Everything else in the underground car park had rotted away or been ransacked. Can’t be much fun for this car of his here, thought Artyom, the only one still alive. Like going to a graveyard to visit your relatives.
The car started immediately.
“My little Japanese girl,” the stalker explained with a hint of pride. “I visit her every time I come up on top. Of course, there aren’t many weirdos wandering about now, but I still worry anyway.”
They crept up out of that crypt and drove out onto the Garden Ring Road.
“To Balashikha, you say?”
“Yes, Balashikha.”
“Where exactly? It’s quite a big place, Balashikha. Pretty much a town.”
“We’ll find it when we get there.”
“You’re a funny guy,” said Savelii.
They went to the right along the Garden Ring. They couldn’t hurry; the corridor through the rusty junk wasn’t very wide and it was twisty. Sometimes they stuck their nose into a track, but it was a dead end. They had to reverse out. The pavements were all cluttered with crashed cars too. When people had tried to escape from Moscow, they’d raced along the pavements as well. And straight over other people. But was there even anywhere to run to anyway?
“And what’s there?”
They’d set off early in the morning, so they would have the dim light of the day for the expedition. The sky was completely smeared over with clouds that didn’t let the ten-rouble sun Artyom had seen the last time shine through. The night had been black; the dawn was gray and the morning was completely colorless.
He drank all evening, just to avoid thinking about the fact that someone else was Sasha’s master; there were only two hours of night left, and he didn’t even wake up with a hangover but still drank. He felt sick—maybe that was the home brew, but obviously it was really the sickness.
There weren’t any crows in the city, or dogs, or rats. The buildings stood there, parched and withered. Only the wind moved; everything else had stiffened and frozen ages ago. The radiation meter ticked away as if it was counting down especially for Artyom. Lyokha was as quiet as if he’d swallowed his tongue. Deadness surrounded them.
“There’s an outpost there. The Red Line is building a colony on the surface.”
“The Red Line? A colony? What for?”
“They’re going to settle the surface,” Artyom said in desperation
“In Balashikha? Balashikha isn’t exactly very far away. Just outside the Orbital Ring Road. Take a look at the meter. Who can live there?”
“People.”
“Just where did you get this from, kid?”
“Someone told me … Someone reliable. He said men had been sent there from Rokossovsky Boulevard Station to build an outpost. Convicts. They’ve got a prison camp at Rokossovsky. And the boulevard is right beside Balashikha, within walking distance. It all fits, if you think about it.”
“But why in Balashikha? What’s that place got?” SaveliI persisted. “Some kind of bunkers? A military base?”
“A radio communications center. Maybe. Apparently. So, thinking logically … They must communicate with someone, if it’s a radio center.” Artyom turned his head and looked at Savelii: How would he react? “So I think there are survivors somewhere else.”
An outpost.
While he was lying there recuperating on the sofa bed in Sasha’s little room, he’d had time for imagining. So it was probably a fortress with walls a few meters high and machine gun towers to keep enemies away; but inside it was like one of those little glass globes with toy snow—a cozy little paradise. But what exactly was there? People, of course, without gas masks, breathing the air. Children playing … All well-fed. Some kind of domesticated animals. Ducks, maybe? Orange ones. And mushrooms, obviously, great huge ones. And the whole inner courtyard was covered in luscious greenery: rustling in the wind and shimmering. Basically, they had a life, not just an existence.
Savelii’s face was covered with pale-green rubber instead of skin: The rubber didn’t wrinkle up or stretch at what Artyom said. Savelii had round glass lenses instead of eyes, and the lenses could only bulge; they couldn’t narrow. Did he think this was funny? Or was he angry that he’d signed on for this imbecilic tomfoolery? Was he wondering why he was taking the risk? If he only knew who told Artyom about Balashikha and what the other people there at the time had said.
