Hunter froze abruptly on the spot and Homer, hunkered down under his snug feather quilt of memories, had no time to pull back: the old man ran into the brigadier’s back at full tilt. Without making a sound, the brigadier flung him aside and froze again, lowering his head and turning his mutilated ear towards the tunnel. Like a bat mapping out space in its blindness, he was picking up wavelengths that only he could hear.
But Homer picked up something else: the smell of Nakhimov Prospect, a smell that was impossible to confuse with any other. They’d certainly got here quickly. He just hoped they wouldn’t be made to pay for the ease with which they’d been let through. As if he could hear Homer’s thoughts, Ahmed shrugged the sub-machine-gun off his shoulder and clicked off the safety catch.
‘Who’s that up there?’ Hunter suddenly boomed, turning to the old man.
Homer chuckled to himself: who could tell what hellish beasts they might find? The wide-open gates of Nakhimov Prospect were like a funnel, sucking in from above creatures that defied the imagination. But the station had its permanent residents too.
‘Small . . . With no hair,’ said the brigadier, trying to describe them, and that was enough for Homer. It was them.
‘Corpse-eaters,’ he said in a low voice.
From Sebastopol to Tula, and maybe in other parts of the Metro as well, this old, clichéd Russian insult now had a different, new meaning. A literal one.
‘Predators?’ asked Hunter.
‘Scavengers,’ the old man replied indecisively.
These repulsive creatures that simultaneously resembled spiders and primates never risked openly attacking human beings and fed on carrion dragged down from the surface to the station they had made their own. A large herd of them nested at the Prospect, and all the tunnels nearby were filled with the sickly-sweet stench of decomposition. At the station itself the sheer pressure of it made men feel dizzy, and many of them found it so unbearable that they pulled on their gas masks on the approaches to the station.
Homer, who remembered this distinctive feature of Nakhimov Prospect only too well, hastily pulled the mask of his respirator out of his knapsack and put it on. Ahmed, who had packed hurriedly, gave Homer an envious glance and covered his face with his sleeve: the repugnant vapours emanating from the station gradually enveloped them, spurring them to move on quickly.
But Hunter didn’t seem to smell anything.
‘Something poisonous? Spores?’ he asked Homer.
‘The smell,’ Homer mumbled through his mask and wrinkled up his face.
The brigadier examined the old man searchingly, as if trying to work out if Homer was making fun of him, then shrugged his massive, broad shoulders.
‘The usual,’ he said and turned away.
He shifted his grip on his short automatic, beckoned for them to follow him and moved on ahead, stepping softly. About fifty steps further on, the hideous stench was joined by an obscure murmuring. Homer wiped away the perspiration that had started streaming down his forehead and tried to curb the galloping pace of his heartbeat. They were really close now.
The groping flashlight beam finally found something. It swept the darkness off broken headlights peering blindly into nowhere, off the glass of dusty windscreens cobwebbed with cracks, off light-blue metal panelling that stubbornly refused to rust. There ahead of them was the first carriage of a train that blocked the throat of the tunnel like a gigantic cork.
The train had died ages ago, it was beyond all hope, but every time he saw it Homer felt like a little boy, he wanted to climb into the devastated cabin, caress the keys and switches of the instrument panel, close his eyes and pretend that once again he was dashing through the tunnels at full speed, pulling behind him a string of brightly lit carriages filled with people – reading, dozing, gazing at advertisements or struggling to make conversation above the rumble of the engines.
‘If the alarm signal “ATOM” is given, drive to the nearest station, stop there and open the doors. Assist the efforts of civil defence units and the army to evacuate the injured and seal off the stations of the Metropolitan . . .’
The instructions on what train drivers should do on Judgement Day were precise and simple. Wherever it was possible, they were carried out. Most of the trains that froze at the platforms of the stations had fallen into a lethargic sleep and gradually been cannibalised for spare parts by the inhabitants of the Metro, who, instead of spending a few weeks in this refuge, as promised, had been detained here for all eternity. In a few places the trains had been preserved and converted into homes, but that seemed blasphemous to Homer, who had always seen trains as possessing a distinctly animate essence – it was like having your favourite pet cat stuffed and mounted. In places that were unfit for human habitation, like Nakhimov Prospect, the trains stood, gnawed on by time and vandals, but still intact.
