hurt.
The brigadier shot another salve at the creature, but it turned out to be surprisingly tough. The monster stumbled for a second, found its center of gravity again and stormed forwards.
Hunter’s bullets were spent but he was able to bury his machete into the enormous chest of the creature. The chimera fell on it, the blade submerged in his chest, and suffocated Hunter with his weight Like if it wanted to destroy all hope, a second creature jumped next to it. It stared over the twitching body of its own kind, put a claw on the white skin as if it wanted to wake it and turned its eyeless grimace to Homer…
He couldn’t pass that chance. The big caliber shredded the chest of the chimera, split its head and when the animal had finally fallen to the ground split the marble plates to shreds and dust. Homer needed time until his heart had calmed down and his finger had loosened from the trigger. Then he closed his eyes, ripped the mask from his head and breathed in the cold air that was filled with the smell of fresh blood.
All heroes had fallen and he had been left on the battlefield.
His book was over before it had begun.
CHAPTER 10
After Death
What remains of the dead? What remains of every one of us? Tombstones sink in, moss covers them, and after a few centuries the name can no longer be read.
Every forgotten grave is designated a new corpse. As the generations passed, remembrance of the dead diminished until it was forgotten.
What was called everlasting peace only lasted half a century. The bones were disturbed as the graveyards were mulched in to suburbs. The earth had become too small, for the living and the dead.
In half a century a funeral had become a luxury that only few could afford who had died before judgment day. But who cares about a single body when the whole planet is dying.
None of the inhabitants of the metro had had the honor of a funeral; nobody could hope that the rats would spare their body.
Earlier the remains of humanity had only had the right to be there as long as the living remembered them. A human being remembers their relatives, their friends and colleagues. But his conscience only reached back three generations before it faded away. Just more then fifty years.
With the same ease, you let the picture of our grandfather or your friend from school out of our conscience into absolute nothingness. The memories of a human can last longer than the bones, but as soon as the last one who remembered us has passed we dissolve with time.
Photographs, who makes them anymore? And how many of them were kept when everybody still made them?
Back then there was almost no more space in the thick family album for old and brown turned pictures, but almost nobody that looked through it could say for sure who was on the photos. The photographs of the passed can be interpreted as some kind of mask, but not as a print of their soul when they were living.
And the photographs only decay as slow as the people that live inside them.
What remains?
Our children?
Homer touched the flame of the candle with his fingers. The answer wasn’t easy to find for him, Achmed’s words still hurt him. He himself had been damned to be without children, unable for this kind of immortality, so he couldn’t do anything but choose another path to immortatlity.
Again he reached for his pen.
They can look like us. In their reflection we mirror ourselves in a mysterious way. United with those we had loved. In their gestures, in their mimics we happily find ourselves or with sorrow.
Friends confirm that our sons and daughters are just like us. Maybe that gives us a certain extension of ourselves when we are no more.
We ourselves weren’t the first. We have been made from countless copies that have been before us, just another chimera, always half from our fathers and mothers who are again the half of their parents. So is there nothing unique in us but are we just an endless mixture of small mosaic parts that never endingly exist in us? Have we been formed out of millions of small parts to a complete picture that has no own worth and has to fall into its parts again?
Does it even matter to be happy if we found ourselves in our children, a certain line that has been traveling through our bodies for millions of years?
What remains of me?
Homer had it harder than the rest. He had always envied those who had put faith in life after death. Whenever he had come to this conversation about the end of life his thoughts had always turned to the Nachimovski prospect immediately, with its disgusting and corpse eating creatures.
But maybe he was made of something more than flesh and blood, which sooner or later would be eaten by corpse eaters and digested.
Only if there existed something in him that didn’t exist as a part of his body.
What had remained of the Egyptian pharaohs? What of Greece’s heroes? From the artist of the renaissance? Did something remain of them and did it exist inside of their bodies or in what they had left behind?
What kind of immortality was left for mankind?
Homer again read what he had written, thought about it for a short time, ripped the pages out of the notebook carefully, crumpled them up and put them on an iron plate and lit them. After a minute, the work that he had done in the last three hours was only a handful of ashes.
She had died.
Sasha had always imagined death like that: The last ray of light had been extinguished, all sounds silenced, her body without any feelings and nothing but darkness.
Humanity had emerged out of darkness and silence.
It was inevitable that they would return to it. Sasha knew all the fables of paradise and hell, but underworld had sounded harmless to her. Eternity in absolute blindness, deafness and absolute not being able to do nothing at all was a hundredth times more terrible than some cauldrons with vegetable oil.
But then a small shivering ray of light appeared.
Sasha reached for it but couldn’t touch it: The dancing ray of light ran away from her, came back, lured her, and ran away from her again immediately. Playing and luring her. She knew immediately: a tunnel light.
When a human died in the metro, her father had said, his or her soul was lost and had to wander the dark labyrinth of tunnels that lead nowhere. It didn’t realize that it wasn’t bound to a body anymore, its earthly life had ended and so it had to wander around long before someday in the distant future it would see the shine of the ghostly fire. So it would guide her there, because this little fire had been sent to lead the soul to find its cold rest. But it can also happen that the fire had pity of on the soul and brought it back to his or her lost body. For these people you could say that they had returned from the beyond. It was more truthful to say that darkness had let them go again.
The tunnel light lured Sasha, again and again; in the end she didn’t resist and accepted her fate.
She didn’t feel her legs anymore, but she wouldn’t need them: To follow the spot of light she just had to keep it in her eyes. She had to fix her eyes on it as if it wanted to talk it over and tame it.
Sasha had caught the light with her gaze and it pulled her through the darkness, through the labyrinth of the tunnels which she wouldn’t have been able to leave if she had been on her own. Until they reached the last station of the lifeline. And then she saw it in front of her: Her guide seemed to sketch the contours of a far room where they waited for her.
“Sasha!” yelled a voice after her. Surprised she registered that she knew the voice, but she didn’t know to whom she belonged anymore. In it a full, know, caring tone swung with it.
“Father?” she said unbelieving.
They had come. The ghostly tunnel fire stood still, turned into a common fire, jumped onto a wick of a
