Metro 2034

CHAPTER 10 After Death

What remains of the dead? What remains of every one of us? Tombstones sink in, moss covers them, and after a few centuries the name can no longer be read.

Every forgotten grave is designated a new corpse. As the generations passed, remembrance of the dead diminished until it was forgotten.

What was called everlasting peace only lasted half a century. The bones were disturbed as the graveyards were mulched in to suburbs. The earth had become too small, for the living and the dead.

In half a century a funeral had become a luxury that only few could afford who had died before judgment day. But who cares about a single body when the whole planet is dying.

None of the inhabitants of the metro had had the honor of a funeral; nobody could hope that the rats would spare their body.

Earlier the remains of humanity had only had the right to be there as long as the living remembered them. A human being remembers their relatives, their friends and colleagues. But his conscience only reached back three generations before it faded away. Just more then fifty years.

With the same ease, you let the picture of our grandfather or your friend from school out of our conscience into absolute nothingness. The memories of a human can last longer than the bones, but as soon as the last one who remembered us has passed we dissolve with time.

Photographs, who makes them anymore? And how many of them were kept when everybody still made them?

Back then there was almost no more space in the thick family album for old and brown turned pictures, but almost nobody that looked through it could say for sure who was on the photos. The photographs of the passed can be interpreted as some kind of mask, but not as a print of their soul when they were living.

And the photographs only decay as slow as the people that live inside them.

What remains?

Our children?

Homer touched the flame of the candle with his fingers. The answer wasn’t easy to find for him, Achmed’s words still hurt him. He himself had been damned to be without children, unable for this kind of immortality, so he couldn’t do anything but choose another path to immortatlity.

Again he reached for his pen.

They can look like us. In their reflection we mirror ourselves in a mysterious way. United with those we had loved. In their gestures, in their mimics we happily find ourselves or with sorrow.

Friends confirm that our sons and daughters are just like us. Maybe that gives us a certain extension of ourselves when we are no more.

We ourselves weren’t the first. We have been made from countless copies that have been before us, just another chimera, always half from our fathers and mothers who are again the half of their parents. So is there nothing unique in us but are we just an endless mixture of small mosaic parts that never endingly exist in us? Have we been formed out of millions of small parts to a complete picture that has no own worth and has to fall into its parts again?

Does it even matter to be happy if we found ourselves in our children, a certain line that has been traveling through our bodies for millions of years?

What remains of me?

Homer had it harder than the rest. He had always envied those who had put faith in life after death. Whenever he had come to this conversation about the end of life his thoughts had always turned to the Nachimovski prospect immediately, with its disgusting and corpse eating creatures.

But maybe he was made of something more than flesh and blood, which sooner or later would be eaten by corpse eaters and digested.

Only if there existed something in him that didn’t exist as a part of his body.

What had remained of the Egyptian pharaohs? What of Greece’s heroes? From the artist of the renaissance? Did something remain of them and did it exist inside of their bodies or in what they had left behind?

What kind of immortality was left for mankind?

Homer again read what he had written, thought about it for a short time, ripped the pages out of the notebook carefully, crumpled them up and put them on an iron plate and lit them. After a minute, the work that he had done in the last three hours was only a handful of ashes.

She had died.

Sasha had always imagined death like that: The last ray of light had been extinguished, all sounds silenced, her body without any feelings and nothing but darkness.

Humanity had emerged out of darkness and silence.

It was inevitable that they would return to it. Sasha knew all the fables of paradise and hell, but underworld had sounded harmless to her. Eternity in absolute blindness, deafness and absolute not being able to do nothing at all was a hundredth times more terrible than some cauldrons with vegetable oil.

But then a small shivering ray of light appeared.

Sasha reached for it but couldn’t touch it: The dancing ray of light ran away from her, came back, lured her, and ran away from her again immediately. Playing and luring her. She knew immediately: a tunnel light.