Homer simply couldn’t take his eyes off the carriage. A phantom alarm signal wailed in his ears, drowning out the ever-louder rustling and hissing sounds from the station, and a deep, low siren blasted out the signal that had never been heard before that day: one long blast and two short ones: ‘ATOM’!
A lingering clang of brakes and a bewildered announcement in all the carriages ‘Ladies and gentlemen, for technical reasons this train will not proceed any further.’ It was too soon yet for the driver mumbling into the microphone, or Homer, his mate, to grasp the anguished hopelessness of those hackneyed words. The rasping sound of hermetic doors straining shut, separating off the world of the living from the world of the dead forever . . . According to instructions, the gates had to be finally locked no later than six minutes after the alarm was sounded, no matter how many people were left on the other side. If anyone tried to prevent the gates closing, the recommendation was to shoot at them.
Would a little police sergeant, who guarded his station against homeless bums and drunks, be able to shoot a man in the stomach because he was trying to hold back the immense metal behemoth, in order to give his wife, who had broken her heel, time to run inside? Would a high-handed turnstile-woman in a round uniform cap, who had spent her thirty-year career in the Metro perfecting two skills – not letting people through and blowing her whistle – be able to refuse entrance to a desperately panting old man with a pathetic row of medal ribbons? The instructions gave them only six minutes to change from a human being into a machine. Or a monster.
Women squealing, men clamouring indignantly, children sobbing desperately. The staccato popping of pistol shots and rumbling bursts of automatic fire. Recorded appeals to remain calm, relayed through every speaker in a metallic, passionless voice – they had to be recorded, because no human being, knowing what was happening, could possibly have kept his presence of mind and simply said it like that, indifferently: ‘Do not panic . . .’
Tears, prayers . . .
More shooting.
And precisely six minutes after the alarm, one minute before Armageddon – the rumbling funereal clang as sections of hermetic doors lock together. The reverberating clicks of the bolts. Silence.
The silence of the crypt.
They had to walk along the wall past the carriage. The driver had braked too late – perhaps he had been distracted by what was happening at that moment on the platform . . . They clambered up a cast-iron ladder and a moment later they were standing in an amazingly spacious hall. No columns, just the half-cylinder of a single semi-circular vault, with egg-shaped recesses behind the lamps. An immense vault, arching over the platform and both tracks, together with the trains standing on them. The structure is incredibly elegant – simple, divinely light and uncluttered. Only don’t look down at your feet, at the floor ahead of you. Don’t let yourself see what the station has been turned into now. This grotesque graveyard, where no rest could possibly be found, this macabre meat market, piled high with gnawed skeletons, rotten carcasses, chunks ripped off someone’s trunk. The vile creatures have greedily dragged in here everything they could grab anywhere within their extensive domain, mo
re than they can devour immediately, reserves for future use. These reserves putrefy and decompose, but the brutes carry on accumulating them incessantly.
In defiance of the laws of nature, the heaps of dead meat moved as if they were breathing, and a repulsive scraping sound could be heard on all sides. The beam of light picked out one of the strange figures: long, knotty limbs; flabby, grey, hairless skin, hanging down in folds; a crooked spine, dull eyes blinking weakly, immense ears moving as if they had a life of their own.
One creature gave a hoarse cry and trudged unhurriedly to the open doors of a carriage, stepping with all four of its arm-legs. Other corpse-eaters started climbing down off other heaps in the same lazy fashion, hissing indignantly, sniffling, baring their teeth and snarling at the travellers.
Standing erect, they barely came up to Homer’s chest, and he was short. He also knew perfectly well that the beasts were cowardly, that they were unlikely to attack a strong, healthy man. But the irrational horror that Homer felt at the sight of the creatures was rooted in nightmares, in which he lay all alone, exhausted and abandoned in a deserted station, and the beasts were creeping ever closer. Like sharks in the ocean, who can scent a drop of blood from kilometres away, these creatures could sense the approach of death, and they hurried to be there when it arrived.
