Metro 2034

CHAPTER 9 Air

Fear and terror are not the same thing at all. Fear spurs a man on to take action and be creative. Terror paralyses the body and blocks the flow of thought, it makes a man less human. Homer had seen enough in his time to know the difference between them. His brigadier, who was not endowed with the ability to experience fear, had proved surprisingly vulnerable to terror. But the old man was even more amazed by what had reduced Hunter to this state.

The body from which he had removed the gas mask looked unusual. The face that had appeared from under the black rubber had dark, glossy skin, thick lips and a broad, flat nose. Homer hadn’t seen any black men since the day the music channels on TV stopped working – more than twenty years ago – but it wasn’t hard for him to recognise the dead man as simply a member of a different race. Curious, certainly. But what was so frightening about it?

The brigadier had already taken a grip on himself: his strange fit had lasted less than a minute. He shone his flashlight on the dark face, growled something unintelligible and started roughly undressing the obstinate body, and Homer could have sworn he heard the crunch of fingers being broken.

‘It’s a mockery… Just to remind me again, right! It’s inhuman… A punishment like that…’ he wheezed almost inaudibly.

Had he taken the man for someone else? Was he mutilating the body in revenge for his own momentary humiliation or settling some older and much more serious score? The old man suppressed his own revulsion, glancing stealthily at the brigadier as he stripped another body.

The girl didn’t take any part in the looting and Hunter didn’t try to force her. She walked away, sat down on the rails and lowered her face into her hands. It seemed to Homer that she was crying.

Hunter dragged the bodies out through the door and dumped them in a heap. In less than twenty-four hours there would be nothing left of them. During the day, mastery of the city passed to creatures so appalling that the fearsome predators of the night hid away deep in their burrows, waiting meekly for their hour to come again.

Although the dead man’s blood wasn’t visible on the dark uniform, it didn’t dry out immediately. It felt cold and clammy on Homer’s stomach and chest, clinging to him as if it wanted to get back into a living body, causing a horrible itching on his skin and in his mind. He wondered if this masquerade was really necessary, and the only consolation he could find was that it would help them to avoid any more casualties in Avtozavod Station. If Hunter’s calculations proved correct, the guards would take them for their own men and let them through unopposed. But what if they didn’t? And was the brigadier even trying to reduce the number of deaths that he left in his wake?

Homer found the brigadier’s bloodthirstiness repellent, but also intriguing. Self-defence could not justify even a third of all the killings he committed, but it was a matter of something more than plain sadism. What concerned the old man most of all was whether Hunter was heading for Tula simply in order to indulge his craving.

Even if the unfortunate people who were trapped at that station couldn’t find a cure for the mysterious fever, it didn’t mean that there was no cure, in principle! There were places in the underground world where the embers of scientific thought continued to glow, where research was carried out, new medicines were developed and serums were manufactured. Polis, for example – that confluence of four major arteries, the heart of the Metro, the last remaining simulacrum of a genuine city, that extended through the connecting passages between the Arbat, Borovitskaya, Alexander Garden and Lenin Library stations, where the doctors and scientists who survived had established their base. Or the immense bunker near Taganka Station, the secret technopolis that belonged to Hansa…

And apart from that, Tula might not be the first station where the epidemic had broken out. What if someone had already managed to beat the sickness? ‘How could I possibly abandon so easily any hope of being saved?’ Homer asked himself. Of course, now that he was carrying the time bomb of the disease in his own body, the old man had a vested interest in this kind of reasoning. In his rational mind Homer had almost accepted the idea that he would die soon. But his instincts rebelled, demanding that he try to find a way out. If he could find a way to save Tula, he would protect his home station from harm and be saved himself…

But Hunter simply didn’t believe there was any cure for this disease. After exchanging a few words with the watch at Tula on a single occasion, he had condemned all the inhabitants of the station to death and immediately set about putting the sentence into effect. He had misled the top command of Sebastopol with wild stories about nomads, imposed his own decision on them and was now inexorably approaching the point of making it a reality by committing Tula to the flames.

