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
