Metro 2034

by Dmitry Glukhovsky

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  The World of Metro 2034

  Chapter 1 The Defence of Sebastopol

  Chapter 2 The Return

  Chapter 3 After Life

  Chapter 4 Tangled Knots

  Chapter 5 Memory

  Chapter 6 On the Other Side

  Chapter 7 The Voyage

  Chapter 8 Masks

  Chapter 9 Air

  Chapter 10 After Death

  Chapter 11 Gifts

  Chapter 12 Signs

  Chapter 13 One Story

  Chapter 14 What Else?

  Chapter 15 By Twos

  Chapter 16 In the Cage

  Chapter 17 Who’s Speaking?

  Chapter 18 Deliverance

  Epilogue

  Also by Dmitry Glukhovsky

  Copyright

  The World of Metro 2034

  The entire world lies in ruins. The human race has been almost completely wiped out. Radiation renders half-ruined cities uninhabitable, and rumours say that beyond the city limits there is nothing but boundless expanses of scorched desert and dense thickets of mutated forest. But no one knows what really is out there.

  As civilisation draws its final, shuddering breaths, memories of humankind’s former glory are already obscured by a thick fog of fantasy and fiction. More than twenty years have passed since the day when the final plane took off. Corroded, rust-pitted railway tracks lead off into nowhere. The great construction projects of the final great age lie in ruins, destined never to be completed. The airwaves are empty, and when radio operators tune in, for the millionth time, to the frequencies on which New York, Paris, Tokyo and Buenos Aires once used to broadcast, all they hear is a vague, distant howling.

  It is only twenty years since it happened. But man is no longer the master of the earth. New creatures born of the radiation are far better adapted to this new world than human beings. The human era is almost over. Those who refuse to believe it are very few, numbering mere tens of thousands. They do not know if anyone else has been saved, or if they are the last people left on the planet. They live in the Moscow Metro – the largest nuclear bomb-shelter ever built; in the final refuge of the human race.

  On that day they were all in the Metro, and that was what saved their lives. Now hermetic seals protect them against radiation and monsters from the surface, decrepit but functional filters purify their water and air, dynamos built by amateur engineers generate electricity, underground farms cultivate mushrooms and breed pigs. But the central control system of the Metro disintegrated long ago, and its stations have become dwarf states, each with a population united by its own ideology and religion – or merely by loyalty to the water filters.

  This is a world without any tomorrow. There is no place in it for dreams, plans and hopes. Here instincts take priority over feelings, and the most powerful instinct of all is survival. Survival at any price.

  What happened before the events recounted in this book is described in the novel Metro 2033.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Defence of Sebastopol

  They didn’t come back on Tuesday or Wednesday, or even Thursday, which had been set as the final deadline. Armoured checkpoint number one was on twenty-four-hour alert, and if the men on watch had caught even a faint echo of appeals for help or spotted even a pale glimmer of light on the dark, damp walls of the tunnel, a search and rescue unit would have been dispatched immediately in the direction of Nakhimov Prospect.

  With every hour that passed the tension grew more palpable. The finest combat troops, superbly equipped and specially trained for exactly this kind of mission, hadn’t grabbed a single moment of shuteye all night long. The deck of cards that was used to while away the time from one alert to the next had been gathering dust in a drawer of the duty-room desk for almost two days. The usual joshing and banter had first given way to uneasy conversations in low voices and then to heavy silence, every man hoping to be the first to hear the echoing footsteps of the returning convoy: far too much depended on it.

  Everyone at Sebastopol could handle a weapon, from a five-year-old boy to the very oldest man. The inhabitants of the station had transformed it into an impregnable bastion, bristling with machine-gun nests, coils of prickly barbed wire and even anti-tank hedgehogs, welded together out of rails. But this fortress-station, which seemed so invulnerable, could fall at any moment.

  Its Achilles’ heel was a chronic shortage of ammunition.

  Faced with what the inhabitants of Sebastopol had to endure on a daily basis, the inhabitants of any other station wouldn’t even have thought of defending it, they would have fled from the place, like rats from a flooding tunnel. After tallying up the costs involved, probably not even mighty Hansa – the alliance of stations on the Circle Line – would have chosen to commit the forces required to defend Sebastopol Station. Despite its undeniable strategic significance, the price was far too high.