When a human died in the metro, her father had said, his or her soul was lost and had to wander the dark labyrinth of tunnels that lead nowhere. It didn’t realize that it wasn’t bound to a body anymore, its earthly life had ended and so it had to wander around long before someday in the distant future it would see the shine of the ghostly fire. So it would guide her there, because this little fire had been sent to lead the soul to find its cold rest. But it can also happen that the fire had pity of on the soul and brought it back to his or her lost body. For these people you could say that they had returned from the beyond. It was more truthful to say that darkness had let them go again.

The tunnel light lured Sasha, again and again; in the end she didn’t resist and accepted her fate.

She didn’t feel her legs anymore, but she wouldn’t need them: To follow the spot of light she just had to keep it in her eyes. She had to fix her eyes on it as if it wanted to talk it over and tame it.

Sasha had caught the light with her gaze and it pulled her through the darkness, through the labyrinth of the tunnels which she wouldn’t have been able to leave if she had been on her own. Until they reached the last station of the lifeline. And then she saw it in front of her: Her guide seemed to sketch the contours of a far room where they waited for her.

“Sasha!” yelled a voice after her. Surprised she registered that she knew the voice, but she didn’t know to whom she belonged anymore. In it a full, know, caring tone swung with it.

“Father?” she said unbelieving.

They had come. The ghostly tunnel fire stood still, turned into a common fire, jumped onto a wick of a molten candle and made its home comfortable like a cat that had returned from an expedition…

A cold, wrinkled hand was on her hand. Slowly Sasha loosened her look from the flame because she feared that she could sink into the ground at any time. As soon as she awoke she felt the stinging pain in her lower arm and in her forehead. Out of the darkness simple furniture appeared tumbling: a few chairs, a dresser… Sasha herself was lying on a stretcher that was so soft that she couldn’t feel her back.

She felt as if her body only came back to her gradually.

“Sasha?” repeated the voice.

She looked on the person that was speaking and hastily retracted her hand. At the bed the old man who had driven with her on the railcar was sitting. His touch had been without any claim, neither harsh nor indecent. Shame and disappointment had made her retract her hand: How could she have mistaken the voice of a stranger with the one of her father’s? Why had the tunnel light led her back here from all places?

The old man smiled softly. He seemed to be pleased that she had awoken again. Only now she recognized the same warm shine in his eyes which she had only seen in with one other human. No she knew that she had been mistaken…

She was ashamed of herself.

“Forgive me,” she said. In the next moment she remembered the last minutes of the Pavelezkaya. With a strong move she rose up. “How’s your friend?”

She didn’t know if she should cry or laugh. Maybe she just didn’t have the strength for it.

Luckily the razor sharp claws of the chimera had missed the girl; only the paws had hit her. But she had been unconscious for the whole day. The doctor had reassured Homer that her life was in no longer in danger. He hadn’t told his own problems to the doctor.

While Sasha had been unconscious Homer had gotten used to calling her that way and sank back into his chair and she leaned against her pillow. The old man returned to the table, where an opened notebook with ninety-six pages waited for him. He turned around the pen in his hand and continued at the place where had had been interrupted by the fevering girl.

“…But this time the return of the caravan had been delayed and that long that there was only one reason for it: Something unknown must have happened, something terrible, that not even the heavy armed and experienced soldiers that accompanied them nor their long and good relationship with hanza could have prevented.

The whole thing would have been a lot less unsettling if they could at least communicate with each other. But there was something wrong with the telephone to the ring line, the connection had been gone since Monday and the troop that had been sent to the breaking point had returned without any success.”

Homer raised his eyes and winced, the girl was standing directly behind him and looking over his shoulder at what he had scribbled down. Her curiosity seemed to be the only thing that kept her on her feet.

Embarrassed the old man turned the notebook on the other side.

“Are you waiting for inspiration?” she asked him.

“I am only at the very beginning,” mumbled Homer.

“And what happened to the caravan?”

“I don’t know”. He carefully framed the title with his pen. “The story isn’t over for a long time yet. Lay down, you need to rest.”

“But you decide how your book ends.”

“In this book nothing is decided by me. I just write down everything that happened.”

“Then it is even more decided by you,” said the girl sunken in thoughts. “Am I in it as well?”

Homer smiled. “I just wanted to ask for your permission.”

“I’ll think about it.” she answered seriously.

“Why are you writing this book?”