Senile anxiety, Homer told himself contemptuously – he had once read a whole raft of text books on applied psychology. But that wasn’t much help to him now.
The corpse-eaters weren’t afraid of people: using up ammunition on the repulsive but apparently harmless devourers of carrion would have been regarded as criminal waste at Sebastopol. The convoys passing through tried not to take any notice of them, although sometimes the corpse-eaters behaved provocatively.
They had bred in huge numbers here, and as the three men moved further in, crushing someone’s small bones under their boots with a sickening crunch at every step, more and more of the beasts reluctantly tore themselves away from their feasting and wandered off into cover. Their nests were in the trains, and Homer loathed them even more for that.
The hermetic doors at Nakhimov Prospect were open. It was believed that if you moved through the station quickly, the small dose of radiation you received was no danger to health, but it was forbidden to halt here. That was why both of the trains were relatively well preserved: the windows were all in place, the stained and soiled seats could be seen through the open doors, the light-blue paint showed no signs of peeling off the metal flanks.
Towering up in the middle of the hall was a genuine burial mound, built from the twisted skeletons of unknown creatures. As he drew level with it, Hunter suddenly stopped. Ahmed and Homer glanced at each other in alarm, trying to work out where any danger could come from. But the reason for the halt turned out to be something different. At the foot of the mound two small corpse-eaters were stripping a dog’s skeleton, champing and growling with relish as they ate. They hadn’t hidden in time: either they were too absorbed in their meal and didn’t notice the signals from other members of their tribe, or they simply hadn’t been able to control their greed.
They screwed up their eyes in the glare of the brigadier’s flashlight and carried on chewing, starting to withdraw slowly in the direction of the nearest carriage, but suddenly, one after another, they somersaulted backwards and flopped down onto the floor, like empty sacks.
Homer gazed in amazement at Hunter, who was putting a heavy army pistol with a long cylindrical silencer back in his shoulder holster. His face was as inscrutable and lifeless as ever.
‘They must have been very hungry, I suppose,’ Ahmed muttered under his breath, examining the dark puddles spreading out from under the dead beasts’ smashed skulls with squeamish interest.
‘So am I,’ the brigadier responded incomprehensibly, making Homer shudder.
Hunter moved on without looking round at the others and old Homer thought he could hear that low, greedy growling again. What an effort it cost him every time to resist the temptation to put a bullet into these vermin! He had to coax himself, calm himself down, and eventually he got the upper hand and demonstrated to himself that he was a mature individual who could tame his nightmares, who refused to let them drive him insane. But Hunter apparently had no intention of even trying to fight his impulsive desires.
Only what were those desires?
The silent demise of two members of the herd galvanised the other corpse-eaters: scenting fresh death, even the boldest and the laziest of them moved off the platforms, wheezing and whining faintly. They crammed into both trains and fell silent, lined up at the windows and crowding in the doors of the carriages. These creatures didn’t show any rage or desire for revenge. Once the team left the station, they would immediately devour their own dead relatives. ‘Aggression is a quality of hunters,’ thought Homer. ‘Those who feed on carrion don’t need it, just as they don’t need to kill. Everything living dies sooner or later, it will all become their food anyway. All they have to do is wait.’
The beam of the flashlight revealed the repulsive faces pressed up against the other side of the dirty, greenish panes of glass, the misshapen bodies, the clawed hands groping restlessly at the inside of the satanic fish tank. In total silence, hundreds of pairs of dull eyes doggedly followed the movement of the team as it walked by, the creatures’ heads turning uncannily in precise synchronisation, watching intently as the men moved away. The little freaks sealed in flasks of formalin at the Kunstkamera Museum would have watched the visitors like that, if their eyelids hadn’t prudently been sewn shut.
