needed a lot of luck get to the northern border of the Nagornaya alive.
“How am I supposed to explain that to you?” answered Achmed unwillingly.
“It is the breath…”
“Whose breath?” asked Hunter, unimpressed. He put his bag on the ground so that he could choose the right weapon for this job.
Achmed whispered: “The breath of the Nagornaya.”
“We’ll see.” said Homer contemptuously and made a grimace. Though it seemed like Hunters distorted face came back to life; in reality it was motionless as always – it was only a trick of the light.
They could see it now too, a few hundred meters further than Hunter: A thick, pale white fog crawled at them on the ground, danced around their feet, crawled up their legs and then filled the tunnel up to their waist… it seemed like they were climbing into an ice-cold and hostile ocean. They stepped deeper and in to it, until the murky water-like “breath” would finally go over their heads.
You couldn’t see anything anymore. The beams of their flashlights got stuck in the fog like flies in a net of a spider. After they had finally fought themselves through the emptiness they felt exhausted and defeated. Noise, as if dimmed by a pillow, came through the fog. Every move cost them a lot of strength, as if they weren’t walking on concrete but on thick mud.
Breathing became harder, not because of the humidity, but because of the bitter stench of the air. They had to force themselves to breathe and they couldn’t shake the feeling that in reality they were breathing in the breath of a giant, strange creature that withdrew oxygen from the air and replaced it with its toxic fumes.
Homer put on his gasmask, just in case. Hunter gave him a quick look, reached into his bag and put on his generic rubber mask as well. Only Achmed was once again without a gasmask.
The brigadier stopped and listened with his shredded ear at the Nagornaya, but the thick white soup hindered him to decipher the noises from the station and create a picture of the situation. It sounded like something heavy had fallen to the ground far away, followed by a long sigh, in a pitch that was too low for a human, or any other creature. Then they heard something scraping hysterically and shrieking like if a giant hand had bent the thick iron pipes on the ceiling to a knot.
Hunter twitched his head, as if he was trying to shake off dirt from his head and instead of a short machine pistol he was now holding an army-Kalashnikov with a double magazine and a mounted grenade-launcher. “Finally,” he said.
At first they didn’t realize that they had already entered the station; the fog in the Nagornaya was as thick as milk. While Homer looked through the glass of his gasmask he felt like a diver that was on board of a sunken ocean cruiser.
You could only see the mosaic through the fog for a few seconds at a time and then it swallowed them again: they were seagulls that had been pressed with coarse soviet metal templates. Fossils, thought Homer, the fate of humanity and their creations… but will somebody dig us up one day?
The fog around them was alive, floated in different directions, twitching. Sometimes dark images emerged from the fog, a dented wagon of a train and a rusty cabin, a scaly body or head of some mythological creature. Homer shuddered while thinking who had filled the seats all these decades ago.
He had heard much about what was going on at the Nagornaya, but he had never seen anything face to face…
“There it is, to the right!” screamed Achmed as he grabbed the old man’s sleeve. A suppressed sound erupted out of Achmed’s gun as the bullet passed through the homemade silencer.
Homer turned around with such speed that nobody would have thought he still had it in his rheumatic body. His blurred beam of light illuminated only a part of the metal covered pillars.
“Behind! Behind us!” Achmed shot another salve. But his bullets only shredded the rest of the marble plates that once decorated the walls of the station. Whatever he had seen through the blurry dim lights had already vanished, seemingly unharmed.
He must have breathed in too much of that stuff, thought Homer. But one second later he saw something in the edge of his field of vision… something gigantic, crouching because the four meter high ceiling of the station was too low for its size and it was unimaginable maneuverable. For an instance it emerged out of the fog, became visible again and disappeared, a long time before the old man was able to point his assault rifle at it.
Homer looked at around desperately for the brigadier.
He couldn’t see him anywhere.
“It is ok. Don’t be afraid” he said again and again. He tried to catch his breath and calm her down. “You know… there are people that are far worse off than we are…” He tried to smile, but he only made a terrible grimace, as if his lower jaw had fallen off.
Sasha smiled back, over her pointed, dirty cheek a salty tear crawled down. At least her father was conscious again, for a few hours at least, enough for her to think about everything.
“This time I couldn’t find anything.” he croaked. “Forgive me. At the end I even went to the garages as well. It was further than I thought. But I found an intact one there. The lock was out of rust free steel, even oiled. Breaking it was impossible, so I used the last demolition charge. I thought, maybe there is a car in there, spare parts and all. I let it explode, went in: Empty. Why did they lock it then the bastards? All that noise, I prayed that nobody had heard me. But when I got out of the garage there were all these dogs. I thought, that’s it… That’s it.” He closed his eyes and went silent.
Sasha took his hand worried, but he shook his head imperceptiblu without opening his eyes: Don’t be afraid, everything is fine. He didn’t even have the strength to talk anymore but he wanted to tell her everything, why he had returned with empty hands, why they now had to starve for a week until he could get up again.
But before he was able to do so he fell into a deep sleep.
Sasha checked the bandages on his shredded leg, wet with black blood. Laying a fresh compress on it, she stood up and went to the rat’s cage and opened the small door.
The animal looked out of its cage distrustfully. It tried to hide at first, and then it jumped down on the train track and ran around. You can rely on the feelings of a rat: There was no danger in the tunnel.
Calmer, the young woman returned to the stretcher.
“Of course you will feel better again. You will be able to walk again.” she whispered to her father. “And you will find a garage with a new car in it. We’ll get in together and drive away from here. Ten maybe fifteen stations away. Somewhere, where they don’t know us, where we are strangers. Where nobody hates us. If there is even such a place…”
Now it was her that told the magical stories that she had heard so many times from him. She repeated it word by word and now that she spoke out the old mantra of her father she believed in it even a hundred times more. She would nurture him back to health, heal him. Somewhere in this world there had to be a place where they didn’t matter to others.
A place where they could be happy.
“There it is! It is looking at me!”
Achmed shrieked as if it had already grabbed him. He had never screamed like that. Again he fired his assault-rifle until it jammed. There was nothing left of Achmed’s sanity: trembling he tried to reload a new clip.
“It is after me… after me…”
Suddenly you could hear the rattling sound of another automatic rifle. It stayed silent for a second and went off again, this time almost inaudible with salvos of three shots. So Hunter was still alive, there was still hope.
The slamming sound distanced itself and came back again, so it was impossible to say if the bullets found their target.
Homer was expecting the angry screams of an injured monster, but the station covered itself in mysterious silence; its inhabitants seemed to have no bodies or they were inviolable.
The brigadier continued his strange fight at the other end of the station, from time to time the glowing tracer rounds cut through the fog, drunken from the fight against the ghost of Nagornaya. He had left his companions alone.
Homer took a deep breath and leaned back his head to look at the ceiling. For some time now he had the need, he had felt the cold, heavy look with his skin, his head, his hair and his back. Now he couldn’t resist his premonitions anymore.
