No one dared to object. The brigadier paused for a moment and blurted out:
‘I’m going to the station. And I’m taking Homer with me. The watch will change in an hour. Arthur’s in charge here.’
The sniper jumped to his feet and nodded, even though the brigadier couldn’t see it. The old man also got up and started bustling about, collecting his scattered bits and pieces into his knapsack, without even finishing his potatoes. The warrior walked up to the campfire, fully kitted out for an expedition, with his eternal helmet and a bulky knapsack behind his shoulders.
‘Good luck.’
Watching the two figures as they receded – the brigadier’s mighty frame and Homer’s skinny one – the sniper rubbed his hands together, as if he felt cold, and cringed.
‘It’s getting a bit chilly. Throw on a bit of coal, will you?’
The brigadier didn’t utter a single word all the way, apart from asking if it was true that Homer used to be an engine driver’s mate, and before that a simple track-walker. The old man gave him a suspicious glance, but he didn’t try to deny it, even though he had always told everyone at Sebastopol that he had risen to the rank of engine driver, and preferred not to dwell on the fact that he used to be a track-walker, believing it wasn’t really worth mentioning.
The brigadier walked into the station commandant’s office without knocking, saluting the sentries stiffly as they moved aside. Istomin and the colonel – both looking tired, dishevelled, and bewildered – got up from the desk in surprise when he entered. Homer halted timidly in the door, shifting from one foot to the other.
The brigadier pulled off his helmet and set it down on Istomin’s papers, then ran one hand over the clean-shaven back of his head. The light of the lamp revealed how terribly his face was mutilated: the left cheek was furrowed and twisted into a huge scar, as if it had been burned, the eye had been reduced to a narrow slit and a thick, purple weal squirmed its way down from his ear to the corner of his mouth. Homer thought he had grown used to this face, but looking at it now he felt the same chilly, repulsive prickling sensation as the first time.
‘I’ll go to the Circle,’ the brigadier blurted out, dispensing with any kind of greeting.
A heavy silence descended on the room. Homer had heard the brigadier was on special terms with the command of the station because he was so irreplaceable in combat. But only now did the realisation dawn that, unlike all the other Sebastopolites, this man didn’t seem to defer to the commanders at all.
And at this moment he didn’t seem to be waiting for the approval of these two elderly, jaded men, but simply giving them an order that they were obliged to carry out, which made Homer wonder yet again just who this man was.
The perimeter commander exchanged glances with his superior and frowned, about to object, but instead merely gestured helplessly.
‘You decide for yourself, Hunter, it’s pointless trying to argue with you.’
CHAPTER 2
The Return
The old man hovering by the door pricked up his ears: he hadn’t heard that name before at Sebastopol Station. Not even a name, but a nickname, like he had – he wasn’t really called Homer, of course, he was just common or garden Nikolai Ivanovich, who had been named after the Greek teller of myths here at the station, for his irrepressible love of all sorts of stories and rumours.
‘Your new brigadier,’ the colonel had said to the watchmen, who were examining with morose curiosity this broad-shouldered newcomer clad in Kevlar and a heavy helmet. Ignoring basic courtesy, he turned away indifferently: the tunnel and the fortifications seemed to interest him far more than the men entrusted to his command. He shook the hands of his new subordinates when they came up to make his acquaintance, but he didn’t introduce himself, nodding without speaking, committing each new nickname to memory, and puffing out bluish, acrid cigarette smoke into their faces to demarcate the limits of closeness. In the shadow of the raised visor his narrow gun-slit eye, framed by scars, had a ghastly, lack-lustre gleam to it. None of the watchmen had dared to insist on knowing his name, either then or later, and so for two months now they had been calling him simply ‘Brigadier’. They decided the station must have shelled out for one of those expensive mercenaries who could manage perfectly well without a past or a name.
