Metro 2034

CHAPTER 5 Memories

Sasha ran to the window and opened it. Fresh air and soft light fell into the room. The window was hanging over an abyss full of soft morning fog. With the first rays of the sun it would disappear and they would be able to see fir covered hills instead of the abyss, green meadows behind them and the matchbox tall buildings and onion-like bell towers.

The early morning was their time. She felt the approaching dawn and stood up half an hour earlier to get on top of the mountains in time. Behind the small, simple, but clean and warm hut a rocky path went up the hill, surrounded by bright yellow flowers and Sasha had slipped several times on her way up and hurt her knee.

In thoughts she wiped the windowsill that was still wet from the breath of the night with her sleeve. She had dreamt about something dark, disastrous that had crossed her happy life, but the rests of this restless vision disappeared immediately when the cold wind started to blow over her skin. Now she no longer wanted to think about what had bothered her in her dream. She had to hurry to get to the mountain top in time to greet the sun and then sliding down the path, returning to the hut, to make breakfast, wake her father and pack his provisions.

Then Sasha would be by herself for the whole day while her father was hunting. She would hunt the slow dragonflies and flying roaches between the flowers that were as yellow as the linkrusta-wallpapers in the trains.

On her toes she crept over the creaking planks, opened the door a bit and laughed silently.

It had been several years since Sasha’s father had last seen a happy smile on his daughters face.

He didn’t want to wake her. His leg was swollen, numb and it didn’t stop bleeding. It was said that the bite of a stray dog never healed…

Should he call her? He hadn’t been home for a entire day because before he had left for the garages, he had entered an apartment complex, a “termite hill”, located two blocks from the station. He remembered passing out on the fifteenth floor. All that time Sasha probably hadn’t closed an eye – his daughter never slept while he was away—she deserved the rest. They all lie, he thought. Nothing is going to happen to me.

He really would have liked to know what she dreamt about. He couldn’t even relax in his dreams.

Only rarely his consciousness let him revisit his sorrow less youth; normally in his dreams he wandered between the familiar dead houses with their empty inners and a good dream was when found an untouched apartment, full of miraculously preserved machines and books.

Every time he fell asleep he hoped to dream about the past. That time when he had just met

Sasha’s mother. When he was only twenty, he became the commander of the garrison of the station.

Back then the inhabitants thought of the metro as a provisional home and not of a glorified barracks for forced labor he surface, where they sat out a life sentence.

Instead he always ended up in the events that happened five years ago. That day that had determined his fate and even worse the fate of his daughter…

Once again he stood there, at the head of his fighters. He held his Kalashnikov so it was ready to fire. His officers’ Makarov could have put a bullet into his head. Apart from his two dozen military police marksmen there wasn’t a single human left in the station that was still loyal to him.

The mob raged, swelled in size and shook the barricade with dozens of hands. The first chaotic voices had transformed themselves into a rhythmic choir controlled by an invisible director. They still demanded that he step down but soon they would demand his head.

This was no spontaneous demonstration. This was the work of provocateurs. He could have tried to identify and liquidate every single one of them, but now it was already too late. When he wanted to stop the rebellion and remain in power there was only one thing left to do: To open fire on the group. It wasn’t too late for that…

His fingers folded around an invisible stock, under his swollen eye lids his pupils twitched restless from one side to the other, his lips moved and formed silent orders. The dark puddle of blood he lay in grew larger as more and more life left his soul.

“Where are they?”

Something ripped Homer out of the dark sea of unconsciousness. He shook himself like a fish on a hook, he gasped, cramped for air, and stared at the brigadier. The dark, cyclopic colossus still towered over him, the guardians of the Nagornaya, and reached with their long fingers; without any struggle they would rip out his legs or crush his ribs. They only disappeared slowly, even unwillingly, when he opened his eyes again.

He tried to jump up again but the stranger’s hand that had held his shoulder with a light grip now held him like the iron hook that had pulled him out of his nightmares.

He started to breathe normally and concentrated himself on the scarred, machine oil covered face with bright eyes… Hunter, he was still alive?

Homer carefully turned his head to the left, than to the right: Where they still in the cursed station?

No, this was an empty and clean tunnel. You could almost no longer see the fog of the Nagornaya that had covered the exits anywhere. Hunter must have carried him over a kilometer. Reassured Homer broke down. He asked him again, just to be sure: “Where are they?”

“Nobody is here. You are safe.”

“These creatures… did they knock me unconscious?”

He wondered as he held the back of his head.

