Metro 2035

by Dmitry Glukhovsky

  “Letyaga for commander!” someone roared.

  And then there was a raid click from somewhere and Letyaga sprayed a red stain onto the beautiful white wall behind him. He spurted red, went limp, sat down, and stretched out facedown on the floor. The back of his head had disappeared, and a crater of flesh had opened up in its place.

  And one exactly like it immediately opened up somewhere in Artyom’s soul.

  “Letyaga!”

  “Letyaaaaga! This is Hansa!”

  “Smash Hansa!”

  Someone flying by swept Miller out of his armchair. He fell on the granite not far from the thick puddle and started twitching his arm like a cockroach turned over on its back, trying to get up; the wheels spun and the spokes flashed, but men were already clashing above him, indistinguishable from each other, but everyone knowing for certain who was against him and who was with him.

  They grabbed Artyom, dragged him away, tore off the tape, and let him speak, shielding him with their chests. They dragged out Lyokha, and Artyom dragged out Homer; now they were in a circle of friends; the men were fighting brutally, with bare hands—no one was allowed to bring weapons into the court, apart from the escorts and executioners.

  “A chance! A chance!” Artyom yelled into Lyokha’s ear as they were unlocking Lyokha’s bracelets with the keys grabbed from the escorts. “We take the men! To Tsvetnoi! And Homer! To the Reich! To the print shop! We’ll do everything! According to plan!”

  “Yes, sir! Yes sir!” Lyokha yelled.

  The two waves that had clashed started separating, moving apart from the line of schism: One took dead Letyaga with it; the other took Miller, twisting his arm about, and the invalid chair with the bent wheels.

  But Artyom couldn’t run off with all the others yet. He darted out of the crowd and started looking round. Where was she?

  “Hey! Heeey!” someone bawled to him from that direction.

  They showed her to him, grabbed by the hair, with her shirt torn: Anya.

  “Where’s the ringleader? Give us Dark! We’ve got his wife!”

  “Anya!”

  “Come over here, creep! Or we’ll rip her foul mouth … We’ll let everyone here shag the bitch … Got that? Crawl over here to us, you shit!”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  Anya was jerking about and cursing them; one bruised eye was already turning black. The brown nipple of one breast protruded in pitiful defiance.

  Artyom caught hold of Homer’s hand.

  “Leaflets! About the jammers, about the survivors, about the Observers! About how we’re all being duped! The truth! The truth, granddad!”

  Homer nodded.

  “Lyokha! You know him! You know his face! Bessolov! Sasha’s fancy man. There’s no one but you! Take some men from here. To Tsvetnoi. Get that rat to …”

  “That’s enough, Dark!”

  “Either he lets you in, or you waste him there and then! Don’t touch her, you motherfuckers.”

  Lyokha blinked.

  “That’s it!” Artyom shouted to the men. “That’s it! I’m coming! I’m coming to you! Let her go! Well?”

  He and Anya met for half a second—between two opposed poles of black. Met and parted.

  CHAPTER 22

  — THE TRUTH —

  Arbat’s absent population came seething out of the passages on its way back to the station: The cordon that was keeping it well away from the rigged trial had gotten involved in the general affray. The Order’s dissenters withdrew from the station in various directions; Artyom, squeezed in between strangers, couldn’t see this any longer, but he shouted to everyone from behind the blank, black backs.

  “The world is still there! We’re not alone! They’re deceiving you. You can leave the Metro! They’re lying to you! Don’t believe them!”

  Then they fastened his mouth shut again.

  The men in the Order who had remained loyal to Miller withdrew to his embassy at Arbat Station. They seated the crumpled colonel on his bent wheelchair and set him in his legitimate place—that office with the shot glass and the lists.

  Artyom and Ilya Stepanovich, who had also been noted down as a mutineer, were held in a cubbyhole beside Miller’s reception area. They were guarded by unfamiliar soldiers. Men walked into the colonel’s office and inquired behind the loosely closed door whether it was time to do away with the prisoners, but Svyatoslav Konstantinovich postponed his decision.