Homer stood up to talk to her from eye to eye.

Already after his last conversation with Sasha he had realized that her youth and missing experience created a wrong picture in her mind. At the strange station where they had taken her with them a year must have seemed as two. So she didn’t answer the questions which he spoke out loud, but the ones that he left unspoken. And she only asked questions on which he himself had no answer.

He was counting on her honestly and how else could she ever be the heroine of his book if not? He had to be honest as well, to not treat her like a child and to not cover her in silence. But he mustn’t say any less then what he had already admitted to himself.

He said: “I want people to remember me. ME and those that were close to me. They don’t know how the world was. The one that I have loved. That they hear the most important stuff that I have witnessed and realized. That my life wasn’t in vain. That something remains of me.”

“You are putting your soul into it?” she put her head oblique. “But it’s just a notebook. It can be burned or lost. An uncertain place to store your soul, is it not?

Homer sighed. “No, I only need this notebook to bring everything into the right order. And so that I don’t forget anything important as long as the story isn’t finished. When it is finished, you would just have to tell it to some people. How I imagine it hopefully you don’t need paper or a body to spread it.”

“You have seen many things that shouldn’t have been forgotten.” The girl shrugged her shoulder. “I don’t have anything that would be worth writing down. Leave me out of the book. Don’t waste paper on me.”

“But you have everything in front of you…” started Homer and had to think that he wouldn’t live to see it.

The girl didn’t react and Homer already feared that she would close off to him. He searched for the right words trying to take everything back, but he tripped over and over again over his sorrows.

“What is the most beautiful thing that you can remember?” she suddenly asked. “The most beautiful?”

Homer hesitated. It was a strange idea to tell another person who he only had only known for two days his deepest secrets. He hadn’t even told Yelena everything and she had always thought that on the wall of their chamber, only a usual landscape of the city hung. Would a girl that had been underground for her whole live even be able to understand what he would tell her?

He decided that he would let it come to it. “Summer rain,” he said.

Sasha’s foreead got wrinkles, which looked strange.

“What is so beautiful about it?”

“Have you ever seen rain?”

“No” the girl shook her head. “Father didn’t want me to go outside. I climbed up two or three times anyways, but I didn’t like it up there at all. It is terrible when all around you there are no walls.”

Then she explained it to make sure that they were talking about the same thing. “Rain is when water comes from above, right?”

Homer didn’t listen anymore. Again that day emerged from the distant past. Like a medium his body let the summoned ghost use it, gazed at into void and didn’t stop speaking…

“The whole month had been dry and hot. My wife was pregnant, she had always had breathing problems and then there was the heat… in the entire clinic there was only one fan and she complained how hot it was. I couldn’t breathe well myself and I was very sorry. It was bad: for years we had tried to get children but without success and now the doctors scared us that we could receive a stillbirth. Now she was under constant watch, but it would have been better for her to remain at home. The date for the birth had already passed but the pains didn’t happen. I couldn’t take off every day of course.

Somebody had once said that if you carry a child too long the risk of a stillbirth would increase. I didn’t know what to do. As soon as I was finished with work I ran to the clinic and kept watch under her window. In the tunnels there was no cell phone network so at every station I checked if I had missed any calls. And then, suddenly there was the message from the doctor: Please call back right away. Until I had found a quiet place to think I had already buried my wife and child in my thoughts, the old, fearful idiot I was.”

Homer went silent as if he was listening to the sound of the signal from the phone, waited if somebody picked up. The girl didn’t interrupt him. She spared her answers for later.

“Then a stranger’s voice said: Congratulations, it’s a boy. It sounds so easy: It’s a boy. From the dead they had brought my wife back and then this miracle… I ran up and it was raining. A cold rain. The air had become so light, so clear. As if the city had lain under a dusty plastic foil and suddenly somebody had taken it away. The leaves shined, finally the sky was moving again and the houses looked so fresh. I ran along the Tverskaya, to the flower booth and cried because I was so happy. I had an umbrella but I didn’t open it, I wanted to get wet, wanted to feel the rain. I can’t recount… It was like I had been born and saw the world for the first time. And also the world was fresh and new, as if they had just cut its umbilical cord and bathed it for the first time. As if everything had become new and as if it tried to make up for all the bad things that had happened. I would now have a second life: What I couldn’t accomplish, my son would accomplish. Everything was just for us. In front of us…”

Again Homer was silent. He saw the ten story high Stalin houses, the sinking, gradually pink turning nightly fog, heard the busy noise of the Tverskaya, breathed in the sweet, polluted air, closed his eyes and put his face into the summery monsoon. When he came back to himself, small raindrops shimmered on his cheeks and eyes.

