Metro 2034

CHAPTER 4 Ties

“Dad… dad! It’s me, Sasha!” She loosened the straps of her father’s helmet from his swollen chin. Then she reached for the rubber of the gasmask, pulled it from his sweaty hair and threw it away like a wrinkly, deadly-grey scalp.

His chest raised and lowered itself heavily, his fingers scrapped over the concrete and his watery eyes looked at her without blinking. He didn’t answer.

Sasha laid a bag under his head and stormed to the gate. She pushed her thin shoulder against the enormous gate, took a deep breath and crunched her teeth. The ton heavy mountain of iron retreated reluctantly, turned around and fell groaning into its lock. Sasha looked it again and sank to the ground. One minute, all he needed was just one minute for him to catch his breath… soon he would return to her.

Every expedition cost her father more strength. It was almost hopeless in the face of their weak harvest. Every expedition shortened his life not by days, but by weeks, yes even months. But it was their need that forced him to do so. When they no longer had anything to sell, there was only one thing to do, eat Sasha’s pet rat, the only thing in this hostile station and then shoot themselves. If he would have let her, she would have taken his place and would have gone. How often had she asked him for his gasmask so that she could go up on her own, but he remained relentless. He probably knew that this holey piece of rubber with its filled up filters wasn’t any better than a talisman but he would have never admitted that. He lied that he knew how to clean the filters, even after hours of expeditions he acted like he felt fine and when he didn’t want her to see that he was throwing up blood he sent her away to be alone.

It wasn’t in Sasha’s power to change something. They had driven her father and Sasha into this abandoned part of the metro, they had left them alive, not out of mercy, but out of sadistic curiosity.

They must have thought that they wouldn’t even survive a week, but the will and stamina of her father had provided them with what they needed and that they had survived for years. They hated them, despised them, but brought them food regularly. Of course not for free.

In breaks between expeditions, in these rare minutes when the two sat on the sparse lit fire, her father loved to talk about earlier times. Years ago he had realized that he didn’t have to fool himself, but when he no longer had a future, than at least nobody could take away his past.

Back than my eyes had the same color as yours, he had said to her. The color of the sky… And Sasha believed to remember these days, these days when the tumor hadn’t bloated his head and when his eyes hadn’t faded, but when they shined like hers now.

When her father said “the color of the sky” of course he meant azure-blue and not the glowing red clouds of dust that reached over his head when he climbed to the surface.

He hadn’t seen real daylight in over 20 years and Sasha didn’t know it at all. He only saw it in his dreams, but he wasn’t sure if what he saw was real. What experience people that are blind from birth: Dreaming from a world that is similar to ours? To they even see anything in a dream?

When small children close their eyes, they believe that the entire world has sunken into darkness; they believe that everybody around them is as blind as they are. In the tunnels humans are as naive as these children, Homer thought. He imagined that light ruled over darkness every time when he turned on his flashlight and then turned it off again. Even the most impenetrable darkness could be full of seeing eyes.

Since the encounter with the corpse eaters he couldn’t think about anything else. A distraction. He needed a distraction.

Strange that Hunter hadn’t known what waited for them at the Nachimovski prospect. When the brigadier turned up at the Sevastopolskaya two months ago, none of the guards could explain how a man with such extraordinary stature was able to pass every single of the northern guard posts unnoticed.

It was their luck that the commander didn’t want an explanation how Hunter got through without the noticing.

But when he didn’t get to the Sevastopolskaya over the Nachimovski prospect, how did he get there? All other ways to the big metro had already been severed. The abandoned Kachovskaya line, in its tunnels they hadn’t seen a single living being in the last years. Impossible. The Tschertanovskaya? Ridiculous. Not even a skilled and relentless fighter as Hunter would be able to fight himself through this cursed station. Also it was impossible to get there without showing up at the Sevastopolskaya first. So the north, south and east were out of the question.

