‘There is one,’ the brigadier objected, pointing at him.
‘I meant . . .’ the old man began, but Hunter stopped him with a gesture of his hand.
At the far end of the platform, where the colonnade came to an end and even the brigadier’s searchlight could barely reach, something was crawling out slowly onto the platform.
Homer tumbled over onto his side, braced his hands against the platform and got up awkwardly. Hunter’s flashlight went out and the brigadier himself seemed to vanish into thin air. Sweating with fear, the old man fumbled at the safety catch and pressed the trembling butt of his automatic hard into his shoulder. He heard the faint pops of two shots in the distance. Feeling bolder, he stuck his head out from behind the column and then hurried forward.
Hunter was standing fully erect in the centre of the platform, with an amorphous, wizened figure squirming pitifully at his feet. It looked as if it had been assembled out of cardboard boxes and rags, and barely even resembled a human being at all, but it was one – ageless and sexless, so dirty that only the eyes could clearly be made out on its face, it whined inarticulately and tried to crawl away from the brigadier towering up over it. It looked as if it had been shot in both legs.
‘Where are the people? Why isn’t there anyone here?’ asked Hunter, setting his boot on the train of tattered, stinking rags trailing after the tramp.
‘They’ve all gone . . . They left me. I’m all alone here,’ the tramp hissed, scraping at the slippery granite with his hands, but not moving from the spot.
‘Where did they go to?’
‘Tula . . .’
‘What’s happening there?’ Homer put in as he came up to them.
‘How should I know?’ the filthy creature said with a crooked grin. ‘Everyone who went there just disappeared. Ask them. But I don’t have any strength for staggering through the tunnels. I’ll die here.’
‘Why did they go?’ the brigadier persisted.
‘They were frightened, boss. The station’s deserted, they decided to break out. No one came back.’
‘No one at all?’ asked Hunter, raising his gun barrel.
‘No one . . . Only one,’ said the tramp, correcting himself when he spotted the raised gun and shrivelling up like an ant in the sun’s rays under a lens. ‘He was going to Nagornaya. I was asleep. Maybe I imagined it.’
‘When?’
‘I haven’t got a watch,’ said the tramp, shaking his head. ‘Maybe yesterday, maybe a week ago.’
The questions had dried up, but the pistol barrel was still staring into the tramp’s eyes. Hunter stopped speaking, as if his spring had suddenly run down. And he was breathing strangely, as if the conversation with the tramp had cost him too much of his strength.
‘Can I . . . ?’ the tramp began.
‘Here, eat that!’ the brigadier snarled, and before Homer realised what was happening, he squeezed the trigger twice.
Black blood from the bullet holes in his forehead flooded the unfortunate victim’s staring eyes. Flattened against the ground by the bullets, he disintegrated again into a heap of rags and cardboard. Without looking up, Hunter inserted four more cartridges into the clip of his Stechkin and jumped down onto the tracks.
‘We’ll find out everything for ourselves soon enough,’ he shouted to Homer.
Ignoring his feeling of disgust, the old man leaned down over the body, took a scrap of material and covered the tramp’s shattered head with it.
‘Why did you kill him?’ he asked feebly.
‘Ask yourself that,’ Hunter replied in a hollow voice.
Now, even if he clenched all his willpower into a single tight fist, all he could do was raise and lower his eyelids. It was strange that he’d woken up at all . . . During the hour he’d been oblivious, the numbness had crept across his entire body like a crust of ice. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, and his chest seemed to be weighed down by something massively heavy. He couldn’t even say goodbye to his daughter, and that was the only thing worth coming round for, without following that old battle all the way to the end.
Sasha wasn’t smiling any longer. Now she was dreaming of something alarming, curled up tight on her makeshift bed and hugging herself, with a scowl on her face. Ever since she was a little child her father had woken her if he saw she was being tormented by nightmares, but now it took all his strength just to blink slowly.
And then even that became too exhausting.