Hastily he wiped them off with his sleeve.

“You know,” said the girl, not less embarrassed, “Maybe rain is something beautiful. I don’t have memories like that. Can you spare some of them? If you want” she smiled at him “You can include me in your book. Somebody has to be in charge how everything ends”

“It is still too early” said the doctor serious.

Sasha didn’t know how she could explain this autocrat the importance of what she was asking him. She took a deep breath and readied another attack, but left it to a surly gesture of her hand and turned around.

“You are going to have to be patient. But because you are already on your feet and apparently feeling well you can go for a walk.” The doctor packed his instruments into an old plastic bag and shook Homer’s hand. “I’ll be back in an hour. The leadership of the station has ordered an especially thorough treatment in your case. After all we are in your debt.”

Homer threw a dirty military jacket over to Sasha. She stepped out, followed the doctor past the other areas of the hospital, past a row of rooms and chambers full of desks and stretchers, then two staircases upwards, through an inconspicuous low door and then into a giant long hall. Sasha froze at the doorstep, unable to go on. She had never seen something like that. It was past her imagination how many living people could live in one place.

Thousands of faces without masks! And so distinct from each another! There were humans of all ages, from the old man to the baby. Uncountable amounts men: With beards, shaven, tall, small, tired, awake, emaciated and muscular. Those who had been mutilated in battle, those with birth errors, bright beauties, and those that were unattractive on the outside, but emitted a mysterious pull. And not any less amount of women: those with big butts, red faced broads, but also thin, pale girls with unbelievable colorful dressers and interlacing necklaces.

Would they recognize that Sasha was different? Would so she could vanish into this crowd act like she was one of them or would they gang up on her and tear her to pieces like a horde of rats would do to a strange albino? At first it seemed to her that all eyes were resting on her and with every new look she felt warmer and warmer. But after fifteen minutes she was used to it: some looked at her hostile, some curious, some others too intrusive, but most weren’t interested in her. They only passed Sasha indifferently with their eyes and pushed onwards immediately without taking notice.

It seemed to her that the scattered and blurry looks were the machine oil that lubricated the gears of this hectic mechanism. If those humans took the slightest interest in another the friction would be too big and the whole spectacle would stand still in the shortest amount of time.

To go under this group you didn’t need a new disguise or a new haircut. It was enough if you didn’t look too deeply into the eyes of others, but left their eyes after a short look. Every time she did that she still shivered. This indifference would make it easy to continuously pass the interlocking inhabitants of the station without getting stuck at one place.

In the first minutes the smell of cooking had numbed her nose, but shortly after that her senses had learnt to filter out the important ones and ignore everything else. Through the sour smell of unclean bodies she smelled a luring, young, yes even pleasant aroma that went over the group like a wave. It was the perfume of a woman. The smell of grilled meat and the miasma of the trash pit mixed together. With one word: for Sasha this smell of the Pavelezkayas was the smell of life and the longer she took it in, the sweatier it became for her.

To explore this long corridor she probably would have needed a month. Everything here was so overwhelming…

There were places where you could buy jewelry that was made out of dozens of yellow and minted metal discs which she could stare at for hours. There was a giant selection of books that had more secret knowledge in them than she would ever be able to accumulate.

A shopkeeper lured passing people with a stand with the words FLOWER. He had a giant selection of feel better soon cards on which different bouquets of flowers were printed on. As a child she had once received a card like that, but how many of them were here!

She saw infants on the breasts of their mothers and older children that played with real cats.

Couples that touched each other with eyes and other that did that same with hands.

