Metro 2034

CHAPTER 6 From the Other Side

One moment after that Homer almost believed that he had imagined everything: The vague outline of the barricades at the end of the tunnel, the somehow familiar distorted voice… when the light went out all other sounds faded as well. He felt like a convict that had been put a sack over his face just before the execution. In the absolute darkness and sudden silence the whole world seemed to have disappeared.

Homer touched his face to reassure himself that he hadn’t vanished into this cosmic blackness as well.

Then he calmed down again, tried to find his lamp and held the trembling beam of light in front of him where a few seconds ago the invisible battle had taken place. About thirty meters from where he had taken cover during the fight, the tunnel ended. A steel door cut through the tunnel like the blade of a guillotine. So he had heard right: Somebody had really activated the hermetic door. Homer knew of its existence but he hadn’t thought that it was still functional. But it turned out that you could still use it.

His eyes, weakened by paperwork, didn’t immediately see the human figure that leaned on the iron wall.

Homer pointed his rifle forward and took a step back. At first he thought that one of the men from the other side had remained outside in the confusion, but then he recognized Hunter.

The brigadier didn’t move. Homer started to sweat.

Hesitantly he approached Hunter. Probably he would see blood on the wall… but no. Even though they had fired at Hunter in an empty tunnel with a machine gun he was completely unharmed. He pressed his mutilated ear on the metal and listened for sounds that only he could hear.

“What happened?” Homer asked carefully and got closer.

The brigadier didn’t pay any attention to him. He whispered something to himself, repeating the words that were spoken on the other side of the closed door. Several minutes passed till he moved away from the door and turned to Homer: “We go back.”

“What happened?”

“There are bandits. We need reinforcements.”

“Bandits?” asked the old man confused. “That voice back there seemed…”

“The entire Tulskaya is in the hand of the enemy. We will have to storm it. For that we need backup with flamethrowers.”

“Why flamethrowers?”

“To be sure. We go back.” Hunter turned around and moved away from Homer.

Before Homer followed Hunter he looked at the door observantly, yes he even pressed his own ear against the cold metal in the hope to hear a part of the conversation as well. But he heard only silence.

And suddenly Homer realized that he didn’t believe Hunter. Whoever this enemy was that had captured the station behaved completely incomprehensible. Why did they activate the hermetic door? To protect themselves from two people? What kind of bandits negotiated with some armed men instead of mowing them down?

And then: What was the “punishment” that the mysterious guardian had mentioned?

Nothing is more valuable than a human life, Sasha’s father had once said.

For him it wasn’t just empty words, not just a saying. There had been a time where he thought differently, he hadn’t been youngest military commander in the whole line for nothing.

When you’re twenty you don’t think much about murder and death. Your whole life seems like a game and in the worst case scenario you just start over again. It wasn’t a coincidence that the armies of the world recruited young men that had been students before. And those boys that played war were only red and blue arrows for only one man commanded thousands. One that didn’t think about ripped off legs, guts swelling out and crushed skulls when he decided to sacrifice a regiment.

There had been a time where her father had hated his enemies as much as himself. Back then he had looked at tasks that put him in danger with strange frivolity. But he had never foolishly moved forward but with strict calculations. Smart, striving and indifferent for his life he couldn’t feel reality, didn’t waste a thought about the consequences and felt no regrets. He had never shot at women and children but he had executed deserters with his own hands and was always the first to storm the enemies’ fortifications.

Pain couldn’t harm him. Most of the time he didn’t care.

Until he met Sasha’s mother.

She defeated him, him who was used to victory, with her indifference. His only weakness, his ambition that had driven him against machineguns before was now directed at a desperate storm attack that had transformed itself into a long siege.

For a long time he didn’t have to strain himself when it was about women. They had always came to him.

Corrupted by their compliance he had always satisfied his longings at the first night so that the seduced had lost every interest for him before he could fall in love with her. His stormy nature and his fame clouded the girl’s eyes and none tried the good old strategy of letting the man wait so that they could get to know him better.

