The crowd towered over the girl and the musician that created these wonderful sounds in the distance remained invisible for her. The melody on the other hand seemed to catch up to her, to make her go back, as if it wanted to talk her down.
In vain.
Again it knocked on the door.
Homer rose groaning from his knees, wiped his lips with his sleeve and pulled the chain to flush.
On the dirty green fabric of his jacket a brown stain had remained.
It had been the fifth time that he had thrown up in one day, even though he actually hadn’t eaten anything.
The symptoms could have a different cause, he told himself. Why had the speed of the sickness been accelerated at all? Maybe it was because…
“Are you going to be finished soon?” yelled the impatient voice. It was the voice of a woman. Oh! Had he misread the letters on the door in his haste? Homer wiped the dirty sleeve over his sweat covered face, put on an hard look and pushed the bar to the side.
“Typical drunk!” A woman dressed barely up to her chest pushed him to the side and shut the door behind her.
Ok, thought Homer. They could believe that he was a drunk, which was a lot better than the truth. He stepped in front of the mirror that was over the sink and put his hot forehead against it. With time he could breathe again, he watched how the glass steamed up and winched: His mouth cover had slid down and was hanging under his chin. Hastily he pushed it back in front of his face and closed his eyes. No, he couldn’t consciously think about that he brought death to all humans that he met. To turn back was impossible: When he was infected, as far as he hadn’t mistaken the symptoms, the whole station was going to die anyways. Starting with the woman whose only fault was that she had to goat the wrong time. What would she do if he would tell her that she now only had a month to live at best?
How foolish, thought Homer. Foolish and stupid. He had wanted to make all immortal that crossed his path. Now fate had transformed him into an angel of death and one of the foolish, bold, powerless kind. He felt like somebody had shortened his wings and told him that an ultimatum of thirty days had been engraved on him. That was as much time as he had to act.
Was that the punishment for him overestimating himself and for his pride?
No, he could no longer be silent. And there was only one human which he could open up to.
He wouldn’t be able to deceive him for long and it was easier for both when they played with open cards.
With unsure steps he made his way to the hospital.
The room was at the end of the hallway and usually a nurse sat in front of it, but now the place was empty. Through the door slit he could hear a broken moaning. He could only make out single words and as long as Homer listened he could put them together to sentences that made sense.
“Stronger… Fighting… Must… Still sense… Resistance… Remember… Still able… Mistake… Punishment…”
His words were now a barking of orders, as if the pain had become unbearable and hindered the speaker on catching his rushing thoughts. Homer entered the room.
Hunter was lying unconscious, spreading his limbs and turning from one side to the other on a wet blanket. The bandage that pressed the head of the brigadier together had slipped over his eyes, the bony cheeks were covered in sweat and the unshaven lower jaw hung down limp.
His broad chest raised and lowered itself, struggling like the bellows of a blacksmith that only kept the fire burning within through struggle.
At the head end stood the girl with her back turned to him, her small hands behind her back.
Not at first, but after a closer look he saw the silhouette of a black knife that she was holding cramped through the fabric of her overalls.
The ringing.
Again and again.
Thousandtwohundredthandthirtyfive. Thousandtwohundredhtandthirtysix. Thousandtwohundredthandthirtyseven.
Artyom counted the sound not because he wanted to justify himself in front of the commander but because he wanted to feel some kind of movement. When he distanced himself from the point where he had started counting so that meant that with every ringing sound the point where this madness was over came closer.
Deceiving oneself? Yeah, probably. But listening to this ringing knowing that it will never stop was unbearable. Even though at first, it had been the same thing after his very first deployment: Like a metronome it had brought order in the cacophony of his thoughts with its monotone sound, had emptied his head and calmed down his racing pulse.
The ringing cut down minutes of his shift and Artyom felt like he was in a trap made out of time out of which he couldn’t escape. In medieval times there had been such torture: They had undressed a criminal and sat him under a barrel out of which never endingly water dropped onto his head. The cause was that the poor guy slowly lost his mind. Where the stretch-table was without success, normal water brought extraordinary results…
Bound to the line of the telephone, Artyom didn’t dare to distance himself just for one second. His whole shift he had tried not to drink so that no important need would lure him from the apparatus.
Days before he hadn’t been able to stand staying in the room, slipped out, hastily run to the exit and had returned immediately. Even on the doorstep he had listened and it had run down cold down his back: The frequency hadn’t been right, the signal was now faster and not as slow as before. That could only mean one thing: The moment that he had waited for was finally here when he had been gone. Fearful he looked to the door if somebody had watched him and had quickly dialed the number again and pressed his ear against the telephone.
Out of the apparatus the same clicking sound emerged, the ringing started from anew - in the know rhythm. From that moment the busy sound hadn’t returned and nobody had picked up. Put Artyom didn’t dare to put down the telephone ever again. Only from time to time he put it from his one already hot ear to his other, cramped trying not to miscount.
He hadn’t said anything to the leadership and he wasn’t even sure if he had heard anything but the eternal rhythm back then. His orders were: Call. For a week there had been only this task. Any violation would bring him in front of the tribunal and there they made no difference between mistakes and sabotage.
The telephone helped him to orientate how long he still had to sit here. Artyom didn’t have his own watch, but the commander had told him, looking at his watch, that the signal repeated itself every five seconds. Twelve sounds were one minute, 720 an hour, 13 680 a whole shift. Like small grains of sand they dropped down from one part of a giant hourglass into another bottomless container. And between the two glasses, directly in the neck Artyom was stuck and listened to time.
Also he didn’t put down the receiver because the commander could return every second to check on him. Otherwise… What he did was absolutely pointless. At the other end of the line apparently nobody seemed to be still alive.
He saw the from inside barricaded office of the head of the station and him pressing his face against the plate of the table, the makarov still in his hand. With his shot through ears he could no longer hear the ringing sound. The ones that were on the other side of the door hadn’t been able to break through, but through the keyhole and the door slit the desperate ringing crawled over the train platform where all the bloated bodies were lying… For a time you hadn’t been able to here the ringing, the noise of the crowd, of the steps, the crying of the children had been to loud, but now it only disturbed the silence of the dead. The gradually dying emergency aggregates still spread their red blinking light.
The ringing.
Again.
Thousandfivehundredthandsixtythree. Thousandfivehundredthandsixtyfour.
No reaction.
Artyom (yes, our Artyom) counted the sound not because he wanted to justify himself in front of the commander but because he wanted to feel some kind of movement. When he distanced himself from the point
