Homer approached her and crouched down. She lowered her head and closed her eyes. She probably didn’t have a lot of contact with other people he thought. Because he didn’t know what to say so he just softly held on to her shoulder.
“We need to go.” Growled Hunter.
“And what’s with …” Homer pointed at the girl with an asking look
“Nothing, she’s none of our business”
“We can’t leave her here alone!”
“Then we give her a bullet” Answered the brigadier harsh.
“I don’t want to go with you.” Said the girl surprisingly clear. “Just get these handcuffs off of me. He probably has the keys.” She pointed at the faceless body on the ground.
With a few moves of his hand Hunter fished the iron keys out of the fat mans pocket and threw them to the girl: “Satisfied?”
The old man played for time. “What did that pig do to you?” He asked the little one.
“Nothing.” She replied while she fumbled whith the lock.
“He didn’t get far. He is no monster. Just a normal human being. Horrible, stupid and unforgiving. Like all.”
“Not all.” Answered the old man but it didn’t sound very convincing.
“All.” Repeated the girl. She made a grimace but she accomplished to stand up onto her swollen feet. “Well it isn’t always easy to remain human”
How fast she had laid down her fear! Now her eyes were no longer looking at the ground but she was looking at the two men as if she was up for a challenge. She fell to her knees next to one of the bodies, carefully turned it on his back, straightened his arms and kissed the forehead of the dead man. Then she turned to Hunter, closed her eyes and said: “Thank you”
She took neither weapons nor any other things with her. She climbed down to the rails and walked slightly limping towards the tunnel.
The brigadier followed her with a dark look. His hand wandered undecided from his flask to his knife. Finally he had made a decision, stood up and yelled: “Wait!”
Chapter 8 (masks)
The cage was still where the fat man hat beaten down Sasha. The door was open and the rat was gone … Well, thought the girl, even a rat has a right for freedom.
It didn’t matter; Sasha had to wear the gasmask of her kidnapper. She believed to smell the rest of his foul breath, but she could be happy that the fat man hadn’t worn the mask when he had been shot.
At the middle of the bridge the radiation suddenly got higher again.
It was like a miracle that she could even move in the giant radiation suit. She bounced around in it like the larva of a roach in its cocoon. The gasmask had been widened by the broad visage of the fat man, but it still stuck to her face. Sasha tried to breathe in as powerful as possible to suck the air through the tubes and filters, but while she looked outside the round glass of the gasmask she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had slipped into a stranger’s body. Just one hour ago this grey demon that had haunted her had been in this suit and now to get over this bridge she had to enter his world, see the world with his eyes.
With his and with the eyes of the humans that had banished her father to the Kolomenskaya, who had let them live for all these years because their greed was stronger than their hate. Would Sasha if she wanted to disappear in the human mass continue to wear this black rubber mask? Would she have to act like she was somebody else, somebody without a face and feelings? If at least it would help her to change her inners: All that what she had suffered through, to forget and to strongly believe that she could start over again!
Sasha had wished that these two hadn’t just found her out of chance but had been sent just for her, but she knew that that wasn’t true. She didn’t get why they took her with them:
Be it for pleasure, out of pity or to prove something to each other. The few words that the old man had thrown before her, certain sympathy had swung with it, but whatever he did now, he was looking after his companion, didn’t speak many words and seemed too concerned to not appear too humane.
The other one hadn’t turned to the girl a single time since he had allowed her to come with them to the next inhabited station. Sasha had stayed behind intentionally, so that she could at least observe them from behind, but it seemed that he had felt her look, because immediately he cramped and twitched with his head but didn’t turn it, maybe in favor of her girly curiosity or maybe so she would think that he didn’t notice her.
The powerful built physique of the bold man, with his animal like behavior, which the fat man had mistaken for a bear marked him as a warrior. But this picture wasn’t just off his physical power. He emitted a certain strength that you could’ve felt if he had been thin and built small. A man of the likes of him could get anybody to follow his orders and if anybody would dare to refuse his order he would eliminate them without hesitation.
And far before Sasha was able to bring her fear of other humans under control, before she was clear about him or herself, an unknown voice told her, the voice of her inner women, that she would follow him.
The railcar proceeded astonishingly fast. Homer felt no resistance from the lever, because the brigadier did all the work. The old man raised and lowered his arms as well, out of decency, but it didn’t cost him any strength.
The compact metro bridge waded with many pillars through the dark, thick water. The concrete had fallen of the iron skeleton at some parts, its legs stood so awry that one of the two lanes had kinked and fallen down.
It had been a totally functional bridge, a standard model, short lived like the new building in the outer areas of the capitol which had been designed on a drawing board.
There was nothing, nothing that was beautiful in it.
Still, Homer had to think about the magically retractable bridges of Petersburg or the elegant bridge constructions of the Krymski Most with its cast iron chains, while he looked all around him.
