Breathing became harder, not because of the humidity but because of the bidder stench of the air. They had to overcome themselves to breathe in the air and they couldn’t shake the feeling that in reality they were breathing in the breath of a giant, strange creature that withdrew oxygen from the air and replaced with its toxic fumes.
Homer put on his gasmask, just in case. Hunter gave him a quick look, reached into his bag and put on his generic rubber mask as well. Only Achmed was once again without a gasmask.
The brigadier stopped and listened with his shredded ear to the Nagornaya, but the thick white soup hindered him to decipher the noises from the station and create a picture of the situation. It sounded like something heavy had fallen to the ground far away, followed by a long sigh, in a pitch that was too low for a human, yes even for every other creature.
Then they heard something scrapping hysterically and shrieking like if a giant hand bent the thick iron pipes on the ceiling to a knot.
Hunter twitched with his head, as if he was trying to shake of dirt from his head and instead of a short machine pistol he was now using an army-Kalashnikov with a double magazine and a mounted grenade-launcher. “Finally.” He said.
At first they didn’t realize that they had already entered the station; the fog in the Nagornaya was as thick as milk. While Homer looked through the glass of his gasmask he felt like a diver that was on board of a sunken ocean cruiser.
You could only see the mosaic through the fog for a few seconds at a time and then it swallowed them again: It were seagulls that had been pressed with coarse soviet metal templates. Fossils, thought Homer, the fate of humanity and their creations … But will somebody dig us up one day?
The fog around them was alive, floated in different directions, twitching. Sometimes dark images emerged from the fog, a dented wagon of a train and a rusty cabin, a scaly body or head of mythological creature. Homer shuddered while thinking who had filled the seats all these decades.
He had heard much about what was going on at the Nagornaya but he had never seen anything face to face …
“There it is, to the right!” Screamed Achmed and ripped on the old man’s sleeve. Out of his self-made suppressor sounded a silent shot.
Homer turned around with such speed, nobody would have thought he still had it in his rheumatic body, but his blurred beam of light illuminated only a part of the metal covered pillars.
“Behind! Behind us!” Achmed shot another salve. But his bullets only shredded the rest of the marble plates that once decorated the walls of the station. Whatever he had seen through the blurry dim lights had already vanished, seemingly unharmed.
He must have breathed in too much of that stuff, thought Homer. But one second later he saw something in the edge of his field of vision … Something gigantic, crouching because the four meter high ceiling of the station was too low for its size and it was unimaginable maneuverable. For an instance it emerged out of the fog, became visible again and disappeared, a long time before the old man was able to point his assault-rifle at it.
Homer looked at around desperately for the brigadier.
He couldn’t see him anywhere.
“It is ok. Don’t be afraid” He said again and again. He tried to catch his breath and calm her down. “You know … There are people that are far worse off than we are …” He tried to smile, but he only made a terrible grimace as if his lower jaw had fallen off.
Sasha smiled back, over her pointed, dirty cheek a salty tear crawled down. At least her father was conscious again after a few hours, enough for her to think about everything.
“This time I couldn’t find anything.” He croaked.
“Forgive me. At the end I even went to the garages as well. It was further than I thought. But I found an intact one there. The lock was out of rust free steel, even oiled. Breaking it was impossible, so I used the last demolition charge. I thought, maybe there is a car in there, spare parts and all. I let it explode, went in: Empty. Why did they look it then the bastards? All that noise, I prayed that nobody had heard me.
But when I got out of the garage there were all these dogs. I thought that’s it … That’s it”. He closed his eyes and went silent.
Sasha took his hand worried, but he shook his head imperceptible without opening his eyes: Don’t be afraid, everything is fine. He didn’t even have the strength to talk anymore but he wanted tell her everything, why he had returned with empty hands, why they now had to starve for a week until he could get up again.
But before he was able to do so he fell into a deep sleep.
Sasha checked the bandages on his shredded leg, wet with black blood and laid a fresh compress on it. She stood up and went to the cage with the rat and opened the small door.
The animal looked out of its cage distrustful, seemed like it tried to hide at first and then it did Sasha the favor and jumped on the train track and ran around. You can rely on the feelings of a rat: There was no danger in the tunnel. Calmer, the young women returned to the stretcher.
“Of course you will feel better again. You will be able to walk again” she whispered to her father. “And you will find a garage with a new car in it. We’ll get in together and drive away from here. Ten maybe fifteen stations away. Somewhere, where they don’t know us, where we are strangers. Where nobody hates us. If there is even such a place …”
Now it was her that told the magical stories that she had heard so many times from him. She repeated it word by word and now that she spoke out the old mantra of her father she believed in it even a hundredth times more. She would nurture him back to health, heal him. Somewhere in this world there had to be a place where they didn’t matter to others.
A place where they could be happy
“There it is! It is looking at me!”
Achmed shrieked as if it had already grabbed him. He had never screamed like that. Again he fired his assault-rifle until it jammed. There was nothing left from Achmed’s serenity: Trembling he tried to reload a new clip.