“No that was me. I had to knock you down, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able get you out of there in your panic. You could have hurt me.”

Finally Hunter loosened his iron grip, stood up stiffly and moved his hand to his officer’s belt where the Stetschkin hang. On the other side hang a mysterious leather box. The brigadier opened it and took out a flat mes bottle. He shook it, opened it and took a deep swig without asking Homer if wanted one to.

Homer tried to close his eyes for a second.

His left eye wouldn’t close.

“Where’s Achmed? What happened to him?” Chills ran down Homer’s back.

“He’s dead.” his answer almost sounded indifferent.

“Dead.” Homer echoed mechanically.

The moment the giant hand ripped the hand of his comrade out of his, Homer knew: No living being could escape its grip. Homer had just been lucky that the Nagornaya hadn’t chosen him. The old man turned around again. He still couldn’t believe that Achmed was gone forever. He stared at his hand, it was scraped and bloody. He hadn’t been able to hold on to him. He didn’t have the strength.

“He knew that he would die.” he said silently.

“Why did they take him out of all of us and not me?”

“There was still life in him.” answered the Brigadier.“They feed on human life.”

Homer shook his head. “That isn’t fair. He had small children. So many things that hold him here… well held him here… but I have been looking for those for eternity…”

“If you were the Nagornaya, would you eat moss?” Hunter cut off Homer and ended the conversation with him pulling Homer back on his feet. “We got to keep moving. We’re late.”

While Homer ran behind Hunter he tried to figure out why he and Achmed had ended up at the Nagornaya. Like a flesh eating orchid the station had clouded their mind with its miasma and lured them back in. But they hadn’t turn around a single time that much was sure for Homer. So he started to believe in the distortion of space in the tunnels now, like those simple minded comrades of his on guard duty. The solution was a lot easier. He stopped and slapped himself on the forehead: The connecting track! Some hundred meters behind the Nagornaya there was a track for trains to turn around. It turned around at a sharp angle and that’s why they following the wall blindly, reached the parallel track and then when the wall suddenly disappeared, ran back to the station.

So much for magic! But there was still another thing that needed an explanation. “Wait!” he yelled after Hunter.

But he just continued to march forward as if he was deaf, so the old man had to catch up to him while breathing heavily. When he had caught up to the Brigadier he tried to look him into the eyes and said: “Why did you leave us to our fate?”

“Me, leave you two?”

There was a sarcastic tone in his emotionless, metallic voice. Homer bit himself on his tongue. True, it was him and Achemd that had ran from the station and left the Brigadier alone with the demons…

The more Homer thought about how raging and helplessly Hunter had fought at the Nagornaya the more he realized that the inhabitants of the station hadn’t accepted the fight that Hunter had tried to force them into. Out of fear? Or had they seen him as a part of the family?

Homer gathered his courage – there was only one question left, the hardest one of all. “At the Nagornaya… why did they ignore you?”

Several minutes passed; Homer didn’t dare to ask again. Then Hunter gave him a short, almost inaudible and grumpy answer: “Would you eat tainted flesh?”

The beauty of the world will redeem you, her father had once said jokingly.

Sasha had put the colorful teabag back in the pocket of her jacket, blushing. The small quadratic plastic hull that still had a faint aroma of green tea was her greatest treasure. And a reminder that the universe wasn’t just the body of the station and its four tunnels buried twenty meters below the graveyard that had once been Moscow. The teabag was some kind of magical portal that moved Sasha back by centuries and thousands of kilometers. It was so much more, something enormously important.

In the wet climate of the metro, paper decayed quickly.

Decay and mold didn’t just eat books and brochures, they destroyed the entire past. Without pictures and chronicles the already limping human mind stumbled and ran into the wrong direction like man without his crutches.

The hull of the teabag was made out of a material that mold and the time couldn’t harm. Sasha’s father had once said that it would take thousands of years before this material would fall apart. So even their decedents would one day inherit this teabag, she thought.

And the picture printed on the teabag was, even though it was a miniature, a real picture. A golden frame that was as bright as on the day it came from the conveyor belt. It depicted a view that robbed Sasha of her breath. Steep walls of stone, covered in dreamlike mist, a far reaching pine forest that held on the almost vertical mountains, roaring waterfalls that fell down from the highest tip of the mountain into an abyss, a purple shine that spoke of the nearing dawn… in her entire life she had never seen anything more beautiful.

