Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Senile anxiety, Homer told himself contemptuously – he had once read a whole raft of text books on applied psychology. But that wasn’t much help to him now.

The corpse-eaters weren’t afraid of people: using up ammunition on the repulsive but apparently harmless devourers of carrion would have been regarded as criminal waste at Sebastopol. The convoys passing through tried not to take any notice of them, although sometimes the corpse-eaters behaved provocatively.

They had bred in huge numbers here, and as the three men moved further in, crushing someone’s small bones under their boots with a sickening crunch at every step, more and more of the beasts reluctantly tore themselves away from their feasting and wandered off into cover. Their nests were in the trains, and Homer loathed them even more for that.

The hermetic doors at Nakhimov Prospect were open. It was believed that if you moved through the station quickly, the small dose of radiation you received was no danger to health, but it was forbidden to halt here. That was why both of the trains were relatively well preserved: the windows were all in place, the stained and soiled seats could be seen through the open doors, the light-blue paint showed no signs of peeling off the metal flanks.

Towering up in the middle of the hall was a genuine burial mound, built from the twisted skeletons of unknown creatures. As he drew level with it, Hunter suddenly stopped. Ahmed and Homer glanced at each other in alarm, trying to work out where any danger could come from. But the reason for the halt turned out to be something different. At the foot of the mound two small corpse-eaters were stripping a dog’s skeleton, champing and growling with relish as they ate. They hadn’t hidden in time: either they were too absorbed in their meal and didn’t notice the signals from other members of their tribe, or they simply hadn’t been able to control their greed.

They screwed up their eyes in the glare of the brigadier’s flashlight and carried on chewing, starting to withdraw slowly in the direction of the nearest carriage, but suddenly, one after another, they somersaulted backwards and flopped down onto the floor, like empty sacks.

Homer gazed in amazement at Hunter, who was putting a heavy army pistol with a long cylindrical silencer back in his shoulder holster. His face was as inscrutable and lifeless as ever.

‘They must have been very hungry, I suppose,’ Ahmed muttered under his breath, examining the dark puddles spreading out from under the dead beasts’ smashed skulls with squeamish interest.

‘So am I,’ the brigadier responded incomprehensibly, making Homer shudder.

Hunter moved on without looking round at the others and old Homer thought he could hear that low, greedy growling again. What an effort it cost him every time to resist the temptation to put a bullet into these vermin! He had to coax himself, calm himself down, and eventually he got the upper hand and demonstrated to himself that he was a mature individual who could tame his nightmares, who refused to let them drive him insane. But Hunter apparently had no intention of even trying to fight his impulsive desires.

Only what were those desires?

The silent demise of two members of the herd galvanised the other corpse-eaters: scenting fresh death, even the boldest and the laziest of them moved off the platforms, wheezing and whining faintly. They crammed into both trains and fell silent, lined up at the windows and crowding in the doors of the carriages. These creatures didn’t show any rage or desire for revenge. Once the team left the station, they would immediately devour their own dead relatives. ‘Aggression is a quality of hunters,’ thought Homer. ‘Those who feed on carrion don’t need it, just as they don’t need to kill. Everything living dies sooner or later, it will all become their food anyway. All they have to do is wait.’

The beam of the flashlight revealed the repulsive faces pressed up against the other side of the dirty, greenish panes of glass, the misshapen bodies, the clawed hands groping restlessly at the inside of the satanic fish tank. In total silence, hundreds of pairs of dull eyes doggedly followed the movement of the team as it walked by, the creatures’ heads turning uncannily in precise synchronisation, watching intently as the men moved away. The little freaks sealed in flasks of formalin at the Kunstkamera Museum would have watched the visitors like that, if their eyelids hadn’t prudently been sewn shut.

Despite the approaching hour of reckoning for his godlessness, Homer still couldn’t bring himself to believe in either the Lord or the Devil. But if Purgatory did exist, this was exactly how it would have looked for the old man. Sisyphus was doomed to battle against gravity, Tantalus was condemned to the torment of unquenchable thirst. But waiting for Homer at the station of his death was a train driver’s jacket and this bloodcurdling ghost train, with its monstrous gargoyle passengers: the mockery of vengeful gods. And on leaving the platform, the train would drive straight into one of the old legends of the Metro, with the tunnel looping round into a Möbius strip, a dragon devouring its own tail.

Hunter had lost interest in the station and its inhabitants and the team crossed the rest of the hall at a brisk pace: Ahmed and Homer could hardly keep up with the brigadier’s impetuous stride.

The old man felt the urge to turn round, shout, fire – to scatter these insolent freaks and banish his own painful thoughts. But instead he trudged on with his head lowered, concentrating hard to avoid stepping on anybody’s rotting remains. Ahmed hung his head too, absorbed in his own thoughts. And in their hasty flight from Nakhimov Prospect, no one thought of looking round any longer.

The patch of light from Hunter’s flashlight scurried rapidly from side to side, as if it were following an invisible gymnast under the dome of this baleful circus, but even the brigadier was no longer taking any notice of what it picked out.

A set of fresh bones and a half-gnawed skull – clearly human – glinted briefly in the beam and immediately disappeared back into the gloom, unnoticed by anyone. Lying beside them like a useless shell were a steel army helmet and a bulletproof vest.

Over the peeling green paint of the helmet a single word had been stencilled in white: ‘Sebastopol’.

‘Dad… Dad, it’s me, Sasha!’

She carefully loosened the tight canvas strap restraining the terribly bloated chin and removed her father’s helmet. Thrusting her fingers into his sweat-soaked hair, she hooked out the strip of rubber, pulled off his gas mask and flung it aside like a ghastly, shrivelled grey scalp. His chest heaved painfully, his fingers scrabbled at the granite floor and his watery eyes stared at her without blinking, but he didn’t answer. Sasha put the knapsack under his head and dashed to the door. Bracing her skinny shoulder against the enormous panel of metal, she took a deep, deep breath and gritted her teeth. The massive slab yielded reluctantly and scraped into place with a low grunt. Sasha clanged the bolt home and slid down onto the floor. A minute, just one little minute to catch her breath, and then she’d go straight back to him.

Every new expedition drained more of her father’s strength, and the meagre pickings he came back with couldn’t compensate for the loss. These sallies were draining away what was left of his life not by the day, but whole weeks and months at a time. An exorbitant price that had to be paid: if they didn’t have anything to sell, they’d have no choice left but to eat their tame rat – the only one in this God-forsaken death-trap of a station – and then shoot themselves.