  But electric power was very expensive, expensive enough for the Sebastopolites, who had constructed one of the largest hydroelectric stations in the Metro, to order ammunition by the crate with the income earned from supplying power to Hansa and still remain in profit. For many of them, however, the price paid for this was counted, not only in cartridges, but in their own crippled and shortened lives.

  Ground waters were the blessing and the curse of Sebastopol Station, flowing round it on all sides, like the waters of the Styx round Charon’s fragile bark. They turned the blades of dozens of water mills constructed by self-taught engineers in tunnels, caverns and underground watercourses – everywhere that the engineering exploration teams could reach – generating light and warmth for the station itself, and also for a good third of the Circle.

  These same waters incessantly eroded support structures and gnawed away at cement joints, murmuring drowsily just behind the walls of the main hall, trying to lull the inhabitants into a false sense of security. And they also made it impossible to blow up the superfluous, unused side tunnels, from out of which hordes of nightmare creatures advanced on Sebastopol Station like an endless millipede creeping into a meat grinder.

  The inhabitants of the station, the crew of this ghostly frigate hurtling through the nether regions of the Underworld, were doomed eternally to seek out and patch over new breaches in the hull of their vessel. It had begun springing leaks long ago, but there was no safe haven where it could rest in peace from its labours.

  And at the same time they had to repel attempt after attempt to board their vessel by monsters from the Chertanovo and Nakhimov Prospect stations, creeping out of ventilation shafts, percolating through drains with rapid streams of turbid water, erupting out of the southern tunnels.

  The whole world seemed to have ganged up against the Sebastopolites in a bitter determination to wipe their home off the map of the Metro. And yet they clung to their station obdurately, as if it were all that remained of the universe.

  But no matter how skilful the engineers of Sebastopol Station were, no matter how experienced and pitiless the soldiers trained there might be, they could not effectively defend their home without ammunition, without bulbs for the floodlights, without antibiotics and bandages. Yes, the station generated electric power, and Hansa was willing to pay a good price for it, but the Circle had other suppliers too, and resources of its own, whereas the Sebastopolites could hardly have held out a month without a flow of supplies from the outside. And the most frightening prospect of all was to be left without ammunition. Heavily guarded convoys set out to Serpukhov Station every week to purchase everything that was needed, using the credit arranged with Hansa merchants, and then, without delaying a single hour more than necessary, they set off back home again. And as long as the World kept on turning and the undergr
ound rivers flowed and the vaults erected by the Metro’s builders held up, the order of things was expected to continue unchanged. But the latest convoy had been delayed – delayed beyond any reasonable limit, long enough for the realisation to dawn that this time something terrible and unforeseen had happened, something against which not even heavily-armed, battle-hardened guards and a relationship built up over the years with the leadership of Hansa had been able to protect it.

  And all this would not have been so bad, if only the lines of communication were functioning. But something had happened to the telephone line that led to the Circle. Contact had been broken off on Monday, and the team sent out to search for the break had drawn a blank.

  The lamp with the broad green shade hung down low over the round table, illuminating yellowed pieces of paper with graphs and diagrams drawn in pencil. The little bulb was weak, only forty watts, not because of any need to save electric power, but because the occupant of the office was not fond of bright light. The ashtray, overflowing with stubs from the atrocious local hand-rolled cigarettes, exuded an acrid, bluish smoke that gathered in viscous clouds, stirring lazily under the ceiling.

  The station commandant rubbed his forehead, then jerked his hand away and glanced at the dial of the clock with his only eye, for the fifth time in the last half-hour. He cracked his finger joints and rose ponderously to his feet.

  ‘We have to decide. No point in putting it off any longer.’

