Metro 2034

by Dmitry Glukhovsky

  The startled commandant started muttering and backed away, opening up the way through. The guard froze expectantly with his arms locked round Homer. Hunter squeezed through the door after the retreating fat man and ended the commandant’s resistance with a single lion’s roar that reduced him to silence. Then he switched to an imperious whisper.

  Letting go of the old man, the orderly stole across to the door and stepped inside. A moment later he was swept back out by a torrent of filthy expletives, during which the commandant’s voice broke into a squeal.

  ‘And let that provocateur go!’ he shouted at the end, as if he was repeating someone else’s order under hypnosis.

  Bright red, as if he had been scalded, the orderly closed the door behind him, stomped back to his post at the entrance and stuck his nose into a news flyer printed on wrapping paper. When Homer moved determinedly past his desk in the direction of the commandant’s office, he just huddled down even lower behind his little newspaper, to indicate that what happened from now on had nothing to do with him.

  Homer glanced triumphantly at the guard covering his shame with the news sheet: at last he could take a proper look at the phones. The one that was winking all the time had a piece of dirty-white plaster stuck to it, on which someone had scrawled a single word with a ballpoint pen:

  ‘Tula’.

  ‘We maintain contact with the Order,’ said the commandant of Dobrynin Station, sweating and cracking his fists, but not daring to raise his eyes to the brigadier. ‘And no one has warned us about this operation. I can’t take this decision on my own.’

  ‘Then call Central,’ said Hunter. ‘You have time to agree things. But not much.’

  ‘They won’t give approval. This will endanger the stability of Hansa . . . Surely you know that comes before anything else for Hansa? And we’ve got everything under control.’

  ‘What damned stability? If measures aren’t taken . . .’

  ‘The situation is stable, I don’t understand what you find unsatisfactory,’ said Andrei Andreevich, shaking his heavy head obstinately. ‘All the exits are covered by guns. A mouse couldn’t get through. Let’s wait for everything to resolve itself.’

  ‘Nothing will resolve itself!’ Hunter bellowed. ‘If you wait, all that will happen is that someone will get out and run across the surface or find a roundabout route. The station has to be purged! By the book! I don’t understand why you haven’t done it yourselves yet!’

  ‘But there could be people there who are still well. How do you imagine it happening? Do I order my lads to shoot everyone in Tula and incinerate them? What about the sectarians’ train? And maybe clean out Serpukhov at the same time? Half the men here have kept women there, and illegitimate children . . . No, let me tell you something! We’re not fascists here. War’s war, but this . . . Killing sick people . . . Even when there was swine fever at Belorussia, they took the pigs into different corners one at a time, so that if one was infected, it died, and if it was healthy, it could live, instead of just slaughtering them all indiscriminately.’

  ‘Those were pigs, these are people,’ the brigadier said flatly.

  ‘No, no,’ said the commandant and started shaking his head again, splashing sweat about. ‘I can’t do that . . . It would be on my conscience afterwards. And I . . . I don’t want the dreams that would come afterwards.’

  ‘You won’t have to do it yourself. For that there are men who don’t have dreams. All you’ll do is let us pass through your station. Nothing more.’

  ‘I sent couriers to Polis, to find out about a vaccine,’ said Andrei Andreevich, wiping away his perspiration with his sleeve. ‘There is hope that . . .’

  ‘There is no vaccine! There is no hope! Stop burying your head in the sand! Why don’t I see any medical units from Central here? Why do you refuse to call them and ask for the green light to let a cohort of the Order through?’

  The commandant remained obstinately silent; for some reason he tried to fasten the buttons on his tunic, fumbling at them with his slippery fingers and then giving up. He walked over to a shabby sideboard, splashed out a glass of some smelly alcoholic infusion for himself and downed it in one.

  ‘Why, you haven’t informed them,’ Hunter guessed. ‘They still don’t know anything about it. You’ve got an epidemic at the next station, and they don’t know anything . . .’

