She knew one thing for certain: this man’s fearlessness made her forget his deformity.
The man with the shaved head went over to the trolley first and started tearing the rubber scalps off his fallen enemies. Then suddenly he staggered back from the motor trolley as if he had seen the devil in person, holding out both arms in front of himself and repeating one word over and over again . . .
‘Black!’
CHAPTER 9
Air
Fear and terror are not the same thing at all. Fear spurs a man on to take action and be creative. Terror paralyses the body and blocks the flow of thought, it makes a man less human. Homer had seen enough in his time to know the difference between them. His brigadier, who was not endowed with the ability to experience fear, had proved surprisingly vulnerable to terror. But the old man was even more amazed by what had reduced Hunter to this state.
The body from which he had removed the gas mask looked unusual. The face that had appeared from under the black rubber had dark, glossy skin, thick lips and a broad, flat nose. Homer hadn’t seen any black men since the day the music channels on TV stopped working – more than twenty years ago – but it wasn’t hard for him to recognise the dead man as simply a member of a different race. Curious, certainly. But what was so frightening about it?
The brigadier had already taken a grip on himself: his strange fit had lasted less than a minute. He shone his flashlight on the dark face, growled something unintelligible and started roughly undressing the obstinate body, and Homer could have sworn he heard the crunch of fingers being broken.
‘It’s a mockery . . . Just to remind me again, right! It’s inhuman . . . A punishment like that . . .’ he wheezed almost inaudibly.
Had he taken the man for someone else? Was he mutilating the body in revenge for his own momentary humiliation or settling some older and much more serious score? The old man suppressed his own revulsion, glancing stealthily at the brigadier as he stripped another body.
The girl didn’t take any part in the looting and Hunter didn’t try to force her. She walked away, sat down on the rails and lowered her face into her hands. It seemed to Homer that she was crying.
Hunter dragged the bodies out through the door and dumped them in a heap. In less than twenty-four hours there would be nothing left of them. During the day, mastery of the city passed to creatures so appalling that the fearsome predators of the night hid away deep in their burrows, waiting meekly for their hour to come again.
Although the dead man’s blood wasn’t visible on the dark uniform, it didn’t dry out immediately. It felt cold and clammy on Homer’s stomach and chest, clinging to him as if it wanted to get back into a living body, causing a horrible itching on his skin and in his mind. He wondered if this masquerade was really necessary, and the only consolation he could find was that it would help them to avoid any more casualties in Avtozavod Station. If Hunter’s calculations proved correct, the guards would take them for their own men and let them through unopposed. But what if they didn’t? And was the brigadier even trying to reduce the number of deaths that he left in his wake?
Homer found the brigadier’s bloodthirstiness repellent, but also intriguing. Self-defence could not justify even a third of all the killings he committed, but it was a matter of something more than plain sadism. What concerned the old man most of all was whether Hunter was heading for Tula simply in order to indulge his craving.
Even if the unfortunate people who were trapped at that station couldn’t find a cure for the mysterious fever, it didn’t mean that there was no cure, in principle! There were places in the underground world where the embers of scientific thought continued to glow, where research was carried out, new medicines were developed and serums were manufactured. Polis, for example – that confluence of four major arteries, the heart of the Metro, the last remaining simulacrum of a genuine city, that extended through the connecting passages between the Arbat, Borovitskaya, Alexander Garden and Lenin Library stations, where the doctors and scientists who survived had established their base. Or the immense bunker near Taganka Station, the secret technopolis that belonged to Hansa . . .
And apart from that, Tula might not be the first station where the epidemic had broken out. What if someone had already managed to beat the sickness? ‘How could I possibly abandon so easily any hope of being saved?’ Homer asked himself. Of course, now that he was carrying the time bomb of the disease in his own body, the old man had a vested interest in this kind of reasoning. In his rational mind Homer had almost accepted the idea that he would die soon. But his instincts rebelled, demanding that he try to find a way out. If he could find a way to save Tula, he would protect his home station from harm and be saved himself . . .
But Hunter simply didn’t believe there was any cure for this disease. After exchanging a few words with the watch at Tula on a single occasion, he had condemned all the inhabitants of the station to death and immediately set about putting the sentence into effect. He had misled the top command of Sebastopol with wild stories about nomads, imposed his own decision on them and was now inexorably approaching the point of making it a reality by committing Tula to the flames.
Or did he know about something happening at the station that turned everything topsy-turvy again? Something that neither Homer nor the man who left his diary at Nakhimov Prospect knew about . . .
When he was done with the bodies, the brigadier tugged his flask off his belt and sucked out the remains of its contents. What was it? Alcohol? Did he use his hooch as a condiment to help him savour his actions, or was he trying to kill the aftertaste? Was he relishing the moment or trying to escape from it – or perhaps he hoped that with alcohol he could smother something inside himself?
For Sasha, the smoky old motor trolley was a time machine out of the bedtime stories her father once used to amuse her with. It wasn’t carrying the girl from Kolomenskoe to Avtozavod, but taking her back from the present into the past – although no one but her could possibly have thought of the stone dungeon where she had spent all these years, that blind alley in space and time, as ‘the present’.