He couldn’t impress Sasha’s mother with his awards, his rank and his triumphs on the real battlefield and on the battlefield of love as well. She didn’t react to his looks and his jokes only made her shake her head. To storm this young woman would be a challenge. A challenge more important than any conquest of some neighboring station.

She should have been only another mark on the stock of his rifle. But soon he understood: The further the unity with her faded into the distance, the more important she became to him. Being with her about one hour per day felt like a triumph for him. But it seemed that she only agreed to it to torment him.

She doubted his service, laughed about his principles, cursed his coldness and shook his conscience until he was at the end of his strength.

He endured everything. He even liked it. With her he started to think. To question. And then to feel: Helplessness, when he didn’t know how to approach her, regret for all the minutes he couldn’t spend near her, fear to lose what he had never won. Love. Then she rewarded him with a sign: A silver ring.

Only when he no longer knew how to live on without her she gave in.

One year later Sasha was born.

He could never abandon these two lives and he himself couldn’t just die anymore.

When you command the strongest army in your known part of the world with the age of twenty-five it is very hard to get rid of the notion that the earth would stop turning because you commanded it to do so.

To take the life of a human you didn’t really need much power; to bring somebody back to life, though, was in nobody’s hands.

He knew that too well: tuberculosis killed his wife and he wasn’t able rescue her. In that moment something in him broke.

Sasha had just turned four but could still remember her mother very well. Sasha remembered the horrible emptiness of the tunnels after she died. The close death of her mother had opened a bottomless abyss in her small world and she had looked straight into it. The edges of the abyss only grew back slowly – two or three years passed until she no longer yelled for her mother in her sleep.

Her father did that to this day.

Maybe Homer didn’t approach the whole thing right. When the hero of his epic didn’t want to appear then why shouldn’t he start with his lover? Maybe he could get him out of hiding with her beauty and youth? When Homer started to draw her outline first, would his hero just step forward out of nowhere? For their love to be complete those two figures had to complement each other ideally and completely.

Therefore the hero of Homers poem had to appear as a completed, finished character.

In their thoughts and facets of their character they would match each other like the shards of the glass mosaics at the Novoslobodskaya. Then when they were once whole, they would be determined to become one again… Homer didn’t find anything bad in “stealing” that plot from the old classics.

It was easier said than done. To form a young woman out of ink and paper was a task that Homer didn’t think he was able to accomplish. He doubted that he was able to describe feelings convincingly as well.

His relationship with Yelena was one of softness; he had learnt too late how to love without holding back. In their age it was no longer about satisfying their passion but to come together and leave the shadows of their pasts behind them and ease their loneliness.

Nikolai Ivanovitsch’s had left his one and only true love on the surface of Moscow. But the facets of her personality had faded over the centuries so that there was no example for his novel anymore. Also there had been nothing heroic about his relationship with his wife.

On the day the atomic thunderstorm broke over Moscow, they had offered Nikolai to take the place of the train driver Serov who had retired shortly before. That meant twice the pay. Before he would take on the new post he was to take a few days off. He had called his wife and she had said that she would bake a Scharlottka, then leave the house to go shopping and take a stroll with their kids.

But before he could go on vacation he just had to bring another shift behind him. When Nikolai Ivanovitsch entered the driver cabin of the train he knew he would be the captain of, happily married, at the beginning of a tunnel that lead to a beautiful and bright future. Half an hour later he had aged twenty years. When he came to the end of the lane, Nikolai was a broken, poor and lonely man. Maybe that was why every time he stumbled onto a miraculously preserved train he felt the strange need to take the place of the train driver, letting his hands glide over the instruments on the dashboard, to look through the front windshield into the network of tunnels. To imagine starting the vehicle again…

And put it in reverse…

It was like the brigadier created some kind of field that shielded them from all dangers. And he seemed to know it.

They didn’t even need an hour back to the Nagornaya.

This time the line didn’t resist them.

