The people on the trolley went quiet, stared at the dark passage, into the pitch-black pit, and started whispering together.
“But the devil only knows …”
“This is all fucking bullshit,” Artyom burst out angrily.” Gibberish! I’ve been in that Metro-2.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Empty tunnels. Empty tunnels and a heap of savages who feed on human flesh. That’s your observers for you. So sit here and wait. They’ll rescue us.”
“I don’t know,” the sweater chuckled good-naturedly.” I’m not much of a storyteller. You should listen to the guy who laid the whole thing out for me. I really got into it!”
“Are there really cannibals, then?” the father with the bundle asked Artyom.
But just then they turned the light on.
In the walkie-talkie someone mumbled a blessing to the guards. The trolley sneezed. The wheels creaked. They set off.
The people released their tight breath, and even the child quieted down
They started drifting past the dark passage and glanced in apprehensively.
The passage turned out to be a utility room. A little dead end.
* * *
Novoslobodskaya was a single endless construction site. Standing on the empty tracks was a caravan of trolleys loaded with sacks—probably sand or cement. Workers were lugging bricks, mixing concrete, dripping stiffening mortar onto the floor, plastering over cracks, pumping water off the tracks. Heating units obtained from somewhere on the surface whirred, propelling hot air onto the damp plasterwork with their blades. A guard in gray had been assigned to each one.
“It’s leaking,” the sweater explained.
Novoslobodskaya had changed. Once there used to be panels of stained glass here, and the station was kept in slightly dim light, so that the glass paintings glowed more brightly. And a double line of upraised gold trim used to run above the stained-glass panels, tracing out rounded arches. And the floor had also been laid out in black and white granite squares, as if a passenger was stepping onto a precious chessboard, a gift to the tsar of Russia from the shah of Persia … Now there was nothing but cement everywhere.
“Fragile stuff,” said Homer.
“Eh?” Artyom turned towards him: The old man had been silent for so long already, it was actually strange to hear him.
“There was someone I used to know. He told me once that the stained-glass panels at Novoslobodskaya had burst a long time ago, fragile stuff. But I’d forgotten. As we were traveling just now, I kept thinking about seeing them.”
“Never mind. We’ll cope,” the sweater said confidently.” We’ll save the station. Our fathers could, and so can we. As long as there’s no war, we’ll cope with it all.”
“Probably,” Homer agreed.” It’s simply a strange feeling. I never liked those stained-glass panels, and I didn’t like Novoslobodskaya because of those panels. I thought they were in bad taste. But just now, while we were traveling, all the same I was expecting them.”
“Maybe we’ll restore the stained glass too!”
“That’s not likely.” Artyom shook his head.
“Well if not, screw them!” Lyokha smiled a cracked smile.” Life goes on even without them. Where’s your way out here?”
“We’ll restore everything! Just as long as there isn’t a war!” the sweater repeated, slapping Lyokha on the shoulder.
He led them to a stairway over the tracks, across a narrow isthmus—to Mendeleev. They passed one cordon in camouflage gear, then another, and only then did the border loom into view, with the brown Hansa circle on standards and a machine-gun post.
Lyokha kept squirming and spinning about, turning to look back for some reason; his merriment was hysterical, Artyom knew that, not real. Homer glued his lips together and gazed in under his forehead at an invisible cinema screen. The sweater carried on spouting all sorts of optimistic prattle.
Languishing at the final checkpoint, in addition to the gray border guards, were another two men dressed as laborers—in stained and smeared overalls and with welding goggles on their foreheads. Artyom’s stuff was standing at their feet: the bundle with the protective suit and the knapsack with the radio set.
They greeted him, unfastened the zip, invited him to check that the automatic and the cartridges—there they were—were all in place, count them if you like. Artyom didn’t bother to count them. Right now he simply wanted to get out of here, get out alive, nothing else.
It’s impossible singlehandedly to fight their entire security service. All of Hansa. But there, in the room, behind the curtain … There’s nothing there. Paranoia.
“Right!” The sweater shook Lyokha’s dirty shoulder blade vigorously and held his hand out to Artyom.” Godspeed!”
Looking from the outside they were four old friends saying goodbye, not knowing when they would see each other again.
* * *
It was only after they had already stepped into Mendeleev Station, when the men in civilian clothes definitely couldn’t hear them anymore, that Homer took Artyom by the sleeve and whispered, “You spoke to them in exactly the right way there. We might never have got out of there, you know.”
Artyom shrugged.
“I can’t stop thinking about one thing,” Homer went on.” When we walked into his office, he cleared away slippers that were scattered about, remember?”
“And?”
“Well, they weren’t his slippers, were they? Did you notice. A woman’s. Those slippers were a woman’s. And the scratches …”
“Nonsense!” Artyom barked at him.” A load of garbage!”
“A meal of something would be good,” Lyokha declared.” Who knows when we’ll get home now?”
CHAPTER 6
— EIGHT METERS —
“This is a one-way road here,” the commander of the border post told them in farewell, picking at a ripe, juicy pimple on his neck with his fingernail.
