I won't ever muster the courage needed to tell them what had actually transpired. I caught some and rubbed them on my palm.
Grey flakes were slowly falling down, covering the brown dirt and the black cracked asphalt. The boy being held by his mother had already taken off his improvised gas mask and was waving towards me. They had no idea their execution was simply replaced with a life sentence. Would people, granted pardon mere moments before their execution, be afraid of catching a cold? They wouldn't be afraid of anything. They stayed to defend their home until the end, which was absolutely sure to follow soon.
They stayed at a besieged station for they had nowhere to run. Everybody here, all these worn-out people, until quite recently were ready to die. Yet, just a few hours before she knew for sure she was going to die. Didn't she fear for the boy's life? She probably did. I saw a woman with a child among those who came to welcome me back. What they didn't know was that I'd just destroyed their last chance for salvation. It seemed to them that my victory had already given their long lost world right back to them. And when they saw me breathe surface's frosty air some of them started removing their masks, too. They came topside despite the taboo, to see the ground I won back for their children from the demons. But the monsters that were quite recently longing for my blood had apparently developed disgust towards it now.Īnd when I reached the Metro, a crowd was already waiting for me there. I stumbled along the street hoping something would just eat me before I got back to the Metro. The air, the polluted and poisoned air, which I wanted to taste for so long, filled my lungs. I came down from a bomb-crippled concrete broadcast tower, but the look in their eyes told me I might as well be coming down from heaven in a shiny chariot.Īll I wanted was to die, so I ripped the gas mask off my face. They were ragged, they were tattered, bloodied and burned. I only find soot instead of forgiveness and ashes instead of hope.Īnd I will be coming here until my legs give. I rabble the dirt with my boot, rummage through the melted iron bars. One thing I know for certain – I'm not going to find any forgiveness or hope here. After all, they do say that the murderers are for some reason drawn towards the place where they carried out their crime, so might it just be an acute case of that? I might not even be looking for anything in particular at all. I don't even know what am I looking for here myself. They got used to it soon, and now they pay me no attention at all. At first people used to see me off with unusual stares, a mix of condescension, admiration and mockery. I don a heavy hazard suit, put on my gas mask, take my weapon and start my climb up the escalator. I come here every day and I've long since lost count of the days I spent here. Should the wind bring any seeds here, they, after falling onto this cursed soil, would simply wither and never even get a chance to sprout.Įven the plastic bags stopping here for a bit of rest don't stay long and soon continue their aimless migration. Not a single living blade of grass or a leaf for kilometers around… It's just soot and melted iron, ashes and concrete rubble around here.
No actual animal lives here – not the regular ones, nor the radiation-adjusted mutants. I take them off my mask's visor and release them – the bags, re-united with the wind, float away like jellyfish. A couple of white plastic bags borne by the wind stick to my face.