They passed a sign that said “Balashikha.”
There was nothing outside the Orbital Ring Road that was different from what was inside.
The buildings stood more sparsely; instead of five-story Khruschev blocks, factory ruins crept up to the road. What else was there here? Shattered kiosks at overturned bus stop shelters; buses like gas chambers with a panoramic view; the wind: blowing roentgens in your face, flying from east to west. The day was beginning, and there was no one to see it. Artyom could have completely lost his faith and renounced the church, only one thing stopped him: The channel carried on farther. Where to?
“Well? Where is it?” SaveliI asked. “Which way, Susanin?”
“Which way?” Artyom asked the man who was coughing in the tunnel.
Why had he believed him? Sasha had told him: Don’t believe anyone.
But how could I not believe? What would I hold on to then, Sash?
“There! What’s that over there?” Lyokha started squirming about behind him.
“Where?”
“Over there! What’s that there, on the left? It’s moving. And there’s more than one!”
They were moving.
Turning.
It was standing by the road, in an open spot: a tower that wasn’t a tower, a windmill that wasn’t a windmill … Made of metal rails, probably, a cross-welded structure about four stories high, broader at the bottom, narrower at the top, with a huge three-bladed propeller grafted onto its head. In its rush the east wind lost it way and fell into the trap, and it spun the blades to free itself.
“And over there! Look! And there too!”
The wind towers were strung out, one after another, along the side of the road. The others were hidden behind the first—one, two, three, four, lots of them. The blades were each three meters long, irregular and sheathed in tin plate that was gray from the gray sky; a single glance was enough to realize that this was a handmade thing, not delivered from a factory but assembled sometime after the end, after the war, maybe not long ago. These were what they had been building recently.
Recently, right now!
Someone had built these wind towers recently!—on the surface!—for some purpose!
The propellers spun without any coordination: It looked like an entire squadron of planes moving across an airfield to take off—maybe a squadron of those pot-bellied slow-flyers with transparent wings. Or as if these propellers wanted to shift the entire planet, move it to somewhere else—maybe to some inhabited planet that people could jump across on to and escape that way?
“What are they for?” Lyokha asked through his nose from the backseat.
Artyom knew.
“They’re like the bicycles at our station,” he answered after a pause, in a dull, spellbound voice. “They’re generators. They produce electricity. From the wind.”
“And what’s that for?”
“Are you plain stupid, or what? It means that people live here! Here! What else would they need such a humongous amount of electricity for? How many of them are there? Just look! Count them: six, seven, eight, nine! Ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen! And over there as well! They could supply an entire high-rise building! Or two! Or three! Fourteen! Fifteen! Sixteen! Can you imagine it? And someone built all of this! On the surface! What’s the radiation level like?
“The same,” said Savelii.
“Well, screw it then. It means they’ve managed to get round it somehow. Or they’ve built themselves something to keep it out. But at least they’re on the surface! Why would the Reds need to be on the surface? They know something that we don’t! They’ve got power here! We don’t have as much power in the entire Metro as these wind turbines produce! A whole city district can live round the clock with this power! Stop the car, pal!” Artyom shouted to Savelii. “Stop. I want to take a closer look!”
SaveliI killed the engine at the side of the road.
Artyom jumped out, hobbled over to a wind tower, narrowed his eyes, and threw his head back to look up at the sky, at the slow, creaking blades. Everything was working properly: From the wind and the creaking, these contraptions made electric current. Not one of them was standing idle.
SaveliI walked over with his cunning 9-millimeter special-forces sniper rifle at the ready and studied the windmill. He looked round and listened.
“But where are your people, then?” he asked Artyom. “Where’s your city district of live people who use this electricity to make porridge and light up the lavatory? Eh?”
“I don’t know, pal. They’re hiding. This is a high road. Why would they stick their noses out here?” Artyom explained.
“You mean they’re watching us right now?”
“They could be.”
SaveliI raised his sniper rifle, put his eye to the sight, and swept it round in a circle.
“Doesn’t look like it. It’s the same as in Moscow, Artyom. Empty.”
