follow his orders and if anybody would dare to refuse his order he would eliminate them without hesitation.
And far before Sasha was able to bring her fear of other humans under control, before she was clear about him or herself, an unknown voice told her, the voice of her inner soul, that she would follow him.
The railcar proceeded astonishingly fast. Homer felt no resistance from the lever, because the brigadier took all the strain. The old man raised and lowered his arms as well, out of decency, but it didn’t cost him any strength.
The compact metro bridge waded with many pillars through the dark, thick water. The concrete had fallen of the iron skeleton at some parts, its legs stood so awry that one of the two lanes had kinked and fallen down.
It had been a totally functional bridge, a standard model, short lived like the new building in the outer areas of the capitol which had been designed on a drawing board.
There was nothing, nothing that was beautiful of it.
Still, as he looked around his surroundings, Homer had to think about the magically retractable bridges of Petersburg or the elegant bridge constructions of the Krymski Most with its cast iron chains.
In the twenty years that he had lived in the metro, Homer had only been on the surface three times. Every time he had tried to see as much as he could in the small time away from his cell. To refresh his memories, to point his weakened eyes at the objects of the city, to push the rusty triggers of his visual memory and to gather as many impressions for the future. Maybe he would never have the chance to get to the beautiful places on the surface, like the Kolomenskaya, the Retschnoi Woksal or the Tjoply Stan, all three where stations that laid far away from other stations. Back then, like many other inhabitants of Moscow he had treated them in with a condescending attitude.
With the years Moscow aged continuously, fell apart, withered away. Homer had the need to touch the disappearing bridge like that girl from the Kolomenskaya had touched the dead man again.
The bridge, the grey edges of the factories, the abandoned beehives of the apartments. To dwell in their sights. To touch them, to feel that they really existed, that everything here wasn’t a dream. And to say goodbye, just in case.
The line of sight was bad, the silver moonlight obtruded through the clouds so that the old man sensed his surroundings more than he perceived them. But that wasn’t too bad: He was used to replacing reality with his imagination.
If it mattered, Homer just thought about what he saw right now. Forgotten legends that he had appointed himself to create and the mysterious disappearance of daylight that had busied his imagination for the last hours. He felt like a child on a field trip: he sucked in the sights, the obscure silhouettes of the skyscrapers into himself; he continuously turned his head from one side to the other and loudly talked to himself.
The others didn’t enjoy the journey as much. The brigadier who silently stared into the direction they were driving only looked from time to time when he had heard a sound from underneath the bridge. His attention was directed at the point where the rails dug themselves back into the ground.
The girl behind them held the scavenged gasmask with both of her hands. He could see that she didn’t feel well on the surface. In the tunnel Homer had thought that she had been tall, but the moment that they had stepped outside she was small as if she had retreated into an invisible house of a snail and even the wide radiation suit that she had taken from the body didn’t make her taller. The fascinating things you could see from the bridge didn’t seem to interest her and most of the time she looked at the ground.
They passed the ruins of the station Technopark. It had been built hastily right before the war.
The poor state it was in was not the doings of the bomb attacks, but the teeth of time.
Then they finally approached the tunnel.
Compared to the bleak darkness of the night the tunnel entrance emitted absolute darkness.
Homer’s suit seemed to him like a real armor and he himself felt like a medieval knight that entered the cave of a legendary dragon.
The sounds of the nightly city remained at the doorstep, exactly here Hunter ordered them to step from the railcar. Now you could only hear the careful steps of the three companions and the few words that echoed from the tunnel segments. The tunnel sounded strange. Homer heard the closeness of the room, as if he had climbed into the inside of a glass bottle.
“It’s closed here.” Hunter seemed to want to enforce their fears. The shine of the lamp exposed the resistance: a hermetic door towered in front of them like an impenetrable wall. Where the door met the rails it shined and the massive corners of the door raised themselves out of brown shreds of oil. Old planks were laying on a hill. Dried firewood and to coal turned pieces of wood were there as if there had been a campfire not long ago. The door was being used, without a doubt, but seemingly only as an exit.
No bell or other signal was to see on this side.
The brigadier turned to the girl: “Is it always like that?”
“Sometimes they come out and drive to us on the other shore. To trade. I thought today…” She seemed to want to distance herself in time. Had she known that there was no more entrance, or had she kept something from them?
Hunter hammered the grip of his machete against the door as if he wanted to operate a giant metal gong. But the steel was too thick and instead of the dull echoing sound he had hoped for it created only an empty clanking sound. Probably nobody would have been able to hear it on the other side even if somebody was still alive there.
No answer. No miracle had happened.
Past all reason Sasha had hoped that the two would be able to open the door. She hadn’t warned them that the entrance to the big metro had been closed out of fear; they could have chosen another way and left her where they had found her.
But nobody waited for them at the big metro and to break through the barricade was impossible.
The bold one searched the door for a weak point or bent key holes, but Sasha already knew that you could only open it from the other side.
“You stay here,” he commended them grimly. “I’ll look at the barricade at the second tunnel and search for any vents.”
He was silent for a moment and added: “I’ll come back.” Then he vanished.
The old man gathered a few twigs and planks and made a sparse fire. He sat down at the doorstep and started to fumble in his backpack. Sasha sat down next to him and watched him out of the corner of her eyes. He made a strange spectacle, maybe for her and maybe for himself.
After he had brought a torn, dirty notebook out of his backpack he threw a distrustful look at
Sasha, distanced himself from her a bit and lowered his head into the pages.
Immediately he jumped up with astonishing speed and looked it the bold one was really gone. Slowly he sneaked ten steps to the exit of the tunnel and only after he didn’t see anybody there he leaned at the door, put the backpack between him and Sasha and sunk into the book.
He read restlessly, mumbling something she couldn’t understand, removed his gloves, reached for his water bottle and put a few drops onto the book. Then he continued to read.
After a short time he suddenly started to clean his hands on his legs, angrily put his hand on his forehead, touched his gasmask for some reason and hastily continued to read on. Infected by his excitement Sasha let herself be distracted from her thoughts and moved closer, the old man was too busy to notice her.
Through the glass of his gasmask she could see the sparkling of his bleak green eyes which mirrored the light of the fire. From time to time he emerged from the book like he wanted to catch his breath. He abandoned his book, stared fearful at the round part of the nightly sky at the end of the tunnel, but nothing had changed. The bold head had vanished indefinitely. And as soon as he realized that he powered through the book.
Now she knew why he put water on it. He was trying to open the pages that were stuck together.
Seemingly he only succeeded with peril, once he even screamed as if he had cut himself. One page had been torn.
He cursed himself and then he realized how carefully she had watched him. Embarrassed he straightened his gasmask but he didn’t say a word until he hadn’t finished reading.
Then he ran to the fire and threw the notebook into it.