Men tried to touch her. They could have mistaken her interest for some kind of invitation or as a wish to sell something to her, but a certain tone in their words was unpleasant to her, yes even disgusted her. What did they want from her? Weren’t there enough women here? Many beauties were under them, covered in colorful dresses they looked like the open heads of the flowers on the cards.

Sasha guessed that these men made fun of her.

Was she even able to get a man curious about her? Suddenly doubts started to bite deeper that she didn’t even know she had. Maybe she understood everything wrong… But why should it be different? Something awoke painfully in her chest, under her ribs, at that certain place that she only had discovered for herself a short while ago.

To get rid of her unrest she wandered along the shops again, where all kinds of wares were, bulletproof vests, normal clothing, machines, but she was almost no longer interested in them. Her inner voice had pushed out the noisy crowd into the background and the picture that her memories painted were more plastic looking then the living humans around her.

Had she been worth his life? Would they still be able to judge him for what he had done? And before all: what sense were those stupid thoughts now? Now that she couldn’t do anything for him anymore…

Suddenly even before Sasha realized why, all doubts faded and her heart calmed down. She listened into herself and heard…. It was the faint echo of distant melody that came from where a large group of people had gathered. Music that Sasha remembered, like the first goodnight songs her mother had sung for her. But she had to be content with only her mother’s songs for years: her father hadn’t had any place for music and only sparsely ever sung, even wandering musicians and jesters hadn’t been welcome at the Avtosvodskaya.

And when the guardsmen on their campfires croaked their heavy hearted and fiery military song neither the wrongly tuned wooden guitars nor Sasha’s inner cords had swung with the melody.

But what she heard now was no boring jingling. It sounded like the soft voice of a young woman, yes of a girl but unreachable high for the human throat. It sounded uncompromised and powerful at the same time. But with what could she even compare this miracle?

The song of the unknown instrument cast a spell over the people who stood around, raised them high and carried them into to never ending place, into worlds which all who had been born in the metro had never seen and with possibilities they couldn’t have guessed. This music let the people dream and make them believe that all dreams could become reality. It awoke an incomprehensible longing and promised to fulfill it at the same time. And it gave Sasha the feeling as if she had wandered through an abandoned station for a long time when she had suddenly found a lamp and in the shine of the lamp, immediately the exit.

She was standing in front of the arms-smith. Directly in front of her was a plank of wood where different knives were screwed on, from a small pocked knife to murderous hand long daggers. Sasha watched them frozen, like the blades had cast a spell on her.

Inside of her a wild fight took place. A small tempting feeling emerged. The old man had given her a handful of bullets, just enough for the giant black knife with the jagged edge, a wide, sharp exemplar, that was better suited for her plan than anything else.

After one minute Sasha had made a decision. She hid her treasure in the chest-pocked of her overall, if possible at the place where she wanted to fight the pain. When she stepped back into the hospital, she didn’t feel the weight of her military jacket nor the pounding in her forehead.

The crowd towered over the girl and the musician that created these wonderful sounds in the distance remained invisible for her. The melody on the other hand seemed to catch up to her, to make her go back, as if it wanted to talk her down.

In vain.

Again it knocked on the door.

Homer rose groaning from his knees, wiped his lips with his sleeve and pulled the chain to flush.

On the dirty green fabric of his jacket a brown stain had remained.

It had been the fifth time that he had thrown up in one day, even though he actually hadn’t eaten anything.

The symptoms could have a different cause, he told himself. Why had the speed of the sickness been accelerated at all? Maybe it was because…

“Are you going to be finished soon?” yelled the impatient voice. It was the voice of a woman. Oh! Had he misread the letters on the door in his haste? Homer wiped the dirty sleeve over his sweat covered face, put on an hard look and pushed the bar to the side.

“Typical drunk!” A woman dressed barely up to her chest pushed him to the side and shut the door behind her.

Ok, thought Homer. They could believe that he was a drunk, which was a lot better than the truth. He stepped in front of the mirror that was over the sink and put his hot forehead against it. With time he could breathe again, he watched how the glass steamed up and winched: His mouth cover had slid down and was hanging under his chin. Hastily he pushed it back in front of his face and closed his eyes. No, he couldn’t consciously think about that he brought death to all humans that he met. To turn back was impossible: When he was infected, as far as he hadn’t mistaken the symptoms, the whole station was going to die anyways. Starting with the woman whose only fault was that she had to goat the wrong time. What would she do if he would tell her that she now only had a month to live at best?