Hunter. Homer silently worked the strange un-Russian word around on his tongue. Better suited for a Central Asian Shepherd Dog than a man. He smiled gently to himself: well, well, so he still remembered that there used to be dogs like that. Where did all this stuff in his head come from? A fighting breed with a short docked tail and ears clipped right in close to the head. Nothing superfluous.
And the name, if he kept repeating it to himself for a while, started sounding vaguely familiar. Where could he have heard it before? Borne along on an endless stream of gossip and tall stories, it had snagged his attention somehow and then settled on the very bottom of his memory. And now it was overlaid with a thick layer of silt: names, facts, rumours, numbers – all that useless information about other people’s lives that Homer listened to with such avid curiosity and tried so zealously to remember.
Hunter . . . maybe some jailbird with a reward from Hansa on his head? The old man tossed the idea like a stone into the deep millpond of his amnesia and listened. No, nothing. A stalker? He didn’t seem like one. A warlord? More like it. And a legendary one, apparently . . .
Homer cast another stealthy glance at the brigadier’s face, so impassive that it seemed almost paralysed. That dog’s name suited him remarkably well.
‘I need a team of three men. I’ll take Homer, he knows the tunnels around here,’ the brigadier went on, without even turning towards the old man or asking his permission. ‘You can give me another man you think will suit. A runner, a courier. I’ll set out today.’
Istomin jerked his head hastily in approval before he gathered his wits and raised his eyes enquiringly to look at the colonel. The colonel frowned and muttered gruffly that he had no objections either, although for days he had been battling desperately with the station commandant for every free soldier. It seemed like no one intended to consult Homer, but he didn’t even think of arguing: despite his age, the old man had never refused this kind of assignment. And he had his reasons for that.
The brigadier snatched his immensely heavy helmet up off the desk and headed towards the exit. Lingering in the doorway for a moment, he said brusquely to Homer:
‘Say goodbye to your family. Pack for a long journey. Don’t bring any bullets, I’ll give you those . . .’ And he disappeared through the opening.
The old man set off after him, hoping to hear at least some basic explanation about what he should expect on this expedition. But when he emerged onto the platform, Hunter was already way ahead, ten of his massive strides away, and Homer didn’t even try to catch up with him, but just shook his head and watched him go.
Contrary to his usual habit, the brigadier had left his head uncovered: perhaps, lost in thoughts of other things, he had forgotten, or perhaps he was feeling a need for air right now. He passed a gaggle of young women – pig herders idling away their lunch break – and there was a whisper of disgust behind his back: ‘Ooh girls, my God, what a repulsive freak!’
‘Where the hell did you dig him up from?’ asked Istomin, slumping back limply in his chair in relief and reaching out his plump hand to a pile of cut cigarette papers.
People said the leaves that were smoked with such relish at the station were gathered by the stalkers at some spot on the surface almost as far away as Bitsevsky Park. Once, for a joke, the colonel had held a radiation dosimeter to a packet of ‘tobacco’, and it had started chattering away menacingly. The old man had given up smoking on the spot, and the cough that had been tormenting him at night, terrifying him with thoughts of lung cancer, had gradually started to ease. But Istomin had refused to believe the story of the radioactive leaves, reminding Denis Mikhailovich, with good reason, that in the Metro absolutely anything you
picked up was more or less ‘hot’.
‘We’re old acquaintances,’ the colonel replied reluctantly; then he paused and threw in: ‘He didn’t used to be like this. Something happened to him.’
‘That’s for sure, if his face is anything to go by, something definitely happened to him,’ the commandant snorted, and immediately glanced towards the door, as if Hunter could have been loitering there and overheard him by chance.
The commander of the defensive perimeter had no right to grumble about the brigadier’s unexpected return from out of the cold mists of the past. From the moment he showed up at the station, he had effectively become the backbone of the perimeter’s defence. But even now Denis Mikhailovich couldn’t entirely believe that he had come back.
