A man shouting his wares at a stand that had a sign saying ‘Flowers’ and a rich collection of greeting cards. The pictures on the cards were faded photographs of all sorts of fancy bouquets. Sasha had been given a card like that when she was little, but there were so many of them here!
Babies glued to their mothers’ breasts, and children a bit older, playing with real cats. Couples still only touching each other with their eyes, and couples already touching each other with their fingers.
And men who tried to touch her.
She might have taken their attention and interest for hospitality or a desire to sell her something, but the way they spoke, in a slippery, breathy kind of tone, gave her an awkward, slightly disgusting feeling. What did they want with her? Weren’t there enough local women here for them? And some of them were genuine beauties too, the bright-coloured fabrics they were wrapped in made them look like the half-open flower buds on the cards. Probably they were just laughing at her . . . Was she really capable of provoking a man’s curiosity anyway? She suddenly felt a prick of unfamiliar doubt – at that spot just below the triangular arch of her interlocking ribs, where the tender hollow began . . . Only deeper. In the place she had only discovered a day ago.
Trying to drive away her anxiety, she wandered along the stalls crammed with all sorts of goods – armour plate and trinkets, clothes and tools – but they didn’t hold her attention so strongly any more. It turned out that her internal conversation could be louder than the commotion of the crowd, and the human images drawn by her memory could be more vivid than live people
Was she worth his life? Could she condemn him after what had happened? And most important of all, what point was there to her stupid musings now? When she could no longer do anything for him . . .
And then, before Sasha even realised why this was happening to her, the doubts receded and her heart calmed down. Listening closely to herself, she caught the notes of a distant melody, seeping into her from the outside, where it was flowing along beside the murky current of the multitude of human voices, without mingling with it.
For Sasha music had begun, as it does for everyone, with her mother’s lullabies. But it had also ended with them: her father had no ear for it and he didn’t like to sing – wandering musicians and similar buffoons were not welcomed at Avtozavod. And the sentries droning their dolefully hearty soldiers’ songs round the campfire were incapable of drawing real music from the drooping strings of their plywood guitars or the taut strings of Sasha’s heart.
But what she could hear now wasn’t dismal strumming on a guitar . . . It was more like the tender, living voice of a young woman, or even a little girl – but too high, beyond the range of the human larynx, and at the same time unnaturally powerful. But what else did Sasha have to compare this miracle with?
The song of the unknown instrument enchanted the unwary, bearing them off to somewhere infinitely far away, to worlds that no one born in the Metro could know, worlds that were impossible – only they weren’t supposed even to suspect that. The song set them dreaming and suggested that any dreams could come true. It aroused a vague, indefinite yearning and immediately promised to satisfy it. It made Sasha feel good, as if she had been lost in an abandoned station, but suddenly found a flashlight and the light of its beam had shown her the way out.
She was standing at a bladesmith’s booth, right in front of a tall sheet of plywood with various kinds of knives attached to it – from little baby folding penknives to predatory hunting knives. Sasha froze, gazing spellbound at the blades, with the two halves of her inner self clashing in a frantic struggle. The idea that had come into her head was simple and tempting. The old man had given her a handful of cartridges, and there were just enough of them for a knife with a broad, sharp serrated, burnished blade, which was absolutely perfect for what she had in mind.
A minute later Sasha had made up her mind and smothered her doubts. She hid her purchase in the breast pocket of her overalls – as close as possible to the spot with the pain she wanted to stop. She walked back to the infirmary, no longer feeling the weight of the soldier’s jacket and with her aching temples forgotten.
The crowd was a whole head taller than the girl, and the distant musician, breathing out his amazing notes, remained invisible to her. Yet the melody was still trying to overtake her, turn her back, make her change her mind.
But it was futile.
Another knock at the door.