Now Homer had only one hypothesis left: The mysterious guest came from the surface. Of course all known entrances and exits of the station had been carefully barricaded and were guarded at all times, but… he could have opened one of the vents. The inhabitants of the Sevastopolskaya didn’t suspect that there was still somebody that had the intelligence to trick their warning system located in the burned concrete ruins. An endless chess board made out of several stories high apartment complexes that had been torn down by the shrapnel of war heads was already deserted and empty. The last players had already given up playing decades ago and left the distorted and scary figures crawling around on the surface. They now played their own game with their own rules. Looking at it from of the view of humanity, a rematch wasn’t possible.

Short expeditions searching for everything useful that hadn’t decayed over the last twenty years, hastily; shameful raids through their own houses were the only things they were still capable of. In rubbers suits that protected the stalkers from radiation they climbed up to search the skeletons of former buildings for the hundredth time, but nobody dared to fight the current inhabitant’s determent enough to wipe them out.

You might shoot a machine-pistol salve at them, retreat into a nearby dirty apartment and run straight back to the rescuing entrance of the metro when the danger had passed.

The old maps of the capitol city had lost every reference to reality. Where back then cars had been stuck in traffic for miles, now there were canyons covered in impenetrable black brushwood. Where once housing areas there were now swamps or just empty burned land.

Only the boldest stalkers dared to venture further than a mile from their entrances to the metro, most were satisfied with less.

The stations past the Nachimovski prospect – the Nagornaya, Nagatinskaya and Tulskaya – had no open entrances and the humans on those two stations didn’t even think about going to the surface.

So from where in this wasteland Hunter was supposed to have emerged from, was an absolute mystery for Homer.

But there was a last possibility where the brigadier could have come from. This possibility made the old atheist unable to breathe and he follow the dark silhouette of Hunter that moved through the darkness as if it didn’t even touch the ground.

He came from underground.

“I have a bad feeling about this” said Achmed hesitantly and so quiet that Homer almost wasn’t able hear him.

“It isn’t the right time to be here. Believe me; I have traveled with many caravans. There is something brewing at the Nagornaya…”

The small groups of bandits that always retreated back as far as possible from the ring line right away after each raid. They took their breaks in dark stations but never dared to attack the caravans of the Sevastopolskaya.

The instant they heard the constant thunder of the studded boots, which announced the arrival of the heavy infantry of the Sevastopolskaya, they got out of their way immediately.

Not because of the bandits or the corpse eaters at the Nachimovski prospect these caravans were protected so well.

Their bone hard training, absolute fearlessness, their ability to close themselves to a iron fist in seconds and to destroy every possible threat in a hail of bullets, all that could have made the convoys of the Sevastopolskaya the undisputed rulers of the tunnels up to the Serpuchovskaya – if there wasn’t the Nagornaya.

The horrors of the Nachimovski prospect were behind them, but nor Homer or Achmed felt the slightest relief. The seemingly inconspicuous, yes, even ugly Nagornaya had become the end station of many that hadn’t treated her with caution. Those poor schmucks that ended up at the neighboring Nagatinskaya coincidentally tried to stay as far away from the greedy mouth of the Nagornaya. As if that would save them. As if what crawled out of the tunnel, searching for prey, was too sluggish to crawl a little bit further and choose a victim of its taste…

As soon as you entered the Nagornaya you could rely on nothing but your luck, because this station didn’t play by the rules. Sometimes it let you pass silently and the travelers looked horrified at the bloody marks on the walls and pillars where someone had tried to climb upwards hopelessly.

And just a few moments after ushering someone safely through the station could give a group a welcome, so hearty that losing half of the men was considered as a victory.

The station was always hungry. It didn’t favor anybody. It didn’t let anybody explore it. For the inhabitants of the neighboring stations the Nagornaya embodied pure arbitrariness of fate. She was the most difficult challenge for all that embarked on their way from Sevastopolskaya to the ring line and the other way around.

“So many missing people… it couldn’t just have been the Nagornaya alone,” said Achmed with superstition. Like many residents of the Sevastopolskaya, he spoke of the Nagornaya like if it was a creature and not a metro station.