Or did he know about something happening at the station that turned everything topsy-turvy again? Something that neither Homer nor the man who left his diary at Nakhimov Prospect knew about…

When he was done with the bodies, the brigadier tugged his flask off his belt and sucked out the remains of its contents. What was it? Alcohol? Did he use his hooch as a condiment to help him savour his actions, or was he trying to kill the aftertaste? Was he relishing the moment or trying to escape from it – or perhaps he hoped that with alcohol he could smother something inside himself?

For Sasha, the smoky old motor trolley was a time machine out of the bedtime stories her father once used to amuse her with. It wasn’t carrying the girl from Kolomenskoe to Avtozavod, but taking her back from the present into the past – although no one but her could possibly have thought of the stone dungeon where she had spent all these years, that blind alley in space and time, as ‘the present’.

She remembered the journey in the other direction very well: she was still only a little girl, her father, tightly bound, with a woolly hat pulled down over his eyes and a gag in his mouth, sat beside her. She cried all the time, and one of the soldiers in the firing squad folded his fingers together and showed her various shadow animals in the little yellow circus ring that was running along the ceiling of the tunnel, racing with the trolley.

The sentence was read out to her father after they crossed the bridge: the revolutionary tribunal commuted his sentence from execution to lifelong banishment.

They pushed him out onto the rails, tossed him a knife, a sub-machine-gun with one clip of cartridges and an old gas mask, then helped Sasha get down. The soldier who had shown the little girl the horsy and the doggy waved to her.

Could he be one of the men who had been shot today?

The feeling of breathing someone else’s air grew stronger when she squirmed into a black gas mask taken off one of the bodies by the man with the shaved head. Every tiny little stretch of her journey cost someone’s life. The man with the shaved head would probably have shot them anyway, but now that Sasha was here, she was an accomplice.

It wasn’t only because he was tired of fighting that her father hadn’t wanted to come home. He used to say that all his humiliations and deprivations weighed less than even a single human life. He suffered in order not to cause suffering to others. Sasha knew that the pan of the scales holding all the lives he had taken already hung very, very low, and her father was simply trying to restore the balance.

But the man with the shaved head could have intervened sooner, couldn’t he? He could have simply frightened the men on the trolley, just by appearing, and disarmed them without firing a single shot: Sasha was sure of that. None of the dead men was a worthy opponent for him. Why did he have to do that?

The station of her childhood was closer than she thought. In less than ten minutes its lights were glimmering ahead of them. There was no one guarding the approaches to Avtozavod: the station’s inhabitants obviously placed too much faith in the locked hermetic doors. Fifty metres before the platform, the man with the shaved head switched the engine to low speed and told Homer to take the helm, while he moved closer to the machine-gun.

The trolley rolled into the station almost without a sound and very, very slowly – or perhaps time was standing still for Sasha, so that she could see everything and remember it all in a few brief moments? On that day her father had left her in the care of his orderly, telling him to hide her until everything was sorted out. The orderly led her deep into the underbelly of the station, to one of the service areas. But even from there they could hear the simultaneous roar of a thousand throats, and he went dashing back to be with his commander. Sasha hurtled along the empty corridor behind him and darted out into the hall…

They drifted along the platform, and Sasha looked at the spacious family tents and the carriages equipped as offices, the little kids playing tag and the old men chatting, the sullen men cleaning their guns…

And she saw her father standing in front of a thin line of angry, frightened men who were trying to enclose and restrain a raging crowd. She ran over to her father and pressed herself against his back. He swung round crazily, shook her off and slapped his adjutant in the face as he came hurrying up. But something had already happened to him. The line of men, which had frozen with its automatic weapons raised in anticipation of the command to open fire, was ordered to stand down. The only shot was one fired into the air. Her father started negotiations on the peaceful handover of the station to the revolutionaries…

Her father believed that a man was given signs. You just had to know how to see them and read them correctly.