Homer got up off his knees with a grunt, wiped his lips with his sleeve and tugged the chain of the cistern. A short brownish streak was left on the dirty-green fabric of his padded jacket. It was the fifth time he had puked in twenty-four hours, although he hadn’t really eaten anything to speak of.
His illness could have several explanations, the old man tried to convince himself. Why did it have to be accelerated development of the disease? It could be something to do with . . .
‘How much longer in there?’ a woman squealed impatiently in a high falsetto.
Oh God! Had he really been in such a hurry that he’d confused the letters on the doors? Homer blotted his sweaty face with his dirty sleeve, put on an imperturbable air and clicked the latch.
‘Drunken lout!’ the gaudily dressed floozy exclaimed. She pushed him out of the way and slammed the door shut.
‘Never mind,’ thought the old man. ‘Better for her to think I’m a drunkard . . .’ He took a step towards the mirror above the washbasin and leaned his forehead against it. As soon as he recovered his breath, he noticed the glass was steaming up and realised his respirator had slid down and was dangling under his chin. Homer hastily pulled the mask back up onto his face and closed his eyes again. No, thinking about how he was transmitting death to every person he met on his journey was unbearable. But it was too late to turn back now: if he was infectious, if he wasn’t confusing the symptoms, the entire station was already doomed in any case. Starting with this woman, who was guilty of nothing more than getting taken short at the wrong moment. What would she do if he told her now that she would die in a month’s time at the latest? How stupid it all was, thought Homer, stupid and tawdry. He was dreaming of immortalising everyone that life and fate brought him into contact with, but instead he had been appointed an absurd, bald, powerless angel of death. His wings had been clipped and he had been ringed, setting him a fixed term of thirty days, and that had galvanised him into action.
Had he been punished for his presumptuousness, for his arrogance?
No, the old man couldn’t keep quiet about it any longer. But there was only one person in the world he could make his confession to. Homer wouldn’t be able to deceive him for long in any case, and it would make the game simpler for both of them if they showed their cards.
He set off to the hospital wards, walking hesitantly.
The ward he needed was at the very end of the corridor, and usually there was an attendant on duty at the door, but now the post had been abandoned, and staccato wheezing could be heard coming out through the crack. It assumed the rough forms of words, but constructing meaningful phrases out of them was beyond even Homer as he stood there hiding.
‘Harder . . Struggle . . . Must . . . Still makes sense . . . Resist . . . Remember . . . Still possible . . . Wrong . . . Condemned . . . But still . . .’
The words merged into a growl, as if the pain had become too intolerable for the man speaking to lasso his scurrying thoughts. Homer stepped inside.
Hunter was lying there unconscious, sprawled across damp, crumpled sheets. The bandages bound tightly round the brigadier’s cranium had crept right down over his eyes, his protruding cheekbones were covered in perspiration and his stubbly lower jaw was hanging open helplessly. His broad chest rose and fell arduously, like a blacksmith’s bellows, struggling to maintain the fire in the body that was too large.
The girl was standing at the head of the bed, facing away from Homer with her thin hands clasped behind her back. The old man didn’t look closely at first, but then h
e noticed the black knife that almost merged into the fabric of her overalls – she was clutching the handle tightly in her fingers.
A ringtone beep.
Then another. And another.
One thousand, two hundred and thirty-five. One thousand two hundred and thirty-six. One thousand two hundred and thirty-seven.
Artyom wasn’t counting them to impress the commander with his diligence. He had to do it to feel that he was moving in some direction. If he was moving away from the point at which he had begun counting, that meant every beep brought him closer to the point at which this insanity would come to an end. Self-deception?
So okay. But listening to those beeps and thinking they would never break off was unbearable. Although at the beginning, on his very first watch, he had actually liked it: the beeps had introduced order into the cacophony of his thoughts, like a metronome, they had emptied his head, subjugating his galloping pulse to their own unhurried rhythm.