Homer knew what Achmed meant. He had thought about it a lot of times if it couldn’t have been the Nagornaya that was responsible for the missing recon team. He nodded his head and added: “If so I hope it just suffocated them…”

“What did you just say?” hissed Achmed angry. His hand twitched in Homers direction, as if he wanted to strike the old man, but he didn’t.“She is not going to suffocate you to be sure!”

Homer took the insult silently. He didn’t believe that the Nagornaya was able to hear them yet.

Hopefully she wouldn’t get angry. At least not at this distance…

Superstition! Nothing but superstition! It was impossible to count all the idols of the underground – you always stepped one of their foot. Homer didn’t think about them anymore. Achmed on the other hand thought differently.

Achmed took a rosary made out of empty Makarov cartridges out of his jacket’s pocket and started to slide the lead through his dirty fingers. At the same time his lips moved silently in his own language, he probably asked Nagornaya for forgiveness for Home’rs sins.

Hunter had felt something with his supernatural senses. He gave them a signal with his hands, slowed down and got to his knees.

“There is fog,” mumbled Hunter As he breathed in the cold air with his nose. “What is there?”

Homer and Achmed looked at each other. Both knew what that meant: It was open season. Now they needed a lot of luck get to the northern border of the Nagornaya alive.

“How am I supposed to explain that to you?” answered Achmed unwillingly.

“It is the breath…”

“Whose breath?” asked Hunter, unimpressed. He put his bag on the ground so that he could choose the right weapon for this job.

Achmed whispered: “The breath of the Nagornaya.”

“We’ll see.” said Homer contemptuously and made a grimace. Though it seemed like Hunters distorted face came back to life; in reality it was motionless as always – it was only a trick of the light.

They could see it now too, a few hundred meters further than Hunter: A thick, pale white fog crawled at them on the ground, danced around their feet, crawled up their legs and then filled the tunnel up to their waist… it seemed like they were climbing into an ice-cold and hostile ocean. They stepped deeper and in to it, until the murky water-like “breath” would finally go over their heads.

You couldn’t see anything anymore. The beams of their flashlights got stuck in the fog like flies in a net of a spider. After they had finally fought themselves through the emptiness they felt exhausted and defeated. Noise, as if dimmed by a pillow, came through the fog. Every move cost them a lot of strength, as if they weren’t walking on concrete but on thick mud.

Breathing became harder, not because of the humidity, but because of the bitter stench of the air. They had to force themselves to breathe and they couldn’t shake the feeling that in reality they were breathing in the breath of a giant, strange creature that withdrew oxygen from the air and replaced it with its toxic fumes.

Homer put on his gasmask, just in case. Hunter gave him a quick look, reached into his bag and put on his generic rubber mask as well. Only Achmed was once again without a gasmask.

The brigadier stopped and listened with his shredded ear at the Nagornaya, but the thick white soup hindered him to decipher the noises from the station and create a picture of the situation. It sounded like something heavy had fallen to the ground far away, followed by a long sigh, in a pitch that was too low for a human, or any other creature. Then they heard something scraping hysterically and shrieking like if a giant hand had bent the thick iron pipes on the ceiling to a knot.

Hunter twitched his head, as if he was trying to shake off dirt from his head and instead of a short machine pistol he was now holding an army-Kalashnikov with a double magazine and a mounted grenade-launcher. “Finally,” he said.

At first they didn’t realize that they had already entered the station; the fog in the Nagornaya was as thick as milk. While Homer looked through the glass of his gasmask he felt like a diver that was on board of a sunken ocean cruiser.

You could only see the mosaic through the fog for a few seconds at a time and then it swallowed them again: they were seagulls that had been pressed with coarse soviet metal templates. Fossils, thought Homer, the fate of humanity and their creations… but will somebody dig us up one day?

The fog around them was alive, floated in different directions, twitching. Sometimes dark images emerged from the fog, a dented wagon of a train and a rusty cabin, a scaly body or head of some mythological creature. Homer shuddered while thinking who had filled the seats all these decades ago.

He had heard much about what was going on at the Nagornaya, but he had never seen anything face to face…

“There it is, to the right!” screamed Achmed as he grabbed the old man’s sleeve. A suppressed sound erupted out of Achmed’s gun as the bullet passed through the homemade silencer.