  ‘I answer for something like that with my head,’ the commandant said hoarsely. ‘An epidemic in the adjacent station means compulsory retirement. I allowed it to happen . . . Didn’t prevent it . . . Created a threat to the stability of Hansa.’

  ‘In the adjacent station? At Serpukhov?’

  ‘Everything’s calm there for the time being, but I caught on too late . . . Didn’t react in time. How could I know?’

  ‘And how did you explain all this to everyone? The forces at an independent station? The cordoning off of the tunnels?’

  ‘Bandits . . . Rebels. It happens everywhere. It’s nothing special.’

  ‘And now it’s too late to confess,’ the brigadier said with a nod.

  ‘It’s not retirement now . . .’ Andrei Andreevich poured himself a second glass and downed it. ‘It’s the death penalty.’

  ‘And now what?’

  ‘I’m waiting.’ The commandant lowered his backside onto his desk. ‘I’m waiting. What if . . . ?’

  ‘Why don’t you answer their calls?’ Homer put in. ‘Your phone’s blowing its top – they’re calling from Tula. What if . . . ?’

  ‘It’s not blowing its top,’ the commandant replied in a flat, hollow voice. ‘I turned the sound off. It’s just the light blinking. While it still does that, they’re alive.’

  ‘Why don’t you answer it?’ the old man repeated angrily.

  ‘What can I tell them? To hang on and be patient? To get well soon? That help is near? To put a bullet through their heads? Talking to the refugees was as much as I could take,’ the commandant yelled, losing control.

  ‘Shut up immediately,’ Hunter told him in a quiet voice. ‘And listen. I’ll come back in one day with a squadron. I have to be allowed through all the guard posts without hindrance. You will keep Serpukhov Station closed off. We’ll move on to Tula and purge it. If necessary, we’ll purge Serpukhov too. We’ll pretend it’s a small war. You don’t have to inform Central. You won’t have to do anything at all. I’ll do it . . . I’ll restore stability.’

  The exhausted commandant nodded feebly, as limp as a deflated inner tube from a bicycle tyre. He poured out some more infusion for himself, sniffed at it and, before he drank it, asked quietly:

  ‘But you’ll be up to your elbows in blood. Doesn’t that bother you?’

  ‘Blood’s easy to wash off with cold water,’ the brigadier told him.

  As they were walking out of the office, Andrei Andreevich filled his lungs with air and summoned the duty orderly in a stentorian voice. The orderly dashed inside and the door slammed shut behind him with a crash. Dropping back a little from Hunter, the old man leaned across the counter, grabbed the black receiver off the phone he’d been watching and pressed it to his ear.

  ‘Hello! Hello! I’m listening!’ he exclaimed in a loud whisper into the sieve of the mouthpiece.

  Silence. Not blank silence, as if the line had been cut, it was a silence that hummed, as if the phone was off the hook at the other end, but there was no one to answer Homer. As if someone there had been waiting for him to answer for a very long time, but hadn’t been able to wait any longer. As if now the other receiver was croaking into the ear of a dead man in the old man’s distorted voice.

  Hunter glanced ominously at Homer from the doorway and the old man carefully put the phone back down and meekly followed the brigadier out.

  ‘Popov! Popov! Rise and shine! Get up, quick!’

  The powerful beam of the commander’s flashlight pierced straight though his eyelids, flooding his brain with fire. A strong hand shook him by the shoulder and then the back of it smashed into Artyom�
��s unshaven cheek.

  ‘Where’s your gun? Take your automatic and follow me, on the double!’ Of course, they dozed with their trousers on, in full gear in fact. Unwinding the tattered rags in which the Kalashnikov that served as his pillow had been wrapped for the night, Artyom tramped off, still swaying, after his commander. How long had he managed to sleep? An hour? Two? His head was buzzing and his throat was dry.

  ‘It’s starting,’ said the commander, looking back over his shoulder and breathing stale alcohol fumes into Artyom’s face.

  ‘What’s starting?’ he asked in fright.