But the minutes that they sliced up became exactly like each other, and Artyom had started to feel that it was true, he was stuck in some kind of time trap and he could never get out of it until the beeps stopped. In the Middle Ages there was a torture like that: they shaved the offender’s head bare and sat him under a barrel with water dripping out, drop by drop, onto the top of his head, gradually driving the poor victim out of his mind. Where the rack was powerless, ordinary water produced excellent results.
Tethered by the telephone wire, Artyom had no right to leave his post for a second. He tried not to drink at all during his watch, so that the call of nature wouldn’t distract him from the beeps. The previous day he’d given in, darted out of the room, rushed to the toilet and then straight back. He paused to listen in the doorway, and his blood ran cold: the speed had changed, the signal was running faster, it had broken away from its usual measured pace. Only one thing could have happened, and he understood that perfectly well. The moment he had been waiting for had arrived when he wasn’t there. Glancing back in fright towards the door – had anyone noticed? – Artyom hastily redialled the number and pressed his ear to the receiver.
The phone clicked and the beeps started up in their usual rhythm. Since then it hadn’t given the ‘engaged’ signal even once and no one had answered it. But even so Artyom didn’t dare put the receiver down, he just moved it from his sweaty ear to his frozen one, trying not to lose count.
He hadn’t told the commander about that incident straight away, and now somehow he didn’t really believe the beeps could have sounded any different. He had been ordered to get through, and for a week now that was what he had been living for. If he violated that order, he would end up at a court martial that saw no difference between a blunder and sabotage.
The phone also told him how much time was left to the end of his watch. Artyom didn’t have his own wristwatch, but he had checked the time from the commander’s when he made his round. The signal was repeated every five seconds. Twelve beeps was a minute. Seven hundred and twenty was an hour. Thirteen thousand, six hundred and eighty was a complete watch. They fell like grains of sand out of one incredibly vast glass flask into another, bottomless one. And Artyom sat in the narrow throat between these two invisible vessels, listening to the time.
The only reason he didn’t dare put the phone down was because the commander could show up at any moment to check on him. But otherwise . . . What he was doing made absolutely no sense. There was definitely not a single living soul left at the other end of the line. When Artyom closed his eyes, he could see the picture in front of him again . . .
He saw the commandant’s office barricaded from the inside and its occupant sitting with his face resting on the desk, clutching a Makarov pistol in his hand. Naturally, with his ears shot to shreds, he can’t hear the phone ringing its head off. The men outside haven’t managed to force open the door, but the keyhole and the cracks are still open, and the desperate jangling of the old telephone leaks out through them, creeping through the air above the platform that is heaped up with swollen corpses. There was a time when the ringing of the phone couldn’t be heard above the incessant hubbub of the crowd, the patter of footsteps and the crying of children, but now it’s the only sound that disturbs the dead. The crimson glow of the emergency batteries blinks in its death throes.
A beep.
And another.
One thousand, five hundred and sixty-three. One thousand, five hundred and sixty-four.
No one answers.
CHAPTER 11
Gifts
‘Report!’
Whatever else about him, the commander certainly knew how to take a man by surprise. Legends circulated about him in the garrison: supposedly the former mercenary had been famous for his skill in handling cold weapons and his ability to dissolve into the darkness. At one time, before he settled down at Sebastopol, he used to massacre entire enemy guard posts singlehanded if the sentries demonstrated even the slightest carelessness.
Artyom jumped up, squeezed the receiver against his ear with his shoulder, saluted and stopped counting rather regretfully. The commander walked over to the duty roster, checked his watch, made a note of the time – 9:22 – beside the date – 3 November – signed it and turned to Artyom expectantly.
‘Silence. I mean, there’s no one there.’
‘They don’t answer?’ said the commander, chewing on his lips; he worked his neck muscles and cracked the vertebrae. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘What don’t you believe?’ Artyom asked cautiously.
‘That Dobrynin’s been taken out so fast. Is the epidemic already in Hansa then? Can you imagine the bedlam that must have broken out, if the Ring’s infected?’