Homer had felt it again: Scout, merchant from the Sevastopolskaya or any other human, as soon as they ventured into the tunnels they became foreign matter for the blood flow of the metro. As soon as they left their station the air around them went up in flames, reality cracked and unbelievable creatures emerged seemingly out of nowhere and threw themselves against the humans of the metro.

Hunter on the other hand was no stranger to the dark tunnels and he didn’t seem to bother the leviathan in which veins they moved. He even turned off his light to transform himself into the darkness that filled the tunnels. Then it seemed that he was gripped by an invisible stream and flew on twice as fast. Even though Homer followed him with all his strength he fell behind and had to yell so that Hunter would wait for the old man.

On their way back they passed the Nagornaya without being disturbed. The fog had disappeared and the station slept.

Now you could see from one end of the station to the other. Where the ghostly giants hid themselves was a riddle that Homer was unable to solve. It was a common, abandoned stop: salt had gathered itself on the wet ceiling, a soft layer of dust was on the platform; here and there somebody had written something indecent on the walls with charcoal and the walls were blackened from smoke. Only on your second look you could see the strange markings on the ground, doing some kind of strange dance through the station and the dried brown stains on the pillars and the ceiling which were cracked and broken as if something had scratched itself on them.

But even the Nagornaya just flickered shortly and then was left behind. They flew on. As long as Homer followed the brigadier his magical cocoon of invincibility seemed to surround him as well. The old man started to wonder, where did he take the strength for this enormous march?

But he didn’t have enough air to talk and Hunter probably wouldn’t have answered. For the hundredth time Homer asked himself why he had joined the silent and merciless brigadier that seemed to forget about him again and again.

The numbing smell of the Nachimovski prospect approached. Homer would have liked to leave this station behind him as quickly as possible but the brigadier slowed down. While the old man was only able to stand the smell through his gasmask Hunter even sniffed around as if he could smell something out of the thick and heavy rotten air.

Again the corpse eaters retreated away from them out of respect, threw away their half gnawed on bones and spit out shreds of flesh onto the ground. Hunter climbed the mountain in the middle of the station, sinking into the rotting body parts up to his ankles, scanning the area with his eyes. He didn’t find what he was looking for and satisfied he made a gesture with his hand into Homers direction and continued to march on.

Homer on the other hand had found something. He had tripped and fallen to the ground; scaring away a young corpse eater that was just disemboweled a wet bulletproof vest.

Homer saw a helmet from the Sevastopolskaya that had rolled to the side. One moment after that the glass of his gasmask steamed up – he was covered in cold sweat.

He desperately tried to fight his nausea, crawled to the bones and started to fish for the dog tags.

Instead he found a small, dark-red smudged notebook. The first page he opened was the last one of the entries: “Do not storm the station, under any circumstances!”

Even when she was just a child her father had taught her not to cry but now she had nothing which she could throw against fate anymore. Tears flowed over her face automatically and out of her chest you could hear a thin, painful whining. She had realized immediately what had happened and now she had been trying for hours to deal with it.

Did he yell for her to help him? Had he wanted to tell her something important? She no longer remembered when exactly she had fallen asleep and she didn’t know if she was awake now. Maybe there was a world where her father was alive. Where she hadn’t killed him with her sleep, her weakness and egoism. Sasha held the cold but still soft hand of her fathers to warm it and talked to herself: “You’re going to find a car. We will go up there, sit inside and drive away. You will laugh again like on the day you brought the recorder with the music CDs…”

Her father had sat upright at first, leaning on the pillar and his chin pressed to his chest so that you could have thought that he was sleeping. But then his body had slipped down into the puddle of blood.

Like if he had been tired of playing alive, no longer wanting to put on a show to her.

The wrinkles that ran through her father’s face had smoothened.

She let go of his hand, helped him to sit more comfortably and covered him from head to toe in a torn blanket.

There was no way to bury him. Of course she could have left him on the surface where he could see the sky when it brightened one day. But long before that his body would have become the victim of the creatures.

In their station nobody would touch him. Out of the lost southern tunnels was no danger to be feared, the only creatures that lived there where flying roaches. In the north the tunnel ended into a rusted, half broken metro bridge. Humans lived there but they would have never thought about crossing the bridge.

