The doors itself had opened without a sound and gave allowed the look into the inners of the tunnel that lead to the Avtosavodskaya Nad and later to the ring. On the rails was a big railcar with a smoking motor, a searchlight at the front and a lot of men as its crew. Through the sights of their machine guns the men saw to blinking wanderers that held their hands in front to their eyes.
“I want to see your hands!” sounded the order.
She followed the example of the old man and both complied and raised their arms. It was the same railcar that had come to them over the bridge on market day. These people knew about Sasha – probably now the old man with his strange name had to regret taking the cuffed girl with them without asking how she had ended up at this godforsaken station.
“Gasmask down, IDs.” Commanded one of the men on the railcar. While Sasha exposed her face she cursed her stupidity. Nobody could free them. The sentence over her father and over her had still all of its power. How could she have been so naive that those two men could have brought her into the metro? That nobody would recognize them at the border?
The men recognized her instantly. “Hey, you can’t go in here! You have ten seconds to leave. And who is that? Is that your…”
“What’s going on?” Said the old man confused.
“Let him in peace! It’s not him!” screamed Sasha.
“Leave!” The voice from the men with the assault rifle was cold as ice. “Or we…”
“At the girl?” Asked a second voice unsure.
“Hey, didn’t you hear us?’
She definitely heard the clicking of their safeties.
Sasha stepped back and closed her eyes. For the third time in a few hours she stood before the face of death.
Then she heard a small whistling noise. In the now reigning silence she waited in for the last order. It never came. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and opened one eye.
The motor was still smoking. Blue-grey clouds swam around the white ray of the search light that had fallen over for some reason. Now that the light didn’t blind her anymore Sasha could recognize the people on the railcar.
They were lying around like folded puppets on the railcar, flopped out on the tracks. Mindlessly hanging arms, unnatural twisted necks and bent in torsos.
Sasha turned around. Behind her was the bold one. He had lowered his pistol and watched the railcar carefully, which now looked like a butcher’s counter. Then he raised the barrel and pulled the trigger again.
“That was it.” He said, satisfied. “Take their uniforms and gasmasks from them.”
“Why?” The face of the old man was distorted by his fear.
“We have to change clothes. We are taking their railcar to get to the Avtosvodskaya!”
Sasha starred at the killer. Inside of her, fear and admire fought with each other. Disgust mixed with gratefulness. He had just eliminated three with one blow and violated her father’s most important rule. But he had done it to save her – well and the old man’s life of course. Was it a coincidence that he had done it for the second time? Could it have been that she had mistaken his cruelty with strictness?
One thing was clear: The fearlessness of this man let her forget his ugliness…
The bold one was the first to walk over to the railcar and start to rip off the enemies’ rubber scalps from their heads. Suddenly he tumbled back and made a shrill scream as if he had seen the devil himself, put both of his hands in front of him and repeated several times: “A dark one!”
CHAPTER 9
Air
Fear and terror aren’t in the slightest way the same. Fear pushes, forces you to act, forces you to be intuitive. Terror paralyzes body and mind and robs humans of their humanity. Homer had seen enough in his life to know the difference between the two.
The brigadier didn’t know fear, but terror could apparently overthrow him. But that wasn’t what Homer was wondering right now but even more what had trigged the reaction.
The body was unordinary. Under the black rubber mask, dark shimmering skin, full lips and a broad, slightly compressed nose were exposed. Homer had never seen any people with dark skin in the ten years without music channels. But he realized immediately that the dead man was an African-American. A rarity in the metro for sure. But was so terrifying about him?
The brigadier had already calmed down; the strange seizure hadn’t lasted for a minute. He lit the flat face, groaned something incomprehensible, and started to undress the resisting body. Homer could have sworn that some finger bones broke.
“They want to mock me… With friendly greetings, what?… And this here is supposed to be humane?… such a punishment…” mumbled Hunter silently.
Had he mistaken the body for somebody else? Did he maim the dead man out of revenge for the humiliation that he had just suffered, or was there an older and more serious score to settle? While Homer suppressed his disgust as he helped to remove the clothes of the body, he looked covertly again and again to the brigadier.
The girl didn’t participate in the scavenging and Hunter left her in peace. She sat a distance on the rail, her face in her hands. Homer believed that she was crying.
Finally Hunter threw the body outside the door on a pile. In less than 24 hours there would be nothing left. By day the city was ruled by such terrible creatures that even the most dangerous tunnel monsters retreated into their caves without complaint.
The strange, but still fresh blood on the dark uniform was not to se but it stuck, like a cold plaster, to his chest as if it wanted to return to a living organism again. It disgusted them.
Homer asked himself if this masquerade was even necessary. He reassured himself that at least they would be able to prevent more victims at the Avtosavodskaya. When Hunter’s plan would work they would pass through freely, thinking they were one of them…. but what if it didn’t work? Did he even have the intention to leave unnecessary victims behind?
The bloodlust of the brigadier disgusted Homer but also fascinated him at the same time. Not even a third of his murders could be justified by self defense, but still there was even more sadism behind them than usual. More importantly a question tormented the old man: had Hunter volunteered to just go to the Tulskaya to satisfy his bloodlust in the end?
The unforunates that had laid a trap for them hadn’t found a cure for the mysterious fever but that didn’t mean that there was none. Here in the underground there existed places where more scientific thinking was present, where people researched, developed new medicaments and mixed serums together. Take for example, Polis, the heart of the metro, where all four arteries merged. The Polis was the last allusion of a city, which stretched over the labyrinth of stations from the Arabatskaya, Borovizkaya, Alexandrovski sad and Biblioteca Imeni Linian.
All the doctors and scientists had settled there or the giant bunker next to the Taganskaya, the secret city of science for Hanza.
The Tulskaya may not have been the only station where the epidemic had stricken. Probably they had fought it successfully? How could you abandon hope for rescue that easily? Of course now that Homer carried the time bomb inside him he only cared about his own egoistic interests. His mind had already made his peace with the death that was in front of him, but his instincts resisted and ordered him to find a way out. Maybe if he found a way to rescue the Tulskaya he could save his own station from oblivion and maybe even himself…
Hunter on the other hand seemed to apparently believe that there was a cure for the disease… The few words that he had exchanged with the guard at the Tulskaya had been enough to condemn them to death and make himself the judge of the sentence. First he had led the commander of the Sevastopolskaya on a false path then he had fastened the decision and now he readied the uncompromised implementation: the Tulskaya would go under in fire.