She could sit there for a long time, with the teabag in her hand, just looking at it. The mist in the morning that covered the mountains held her view magically. And even though she had read all the books that her father had brought from his expeditions before they sold them, the words did not suffice to describe what she felt looking at these one centimeter tall mountains, taking in the smell of the pine needles. It was a world so far from their reality but it had a strong pull…

The sweet longing and the eternal expectation of what the sun would see first… the endless thoughts about what was behind the sign with the brand of the tea: A strange tree? A nest of an eagle? One of those houses that lay on the slope of the mountain, and in which she would soon live with her father?

It was him that had brought her the teabag when she was five years old. Back then, the contents of the bag were a real rarity.

He had wanted to surprise her with real tea. She had to gather her courage to drink it, as if it was medicine.

But the plastic hull had fascinated her from the very start. Back then he had explained her that it wasn’t a very artful illustration: A conventional Chinese province, just good enough for the print of a teabag.

But teen years later Sasha still viewed it with the same eyes as on the day she had gotten the gift from her father.

Her father, on the other hand, thought that the teabag was just a shabby replacement for the whole world. And every time she fell into this trance and looked at this badly drawn fantasy he felt the unspoken accusation for their mutilated, bloodless life. He tried to hold her back every time, without any success. With almost anger he asked her for the hundredth time what she liked about this old packaging for a gram of tea. For the hundredth time she put it back into her pocket and answered embarrassedly: “Father… I think it is beautiful!”

Hunter wouldn’t stop for a moment, a second’s rest. If Hunter had been there, Homer would have taken three times as long, slowly making his way down the tunnel. He would have never moved so securely and self-confident through the tunnel. The group had to pay a terrible transit fee down the Nagornaya, but at least two out of three had made it. And all three could have survived if they hadn’t been lost in the fog. The price wasn’t higher than usual: Nothing had happened there that hadn’t happened before, neither at the Nachimovski prospect nor at the Nagornaya.

So it wasn’t because of the tunnels that lead to the Tuskaya? Now they were completely silent, but it was a disastrous and tense silence. Sure: even at a totally unknown station Hunter could feel dangers that waited for them hundredths of meters in advance. But was it possible that his intuition would leave him exactly here, here where at least a dozen experienced fighters had suffered the same fate?

Approaching the Nagatinskaya he hoped he would have the solution for all the secrets… Homer struggled to keep his thoughts together because they ran fleetingly through his head.

Still, he tried to think about what waited for them at the station that he had once loved so much. The myth teller imagined that the legendary satanic legation had emerged at the Nagatinskaya or that the inhabitants had been eaten by migrating rats on their way for food through the tunnels that humans couldn’t pass through. Even if Homer would have been alone he wouldn’t have turned around for anything in the world. In all these years at the Sevastopolskaya he had forgotten to fear death. When he had embarked on this journey he knew that it could be his last journey; and he was ready to sacrifice his remaining time for it.

A mere half an hour after the encounter with the monsters of the Nagornaya they had become the horrors of his memories.

Even more, while he listened to his thoughts, he felt faint movement in the deeps of his soul: Somewhere deep down inside him something had been awakened, the thing that he had wanted so much. What he had searched for on his dangerous adventures, that what he had never been able to find at home…

Now he had a real reason to delay death with all his power. He would allow it after his work was done.

The last war had been more brutal than all that had come before it and it had only taken a few days.

Since the Second World War three generations had passed, the last veterans had died and the living didn’t fear war anymore. The collective insanity that had robbed millions of humans of their humanity had once again become a simple political instrument.

The fatal game had become more like routine with every day that had passed and in the end there was no more time to make the right decision. The ban of using atomic weapons was dropped under the table in the heat of the fight: In the first act of the drama they had hung their rifle on the wall and in the one before the last they had actually fired it. It didn’t matter who had pulled the trigger first anymore.

All the metropolises on the earth were turned into ash and rubble at the same time. Even the few that had an anti-rocket shield were destroyed; they remained intact from the outside but radiation, chemical and biological weapons killed the majority of the population instantly. The unstable radio transmission between the few survivors ended after a few years. From that moment the world had ended for the inhabitants of the metro and neighboring lines.

While before the earth had been explored and colonized now it had sunk down to the borderless ocean of chaos and oblivion of ancient times. The small islands of civilization sank into the depths one after another, without oil or power, humanity returned to the Stone Age.

An age of terror began.