How foolish, thought Homer. Foolish and stupid. He had wanted to make all immortal that crossed his path. Now fate had transformed him into an angel of death and one of the foolish, bold, powerless kind. He felt like somebody had shortened his wings and told him that an ultimatum of thirty days had been engraved on him. That was as much time as he had to act.

Was that the punishment for him overestimating himself and for his pride?

No, he could no longer be silent. And there was only one human which he could open up to.

He wouldn’t be able to deceive him for long and it was easier for both when they played with open cards.

With unsure steps he made his way to the hospital.

The room was at the end of the hallway and usually a nurse sat in front of it, but now the place was empty. Through the door slit he could hear a broken moaning. He could only make out single words and as long as Homer listened he could put them together to sentences that made sense.

“Stronger… Fighting… Must… Still sense… Resistance… Remember… Still able… Mistake… Punishment…”

His words were now a barking of orders, as if the pain had become unbearable and hindered the speaker on catching his rushing thoughts. Homer entered the room.

Hunter was lying unconscious, spreading his limbs and turning from one side to the other on a wet blanket. The bandage that pressed the head of the brigadier together had slipped over his eyes, the bony cheeks were covered in sweat and the unshaven lower jaw hung down limp.

His broad chest raised and lowered itself, struggling like the bellows of a blacksmith that only kept the fire burning within through struggle.

At the head end stood the girl with her back turned to him, her small hands behind her back.

Not at first, but after a closer look he saw the silhouette of a black knife that she was holding cramped through the fabric of her overalls.

The ringing.

Again and again.

Thousandtwohundredthandthirtyfive. Thousandtwohundredhtandthirtysix. Thousandtwohundredthandthirtyseven.

Artyom counted the sound not because he wanted to justify himself in front of the commander but because he wanted to feel some kind of movement. When he distanced himself from the point where he had started counting so that meant that with every ringing sound the point where this madness was over came closer.

Deceiving oneself? Yeah, probably. But listening to this ringing knowing that it will never stop was unbearable. Even though at first, it had been the same thing after his very first deployment: Like a metronome it had brought order in the cacophony of his thoughts with its monotone sound, had emptied his head and calmed down his racing pulse.

The ringing cut down minutes of his shift and Artyom felt like he was in a trap made out of time out of which he couldn’t escape. In medieval times there had been such torture: They had undressed a criminal and sat him under a barrel out of which never endingly water dropped onto his head. The cause was that the poor guy slowly lost his mind. Where the stretch-table was without success, normal water brought extraordinary results…

Bound to the line of the telephone, Artyom didn’t dare to distance himself just for one second. His whole shift he had tried not to drink so that no important need would lure him from the apparatus.

Days before he hadn’t been able to stand staying in the room, slipped out, hastily run to the exit and had returned immediately. Even on the doorstep he had listened and it had run down cold down his back: The frequency hadn’t been right, the signal was now faster and not as slow as before. That could only mean one thing: The moment that he had waited for was finally here when he had been gone. Fearful he looked to the door if somebody had watched him and had quickly dialed the number again and pressed his ear against the telephone.

Out of the apparatus the same clicking sound emerged, the ringing started from anew - in the know rhythm. From that moment the busy sound hadn’t returned and nobody had picked up. Put Artyom didn’t dare to put down the telephone ever again. Only from time to time he put it from his one already hot ear to his other, cramped trying not to miscount.

He hadn’t said anything to the leadership and he wasn’t even sure if he had heard anything but the eternal rhythm back then. His orders were: Call. For a week there had been only this task. Any violation would bring him in front of the tribunal and there they made no difference between mistakes and sabotage.

The telephone helped him to orientate how long he still had to sit here. Artyom didn’t have his own watch, but the commander had told him, looking at his watch, that the signal repeated itself every five seconds. Twelve sounds were one minute, 720 an hour, 13 680 a whole shift. Like small grains of sand they dropped down from one part of a giant hourglass into another bottomless container. And between the two glasses, directly in the neck Artyom was stuck and listened to time.

