And though she hadn’t spoken a word yet, he was ready in advance to believe her. For after all, apart from everything else, this teenage girl, with her white, tousled, carelessly lopped hair, pointed little ears, soot-smeared cheeks and exposed, sculpted collarbones – surprisingly white and vulnerable – with her childishly plump, bitten lower lip, was beautiful in a very special way.
The old man’s curiosity was mingled with pity and a surprising tenderness. He moved closer and squatted down beside her. She huddled away and squeezed her eyes shut. ‘A little savage,’ he thought. He patted her on the shoulder, not knowing what to say.
‘Time to go,’ Hunter butted in.
‘But what about . . . ?’ Homer asked with a nod at the girl.
‘Never mind. It’s none of our business.’
‘We can’t just abandon her here alone!’
‘Simpler to shoot her,’ the brigadier snapped.
‘I don’t want to go with you,’ the girl said, suddenly pulling herself together. ‘Just take the handcuffs off. He should have the key.’ She pointed to the shattered, faceless mannequin.
In three swift movements Hunter frisked the body and pulled a bunch of steel keys out of an inside pocket. He tossed them to the girl and looked round at the old man.
‘Is that all?’
Still trying to postpone the parting, Homer spoke to the girl.
‘What did that subhuman brute do to you?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, fiddling with the lock. ‘He didn’t have time. He’s not subhuman. Just an ordinary human being. Cruel, stupid, spiteful. Like all of them.’
‘They’re not all like that,’ the old man objected, but without any real conviction.
‘All of them,’ the girl said obstinately, wincing as she got up on her numbed legs. ‘It’s all right. Staying human’s not that easy.’
She’d certainly got over her fright very quickly! She didn’t lower her eyes any more, now she looked at the men with a lowering, challenging gaze. She walked up to one of the corpses, carefully turned it face up, arranged its arms on its chest and kissed it on the forehead. Narrowing her eyes, she turned to Hunter and the corner of her mouth trembled.
‘Thank you.’
Without taking any things or even a weapon, she climbed down onto the tracks and limped off towards the tunnel. The brigadier watched her go with his head lowered, frowning: his hand wandered indecisively along his belt between the knife and the flask. Finally he reached a decision, straightened up and called to her.
‘Wait!’
CHAPTER 8
Masks
The cage was still lying where the fat man had knocked it out of her hands. Its little door was slightly open and the rat had fled. ‘Let him go,’ the girl thought. The rat deserved his freedom too.
There was nothing else for it, so Sasha had put on her kidnapper’s gas mask. She thought there were still traces of his stale breath in it, but she could only be glad he’d taken the mask off before he was shot.
Close to the middle of the bridge, the background radiation spiked again
Sasha rattled about in the immense tarpaulin suit like a cockroach larva in a cocoon – it seemed miraculous that it could stay on her. But the gas mask clung firmly to her face, even though it had been stretched across the fat man’s broad features and drooping jowls. Sasha tried to blow as hard as she could, in order to drive the air predestined for the dead man out through the tubes and filters. But looking around through the perspiring circular lenses, she had an eerie feeling that she had climbed into someone else’s body, not just his protective suit. Only an hour ago the soulless demon who had come for her was in here. And now it was as if, in order to get across the bridge at all, she had been forced to become him and take a look at the world through his eyes. Through the eyes of the men who had banished her and her father to Kolomenskoe and kept them alive there for all these years only because their greed was stronger than their hate. Sasha wondered whether, in order to get lost among people like that, she too would have to wear a black rubber mask and pretend to be someone with no face and no feelings. If only that would help her to change on the inside too, and reset her memories to zero . . . To genuinely believe that she hadn’t been damaged beyond repair, that she could still start all over again.
Sasha would have liked to think these two men had not picked her up simply by chance, that they had been sent to the station especially for her, but she knew it wasn’t true. She found it hard to decide why they had taken her with them – for amusement, out of pity or to prove something to each other. The few words the old man had tossed to her, like a bone to a dog, seemed to hint at sympathy, but he did everything with wary deference to his companion, held his tongue and seemed afraid of being accused of mere common humanity.
And the other one, after giving permission for the girl to go with them as far as the nearest inhabited station, had never even looked in her direction again. Sasha had deliberately hung back and let him go ahead slightly, so she could study him freely from behind. He obviously sensed her gaze on him, immediately tensing up and jerking his head back, but he didn’t look round – perhaps out of tolerance for a young girl’s curiosity, or perhaps because he didn’t want to show that he was paying any attention to her.
From the powerful build and feral agility of the man with the shaved head, which had made the fat man confuse him with a bear, it was obvious that he was a soldier and a solitary. But it wasn’t just a matter of his height or his massive shoulders. He radiated energy, and it would have been just as palpable if he were short and skinny. A man like that could make almost anyone submit to his will, and he would eliminate anyone who disobeyed without compunction. And long before the girl finally mastered her fear of this man, before she even started trying to make sense of him and herself, the unfamiliar voice of the woman awakening within her told Sasha that she would submit too.