  ‘You’ll see in a moment. Here, take this clip. You’ll need it.’

  Tula – a spacious station with no columns which looked like merely the top of a single, unbelievably broad tunnel, was enveloped in almost total darkness. In a few places feeble beams of light were darting about, but there was no order or system to their movements, no sense at all, as if the flashlights were in the hands of little children or monkeys. Only where would monkeys come from here?

  Waking instantly and feverishly checking his automatic, Artyom suddenly realised what had happened. They hadn’t been able to hold them! Or maybe it still wasn’t too late?

  Another two soldiers, still puffy and hoarse from sleep, darted out of the watch office and joined them. Along the way the commander scraped together the remainder, everyone who could still stand on his feet and hold a gun. Even the ones who were already coughing a bit.

  A strange, sinister cry pervaded the thick, stale, expired air. Not a scream, not a howl, not a command . . . A groan pouring out of hundreds of throats – straining in agony, full of despair and horror. A groan punctuated by a meagre jangling and scraping of iron that came from two, three, ten places at the same time.

  The platform was cluttered with torn, sagging tents and capsized kennels for living in, constructed out of sheets of metal and pieces of Metro-carriage cladding, all jumbled together with plywood counters and people’s abandoned belongings. The commander strode on, parting the heaps of garbage like an icebreaker moving through icepacks, with Artyom and the other two trotting along in his wake.

  A truncated train standing on the right-hand track loomed up out of the darkness: the light in both carriages was off, the open doors had been clumsily blocked with pieces of mobile barriers, and inside . . . On the other side of the dark window panes a terrible mishmash of humanity was heaving about, seething and simmering. Dozens of hands had grabbed the bars of the frail barriers and were swaying, shaking and rattling them. Occasionally the machine-gunners in gas masks who were posted at each of the exits skipped up to the black, gaping mouths of the doors and raised their gun butts, but they didn’t dare to beat the prisoners, let alone shoot them. In other places, on the contrary, the sentries tried to reason with the raging human sea squeezed into the metal boxes and calm it down.

  But did the people in the carriages still understand anything?

  They had been herded into the train because they started running away from the special sections of the tunnels, and because there were already too many of them – more than the healthy men.

  The commander rushed past the first carriage, and the second, and then Artyom saw where they were going in such a great hurry. The last door, that was where the abscess had ruptured. Strange creatures had flooded out of the carriage – barely able to stand, mutilated beyond recognition by the swellings on their faces, with puffy, appallingly thick arms and legs. No one had managed to get away yet: all the free sub-machine-gunners were converging on the door.

  The commander tore through the cordon and walked forward.

  ‘I order all patients to return to their places immediately!’ he exclaimed, pulling his officer’s Stechkin pistol out of its holster.

  The infected man closest to him raised his cumbersome, swollen head with a struggle, in several stages, and licked his cracked lips.

  ‘Why are you treating us like this?’

  ‘You are aware that you are infected with an unknown virus. We’re looking for a cure . . . You just have to wait for it.’

  ‘Looking for a cure,’ the man repeated after him. ‘That’s funny.’

  ‘Get back into the carriage immediately.’ The commander clicked off the safety catch of his revolver. ‘I’ll count to ten, then I’ll shoot to kill. One . . .’

  ‘You just don’t want to leave us without hope, so that you can control us. Until we all die anyway . . .’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘It’s a day now since they gave us any water. Why give dead men anything to drink?’

  ‘The sentries are afraid to approach the bars. Two of them have been infected like that. Three.’

  ‘There are lots of bodies in the carriages already. We’re trampling on people’s faces. Do you know how a nose crunches? If it’s a child’s, then . . .’

  ‘There’s nowhere to put them! We can’t burn them. Four.’

  ‘The next carriage is so cramped, the dead are still standing beside the living. Shoulder to shoulder.’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘For God’s sake, shoot me, will you? I know there isn’t any cure. I’m going to die soon. Then I won’t feel my insides being scraped raw with coarse sandpaper and soaked in alcohol . . .’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘And set alight. It feels like my head’s full of worms that are eating away my brain and my soul bit by bit from the inside . . . Yum-yum, crunch, crunch, crunch . . .’