No, time hadn’t slowed down just so that she could revisit the final day of her childhood. She spotted the armed men rising to meet the trolley before the others did. She saw the man with the shaved head reach the trigger switch with an elusive, fluid movement and start turning the thick, burnished barrel towards the amazed sentries. She heard the hissed command to halt the trolley before the old man did. And Sasha realised so many people would be killed now, that she would feel as if she were breathing someone else’s air for the rest of her life. But she could still prevent the massacre, save them and herself and one other man from something more appalling than any words could express.

The sentries were already taking their automatics off the safety catches, but they fiddled with them too long, and were several moves behind the man with the shaved head. She did the first thing that came into her mind – she jumped up and pressed herself against his lumpy, iron-hard back, hugging him from behind and clasping her hands on his chest, which was so still, it didn’t seem to be breathing. He shuddered as if she had lashed him with a whip, hesitated… The sentries, finally ready to fire, were bewildered too.

The old man understood her without any words.

The trolley shot off down the tracks, belching out black clouds of bitter smoke, and Avtozavod Station receded rapidly – back into the past.

All the way to Pavelets Station no one spoke another word. Hunter freed himself from the unexpected embrace, parting the girl’s arms as if he were bending open a steel hoop that prevented him from breathing. They slipped past the only guard post at full speed and the spray of bullets directed at them from it bit into the ceiling above their heads. The brigadier managed to pull out his pistol and reply with three soundless flashes of flame. He seemed to have brought one man down, but the others melted into the walls, squeezing themselves in behind the shallow lips of the tunnel liners to save themselves.

‘My, my,’ thought Homer, glancing at the girl, who was quiet and subdued now. He had assumed the love line would come into play soon after the heroine’s appearance, but everything was developing too fast. Faster than he could understand it all, let alone write it down.

They rode into Pavelets Station and stopped.

The old man had been here before, at this station straight out of the mists of Gothic legend. Instead of the plain columns that supported the vaults in all the newer, outlying stations of the Metro, Pavelets Station was supported by a series of airy, rounded arches that were too high for ordinary people. In typical fashion for legends of that kind, Pavelets was the victim of a distinctive curse. At precisely eight o’clock in the evening the hustle and bustle suddenly died away and the thriving station was transformed into its own ghost. Out of its entire dynamic and resourceful population, only a few daredevils were left on the platform. Everyone else disappeared – together with their children, personal effects, trunks stuffed with goods, benches and makeshift beds.

They all crammed into the refuge – the almost kilometre-long connecting passage to the Circle Line – and trembled there through the long night while monstrous creatures who had woken from their sleep prowled around on the surface at the Pavelets railway station. People who ought to know said these creatures were the unchallenged masters of the station building and the adjoining territory, and even while they slept no other beasts would dare to wander in there. The inhabitants of Pavelets had no defences against them: the shutters that cut off the escalators at other stations simply didn’t exist here, and the way out to the surface was always open. To Homer’s mind, it would have been hard to find anywhere less appropriate for an overnight halt. But Hunter thought differently: when the trolley reached the far end of the hall, it stopped.

‘We’ll stay here until the morning. Make yourselves at home,’ he said, pulling off his gas mask and waving his hand round at the station. And he left them. The girl watched him go, then curled up on the hard floor of the trolley. The old man made himself as comfortable as possible and closed his eyes, trying to doze off, but in vain. He was besieged again by thoughts of the plague that he was carrying round all the stations that were still uninfected. The girl couldn’t sleep either.

‘Thank you. I thought you were the same as him,’ she told Homer.

‘I don’t think there are any other men like that,’ the old man replied.

‘Are you two friends?’

‘Like a sucker fish and a shark,’ he said with a grim smile, thinking that was exactly the way it was: Hunter devoured people, but occasional bloody scraps of human flesh came his way too.