The trolley moved forward at an incredible pace. Homer could hardly feel the resistance of the levers, all the strain was taken by the brigadier. For form’s sake, standing there opposite Hunter, the old man also raised and lowered his hands, but the work cost him no effort at all.
The squat Metro bridge was like a millipede fording the murky, turbid river. The concrete flesh was peeling off its steel bones, its legs were buckling under it, and one of its two backbones had slumped and collapsed. Standard, functional and impermanent, it lacked the slightest trace of elegance – like the residential high-rise developments around it, like all of Moscow’s banal, stereotyped suburbs. But gazing round rapturously as he rode across it, Homer recalled the magical movable bridges of St Petersburg and the burnished metal lacework of Moscow’s Crimea Bridge.
In the twenty years he had lived in the Metro, the old man had only come up to the surface three times, and each time he had tried to observe more than he could possibly see during his short period of leave. Tried to bring his memories to life, focus the lenses of his eyes, already turning cloudy with age, on the city and click the rusting shutter of his visual memory. Tried to store up memories for the future. He might never be up on the surface again, at Kolomenskoe, Rechnoi Vokzal or Tyoply Stan – in those miraculously beautiful places that he and so many other Muscovites used to regard with such unjustified contempt.
Year by year his Moscow was growing older, falling apart, being eroded away. Homer wanted to stroke the decaying Metro bridge in the same way as the girl at Kolomenskoe caressed the man who had bled to death for the last time. And not just the bridge, but the grey crags of the factory buildings too. He wanted to gaze at them in endless adoration, to touch them, so he could feel that he was really there among them and not just dreaming all this. And also, just in case, to say goodbye to them.
The visibility was atrocious, the silvery moonlight couldn’t force its way through the filter of dense clouds, and the old man had to guess at more than he could observe. But that was okay, he was well used to substituting fantasies for reality.
Completely absorbe
d in his musings, at that moment Homer wasn’t thinking of anything else. He forgot about the legends that he was going to compose and the mysterious diary that had been harrowing his imagination without a break for so many hours. He behaved just like a child on a holiday outing, gazing in delight at the blurred silhouettes of the high-rises, turning his head to and fro, talking out loud to himself.
The others got no pleasure from the journey across the bridge. The brigadier, who had taken the forward-facing position, occasionally froze and peered in the direction of sounds that came flying up from below. Apart from that, his attention was riveted to the distant point, still invisible to his companions, where the tracks burrowed back into the earth. The girl sat behind Hunter, for some reason clutching her salvaged gas mask with both hands.
It was very obvious that she felt uncomfortable up on the surface. While the team was walking through the tunnel, the girl had seemed quite tall, but the moment they stepped out into the open she shrank into herself, as if she had withdrawn into an invisible shell, and not even the tarpaulin suit taken from the corpse made her seem any bigger, although it was hideously large for her. She was indifferent to the beautiful views from the bridge and most of the time she looked straight down at the floor in front of her.
They rode through the ruins of Technopark Station, which was being built, with careless haste, just before the war – it had crumbled away, not because of the nuclear strikes, but simply from the passage of time – and finally approached the tunnel. In the pale darkness of the night, its entrance was black with an absolute blackness. For Homer, his suit was transformed into a genuine suit of armour, and he was a medieval knight, riding into a fantastic fairytale cave, straight into the dragon’s lair. The noise of the nighttime city was left behind on the threshold of the beast’s abode, at the point where Hunter ordered them to abandon the trolley. All that could be heard now was the tentative rustling of three travellers’ footsteps and their sparse words, fractured by an echo that stumbled across the tunnel liners. But there was something unusual about the quality of sound in this tunnel. Even Homer could clearly sense the enclosed nature of the space, as if they had walked in through the neck of a glass bottle.
‘It’s closed off ahead,’ said Hunter, confirming the old man’s fears.
The beam of Hunter’s flashlight was the first to find the bottom of the bottle: the closed hermetic door loomed up in front of them, a blank wall. Rails glinted faintly, breaking off at the door, and dollops of brownish lubricant oozed from the bearings. Some old planks, dry broken branches and charred pieces of wood had been dumped right beside the door, as if someone had tried to light a fire there recently. The door was clearly in use, but apparently only for coming out from the inside – there were no bells or any other signalling devices on this side of it.
The brigadier looked at the girl.
‘Is it always like this here?’
‘They come out sometimes. They come to us on the other side. To trade. I thought . . . today . . .’ She seemed to be making excuses. Had she known there was no access, but kept it secret?
Hunter hammered on the door with the handle of his machete, as if it were a huge metal gong. But the steel was too thick and instead of a resonant chime, it gave out only a feeble clang. That sound almost certainly couldn’t be heard on the other side of the wall, even if there was anybody alive there.
No miracle happened. There was no answer.
