Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘Okay. Okay. Don’t worry,’ her father reassured her, halting to rest between the words. ‘You know… somewhere in the Metro right now there are people who are far more afraid…’

He tried to smile, but it turned out terrifying, like a skull with a jaw that has come adrift. Sasha smiled back, but a salty dewdrop crept down across her sharp, soot-stained cheekbone. At least her father had come round – and the few hours that seemed so long had given her time to think everything through again.

‘A real failure this time, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I decided to go to the garages after all. But it turned out to be too far. I found one completely untouched. A stainless steel castle, covered in oil. I couldn’t break in, so I attached a charge, the last one. I was hoping there’d be a car inside, spare parts. And when I blasted it opened, it was empty. Nothing at all. So why did they lock it, the bastards? And that thunderous noise… I was praying no one would hear. Then I walked out of the garage and I was surrounded by dogs on all sides. I thought that was it… I thought I was done for…’

Her father lowered his eyelids and stopped talking. Feeling alarmed, Sasha grabbed hold of his hand, but he just swayed his head gently, without opening his eyes, as if to tell her: Don’t worry, everything’s okay. He was too weak even to speak, but he wanted to tell her how it happened, he needed to explain why he’d come back empty-handed, why they would have a tough week now until he got back on his feet. But sleep overcame him before he could tell her.

Sasha checked the bandage wrapped round his torn calf – it was soaked through with black blood – and changed the compress that was already hot. She straightened up, went over to the rat’s little house and opened the tiny door a crack. The little beast peeped out warily and hid again, but then it did what Sasha was hoping for and scrabbled out onto the platform to stretch its legs. The rat’s intuition never let it down: the tunnels were quiet. Reassured, the girl went back to the stretcher bed.

‘You will definitely get up, you’ll walk again,’ she whispered to her father. ‘And you’ll find a garage with an entire car in it, all in one piece. And we’ll go up there together, get into it and drive far away from here. Ten, fifteen stations away. To where no one knows us, where we’ll be strangers. Where no one will hate us. If there is a place like that anywhere…’

She was telling him the same magical fairytale that she had heard from him so often, repeating it word for word, and now, as she recited this old mantra of her father’s, she believed in it a hundred times more powerfully. She would nurse him back to health, she would cure him. There was a place in this world where no one could give a damn about them. A place where they could be happy.

‘There it is! There! It’s looking at me!’

Ahmed squealed as if he had already been seized and dragged away, he screamed as he had never allowed himself to scream before. His automatic roared again, then stuttered and choked. Ahmed’s usual composure deserted him completely and he trembled violently as he tried to insert a full clip into the slot.

‘It’s chosen me… Me.’

Somewhere nearby another automatic barked briefly, fell silent for a second and then chattered again in clipped, three-shot bursts. Hunter was still alive after all, so there was still hope. The chattering moved away and then came closer, but it was impossible to tell if the bullets had found their mark. Homer strained his ears in vain for the furious roar of a wounded monster. The station was enveloped in oppressive silence; its mysterious residents seemed to be either immaterial or invulnerable.

Now the brigadier was waging his strange battle at the far end of the platform, where fiery strings of tracer bullets repeatedly flared up and faded away. Enthralled by his fight with phantoms, he had abandoned his men to their fate. Homer took a deep breath and looked up, cautiously giving in to the desire that had been tormenting him for several long moments already. He could feel that gaze all too clearly with his skin, the top of his head, the fine hairs on his neck – a cold, leaden, crushing gaze – and he couldn’t fight his foreboding any longer.

Right up under the ceiling, high above their heads, another head was hovering in the fog. A head so immense that at first Homer didn’t realise what he was looking at. The titanic creature’s body remained hidden in the dense gloom of the station, leaving its monstrous face suspended, swaying in the air above the tiny little men brandishing their useless weapons: strangely, it seemed in no hurry to attack, allowing them a brief respite.

Numb with horror, the old man sank to his knees, resigned to his fate, and the automatic rifle tumbled out of his hands, clanking pitifully against a rail. Ahmed howled and screeched hideously. The creature shifted forward effortlessly, and all the space in front of them was blotted out by its dark body, as huge as a cliff. Homer closed his eyes, readying himself, saying goodbye… He had only one thought left, one regret – a bitter thought searing through his mind: ‘I haven’t finished yet!’

And at that very moment the grenade launcher spat fire and the pressure wave slammed into his ears, deafening them, leaving behind a subtle whistling sound that went on and on. Gobbets of burnt flesh came showering down. Ahmed, the first to gather his wits, tugged the old man to his feet by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away. They ran forward, stumbling over sleepers and getting up again without feeling any pain. They clung to each other, because it was impossible to make out anything through the milky haze even at arm’s length. They raced along as if it was not mere death pursuing them, but something infinitely more terrible – the final extinction and utter annihilation of their bodies and souls.

Demons pursued them, invisible and almost completely silent, but only one step behind, escorting them without attacking, toying with them, allowing them the illusion of escape.

Then the chipped marble walls gave way to the lining of the tunnel: they’d made it through Nagornaya! And the guardians of the station were left behind, as if they had reached the limit of the chains to which they were attached. But it was still too soon to stop. Ahmed strode on in front, feeling for the pipes on the walls, groping for the way ahead and goading on the old man, who was stumbling along, and kept trying to sit down.

‘What happened to the brigadier?’ Homer croaked, tearing off his stifling gas mask as he walked.

‘When the fog ends, we’ll stop and wait. That must be soon now, very soon! Only another two hundred metres… Get out of the fog. The important thing is to get out of the fog,’ Ahmed kept intoning. ‘I’m going to count the steps…’

But after two hundred steps, and even after three hundred, the haze enveloping them was still as dense as ever. ‘What if it’s spread all the way to Nagatino?’ thought Homer. ‘What if it’s already gobbled up Tula and Nakhimov Prospect?’

‘It’s not possible… I must… Not far to go now…’ Ahmed mumbled for the hundredth time and suddenly froze on the spot. Homer ran into him and they both tumbled to the ground.

‘There’s no more wall,’ said Ahmed, stroking the sleepers, the rails, the rough, damp concrete of the floor in dumb bewilderment, as if afraid that any moment now the ground would treacherously slip away from under his feet in the same way as his other support had vanished.

‘Here it is, what’s wrong with you?’ said Homer groping around for the slope of a tunnel liner, then grabbing hold of it and cautiously getting to his feet.

‘Sorry,’ said Ahmed and paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘You know, back there at the station… I thought I’d never get away from the place. The way it was looking at me… Looking at me, you know. It had decided to take me. I thought I’d be left there forever. And never buried.’