“It is after me … after me …”
Suddenly you could hear the rattling sound of another automatic rifle. It stayed silent for a second and went off again, this time almost inaudible with salves of three shots. So Hunter was still alive, there was still hope.
The slamming sound distanced itself and came back again, so it was impossible to say if the bullets found their target.
Homer was expecting the angry screams of an injured monster, but the station covered itself in mysterious silence; its inhabitants seemed to have no bodies or they were inviolable.
The brigadier continued his strange fight at the other end of the station, from time to time the glowing tracer rounds cut through the fog, drunken from the fight against the ghost of Nagornaya he had left his companions alone.
Homer took a deep breath and put back his head. For some time now he had the need, he had felt the cold, heavy look with his skin, his head, his hair and his back. Now he couldn’t oppose his premonitions anymore.
Directly under the ceiling, far above their heads, a big head floated in the fog, so big that Homer didn’t realize at what he was looking at in the beginning. The rest of the giant body remained in the darkness of the station. Its huge face was hanging above the tiny humans that tried to defend themselves with their useless weapons. It wasn’t in a hurry – it just gave them a bit of time before it attacked.
Silent with terror Homer sank to his knees. His rifle fell out of his hands and hit the floor with a rattling sound. Achmed screamed as he was being tortured. Without haste the creature approached and filled the entire room in front of them with its dark body, giant as a mountain. Homer closed his eyes, prepared himself, said farewell. Only one thing went through his mind, a regretful, bidder thought drilling into his conciseness: He hadn’t made it …
Hunter’s grenade launcher spit out a flame, the shockwave numbed their ears; it left a continuously thin humming sound while burning parts of shredded flesh was raining down on them.
Achmed was the first to snap out of it, helped Homer to his feet and dragged him with him.
They ran, stumbled over the tracks, got back up again without feeling any pain. They held on to each other, because in the milky soup you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. They ran as if they were threatened not just with death, but with something even more terrible: Utter, final, unchangeable embodiment of absolute, physical and mental destruction.
Invisible and almost inaudible, but only a step behind them, the demons followed, accompanying them but not attacking. They seemed to toy with them by giving them the illusion of a possible rescue.
Then the two men saw the fragmented marble walls and after that segments of the tunnels. They had made it out of the Nagornaya! The guardians of the station fell back like they were chained to the station. But it was too early to stand still.
Achmed ran ahead, searched with his hands for the pipes on the wall and pushed Homer in front of him, who stumbled and wanted to sit down several times.
“What’s with the brigadier?” croaked Homer after he had ripped off the sticky gasmask from his face while he was walking.
“As soon as we pass the fog we’ll stop and wait. It got to be soon, maybe 200 steps … Out of the fog. Everything but to get out of the fog” repeated Achmed, mysterious, “I’ll count the steps …”
But neither after 200 steps nor after 300 did the fog seemed to disappear. What if it had spread to the Nagatinskaya? What if had swallowed the Tulskaya and the Nachimovski as well?
“That can’t be … it has to … only a bit …” Mumbled Achmed for the hundredth time and stopped immediately.
Homer bumped into him and both fell to the ground.
“The wall has ended” Achmed stepped over the tracks and the wet concrete floor as if he thought that the ground would vanish as quick under his feet.
“There she is, what do you mean?” Homer had felt the oblique tunnel segment and hold on to it and stood up carefully.
“Sorry” Achmed replied silently. “You know back at the station … I thought I would never leave it. How it looked at me … Me, do you understand? It had decided to take me. I thought I would stay there forever. You don’t even get a real burial” he spoke slowly to keep himself from crying.
He tried to justify the way he was speaking, even thought he didn’t have too.
Homer shook his head. “It’s alright; I shat my pants as well. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go, it can’t be far now”
The hunt was over, they could breathe again and even if it wasn’t they couldn’t run anymore. So they kept walking slowly, feeling their way along the wall half blind with their hands. Step by step to salvation. The worst part was behind them and even though the fog hadn’t disappeared soon the air from the tunnel would rip it apart and carry it away through the vents. Soon they would get to humanity and wait for their officer.
It happened earlier than they thought. Did space and time get bent in the fog as well?
An iron staircase crawled up the wall; the round tunnel became a square one and next to the tracks you could see the indent in the track that had saved a lot of lives.
“Look!” whispered Homer, “It looks like a station. A station!”
“Hey! Is there someone?” screamed Achmed as loud as he could.
“Brothers, is there somebody?” he fell into a pointless, triumphal laugh.
The dim light of the lamps revealed what the darkness had hidden, walls of marble, that hadn’t been left untouched by man and time. It seemed that none of the colorful mosaics, which had been the pride of the Nagatinskaya had survived.
And what had happened to the marble around the pillars? That can’t be …
Even though Achmed didn’t get an answer he kept screaming and laughing: Of course they had been afraid of the fog and had run through it like crazy, but they no longer cared about that anymore.
Homer on the other hand was worried and searched the wall with the weaker becoming beam of his flashlight. His suspicions let him cold running down his back.