  A cold draft wandered along the corridor, carrying tatters of conversations in through cracks under the doors: Some from the station, others from the colonel’s office. They could hear an agitated crowd accumulating at Arbat. People were telling each other what had happened to the Order and repeating Artyom’s bellowing in a cracked echo.

  It was a good thing that he’d handed himself over in exchange for Anya, Artyom thought.

  If only she had escaped!

  Ilya Stepanovich goggled at the men in black; he was shuddering violently. There was a smell of urine. Maybe he was imagining to himself for the time being the way a bullet would drill its way into his forehead. But he wasn’t whining at all. Just muttering almost inaudibly.

  “Of course, he can do anything he likes. His daughter has no fingers. Did he hand her over? No, he kept her. He probably sees her. Watches her growing up. Plays with her. And his wife is alive. She didn’t hang herself. With her tights. She’s not dangling from the ceiling. With her tongue sticking out. Her black tongue.”

  One of the men guarding them had a watch on his right wrist. On its topsy-turvy hands Artyom noted infinity. He calculated how much time Homer would need to reach the Reich. Working remotely, Artyom figured out the workings of the printing press with him, looked for dry paper and dictated the text to the old man. They didn’t even have to carry the leaflets throughout the whole Metro. If they could deliver them to Polis and Tsvetnoi, at least, everything would creep farther on from there of its own accord.

  Apart from Lyokha and Homer, no one knew about the plan. All the Hansans in the Order were here: with Miller. Holding back the swarm that was pressing forward.

  A voice barked in the office.

  “Call Bessolov’s number! Again! I need to talk to him! In person!”

  Lost, knocked out of his chariot and off his stride, he kept trying to call his master. He couldn’t get through. So Lyokha still had a chance to find Bessolov before Miller located him

  And then, after dropping Homer off at Chekhov Station in his own mind, Artyom rowed on remotely with Lyokha to the brothel. Operating remotely he stole through the hubbub and the whoring under cover of the Order’s veterans, invisibly cordoned off Sasha’s little shanty and finished off his former unsuccessful attempt on Bessolov’s life for Lyokha and himself. No, he took him hostage and led a combat team to the bunker.

  “Dial him again! Again!”

  The inverted minute hand moved backwards. It measured off half an hour, three quarters, an hour. The droning in the station was growing louder. The local administrators, who had been sent by the managers of Polis, shouted at people uncertainly. But the gawkers didn’t want to disperse. They asked the cordon what had happened, and who the madman was who had howled about survivors in other cities on the earth.

  “And what did mine have? A little tail. The tail could have been removed. Right there. Such a sweet little mite. Narine said, Let’s call her after your mother if it’s a girl. Marina, that is. Marina Ilinichna. Marina Ilinichna Shkurkina.”

  Artyom suddenly realized that Ilya Stepanovich wasn’t talking to himself; he was telling Artyom about it, even though he wasn’t looking him in the eyes. Artyom shook his head in agreement, but he was thinking his own thoughts.

  “Shut your gob!” a guard wheezed to Ilya. “My head’s splitting from all your muttering! Shut it, I said, or I’ll whack you right here. We’ve got to waste both of you anyway!”

  “Marina Ilinichna!” Ilya whispered then, too quietly for the guard to hear, but clearly enough for Artyom. “Little Marina Il
inichna. Her grandmother would have been delighted.”

  But would Lyokha be able to grab Bessolov?

  And take him though half the Metro as a prisoner? After all, he hadn’t been specially trained for that. He was a broker, not a soldier or a killer. Back at the radio center he had managed somehow, but there they had been shooting at him and he didn’t have to plan anything, only survive and get out of a tight corner.

  Never mind; he could do it.

  The veterans would help. He’d be able to explain everything to them, wouldn’t he?

  He would. That was what an apostle was for. He had been through everything together with Artyom. He didn’t have to be convinced; nothing had to be proved to him. He remembered everything; he felt everything himself.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass if he doesn’t answer! Keep calling!”

