The tall, broad-shouldered fighter who sat alone, approached the campfire with leisurely steps, took his ration and returned to his place – if possible close to the tunnel, and if possible as far away from the people.
The fat man pointed his head at the broad back of the man, who just returned into the darkness and whispered:
“Does he ever go to the station?”
“No, he has been sitting here for over a week” answered the sharpshooter as silent as the other man. “He sleeps in a sleeping bag… Maybe he needs it. Three days ago, when the creatures almost devoured Rinat, he killed every last of them. With his own hands. For fifteen minutes.
When he returned, his boots and rifle were full of blood. And he looked very satisfied doing it.”
“That’s not a human, but a machine,” said the gaunt machine-gunner. “I wouldn’t like to sleep near him. Did you see what happened to his face?”
The old man, who was called Homer, shrugged his shoulders and said: “Strange, I really only feel safe when he is around. What do you want from him? The guy is alright, he just got hit. For what do we need beauty, it is for the other stations. And by the way: Your Novoslobodskaya is the tip of a mountain of bad taste. And I can’t even watch those stained windows when I am sober… stained windows, laughable!”
“And a Kolcho-mosaic over half the ceiling is no bad taste?”
“Please tell me where you saw a Kolcho-mosaic in the Komsomolskaya?”
Now the fat man got going. “The whole damned soviet art has only one theme: The life on a Kolchose and our heroic pilots!”
“Seryoscha, leave the pilots out of it,” warned the sharpshooter.
Suddenly a hollow, deep voice said: “The Komsomolskaya is shit and the Novoslobodskaya as well.”
The fat man was so surprised that he wasn’t able to say a single word and he starred at the brigadier who was still sitting in the dark. The others stopped talking as well. The stranger did almost never participate in any conversations.
Even when someone asked him something, he answered, if at all with one word.
He still had his back turned at them, continuously looking into the mouth of the tunnel. “At the Komsomolskaya the ceiling is too high and the pillars are too thin, the whole station lies in the open. Also it is very hard to barricade all passage ways. And at the Novoslobodskaya all of the walls have cracks, it doesn’t matter how often they repaired them. You can destroy the entire station with one grenade. And the stained windows are already broken. Way too brittle.”
One could have countered this argument very well, but nobody dared to raise their voice. The brigadier was silent for a while, than he said casually: “I am going to the station. Come with me Homer. Shift changes in one hour. Arthur you are in command.”
The sharpshooter stood up hastily and nodded his head, even though the brigadier wasn’t looking at him. Even the old man stood up and gathered his possessions, even though he wasn’t finished with eating. When the fighter returned to the campfire he was already in full gear and carrying his enormous rucksack.
As the contrasting figures – the colossal brigadier and the thin Homer – gradually entered into the lit part of the tunnel, the sharpshooter followed them with his eyes. Then he rubbed his cold hands together and realized he was shaking.
“I’m feeling cold. Someone put more coals on the fire.”
On their way the brigadier didn’t speak a single word. He only asked if Homer really once had been working in the metro and if he had ever drove a train. The old man looked at him with a distrusting look at first, but then he nodded his head.
He said he drove trains at the Sevastopolskaya, but he never mentioned that he used to maintain tracks before that. That was a embarrassing subject.
The brigadier greeted the guards with a military salute.
Those stepped out of his way and he entered the office of the head of the station without knocking.
Istomin and the colonel stood up surprised from their chairs and walked into his direction. Both looked tousled somehow, tired and lost.
While Homer remained shyly at the entrance, stepping from one leg onto the other, the brigadier took off his helmet, put it right on top of Istomins papers and scratched his clean-shaven head. You could see once again how badly distorted his face was: The left cheek had contracted like after a heavy fire injury, the eye above it was a small crack and a big violet scar ran from his mouth to his ear. Although Homer knew this sight; chills still ran down his back, like he had seen it for the first time.
“I will go to the Ring line myself,” said the brigadier.
He hadn’t even greeted any of them. Deep silence followed. Homer already knew that the man was an extraordinary fighter and that had earned him a special reputation with the leaders of the station. But it took him until now to realize that compared to other inhabitants of the Sevastopolskaya the brigadier didn’t follow orders. He wasn’t waiting for a permission of the two old and exhausted men; it almost seemed like he was giving them orders and expected them to follow them. And again – how many times now? – Homer asked himself: Who was this man?
The colonel looked at Istomin. His face darkened as if he wanted to argue.
“Whatever you want, Hunter,” he said. “Nobody can talk you out of it anyway.”
CHAPTER 2
Return
Homer listened. Hunter. He had never heard that name at the Sevastopolskaya. It sounded like a nickname – like his own, of course he wasn’t called Homer, but Nikolai Ivanovitsch. They named him after the creator of the Greek epics, because he loved stories and rumors of all kind.
“Your new brigadier,” said the colonel to the guards in the southern tunnel two months ago. They looked at the broad-shouldered man in the Kevlar armor and the heavy helmet with distrust and curiosity. He just looked at them indifferently and returned to the fortifications as if he couldn’t care less.
He shook the hands of those who came to introduce themselves, but didn’t speak a word. He nodded his head silently, remembered their names and puffed blue smoke in their faces like he wanted to keep them at distance. His lifeless eye shimmered in the shadow of his folded up visor. Not then nor later the guards dared to ask for his name and so he remained “the brigadier”. It seemed that the station had hired a mercenary that didn’t need a name.
Hunter.
While Homer stood in the entrance of Istomin’s office undecided he formed the strange word silently with his lips. It didn’t fit for a human – more for a shepherd hound. He couldn’t suppress a smile: actually there had been such dogs here. How did all this come to his head?
A militant race, with a shortened tail and ears directly on the head – nothing superfluous.
But the more often he said his name, the more he thought that he knew it. Where had he heart it? It probably got stuck in the endless stream of legends and rumors and had sunken to the ground of his mind. Meanwhile a thick layer of names, facts, rumors and numbers had appeared in his mind – all that useless data about the lives of other humans that Homer had always listened to eagerly and tried to remember faithfully.
Hunter… a criminal with a price on his head from Hanza? Homer threw a stone into the dim lake of his mind and listened. No. A stalker? Didn’t match his appearance. A field commander? More like it.
And apparently a legend as well. Homer studied the face of the brigadier in secret. The name of a dog suited him surprisingly good.
“I still need two men. Homer comes with me, he knows these tunnels.” The brigadier didn’t ask for his approval and nor did he turn to him.
“And a runner, a currier. I will leave today.” Istomin nodded his head, but then he gave the colonel an asking look.