She remembered the journey in the other direction very well: she was still only a little girl, her father, tightly bound, with a woolly hat pulled down over his eyes and a gag in his mouth, sat beside her. She cried all the time, and one of the soldiers in the firing squad folded his fingers together and showed her various shadow animals in the little yellow circus ring that was running along the ceiling of the tunnel, racing with the trolley.
The sentence was read out to her father after they crossed the bridge: the revolutionary tribunal commuted his sentence from execution to lifelong banishment.
They pushed him out onto the rails, tossed him a knife, a sub-machine-gun with one clip of cartridges and an old gas mask, then helped Sasha get down. The soldier who had shown the little girl the horsy and the doggy waved to her.
Could he be one of the men who had been shot today?
The feeling of breathing someone else’s air grew stronger when she squirmed into a black gas mask taken off one of the bodies by the man with the shaved head. Every tiny little stretch of her journey cost someone’s life. The man with the shaved head would probably have shot them anyway, but now that Sasha was here, she was an accomplice.
It wasn’t only because he was tired of fighting that her father hadn’t wanted to come home. He used to say that all his humiliations and deprivations weighed less than even a single human life. He suffered in order not to cause suffering to others. Sasha knew that the pan of the scales holding all the lives he had taken already hung very, very low, and her father was simply trying to restore the balance.
But the man with the shaved head could have intervened sooner, couldn’t he? He could have simply frightened the men on the trolley, just by appearing, and disarmed them without firing a single shot: Sasha was sure of that. None of the dead men was a worthy opponent for him. Why did he have to do that?
The station of her ch
ildhood was closer than she thought. In less than ten minutes its lights were glimmering ahead of them. There was no one guarding the approaches to Avtozavod: the station’s inhabitants obviously placed too much faith in the locked hermetic doors. Fifty metres before the platform, the man with the shaved head switched the engine to low speed and told Homer to take the helm, while he moved closer to the machine-gun.
The trolley rolled into the station almost without a sound and very, very slowly – or perhaps time was standing still for Sasha, so that she could see everything and remember it all in a few brief moments? On that day her father had left her in the care of his orderly, telling him to hide her until everything was sorted out. The orderly led her deep into the underbelly of the station, to one of the service areas. But even from there they could hear the simultaneous roar of a thousand throats, and he went dashing back to be with his commander. Sasha hurtled along the empty corridor behind him and darted out into the hall . . .
They drifted along the platform, and Sasha looked at the spacious family tents and the carriages equipped as offices, the little kids playing tag and the old men chatting, the sullen men cleaning their guns . . .
And she saw her father standing in front of a thin line of angry, frightened men who were trying to enclose and restrain a raging crowd. She ran over to her father and pressed herself against his back. He swung round crazily, shook her off and slapped his adjutant in the face as he came hurrying up. But something had already happened to him. The line of men, which had frozen with its automatic weapons raised in anticipation of the command to open fire, was ordered to stand down. The only shot was one fired into the air. Her father started negotiations on the peaceful handover of the station to the revolutionaries . . .
Her father believed that a man was given signs. You just had to know how to see them and read them correctly.
No, time hadn’t slowed down just so that she could revisit the final day of her childhood. She spotted the armed men rising to meet the trolley before the others did. She saw the man with the shaved head reach the trigger switch with an elusive, fluid movement and start turning the thick, burnished barrel towards the amazed sentries. She heard the hissed command to halt the trolley before the old man did. And Sasha realised so many people would be killed now, that she would feel as if she were breathing someone else’s air for the rest of her life. But she could still prevent the massacre, save them and herself and one other man from something more appalling than any words could express.
The sentries were already taking their automatics off the safety catches, but they fiddled with them too long, and were several moves behind the man with the shaved head. She did the first thing that came into her mind – she jumped up and pressed herself against his lumpy, iron-hard back, hugging him from behind and clasping her hands on his chest, which was so still, it didn’t seem to be breathing. He shuddered as if she had lashed him with a whip, hesitated . . . The sentries, finally ready to fire, were bewildered too.
The old man understood her without any words.
The trolley shot off down the tracks, belching out black clouds of bitter smoke, and Avtozavod Station receded rapidly – back into the past.
All the way to Pavelets Station no one spoke another word. Hunter freed himself from the unexpected embrace, parting the girl’s arms as if he were bending open a steel hoop that prevented him from breathing. They slipped past the only guard post at full speed and the spray of bullets directed at them from it bit into the ceiling above their heads. The brigadier managed to pull out his pistol and reply with three soundless flashes of flame. He seemed to have brought one man down, but the others melted into the walls, squeezing themselves in behind the shallow lips of the tunnel liners to save themselves.
‘My, my,’ thought Homer, glancing at the girl, who was quiet and subdued now. He had assumed the love line would come into play soon after the heroine’s appearance, but everything was developing too fast. Faster than he could understand it all, let alone write it down.
They rode into Pavelets Station and stopped.
