“Thanks,’” she said suddenly. “At first I thought you were just like him.”
“I don’t think there is anybody just like him,” said Homer.
“Are you friends?”
“Like a shark and its pilot fish.” He smiled sadly because he thought how fitting this picture was: of course it was Hunter that eliminated all these humans, but a few bloody shreds were Homer’s to clean up.
She stood up a bit. “What do you mean?”
“Where he goes I go. I think I can’t go alone anywhere without him and he… Well maybe he thinks that I clean him up like one of the pilot fish. But I don’t really know what he is thinking myself.”
The girl sat down closer next to the old man: “And what do you want from him?”
“I have a feeling that as long as I am near him… I keep my inspiration.”
“What does inspiration mean?”
“Actually it means to breathe in something.”
“What do you want to breathe in? What does it get you?”
Homer shrugged his shoulders. “It is nothing that we breathe in. It is what something breathes into us.”
The girl drew something into the dirty floor of the railcar. “As long as you breathe in death nobody is going to want to touch your lips. Everybody is going to back away from the smell of corpses.”
“When you see death you think about many things.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to cause death anytime you want to think about something,” she said.
“I’m not doing that” justified the old man. “I am just standing next to him. But for me it is not about death, not just about it. It is so that I will be shook awake, to get my head clear.”
“Have you had a bad life?” asked the girl.
“A boring one. When one day is like the other, they fly by so fast that the last seems to approach with great speed,” Homer tried to explain. “You fear that can’t take care of things anymore. And every day is filled with thousands of small things. After you are finished with one you shortly catch a breath and do the next thing. At the end you don’t have the strength or the time to do something really important. You think to yourself: Ok, I’ll just start tomorrow. But that tomorrow never comes and it is always today.”
“Have you seen many stations?” It seemed that she hadn’t really listened to him.
“I don’t know,” answered Homer surprised. “Probably all.”
“I only two,” sighed the girl. “At first my father and I lived at the Avtosavodskaya, and then they chased us away, to the Kolomenskaya. I have always wished to see at least one other. But this one here is so strange”. Her view wandered along the array of round arcs. “Like thousands of entrances without any walls in between them. Now they are all open, but I no longer want to go there. I am afraid.”
“The second one… was that your father?” Homer hesitated. “Is he dead?”
The girl retreated into her shell and was silent for a while before she answered: “Yes”.
Homer took a deep breath. “Stay with us. I am going to talk to Hunter that I need you, to…” He spread his arms but he didn’t know how he could explain to the girl that she would be his muse.
“Tell him that he needs me,” she jumped onto the rails and distanced herself from the railcar.
While doing so she looked at every single pillar she passed.
She wasn’t a bit flirtiest nor did she play with him. She wasn’t interested in guns and she felt indifferently about using her female arsenal, like gripping looks and lovely gestures. She didn’t know anything, that a blink in a man’s direction could rise up a storm, and that some people were ready to kill others over a fleeting glance. Or was she just not able to use them in the right way?
Whatever, she didn’t need this arsenal. With her hard, direct look she had forced Hunter to change his decision, with a single move she had thrown her net over him and stopped him from committing another murder.
Had she broken his armor? Had she found his soft core? Or did he need her for something? Probably the last one: the thought about the brigadier having a weakness was too much for Homer.
He just could not sleep. Even though he had changed the heavy and sticky gasmask with a lighter one he still had trouble breathing and it was like somebody had put his head into a vise.
Homer had left all his possessions at the tunnel. He had cleaned his hands with a piece of grey soap, washed away the dirt with the foul water out of his canister and decided to wear a gasmask at all times. What else could he do protect the people in his immediate area?
Nothing. Truly nothing anymore. Not even to go away, fight through the tunnels and become a rotten pile of shreds would have helped. But now that he was so close to death it immediately put him back more than twenty years, into his time, when he had just lost the people that he had loved. And this gave his plans new and true purpose.
If it would have been in Homers power he would have given them a memorial. But they hadn’t earned even a common tombstone. They had been born generations apart and had all died on the same day: His wife, his children and his parents.
And his classmates and friends at school. The actors and musicians that he had worshipped. All who still had been at work, already at home or stuck in traffic.
Those who didn’t die, those that remained for many days in the irradiated, half destroyed capitol, had tried to survive and weakly scraped at the closed security gates of the metro.
Those that had been instantly pulverized into their smallest atoms and those that had bloated and fallen into pieces, were eaten alive by radiation sickness.
The scouts that were the first to go to the surface had trouble finding sleep for many days. Homer had met some of them at the campfire near the transfer station. In their eyes there was still the inextinguishable impression that the city had left on them, their eyes were like frozen rivers that spilled over with dead fish. Thousands of not moving cars with their lifeless passengers that blocked the prospects and exits of Moscow. Bodies everywhere. Nobody there to get rid of them until finally new creatures took over the reign of the city.
To keep their sanity they avoided schools and kindergartens. But it was enough to lose your mind if you coincidentally saw the staring look through the dusty window from the backseat of a car.
Millions of lives had stopped. Millions of words left unspoken, milliions of dreams left unfulfilled and milliards of arguments unsolved. Nikolai’s youngest son had asked him for a big package of colored felt tip pens, his daughter had been afraid of figure skating training, and his wife had described to him that they should do a short vacation, just the two of them at the ocean, before going to bed…
When he had realized that their small wishes and passions had been their last, they appeared far more important to him.
He would have liked to engrave a memorial plate for every one of them, but an engraving on a giant mass grave of humanity was also a worthy cause. And now that his time was running out he thought that he now knew how to find the right words.
He didn’t know in which order he should put them together yet, with what he could fix them to a place, with what he would decorate them, but he felt: In the story that played in front of his eyes he would find a place for all the restless souls, all the feelings and all the small grains of knowledge that he had gathered so meticulously. In the end also for himself. The plot was best for this, better for this than for anything.
As soon as he would be up there again and it would be bright and the merchant s would venture to their station again he would try to find a clean notebook and a pen. He had to hurry: If he didn’t bring this mirage of his novel that was floating in the distance to paper soon it could disappear into thin air again and he didn’t know how long he would have to sit on the dune and stare at the horizon in the hope that out of tiny grains of sands and flickering air again an ivory tower would emerge.
He probably didn’t have enough time for even that.
An ironic smile on his lips, Homer thought: whatever the girl said, it was the look in her empty eyes that forced him to act. Then he had to think about the curved eyebrows, the two bright rays in her dark, dirty face, the chewed on lips, the shaggy blond hair and he smiled again.
Tomorrow at the market hew would have to search for something for her as well, he thought, as he drifted to sleep.
At the Pavelezkaya the night was always restless. The shadow of the odorous torches twitched over the marble walls, the tunnel breathed restlessly, only at the foot of the escalator a few silhouettes talked to each other
