Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(75)
“Fuck!” Forsyth screamed, and rolled behind a skip. “Fuck!” The tunnel was full of ricocheting fragments of concrete and metal, and Forsyth tried to curl himself into a ball of zero size and mass.
At length, the storm abated and silence fell again on the tunnel, though Forsyth’s ears had begun to ring once more. Very slowly, he put his head around one side of the skip, and in the gap between it and the tunnel wall he could see the bobbing light of torches back towards the station. Very carefully, trying not to make any noise and at the same time trying to keep the skip between himself and whoever was in the station, he began to move back down the tunnel. He couldn’t stop thinking about Crispin’s story of the cammo dudes, men with little guns that could perforate a motor car like a teabag.
At first he moved on hands and knees, but that wasn’t anything like quick enough to suit him, so he got up in a kind of crouching run, checking frequently for any more of those red dots of light on his body. The tunnel curved twenty metres or so outside the station, and when he had the bulk of the tunnel wall between him and whoever was back there he got up from the crouch and started to run. Very quietly.
Stare Miasto was an interchange station between the east-west and north-south lines. There were utilities tunnels every hundred and fifty metres, connections between the east-west and north-south main tunnels in case of fire or some other disaster. Forsyth ducked into one of them, switched off the torch, and pressed himself up against the wall, listening. No sound behind him, no light in the main tunnel.
He picked his way carefully down the cross-tunnel, checking each step before he put his foot down. Once he thought he heard a sound behind him, and froze against the curving wall. He waited for a very long time, trying to control his panting breath, but there were no more noises, and he set out again, feeling each step with his toes for obstructions.
His hand encountered a gap in the tunnel wall, and he felt a breath of cold damp air on his face from somewhere down below. This was one of the connections between the four tunnels, a ramp down to the north-south tracks. He stepped through the entrance. The ramp was a spiral, broad enough to allow purpose-designed emergency vehicles to go up or down with casualties or emergency workers. He went down the ramp, listening all the time for sounds behind him.
Whatever had happened, whoever was in the east-west part of the station, he seemed to have left them behind. No sounds except for his ragged breathing. He stopped for a moment and his knees suddenly refused to respond to conscious commands and he slid down onto the tunnel floor. All of a sudden he was exhausted. It was all he could do to keep his head from nodding and his chin from sinking down onto his chest. What he wanted, most of all, at a truly fundamental level far far below conscious thought, was to go to sleep and wake up tomorrow in his own humble but warm and secure bed and know that this whole evening was a nightmare...
A noise lifted him out of his faint, so suddenly that he jerked his head back and banged it against the tunnel wall. It was such a familiar noise that if some remote corner of his mind hadn’t been keeping track of where he was he might have ignored it altogether. It was the sound of an underground train, coming up the ramp from below. Except, as that remote corner of his mind reminded him, there were no underground trains on this stretch of line.
He struggled to his feet and carried on down the ramp. He had been walking for a couple of minutes before he realised he could see the walls of the ramp; there seemed to be a faint, lambent glow somewhere ahead, and the sound of another train, and voices...
At the bottom of the ramp he stepped out into warm yellow light, and heard an amplified voice speaking in Russian, and he lost his mind for a moment. Or for a minute. Or for an hour, he was never able to be sure afterwards. All he could be certain of was that he had ceased to be rational for some period of time, and when that period of time came to an end he was on his hands and knees on Juliana Bruna Street, down in Mokotów, being sick onto the pavement and trying to scream at the same time while someone shouted at him to be quiet from one of the flats along the street. He remembered that he had hallucinated someone speaking urgently to him in Russian, then he toppled over on his side and passed out.
“NO,” SAID THE speaker grille of the security lock.
“I need your help, Ewa,” Forsyth gasped, trying to crush himself out of sight in the doorway.
“You should have f*cking thought about that earlier, when you went off with that f*cking degenerate.” The speaker system reduced Ewa’s voice to something that George Lucas might have used for those charming robots in the Star Wars films.
“Ewa,” Forsyth said, desperately summoning what small reserves of macho remained to him, “let me in.”
“Fuck off.”
Forsyth looked out of the doorway. Ewa lived in a pretty nice, quiet street, a place the city’s recent epidemic of muggers and car thieves had so far overlooked, but suddenly every tree and waste-bin and doorway seemed to have too many shadows. Forsyth pressed Ewa’s button again and again, but she refused to answer. He saw a tram trundling along the main street, and began to run towards the stop.
“GRANT, GRANT,” MAGDA said, shaking her head.
“I need a place to stay,” Forsyth said, sitting forwards on the edge of the sofa and clasping his hands between his knees.
Magda smiled. She was tall and black-haired, with high, Slavic cheekbones and a nose that had been broken as a child when, just to feel the breeze across the spokes, she had put her face too close to a rotating bicycle wheel that her father had been repairing.