As soon as he would be up there again and it would be bright and the merchant s would venture to their station again he would try to find a clean notebook and a pen. He had to hurry: If he didn’t bring this mirage of his novel that was floating in the distance to paper soon it could disappear into thin air again and he didn’t know how long he would have to sit on a dune and stare at the horizon in the hope that out of tiny grains of sands and flickering air again a personal ivory tower would emerge.
He may even didn’t have enough time for that.
An ironic smile was on his lips, Homer thought:
Whatever the girl had said, it had been the look in her empty eyes which forced him to act. Then he had to think about the curved eyebrows, the two bright rays in her dark, dirty face, the chewed on lips, the shaggy blond hair and he smiled again.
Tomorrow at the market he would have to search for something for her as well, he thought while he started to fall asleep.
At the Pavelezkaya the night was always restless. The shine of the stinking torches twitched over the marble walls, the tunnel breathed restlessly, only at the foot of the escalator a few silhouettes if it was to each other almost inaudible. The station acted like it was dead. Everyone hoped that the wild creatures on the surface didn’t lust after corpses.
But sometimes the curious animals discovered the deep down reaching entrance and smelt the fresh sweat, heard the regular beating of human hearts and felt the warm blood running through their veins.
And sometimes they even came down.
Homer had finally sunken into a half sleeplike state and the excited voice on the other side of the train platform only got through to his conscience with struggle and distorted. But then the sound of the machine gun ripped him out of his slumber. The old man jumped up and searched the floor of the railcar for his weapon.
The ear numbing heavy machine gun salve was joined by shots out of assault rifles. The screams of the guards weren’t just nervous but scared. Whatever it was that they were shooting at with their calibers they seemed to not do any damage. From an organized defense against the moving target was not to speak, here people fired around wildly and only thought about saving their own skin.
Finally Homer had found his Kalashnikov but he didn’t dare to step onto the train platform. He resisted the temptation to start the motor and flee and it didn’t matter to him where. He remained on the railcar and put his head through the pillars to watch the place where the fighting was happening.
Suddenly the penetrating scream came from a close distance where the guards yelled and cursed. The heavy machine gun fire ebbed, somebody screamed terrible and then turned silent. Sudden like something had ripped his head off.
Again the assault rifles sounded off, but only scarce and only for a short time. Again screaming, it seemed further away … And suddenly the creature who had made the sound and which echo he had heard came from the close proximity of the railcar.
Homer counted to ten and started the motor with his shivering hands. Every moment his companions would return or he would leave, he did this for them not for himself …
The railcar vibrated, started to smoke, the motor overheated and something jumped through the pillars unimaginably fast. Fast like lighting it disappeared out of his point of view, so that no picture of it could emerge from his head.
The old man held on to the rails, put his foot on the accelerator and took a deep breath. If they wouldn’t return in ten seconds he would leave them and …
Without realizing he had stepped onto the train platform and was holding the useless assault rifle in front of him. He just wanted to make sure that he couldn’t help his people anymore.
He pressed himself against the pillar and threw a look at the middle floor …
He wanted to scream but his lungs were out of air.
Sasha had always known that the world wasn’t just the two stations where she had lived up till now. But she had never known that the world was so beautiful. Even the boring, yes even dreary Kolomenskaya had been a comfortable home and she had known every inch of it. The Avtosavodskaya, roomy and cold had arrogantly turned away from her father, exiled him and she couldn’t forget about it.
Her relationship to the Pavelezkaya on the other hand was unstressed and with every minute Sasha felt that she was falling in love with the station. The soft, wide reaching pillars, the big, inviting arches, the noble marble, the fine veins on the walls let it look like the soft skin of a human …
Had the Kolomenskaya been dreary and poor, the Avtosavodskaya been dark, this station was like a woman: In her unworried and playful nature the Pavelezkaya had even after centuries retained her former beauty.
The humans here couldn’t bee merciless or evil, thought Sasha. She and her father would have only had to get over two hostile station to get to this magical place … He would have just had to live one more day to escape from exile and get his freedom … She would have forced the bold one to take both of them with them …
In the distance a campfire flickered where moments before the guardsman had sat around. The ray of light of the search light climbed up to the high ceiling but Sasha didn’t get pulled to there. How many years had she believed that she just had to escape the Kolomenskaya to meet other peoples and be happy! But now she only wanted one human to share her company, her awe that the earth was a whole third bigger and her hope that she could repair it. But who would need her, Sasha? No other human would need her, no matter what she and the old man had said.
And so the girl walked into the other direction, there were a fallen train with smashed windows and an open door stood in the half of the right tunnel. She stepped into the wagon, from one to the next, inspected the first, the second and then the third. In the last one she discovered a miraculously unharmed couch and laid on it. She looked up and imagined that the train would start to drive to the next station at any second where bright and loud human voices were. But now she didn’t have enough strength to imagine that all these tons of steel scraps would move from its place.
With her bicycle it had been a lot easier.