And then they started wondering where they’d ended up
Mendeleev Station turned out to be dimly lit, misty with steam and sopping wet. The steps of the passage from next-door Novoslobodskaya ran down not onto granite flooring, but into a lake: people here lived up to their ankles in freezing-cold brown water. Artyom unbuttoned his bundle—his waders were in it. He hung the automatic on himself at the same time. Homer was clad in rubber too—easy to see he was an experienced traveler.
“I didn’t know it had sprung a leak,” Lyokha muttered.
Lying here and there in the water were frames cobbled together out of rotten wood, which lifted a person up a little bit above the bottom. They were scattered about haphazardly, and no one made any effort to knock them together into an island or a road.
“Pallets.” Homer recognized them as he dunked himself into the cold murk in order to reach a wooden platform.” They used to use them in trucks before. The whole area around Moscow was covered in advertising hoardings: Pallets bought! Pallets for sale! An entire black market in these pallets! Now just think about it: What damned good did those pallets do anyone? It turns out they were buying them up for the Flood.”
But even the pallets had long ago become soaked and sunk down a few centimeters. It was only possible to see them through the mud from very close up, and only looking straight down at your feet; from the side it really did look as if everything here was a single, uninterrupted, turbid Biblical sea.
“They walk miraculously here, straight across the water,” Homer chuckled, looking at the local people paddling along.
The broker appreciated the sight too:
“Like it’s flooded in shit!”
The pupils of their eyes soon forgot how brightly Hansa had shone, and the meager local light became more than enough for them. Oil burned in little bowls—scattered around with whoever happened to have it, sometimes behind screens of plastic bags from shops—with colors that were faded, but not completely.
“Kind of like Chinese paper lanterns,” Homer pointed out.” Be
autiful, eh?”
It looked different to Artyom.
In the archways, which at first seemed solid black, they discovered the tracks. But not ordinary tracks, like at other stations. At Mendeleev no border existed between the platform and the tracks. The murky water made everything look level. You had to guess where you could still stand and where you would lose your footing and swallow a bitter mouthful.
But the main question was: How to move on from here?
The exit to the surface was collapsed, sealed off. The pedestrian passage was cut off. The tunnel was flooded neck-high with cold and dirty water. And it was probably radioactive too; try bathing in that. Compulsive cramp, a shorted-out torch, and you’d just loiter there, facedown, like a float log until you filled up your lungs.
Locals sat along the invisible tracks, scratching themselves, trawling creatures better not thought about out of the depths with nets of some kind and immediately devouring them raw.
“You lured my worm away! Give back my worm, you bastard!” One fisherman grabbed another by his disheveled locks.
They didn’t have any boats or any rafts. They couldn’t get away from Mendeleev, and they weren’t even planning to. But what could Artyom and Homer do?
“Why is everything flooded? Is it lower than Novoslobodskaya, then?” Artyom asked out loud.
“Eight meters deeper.” Homer extracted the information from his memory.” So the water from there all flows here.”
The moment they moved a little farther away from the steps of the passage, their legs were hung all over with skinny children. They didn’t dare to meddle with the Hansa cordon; somehow they’d been scared off from there.
“Mister, a bullet. Mister, a bullet. Mister, a bullet.”
Skinny, but wiry. Uh-oh! You catch someone’s little hand in your pocket. Slippery, quick, agile. Seems like you’ve just caught it—and there’s nothing. And which of the little imps it was, you can’t tell.
Underground rivers flowed all around the Metro, scraped at the concrete, asking to be let into the deep stations. Those who could, bailed the water out: They reinforced the walls, pumped out the slurry, dried out the damp. Those who couldn’t, drowned in silence.
At Mendeleev the people were too lazy either to scoop or to drown. They just carried on in temporary fashion, any old way they could: stole scaffolding pipes from somewhere, partitioned off the hall with them, screwed jungles together out of them, scrambled higher, up to the ceiling, and hung there on those metal lianas. The more bashful ones wound plastic bags around their nests so no one could gawk into their life from the outside. The simpler ones did their business loud and clear in front of everyone, straight from the upper tiers into the water—and that was fine.
Formerly the hall of Mendeleev Station—solemn and restrained, in white marble, with spacious rounded archways—was suitable, for instance, for a palace of weddings. But avalanches of mud had sluiced the marble slabs off the walls, short-circuited the electricity, extinguished the artfully twisted chandeliers, and transformed the people into amphibians. It was unlikely that anyone here still married—they simply clambered up a bit higher, in order not to get their backsides wet, and mated in casual haste.
Those who weren’t trying to catch worms sat on their bunk tiers apathetically and dejectedly: They gaped into the darkness, babbled gibberish, and giggled brainlessly. Apparently there wasn’t anything else to do here.
“So what’s for chow, like?” Lyokha repeated in bewilderment, scrambling from wet to dry, brushing off the little scroungers and looking mournfully at his boots.
His persistence set Artyom’s stomach rumbling too. They should have eaten at the Prospect: They had been roasting pork kebabs there, and they could have tipped a few braised mushrooms out into a bowl. But here …
“A bullet, mister!”