Homer turned around with such speed that nobody would have thought he still had it in his rheumatic body. His blurred beam of light illuminated only a part of the metal covered pillars.

“Behind! Behind us!” Achmed shot another salve. But his bullets only shredded the rest of the marble plates that once decorated the walls of the station. Whatever he had seen through the blurry dim lights had already vanished, seemingly unharmed.

He must have breathed in too much of that stuff, thought Homer. But one second later he saw something in the edge of his field of vision… something gigantic, crouching because the four meter high ceiling of the station was too low for its size and it was unimaginable maneuverable. For an instance it emerged out of the fog, became visible again and disappeared, a long time before the old man was able to point his assault rifle at it.

Homer looked at around desperately for the brigadier.

He couldn’t see him anywhere.

“It is ok. Don’t be afraid” he said again and again. He tried to catch his breath and calm her down. “You know… there are people that are far worse off than we are…” He tried to smile, but he only made a terrible grimace, as if his lower jaw had fallen off.

Sasha smiled back, over her pointed, dirty cheek a salty tear crawled down. At least her father was conscious again, for a few hours at least, enough for her to think about everything.

“This time I couldn’t find anything.” he croaked. “Forgive me. At the end I even went to the garages as well. It was further than I thought. But I found an intact one there. The lock was out of rust free steel, even oiled. Breaking it was impossible, so I used the last demolition charge. I thought, maybe there is a car in there, spare parts and all. I let it explode, went in: Empty. Why did they lock it then the bastards? All that noise, I prayed that nobody had heard me. But when I got out of the garage there were all these dogs. I thought, that’s it… That’s it.” He closed his eyes and went silent.

Sasha took his hand worried, but he shook his head imperceptiblu without opening his eyes: Don’t be afraid, everything is fine. He didn’t even have the strength to talk anymore but he wanted to tell her everything, why he had returned with empty hands, why they now had to starve for a week until he could get up again.

But before he was able to do so he fell into a deep sleep.

Sasha checked the bandages on his shredded leg, wet with black blood. Laying a fresh compress on it, she stood up and went to the rat’s cage and opened the small door.

The animal looked out of its cage distrustfully. It tried to hide at first, and then it jumped down on the train track and ran around. You can rely on the feelings of a rat: There was no danger in the tunnel.

Calmer, the young woman returned to the stretcher.

“Of course you will feel better again. You will be able to walk again.” she whispered to her father. “And you will find a garage with a new car in it. We’ll get in together and drive away from here. Ten maybe fifteen stations away. Somewhere, where they don’t know us, where we are strangers. Where nobody hates us. If there is even such a place…”

Now it was her that told the magical stories that she had heard so many times from him. She repeated it word by word and now that she spoke out the old mantra of her father she believed in it even a hundred times more. She would nurture him back to health, heal him. Somewhere in this world there had to be a place where they didn’t matter to others.

A place where they could be happy.

“There it is! It is looking at me!”

Achmed shrieked as if it had already grabbed him. He had never screamed like that. Again he fired his assault-rifle until it jammed. There was nothing left of Achmed’s sanity: trembling he tried to reload a new clip.

“It is after me… after me…”

Suddenly you could hear the rattling sound of another automatic rifle. It stayed silent for a second and went off again, this time almost inaudible with salvos of three shots. So Hunter was still alive, there was still hope.

The slamming sound distanced itself and came back again, so it was impossible to say if the bullets found their target.

Homer was expecting the angry screams of an injured monster, but the station covered itself in mysterious silence; its inhabitants seemed to have no bodies or they were inviolable.

The brigadier continued his strange fight at the other end of the station, from time to time the glowing tracer rounds cut through the fog, drunken from the fight against the ghost of Nagornaya. He had left his companions alone.

Homer took a deep breath and leaned back his head to look at the ceiling. For some time now he had the need, he had felt the cold, heavy look with his skin, his head, his hair and his back. Now he couldn’t resist his premonitions anymore.