“There’s a road, and they built wind generators. Someone built all this. Workers, engineers, electricians!”
“There’s no one here. You’re not blind, are you? They built this and went back into the Metro. The meter reading’s off the scale! The experiment didn’t work!”
They drove on: at walking speed, with the windows lowered so they wouldn’t miss a single person, not even the very smallest. But there wasn’t a single one. Naked trees reached their gnarled fingers up to the sky, asking for something. Behind the trees the pylons of a power transmission line jutted up, with their wires broken; they were invisible from a distance, concealed behind the buildings. The wind got tangled in the propellers. The cumbersome rotors creaked in raucous disunity, and this collective creaking never stopped for a second. And then they could see that the wind towers came to an end up ahead. But the outpost still hadn’t appeared.
“Take us back. We’ve probably driven past it!”
SaveliI did that. While they were turning round, Artyom started feeling impatient and got out of the car again. He set off on foot, listening and looking.
Where are you, people?
You do exist! You are here! Come out! Don’t be afraid! I’m friendly!
Even if you’re Reds, it’s okay. Anyone. Do those underground colors exist up on the surface anyway? Surely they’ll fade out in the sunlight?
A dog appeared at the edge of the road.
It sniffed at the air and yapped lazily.
Artyom hobbled towards it. It wasn’t a guard dog: It had no collar, no pedigree, nothing. A whitish coat with darker patches, dirty.
“What?” asked Savelii, overtaking him.
“Do you see?”
“A dog.”
“It’s not afraid of us. It’s not afraid of people. And look how fat it is! It’s so glossy! Domesticated, get it? Eh? There’s a settlement here. Somewhere behind the trees. It’s tame and it lives in the settlement, like the mongrels we have at our station. Look how they’ve fattened it up!”
A few more wandered out slowly to join the whitish creature. If Artyom came across dogs in Moscow, he’d pick out the leader and shoot it, or he’d never get away. But they were different here: They didn’t growl; they didn’t spread out in a semicircle to corner you; they narrowed their eyes peaceably and just yapped gently. The radiation had taken its toll on them—one had five legs and another one with a big head had a little, blind head beside it. The radiation had taken a toll, but not turned them vicious. They were well-fed, that was it.
“Where did they come from? Look, over there! There’s a path behind the trees! That’s where the people are!” Artyom droned to Savelii.
SaveliI parked the car and took out the keys. Lyokha slammed his door as he got out. He had dark glasses with pink, heart-shaped frames over his gas mask to protect him from the sun. Savelii had lent them to him.
The dogs sniffed at the people; SaveliI shooed them off with his gun, and they ran away a few steps, lazily, not believing. Their paunches prevented them from running any faster. Fattened up.
Artyom ra
ised his empty hands and set off along the path ahead of the others.
“Is anybody there? Hey! Don’t shoot! We were just driving by!”
Could they hear him here? Artyom couldn’t tell; the wind towers were creaking so desperately, and his voice could easily have gotten stuck in the creaking.
“Is anybody there? Hey, hey! Don’t be afraid. We’re not going to …”
It was hard to breathe. The filters didn’t let through as much air as Artyom needed right now. And his little windows had steamed up, turned misty. But he didn’t want to pick up another dose: Doses added up, and now every breath took time off his life, and he still had to figure everything out; he still had to find comfort and hope for himself and the whole Metro.
SaveliI and Lyokha walked after him.
The dogs trudged after them without hurrying, then went ahead, showing the way. Through the bare trees they couldn’t see a building or a shed, or a fence, but there was something reddish towering up about fifty steps from the road.
They came out into a grassy clearing.
Wagging their tails guiltily, the dogs glanced into their visitors’ eyes and ran to the center. When they got there, they disappeared. Artyom walked closer. Maybe there were dugouts there?
It was a hole.
An immense hole, dug out by an excavator. Not just a hole, but a foundation pit. The brownish color through the trees was the clay and sand taken out of it, a mountain, and there was no dugout.
The pit was full of people, dumped there.
All dressed any old way at all.
All men. Artyom couldn’t make out any more than that. The dogs had gnawed away at them.