Everybody knew that there was nothing on the other side but burned wasteland. And on the edge of this wasteland there was a guard station where two castaways sat out their death sentence.

Her father would have never allowed her to stay here on her own and now it was completely pointless.

Also Sasha knew: It didn’t matter how far she ran, it didn’t matter how desperately she tried to escape, she would never be able to free herself from this cursed dungeon. Not anymore.

“Papa… Forgive me” she sobbed. There was nothing there anymore with which she could have earned his forgiveness.

She pulled the silver ring from his finger and dropped into the pocket of her overall. Then she took the cage with the rat that was still uneasy and walked slowly to the north. Her boots left bloody prints on the granite.

She had already stepped onto the rails and entered the tunnel when suddenly; in the empty station, something astonishing happened. A long flame from the fire reached at the body of her father.

But it didn’t reach him and retreated unwillingly back into the deep darkness, as if it respected his right for his last rest.{In this moment Sasha’s part of the book is ahead of this chapter, this happens after Homer and Hunter leave again – Chapter 7}

“They are coming back! They are coming back!” it sounded out of the loudspeaker.

Istomin put down the receiver from his ear and looked at him unbelievingly.

“Who’s they?” Denis Michailovitsch jumped up from his chair and spilled his tea. A dark stain spread on his pants. He cursed the tea and repeated his question.

“Who’s they?” asked Istomin again mechanically.

“The brigadier and Homer, Achmed is dead.” sounded the receiver through the static.

Vladimir Ivanovitsch wiped the sweat of his forehead with a handkerchief and scratched himself under the black rubber of his pirate-like eye patch. Whenever a fighter died it was his responsibility to inform their families.

Without letting himself be connected again he put his head out of the door and yelled for the adjutant: “Both of them to me, immediately! And I want the table ready!”

He went into his office, straightened the pictures on the wall for some reason, stopped at the map of the metro, whispered something to himself and then turned to Denis Michailovitsch. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest with a broad smile plastered on his face.

“Wolodya, you act like a girl before her rendezvous.” the colonel said grinning.

“And you aren’t nervous at all?” answered the leader of the station. He pointed with his head at the colonels wet trousers.

“Me? I am ready. The two strike teams are ready. Just another day and we can go.”

Dennis moved his finger over the blue beret, stood up and put it on his head. He looked more official that way.

They heard hasty steps from the hallway; the adjutant looked at them, holding a dim glass bottle of some sort of alcohol through the crack in the door.

Istomin made a gesture with his hands: Later, Later!

Then they finally could hear the familiar voice, the door sprang open and a broad figure entered. Behind the brigadiers back was the old storyteller that Hunter had carried around for some reason.

“I welcome you!” Istomin sat into his seat, stood up and sat back down.

“Now, what is it?” asked the colonel. The brigadier looked from one man to the other and turned to Istomin.

“The Tulskaya has been captured by a wandering group of bandits. They have killed everyone.”

Dennis Michailovitsch raised his bushy eyebrows. “Our men too?

“As far as I can tell. We only got to the stations door. There it came to a fight and then they closed the hermetic door.”

“The hermetic door?” Istomin held on to the edge of the table and stood up.

“What are we supposed to do now?”

“Storm the station.” both the brigadier and the colonel answered, completely synchronized.

“No. We can’t storm the station.”

It was Homer’s voice that sounded out of the background.

She just had to wait for the right hour. If she hadn’t confused the days the railcar would soon emerge from the wet mist of the night. Every other minute she remained in this place, this abyss, there were the tunnel emerged from the earth like an open vein would one day cost her life. But there was nothing to do but to wait. On the other side of this never ending bridge she would find a closed hermetic door that you could only open from the other side. It only did once a week, on market day.

Today Sasha had nothing to offer, but this time she had to buy more than ever before. She didn’t care what the people on the railcar would want in return for her to pass into the world of the living – the grave coldness and the lifeless lack of emotion of her father had passed to her.