  What if Bessolov had already been taken? What if they were already dragging that louse with a bag over his head towards the secret entrance of their rusty bunker from down-and-out Taganskaya Station? If only Homer was in time with the leaflets. But even without the leaflets … He knew everything as well, didn’t he? If the print shop couldn’t be brought back to life, he could do it himself and tell everyone about everything. Like that other Homer, the real one …

  Someone scrabbled at the outside of the door.

  They walked in, preoccupied and sullen, three of them: one Brahmin in a robe, one military officer in a tall peaked cap with a double-headed eagle, and some kind of civilian. They knocked at Miller’s office and mumbled outside the door in collective anxiety. They were also looking for an answer to certain questions.

  Something was maturing out there in the station. Fermenting, taking shape, rising up. And the three who had been sent to Miller wanted to halt this fermentation and keep a lid on it.

  Miller barked back raggedly and angrily.

  The office door opened slightly.

  “We’ll call a session of the Council of Polis. We have no right to remain silent! Let everyone speak there. And then we’ll inform the population. In accordance with the outcome. And this schism of yours … Deal with it yourself somehow!”

  “And what if the Reich really is a fake,” Ilya interrupted. “If Yevgeny Petrovich himself is a fake and a traitor, if everything they have there is fake, then what about me, what do I do, what did they do that to Marina with her little tail for, and what did Narine hang herself with her tights for, and why did it happen to me, and what for? They tell me write, but write what? How can you write that down? what words can you use?”

  But Artyom’s mouth was stuffed with rotten rags; he couldn’t answer and he couldn’t even ask Ilya Stepanovich to be quiet.

  The unshorn Brahmin rustled towards the way out, sweeping the dust with his robe; the officer strode after him, smelling of stale sweat and unwashed underwear, and the unidentified civilian trotted by last. The end of the audience.

  “Get through to him!”

  The trinity wafted away, fitted through a doorway compressed to the size of a matchbox at the end of the corridor, and emerged to the people.

  “The truth!” blazed in from outside through the open door.

  Ilya Stepanovich got up along the wall and reached out in the direction of the shouting, leaning himself bodily towards it, but a wool-faced man stopped him short and planted a fist in his solar plexus.

  And everything slammed shut again.

  There, look: The people finally wanted to know, and Artyom had a stinking rag in his mouth again. That was okay; now others could speak for him. Both speak and act. He had sent out messengers in all directions; now it wasn’t so terrible to croak.

  He could hear those three taking turns to purr something soothing to the awakened crowd. It shouted questions; it didn’t want lullabies.

  Thanks, Letyaga, Artyom thought.

  A pity you died.

  Strange that you died.

  How come you’ll never squint at me again with that eye of yours? You won’t be able to crack jokes. Who can I borrow blood from now? Forgive me for doubting you at the very last moment, Letyaga. But then you doubted me at the very last moment, didn’t you?

  You doubted, but you said everything right; so they would take the noose off my neck.

  A pity you can’t hear the people out there in the station, asking for the truth.

  The two of us will open the hermetic doors for them now: you and me. Together we’ll let them up and out.

  And somewhere the others, our conspirators, are doing their own bit. Homer’s printing leaflets; the apostle’s leading Bessolov along with a gun barrel pressed against his pale temple—to unseal the bunker. Let Miller thrash about frantically here—a dog without a master.

  What are they going to talk about at the Council of Polis? About how to press the lid down tighter and screw it on? About how to crush all the rebels quickly, one by one, so the rumors of the resurrected world won’t spread through the Metro?

  “Call! Call anywhere you like! Call Tsvetnoi!”

  They won’t crush all of them.

  “Tell us!” voices bellowed outside.

  “Are you telling the truth?” Ilya Stepanovich asked Artyom. “Everything that you told Homer? Is it true?”

  Artyom nodded to him. What was being smelted inside the little teacher’s head? What was it being cast into?

  The owner of the watch—two shifty eyes in holes—kept raising the hands to his face more and more often. A presentiment of the solidifying irreversibility of everything that was happening in the Metro leaked out through the cracks from the colonel’s office into this lobby of the reception area.