Directly under the ceiling, far above their heads, a big head floated in the fog, so big that Homer didn’t realize at what he was looking at in the beginning. The rest of the giant body remained in the darkness of the station. Its huge face was hanging above the tiny humans that tried to defend themselves with their useless weapons. It wasn’t in a hurry – it just gave them a bit of time before it attacked.

Silent with terror Homer sank to his knees. His rifle fell out of his hands and hit the floor with a rattling sound. Achmed screamed as if he was being tortured. Without haste the creature approached and filled the entire room in front of them with its dark body, giant as a mountain. Homer closed his eyes, prepared himself, said farewell. Only one thing went through his mind, a regretful, bitter thought drilling into his consciousness: He hadn’t made it…

Hunter’s grenade launcher spit out a flame, the shockwave numbed their ears; it left a continuously thin humming sound while burning parts of shredded flesh was raining down on them.

Achmed was the first to snap out of it. He helped Homer to his feet and dragged him with him.

They ran, stumbled over the tracks and got back up again without feeling any pain. They held on to each other, because in the milky soup you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. They ran as if they were threatened not just with death, but with something even more terrible: Utter, final, unchangeable embodiment of absolute, physical and mental destruction.

Invisible and almost inaudible, but only a step behind them, the demons followed, accompanying them but not attacking. They seemed to toy with them by giving them the illusion of a possible rescue.

Then the two men saw the fragmented marble walls and after that segments of the tunnels. They had made it out of the Nagornaya! The guardians of the station fell back like they were chained to the station. But it was too early to stand still.

Achmed ran ahead, searched with his hands for the pipes on the wall and pushed Homer in front of him.

They stumbled together, wishing to sit down.

“What’s with the brigadier?” croaked Homer after he had ripped off the sticky gasmask from his face while he was walking.

“As soon as we pass the fog we’ll stop and wait for him. It has to be soon, maybe 200 steps. Out of the fog, we need to get out of the fog.” repeated Achmed, mysterious, “I’ll count the steps…”

But neither after 200 steps nor after 300 did the fog seemed to disappear. What if it had spread to the Nagatinskaya? What if had swallowed the Tulskaya and the Nachimovski as well?

“That can’t be… it has to… only a bit…” mumbled Achmed for the hundredth time. He suddenly stopped.

Homer bumped into him and both fell to the ground.

“The wall has ended.” Achmed stepped over the tracks and the wet concrete floor as if he thought that the ground would vanish under his feet.

“It’s here, what do you mean?” Homer had felt the segment of the tunnel wall and pulled himself up off the floor.

“Sorry,” Achmed replied silently. “You know back at the station… I thought I would never leave it. How it looked at me… me, do you understand? It had decided to take me. I thought I would stay there forever. You don’t even get a real burial.” He spoke slowly to keep himself from crying.

He tried to justify the way he was speaking, even thought he didn’t have to.

Homer shook his head. “It’s alright; I shitted my pants as well. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go, it can’t be far now.”

The hunt seemed to be over and they could breathe again. Even if it wasn’t, they couldn’t run anyways.

So they kept walking slowly, feeling their way along the wall half blind with their hands. Step by step to salvation. The worst part was behind them and even though the fog hadn’t disappeared soon the air from the tunnel would rip it apart and carry it away through the vents. Soon they would get to humanity and wait for their officer.

It happened earlier than they thought. Did space and time get bent in the fog as well?

An iron staircase crawled up the wall; the round tunnel became a square one and next to the tracks you could see the indent in the track that had saved a lot of lives.

“Look!” whispered Homer, “It looks like a station. A station!”

“Hey! Is there someone?” screamed Achmed as loud as he could.

“Brothers, is there somebody?” Achmed fell into a pointless, triumphal laugh.

The dim light of the lamps revealed what the darkness had hidden, walls of marble, that hadn’t been left untouched by man and time. It seemed that none of the colorful mosaics, which had been the pride of the Nagatinskaya, had survived.

And what had happened to the marble around the pillars? That can’t be…

Even though Achmed didn’t get an answer he kept screaming and laughing: Of course they had been afraid of the fog and had run through it like crazy, but they no longer cared about that anymore.