In the twenty years that he had lived in the metro, Homer had only been on the surface three times. Every time he had tried to see as much as he could in the small time away from his cell. To refresh his memories, to point his weakening eyes at the objects of the city, to push the rusty triggers of his visual memory and to gather as many impressions for the future. Maybe he would never have the chance to get to the beautiful places on the surface, like the Kolomenskaya, the Retschnoi Woksal or the Tjoply Stan, all three where stations that laid far away from other stations. Back then, like many other inhabitants of Moscow he had treated them in with a condescending attitude.
With the years Moscow aged continuously, fell apart, withered away. Homer had the need to touch the disappearing bridge again like that girl from the Kolomenskaya had touched the dead man. The bridge, the grey edges of the factories and the abandoned beehives of the apartments. To dwell in their sights. To touch them, to feel that they really existed, that everything here wasn’t a dream. And to say goodbye, just in case.
Their line of sight was bad, the silver moonlight was obtruded by the clouds so that the old man sensed his surroundings more than he perceived them. But that wasn’t too bad: He was used to replacing reality with his imagination.
If it mattered, Homer just thought about what he saw right now. Forgotten legends that he had appointed himself to create and the mysterious disappearance of daylight that had busied his imagination for the last hours. He felt like a child on a field trip: He sucked in the sights and the obscure silhouettes of the skyscrapers into himself; he continuously turned his head from one side to the other and talked loudly to himself.
The others didn’t enjoy the journey as much. The brigadier who silently stared into the direction they were driving only looked up from time to time when he had heard a sound from underneath the bridge. His attention was directed at the point where the rails dug themselves back into the ground.
The girl behind them held the scavenged gasmask with both of her hands. He could see that she didn’t feel well on the surface. In the tunnel Homer had thought that she
had been tall, but the moment that they had stepped outside she was small as if she had retreated into an invisible house of a snail and even the wide radiation suit that she had taken from the body didn’t make her taller. The fascinating things you could see from the bridge didn’t seem to interest her and most of the time she looked at the ground.
They passed the ruins of the station Technopark. It had been built hastily not much time before the war. Its poor condition was not the doings of the bombing but the teeth of time.
Then they finally approached the tunnel.
Compared to the bleak darkness of the night the tunnel entrance emitted absolute darkness. Homer’s suit seemed to him like a real armor and he himself felt like a medieval knight that entered the cave of a legendary dragon.
The sounds of the nightly city remained at the doorstep, exactly here hunter ordered them to step from the railcar. Now you could only hear the careful steps of the three companions and the few words that echoed from the tunnel segments. The tunnel sounded strange. Homer heard the closeness of the room, as if he had climbed into the inside of a glass bottle.
“It’s closed here”. Hunter seemed to want to enforce their fears. The shine of the lamp exposed the resistance: A hermetic door towered in front of them like an impenetrable wall. Where the door met the rails were shiny and the massive door angles raised themselves out of brown shreds of oil. Old planks were lying on a hill. Dried firewood and to coal turned pieces of wood were there as if there had been a campfire not long ago. The door was being used, without a doubt, but seemingly only as an exit. No bell or other signal was to be seen on this side.
The brigadier turned to the girl: “Is it always like that?”
“Sometimes they come out and drive to us on the other shore. To trade. I thought today …” She seemed to want to distance herself in time. Had she known that there was no more entrance or had she kept something from them?
Hunter hammered the grip of his machete against the door as if he wanted to operate a giant metal gong. But the steel was too thick and instead of the dump echoing sound it created only an empty clanking sound. Probably nobody would have been able to hear it on the other side even if somebody was still alive there.
No answer. No miracle had happened.
Past all reason Sasha had hoped that the two would be able to open the door. She hadn’t warned them that the entrance to the big metro had been closed out of fear; they could have chosen another way and left her where they had found her.
But nobody waited for them at the big metro and to break through the barricade was impossible. The bold one searched the door for a weak point or bent key holes, but Sasha already knew that you could only open it from the other side.
“You stay here”. He commanded them grimly. “I’ll look at the barricade at the second tunnel and search for any vents”
He was silent for a moment and added: “I’ll come back.” Then he vanished.
The old man gathered a few twigs and planks and made a sparse fire. Then he sat down at the doorstep and started to fumble with his backpack. Sasha sat down next to him and watched him out of the corner of her eyes. He made a strange spectacle, maybe for her and maybe for himself.
After he had brought a torn, dirty notebook out of his backpack he threw a distrustful look at Sasha, distanced himself from her a bit and lowered his head into the pages.
Immediately he jumped up with astonishing speed and looked if the bold one was really gone. Slowly he sneaked teen steps to the exit of the tunnel and only after he didn’t see anybody there he leaned at the door, put the backpack between him and Sasha and sunk into the book.
He read restlessly, mumbling something she couldn’t understand, removed his gloves, reached for his water bottle and put a few drops onto the book. Then he continued to read.