To hold out until Sasha woke up he would have to carry on fighting. He had never stopped fighting for over twenty years, every day, every minute – and he was deadly tired of it. Tired of battling, tired of hiding, tired of hunting. Arguing, asserting, hoping, lying.
Only two desires remained in his fading consciousness: he wanted to look into Sasha’s eyes at least one more time, and he wanted to find peace. But he couldn’t manage either. Alternating with reality, images from the past starting flickering in front of his eyes again. He had to take a final decision. Break or be broken. Punish or repent . . . The guardsmen had closed ranks. Every one of them was loyal to him personally. Every one of them was willing to die now, torn to pieces by the mob, or to fire on unarmed people. He was the commander of the last unconquered station, the president of a confederation that no longer existed. For them his authority was indisputable, he was infallible, and any order he gave would be carried out immediately, without a second thought. He would take responsibility for everything, just as he had always done.
If he backed down now, the station would sink into anarchy, and then it would be annexed by the Red Empire that was expanding so fast, frothing over its original boundaries, subjugating more and more new territory. If he ordered his men to open fire on the demonstrators, he would retain his grasp on power – for a while. Or perhaps forever, if he didn’t balk at mass executions and torture.
He raised his automatic and a moment later the line of men repeated his movement. Along the line of the gun’s sight he saw a raging mob, not hundreds of people who had gathered together, but a faceless jumble of humanity. Grinning teeth, gaping eyes, clenched fists.
He clattered the breech of his gun and the line of men did the same.
It was time at last to take destiny by the scruff of the neck. Pointing the barrel of his gun upward, he pressed the trigger and whitewash showered down from the ceiling. The mob fell silent for a moment. He signalled for the soldiers to lower their weapons and took a step forward. It was his final choice.
And at last memory released him.
Sasha was still sleeping. He drew a final breath and tried to glance at her one last time, but he couldn’t even raise his eyelids. And then, instead of imperishable, eternal darkness, he saw before him an impossibly blue sky – as clear and bright as his daughter’s eyes.
‘Halt!’
Homer was so startled, he almost jumped and raised his hands in the air, but just checked himself in time. He was the only one that nasal yell through a megaphone took by surprise – the brigadier wasn’t surprised in the least: huddling down like a cobra before it strikes, he surreptitiously pulled the heavy sub-machine-gun out from behind his back.
Hunter still hadn’t replied to the old man’s question, in fact he’d stopped talking to him at all. To Homer the one-and-a-half-kilometre journey from Nagatino to Tula had seemed as endless as the road to Golgotha. He knew this stretch of tunnel would almost certainly lead him to his death, and it was hard to force himself to walk more quickly. At least now there was time to prepare, and Homer had occupied his mind with memories. He thought about Elena, chided himself for his egotism and begged her forgiveness. He recalled with a luminous sadness that magical day on Tver Street under the light summer rain. He regretted not having made any arrangements for his newspapers before he left. He prepared himself to die – to be torn apart by monsters, devoured by immense rats, poisoned by pollution . . . What other explanations could he find for the fact that Tula had been transformed into a black hole that sucked everythin
g into it and let nothing back out?
And now, when he heard a normal human voice as they approached Tula, he didn’t know what to think. Had the station simply been captured? But who could grind several assault units from Sebastopol into dust, who would have exterminated all the tramps who converged on the station out of the tunnels and not let even women or old men go?
‘Thirty steps forward!’ said the distant voice.
It sounded incredibly familiar, so familiar that if Homer only had time, he could have identified who it belonged to. Could it be one of the Sebastopolites?
Cradling his Kalashnikov in his arms, Hunter started meekly counting out the steps: at thirty of the brigadier’s steps, the old man had taken fifty. Ahead of him he could vaguely make out a barricade that seemed to be crudely assembled out of random items. And for some reason its defenders weren’t using any light.
‘Turn out the flashlights!’ someone commanded from behind the ragged heap. ‘One of you two – another twenty steps forward.’
