bottle. He shook it, opened it and took a deep swig without asking Homer if wanted one to.
Homer tried to close his eyes for a second.
His left eye wouldn’t close.
“Where’s Achmed? What happened to him?” Chills ran down Homer’s back.
“He’s dead.” his answer almost sounded indifferent.
“Dead.” Homer echoed mechanically.
The moment the giant hand ripped the hand of his comrade out of his, Homer knew: No living being could escape its grip. Homer had just been lucky that the Nagornaya hadn’t chosen him. The old man turned around again. He still couldn’t believe that Achmed was gone forever. He stared at his hand, it was scraped and bloody. He hadn’t been able to hold on to him. He didn’t have the strength.
“He knew that he would die.” he said silently.
“Why did they take him out of all of us and not me?”
“There was still life in him.” answered the Brigadier.“They feed on human life.”
Homer shook his head. “That isn’t fair. He had small children. So many things that hold him here… well held him here… but I have been looking for those for eternity…”
“If you were the Nagornaya, would you eat moss?” Hunter cut off Homer and ended the conversation with him pulling Homer back on his feet. “We got to keep moving. We’re late.”
While Homer ran behind Hunter he tried to figure out why he and Achmed had ended up at the Nagornaya. Like a flesh eating orchid the station had clouded their mind with its miasma and lured them back in. But they hadn’t turn around a single time that much was sure for Homer. So he started to believe in the distortion of space in the tunnels now, like those simple minded comrades of his on guard duty. The solution was a lot easier. He stopped and slapped himself on the forehead: The connecting track! Some hundred meters behind the Nagornaya there was a track for trains to turn around. It turned around at a sharp angle and that’s why they following the wall blindly, reached the parallel track and then when the wall suddenly disappeared, ran back to the station.
So much for magic! But there was still another thing that needed an explanation. “Wait!” he yelled after Hunter.
But he just continued to march forward as if he was deaf, so the old man had to catch up to him while breathing heavily. When he had caught up to the Brigadier he tried to look him into the eyes and said: “Why did you leave us to our fate?”
“Me, leave you two?”
There was a sarcastic tone in his emotionless, metallic voice. Homer bit himself on his tongue. True, it was him and Achemd that had ran from the station and left the Brigadier alone with the demons…
The more Homer thought about how raging and helplessly Hunter had fought at the Nagornaya the more he realized that the inhabitants of the station hadn’t accepted the fight that Hunter had tried to force them into. Out of fear? Or had they seen him as a part of the family?
Homer gathered his courage – there was only one question left, the hardest one of all. “At the Nagornaya… why did they ignore you?”
Several minutes passed; Homer didn’t dare to ask again. Then Hunter gave him a short, almost inaudible and grumpy answer: “Would you eat tainted flesh?”
The beauty of the world will redeem you, her father had once said jokingly.
Sasha had put the colorful teabag back in the pocket of her jacket, blushing. The small quadratic plastic hull that still had a faint aroma of green tea was her greatest treasure. And a reminder that the universe wasn’t just the body of the station and its four tunnels buried twenty meters below the graveyard that had once been Moscow. The teabag was some kind of magical portal that moved Sasha back by centuries and thousands of kilometers. It was so much more, something enormously important.
In the wet climate of the metro, paper decayed quickly.
Decay and mold didn’t just eat books and brochures, they destroyed the entire past. Without pictures and chronicles the already limping human mind stumbled and ran into the wrong direction like man without his crutches.
The hull of the teabag was made out of a material that mold and the time couldn’t harm. Sasha’s father had once said that it would take thousands of years before this material would fall apart. So even their decedents would one day inherit this teabag, she thought.
And the picture printed on the teabag was, even though it was a miniature, a real picture. A golden frame that was as bright as on the day it came from the conveyor belt. It depicted a view that robbed Sasha of her breath. Steep walls of stone, covered in dreamlike mist, a far reaching pine forest that held on the almost vertical mountains, roaring waterfalls that fell down from the highest tip of the mountain into an abyss, a purple shine that spoke of the nearing dawn… in her entire life she had never seen anything more beautiful.
She could sit there for a long time, with the teabag in her hand, just looking at it. The mist in the morning that covered the mountains held her view magically. And even though she had read all the books that her father had brought from his expeditions before they sold them, the words did not suffice to describe what she felt looking at these one centimeter tall mountains, taking in the smell of the pine needles. It was a world so far from their reality but it had a strong pull…
The sweet longing and the eternal expectation of what the sun would see first… the endless thoughts about what was behind the sign with the brand of the tea: A strange tree? A nest of an eagle? One of those houses that lay on the slope of the mountain, and in which she would soon live with her father?
It was him that had brought her the teabag when she was five years old. Back then, the contents of the bag were a real rarity.
He had wanted to surprise her with real tea. She had to gather her courage to drink it, as if it was medicine.
But the plastic hull had fascinated her from the very start. Back then he had explained her that it wasn’t a very artful illustration: A conventional Chinese province, just good enough for the print of a teabag.
But teen years later Sasha still viewed it with the same eyes as on the day she had gotten the gift from her father.
Her father, on the other hand, thought that the teabag was just a shabby replacement for the whole world. And every time she fell into this trance and looked at this badly drawn fantasy he felt the unspoken accusation for their mutilated, bloodless life. He tried to hold her back every time, without any success. With almost anger he asked her for the hundredth time what she liked about this old packaging for a gram of tea. For the hundredth time she put it back into her pocket and answered embarrassedly: “Father… I think it is beautiful!”
Hunter wouldn’t stop for a moment, a second’s rest. If Hunter had been there, Homer would have taken three times as long, slowly making his way down the tunnel. He would have never moved so securely and self- confident through the tunnel. The group had to pay a terrible transit fee down the Nagornaya, but at least two out of three had made it. And all three could have survived if they hadn’t been lost in the fog. The price wasn’t higher than usual: Nothing had happened there that hadn’t happened before, neither at the Nachimovski prospect nor at the Nagornaya.
So it wasn’t because of the tunnels that lead to the Tuskaya? Now they were completely silent, but it was a disastrous and tense silence. Sure: even at a totally unknown station Hunter could feel dangers that waited for them hundredths of meters in advance. But was it possible that his intuition would leave him exactly here, here where at least a dozen experienced fighters had suffered the same fate?
Approaching the Nagatinskaya he hoped he would have the solution for all the secrets… Homer struggled to keep his thoughts together because they ran fleetingly through his head.
Still, he tried to think about what waited for them at the station that he had once loved so much. The myth teller imagined that the legendary satanic legation had emerged at the Nagatinskaya or that the inhabitants had been eaten by migrating rats on their way for food through the tunnels that humans couldn’t pass through. Even if Homer would have been alone he wouldn’t have turned around for anything in the world. In all these years at the Sevastopolskaya he had forgotten to fear death. When he had embarked on this journey he knew that it could be
