote it. Then the chronologic order was there again: “At the Nagornaya they let me pass, many thanks! I have no more strength. I walk and walk. Passed out.”

How long did I sleep? Don’t know. Blood in the lung? From the bullet, or am I sick? I…” The curve of the last letters stretched itself to a straight line like the encephalogram of a dying. But then he seemed to have come to his senses again and continued the sentence to an end: “Can’t find the defective part.”

What now flow in red streams over the paper had no more connection to each other: “The Nachimovski. I am here. I know where the telephone is. I am going to warn them… Everything but rescue… miss you… got through. If they heard me? The end is near. Strange, I am tired. No more bullets. I want to sleep, before those… standing there and waiting. Go away!… I am still alive.”

He probably had written the end of the diary before that. With formal, straight writing he had repeated the warning not to storm the Tulskaya, added his name, the name of the man who had given his life to stop that from happening.

But Homer knew: The last thing the radio operator had written, before his signal had been silenced was the sentence: “Go away!… I am still alive.”

A heavy silence surrounded the two humans that cowered at the fire. Homer didn’t bother to get the girl to talk anymore. Silent he scratched in the ashes of the fire with a stick, there where the wet notebook burned reluctantly like a heretic and waited for the storm to blow it out.

Fate made fun of him. How he had longed to decipher the riddle of the Tulskaya. How proud had he been that he had discovered the notebook. How he had hoped to weave the threads of history by himself. Now? Now that he had found the answerer to all questions he cursed his curiosity.

Of course when he took the notebook at the Nachimovski he had worn a mask and even now he was wearing a suit. But nobody knew how this disease was transmitted!

He had been an idiot to tell himself that he hadn’t much time anymore. Of course overreacting had helped him to get over sloth and fear. But death had his own will and didn’t like it very much to be ordered around. And now the diary had given him a concrete ultimatum: From infection to death it was only a few weeks. It could even be a whole month: How much he still had to do in those puny thirty days!

What should he do? To confess to his companions that he was sick and to remain at the Kolomenskaya so he could die there, if not from the epidemic but hunger and radiation?

On the other hand: When he carried the terrible disease in him so were Hunter and the girl who had shared the same air with him. Before all, the brigadier who had talked with the guardsmen at the Tulskaya, he had been especially close to them.

Or should he hope that the disease would spare him, to keep it to himself and wait? Not just like that but to continue the journey with Hunter. So that the storm of events that had carried him away wouldn’t stop and he could continue to get his inspiration from it.

Because Nikolai Ivanovitsch, this commoner, this useless inhabitant of the Sevastopolskaya, this former helper of the train operator, this former gravity bound caterpillar, had to die through the discovery of this cursed diary so Homer the chronic and myth creator would come to light as a beautiful butterfly. If even just for a short time. Maybe he had been appointed a tragedy that was worthy of the feathers of the great masters, but everything depended on what he would be able to put on a piece of paper in the next thirty days.

Had he the right to let this chance pass? Had he the right to turn into an eremite, to forget his legend, to voluntarily pass on true immortality and rob all other around him from it as well? What was the bigger crime, the bigger stupidity: To carry the pest through half of the metro or to burn his manuscript with himself?

He was without courage, but he was still seeking fame.

Homer had already decided and just searched for arguments for it. What did it bring him that he put himself next the two corpses at the Kolomenskaya, to let himself be turned into a mummy while he was still alive? He hadn’t been made for heroics. When the fighters of the Sevastopolskaya had been ready to go to their certain death at the Tulskaya it was their own decision. At least they didn’t die alone.

But what was the point that Homer sacrificed himself?

He couldn’t stop Hunter anyways. The old man had carried the epidemic around with him unknowingly – but Hunter knew exactly what was going on at the Tulskaya. No wonder that he had ordered the complete destruction of all the inhabitants of the station, including the caravan from the Sevastopolskaya. And no wonder he had wanted to use flamethrowers so badly.

But if both of them had already been infected they wouldn’t be able to avoid that the epidemic would hit the Sevastopolskaya. And the first humans to be hit would be all the people that had been next to him. Yelena. The head of the station. The commander of the outer guard posts. The adjutants. So in three weeks the station would have no more leadership. Chaos would emerge and finally the epidemic would kill everyone.

But why had Hunter returned when he had known that they had been infected? Gradually Homer realized that the brigadier hadn’t acted out of intuition but he had followed a certain plan step by step.

But then the old man had mixed the cards anew and thought.

So was the Sevastopolskaya doomed to go under and did his expedition have no more reason?

Even if Homer would have wanted to return home to be reunited with Yelena in death it was impossible.

Alone the way from the Kachovskaya to the Kaschirskaya had been enough to render their gasmask useless and the suits that had got dozen if not hundredths of Röntgen and they had to dispose of them very soon. What to do now?

The girl had rolled together and slept. The campfire had finally eaten the infected diary, the last twigs and had gone out. To save the batteries in his lamp Homer decided to wait in the dark as long as possible.