‘How do you mean?’ she asked, half-sitting up.

‘Where he goes, I go. I don’t think I could manage without him, and he… Perhaps he thinks that I’ll absolve him somehow. Although no one really knows what he thinks.’

‘But why can’t you manage without him?’ asked the girl, moving to sit closer to the old man.

‘I have the feeling that while I’m with him, my inspiration… won’t desert me.’ Homer tried to explain.

‘Inspiration – I read somewhere that means “breathing in”,’ said Alexandra. ‘But why do you want to breathe that? What good will it do you?’

Homer shrugged.

‘It’s not what we breathe in, it’s what’s breathed into us,’ he replied.

‘I think that as long as you breathe death, no one will kiss your lips. They’ll be scared of the rotten corpse smell,’ she said, drawing something on the dirty floor with her finger.

‘When you see death, it makes you think about many things,’ Homer remarked.

‘You don’t have any right to summon death every time you need to think,’ she objected.

‘I don’t summon it, I just stand there… and then it hasn’t really got anything to do with death… or not only with death,’ the old man countered. ‘I wanted a story to happen to me, a story that would change everything. I wanted something to happen in my life. To shake me up. And clear out my head.’

‘Did you have a bad life?’ the girl asked sympathetically.

‘A boring one. You know, when one day’s like any other, they fly by so fast and it seems like the last one is really close already,’ Homer tried to explain. ‘You feel afraid of not getting anything finished. And every one of those days is full of a thousand little things to be done. Do one, take a break, and it’s time to start on the next one. You have no time or strength left for what’s really important. You think: never mind – I’ll start tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes, it’s always just one long, endless today.’

‘Have you seen many stations?’ She didn’t seem to be following what the old man was telling her at all.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, puzzled. ‘All of them, probably.’

‘And I’ve seen two,’ the girl sighed. ‘First my father and I lived at Avtozavod, then we were exiled to Kolomenskoe. I always wanted to see at least one more. It’s so strange here…’ She ran her eyes along the line of arches. ‘As if there were a thousand gateways, and not even any walls between them. And there they are, all open for me, but I don’t want to go through. And I’m afraid.’

‘So he was your father? That man, the other one…’ Homer hesitated. ‘Did they kill him?’

The girl retreated back into her shell of silence for a long time before she responded.

‘Yes.’

‘Stay with us,’ said the old man, plucking up his nerve. ‘I’ll have a word with Hunter, I think he’ll agree. I’ll tell him I need you, for…’ He shrugged, not knowing how to explain to the girl that now she had to inspire him.

‘Tell him he needs me,’ said Sasha.

She jumped down onto the platform and wandered away from the trolley, stroking every column as she walked past it.

There was absolutely nothing coy about her, she didn’t flirt at all. Along with all kinds of firearms, she seemed to despise the standard female arsenal – those sweet little glances and heart-melting gestures, those fluttering eyelashes that can raise a hurricane and those half-smiles for which a man would sacrifice himself or kill another. Or was it that she simply didn’t know yet how to use these weapons?

Whatever the reason, she could manage without them. A single dagger thrust from those eyes of hers had made Hunter reverse a decision, a single movement from her had snared him in a net and kept him from killing. But had that thrust really pierced through his armour into the soft flesh? Or did he need her for something? That was probably it. It seemed strange to Homer even to imagine that the brigadier had any vulnerable spots, that he could even be pricked, let alone wounded.

Homer simply couldn’t sleep. Although he had swapped the stifling black gas mask for a light respirator, he still found it just as hard to breathe and the vice that was crushing his head hadn’t slackened its grip. Homer had dumped all his old things in the tunnel. He had scrubbed his hands clean with a piece of grey soap, washed off the dirt with greenish water from an old fuel can and made a voluntary decision always to wear a white face mask from now on. What else could the old man do to avoid danger to people he was with?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all now, not even going into the tunnel and reducing himself to an abandoned heap of rotten rags would do any good. But today’s close brush with death had suddenly taken him back twenty years, to the days when he had just lost everyone he loved. And that had given his plans a new, authentic meaning.