  ‘Seven!’

  ‘You idiot! Let us out of here! Let us die like human beings. What makes you think you have the right to torture us like this? You know that you’re probably already . . .’

  ‘Eight! This is all a safety measure. So that others can survive. I’m prepared to croak, but not one of you plague dogs is going to leave here. Get ready!’

  Artyom flung up his automatic and set the sight on the nearest sick person. Oh God, he thought it was a woman . . . Swollen breasts stuck out under the T-shirt that was dried into a reddish-brown crust. He blinked and turned his gun barrel towards a shambling old man. The crowd of monsters started muttering and pulled back at first, trying to squeeze back in through the door, but it couldn’t – more and more infected people were oozing out of the carriage like fresh pus, groaning and weeping.

  ‘You sadist! What are you doing! You’re going to shoot living people! We’re not zombies!’

  ‘Nine!’ The commander’s voice turned dull and hollow.

  ‘Just let us go!’ the sick man yelled hoarsely, reaching his arms out towards the commander as if he were conducting a choir, and the whole crowd surged forward, following the sweep of his fingers.

  ‘Fire!’

  People started flowing towards Leonid immediately, the moment he put his lips to his instrument. The first sounds drawn out of the barrel of his flute were tentative and impure, but still enough to set the people gathered around smiling and clapping in approval, and when the flute’s voice grew firmer, the faces of his listeners were transformed, as if the dirt had fallen away from them.

  This time Sasha was awarded a place of distinction – beside the musician. Now Leonid was not the only one with dozens of eyes gazing at him intently, some of the admiring stares came her way. At first this made the girl feel awkward – after all, she didn’t deserve their attention and gratitude, but then the melody picked her up off the granite floor and carried her along with it, distracting her from her surroundings, in the same way that a good book or a story told by someone can captivate you and make you forget about everything.

  The same melody floated through the air again – Leonid’s own composition, untitled. He started and ended every one of his performances with it. It could smooth out wrinkles and whisk the dust off the windowpanes of glazed eyes, lighting little icon lamps on the other side of them. Sasha already knew the melody, but Leonid opened up new, mysterious little doors in it, discovering new harmonies, and the music sounded new and different. As if she had been gazing at the sky for a long, long
time, and suddenly, through an opening in the white clouds, she had glimpsed a boundless, bottomless, delicate-green expanse.

  Suddenly she felt a prick that startled her and brought her back down under the ground ahead of schedule. Sasha spun round in fright. So that was it . . . Towering above the crowd, Hunter was standing slightly behind the other listeners with his head thrown back. The sharp, barbed blade of his gaze was thrust into her, and if he released his grip briefly, it was only in order to stab the musician too. Leonid took no notice of the man with the shaved head – or at least, he gave no sign that anything was interfering with his playing.

  Strangely enough, Hunter didn’t leave, and he didn’t make any attempt to take her away or break off the performance. He waited until the final notes, then moved back and disappeared. Abandoning Leonid, Sasha immediately forced her way into the crowd, trying to keep up with the man with the shaved head. He stopped not far away, in front of a bench on which Homer was sitting, looking dejected.

  ‘You heard everything,’ he said in a husky voice. ‘I’m leaving. Will you go with me?’

  ‘Where to?’ asked the old man, smiling as the girl walked up to them. ‘She knows everything,’ he explained to the man with the shaved head.

  Hunter stabbed Sasha again with his barbed gaze, then nodded without saying anything to her.

  ‘Not far,’ he said, shifting his head to speak to the old man. ‘But I . . . I don’t want to be left alone.’

  ‘Take me with you,’ said Sasha, seizing her chance.

  The man with the shaved head breathed in loudly, clenching his fingers and unclenching them again.

  ‘Thank you for the knife,’ he said eventually. ‘It came in very useful.’