Hunter’s grenade launcher spit out a flame, the shockwave numbed their ears; it left a continuously thin humming sound while burning parts of shredded flesh was raining down on them.
Achmed was the first to snap out of it. He helped Homer to his feet and dragged him with him.
They ran, stumbled over the tracks and got back up again without feeling any pain. They held on to each other, because in the milky soup you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. They ran as if they were threatened not just with death, but with something even more terrible: Utter, final, unchangeable embodiment of absolute, physical and mental destruction.
Invisible and almost inaudible, but only a step behind them, the demons followed, accompanying them but not attacking. They seemed to toy with them by giving them the illusion of a possible rescue.
Then the two men saw the fragmented marble walls and after that segments of the tunnels. They had made it out of the Nagornaya! The guardians of the station fell back like they were chained to the station. But it was too early to stand still.
Achmed ran ahead, searched with his hands for the pipes on the wall and pushed Homer in front of him.
They stumbled together, wishing to sit down.
“What’s with the brigadier?” croaked Homer after he had ripped off the sticky gasmask from his face while he was walking.
“As soon as we pass the fog we’ll stop and wait for him. It has to be soon, maybe 200 steps. Out of the fog, we need to get out of the fog.” repeated Achmed, mysterious, “I’ll count the steps…”
But neither after 200 steps nor after 300 did the fog seemed to disappear. What if it had spread to the Nagatinskaya? What if had swallowed the Tulskaya and the Nachimovski as well?
“That can’t be… it has to… only a bit…” mumbled Achmed for the hundredth time. He suddenly stopped.
Homer bumped into him and both fell to the ground.
“The wall has ended.” Achmed stepped over the tracks and the wet concrete floor as if he thought that the ground would vanish under his feet.
“It’s here, what do you mean?” Homer had felt the segment of the tunnel wall and pulled himself up off the floor.
“Sorry,” Achmed replied silently. “You know back at the station… I thought I would never leave it. How it looked at me… me, do you understand? It had decided to take me. I thought I would stay there forever. You don’t even get a real burial.” He spoke slowly to keep himself from crying.
He tried to justify the way he was speaking, even thought he didn’t have to.
Homer shook his head. “It’s alright; I shitted my pants as well. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go, it can’t be far now.”
The hunt seemed to be over and they could breathe again. Even if it wasn’t, they couldn’t run anyways.
So they kept walking slowly, feeling their way along the wall half blind with their hands. Step by step to salvation. The worst part was behind them and even though the fog hadn’t disappeared soon the air from the tunnel would rip it apart and carry it away through the vents. Soon they would get to humanity and wait for their officer.
It happened earlier than they thought. Did space and time get bent in the fog as well?
An iron staircase crawled up the wall; the round tunnel became a square one and next to the tracks you could see the indent in the track that had saved a lot of lives.
“Look!” whispered Homer, “It looks like a station. A station!”
“Hey! Is there someone?” screamed Achmed as loud as he could.
“Brothers, is there somebody?” Achmed fell into a pointless, triumphal laugh.
The dim light of the lamps revealed what the darkness had hidden, walls of marble, that hadn’t been left untouched by man and time. It seemed that none of the colorful mosaics, which had been the pride of the Nagatinskaya, had survived.
And what had happened to the marble around the pillars? That can’t be…
Even though Achmed didn’t get an answer he kept screaming and laughing: Of course they had been afraid of the fog and had run through it like crazy, but they no longer cared about that anymore.
Homer on the other hand was worried and searched the wall with the weak beam of his flashlight. His suspicions left cold droplets running down his back.
Finally he found them: The iron letters screwed on the burst marble.
NAGORNAYA.
You never returned to the same place coincidentally.
Her father had always said that. You return to change something, to apologize for something.
Sometimes god grabs us and brings us back to the place where he forgot us last. God does that to make a decision or to give us a second chance.
Her father explained that to her; he would never be able to return to his home station. He had no more strength to get revenge, to fight or to proof something. He no longer wanted forgiveness.
It was an old story that had almost cost him his life. But he was certain that everybody had gotten what they deserved.
Now they lived in eternal exile, because Sasha’s father had nothing to make up and god didn’t live in this station.
The plan for their rescue, to find a new car on the surface that hadn’t rotted, to repair it, get enough gas and to break out of this vicious cycle that fate had drawn, had become a good fairy tail a long time ago.
For Sasha there was another way to the big metro.
When she put the half repaired machines, old jewelry, or decayed books on the tracks, the merchants offered more: food and bullets.
They illuminated her thin, young stature with the lights of their railcar, winked at each other, tried to talk to her and promised a lot of things. The girl looked wild. Silent and distrusting she looked at them, ready to strike with knife behind her back. Her jacket was big but it didn’t hide her stature. Dirt and machine oil in her face made her blue eyes glow brighter. So bright that some couldn’t look at them.
Blond hair, cut unevenly with the knife she was holding, didn’t even go over her ears. Her lips never smiled.
The men on the rail cart knew that they couldn’t tame this wolf with riches, so they tried it with freedom. She never answered them. That’s why they thought she couldn’t talk, which made it even easier.
But Sasha knew one thing: Whatever she did she wouldn’t be able to buy two seats on the rail cart.
Her father had a history with this people that she could never change.
How they were standing in front of her, faceless with their black gas masks, they looked more like enemies for her. She didn’t find anything on them of which she would have dreamt, not even while she was sleeping. So she put the telephones, irons, and teapots on the tracks, stepped back and waited till the merchants had gathered the goods.
Then they threw a few packets of dried pork and a handful of bullets on the tracks, only so that they could watch her crawling around to pick all up. Than the rail cart left slowly and vanished back to the real world.
Sasha turned around and went back home where a mountain of broken machines, a screw driver, a blowtorch a dynamo machine repurposed bicycle were waiting for her. She sat herself on the saddle, closed her eyes and rode far, far away. She almost forgot that she wasn’t moving. And the fact that she had refused the easy way out gave her even more strength.
What the devil? How did we end up here again? Like in a fever, Homer tried to find an explanation for what had happened here.
Suddenly Achmed turned silent; he had seen where Homer had shined his lamp. “It’s not letting me go…”