If it was up to Homer, he would have erected a genuine monument to them. But they surely deserved at least a basic headstone. Born decades apart, they had all died on the same day: his wife, his children, his parents.

And there were all his classmates from school and friends from the technical college. His favourite movie actors and musicians. And all those people who were still at work that day, or had already got home, or were stuck somewhere halfway in the traffic jams.

The ones who died immediately and the ones who tried to survive, lingering for a few more days in the poisoned, half-ruined capital, scraping feebly at the locked hermetic doors of the Metro. The ones who disintegrated instantly into atoms, and the ones who swelled up and crumbled away while still alive, devoured by radiation sickness.

The scouts who went up onto the surface first couldn’t get to sleep for days after they returned from their mission. Homer had met some of them round the campfires at transfer stations, he had looked into their eyes and seen streets like frozen rivers swollen with dead fish, imprinted on those eyes forever. Thousands of stalled cars with dead passengers choked the avenues and the highways leading out of Moscow. Dead bodies were lying everywhere. Until the city’s new masters arrived, there was no one to clear them away.

To spare themselves, the scouts tried to avoid the schools and kindergartens. But to lose your mind, it was enough to catch a single frozen gaze from the back seat of a family car. Billions of lives were broken off simultaneously. Billions of thoughts were left unspoken, billions of dreams were left unrealised, billions of grievances were left unforgiven. Nikolai’s little son had asked him for a big set of coloured felt-tip pens, his daughter had been afraid to go to her figure skating lessons; before she went to sleep, his wife had described in vivid detail how they would spend a short holiday by the sea together, just the two of them. When he thought that these little wishes and desires were the last they had, they suddenly became exceptionally important. Homer would have liked to carve an epitaph for each one of them. But humanity certainly deserved at least one epitaph for its gigantic mass grave. And now, when he himself had almost no time left, Homer felt he could find the right words for it.

He still didn’t know what order to arrange them in, what he would use to bind them together, how he would embellish them, but he could already sense that the story unfolding before his very eyes would have a place for every restless, troubled soul, for every single feeling and every crumb of knowledge that he had gathered so painstakingly, and for him too. No plot could have suited his purpose better.

When dawn came up on the surface, the rows of market stalls would stir into life down below, and then he would definitely take a walk along them to get himself a clean exercise book and a ballpoint pen. And he had to hurry: if he didn’t get down on paper the outlines of the future novel that he could see glimmering like a mirage ahead of him, it could melt away, and who could say how much longer he would have to sit on the summit of his sand dune, gazing into the distance and hoping that his ivory tower would start rising up again out of the fine grains of sand and the shimmering, incandescent air?

There might not be enough time.

‘No matter what nonsense the girl might talk, a glance into the empty eye sockets of eternity is certainly a great stimulus to action,’ the old man chuckled to himself. And then, recalling the arches of her eyebrows – two flashes of white on the sombre, grimy face – and the bite marks on her lip, and her tousled, straw-blonde hair, he smiled again.

‘I’ll have to find something else at the market tomorrow as well,’ Homer thought as he fell asleep.

Night at Pavelets Station is always restless. Glimmers of light from the smoking torches flicker across the soot-stained marble walls, the tunnels breathe uneasily and the men sitting at the foot of the escalators talk to each other in voices so low, they can hardly be heard. The station pretends to be dead, hoping the predatory beasts from the surface won’t be tempted by the smell of meat.

But sometimes the most curious of those beasts discover a passage that leads down deep, start sniffing at it and catch the scent of fresh sweat, the beating of hearts, the murmur of blood coursing through veins. And they set off downwards.

