his last journey; and he was ready to sacrifice his remaining time for it.
A mere half an hour after the encounter with the monsters of the Nagornaya they had become the horrors of his memories.
Even more, while he listened to his thoughts, he felt faint movement in the deeps of his soul: Somewhere deep down inside him something had been awakened, the thing that he had wanted so much. What he had searched for on his dangerous adventures, that what he had never been able to find at home…
Now he had a real reason to delay death with all his power. He would allow it after his work was done.
The last war had been more brutal than all that had come before it and it had only taken a few days.
Since the Second World War three generations had passed, the last veterans had died and the living didn’t fear war anymore. The collective insanity that had robbed millions of humans of their humanity had once again become a simple political instrument.
The fatal game had become more like routine with every day that had passed and in the end there was no more time to make the right decision. The ban of using atomic weapons was dropped under the table in the heat of the fight: In the first act of the drama they had hung their rifle on the wall and in the one before the last they had actually fired it. It didn’t matter who had pulled the trigger first anymore.
All the metropolises on the earth were turned into ash and rubble at the same time. Even the few that had an anti-rocket shield were destroyed; they remained intact from the outside but radiation, chemical and biological weapons killed the majority of the population instantly. The unstable radio transmission between the few survivors ended after a few years. From that moment the world had ended for the inhabitants of the metro and neighboring lines.
While before the earth had been explored and colonized now it had sunk down to the borderless ocean of chaos and oblivion of ancient times. The small islands of civilization sank into the depths one after another, without oil or power, humanity returned to the Stone Age.
An age of terror began.
For centuries scientists have tried to return history from its almost destroyed papyri, parchments and foliants. With the invention of the press newspapers have continued to weave the fabric of history. And then the chronics of the last centuries almost no longer had any gaps in it: Almost every gesture, every move of those who controlled the world had been carefully documented.
Now the presses of the world had been destroyed with a single blow, abandoned. The looms of history stood still. In a world without a future they were no longer needed. The shreds of this fabric were only held together by a single, thin thread.
In the first years after the disaster Nikolai Ivanowitsch had tried to find his family in the overcrowded stations. It had been in vain. He had abandoned all hope already but alone and lost as he was he now stumbled through the darkness of the underground because in this kind of afterlife he didn’t know what to do with himself. The thread of Arianne – the sense of life – that could have showed him the exit out of this never ending maze had fallen out of his hand.
In his longing for the past he had began to collect the newspapers, to remember and to dream.
He searched the articles and reports to find out if they could have prevented the apocalypse. One day he started to write down the events in his station in some kind of article.
And so it happened that Nikolai Ivanowitsch had found a new thread: He decided to become chronicler of the metro, author of the youngest history, from the end of the world to his own. His disorganized, aimless collection had now a purpose: To restore the damaged fabric of time and continue to weave it further.
The others saw Nikolai Ivanowitsch’s passion as harmless nonsense. Out of his own will he sacrificed his pay for old newspapers and turned every corner of his personal space into an archive. He volunteered for guard duty, because there at the fire at meter 300 wild men told themselves the craziest stories like little boys, where he caught every granule of truth about the rest of the metro. Out of the myriad of rumors he filtered out the facts and wrote them down in his books.
Even though this work distracted him he knew how useless it was. After his death all these reports would turn do dust without any care. The day he wouldn’t return home they were only good as a few more seconds for the fire.
From the yellowed paper only smoke and ash would remain, the atoms would enter new connections and forms. They would be saved in some other type of matter. But what he really tried to preserve wouldn’t. All that unimaginable, ethereal information that was on those pages would be lost forever.
Humans worked that way: What stood in the school books remained in their heads up to graduation.
And when they forgot the material afterwards they did it with a true sense of relief. The memories of men were like the sand of the desert. Numbers, dates and names of unimportant people disappeared in it without a trace, as if one threw a stick into a sand dune.
Something only remains if it conquers the fantasy of man, makes the heart beat faster, to move them, make them feel something. A gripping story of a hero or a great love could survive an entire civilization because it remains in the brain and is told by generation to generation.
When he had realized that he transformed himself from a amateur scientist to an alchemist – and out of Nikolai Ivanowitsch, Homer emerged.
And from now on he no longer spent his nights to create some chronics but to search for the formula for immortality. For a story as long living as Gilgamesh and a hero that was tough as Odysseus. On the thread of this story he would attach all his accumulated knowledge. And in a world where paper was transformed into warmth, where you carelessly sacrificed the past for a small moment in the present, the legend of this hero would storm the hearts of the people and redeem them from their collective amnesty.
But he had to wait for the main reactant in the formula; the hero just didn’t want to step onto the stage.
The copying of the newspaper articles hadn’t taught Homer how to create myths, to breathe life into this golem and make this made up story more interesting than reality. His worktable seemed like Frankenstein’s laboratory to him: Crumpled pages with fragments of the first chapters of his saga, which characters weren’t convincing, weren’t able to survive. The only things that he got from these nightly works were dark rings under his eyes and a sore bitten lip.
Still, Homer still didn’t give up on his new destiny that easy. He chased away every suspicion that it could be that he wasn’t suited for it, that you needed a skill to create worlds that he hadn’t received.
He just had to wait for an inspiration, he said to himself… and from where should it come from? From the humid air in the station maybe? The tea ritual at his home or during his shift doing agriculture? Or while on guard duty, which became and more scarce for him because of his age? No, he needed excitement, adventure and the storm of passion. Maybe then the dams of his mind would break and he could start his creation…
Even in the hardest times the Nagatinskaya had never been abandoned completely. Of course it wasn’t an ideal place to life. Nothing grew here and the exits were closed. But many used the station to slip under the radar for a while or for some intimate time with their lover.
But now the station was empty.
Hunter moved with silent steps up the stairs, up to the tracks and then he stopped. Homer followed him, breathing heavily, looking around nervously at all sides. The station was dark, only the dust hanging in air glittered in the shine of their lamps. The sparse hills of shredded cardboard on which the inhabitants of the Nagatinskaya slept on were spread out all over the floor. Homer leaned his back against a pillar and sledded down slowly to the ground. The Nagatinskaya had once been one of his favorite stations because of the elegant and colorful marble mosaics. Now the station was dark and lifeless. The Nagatinskaya was nothing like he remembered.
Like a dead man’s old passport, his old picture taken at a time where he didn’t know that he wasn’t just looking into a camera but eternity.
“Not a single soul is here,” said Homer hesitantly.
“Except one.” Hunter nodded into Homers direction.
“I meant…” started Homer, but Hunter cut him off with a gesture of his hand.
At the end of the station where the row of pillars ended and even the brigadier’s search light couldn’t shine, something crawled slowly onto the platform…
Homer fell onto the ground next to him, lightened his fall with his arms and stood up clumsily. Hunters lamp was turned off and the brigadier himself had disappeared into thin air. Sweating because of his fear, Homer