Despite the approaching hour of reckoning for his godlessness, Homer still couldn’t bring himself to believe in either the Lord or the Devil. But if Purgatory did exist, this was exactly how it would have looked for the old man. Sisyphus was doomed to battle against gravity, Tantalus was condemned to the torment of unquenchable thirst. But waiting for Homer at the station of his death was a train driver’s jacket and this bloodcurdling ghost train, with its monstrous gargoyle passengers: the mockery of vengeful gods. And on leaving the platform, the train would drive straight into one of the old legends of the Metro, with the tunnel looping round into a Möbius strip, a dragon devouring its own tail.
Hunter had lost interest in the station and its inhabitants and the team crossed the rest of the hall at a brisk pace: Ahmed and Homer could hardly keep up with the brigadier’s impetuous stride.
The old man felt the urge to turn round, shout, fire – to scatter these insolent freaks and banish his own painful thoughts. But instead he trudged on with his head lowered, concentrating hard to avoid stepping on anybody’s rotting remains. Ahmed hung his head too, absorbed in his own thoughts. And in their hasty flight from Nakhimov Prospect, no one thought of looking round any longer.
The patch of light from Hunter’s flashlight scurried rapidly from side to side, as if it were following an invisible gymnast under the dome of this baleful circus, but even the brigadier was no longer taking any notice of what it picked out.
A set of fresh bones and a half-gnawed skull – clearly human – glinted briefly in the beam and immediately disappeared back into the gloom, unnoticed by anyone. Lying beside them like a useless shell were a steel army helmet and a bulletproof vest.
Over the peeling green paint of the helmet a single word had been stencilled in white: ‘Sebastopol’.
CHAPTER 4
Tangled Knots
‘Dad . . . Dad, it’s me, Sasha!’
She carefully loosened the tight canvas strap restraining the terribly bloated chin and removed her father’s helmet. Thrusting her fingers into his sweat-soaked hair, she hooked out the strip of rubber, pulled off his gas mask and flung it aside like a ghastly, shrivelled grey scalp. His chest heaved painfully, his fingers scrabbled at the granite floor and his watery eyes stared at her without blinking, but he didn’t answer. Sasha put the knapsack under his head and dashed to the door. Bracing her skinny shoulder against the enormous panel of metal, she took a deep, d
eep breath and gritted her teeth. The massive slab yielded reluctantly and scraped into place with a low grunt. Sasha clanged the bolt home and slid down onto the floor. A minute, just one little minute to catch her breath, and then she’d go straight back to him.
Every new expedition drained more of her father’s strength, and the meagre pickings he came back with couldn’t compensate for the loss. These sallies were draining away what was left of his life not by the day, but whole weeks and months at a time. An exorbitant price that had to be paid: if they didn’t have anything to sell, they’d have no choice left but to eat their tame rat – the only one in this God-forsaken death-trap of a station – and then shoot themselves.
Sasha wanted to take her father’s place. So many times she had asked him for the respirator, so that she could go up there, but he was adamant. Probably he knew the filters on the leaky gas mask had been blocked for so long, it was no more use now than any other good luck charm. But he never admitted that to her. He lied about knowing how to clean the filters, he lied about feeling fine after an hour’s ‘stroll’, he lied about simply wanting to be alone, when he was afraid that she would see him vomiting blood.
Sasha was powerless to change anything. They had driven her father and her into this corner and if they hadn’t finished them off, it was more out of contemptuous curiosity than pity. They hadn’t expected the two of them to last more than a week, but her father’s willpower and sheer grit had kept them going for years. Although they were hated and despised, they were given food regularly – but not, of course, for free.
In the breaks between expeditions, in those rare moments when the two of them sat together beside the stunted, smoky little campfire, her father liked to tell her about the way things used to be before. He had realised years ago that there was no point in lying to himself any longer: he had no future. But no one could take away his past. ‘I used to have eyes the same colour as yours,’ he told her. ‘The colour of the sky.’ And Sasha thought she could remember those days too – the days before the gigantic tumour swelled up on his neck, before his eyes faded and turned colourless, when they were still as bright as her own were now.
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