How often had she dreamt to one day get to into another station, to be surrounded by other people, establish friendships and to meet someone special…

She had asked her father about his youth, not just to go back to her bright lit childhood, but because instead of her mother she saw herself and instead of her father she saw the blurry picture of a beautiful young man in her own naïve imagination of love. She doubted that she would be able to get along with other people if one day she would be able to go back to the metro. About what would these people would talk about?

But now, mere hours before the arrival of the ferry, yes maybe even minutes, the other men and women didn’t matter to her. Even the thought of her existence being worthy of a human being felt like she was betraying her father. Without hesitating one second she would have agreed to spend the rest of her days in this station, if that would have been able to save him.

When the candle stump in the glass started to fight its last fight she put the fire on a new wick.

On one of his expeditions her father had found a whole chest full of wax candles and she always carried one of them in her overall’s pocket. Sasha enjoyed imagining that their bodies were exactly like the candles and that a part of her father had passed to her when he faded.

Would the people on the railcar would recognize her signal through the mist?

Until now she had only looked outside from time to time to remain outside for the least time possible. Her father had prohibited her from doing soand his swollen head was warning enough for her.

On the slope Sasha always felt uneasy, like a trapped mole, looking around restlessly, only daring to venture to the beginning of the bridge to watch the black river. But now she had too much time. Leaning forward and trembling in the wet and cold wind Sasha made a few steps forward. Through the dawn and boney trees she saw the fallen skyscrapers; in the oily, thick waters of the rivers something massive swam around and in the distance she heard an inhuman scream. Suddenly a familiar sound emerged, the familiar squeaking sound of the railcar.

Sasha jumped up, holding the glass with the candle up high and from the bridge a small ray of light answered.

The old railcar approached, struggling against the thick fog. The weak shine of the spotlight cut through the night and Sasha made one step back. It wasn’t the same railcar as normal. It moved slowly, like every rotation of the wheels cost the people pushing the levers a lot of strength.

Finally it stopped ten feet in front of Sasha. A fat giant in a primitive radiation suit jumped off the railcar and landed on the gravel. The diabolically dancing fire of her candle was being reflected by the glass of his gasmask so that Sasha couldn’t see his eyes. With one hand he held an army Kalashnikov with a wooden stock.

“I want to get away from here.” explained Sasha and raised her head.

“A-way.” echoed the scarecrow and stretched the sound surprised and sarcastic at the same time.

“And what do you offer in return?”

“I have nothing anymore.” She withstood his look and looked directly into the glasses of the gasmask.

“There is always something to take. Especially with women.” The ferryman groaned, than he went silent. “You would leave your father alone here?”

“I have nothing anymore.” she repeated and looked to the ground.

“So he did die.” it sounded parts relieved parts disappointed out of the mask.

“Better this way. He wouldn’t have liked this.”

The barrel of the gun slowly unzipped her overall.

“Stop it!” she screamed and took a step back.

The glass with the candle fell onto the rail, shards flew around and darkness took over.

“Don’t you get it? Nobody returns from here.” the scarecrow looked at her indifferently out of the dark dead glasses. “Your body isn’t even enough to pay for the trip, but it may just pay for your father’s debt.”

The assault rifle swirled in his hands so that the stock of the gun pointed forward. Sasha felt a heavy blow to her forehead. Her consciousness showed pity and left her.

Since the Nachimovski prospect Hunter hadn’t left Homer out of his sight, so that he hadn’t been able to take a closer look into the notebook. Suddenly the brigadier cared, he even tried to not just to not let him fall behind any further but to match Homer’s speed. For that Hunter had to slow down a lot.

Several times he had stopped and turned around checking if somebody was following them. But the blinding light of his lamp was always pointed at Homer face so that the old man felt like he was being interrogated.

He cursed, blinked and tried to remain calm. The penetrating look of the brigadier moved over his entire body, searching for the item he had found at the Nachimovski prospect. Nonsense! Of course Hunter couldn’t have seen anything, in that moment he had been too far away. He had probably felt the change in Homers behavior. But every suspecting something. But every time their looks met he started to sweat. The few things that he had been able to read had made him question the brigadier’s intentions.