SaveliI waited for a moment, then reached out his hand, found a button, and switched on the radio. He ran through the FM wavelengths and switched to AM. And then to ultra-short waves. Everywhere the abandoned airwaves howled faintly, like the wind in naked branches. The sterile Earth spun in its dusting of insect powder, completely empty, in airless space, with man only perched on it at one spot, like a solitary louse that hadn’t been killed yet. Squatting there, motionless and sleepy, under the bell jar of the heavens: with nowhere to go and death won’t come.
“It would be good if there were survivors somewhere,” SaveliI answered, and looked back at Artyom. “Maybe there really are?”
Artyom couldn’t believe he was being honest when he said that.
“I’m not from Moscow,” the stalker continued. “I come from near Ekaterinburg. I came here to study after the army. To be a cameraman. I wanted to shoot a film about the war, what a cretin. I thought I could come up with a film about tanks and my time in the army. And conquer the capital. I left everyone behind there. My mother and father. My younger sister. And my grandad and granny were still alive. My mother hinted that I could get settled in in Moscow and then Varka could come up here too. And maybe, she said, in our old age we’ll move to somewhere outside Moscow, closer to you. Or you can come back to us, leave the grandchildren with us for the summer, to go mushrooming and berry-picking. I finished my studies. But the work went nowhere. And every year I told them, Yes, yes, right away, any moment now. I couldn’t sink any roots into this Moscow, and that was it. I lived in rented apartments all the time. Just one room, always in the outskirts. I was ashamed to bring women to photoshoots, let alone put up my own sister. And then, if my little sister was there, what could I do about women? I reckoned I’d fallen in love, but I didn’t have the money to get married. To get to work, I always took the minibuses and the Metro and the taxis—never had enough money for a car. I saved up and saved up, and then the rouble went down the drain. Life was lousy. That’s what I thought then. But now I think different.”
“Have you ever tried listening for radio signals?” Artyom asked.
“I’ve tried, all right,” SaveliI responded. “Nothing there. But basically, I couldn’t give a shit for the radio. I have the car all fitted out and fueled up because the way I think is this: Why not just abandon the whole fucking shooting match? Why not just walk out of the Metro one morning and get into the car, put on a Prodigy disk, and zoom off out of this fucking Moscow of yours and go east, for as far as I can keep going? Eh? I’ve already swapped some stuff for oil from the chemists and pickled plenty of mushrooms. They’re in the boot, by the way. And I packed them in rubber, so the jars wouldn’t smash against the machine gun. Everything’s ready. It’s been that way for more than two years.”
“Why don’t you go?”
“Because. Because I’m a human being, craven and cowardly. It’s easy to decide; going through with it is harder.”
“I can see that.”
“But every couple of nights I see our dacha: the vegetable patch, the well, the raspberries on the bushes, my father scattering manure on the dug-over soil and shouting ‘come and help me,’ and I keep dodging him. And my mother calling me to drink goat’s milk. Can you see that too?”
“I can see it,” sleepy Lyokha piped up from the backseat. “Not all of it, but some of it.”
“Well then,” said Savelii, “I wouldn’t mind if they were all alive. Or someone, at least. At least the old man who lived opposite us and used to pull my ears for firing my catapult at his chickens.”
They drove past the Leningrad Railwa
y Station, and the Kazan Railway Station, and the Kursk Railway Station. From all of them the rusty tracks ran off into bleak desolation. Artyom had been here, when he was serving under Miller: He’d walked out onto the tracks and watched the two rails come together at a single point and wondered what was out there, at the other side of the world. A strange thing, a railway: like the Metro, but with no walls.
“But I’ve heard,” he said, “that there’s a tunnel somewhere from Metro Two that goes to the Urals. To the government bunkers. And that’s where all the government leaders are. Guzzling tinned stuff and waiting for the radiation level to drop.”
“They’re guzzling each other,” SaveliI retorted. “You don’t know those people; you never watched the television.”
Artyom didn’t know those people, but he knew others. He remembered the unopened envelope that must be lying somewhere in Dietmar’s breast pocket, riddled with bullet holes. Miller and that Felixovich in his phone had failed to stop the war.