For centuries scientists have tried to return history from its almost destroyed papyri, parchments and foliants. With the invention of the press newspapers have continued to weave the fabric of history. And then the chronics of the last centuries almost no longer had any gaps in it: Almost every gesture, every move of those who controlled the world had been carefully documented.

Now the presses of the world had been destroyed with a single blow, abandoned. The looms of history stood still. In a world without a future they were no longer needed. The shreds of this fabric were only held together by a single, thin thread.

In the first years after the disaster Nikolai Ivanowitsch had tried to find his family in the overcrowded stations. It had been in vain. He had abandoned all hope already but alone and lost as he was he now stumbled through the darkness of the underground because in this kind of afterlife he didn’t know what to do with himself. The thread of Arianne – the sense of life – that could have showed him the exit out of this never ending maze had fallen out of his hand.

In his longing for the past he had began to collect the newspapers, to remember and to dream.

He searched the articles and reports to find out if they could have prevented the apocalypse. One day he started to write down the events in his station in some kind of article.

And so it happened that Nikolai Ivanowitsch had found a new thread: He decided to become chronicler of the metro, author of the youngest history, from the end of the world to his own. His disorganized, aimless collection had now a purpose: To restore the damaged fabric of time and continue to weave it further.

The others saw Nikolai Ivanowitsch’s passion as harmless nonsense. Out of his own will he sacrificed his pay for old newspapers and turned every corner of his personal space into an archive. He volunteered for guard duty, because there at the fire at meter 300 wild men told themselves the craziest stories like little boys, where he caught every granule of truth about the rest of the metro. Out of the myriad of rumors he filtered out the facts and wrote them down in his books.

Even though this work distracted him he knew how useless it was. After his death all these reports would turn do dust without any care. The day he wouldn’t return home they were only good as a few more seconds for the fire.

From the yellowed paper only smoke and ash would remain, the atoms would enter new connections and forms. They would be saved in some other type of matter. But what he really tried to preserve wouldn’t. All that unimaginable, ethereal information that was on those pages would be lost forever.

Humans worked that way: What stood in the school books remained in their heads up to graduation.

And when they forgot the material afterwards they did it with a true sense of relief. The memories of men were like the sand of the desert. Numbers, dates and names of unimportant people disappeared in it without a trace, as if one threw a stick into a sand dune.

Something only remains if it conquers the fantasy of man, makes the heart beat faster, to move them, make them feel something. A gripping story of a hero or a great love could survive an entire civilization because it remains in the brain and is told by generation to generation.

When he had realized that he transformed himself from a amateur scientist to an alchemist – and out of Nikolai Ivanowitsch, Homer emerged.

And from now on he no longer spent his nights to create some chronics but to search for the formula for immortality. For a story as long living as Gilgamesh and a hero that was tough as Odysseus. On the thread of this story he would attach all his accumulated knowledge. And in a world where paper was transformed into warmth, where you carelessly sacrificed the past for a small moment in the present, the legend of this hero would storm the hearts of the people and redeem them from their collective amnesty.

But he had to wait for the main reactant in the formula; the hero just didn’t want to step onto the stage.

The copying of the newspaper articles hadn’t taught Homer how to create myths, to breathe life into this golem and make this made up story more interesting than reality. His worktable seemed like Frankenstein’s laboratory to him: Crumpled pages with fragments of the first chapters of his saga, which characters weren’t convincing, weren’t able to survive. The only things that he got from these nightly works were dark rings under his eyes and a sore bitten lip.

Still, Homer still didn’t give up on his new destiny that easy. He chased away every suspicion that it could be that he wasn’t suited for it, that you needed a skill to create worlds that he hadn’t received.

He just had to wait for an inspiration, he said to himself… and from where should it come from? From the humid air in the station maybe? The tea ritual at his home or during his shift doing agriculture? Or while on guard duty, which became and more scarce for him because of his age? No, he needed excitement, adventure and the storm of passion. Maybe then the dams of his mind would break and he could start his creation…

Even in the hardest times the Nagatinskaya had never been abandoned completely. Of course it wasn’t an ideal place to life. Nothing grew here and the exits were closed. But many used the station to slip under the radar for a while or for some intimate time with their lover.

But now the station was empty.

Hunter moved with silent steps up the stairs, up to the tracks and then he stopped. Homer followed him, breathing heavily, looking around nervously at all sides. The station was dark, only the dust hanging in air glittered in the shine of their lamps. The sparse hills of shredded cardboard on which the inhabitants of the Nagatinskaya slept on were spread out all over the floor. Homer leaned his back against a pillar and sledded down slowly to the ground. The Nagatinskaya had once been one of his favorite stations because of the elegant and colorful marble mosaics. Now the station was dark and lifeless. The Nagatinskaya was nothing like he remembered.