‘But we don’t know, do we?’ Artyom responded uncertainly. ‘Maybe it’s started already. We’ve got no contact with them.’
‘What if the lines are damaged?’ The commander leaned down and drummed his fingers on the table.
‘Then it would be like with base.’ Artyom jerked his head in the direction of the tunnel that led to Sebastopol. ‘I dial, and it’s completely dead. But with them at least I get the signal. The equipment’s working.’
‘Base clearly doesn’t need us, since no one comes to our door any more. Or maybe there simply isn’t any base left. And no Dobrynin either,’ the commander said flatly. ‘Listen, Popov . . . If there’s no one left there, then we’ll all croak soon. And that makes our quarantine pointless. Maybe we should just drop it, what do you think?’ he asked and chewed on his lips again.
‘Definitely not, the quarantine’s essential,’ said Artyom, crossing himself in fright at his own heresy and recalling the commander’s manner of first shooting deserters in the stomach and reading them their sentence afterwards.
‘Essential,’ the commander repeated thoughtfully. ‘Another three feel ill today. Two locals and one of ours. Akopov. And Aksyonov died.’
‘Aksyonov?’ Artyom gulped hard and squeezed his eyes shut.
‘He smashed his head open against a rail. Said the pain was really bad,’ the commander went on in the same even tone. ‘And he’s not the first. It must be one hell of a headache for a man to spend half an hour down on his knees, trying to crack his skull, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Artyom suddenly felt sick.
‘No nausea? No weakness?’ the commander asked considerately, pointing his flashlight into Artyom’s face. ‘Open your mouth. Say “aaaaa”. Good man. I tell you what, Popov, you get through to Dobrynin, and get them to tell you Hansa has a vaccine and the medical brigades will be here soon. And they’ll save all of us who are healthy. And they’ll cure everyone who’s sick. And we won’t be stuck here in this hell for all eternity. And we’ll all go back home to our wives. You’ll back to your Galya. And I’ll go back to Alyona and Vera. Got that, Popov?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Artyom, nodding vehemently.
‘At ease.’
His machete had broken off at the handle, unable to support the weight of creature that collapsed onto
it. The blade had pierced so deep into the carcass that they didn’t even try to extract it. And the man with the shaved head, covered in slashes from the beasts’ claws, still hadn’t come round after almost three days.
There was nothing Sasha could do to help him, but she had to see him anyway. If only to say thank you. Even if he couldn’t hear her. But the doctors wouldn’t allow the girl into his ward. They said that all the injured man needed now was peace and quiet
Sasha didn’t know for certain why the man with the shaved head had killed those men on the trolley. If he had fired in order to save her, she could absolve him, but although she honestly tried to believe it, she couldn’t. Another explanation was more plausible: it was easier for him to kill than to ask for anything.
But at Pavelets everything had been completely different. There was no doubt about it: he had come for Sasha and even been prepared to die for her. Did that mean she hadn’t been wrong after all, and some kind of connection really had started developing between them?
When he called to her that time back at Kolomenskoe, she was expecting a bullet, not an invitation to move on together. But when she submitted and looked round, she had noticed the change in him immediately, even though his frightening face was still as impassive as ever: it was in his eyes, as if someone else had suddenly peeped out through the loopholes of those motionless black pupils. Someone who felt curious about her.
Someone to whom she now owed her life. She wondered if she should let him have the silver ring as a hint, the way her mother once did, but she was afraid the man with the shaved head wouldn’t understand the sign. How else could she thank him? To give him a knife to replace the one he had broken defending her was the very least that Sasha could do. When she was struck by this simple idea and stopped dead in front of the bladesmith’s counter, imagining how she would hand him his new knife, how he would look at her and what he would say, she hadn’t forgotten even for a moment that she was planning to buy a killer a weapon that he would use to slit throats and slash open stomachs.
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