“Felixovich,” said Artyom, sobering up. “AlexeI Felixovich. Bessolov?”
“Sleep it off,” SaveliI advised him. “Your friend back there has switched off. Why don’t you do the same? It’ll take us a while to get to Balashikha at this rate.”
But Artyom couldn’t. The tension was making him feel dizzy.
“Stop,” he told Savelii. “I feel sick.”
SaveliI stopped, and Artyom got out to spill his guts. It felt better without the gas mask, but the radiation tasted bitter on his tongue; that was bad. And the desolation all around was so bad that Artyom couldn’t think any more about who was Sasha’s master, and who was Miller’s.
A different thought started buzzing in his head instead: What a stupid idiot you are, how could you let yourself be deceived by that half-alive corpse in the tunnel, how could you have believed his dying ravings? There isn’t anything there. Not in Balashikha, or in Mytishchi, or in Korolyov, or in Odintsovo, nowhere, there never had been.
“Copped a dose, did you?” SaveliI droned. “Or is it the hangover?
“Let’s get going.” Artyom slammed the door.
From the Garden Ring they trundled down to the embankment of a swampy little river with heavy yellow vapor slowly rising from it. Then through a thousand empty buildings again, past a strange, tiny little red church with dull little crosses, crushed in between two squat little houses. His hand rose up to his neck of its own accord, felt for the talisman through the rubber suit and stroked it: without any help from his head or his conscious mind.
They came out onto a straight, wide road, very wide and straight, like the Red Line itself: no bends and no sharp corners—three lanes in one direction, three lanes in the other, and tramlines as well. And it was packed solid, but only in one direction—to the east, out of the poisonous city. Packed solid with cars that had stalled or collided.
The veins of Moscow had choked up.
“Enthusiasts’ Highway,” Artyom read on a blue sign.
The cars had turned into metal containers, into tins. The petrol had been drained out of all of them a long time ago, but nobody had taken the people out of their tins: Where could you put them, anyway? The cars had stopped so tightly packed together that the doors couldn’t be opened. So their owners were still there inside them, still traveling east to this very day. Black and withered, long ago gnawed right down to the bones. Some had nestled their faces into the driving wheels; some had lain down on the backseat; some were lulling a child to sleep. It was good that they hadn’t died of hunger but from the radiation, or perhaps from the poisonous gases: They hadn’t had to wait long and hadn’t really understood anything.
Where there could have been eight rows, twelve had squeezed in. One car every four meters. On average, let’s say, three people in a car, although many of them were packed. How many did that make? How long, Artyom wondered, was the highway? Where did it go to? Where did it end?
The meter started crackling loudly. SaveliI squirmed anxiously in his chair, which had some kind of white pelt thrown over it to make it cozier. They had to scramble along the margin of the road, and there was barely enough space.
“Right then, enthusiasts?” he asked Artyom. “Balashikha, is it?”
“Craven and cowardly,” Artyom replied. He stopped looking at the passengers hurrying along in their frozen jeeps and sedans. He was bored with them. He closed his eyes. A rusty taste lingered miserably in his mouth. SaveliI and he were going nowhere. Everyone was right; Artyom was wrong. He’d gone out of his mind.
How long had Sasha said he had left? Three weeks?
And the doctor said the same. She’d stamped the sentence with her medical seal. And that seal was all the doctor had; she didn’t have any medicine.
And what could he do in those three weeks? What else should he do during that time?
Go back to everyone and ask them all for forgiveness?
Anya—because Artyom hadn’t wanted to live a coherent human life with her and he hadn’t been able to give her children. Miller—because Artyom had turned his only daughter’s head. Sukhoi—because Artyom had never been able to call him father, not when he was six and not when he was twenty-six, and instead of “good bye” he would say to him, “Dad, give me some money.”