Hunter clicked the switch of his flashlight and moved on. Left alone again, Homer didn’t dare disobey the voice. In the sudden darkness he squatted down on a sleeper, as far out of harm’s way as possible, felt warily for the wall and pressed himself against it.
The brigadier’s steps fell silent at the measured distance. Homer heard voices: someone interrogating Hunter in a voice he couldn’t make out and the brigadier barking abrupt replies. The situation was heating up: tense, but restrained tones were replaced by abuse and threats. Hunter seemed to be demanding something from the invisible guards, and they were refusing to do as he wanted.
Now they were shouting at each other, almost at the top of their voices, and Homer thought he would be able to make out the words any moment now. But he heard just one word clearly, the final one:
‘Judgement!’
And then an automatic started stuttering, interrupting the men’s argument, followed by the rumble of an army Pecheneg machinegun, spitting a burst of fire in Homer’s direction. The old man threw himself on the ground, jerking back the breech of his gun, not knowing if he ought to fire, and at whom. But it was all over before he could even take aim.
In the short pauses between the chattering of the guns, the depths of the tunnel echoed to a long, drawn-out scraping sound that Homer could never possibly have confused with anything else. The sound of a hermetic door closing. Confirming his guess, a steel slab weighing tons upon tons slammed home into its groove ahead of him, cutting off the shouting and the rumble of shots at a stroke.
Shutting off the only way out into the Greater Metro.
Severing Sebastopol’s final hope.
CHAPTER 6
On the Other Side
A moment later Homer was willing to believe he had imagined everything – the amorphous outlines of the barricade at the end of the tunnel and the voice that had seemed so familiar, distorted by the old megaphone. All sounds had been extinguished together with the light, and now he felt like a condemned man with a bag over his head, ready for execution. In the impenetrable darkness and sudden silence, the entire world seemed to have disappeared: Homer reached up and touched his own face, trying to convince himself that he hadn’t dissolved into this cosmic blackness.
Then he gathered his wits, fumbled around for his flashlight and launched the trembling beam forward – to where the invisible battle had been played out only minutes earlier. About thirty metres from the spot where he had waited out the fight, the tunnel came to a dead end, cut off by an immense steel shutter that filled its entire height and breadth, like the fallen blade of a guillotine.
His hearing hadn’t deceived him: someone really had activated the hermetic door. Although Homer knew about it, he didn’t think it could still be used – but apparently it could.
With his eyes weakened by all his paperwork, Homer didn’t immediately spot the human figure pressed up against the wall of metal. He held his automatic out in front of him and backed away, thinking it must be one of the men from the other side who had been lost overboard, but then he recognised the figure as Hunter.
The brigadier wasn’t moving. Streaming with perspiration, the old man hobbled towards him, expecting to see streaks of blood on the rusty metal. But there weren’t any. Although he had been fired on by a machine-gun at point blank range in the middle of a bare, empty tunnel, Hunter was unhurt. He had his flattened and mutilated ear pressed up against the metal, sucking in sounds that only he could hear.
‘What happened?’ Homer asked cautiously as he walked up.
The brigadier didn’t even notice him. He was whispering something, but whispering to himself, repeating words spoken by someone who was there, behind the closed door. Several minutes went by before he tore himself away from that wall and turned to Homer.
‘We’re going back.’
‘What happened?’ Homer asked again.
‘There are bandits in there. We must have reinforcements.’
‘Bandits?’ the old man exclaimed in bewilderment. ‘But I thought I heard . . .’
‘Tula has been captured by the enemy. We have to take it. We need men with flamethrowers.’
‘Why flamethrowers?’ asked Homer, completely confused now.
‘To make certain. We’re going back.’ Hunter swung round and strode off.
Before the old man followed him, he inspected the hermetic door carefully and pressed his ear to the cold steel, hoping that he could listen to a snatch of conversation too. Silence . . .