Then the game of hide and seek was at an end: The sound of a fight jumped from wagon to wagon to Sasha’s and finally reached her.
Again?
She jumped up and ran onto the train platform, the only place where she could still do something.
The shredded corpses of the guards were lying next to the glass cabin with the not moving search light, over the burnt down fire in the middle of the hall. Other fighters had apparently given up early and started running to find cover in the passage way, but death had caught up to them halfway.
Over one of the bodies a terrible and unnatural figure was covering down. Even though you could only see it badly from this distance, Homer recognized smooth white skin, a powerful, twitching comb and the impatiently twitching legs with many strongly bent joints.
The battle was lost.
Where was Hunter? Homer leaned forwards again and froze …. Maybe ten steps from him, leaning as far behind the pillar as Homer, as if it wanted to lure him or play with him.
A terrible visage stared down from its height of two meters. From its lower jaw it dripped red and the heavy jaw was gnawing on a terrible chunk of flesh. Never endingly.
Under the flat forehead there was nothing but that the creature had no eyes didn’t seem to keep it from sensing other beings or from moving and attacking.
Homer turned around and pulled the trigger but the rifle remained silent. The chimera made a long ear numbing scream and jumped into the middle of the hall. Panicking Homer fumbled with the locking handle, even though he knew that there was no use in it …
But suddenly the creature lost all interest in him and turned its attention to the train platform. With a strong movement Homer followed the look of the blind creature and his heart set out a beat.
There stood, scarred and looking around, the girl.
“Run!” Yelled Homer and his voice was suffocated by a painful cr
oaking sound.
The white chimera jumped forward many meters and now stood directly in front of the young women. She pulled out a knife which you should only use to cook and made a threatening move to the side.
As an answerer the creature swooshed with its front paws at the girl and she fell to the ground. The blade flew to the side.
Homer already stood next to the railcar but he didn’t think about fleeing. Rasping he waved his assault rifle and tried to get the white dancing silhouette into his sights.
Without success: The creature had reached the girl.
The guards who could have been a threat to this creature had been shredded after a few minutes and now there were only these two helpless beings left, backed into a corner.
I seemed to want to play with them for a while before it killed them.
It was hovering over Sasha so that the old man couldn’t see anything. Was it turning her insides out?
But then it winched and moved back, scratched at a bigger getting spot on its back with its claws, turned around screaming, ready to eat its attacker.
Hunter stumbled to the creature.
In one hand an automatic assault rifle and the other hanging down limp. You could see that every move hurt.
The brigadier shot another salve at the creature but it turned out to be surprisingly tough, it tumbled for a second, found its center of gravity again and stormed forwards.
Hunter’s bullets dried up but he was able to bury his machete into the enormous chest of the creature. The chimera fell on it, buried it under it and suffocated him with its weight.
Like if it wanted to destroy all hope 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 it 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 even started.
Chapter 10 (After death)
What remains of the dead? What remains of every one of us? Tombstones sink in, moss covers the, and after a few centuries the insignia can no longer be read.
Even in earlier times a grave who nobody cared about anymore, would be assigned to a new dead. Most only visited their children or the adults of the dead, grandchildren even less often and grand-grandchildren almost never.
What was called everlasting peace, only lasted half a century in big cities, then the bones where disturbed, to increase the density of the grave because you wanted to transform the graveyard into a suburb. The earth had become too small, for the living and the dead.
In half a century that 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 reached only back three generations. 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 remembers us had 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 who looked through it could say for sure who was on the photos. The photographs of the past can be interpreted as some kind of death masks, but not as a print of their soul when they were living.
And the photographs only decay slower as the body that was on 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 this path to immortality.
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, their memes 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 out of countless copies that have been before us, just another chimera, always half from our fathers and mothers who were again the halfs 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 milliards 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 it existed as a part of his body.
What had remained of the Egyptian pharaohs? What of Greece’s heroes? From the artists 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, from the work he had done in the last three hours there was only a handful of ash left.
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 the underworld had sounded harmless to her. Eternity in absolute blindness, deafness and absolutly not being able to do nothing at all was a hundredth times more terrible than some cauldrons with cooking oil in them.
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 t
hey 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 she 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 molten candle and made its home comfortable like a cat that had returned from an expedition …
A cold, wrinkled hand was on her hand. Slowly Sasha loosened her look from the flame because she feared that she could sink into the ground at any time. As soon as she awoke she felt the stinging pain in her lower arm and in her forehead. Out of the darkness simple furniture appeared tumbling: A few chairs, a dresser … Sasha herself was lying on a stretcher that was so soft that she couldn’t feel her back.
She felt as if her body only came back to her gradually.
“Sasha?” Repeated the voice.
She looked at the person that was speaking and hastily retracted her hand. At the bed the old man who had been with her on the railcar was sitting. His touch had been without any claim, neither harsh nor indecent. Shame and disappointment had made her retract her hand: How could she have mistaken the voice of a stranger with the one of her father’s? Why had the tunnel light led her back here from all places?
Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) Page 16
