He didn’t look at Sasha and she understood: There was no use in asking. He would just lie to her or say nothing.
There were other things that caught her attention. She guessed that the bold one had been gone for a whole hour.
Had he left them like unnecessary ballast? Sasha sat down next to the old man and said silently: “The second tunnel is closed as well. All the vents in the area are walled off. There is only this entrance.”
The man looked at her but his thoughts were somewhere else. It seemed that it cost him a lot of strength to concentrate himself to hear what she just had said. “He is going to find a way. He feels it.”
He was silent for a minute and asked more out of politeness: “What’s your name?”
“Alexandra,” she answered seriously, “And you?”
“Nikolai…” he started and gave her his hand, but before she could shake it he pulled it back again cramped. It seemed that he had decided differently. “Homer. I’m Homer.”
“Homer. Strange nickname,” answered Sasha, sunken in thoughts.
“It’s my name,” alleged Homer stiff and firmly.
Should she explain him that as long as she was with them these closed doors would remain closed? If the two men would have gone on their own the door could have been open.
The Kolomenskaya didn’t let Sasha go. She punished herself for how she had treated her father.
She had tried to flee, but now the chain was strained and she couldn’t break it. The cursed station had brought her back once and it would do it again.
She had tried to chase away her thoughts and visions like bloodsucking insects. They always returned, circled her and crawled into her ears and eyes.
The old man had asked Sasha something but she didn’t answer. Tears came out of her eyes and once again she heard the voice of her father: Nothing is more valuable than a human life.
Now she knew what he had meant.
That what had happened at the Tulskaya was no longer a riddle for him. The explanation was much simpler and terrible then what he had thought. And now after he had deciphered the entries of the notebook a worse story began: The diary led him on a journey of no return. Now that he had held it in his hands he wouldn’t be able to get rid of it, no matter how long it burned on the fire.
Also his distrust for Hunter had been given more fuel by the irrefutable evidence even though Homer had no idea what he should do with it. What he had read in the diary contradicted what the brigadier had said. He had lied and he was aware of it. Now Homer had to find out what his lies accomplished and if they even made sense. It all depended on it if he would continue to follow Hunter and end his journey with his heroic epos or with a massacre without any live witnesses.
The first entries of the diary dated back to the first day when the caravan had passed the Nagornaya without any problems and closed in on the Tulskaya without encountering any resistance.
“We’re now at the Tulskaya. The tunnel is silent and empty,” reported the radio operator. “We are a making good progress which is a good sign. The commander expects that we will be back tomorrow.” A few hours after that he wrote worried: “The Tulskaya isn’t guarded. We sent a scout. He disappeared. The commander has decided that we are going to enter the station as a team. We are readying ourselves to storm the station.” Again a bit later he wrote: “It’s difficult to understand what is going on… We talked to one of the inhabitants. It’s bad. Some kind of disease”. Then with he wrote with more clarity: “Some inhabitants of the station are infected with something… Some kind of unknown sickness…”
It seemed that the members of the caravan had tried to help the infected at first: “The medic doesn’t know how to treat it. He says it is something like rabies… Unimaginable pain, people lose their minds and attack others”. And right after that: “Once weakened by the disease they are more or less harmless.
The worst thing is…” Exactly at that point the pages were stuck together and Homer tried to wet them with water so that he could separate them again. “The light hurts. Nausea. Blood in their mouth. Coughing. Then they bloat and turn to…” The word had been painted over carefully. “We don’t know how it is transmitted. Through the air? Through contact?” The entry was now already from the next day.
The return of the group had been delayed.
Why hadn’t they reported what they had found? thought Homer. Instantly he remembered that he had already read the answer. He turned back some pages… “No connection. The telephone is dead. Maybe sabotage. One of the exiled, out of revenge? They had realized it before we had arrived. At first they had chased the sick into the tunnel. Maybe one of them has cut the cable?”
At that point Homer ripped himself away from the letters and stared into the dark room without seeing anything.
If they cable had been cut, why hadn’t they returned to the Sevastopolskaya?
“Even worse. Until it breaks out a week passes. What if more…? Until death another week or two. Nobody knows who is sick, nobody knows who is healthy. There is no cure. The disease is absolutely deadly.” On the same page the radio operator had made another entry which Homer already knew: “Chaos at the Tulskaya. No way to the metro. Hanza isn’t letting anybody through. We can’t go back as well.”
Two pages ahead he continued: “The healthy shoot at the sick, especially at the aggressive ones. They have herded the infected into a cage… They resist, want out.” Then the most horrible sentence: “They are tearing each other to pieces…”
The radio operator had been afraid too, but the iron discipline of the group had prevented it from turning into panic. Even in the midst of a deadly fever epidemic the brigade of the Sevastopolskaya held their ground.
“Have the situation under control. The station is sealed and we have a new commander.” And then. “Who dies next?” read Homer. “They are all alright but not enough time has passed.”
The search troop of the Sevastopolskaya had reached the Tulskaya, but had been stuck there as well. “Our orders are to stay here until the incubation period has passed so that we don’t endanger anyone… we might be staying here forever.” The radio operator noted darkly: “The situation is without hope. We can’t expect help from anywhere. If we demand more men from the Sevastopolskaya we lead them to their doom. There is nothing but to endure it here… How long?”
So the mysterious guard at the hermetic door of the Tulskaya had been put there by the troop of the Sevastopolskaya. That was why the voices had been familiar to Homer: It had been people with whom he had freed the Tschertanovskaya from some monsters just a few days back!
By passing voluntarily on returning they hoped to spare their own station the epidemic…
“Mostly from human to human but apparently also through the air. Some seem immune to it. It has started a few week ago and some are still not sick… But there are becoming more and more. We are living in a morgue. Who dies next?”
The chased writing looked like a hysterical scream at that sentence. But then the radio operator had calmed down again and continued normally. “We have to do something. To warn the others. I am going to volunteer. Not to the Sevastopolskaya but to repair the broken part of the cable. We have to reach them.”
Another day passed when the author had probably argued with the commander of the caravan and other soldiers.
A day where his despair had grown stronger. What the radio operator had tried to explain them, after he had calmed down again he had written down in this diary: “They don’t understand! The blockade has lasted for a whole week. The Sevastopolskaya is going to send a new troop and this one won’t come back as well. Then they are going to go mobile and storm the station. But whoever gets to the Tulskaya enters the risk zone. Someone is going to infect himself and run back home. That is the end. We have to keep them from storming the station! Why don’t they understand…?”
Another try to convince the leader turned out to be a failure, like the others: “They won’t let me go. They have gone mad. If not me then who? I have to flee!”
“I now act like I agree with them to wait here longer.”
Then one day later he wrote: “I let myself be assigned for guard duty at the gate. At sometime I said that I would find the place where the cable had been cut and just started running. They shot me in the back. The bullet is still inside”.
Homer turned the page:”Not for me. For Natasha and Seryoschka…” Here the feather had fallen out of the