How many were there? A lot. Maybe twenty, just on the top. But there was obviously another layer under those, and then another and another, going deeper and deeper.
And there were a lot of dogs—but there was more than enough for all of them; that was why they were so gentle and good-natured. They jumped down and carried on quietly gnawing on someone. This was the activity that Artyom had distracted them from with his own howling.
“There they are, your builders,” SaveliI said to his back. “The builders and the engineers and the electricians. All lying here. Work hard, play hard.”
Artyom looked round at him.
“Why this?” he asked. “What’s this for?”
“What do you mean, what for?” Lyokha droned in his pink-heart spectacles. “What’s it for at the Reich? As if you never saw it. Did you think it’d be different here?”
Artyom grabbed hold of his rubber trunk and tore off the mask. He needed air, so that he wouldn’t lose his mind; he’d forgotten that corpses smell. Sweet and repulsive, it slammed into his brain, and he gasped and puked up bile.
He ran, dragging himself away, away from the disturbed grave; and the creaking blades of the wind towers lashed and lashed at his ears. He ran out to them, standing in their neat single column; bad work, difficult—building them here. But they were built. It must have taken a long time to get them up. Men died off one by one, and others came instead. No they didn’t come—they were brought here, political prisoners, or any kind, to build the outpost, and almost no one ever went back. Probably Zuev’s people were the only ones who escaped, but they were caught in the Metro and liquidated rapidly, so they wouldn’t talk. That was how it was.
The tin-plated wings of the wind towers swirled inexorably, glinting dully in the dull sunlight, but it wasn’t a squadron of visionary airplanes; these were the blades of a meat grinder to which men had been brought from the Metro to be turned into dog food and have electricity pumped out of their lives.
“What for?” Artyom asked. “What do you need so much power for?”
He spat out the sour, bitter saliva and pulled on his gas mask.
And then there was a roar from behind the trees. An engine!
Artyom dropped to the ground and waved to the others, who were walking back. They lay flat too, so they couldn’t be seen through the bare trees.
A truck drove out—six immense wheels, barred windows, a toothed battering ram instead of a bumper, a riveted iron box with narrow loopholes and a little door instead of a back section, and everything painted gray. It drove out from a side road onto the endless Enthusiasts’ Highway and into the clear channel—at a point they had shot past in their Japanese car. It stopped and stayed there. What was it waiting for?
Artyom didn’t breathe. had they heard? Were they searching? Could they see the Japanese car parked behind them?
No. There was another roar, and another truck, exactly the same, trundled out onto the road. Freshly painted. They lined up, belched out black smoke, hooted, and set off towards Moscow. Hurtling along the open channel, fitting neatly and precisely between the heaped-up tinned goods—and soon they could no longer be seen at all on the gray asphalt.
“From over there,” said Artyom. “Round the corner. What’s round there?”
That was where the power line pylons jutted up above the trees.
He set off along the edge of the road, his fingers spontaneously grasping the handle of his automatic. It didn’t matter if SaveliI and Lyokha were following him or they were thinking it over. He had to find that place. He had to know what was there. What all those men had been spent on.
He turned off Enthusiasts’ Highway onto a road attached to it; the sign called it Bypass Highway.
And began to understand, even before he got there. They weren’t power line pylons. They were radio masts. One two, three, ten … How many were there? This was the radio center!
He hobbled and skipped towards them, and the pylons also crept towards him from where they had been hiding behind the trees, moving out onto the sky, towering lacework forms woven out of metal. Never mind the silly wire that Artyom used to unwind on the roof of a skyscraper! These radio aerials must be able to reach all the way to the end of the world! If they couldn’t pick up a signal from Polar Dawns, then what could?
“Wait!” SaveliI grabbed hold of his arm. “Where are you dashing off to? In the front entrance? Through the checkpoint?”
“Ah, fuck that,” said Artyom. “The front entrance will do. These are radio masts, get it? These are aerials! A radio station. All those turbines—this is what they’re for. They were built beside this! Not a settlement! They’re here to power the radio! Now do you see? And what does that mean? It means they’re in contact with someone! Maybe those Urals of yours! The bunker at Mount Yamantau! The red-bellies are talking to someone! Get it? Otherwise, why guard this? You do what you like, friend. I’ve only got three weeks left anyway. I’ve got to know.”