The news of Hunter’s strange and terrible death had flashed round the Metro the previous year, like an echo racing through the tunnels. And when Hunter turned up on the doorstep of the colonel’s little room two months ago, the colonel had hastily crossed himself before opening the door. The suspicious ease with which the resurrected man had passed through the guard posts – as if he had walked straight through the soldiers there – made the colonel doubt that this miracle was entirely benign.
Through the steamed-up spyhole of the door he saw what seemed to be a familiar profile: a bull neck, a cranium scraped so smooth that it shone, a slightly flattened nose. But for some reason the nocturnal visitor had frozen in semi-profile, with his head lowered, and he didn’t make any attempt to lighten the heavy silence. Casting a reproachful glance at the large, open bottle of home-brew beer standing on the table, the colonel heaved a deep sigh and pulled back the bolt. The honour code required him to help his own, and it drew no distinctions between the living and the dead.
When the door swung open Hunter looked up from the floor, making it clear why he had been hiding the other half of his face. He was afraid the other man simply wouldn’t recognise him. Even a hardboiled veteran like the old colonel, for whom the command of the Sebastopol garrison was like honorary retirement on a pension, compared with the turbulent years that came before it, winced when he saw that face, as if he had burned his fingers, and then started laughing guiltily – he couldn’t help himself.
His visitor didn’t even smile in reply. Over the months the terrible scars that mutilated his face had healed over slightly, but even so almost nothing about him reminded the colonel of the old Hunter. He flatly refused to explain his miraculous escape or why he had been missing for so long, and simply didn’t answer any of the colonel’s questions, as if he hadn’t even heard them. And worst of all, Hunter presented Denis Mikhailovich with an old debt for repayment and made him promise not to tell anyone that he had shown up. The colonel had been obliged to leave Hunter in peace and stifle his own commonsense reaction, which cried out for him to inform his commander immediately.
The old man had, however, made some cautious enquiries. His visitor was not implicated in anything shady and no one was looking for him any more after his funeral rites had been read so long ago. His body, admittedly, had never been found, but if Hunter had survived, someone would certainly have heard from him, the colonel was confidently informed. Definitely, he agreed.
On the other hand, as often happens when people disappear without a trace, Hunter, or rather, his simultaneously blurred and embellished image, had surfaced in at least a dozen myths and legends that had the ring of half-truth about them. Apparently this role suited him just fine, and he was in no hurry at all to disabuse the comrades who had buried him so prematurely.
Bearing in mind his unpaid debts and drawing the appropriate conclusions, Denis Mikhailovich had kept his mouth shut and even started playing along: he avoided calling Hunter by name in the presence of outsiders and let Istomin in on the secret, but without going into detail. It was basically all the same to Istomin: the brigadier earned his issue of rations in spades, spending all his time, day and night, on the front line in the southern tunnels. He was hardly ever spotted at the station where he put in an appearance once a week, on his bath day. And even if he had only jumped into this hellhole so that he could hide there from unknown pursuers, that didn’t bother Istomin, who had never been squeamish about employing the services of legionaries with dark pasts. Just as long as he was a fighter – and there were no problems on that score.
The soldiers of the watch had grumbled among themselves about their new commander, but they stopped after the first engagement. Once they saw the cold, methodical, inhuman euphoria with which he annihilated everything they were supposed to annihilate, they all understood his true value. No one tried to make friends with the unsociable brigadier any longer, but they obeyed him implicitly, so he never needed to raise his dull, cracked voice. There was something hypnotic about that voice, even the station commandant started nodding dutifully every time Hunter spoke to him, without even waiting for him to finish, for no special reason, it was simply an automatic response.
For the first time in recent days it felt easier to breathe in Istomin’s office, as if a silent thunderstorm had swept through it, relieving the tension in the air and bringing welcome release. There was nothing left to argue about. There was no finer warrior than Hunter – if he disappeared in the tunnels, the Sebastopolites would be left with only one choice.
‘Shall I give instructions to prepare for the operation?’ asked the colonel, bringing up the subject first, because he knew the station commandant would want to talk about it anyway.