The old man had been here before, at this station straight out of the mists of Gothic legend. Instead of the plain columns that supported the vaults in all the newer, outlying stations of the Metro, Pavelets Station was supported by a series of airy, rounded arches that were too high for ordinary people. In typical fashion for legends of that kind, Pavelets was the victim of a distinctive curse. At precisely eight o’clock in the evening the hustle and bustle suddenly died away and the thriving station was transformed into its own ghost. Out of its entire dynamic and resourceful population, only a few daredevils were left on the platform. Everyone else disappeared – together with their children, personal effects, trunks stuffed with goods, benches and makeshift beds.
They all crammed into the refuge – the almost kilometre-long connecting passage to the Circle Line – and trembled there through the long night while monstrous creatures who had woken from their sleep prowled around on the surface at the Pavelets railway station. People who ought to know said these creatures were the unchallenged masters of the station building and the adjoining territory, and even while they slept no other beasts would dare to wander in there. The inhabitants of Pavelets had no defences against them: the shutters that cut off the escalators at other stations simply didn’t exist here, and the way out to the surface was always open. To Homer’s mind, it would have been hard to find anywhere less appropriate for an overnight halt. But Hunter thought differently: when the trolley reached the far end of the hall, it stopped.
‘We’ll stay here until the morning. Make yourselves at home,’ he said, pulling off his gas mask and waving his hand round at the station. And he left them. The girl watched him go, then curled up on the hard floor of the trolley. The old man made himself as comfortable as possible and closed his eyes, trying to doze off, but in vain. He was besieged again by thoughts of the plague that he was carrying round all the stations that were still uninfected. The girl couldn’t sleep either.
‘Thank you. I thought you were the same as him,’ she told Homer.
‘I don’t think there are any other men like that,’ the old man replied.
‘Are you two friends?’
‘Like a sucker fish and a shark,’ he said with a grim smile, thinking that was exactly the way it was: Hunter devoured people, but occasional bloody scraps of human flesh came his way too.
‘How do you mean?’ she asked, half-sitting up.
‘Where he goes, I go. I don’t think I could manage without him, and he . . . Perhaps he thinks that I’ll absolve him somehow. Although no one really knows what he thinks.’
‘But why can’t you manage without him?’ asked the girl, moving to sit closer to the old man.
‘I have the feeling that while I’m with him, my inspiration . . . won’t desert me.’ Homer tried to explain.
‘Inspiration – I read somewhere that means “breathing in”,’ said Alexandra. ‘But why do you want to breathe that? What good will it do you?’
Homer shrugged.
‘It’s not what we breathe in, it’s what’s breathed into us,’ he replied.
‘I think that as long as you breathe death, no one will kiss your lips. They’ll be scared of the rotten corpse smell,’ she said, drawing something on the dirty floor with her finger.
‘When you see death, it makes you think about many things,’ Homer remarked.
‘You don’t have any right to summon death every time you need to think,’ she objected.
‘I don’t summon it, I just stand there . . . and then it hasn’t really got anything to do with death . . . or not only with death,’ the old man countered. ‘I wanted a story to happen to me, a story that would change everything. I wanted something to happen in my life. To shake me up. And clear out my head.’
‘Did you have a bad life?’ the girl asked sympathetically.
‘A boring one. You know, when one day’s like any other, they fly by so fast and it seems like the la
st one is really close already,’ Homer tried to explain. ‘You feel afraid of not getting anything finished. And every one of those days is full of a thousand little things to be done. Do one, take a break, and it’s time to start on the next one. You have no time or strength left for what’s really important. You think: never mind – I’ll start tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes, it’s always just one long, endless today.’
‘Have you seen many stations?’ She didn’t seem to be following what the old man was telling her at all.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, puzzled. ‘All of them, probably.’
‘And I’ve seen two,’ the girl sighed. ‘First my father and I lived at Avtozavod, then we were exiled to Kolomenskoe. I always wanted to see at least one more. It’s so strange here . . .’ She ran her eyes along the line of arches. ‘As if there were a thousand gateways, and not even any walls between them. And there they are, all open for me, but I don’t want to go through. And I’m afraid.’
‘So he was your father? That man, the other one . . .’ Homer hesitated. ‘Did they kill him?’
The girl retreated back into her shell of silence for a long time before she responded.
‘Yes.’
‘Stay with us,’ said the old man, plucking up his nerve. ‘I’ll have a word with Hunter, I think he’ll agree. I’ll tell him I need you, for . . .’ He shrugged, not knowing how to explain to the girl that now she had to inspire him.
‘Tell him he needs me,’ said Sasha.
She jumped down onto the platform and wandered away from the trolley, stroking every column as she walked past it.
There was absolutely nothing coy about her, she didn’t flirt at all. Along with all kinds of firearms, she seemed to despise the standard female arsenal – those sweet little glances and heart-melting gestures, those fluttering eyelashes that can raise a hurricane and those half-smiles for which a man would sacrifice himself or kill another. Or was it that she simply didn’t know yet how to use these weapons?