Artyom wrapped his arms more tightly round his bundle and shooed the small fry away. Someone’s little paw slithered craftily into his pocket again. It found something and twitched—but this time around Artyom was on the alert. The thief he caught was a little girl, about six years old. Hair tangled, every second tooth missing.
“That’s it now, you little louse. Give it back. What have you got there?”
He unfolded one finger after another, trying to be angry. The girl seemed to have taken fright, but she tried to be cheeky. She offered to kiss Artyom if he let her go. The thing in her hand was a mushroom. How could a mushroom have got into Artyom’s pocket? A raw mushroom, from a cultivation plot. What kind of nonsense was this?
“Ah, come on, give us the mushroom! Tight bastard, are yer?” the little girl squealed.
He guessed: Anya put it there.
She had slipped him the mushroom in farewell: This is you, Artyom. This is who you are and your essential nature, and remember about that in your heroic wanderings. Remember about yourself, and remember about me.
“I won’t give you it,” Artyom said firmly, squeezing the childish hand harder than he had intended.
“That hurts! That hurts! You monster!” she screeched.
Artyom let go of the fingers and released the wolf cub.
“Stop. Wait.”
She was about to swing at him from a distance with some kind of iron bar, but she froze, agreed to hold on for a moment. She still trusted people a little bit, then.
“Here!” he held out two cartridges to her.
“Throw ’em,” the little girl ordered Artyom.” You monster. I won’t come near ya.”
Well, maybe only a tiny little bit.
“How can we get out of here? To TsvetnoI Boulevard?”
“No way!” She blew her nose in her hand.” If they want, they’ll come and get ya.”
“Who?”
“Them as wants to!”
Artyom tossed one cartridge into her palm, then the other. She caught the first, but the second plunged into the murk, and three little squirts immediately reached into the mire after it. The little girl smashed her heel into one’s nose and another’s ear: geroff, geroff, it’s mine! But someone else had already gotten lucky. She didn’t start crying in her frustration; she told the lucky devil cold-bloodedly, “Right, you son of a bitch, I’ll get ya anyway!”
“Listen, girly,” Lyokha called to her.” Has anyone here got any kind of chow? Something I won’t get poisoned on? Take me there, and I’ll toss you another bullet.”
She stared at him dubiously, then sniffed.
“Want an egg?”
“A chicken egg?”
“Nah, don’t be daft! Of course a chicken egg! At the other end of the village this guy’s got one.”
Lyokha was delighted, and Artyom also suddenly believed in this egg—boiled, with a white like a human eye and a yolk like the sun in children’s drawings, fresh and soft. And he was suddenly desperate for an egg like that, or better still, three fried eggs with round yolks, all at once, fried in greasy pork fat. They didn’t keep chickens at Exhibition, and the last time he had tried fried eggs was in Polis, more than a year ago, when the blaze between him and Anya was only just starting to kindle.
Artyom put the mushroom greeting away in his inside pocket.
“I’m in,” he told Lyokha.
“They’re going to eat the egg!” the little girl proclaimed.
This news drove the small fry into a fervor. Everyone who had been trying to cadge a cartridge from Artyom put his dreams on hold and stopped trying to extort a free handout; wide-eyed and mute, they clustered around the outsiders.
The entire delegation had to jump from pallet to pallet, like a brood of chicks, to the far end of the platform, to the chicken coop that was hidden there. The children clambered after them over the scaffolding and ran, overtaking them, along the upper tiers, sometimes falling into the swamp with a squeal.
The semi-slumbering figures on the bunks watched them go sluggishly and apathetically, feebly trying to untangle their muddled thoughts.
“What say we go down the Solyanka Club today? I read o
n a poster some shit-cool Swedish guy has come over. Electronic vibes.”
“It’s your soul he’s come for. They’re all faggots up there in Sweden. They said so yesterday on the telly.”
“They’re zonked on worms,” the girl explained as she walked along.
Left to its own devices a corpse lay, bloating, on one of the pallets.
Artyom glanced as a rat, holding its little face up high, swam towards it to feed, and he thought out loud, “The difference is only eight meters, and it’s like we’ve descended into hell.”
“Don’t shit yourself!” Lyokha encouraged him.” That means even in hell our lads are there! And they haven’t forgotten Russian. Great stuff!”
They hopped and skipped all the way to the other end of this cursed little village. Right into the dead end.
“There!” said the girl, spitting.” Here he is. Let’s have my bullet.”
“Hey, missus!” the broker shouted upwards.” They say you deal in eggs?”
“That’s right enough.” A matted beard dangled down from above.
“Gimme the bullet! Gimme the bullet! Monster!” The little girl started getting worked up.
Lyokha sighed bitterly and grudgingly, but he settled up with their guide. From the bunks around them this was watched enviously.
“How much?”
“Two!” the beard demanded.” Two bullets!”
“I could do with a couple and another … Another three for my comrades here. You’ve got the deal of the century shaping up here, brother!”
Up above there was shuffling and grunting. A minute later a little man appeared in front of the visitors, wearing a jacket over his naked body. Private parts covered with a skirt made out of a broad plastic bag, slit from below, with the half-effaced inscription Aucha; a disheveled beard littered with garbage; eyes blazing like burning fat.
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