switched his rifle to auto-fire and pressed the stock, shivering against his shoulder.
Out of the distance he heard two suppressed shots.
Encouraged he looked past the pillar and hasted forward. In the middle of the platform Hunter was standing upright. At his feet was lying a difficult to see, skinny and pitiful figure. It seemed to be made out of boxes and rags and only had a slight remembrance to a human being. But it was one. You couldn’t determine its age or sex – in its dirty face you could only see its eyes. It made almost inaudible, sighing sounds and tried to crawl away from the brigadier. He seemed to have shot through both of its legs.
“Where is everyone?” Why is nobody here?” Hunter put his foot on the stinking bundle of torn rags.
“They are all gone… left me alone. Left me all by myself” it croaked. At the same time its hand wiped over the granite without moving forwards.
“Where did they go?”
“To the Tulskaya…”
Homer had reached both of them and joined the conversation immediately: “What is going on there?”
“How am I supposed to know?” The homeless person made a grimace. “Everybody that went there, died there. Go and ask them. I had no more strength to move around in those tunnels. I’d rather die here.”
The brigadier didn’t give up: “Why did they leave?”
“They were afraid, boss. The station got more and emptier over time. So they decided to break through. Nobody returned.”
“Not a single one?” Hunter raised his pistol.
“Nobody. Only one.” the pile of rags corrected himself. When he realized that the barrel of the gun was still pointed at him he floundered around like an ant under a magnifying glass.
“He went to the Nagornaya. I was asleep. I could have imagined it.”
“When?”
The homeless man shook his head. “I don’t have a watch. Maybe yesterday, maybe last week.”
No more questions came but the barrel of the pistol was still pointed at the forehead of the interrogated man.
Hunter was silent. Strange, but he was breathing heavily; it looked like the conversation with the bum had cost him a lot of strength.
“Can I…” asked the homeless man.
“There, eat!” growled the brigadier and before Homer knew what was going on he had pulled the trigger twice. The dark blood coming from the hole in the unlucky man’s forehead made its way his wide open eyes. He fell to the ground – once again nothing but rags and cardboard. Without looking up Hunter loaded four more bullets into the clip of the Stetschkin and jumped on the tracks. “We will find out for ourselves soon enough,” he yelled at the old man.
Homer lowered himself unwillingly over the body, took a piece of dirty cloth and put it over the destroyed head of the homeless man. His hands hadn’t stopped shaking.
“Why did you kill him?” he asked weakly.
“Ask yourself” answered Hunter in a dull voice.
Even when he gathered all his strength the only thing he could still do was open and close his eyes.
Strange that he had awoken at all… he had been laying there unconscious for about an hour and his body had felt as numb as if it was covered with a layer of ice. His tongue had dried at his palate and a ton heavy weight laid on his chest. No he couldn’t even say goodbye to his daughter, it would have been the only thing worth delaying the end of his eternal fight for survival.
Sasha didn’t smile anymore. It seemed she was now dreaming uneasily, rolled up on her bedroll, both arms crossed in front of her chest. Even when she was a child he had always woken her when she had been tormented by nightmares, but now he had only enough strength to slowly movie his eyelids.
And then even that became harder and harder. When he wanted to do was hold on till Sasha awoke, to continue the fight. It had lasted for over twenty years now, every day, every minute and he was damned tired of it. Tired of fighting, hiding, hunting, proving, hoping and lying.
While his mind darkened he only had two wishes: To see Sasha’s eyes one more time and then… to finally find peace. But he couldn’t do it. Once again the pictures of the past rose up in front of his inner eye and mixed with reality.
He had to make a decision. To break others or be broken himself. To punish or to penance…
The guardsmen closed the rows. Every single one of them was loyal to him alone. Ready to die here and now, to let themselves be torn apart by the masses or to shoot at the innocent. He was the commander of the last unbreakable station of the metro, president of a no longer existing confederation.
Under his soldiers his authority was unquestioned, unmistaken, every single of his orders was to be executed immediately, without question. He would take full responsibility for it, like he had always done.
When he retreated now this station would sink into anarchy at first and then it would be swallowed by the boiling red empire that had swelled over its usual borders and had annexed more and more territories. When he would open fire on the demonstrators, power would remain in his hands – at least for some time. And if he wouldn’t shy away from mass executions and torture maybe even forever.
He aimed his rifle. One moment after him the entire unit did so too.
There they raged, not just a few hundred demonstrators but a giant, faceless human mass: Bared fangs, wide open eyes, raised fists.
He turned off the safety. His unit answered with the same clicking sound.
It was time to take fate into his own hands.
He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. Chalk fell from the ceiling. For a moment the masses turned silent. He signaled his fighters to lower their weapons and made on step towards the demonstrators. He had made his decision.
And finally the memory let him in peace.
Sasha was still sleeping. He took his last breath, tried to look at her one last time but he could no longer raise his eyelids… but instead of eternal, impenetrable darkness he saw an unimaginable blue sky – clear and bright, like the eyes of his daughter.
“Stop!”
Homer almost jumped and raised his hands, he was that startled. But he kept it together. The voice – probably from a megaphone – out of the depths of the tunnel had surprised him. The brigadier wasn’t surprised at all. Tense as a cobra before it strikes; he took the heavy automatic rifle from his back silently.
Hunter hadn’t just refused to answer a single of the old man’s questions but hadn’t said a single word at all. The one and a half kilometer from the Nagatinskaya to the Tulskaya had felt as endless as the journey to Golgatha. He feared that death waited at the end of the tunnel and it was getting harder for him to keep Hunter’s speed.
At least he had time to prepare himself and to think about old times. He thought about Yelena, cursed himself for his egoism and asked her to forgive him. He once saw the magical, soft, sad light on that slightly rainy summer day on the Tverskaya. He regretted that he hadn’t said what should happen to his newspapers before he left.
He had been ready to die – to be ripped apart by monsters, eaten by giant rats, poisoned by some kind of gas… what other explanation was there why the Tulskaya had transformed itself into a black hole that swallowed everything outside and didn’t let it go?
But when he heard the mysterious but familiar human voice he didn’t know what to think anymore. Had the Tulskaya just been captured? But who was able to destroy all the recon teams of the Sevastopolskaya, vagabonds that traveled through the tunnels systematically, not even sparing women and old people?
“Thirty steps forward!” said the voice out of the distance.
It sounded vaguely familiar and if he would have had time to think about it he would have been able to determine who’s voice it was.
Wasn’t that someone from the Sevastopolskaya?
Hunter put his Kalashnikov in one hand and carefully counted his steps: For the thirty steps Hunter took Homer needed fifty. In front of them was a fuzzy barricade that had been constructed out of random objects. Strangely the defenders didn’t use any light…