Homer on the other hand was worried and searched the wall with the weak beam of his flashlight. His suspicions left cold droplets running down his back.

Finally he found them: The iron letters screwed on the burst marble.

NAGORNAYA.

You never returned to the same place coincidentally.

Her father had always said that. You return to change something, to apologize for something.

Sometimes god grabs us and brings us back to the place where he forgot us last. God does that to make a decision or to give us a second chance.

Her father explained that to her; he would never be able to return to his home station. He had no more strength to get revenge, to fight or to proof something. He no longer wanted forgiveness.

It was an old story that had almost cost him his life. But he was certain that everybody had gotten what they deserved.

Now they lived in eternal exile, because Sasha’s father had nothing to make up and god didn’t live in this station.

The plan for their rescue, to find a new car on the surface that hadn’t rotted, to repair it, get enough gas and to break out of this vicious cycle that fate had drawn, had become a good fairy tail a long time ago.

For Sasha there was another way to the big metro.

When she put the half repaired machines, old jewelry, or decayed books on the tracks, the merchants offered more: food and bullets.

They illuminated her thin, young stature with the lights of their railcar, winked at each other, tried to talk to her and promised a lot of things. The girl looked wild. Silent and distrusting she looked at them, ready to strike with knife behind her back. Her jacket was big but it didn’t hide her stature. Dirt and machine oil in her face made her blue eyes glow brighter. So bright that some couldn’t look at them.

Blond hair, cut unevenly with the knife she was holding, didn’t even go over her ears. Her lips never smiled.

The men on the rail cart knew that they couldn’t tame this wolf with riches, so they tried it with freedom. She never answered them. That’s why they thought she couldn’t talk, which made it even easier.

But Sasha knew one thing: Whatever she did she wouldn’t be able to buy two seats on the rail cart.

Her father had a history with this people that she could never change.

How they were standing in front of her, faceless with their black gas masks, they looked more like enemies for her. She didn’t find anything on them of which she would have dreamt, not even while she was sleeping. So she put the telephones, irons, and teapots on the tracks, stepped back and waited till the merchants had gathered the goods.

Then they threw a few packets of dried pork and a handful of bullets on the tracks, only so that they could watch her crawling around to pick all up. Than the rail cart left slowly and vanished back to the real world.

Sasha turned around and went back home where a mountain of broken machines, a screw driver, a blowtorch a dynamo machine repurposed bicycle were waiting for her. She sat herself on the saddle, closed her eyes and rode far, far away. She almost forgot that she wasn’t moving. And the fact that she had refused the easy way out gave her even more strength.

What the devil? How did we end up here again? Like in a fever, Homer tried to find an explanation for what had happened here.

Suddenly Achmed turned silent; he had seen where Homer had shined his lamp. “It’s not letting me go…”

he whispered silently, almost without any sound.

The fog around them became thicker and thicker, they could almost no longer see each other. Without humans the Nagornaya had been asleep, now she awoke again. To new life: The heavy air reacted to their words with almost unnoticeable fluctuations and vague shadows moved in the deep.

No trace of Hunter… a being of flesh and blood couldn’t win the fight against these phantoms; as soon as the station had played enough with them she would swallow them as a whole.

“Go,” said Achmed. “It wants me. You can’t know it. You haven’t been here as much as I have.”

“Stop it!” yelled Homer, surprised by the volume of his voice. “We got lost in the fog. Let’s go back!”

“We can’t go back. You can run as much as you want, you will return to this place again and again if you stay with me. You will get through on your own. Go, I beg you.”

“Enough!” Homer grabbed Achmed’s hand and dragged him behind him to the tunnel. “In an hour you will thank me!”

“Tell my wife…”

An unbelievable powerful force ripped Achmed out of Homer’s grip, up into the fog, into the void.

He wasn’t even able to scream, he just vanished, as if from one second to the next he had been atomized and ceased to exist.

Homer screamed, turned around and fired his precious bullets, one clip after another.

Suddenly he felt a blow to his back, so strong that it had to have been one of these demons.

The universe imploded.