Homer had finally dozed off, and the alarmed voices from the far end of the platform filtered into his awareness as dull, distorted echoes. But then a shot rang out, instantly jerking him out of his hazy half-sleep. The old man jumped up, staring around wildly and groping for his gun on the floor of the trolley.

The deafening, thunderous rumbling of the machine-gun was joined by the stuttering of several sub-machine-guns and the alarm in the sentries’ shouts was replaced by genuine terror. Whoever it was they were firing all their weapons at, it wasn’t having any effect. This was no longer coordinated fire at a moving target, but the desperate, ragged shooting of men simply trying to save their own skins.

Homer found his automatic, but he couldn’t make himself go out into the hall; it took all his willpower to resist the temptation to start the motor and shoot out of the station at top speed – it didn’t matter a damn where to. But he stayed in the trolley, craning his neck to make out the battle zone through the crowded line of the columns. Slicing through the yelling and swearing of the sentries trying to defend themselves came a piercing shriek that sounded surprisingly close.

The machine-gun choked and someone gave a terrible scream that was cut short as suddenly as if his head had been torn off. The chatter of sub-machine-guns hammered at Homer’s ears again. But now it was sparse and scattered. The shriek was repeated – it sounded a little further away now… And suddenly the creature that made it was answered by an echo – somewhere close to the trolley.

Homer counted to ten and started the motor with trembling hands: any moment now his companions would come back, and they could go racing off immediately – he was doing it for their sake, not his own… The trolley trembled and smoked as the motor warmed up, and then something flickered between the columns at an unbelievable speed, blurring past and slithering out of view faster than his mind could process the image. The old man grabbed hold of the handrail, set his foot on the accelerator pedal and took a deep breath. If they didn’t come in the next ten seconds, he’d just drop everything and… And then, without even knowing why he was doing it, Homer stepped out onto the platform, holding his useless automatic out in front of him. Just to make sure that there was nothing more he could still do for either of his companions. He pressed himself tight against a column and glanced out into the hall… He tried to scream, but he didn’t have enough air.

Sasha had always known the world wasn’t limited to the two stations where she had lived, but she could never have imagined that the world beyond them could be so beautiful. Dull and bleak as Kolomenskoe was, to her it had seemed like a home, cosy and familiar in every little detail. Avtozavod was haughty and spacious, but cold, it had turned its back on her father and her, rejected them, and she couldn’t forget that.

But in her relationship with Pavelets she could turn a new leaf, and Sasha’s desire to fall in love with this station grew stronger with every minute she spent there. She wanted to fall in love with its light, branching columns, with its huge, inviting arches, with its noble marble covered in darling little veins that made the walls look like someone’s delicate skin… Kolomenskoe was ugly, Avtozavod was too severe, but this station seemed to have been built by a woman, it was playful, even frivolous. Even decades on, Pavelets refused to forget its own former glory. The people who lived here couldn’t be vicious and cruel, Sasha thought. Did she and her father really only have to get past one hostile station in order to find themselves in this magical land? Would it really have been enough for him to live just one more day, in order to escape from his exile and hard labour and be free again? She would have been able to persuade the man with the shaved head to take both of them…

In the distance a campfire flickered, surrounded by sentries, and the beam of a searchlight probed at the high ceiling, but Sasha didn’t want to go that way. For so many years it had seemed to her that once she broke out of Kolomenskoe and met other people, she would be happy! But now Sasha needed only one person – to share her delight and amazement that now the world really was bigger by a whole third and her hope that everything could still be put right. But there probably wasn’t anyone at all who needed Sasha, no matter what she might try to make herself and the old man believe.

So the girl wandered off in the opposite direction, to where a dilapidated train stood halfway into the right tunnel, with its windows broken and doors wide open. She walked inside and along through the train, soaring over the gaps between the carriages as she inspected the first, the second, the third… In the last one Sasha found a seat that had miraculously survived and clambered onto it, pulling up her legs. She looked round, trying to imagine that any moment now the train would start moving and carry her on to more stations, brightly lit and vibrant with human voices. But her faith and imagination weren’t strong enough to set thousands of tons of scrap iron moving. It had all been so much easier with her bicycle. And her attempt to hide failed: skipping from carriage to carriage in her wake, the noise of the battle unfolding in Pavelets Station finally caught up with her. Again?