It was the diary. Parts of the pages were glued together by dried blood. Homer left those alone, his tired and numb fingers would have just ripped them apart. The entries on the first pages were confusing, as if the author no longer knew which letters meant what and his thoughts ran all over the place so that you almost couldn’t follow them.

“Passed the Nagornaya without casualties.” revealed the notebook and jumped on immediately: “Chaos at the Tulskaya. No way to the metro. Hanza isn’t letting anybody through. We can’t go back as well.”

Homer continued to read. Out of his field of vision he saw the brigadier stepping down from the kurgan and approaching him. He couldn’t let the diary fall into the brigadiers hands. Before he let the notebook disappear in his backpack he read: “Have the situation under control. The station is sealed and we have a new commander.” and then “Who dies next?”

Written over the question was the date. The yellowed pages of the notebook made him believe that what had happened in it had happened in the last century, but the entry was only a couple of days old.

Homers old brain put together the single pieces of this mosaic with almost forgotten speed: The mysterious wanderer, the pitiful homeless man at the Nagatinskaya, the seemingly familiar voice of the guard at the door and the sentence: “We can’t go back as well”. In front of his inner eye he had put it together to one picture. Maybe the pages that were stuck together had all the answers to the mysterious events?

At least one thing was sure; there had been no attack on the Tulskaya. What had happened there was far more complex and mysterious. And Hunter that had questioned the guards fifteen minutes ago knew that as well as Homer.

That was why he couldn’t show the notebook to Hunter.

And that was why he had risked disagreeing with him in Istomins office.

“No, we can’t storm the station.” he repeated. Hunter slowly turned his head, like a battleship that readied its main cannon. Istomin pushed back his chair and came out from behind the table after all.

The colonel made a tired grimace.

“We can’t blow up the door.” Homer continued, “Because there is the groundwater, we would flood the entire line. The Tulskaya is just barely holding it back, every day they hope that the ground water doesn’t break through. And you know that for ten years now the parallel tunnel has been…”

“Are we supposed to knock and wait till they open up?” the colonel interrupted.

“We can still go around.” said Istomin.

The colonel was so surprised that he started to cough. Then he argued with Istomin, accused him of wanting to make his best man into cripples, and bring them into their graves. But then the brigadier interrupted them.

“The Tulskaya has to be cleaned. This situation demands the total destruction of all that are there. Not one of your people is still there. They are all dead. If you want to prevent any more casualties this is the only way. I have all the necessary information.”

His last words were definitely aimed at Homer.

The old man felt like a small dog that had been shook so it would stop barking.

Istomin straightened his jacket: “If the way is blocked from the other side there is only one way to get to the Tulskaya. From the other side. From Hanza. But that also means that we can’t send armed men. That is out of the question.”

Hunter made a reassuring gesture with his hand: “I’ll find some.”

The colonel winced.

“But if you want to get to Hanza by going around you have to cross two stations over the Kaschovkaya line to the Kaschirskaya.” said Istomin and went silent.

The brigadier crossed his arms in front of his chest: “And?”

“There’s very high radiation in the area near the Kaschirskaya. A fragment of a warhead went down not far from there. There was no detonation but the radiation is still dangerously high. One out of two that gets a dose of radiation like that dies in about a month. Even now.”

The group went silent. Homer used the break to make an unnoticed, tactical retreat out of Istomins office.

Then Vladimir Ivanovitsch came to words again. It seemed that he feared that the uncontrollable brigadier would still try to blow up the hermetic door at the Tulskaya and said: “We have radiation suits.

Two of them. You can take one of our best fighters with you. We’ll wait.” He looked at the colonel.

“What can we do otherwise?”

Dennis Michailovitsch sighed. “Let’s go to the boys. We’ll talk about it and you can choose a companion.”

“Not necessary,” Hunter shook his head.

“I need Homer.”