No, he would continue to follow the brigadier! To reduce the risk of infecting others he would avoid contact with them, leave the backpack with his things here, destroy his clothes, hope for a merciful fate and keep an eye on the thirty day countdown. Every day he would work on his book.

Somehow everything would be solved, he said to himself. The main thing was that he followed Hunter.

If he came back.

It had been over an hour since he had vanished through the obscure exit of the tunnel. Homer had talked to the girl to calm her down but he wasn’t entirely convinced that the brigadier would return.

The more he found out about him the less he understood him. It was possible to doubt the brigadier and to believe him at the same time. He didn’t follow any pattern, didn’t show common human ways. When he trusted himself to himself he exposed himself to Mother Nature. But for Homer it was too late: he had already done it. Regret was pointless.

In the darkness the silence now seemed impenetrable to him. Like through a thin bowl he could hear a strange whispering sound, a distant howling and a rustling sound…

Homer thought it sounded like the staggering walk of one of the corpse eaters then again it was like the giant ghost at the Nagornaya and finally like the screams of the dying.

He gave up before it had been ten minutes.

He switched his lamp back on and winced.

Two steps away from him Hunter was standing, his arms crossed in front of his chest and looking at the sleeping girl. He protected his eyes from the blinding ray of light and said calmly: “They are going to open the door very soon.”

Sasha dreamt… of when she was alone at the Kolomenskaya and had to wait for the return of her father’s expedition. He was late and she definitely had to wait and help him out of the radiation suit, pull off the gasmask and help him eat. The table was already laid and she didn’t know what else she could to do to keep herself occupied. She already wanted to go away from the door that lead the surface but what would he think when he came back and she wasn’t around? Who would open the door for him? So she sat on the cold ground at the exit, hours passed, days went by and he didn’t come. But she wouldn’t leave her place until the door…

The dull beating of opening bars awoke her; it was the same sound like at the Kolomenskaya. She awoke smiling, her father had returned. The she looked around and remembered everything.

The only thing that had been real about her dream was the groaning of the heavy bars on the iron gate. Only a few moments later the giant door started to vibrate and opened slowly. A ray of light fell through the widening space and it smelled of burnt diesel. The entrance to the big metro…

The doors itself had opened without a sound and gave allowed the look into the inners of the tunnel that lead to the Avtosavodskaya Nad and later to the ring. On the rails was a big railcar with a smoking motor, a searchlight at the front and a lot of men as its crew. Through the sights of their machine guns the men saw to blinking wanderers that held their hands in front to their eyes.

“I want to see your hands!” sounded the order.

She followed the example of the old man and both complied and raised their arms. It was the same railcar that had come to them over the bridge on market day. These people knew about Sasha – probably now the old man with his strange name had to regret taking the cuffed girl with them without asking how she had ended up at this godforsaken station.

“Gasmask down, IDs.” Commanded one of the men on the railcar. While Sasha exposed her face she cursed her stupidity. Nobody could free them. The sentence over her father and over her had still all of its power. How could she have been so naive that those two men could have brought her into the metro? That nobody would recognize them at the border?

The men recognized her instantly. “Hey, you can’t go in here! You have ten seconds to leave. And who is that? Is that your…”

“What’s going on?” Said the old man confused.

“Let him in peace! It’s not him!” screamed Sasha.

“Leave!” The voice from the men with the assault rifle was cold as ice. “Or we…”

“At the girl?” Asked a second voice unsure.

“Hey, didn’t you hear us?’

She definitely heard the clicking of their safeties.

Sasha stepped back and closed her eyes. For the third time in a few hours she stood before the face of death.

Then she heard a small whistling noise. In the now reigning silence she waited in for the last order. It never came. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and opened one eye.

The motor was still smoking. Blue-grey clouds swam around the white ray of the search light that had fallen over for some reason. Now that the light didn’t blind her anymore Sasha could recognize the people on the railcar.

They were lying around like folded puppets on the railcar, flopped out on the tracks. Mindlessly hanging arms, unnatural twisted necks and bent in torsos.

Sasha turned around. Behind her was the bold one. He had lowered his pistol and watched the railcar carefully, which now looked like a butcher’s counter. Then he raised the barrel and pulled the trigger again.

“That was it.” He said, satisfied. “Take their uniforms and gasmasks from them.”

“Why?” The face of the old man was distorted by his fear.

“We have to change clothes. We are taking their railcar to get to the Avtosvodskaya!”

Sasha starred at the killer. Inside of her, fear and admire fought with each other. Disgust mixed with gratefulness. He had just eliminated three with one blow and violated her father’s most important rule. But he had done it to save her – well and the old man’s life of course. Was it a coincidence that he had done it for the second time? Could it have been that she had mistaken his cruelty with strictness?

One thing was clear: The fearlessness of this man let her forget his ugliness…

The bold one was the first to walk over to the railcar and start to rip off the enemies’ rubber scalps from their heads. Suddenly he tumbled back and made a shrill scream as if he had seen the devil himself, put both of his hands in front of him and repeated several times: “A dark one!”