  He thought about Anya again.

  About how stubborn her love had proved to be.

  Artyom was arranged differently on the inside: He’d felt the first coolness from Anya—and started cooling in response. As if he couldn’t radiate love himself, but only reflected Anna’s love with his own concave soul. He sensed the diffuse light of attention on him—gathered it into a beam and directed it back. He inflamed her with it—and gathered more warmth in reply. But the moment Anya started to fade, he had nothing to repay her with. And her light had grown feebler and feebler like that until it went out completely and he stopped believing, until their future dried out and crumbled away in his mind.

  But Anya’s heart seemed to work the other way round, back to front. It seemed like she didn’t need him any longer—because of his mean-spirited deafness, his malign obstinacy, his unwillingness to compromise on his own idiotic dreams and his disdain for hers. Maybe she really had been thinking of dropping Artyom first. The wick only had enough oil left on it to smoke. But as soon as he left, she had flared up again—with obdurate desperation. So intensely that the heat had started grilling his eyes and he wanted to cover them with his hand. He had covered them —and the heat still reached him anyway. Anya was reflected in it—crookedly and comically—but the image was growing clearer and brighter.

  Love—what a strange fuel!

  “No answer?”

  Maybe there’s nowhere for you to call now, dad. Enough time has gone by. If the apostle got lucky, if he’s done everything just right, maybe the bunker has already been taken and gutted. The fat rats have already been lined up in ranks at Taganskaya Station, in their stupid outfits, and they’re reciting their latest geography lesson for the teacher, like schoolkids.

  “Anzor!”

  Anzor walked in and looked Artyom and Ilya up and down with a hostile glare. He listened to Svyatoslav Konstantinovich’s barking and rolled him out, skipping along on the wobbly wheelchair, into the corridor.

  “What do we do with these?” asked the one with the watch.

  “I haven’t decided yet. After the Council,” Miller hissed without turning round.

  He hadn’t gotten through on the phone.

  “Do we keep them here?”

  “Yes. No, wait. Let me take them with me. They might come in useful. Only make sure they keep their mouths shut.”


  They took them under the arms and lifted them off the floor—Artyom with his taped-up mouth and Ilya with his pissed pants. And led them out into gleaming Arbat Station. They formed up in a wedge and forced their way through the crowd. They marched through the whole station, defiantly. They turned deaf and didn’t hear the people shouting to them.

  The Council of Polis convened right here: That was why Miller required an office at Arbat Station.

  The entire formation remained outside—Artyom and Ilya weren’t summoned into the Council either. The Order formed up like a hedgehog, with its bristles raised to close off the entrance to rubberneckers. Miller and Anzor went in; then a few late Brahmins walked through and the doors closed.

  “They say they picked up some signals or other …” voices rustled on all sides.

  “It seems like we’re not the only ones who survived …”

  “But where else? Who? Who said so?”

  “That will all be clear when they come out. They’re conferring.”

  “But how could something like that happen? They haven’t said anything all these years … And then—take that—”

  “The Order found out. There was a skirmish over whether to tell or not.

  “But who are they? On the bench? Who’s the one tied up?”

  “They caught some terrorists. They’ll tell us soon.”

  Artyom couldn’t see the people whispering. Instead of them he saw identical black backs, the shoulder straps of bulletproof vests, the woolly backs of heads and wide-straddled boots. But he could sense them: Their curiosity set the air ringing; the oxygen was burning up; the walls were closing in. There were hundreds of them here. Just let Miller try to make them wait for his answers.

  Suddenly there was a commotion.

  Someone was forcing his way through the crush—skillfully and determinedly.

  “To the Council! Make way!”

  The men in the cordon were confused too. At first they grabbed hold of each other tighter than ever. Then they swayed doubtfully.

  Was that Timur’s voice? A comrade of Letyaga and Artyom. Another schismatic, Timur … He had left together with Lyokha and Homer, with rescued Anya! Why was he here? Why had he come back? He was storming the bunker right now. Or had he already taken it? had he brought Bessolov’s severed head to the Council session?