Like a dead man’s old passport, his old picture taken at a time where he didn’t know that he wasn’t just looking into a camera but eternity.

“Not a single soul is here,” said Homer hesitantly.

“Except one.” Hunter nodded into Homers direction.

“I meant…” started Homer, but Hunter cut him off with a gesture of his hand.

At the end of the station where the row of pillars ended and even the brigadier’s search light couldn’t shine, something crawled slowly onto the platform…

Homer fell onto the ground next to him, lightened his fall with his arms and stood up clumsily. Hunters lamp was turned off and the brigadier himself had disappeared into thin air. Sweating because of his fear, Homer switched his rifle to auto-fire and pressed the stock, shivering against his shoulder.

Out of the distance he heard two suppressed shots.

Encouraged he looked past the pillar and hasted forward. In the middle of the platform Hunter was standing upright. At his feet was lying a difficult to see, skinny and pitiful figure. It seemed to be made out of boxes and rags and only had a slight remembrance to a human being. But it was one. You couldn’t determine its age or sex – in its dirty face you could only see its eyes. It made almost inaudible, sighing sounds and tried to crawl away from the brigadier. He seemed to have shot through both of its legs.

“Where is everyone?” Why is nobody here?” Hunter put his foot on the stinking bundle of torn rags.

“They are all gone… left me alone. Left me all by myself” it croaked. At the same time its hand wiped over the granite without moving forwards.

“Where did they go?”

“To the Tulskaya…”

Homer had reached both of them and joined the conversation immediately: “What is going on there?”

“How am I supposed to know?” The homeless person made a grimace. “Everybody that went there, died there. Go and ask them. I had no more strength to move around in those tunnels. I’d rather die here.”

The brigadier didn’t give up: “Why did they leave?”

“They were afraid, boss. The station got more and emptier over time. So they decided to break through. Nobody returned.”

“Not a single one?” Hunter raised his pistol.

“Nobody. Only one.” the pile of rags corrected himself. When he realized that the barrel of the gun was still pointed at him he floundered around like an ant under a magnifying glass.

“He went to the Nagornaya. I was asleep. I could have imagined it.”

“When?”

The homeless man shook his head. “I don’t have a watch. Maybe yesterday, maybe last week.”

No more questions came but the barrel of the pistol was still pointed at the forehead of the interrogated man.

Hunter was silent. Strange, but he was breathing heavily; it looked like the conversation with the bum had cost him a lot of strength.

“Can I…” asked the homeless man.

“There, eat!” growled the brigadier and before Homer knew what was going on he had pulled the trigger twice. The dark blood coming from the hole in the unlucky man’s forehead made its way his wide open eyes. He fell to the ground – once again nothing but rags and cardboard. Without looking up Hunter loaded four more bullets into the clip of the Stetschkin and jumped on the tracks. “We will find out for ourselves soon enough,” he yelled at the old man.

Homer lowered himself unwillingly over the body, took a piece of dirty cloth and put it over the destroyed head of the homeless man. His hands hadn’t stopped shaking.

“Why did you kill him?” he asked weakly.

“Ask yourself” answered Hunter in a dull voice.

Even when he gathered all his strength the only thing he could still do was open and close his eyes.

Strange that he had awoken at all… he had been laying there unconscious for about an hour and his body had felt as numb as if it was covered with a layer of ice. His tongue had dried at his palate and a ton heavy weight laid on his chest. No he couldn’t even say goodbye to his daughter, it would have been the only thing worth delaying the end of his eternal fight for survival.

Sasha didn’t smile anymore. It seemed she was now dreaming uneasily, rolled up on her bedroll, both arms crossed in front of her chest. Even when she was a child he had always woken her when she had been tormented by nightmares, but now he had only enough strength to slowly movie his eyelids.

And then even that became harder and harder. When he wanted to do was hold on till Sasha awoke, to continue the fight. It had lasted for over twenty years now, every day, every minute and he was damned tired of it. Tired of fighting, hiding, hunting, proving, hoping and lying.

While his mind darkened he only had two wishes: To see Sasha’s eyes one more time and then… to finally find peace. But he couldn’t do it. Once again the pictures of the past rose up in front of his inner eye and mixed with reality.