If his legs would carry him a little bit farther, he could go and find Hunter too. Have a final drink with him. Tell him, “It didn’t work out for you, and it didn’t work out for me. My hair’s fallen out, but apart from that I’m nothing like you. So after I’m gone people will still be stuck in the Metro forever eating worms, stumbling around in the darkness, telling tall stories, trading in pig shit, and fighting to the last breath. I won’t open their cell door for them; I won’t set them free; I won’t teach them not to go blind in the sun.”
Then take the cartridges that Sukhoi had tipped into his pocket, go to TsvetnoI Boulevard, give them all to Sasha and embrace her gently, snuggle up against her, with their foreheads and noses touching, for this money, and do nothing—just simply lie there and look into her eyes from close up. Oh, and ask Homer to take her out of that dive when Artyom kicked the bucket.
Well, it was a plan.
Didn’t it seem like the Japanese girl had started moving a bit faster?
“Look.”
Artyom opened his narrowed eyes.
A path had opened up. The cars had been pushed off it, crumpled up and squeezed into other rows. As if an immense bulldozer had moved along, clearing them off to the side with its metal blade. An asphalt channel had been cleared through the solid surface of rust, all the way to the horizon.
“There,” said Artyom. “There! Who do you think did that?”
His heart started trembling and swaying on thin rubber straps in his hollow chest. His body broke into a sweat under the impermeable protective suit. The excitement brought that sour spittle back into his mouth, but Artyom checked it and held it back. He didn’t want to stop and lose even a single second.
So they had found some kind of equipment, brought it here, and worked in secret on the surface, raking aside the endless traffic jam and clearing a road for traffic going east, to Balashikha. Probably no one but the Reds could have pulled off something like that in total secrecy. So that man in the tunnel hadn’t deceived him. Artyom simply had to rush to the horizon, burst through it like the ribbon on a finishing line, and there it would be: the outpost. The place where in some miraculous way people lived on the surface.
No, it wasn’t all in vain.
Not a madman, not an idiot, not a pitiful dreamer.
“Step on it,” Artyom told Savelii.
Lyokha was dozing. The radio was hissing. The wind was flattening itself against the windshield. SaveliI went up to a hundred kilometers an hour, and the channel narrowed from the speed, but he didn’t even think about slowing down; Artyom got the feeling that under the clinging rubber the stalker was also smiling with his steel-lined mouth.
The buildings came to an end, and strange forest thickets began: Tree trunks r
ose up on both sides of the confined road, leaned in towards each other, stretched out their branches and wove them into a canopy, trying either to embrace or to strangle each other. But there were no leaves on them—as if they were fighting for sunlight and water, but had expended their final reserves of life on this. And whoever had carved the road through the cars had moved through this thicket too, without hesitating.
Then the thickets receded, and a wide space opened up, dotted haphazardly with multistory boxes; Enthusiasts’ Highway expanded by another two lanes at each side, and all of them, apart from the channel, were packed solid with corpses; eventually an immense flyover curled round into a concrete loop up ahead.
“We’re crossing the Orbital Ring Road,” SaveliI announced. “Balashikha comes after that.”
Artyom rose halfway out of his seat.
Where are you, miracle? Straight after the Ring Road? Could it really be that they only had to cross the orbital highway and the radiation level would drop immediately? No, the meter only started clicking away even faster; the channel narrowed—the carrion had been cleared off it less carefully here—and it became harder to hurtle along it so fast.
The Orbital Ring Road was immensely wide, like a highway in the kingdom of the dead, and just as endless. Standing together on it in the queue for final judgment were sedans and heavy trucks, plain little Russian boxes and stately foreign limousines. Some of the trailer-trucks had their cabins tipped forward, as if their heads had been half-severed in an execution; all of their bellies had been gutted. The metal herd stretched from horizon to horizon; the circle of the Orbital Ring Road closed in some place unknown, like the circle of the Earth itself.
But the Earth didn’t end here. It carried on; it was still the same Earth.
METRO 2035. English language edition.: The finale of the Metro 2033 trilogy. (METRO by Dmitry Glukhovsky) Page 33