Finally he found them: The iron letters screwed on the burst marble.
NAGORNAYA.
You never returned to the same place coincidentally.
Her father had always said that. You return to change something, to apologize for something. Sometimes god grabs us and brings us back to the place where he forgot us last. God does that to make a decision or to give us a second chance.
Her father explained that to her; he would never be able to return to his home station. He had no more strength to get revenge, to fight or to proof something. He no longer wanted forgiveness.
It was an old story that had almost cost him his life. But he was certain that everybody had gotten what they deserved.
Now they lived in eternal exile, because Sasha’s father had nothing to make up and god didn’t show up at this station.
The plan for their rescue, to find a new car on the surface that hadn’t rotted, to repair it, get enough gas and to break out of this vicious cycle that fate had drawn, had become a good night story a long time ago.
For Sasha there was another way to the big metro.
When she put the half repaired machines, old jewelry or decayed books for food and bullets on the tracks on certain days, it happened that the merchants offered a lot more.
They illuminated her thin, young stature with the lights of their railcar, winked at each other, tried to talk to her and promised a lot of things. The girl looked wild. Silent and distrusting she looked at them, ready to strike with knife behind her back. Her jacket was big but didn’t hide her stature. Dirt and machine oil in her face made her blue eyes glow brighter. So bright that some couldn’t look at them.
Blond hair, cut unevenly with the knife she was holding, didn’t even go over her ears. Her lips never smiled.
The men on the rail cart knew that they couldn’t tame this wolf with riches so they tried it with freedom. She never answered them. That’s why they thought she couldn’t talk, what made it even easier.
But Sasha knew one thing: Whatever she did she wouldn’t be able to buy two seats on the rail cart.
Her father had a history with these people that she could never change.
How they were standing in front of her, faceless in their black gas masks, they looked more like enemies to her.
She didn’t find anything on them of which she would have dreamt of, not even while she was sleeping.
So she put the telephones, irons and tee cookers on the tracks, steeped 10 steps back and waited till the merchants had gathered the goods.
Then they threw a few packets of dried pork and threw a handful of bullets on the tracks, only so that they could watch them crawling around to pick them all up. Than the rail cart left slowly and vanished back to the real world.
Sasha turned around and went back home where a mountain of broken machines, a screw driver, a blowtorch and to a dynamo machine repurposed bicycle were waiting for her. She sat herself on the saddle, closed her eyes and rode far, far away. She almost forgot that she wasn’t even moving. And the fact that she had refused the easy way out gave her even more strength.
What the devil? Why did we end up here again? Like in a fever, Homer tried to find an explanation for what had happened here.
Suddenly Achmed turned silent; he had seen where Homer had shined his lamp. “It’s not letting me go …” He whispered silently, almost without making any sound.
The fog around them became thicker and thicker, they could almost no longer see each other. Without humans the Nagornaya had been asleep, now she awoke again. To new life: The heavy air reacted to their words with almost unnoticeable fluctuations and vague shadows moved in the depths.
No trace of Hunter … A being of flesh and blood couldn’t win the fight against these phantoms; as soon as the station had played enough with them it would swallow them whole.
“Go” Said Achmed. “It wants me. You can’t know it. You haven’t been here as
much as I have”
“Stop it!” Yelled Homer, surprised by the volume of his voice. “We got lost in the fog. Let’s go back”
“We can’t go back. You can run as much as you want, you will return to this place again and again if you stay with me. You will get through on your own. Go, I beg you”
“Enough!” Homer grabbed Achmeds hand and dragged him behind him to the tunnel. “In an hour you’ll thank me!”
“Tell my wife …”
An unbelievable powerful force ripped Achmeds hand out of Homer’s grip, up into the fog, into the void.
He wasn’t even able to scream, he just vanished, as if from one second to the other he had been atomized and stopped to exist.
Homer screamed, turned around and shot his precious bullets, one clip after another.
Suddenly he felt a blow to his back, so strong that it had to have been one of these demons and the universe imploded.
Memories (Chapter 5)
Sasha ran to the window and opened it. Fresh air and soft light fell into the room. The window was hanging over an abyss full of soft morning fog. With the first rays of the sun it would disappear and they would be able to see fir covered hills instead of the abyss, green meadows behind them and the matchbox tall buildings and onion formed bell towers.
The early morning was their time. She felt the approaching dawn and stood up half an hour earlier to get on top of the mountains in time. Behind the small, simple, but clean and warm hut a rocky path went up the hill, surrounded by bright yellow flowers and it could happen that Sasha slipped several times on her way up and hurt her knee.
In thoughts she wiped the windowsill that was still wet from the breath of the night with her sleeve. She had dreamt about something dark, disastrous that had crossed her happy life, but the rests of this restless vision disappeared immediately when the cold wind started to blow over her skin. Now she no longer wanted to think about what had bothered her in her dream. She had to hurry to get to the mountain top in time to greet the sun and then slide down the path, returning to the hut, to make breakfast, wake her father and pack his provisions.
Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) Page 7