‘Three days ought to be enough for you,’ said Istomin, clicking his cigarette lighter and screwing up his eyes. ‘We won’t be able to wait for them any longer than that. How many men will we need, what do you think?’
‘We’ve got one assault brigade awaiting orders, I can handle the other men, there’s another twenty or so. If by the day after tomorrow we haven’t heard anything about them—’ the colonel jerked his head in the direction of the door ‘—declare a general mobilisation. We’ll break out.’
Istomin raised his eyebrows, but instead of objecting, he took a deep drag on his cigarette, which crackled faintly. Denis Mikhailovich raked together several well-scribbled sheets of paper that were lying around on the desk, leaned down over them shortsightedly and started sketching mysterious diagrams, writing surnames and nicknames inside little circles.
Break out? The station commandant looked through the drifting tobacco smoke, over the back of the colonel’s head, at the large schematic map of the Metro hanging behind the old man’s back. Yellowed and greasy, covered with markings in ink – arrows for forced marches, rings for ambushes, little stars for guard posts and exclamation marks for forbidden zones – the map was a chronicle of the last decade. Ten years, during which not a single day had passed peacefully.
Below Sebastopol the marks broke off immediately beyond Southern Station: Istomin couldn’t remember anyone ever coming back from there. The line crept on downwards like a long, branching root, immaculately chaste all the way. The Serpukhov line had proved too tough a nut for the Sebastopolites to crack; even if the entire toothless, radiation-sick human population combined its most desperate efforts, it probably wouldn’t be enough down there.
And now a white, swirling fog of uncertainty had obscured the stub end of their line that reached obstinately northwards, to Hansa, to the human race. Tomorrow none of the men that the colonel ordered to prepare for battle would refuse to fight. The war for the extinction or survival of humankind, begun more than two decades ago, had never stopped for a moment at Sebastopol. When you live by side with death for many years, the fear of dying gives way to indifference, fatalism, superstitions, protective amulets and animal instincts. But who knew what was waiting for them up ahead, between the Nakhimov Prospect and Serpukhov stations? Who knew if it was even possible to break through this mysterious barrier – and if there was anywhere to break through to?
He recalled his latest trip to Serpukhov Station: market stalls, tramps’ makeshift beds and dilapidated screens behind which th
e slightly better-off inhabitants slept and made love to each other. They didn’t produce any food of their own, there were no hothouse chambers for growing plants, no pens for cattle. The nimble-footed, light-fingered Serpukhovites fed themselves from profiteering, reselling old surplus goods picked up for a song from convoy merchants who were running behind schedule, and by providing citizens of the Circle Line with services for which those citizens would have faced trial at home. Not a station, but a fungus, a parasitic growth on the mighty trunk of Hansa.
The alliance of rich trading stations on the Circle Line, aptly dubbed ‘Hansa’ in memory of its Teutonic prototype, was an enduring bulwark of civilisation in a Metro that was sinking into a swamp of barbarity and poverty. Hansa was a regular army, electric lighting even at the poorest way station and a guaranteed crust of bread for everyone whose passport contained the coveted stamp of citizenship. On the black market passports like that cost an absolute fortune, but if Hanseatic border guards discovered anyone with a counterfeit, the price he paid was his head.
Of course, Hansa owed its wealth and power to its location: the Circle Line ringed the central tangle of radial lines, with its transfer stations allowing access to all of them and harnessing them together. Shuttle traders carrying tea from the Economic Achievements Station and trolleys delivering ammunition from the arms factories at Bauman Station preferred to offload their goods at the closest Hansa post and go back home. Better to let the goods go cheap than set off right round the Metro in pursuit of profit, on a journey that could be cut short at any moment.
Hansa had annexed some of the adjacent radial line stations, but most of them had been left to themselves and became transformed, with Hansa’s connivance, into grey areas, where people conducted the kind of business in which the disdainful bosses of Hansa preferred not to be implicated.
Metro 2034 Page 3