off.
“Who is there?” whispered Homer to Hunter.
Homer smiled in secret: Who knew what the devil had brought them? Through the wide open doors of the Nachimovski prospect horrible creatures feel through the ceiling like through a funnel. But there were also permanent residents in this station. Even though they were seen as not dangerous Homer felt about them in a special way: A sticky mixture of fear and disgust.
“Small… hairless”, the brigadier tried to describe them.
That was enough for Homer: There they were. “Corpse-eaters”, he said silently.
Between the Sevastopolskaya and the Tulskaya, maybe in different regions of the metro, this curse had achieved a new literally meaning in the last years.
“They feed on flesh?” asked Hunter.
“More on dead flesh,” answered the old one, unsure.
These disgusting creatures – spiderlike primates – didn’t attack humans; they fed on dead flesh that they had dragged down from the surface. And a big clan had made their nest at the Nachimovski prospect. The reason you could smell the disgusting-sweet smell rotting flesh in the neighboring tunnels, in the station, it was so heavy that it could make your head spin, was that they gathered dead bodies as food. Some wore their gasmasks before entering so that they could tolerate the smell.
Homer who remembered the special feature of the Nachimovski very vividly, reached hastily for his gasmask and put it over his mouth and nose.
Achmed that didn’t have enough time to pack looked at it with envy and covered his nose with his arm. The miasma that grew in this station covered them, surrounded them and chased them forwards.
Hunter didn’t seem to experience anything like them. “Is that toxic? Spores?” asked Hunter.
“The smell,” said Homer under his mask.
The brigadier looked at Homer as if he wanted to make sure that he wasn’t trying to make a joke at his expense.
Than the shrugged his broad shoulders and said: “So just the usual”. He held his assault rifle more comfortably and made clear that they should follow him and continued with soft steps.
After maybe fifty meters an almost unnoticeable whispering joined the horrendous smell. Homer wiped the warm sweat from his head and tried to keep his galloping heart at bay. They were close.
Finally the shine of the lamp illuminated something, the broken lights of a train that tried so hard to fight against the rust, its headlights starring blindly into the dark; a shattered windshield… in front of them was the first wagon of a train that blocked the tunnel like a giant cork.
The train laid hopelessly dead for a long time, but every time he saw it he had the childish wish to climb into the dusty driver cabin, touch the buttons of the panel and to imagine with his eyes closed that he was rushing through the tunnel, behind him a garland of bright lit wagons, full of people, that read, slept, stared at the advertising and tried to hold a conversation over the sound of the rushing train.
“When the alarm signal is given, you are to go to the next station. There you are to man the station. The doors are to be opened. The civilian teams have to help with the evacuation of wounded and the hermetic closure of the metro stations.”
For judgment day he had gotten clear and easy instructions. Everywhere possible they were followed. Most of the trains broke down on the tracks and fell into a lethargic sleep and then there where the survivors that instead of a few weeks, what had been promised to them, now had to stay there forever. Most of the trains had been completely dismantled for inventory and spare parts.
In some places they used them as homes, but Homer, who viewed the trains as living beings, thought that that was like vandalizing a corpse, as if they had stuffed his favorite cat.
In uninhabitable places like the Nachimovski prospect time and vandals had left their mark on the train but it remained intact.
Homer couldn’t turn away. The rustling and hissing that approached from the station, faded into the background and once again he heard the ghostly howling alarm siren and then the deep signal of the train that spread the unheard message, once long, twice short: “Atom!”
Brakes squeaked and through the speakers came the confusing message: “Dear passengers, because of technical emergency the train can’t continue its ride…”
Nor the train driver whispering into his microphone neither his assistant Homer knew the full extent of overwhelming hopelessness of this formal sentence. The exhausting creaking sound of the hermetic gates… they separated the living from the dead, once and for all. Protocol demanded that the doors had to be closed six minutes after the alarm had been sound and they had to be closed forever, it didn’t matter how many people where still on the other side.
Those who resisted the closing of the gates were to be shot immediately.
Would a tiny police officer that normally chased homeless people and drunks out of the station be capable of shooting a man into his stomach because he resisted the ton heavy machine so that his wife with her broken heel would still be able to slip through? Would the feisty women with her uniform and her cap, who checked tickets and had only brought two things to perfection in her 30 years of service, be able to get in and cut off a gasping old man that was still trying to pass through the door?
The instructions saw six minutes for a human to become a machine. Or a monster.
The screaming of the women and the screams of the men, the unrestrained crying of the children, the sounds of the pistol and machine guns salves… Out of every speaker the request to remain calm sounded metallic and emotionless.
Somebody unaware read it because nobody that knew would be so controlled and indifferent in repeating the same sentence over and over again: “Please remain calm!” Crying, pleading… Again shots.
And exactly six minutes after the alarm, one minute before Armageddon – with the dull sound of a graveyards bell the doors closed. The sound of the bolts locking in place.
Silence.
Like in a grave.
To get around the wagon they had to move along the wall. The driver had braked too late, maybe he had been distracted by something on the track. They climbed upwards over an iron ladder and found
themselves in a roomy hall. It had no pillars but a half-round ceiling with egg shaped holes for the lamps.
The hall was big; it included the train station and both tracks with the trains. An unbelievable elegant, easy construction, simple and laconic.
Just don’t look down, not under your feet nor in front of you.
Don’t look what the station had become.
A grotesque meadow of corpses, where no one ever found peace, a terrible field of flesh, covered with gnawed off skeletons, rotting bodies and ripped off parts of corpses. Grotesque creatures had dragged down greedily everything they could find in their small kingdom, a lot more than they could eat, as reserves. These reserves decayed and dissolved, but they were still growing.
The mountains of rotting flesh moved, ignoring the laws of nature, as if they breathed and from everywhere a disgusting scraping sound could be heard. The shine of the flashlight caught one of the strange creatures: Long nodular arms and legs, slack, wrinkled, hanging, hairless grey skin and a bent back. The dim eyes starring half blind around the room and the big ears moved like they had a life of their own.
The creature made a hoarse scream and retreated slowly on all limbs back through the open train door. As sluggish as this one the other corpse eaters started to climb down from their mountains of bodies. Angered they bared their teeth and growled at the group.
On two feet they wouldn’t have been able to reach Homer to the chest and he knew that the cowardly creatures wouldn’t attack a strong, healthy human. But the irrational horror that he felt for these creatures came with his nightly nightmares: Weakened and abandoned he was laying there alone in an empty station and the monsters came closer and. closer. Like a drop of blood in the ocean attracted countless sharks these creatures could feel the approaching death of a stranger and rushed to look at them.