She lowered her feet onto the floor and dashed back to the station – to the only place where she could at least do something.

The mutilated bodies of sentries were lying by the glass booth with the frozen searchlight, and in the extinguished campfire, and in the centre of the hall – those men had already abandoned any resistance and were running to seek refuge in the passage, but death had overtaken them halfway there.

A sinister, unnatural figure was doubled up over one of the bodies. From that distance it was hard to make it out clearly, but Homer saw smooth white skin, an immensely powerful, twitching neck, and legs bent at too many joints, with impatiently shuffling feet.

The battle had been lost. But where was Hunter?

The old man peeped again and froze in horror… About ten steps away from him, more than two metres up in the air, a nightmarish face was staring at him, peeping out from behind a column exactly like Homer, as if it was playing peek-a-boo. Something red was dripping from the drooping lower lip, the lower jaw was working incessantly, grinding up its hideous cud, and the space below the sloping forehead was absolutely empty, but the lack of eyes didn’t seem to cause the beast any difficulty in moving about and attacking.

Homer pulled back, squeezing the trigger – his automatic didn’t make a sound. The monster let out a long, deafening howl and darted into the centre of the hall. The old man started jerking the jammed breech backwards and forwards, realising he didn’t have enough time…

But suddenly the monster lost all interest in him: now its attention was riveted to the edge of the platform. Homer swung round sharply, following the line of that blind gaze, and his heart stopped dead. The girl was standing there, gazing round in fright.

‘Run!’ Homer yelled, his voice instantly breaking into a croak that scraped at his throat.

The white monster sprang forward, covering several metres in a single bound, and stood in front of the girl. She pulled out a knife that was useless for anything but cooking and made a warning lunge. In reply the beast swung one of its front paws and the girl collapsed on the ground; her knife went flying several metres through the air.

The old man was already on the trolley. But he wasn’t thinking about running away any more. Puffing and panting, he swung the machine-gun round, trying to catch that white, dancing silhouette in the cobweb lines of the sight. He couldn’t: the monster was moving in on Sasha. Homer had the impression that after savaging the sentries, who represented at least some kind of danger to it, the creature was amusing itself by driving two helpless victims into a corner and toying with them before it finished them off.

Now it was hunched over Sasha, screening her from the old man’s view. Skinning its prey?

Suddenly it jerked and staggered backwards, scraping with its claws at a dark patch spreading across its back, and swung round with a roar, preparing to devour its attacker.

Treading unsteadily, holding his automatic out in one hand, Hunter walked towards it. His other arm dangled limply at his side and it was clear that every step he took cost him an immense effort and great pain.

The brigadier raked the monster with another burst of fire, but the creature was incredibly tough; it merely swayed, then immediately recovered its balance and came hurtling forward. Hunter had run out of cartridges and he pivoted round in an incredible turn, taking the immense carcass on the blade of his machete as the monster collapsed down onto him, stifling him with its sheer weight and breaking his bones.

The second monster came running up to destroy any remaining hope. It froze over the twitching body of its fellow and plucked at the white skin with its claw, as if trying to wake the other beast up, then slowly raised its eyeless face towards the old man…

Homer didn’t miss his chance. The heavy calibre bullets shredded the monster’s torso and shattered its skull, knocking it to the ground, then continued reducing the marble slabs behind its back to chips and dust. It was some time before the old man could calm his heart and unclasp his cramped fingers.

Then he closed his eyes, took off his respirator and let the frosty air, saturated with the rusty smell of fresh blood, flood into him. All the heroes had fallen, he was left alone on the battlefield.

His book was over before it had even begun.