He had to make a decision. To break others or be broken himself. To punish or to penance…

The guardsmen closed the rows. Every single one of them was loyal to him alone. Ready to die here and now, to let themselves be torn apart by the masses or to shoot at the innocent. He was the commander of the last unbreakable station of the metro, president of a no longer existing confederation.

Under his soldiers his authority was unquestioned, unmistaken, every single of his orders was to be executed immediately, without question. He would take full responsibility for it, like he had always done.

When he retreated now this station would sink into anarchy at first and then it would be swallowed by the boiling red empire that had swelled over its usual borders and had annexed more and more territories. When he would open fire on the demonstrators, power would remain in his hands – at least for some time. And if he wouldn’t shy away from mass executions and torture maybe even forever.

He aimed his rifle. One moment after him the entire unit did so too.

There they raged, not just a few hundred demonstrators but a giant, faceless human mass: Bared fangs, wide open eyes, raised fists.

He turned off the safety. His unit answered with the same clicking sound.

It was time to take fate into his own hands.

He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. Chalk fell from the ceiling. For a moment the masses turned silent. He signaled his fighters to lower their weapons and made on step towards the demonstrators. He had made his decision.

And finally the memory let him in peace.

Sasha was still sleeping. He took his last breath, tried to look at her one last time but he could no longer raise his eyelids… but instead of eternal, impenetrable darkness he saw an unimaginable blue sky – clear and bright, like the eyes of his daughter.

“Stop!”

Homer almost jumped and raised his hands, he was that startled. But he kept it together. The voice – probably from a megaphone – out of the depths of the tunnel had surprised him. The brigadier wasn’t surprised at all. Tense as a cobra before it strikes; he took the heavy automatic rifle from his back silently.

Hunter hadn’t just refused to answer a single of the old man’s questions but hadn’t said a single word at all. The one and a half kilometer from the Nagatinskaya to the Tulskaya had felt as endless as the journey to Golgatha. He feared that death waited at the end of the tunnel and it was getting harder for him to keep Hunter’s speed.

At least he had time to prepare himself and to think about old times. He thought about Yelena, cursed himself for his egoism and asked her to forgive him. He once saw the magical, soft, sad light on that slightly rainy summer day on the Tverskaya. He regretted that he hadn’t said what should happen to his newspapers before he left.

He had been ready to die – to be ripped apart by monsters, eaten by giant rats, poisoned by some kind of gas… what other explanation was there why the Tulskaya had transformed itself into a black hole that swallowed everything outside and didn’t let it go?

But when he heard the mysterious but familiar human voice he didn’t know what to think anymore. Had the Tulskaya just been captured? But who was able to destroy all the recon teams of the Sevastopolskaya, vagabonds that traveled through the tunnels systematically, not even sparing women and old people?

“Thirty steps forward!” said the voice out of the distance.

It sounded vaguely familiar and if he would have had time to think about it he would have been able to determine who’s voice it was.

Wasn’t that someone from the Sevastopolskaya?

Hunter put his Kalashnikov in one hand and carefully counted his steps: For the thirty steps Hunter took Homer needed fifty. In front of them was a fuzzy barricade that had been constructed out of random objects. Strangely the defenders didn’t use any light…

“Lamps out!” commanded somebody from behind the pile. “One of you, come twenty steps closer.”

Hunter unsecured his rifle and moved forwards.

Homer remained behind alone again; he didn’t dare to refuse the orders. In the deep darkness that reigned here now, he carefully sat down on the ground, reached for the wall and leaned on it with his shoulder.

The steps of the brigadier went silent at the wanted distance. Somebody asked him something inaudible and he gave a growling answer. Then the situation got tense: Instead of the first neutral mood now you could hear curses and insults. It seemed that Hunter demanded something that the invisible guardians denied him.

Now they almost screamed at each other and Homer could almost make out single words… but he could make out one word: “Punishment!”

In this moment the sound of a Kalashnikov ended the conversation and a heavy salve from a Petscheng (a heavy machine gun) answered. Homer threw himself to the ground, unsecured his rifle but didn’t fire, he didn’t knew if he should shoot or not, or at whom.

But it was over before it started; Homer hadn’t even time to aim his rifle.

In the small breaks between the machine gun salves that almost sounded like Morse signals, the stomach of the tunnel made a long shrieking sound that Homer wouldn’t have mistaken for anything else.

The hermetic doors where closing! Tons of steel slammed against each other, it muffled the screams and the machine gun salves.

The only entrance to the metro was closed.

Now there was no more hope for the Sevastopolskaya.