After a short time he suddenly started to clean his hands on his legs, angrily put his hand on his forehead, touched his gasmask for some reason and hastily continued to read on. Infected by his excitement Sasha let herself be distracted from her thoughts and moved closer, the old man was too busy to notice her.
Through the glass of his gasmask she could see the sparkling of his bleak green eyes which mirrored the light of the fire. From time to time he emerged from the book like he wanted to catch his breath. He abandoned his book, stared fearful at the round part of the nightly sky at the end of the tunnel, but nothing had changed. The bold head had vanished indefinitely. And as soon as he realized that he powered through the book.
Now she knew why he put water on it. He was trying to losen the pages that were stuck together from each other.
Seemingly he only succeeded with peril, once he even screamed as if he had cut himself. One page had been torn.
He cursed himself and then he realized how carefully she had watched him. Embarrassed he straightened his gasmask but he didn’t say a word until he hadn’t finished reading.
Then he ran to the fire and threw the notebook into it.
He didn’t look at Sasha and she understood: There was no use in asking. He would just lie to her or say nothing.
There were other things that caught her attention. She guessed that the bold one had been gone for a whole hour now.
Had he left them like unnecessary ballast? Sasha sat down next to the old man and said silently: “The second tunnel is closed as well. All the vents in the area are walled off. There is only this entrance”
The man looked at her but his thoughts were somewhere else. It seemed that it cost him a lot of strength to concentrate himself to hear what she had just told him. “He is going to find a way. He feels it”. He was silent for a minute and asked more out of politeness: “What’s your name?”
“Alexandra.” She answered serious: “And you?”
“Nikolai …” He started and gave her his hand, but before she could shake it he pulled it back again cramped. It seemed that he had decided differently. “Homer. I’m Homer”
“Homer. Strange nickname.” Answered Sasha sunken in thoughts.
“It’s my name.” Alleged Homer stiff and firmly.
Should she explain him that as long as she was with them these closed doors would remain closed? If the two men would have gone by themselves the door could have been open.
The Kolomenskaya didn’t let Sasha go. She punished her for how she had treated her father. She had tried to flee but now the chain was strained and she couldn’t break it. The station had brought her back once and it would do it again.
How strong she had tried to chase away her thoughts and emerging pictures like bloodsucking insects. They always returned, circled her and crawled into her ears and eyes.
The old man had asked Sasha something but she didn’t answer. Tears came out of her eyes and once again she heard the voice of her father: Nothing is more valuable than a human life.
Now she knew what he had meant.
That what had happened at the Tulskaya was no longer a riddle for him. The explanation was much simpler and more terrible then what he had thought. And now after he had deciphered the entries of the notebook a worse story began:
The diary led him on a journey of no return. Now that he had held it in his hands he wouldn’t be able to get rid of it, he could burn it as often as he wanted.
Also his distrust for Hunter had been given more fuel by the irrefutable evidence. Even though Homer had no idea what he should do with it. What he had read in the diary contradicted what the brigadier had said. He had lied and he was aware of it. Now Homer had to find out what his lies were accomplishing and if they even made sense. It all depended on it if he would continue to follow Hunter and end his journey with his heroic epos or with a massacre with no witnesses.
The first entries of the diary dated back to the first day when the caravan had passed the Nagornaya without any problems and closed in on the Tulskaya without encountering any resistance.
“We’re now at the Tulskaya. The tunnel is silent and empty”. Reported the radio operator. “We are
a making good progress which is a good sign. The commander expects that we will be back tomorrow.” A few hours after that he wrote worried: “The Tulskaya isn’t guarded. We sent a scout. He disappeared. The commander has decided that we are going to enter the station as a team. We are readying ourselves to storm the station.” Again a bit later he wrote: “It’s difficult to understand what is going on … We talked to one of the inhabitants. It’s bad. Some kind of disease”. Then he wrote with clearer: “Some inhabitants of the station are infected with something … Some kind of unknown sickness…”
It seemed that the members of the caravan had tried to help the infected at first: “The medic doesn’t know how to treat it. He says it is something like rabies … Unimaginable pain, people lose their minds and attack others”. And right after that: “Once weakened by the disease they are more or less harmless. The worst thing is …” Exactly at that point the pages were stuck together and Homer tried to wet them with water so that he could separate them again. “The light hurts. Nausea. Blood in their mouthes. Coughing. Then they bloat and turn to …” The word had been painted over carefully.
“We don’t know how it is transmitted. Through the air? Through contact?” The entry was now already from the next day. The return of the group had been delayed.
Why hadn’t they reported what they had found?
Thought Homer. Instantly he remembered that he had already read the answer. He turned back some pages … “No connection. The telephone is dead. Maybe sabotage. One of the exiled, out of revenge? They had realized it before we had arrived. At first they had chased the sick into the tunnel.
Maybe one of them has cut the cable?”
At that point Homer ripped himself away from the letters and stared into the darkness without seeing anything.
If they cable had been cut, why hadn’t they returned to the Sevastopolskaya?
Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) Page 13