Homer realised he didn’t believe the brigadier. Whoever this enemy was that had captured the station, the way he behaved was absolutely inexplicable. Why would anyone think of using hermetic doors to protect themselves against just two men? What kind of bandits would engage in long negotiations with armed men at a border post, instead of simply riddling them with bullets as they approached?
And finally, what was the meaning of that final, sinister word barked by those mysterious sentries? ‘Judgement’?
There is nothing more valuable than human life, Sasha’s father used to tell her. And for him those were not merely empty words, not just some bland truism. But there was a time when her father didn’t think that way at all – there were good reasons why he became the youngest military commander on the entire line.
At the age of twenty years, you take killing and death far less seriously, and life itself seems like a game that you can start all over again if anything happens. It is no coincidence that the armies of the world were always made up of yesterday’s schoolboys. And all these youngsters playing at war were commanded by someone who could see thousands of people fighting and being killed as no more than blue and red arrows on maps, someone who could take the decision to sacrifice a company or a regiment without thinking about the torn-off legs, ripped-out intestines and shattered skulls.
There was a time when her father also regarded his enemies and even himself with disdain, when he astounded everyone with his readiness to take on missions that should have cost him his life. But he wasn’t reckless, and his actions were always precisely calculated. Intelligent and assiduous, at the same time he was indifferent to life, he had no sense of its reality, he didn’t think about consequences and wasn’t burdened with a conscience. No, he never fired at women and children, but he executed deserters in person and was always the first to storm the machine-gun nests. He was also almost insensitive to pain. Basically, he couldn’t give a damn for anything. Until he met Sasha’s mother.
She hooked him, so accustomed to his victories, with her own indifference. His only weakness – his vanity – which had driven him on against the machine-guns, launched him into a new, desperate assault that unexpectedly became a protracted siege.
He had never needed to make any special effort in love before: women themselves cast down their banners at his feet. Debauched by their easy acquiescence, he always sated his appetite for his latest girlfriend before he could fall in love with her and lost all interest in his conquest after the ver
y first night. His relentless insistence and his fame blinded girls’ eyes, and very few of them even tried to apply the age-old strategy of making a man wait until they got to know him.
But she found him boring. She wasn’t impressed by his decorations and titles, his triumphs in battle and love. She didn’t respond to his glances, she shook her head at his jokes. And he started taking the conquest of this young woman as a serious challenge. More serious than subjugating the nearby stations.
She was supposed to be just one more notch on his gun butt, but soon he realised that the prospect of intimacy with her was receding – and also becoming less important. Her attitude made the chance to spend even an hour together during the day feel like a real achievement – and she only went that far in order to torment him a little. She doubted the value of his accomplishments and mocked his principles. She chided him for his heartlessness. She shook his confidence in his strength and his goals.
He put up with all of it. But more than that – he enjoyed it. With her he started reflecting on things, hesitating over decisions. And then he started feeling things: helplessness – because he didn’t know how to get close to this girl; regret for every minute not spent with her; and even fear – the fear of losing her, without ever having won her. Love. And she rewarded him with a sign. A silver ring.
Finally, when he had completely forgotten how to manage without her, she yielded to him.
A year later Sasha was born – which meant that now there were two lives he could no longer treat with disdain, and he himself no longer had any right to be killed. At the age of only twenty-five, when you command the most powerful army in the observable part of the world, it’s hard to rid yourself of the feeling that your orders can stop the world itself from turning. No tremendous, supernatural might is required for taking away people’s lives, but the power to give back life to the dead is granted to no one.
This truth was borne in on him cruelly when his wife died of tuberculosis and he was helpless to save her. After that something in him was broken. Sasha was only four years old at the time, but she remembered her mother very well. And she remembered the terrible, tunnel-black void that was left behind after her mother was gone. A gaping abyss – the closeness of death – opened up in her little world, and she looked down into it often. The edges of the abyss knitted together only very slowly. It was two or three years before Sasha stopped calling out to her mother in her sleep.