He tore his arm free and walked on.
“Wait, you blockhead!” SaveliI whispered furiously. “We can’t just charge in! What can three of us do against them? At least let’s sit down for a while and figure this out.”
“You sit; I’ll reconnoiter.”
He limped off under the trees—he could already see the concrete wall that the pylons stood behind. If he could just get past the wall somehow … The gates maybe? No, better not go near the gates.
At one spot the trees parted, close to the barrier. Artyom scrambled through the brushwood: There was barbed wire stretched out along the concrete top of the wall. Never mind. He wasn’t afraid of that any longer. He jabbed his automatic at it. Would it short out and spark? No. He grabbed hold, tore his mittens, ripped his trousers, and bloodied his leg again, but didn’t even notice immediately. He scrambled over to the other side and dropped down with his good leg first. Slapdash.
If they saw him, they’d drop him on the spot.
He’d jumped at a good place. They hadn’t seen him immediately: The grounds were covered in bushes and cluttered with brick buildings and junk; there was even an excavator curled up in the corner, sleeping—probably the one they’d used to make the dugout for the builders.
A surprised Alsatian started barking and dashed out at Artyom from behind a corner, but Artyom put a quiet bullet into its face. The
dog gurgled and tumbled head over heels.
He crept along a building—the guardhouse at the gates. He glanced in through the window at the back. Men. Dressed in rubber. Under the suits he couldn’t tell if they were Reds or some other color.
He walked round and knocked at the door. They opened it, and he gave them a dose of lead. As you do unto us, so we do unto you. We can figure out later if I should have done that or not; we’ll work that out in three weeks’ time.
There was a little television on a desk, showing the gates and the wall. Winding the image back: They’d missed his jump, turned their backs, decided to rewind or just been too slow … So God had protected him, then … The one who was the Father. He appreciated this kind of thing … The entire Old Testament was nothing but wars and covert operations.
He found the button marked GATES. Then hit it and went outside.
And that was when he got the bullet he’d been asking for from the very beginning. In the shoulder. He managed to run to a wall—at least it was the right wall, facing away from the shooter—and pressed up against it. He lifted the heavy automatic with his good arm and fired at random. The wrong wall, the wrong one! Another bullet zipped off it right beside his head, and a chip of brick flew into one of his glass lenses and the glass cracked. He ran towards the opposite wall—the shooting pain from his knee cut him down and he fell. A burst of fire started moving over the ground towards him in little fountains of dust; it had just crept up to his belly when someone started shooting from the gates. He looked with one eye: Lyokha! You’ve drawn their fire. Thanks.
Artyom got up, slipping in the dust—and another three of them came running out of the building, all in protective suits; they must have been delayed putting them on. Lyokha hid behind the corner. Someone was blasting entire belts of bullets at the corner from the roof, so he couldn’t come out, and those three had spotted Artyom, who was down on all fours again, who just needed two steps to get away. But he didn’t have those steps, and they would have dropped him, staining the dust red, if the Japanese car hadn’t come flying in through the gates and squealed as it swung round, straight through the dumbfounded men, hurling them across its hood. They started peppering it from the roof. Lyokha peeped out and distracted the rooftop machine gunner again. Artyom managed to get away and reach the door. SaveliI jumped out of his car and took shelter behind it. The stalker found the man on the roof in the sight of his sniper’s rifle, the silencer smacked its lips twice, and the machine gun choked. One of the men who had been knocked down got up and struck Lyokha a stupid blow on the chin with the butt of his gun. Then he started fiddling with his gun like a drunk, so he could finish the stunned broker off, but Artyom came up, shot him in the face, and rescued his rescuer. He pushed the door and started running along a corridor. Someone came at him with a pistol, and he didn’t have time to think about anything—just pulled the trigger; the man staggered back. And that was all; that was it.
METRO 2035. English language edition.: The finale of the Metro 2033 trilogy. (METRO by Dmitry Glukhovsky) Page 34