  The robust-looking old man sitting opposite him in a military camouflage jacket and threadbare sky-blue beret, opened his mouth to speak, but instantly started coughing. He drove away the smoke with a sharp flap of his hand, frowned in annoyance and replied:

  ‘Then let me tell you again, Vladimir Ivanovich: we can’t take anyone off the south side. The guard posts are already struggling to hold out under this kind of pressure. In the last week alone they’ve had three men wounded, one critically – and that’s despite the reinforcements. I won’t let you weaken the south side. And apart from that, they need two teams of three scouts to patrol the shafts and connecting tunnels. And as for the north, apart from the soldiers from the reception team, we don’t have any men to spare, I’m sorry. You’ll have to find them somewhere else.’

  ‘You’re the commanding officer of the perimeter, you find them,’ snapped the station commandant. ‘And I’ll handle my own business. But the team has to set out in one hour. What you need to grasp is that we’re thinking in different categories here. We have to look beyond solving the immediate problems! What if it’s something really serious out there?’

  ‘I think you’re getting ahead of yourself, Vladimir Ivanovich. We’ve got two unopened crates of 5.45 calibre in the arsenal, that’s enough for a week and a half, for certain. And I’ve got more lying around under my pillow at home.’ The old man laughed, baring his strong, yellow teeth. ‘I can scrape together a crate, for sure. The problem’s not the ammunition, it’s the men.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what the problem is. We’ve got two weeks to get our supplies in order before we have to close the hermetic doors in the southern tunnels, because we won’t be able to hold them without ammunition. That means we won’t be able to inspect and repair two-thirds of our mills. A week after that they’ll start breaking down. Nobody will be happy about disruptions in the power supply to Hansa. If we’re lucky, they’ll just start looking for other suppliers. And if we’re not . . . But the power’s not the worst of it! The tunnels have been totally deserted for almost five days now – nobody, not a single man! What if there’s been a cave-in? What if we’ve been cut off?’

  ‘Ah, come on! The power cables are in good order. The little numbers are spinning on the meters, the current’s flowing, Hansa’s consuming it. If there was a cave-in, you’d know straight away. Even supposing it was sabotage, they’d have cut our cables, not the phone. And as for the tunnels – who’s going to come down them now? Even in good times no one’s ever strolled down here just to be sociable. Nakhimov Prospect is bad enough, without throwing all the rest in. No one can get through it on his own, the merchants from other stations don’t stick their noses in here any longer. And the bandits obviously know about us. We did the right thing, letting one go alive every time. I’m telling you, don’t panic.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to talk,’ growled Vladimir Ivanovich, lifting the bandage off his empty eye socket and wiping away the sweat that had sprung out on his forehead.

  ‘I’ll give you a team of three men. Honestly, I simply can’t give you any more yet,’ the old man said, speaking more calmly now. ‘And stop smoking, will you! You know I can’t breathe that stuff, and you’re poisoning yourself! Why don’t you just get us some tea?’

  ‘That’s something we can always manage,’ said the commandant, rubbing his hands together. ‘Istomin here,’ he growled into the telephone receiver. ‘Tea for me and the colonel.’

  ‘And summon the duty officer,’ said the perimeter commander, taking the beret off his head. ‘I’ll give the instructions about those three men.’

  Istomin’s tea was always the same, from the Economic Achievements Station – a special, select variety. Not many could afford that sort of thing – delivered from the far side of the Metro and charged duty three times along the way by Hansa’s customs posts, the commandant’s beloved beverage was getting to be so expensive, even he would have stopped indulging his weakness, if not for his old contacts at Dobrynin Station. He once fought side by side with someone there, and ever since then, every month, without fail, the commander of the convoy returning from Hansa had brought a bright-coloured bundle, which Istomin came to collect in person.

  A year ago, however, supplies of the tea had become unreliable. Alarming rumours reached Sebastopol Station of a terrible new danger menacing the Economic Achievements Station, perhaps even the entire Orange Line: new mutants of a type never seen before had come down from the surface, and supposedly they could read people’s thoughts, were almost invisible and, even worse, virtually impossible to kill. Some said the station had fallen and Hansa, fearing an incursion, had blown up the tunnel beyond Peace Prospect Station. The prices for tea soared, and then it disappeared completely, and Istomin had been seriously alarmed. But a few weeks later the frenzy subsided, and the convoys returning to Sebastopol Station with ammunition and electric light bulbs started delivering the aromatic beverage again – and what could possibly be more important than that?