Also he didn’t put down the receiver because the commander could return every second to check on him. Otherwise… What he did was absolutely pointless. At the other end of the line apparently nobody seemed to be still alive.

He saw the from inside barricaded office of the head of the station and him pressing his face against the plate of the table, the makarov still in his hand. With his shot through ears he could no longer hear the ringing sound. The ones that were on the other side of the door hadn’t been able to break through, but through the keyhole and the door slit the desperate ringing crawled over the train platform where all the bloated bodies were lying… For a time you hadn’t been able to here the ringing, the noise of the crowd, of the steps, the crying of the children had been to loud, but now it only disturbed the silence of the dead. The gradually dying emergency aggregates still spread their red blinking light.

The ringing.

Again.

Thousandfivehundredthandsixtythree. Thousandfivehundredthandsixtyfour.

No reaction.

Artyom (yes, our Artyom) counted the sound not because he wanted to justify himself in front of the commander but because he wanted to feel some kind of movement. When he distanced himself from the point where he had started counting so that meant that with every ringing sound the point where this madness was over came closer.

Deceiving oneself? Yeah, probably. But listening to this ringing knowing that it will never stop was unbearable.

Even though at first, it had been the same thing after his very first deployment: Like a metronome it had brought order in the cacophony of his thoughts with its monotone sound, had emptied his head and calmed down his racing pulse.

The ringing cut down minutes of his shift and Artyom felt like he was in a trap made out of time out of which he couldn’t escape. In medieval times there had been such torture: They had undressed a criminal and sat him under a barrel out of which never endingly water dropped onto his head. The cause was that the poor guy slowly lost his mind.

Where the stretch-table was without success, normal water brought extraordinary results…

Bound to the line of the telephone, Artyom didn’t dare to distance himself just for one second.

His whole shift he had tried not to drink so that no important need would lure him from the apparatus.

Days before he hadn’t been able to stand staying in the room, slipped out, hastily run to the exit and had returned immediately. Even on the doorstep he had listened and it had run down cold down his back: The frequency hadn’t been right; the signal was now faster than before. That could only mean one thing: The moment that he had waited for was finally here when he had been gone.

Fearful he looked to the door if somebody had watched him and had quickly dialed the number again and pressed his ear against the telephone.

Out of the apparatus the same clicking sound emerged, the ringing started from anew - in the know rhythm.

From that moment the busy sound hadn’t returned and nobody had picked up. Put Artyom didn’t dare to put down the telephone ever again. Only from time to time he put it from his one already hot ear to his other, cramped trying not to miscount.

He hadn’t said anything to the leadership and he wasn’t even sure if he had heard anything but the eternal rhythm back then. His orders were: Call. For a week there had been only this task. Any violation would bring him in front of the tribunal and there they made no difference between mistakes and sabotage.

The telephone helped him to orientate how long he still had to sit here. Artyom didn’t have his own watch, but the commander had told him, looking at his watch, that the signal repeated itself every five seconds. Twelve sounds were one minute, 720 an hour, 13 680 a whole shift. Like small grains of sand they dropped down from one part of a giant hourglass into another bottomless container. And between the two glasses, directly in the neck Artyom was stuck and listened to time.

Also he didn’t put down the receiver because the commander could return every second to check on him.

Otherwise… What he did was absolutely pointless.

At the other end of the line apparently nobody seemed to be still alive.

He saw the from the inside barricaded office of the head of the station and him pressing his face against the plate of the table, the makarov still in his hand. With his shot through ears he could no longer hear the ringing sound. The ones that were on the other side of the door hadn’t been able to break through, but through the keyhole and the door slit the desperate ringing crawled over the train platform where all the bloated bodies were lying… For a time you hadn’t been able to here the ringing, the noise of the crowd, of the steps, the crying of the children had been too loud, but now it only disturbed the rest of the dead. The gradually dying emergency aggregates still spread their red blinking light.

The ringing.

Again.

2563

2564.

No reaction.