In defiance of common sense, Sasha had been hoping these men would be able to unlock the door. She’d been afraid to warn them that the entrance into the Greater Metro was closed – what if they decided to take a different route and abandoned her where they had found her?
But no one in the Greater Metro was expecting them, and breaking open a hermetic door was beyond the power of any human being. The man with the shaved head examined the massive panel of metal, trying to find a weak point or a secret lock, but Sasha knew there weren’t any locks on this side. The door only opened outwards.
‘You stay here, I’m going to reconnoitre. I’ll check the door in the other tunnel and look for ventilation shafts,’ the big man barked. After a short pause he added: ‘I’ll be back’.
And then he disappeared.
The old man gathered up the branches and planks that were lying around and lit a puny little campfire. He sat down directly on the sleepers, thrust his hands into his knapsack and started rummaging through his belongings. Sasha crouched down quietly beside him, observing. The old man ran through a strange performance – perhaps for her, or perhaps for himself. He fished a filthy, battered notepad out of the knapsack, cast a wary glance at Sasha, shifted sideways away from her as far as he could and hunched over the paper. Then he immediately jumped up with suspicious agility for his age, to check that the man with the shaved head really had gone: he crept awkwardly about ten steps towards the exit of the tunnel, didn’t find anyone there and decided that these precautions would be sufficient. Leaning back against the door, he screened himself off from Sasha with a sack and immersed himself in his reading.
He read fretfully, droning something indistinctly to himself, then removed his gloves, took out a flask of water and started sprinkling it on his notepad. He read a bit more, then suddenly started rubbing his hands against his trouser legs, slapped himself fretfully on the forehead, touched his gas mask and plunged back into his reading. Infected by his agitation, Sasha abandoned her musings and crept closer: the old man was too engrossed to notice her cautious movements.
Infused with the light of the campfire, his pale green eyes glinted feverishly even through the lenses of the gas mask. Every now and then he surfaced with an obvious effort – for a gulp of air. In these breaks from reading, the old man peered warily at the distant patch of night sky at the end of the tunnel, but it was clear. The man with the shaved head had disappeared completely. And then the notepad engrossed him entirely again.
Now she realised why he had sprinkled the paper with water: he was trying to separate pages that were stuck together. They obviously resisted and once, when he accidentally tore one of them, he cried out as if he had cut himself. He swore, cursing his own clumsiness, and noticed how inquisitively she was examining him. Embarrassed, he adjusted his gas mask again, but didn’t say anything to her until he had read right to the end. Then he skipped over to the fire and flung the notepad into it, without even looking at Sasha, and she sensed that it was pointless to ask any questions now: he would only lie or say nothing. And there were other things that worried her far more just at the moment. Probably an entire hour had passed since the man with the shaved head left. What if he had abandoned them as an unnecessary burden? Sasha moved to sit a bit closer to the old man.
‘The other tunnel’s closed too,’ she said. ‘And all the shafts nearby have been blocked off. This is the only way in.’
The old man looked at her absent-mindedly, clearly struggling to concentrate on what he had heard.
‘He’ll find a way to get inside, he’s got intuition,’ he said, and a minute later, as if he didn’t want to seem impolite, he asked: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Alexandra,’ she replied seriously. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Nikolai,’ he began, reaching out his hand, and then suddenly jerking it back again before Sasha could touch it, as if he had changed his mind. ‘Homer. My name’s Homer.’
‘Homer. That’s a strange nickname,’ Sasha said slowly.
‘It’s just a name,’ Homer said firmly.
Should she explain to him that as long as they were with her the door would stay closed? Although it could easily have been standing wide open, if these two had come on their own. This was Kolomenskoe refusing to let Sasha go, punishing her for what she had done to her father. The girl had run off and stretched her chain to its limit, but she still couldn’t break it. The station had brought her back to itself once, and it would do it again.
No matter how hard she tried to drive these thoughts and images away, they only flew of
f to arm’s length, like bloodsucking gnats, but always came back, circling round and round her, creeping into her ears and her eyes. The old man was asking Sasha about something else, but she didn’t respond: her eyes were veiled by tears and she could hear her father’s voice in her ears, repeating: ‘Nothing is more precious than human life’. And now the moment had come when she really understood what he meant.
What was going on at Tula was no longer a mystery to Homer. The explanation for everything was simpler and more terrible than he had imagined, but an even more terrible story was only just beginning, now that the notepad had been deciphered. The diary was Homer’s black spot; it was a one-way ticket, and once he had held it in his hand, the old man could never be free of it, even if he burned it.
And besides that, his suspicions concerning Hunter had now been confirmed by substantial, unambiguous proof, although Homer didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with it. Everything he had read in the diary completely contradicted the brigadier’s claims. Hunter was simply lying, and quite deliberately. The old man had to work out what was the motive behind his lies, and if the lies made any kind of sense. The answer to that would determine whether he decided to carry on following Hunter and whether his adventure would turn out to be a heroic epic or a mindless, horrendous bloodbath that left no surviving witnesses.
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