  As he poured the perimeter commander’s tea into a china cup with a chipped gold border, Istomin squeezed his eyes shut for an instant, breathing in the fragrant steam. Then he strained some tea out for himself, sat down heavily on his chair and stirred in a tablet of saccharin, tinkling his little silver spoon.

  Neither of them spoke, and for thirty seconds or so this melancholy tinkling was the only sound to be heard in the dark office, wreathed in tobacco smoke. But suddenly the tinkling was drowned out by a different sound, in almost exactly the same rhythm, that came hurtling out of the tunnel – the jangling of the alarm bell.

  ‘The alarm!’

  The perimeter commander leapt up off his chair with incredible agility for a man of his age and darted out of the room. Somewhere in the distance there was the crack of a single rifle shot, immediately overtaken by the chatter of machine-guns – one, two, three of them. Metal-tipped soldiers’ boots clattered along the platform and from somewhere far away came the bass rumble of the colonel’s voice barking out orders.

  Istomin also reached for the gleaming militia machine-gun that was hanging by the cupboard, but then he gasped and clutched at his waist, flapped his hand helplessly, went back to the table and took a sip of tea. The perimeter commander’s abandoned cup was standing there, cooling, on the table in front of him, with the light-blue beret lying beside it, forgotten in the colonel’s haste. The station commandant grinned sourly at the beret and started arguing in a low voice with the commander who had bolted, coming back again and again to the same old topics with new argument
s that he hadn’t thought of while they were wrangling face to face.

  It was a constant subject of sombre jokes at Sebastopol – the similarity of the next station’s name, Chertanovo, to the Russian word for a demon, ‘chert’. The watermill generators were scattered deep into the tunnels between the two Metro stations, but nobody even dreamed of making things more convenient by occupying and developing vacant Chertanovo, in the same way as Kakhovka Station, adjacent to Sebastopol, had been annexed. The undercover engineering teams who crept closest to it, in order to install and inspect the more distant generators, didn’t dare approach within a hundred metres of the platform. Apart from the most hard-bitten atheists, almost all the men setting out on an expedition like that crossed themselves furtively, and some even said goodbye to their families, just in case.

  There was something bad about that station, and everyone who came within half a kilometre could sense it. The heavily armed detachments that the Sebastopolites, in their ignorance, dispatched to Chertanovo when they were still hoping to expand their territory, had sometimes returned battered and crushed, with their numbers reduced by half, but most often they hadn’t returned at all. Some battle-hardened soldiers had come back so badly frightened that they hiccupped and drooled and trembled uncontrollably, even sitting so close to the campfire that their clothes began to smoulder. They struggled to recall what they had been through, but one man’s recollection was never like another’s.

  The generally accepted explanation was that somewhere beyond Chertanovo Station the side branches of the main tunnels dived downwards, weaving their way into a colossal labyrinth of natural caves, rumoured to be teeming with all sorts of loathsome creatures. At the station this place was referred to provisionally as the Gates – only provisionally, because none of the living inhabitants of Sebastopol Station had ever seen it. There was, of course, the wellknown incident in the early days, when the line was still being explored and the Gates were apparently discovered by a large reconnaissance team that had managed to get through Chertanovo Station. They were carrying a communications device, something like a land-line telephone. On this device, the signal officer reported to Sebastopol Station that the scouts were standing at the entrance to a wide corridor that descended in an almost vertical incline. His voice was cut off before he could add anything else, but for several minutes after that, until the cable was snapped, the commanding officers of Sebastopol Station huddled round the intercom, listening as the soldiers of the reconnaissance team screamed in diabolical horror and agony – until one by one their screams were cut short. Nobody even attempted to fire, as if every one of the dying men realised that ordinary weapons couldn’t possibly protect them. The last one to fall silent was the commanding officer of the group, a cutthroat Chinese mercenary from Kitai Gorod Station who collected the little fingers of his dead enemies. He was evidently some distance away from the telephone receiver dropped by the signal officer, and it was hard to make out what he was saying. But, concentrating hard on the man’s sobbing as he died, the station commandant recognised a prayer – the simple, naïve kind of prayer that parents who believe teach their little children to say.