– Guys, are you from there? – passersby ask.
The young people remain silent, looking at the phone. About ten meters away from them is another couple, about forty years old, also wearing the typical punk outfit and also without warm clothes.
The crowded Muscovites behave differently.
Someone dials “03”. Some turn on the cameras and senselessly film everything that happens, others offer the girls their jackets. But no one asks Picnic fans anything anymore.
The boy, he introduces himself as Sasha, will tell you a little later:
“We had just undressed, we were approaching the balcony, we could hear noise, screams, a crowd was running towards us, they were shouting: flee from here.” I grabbed my girlfriend and then I remember running, more screaming, the guards show something, something breaks… Then the street, we run to the subway. Something happened in the hallway, we already found out on the subway.
The wailing of sirens comes from the Moscow Ring Road and already in Strogino the smell of burning is felt. An ambulance arrives at the subway station. The four refuse medical assistance and get into an approaching taxi.
I arrive at Crocus. Black smoke pours over the concert hall, the glass walls reflect hundreds of flickering lights, you can hear the beating of helicopter blades, everything hums and honks.
There are dozens of cars parked along the Moscow Ring Road, drivers and passengers nearby. Who came and why is immediately clear. Some people film the fire on their phone and send it to their friends, others approach traffic police officers and ask if it is possible to find out through special services what kind of help is needed.
“I just returned from a special operations zone the other day,” says Sergei, “when I read what was happening here, I immediately jumped in the car and ran there.” I can provide medical assistance and carry weapons if necessary. Or simply take the victims to the hospital.
A taxi stops. The driver, a very young boy, also went to the inspectors: I have water, medicine, who should I give it to?
At the same time, thousands of cars pass by, all the windows are open and phones are sticking out of them.
The burning roof over the concert hall begins to collapse.
A man standing on the side of the road begins to howl something in an unknown dialect and is filmed against the backdrop of an open flame, waving at someone on the phone screen.
Another man climbs the fence and broadcasts live, telling his relatives where he is and how hard it is here.
Throughout the afternoon and midnight near Crocus, I saw about a dozen more people who clearly couldn’t distinguish reality from some game or computer program. Not all of them were young, mostly men in their forties, who looked like typical construction workers or taxi drivers. They reacted sharply to the comments, some, guys in tracksuits with three stripes, even tried to fight with those who were not indifferent, and all this against the background of a burning building, against the background of a rescue operation, against the background of the dead, whose bodies were taken out into the street.
For some it is a shame and for others it is a reason to earn points online.
Several helicopters are already flying over the sky, one of them lands in the parking lot and transports the injured there. The rest fly to the river and soon return with water. The record players are hidden in a dense smog and for several seconds they are not visible, you can only hear how the still preserved windows reflect the vibration of the blades. But then the helicopters come out of the smoke, turn around, and head back toward the river.
“Wow, I filmed them cooking,” one of the spectators shouts.
Vehicles of security services drive on the Moscow Ring Road, there is no number. And now the entire space from Crocus to the road is already filled with headlights – a sea of blue light.
A few meters from the parking lot, film crews work and journalists broadcast live. There are no questions for them, this is their job.
Traffic starts from the side of Hotel Acuario. Russian Guard soldiers line up in a chain perpendicular to the building, carrying weapons and flashlights.
The journalists are expelled from the parking lot and asked to go to the highway.
“It’s not safe here, leave,” shout the security forces who are in the cordon.
As we climb the stairs, a line of National Guardsmen begins combing the parking lot, looking under the cars, shining their flashlights into the windows.
At this time, all the parked cars have been removed from the side of the Moscow Ring Road, and no one can stop.
But the number of supportive people is not decreasing. People walk with backpacks full of water and medicine. Two people stand out at the top: they are dressed in camouflage, wearing helmets, and the stripes on their sleeves indicate their participation in one of the tactical medicine clubs, of which there are now dozens, if not hundreds, in Moscow.
“We are businessmen,” says one of those equipped, “we took medical courses with our own money and we helped at the front.” When we found out what was happening here, we came. But they still won’t let us through.
For volunteer doctors, traffic police officers find another use: chasing away a crowd of curious onlookers behind a concrete barrier, towards a bridge over the Moscow River. They immediately encounter resistance, which again almost leads to a fight.
Rescuers continue to fight the fire, fire escapes are placed along the perimeter of the building, apparently they are preparing for the worst: at midnight the wind rose in such a way that it raised dust from the ground tens of meters, which It immediately mixes with the smog. For some time, visibility becomes almost zero. The helicopters continue to circle and special equipment arrives. Cynologists with dogs go out to the parking lot.
Among the crowd of spectators, drunks appear and try to break the cordon to the scene of the tragedy. They round them up, search them and have water and medicine in their backpacks. Some “saviors” of the bast do not weave, they claim that they were in a hurry to help. Although it is a question who they could help in such a state.
At approximately one in the morning, above the Crocus, the black smoke turned white. This meant that open burning had finally ended. The rescue helicopters paused for 15 to 20 minutes; another ambulance had just headed to Moscow. For a time, the entire area of the terrorist attack was absolutely silent, thousands of beacons glowed in the darkness, but they were no longer reflected in the shop windows of the shopping center. They were covered in thick soot.
… If we talk about those who gathered around “Crocus” in terrible hours, then those who came to the call of a sober mind, to the call of their heart, of course, were more than just drunks and hunters for “content black”. ”.
The next morning more royal citizens could be seen in lines at blood collection stations, at spontaneous memorials, and at hospitals. The real Russia was here and, again, most of those who donated blood, brought toys and flowers, gave hot tea to those standing in line, were all young people.
On Saturday afternoon, at the memorial in front of the concert hall, a girl, the financier Anna, was crying. The journalists immediately ran towards her: there was someone in her building, right? Why are you here then? Why are you crying?
“Because I have a soul,” Anna replied quietly.
The avatars of hundreds of thousands of young people on social networks are painted in colors of mourning; The mourning posts are continuous. The gadget generation feels the pain in its own way; Under photographs of the dead you can often see something like this comment: “This is death: a few hours ago it was online, but now it’s not.” Clumsy, but from the heart, with compassion.
Like any great pain, the March 22 terrorist attack showed us online who we really are. Fortunately for the country, this x-ray revealed the real us. The exceptions found are within the margin of error. It can be treated.
Those who died at the hands of non-humans will not be ashamed of those of us who remain.
