Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

He raised his automatic and a moment later the line of men repeated his movement. Along the line of the gun’s sight he saw a raging mob, not hundreds of people who had gathered together, but a faceless jumble of humanity. Grinning teeth, gaping eyes, clenched fists.

He clattered the breech of his gun and the line of men did the same.

It was time at last to take destiny by the scruff of the neck. Pointing the barrel of his gun upward, he pressed the trigger and whitewash showered down from the ceiling. The mob fell silent for a moment. He signalled for the soldiers to lower their weapons and took a step forward. It was his final choice.

And at last memory released him.

Sasha was still sleeping. He drew a final breath and tried to glance at her one last time, but he couldn’t even raise his eyelids. And then, instead of imperishable, eternal darkness, he saw before him an impossibly blue sky – as clear and bright as his daughter’s eyes.

‘Halt!’

Homer was so startled, he almost jumped and raised his hands in the air, but just checked himself in time. He was the only one that nasal yell through a megaphone took by surprise – the brigadier wasn’t surprised in the least: huddling down like a cobra before it strikes, he surreptitiously pulled the heavy sub-machine-gun out from behind his back.

Hunter still hadn’t replied to the old man’s question, in fact he’d stopped talking to him at all. To Homer the one-and-a-half-kilometre journey from Nagatino to Tula had seemed as endless as the road to Golgotha. He knew this stretch of tunnel would almost certainly lead him to his death, and it was hard to force himself to walk more quickly. At least now there was time to prepare, and Homer had occupied his mind with memories. He thought about Elena, chided himself for his egotism and begged her forgiveness. He recalled with a luminous sadness that magical day on Tver Street under the light summer rain. He regretted not having made any arrangements for his newspapers before he left. He prepared himself to die – to be torn apart by monsters, devoured by immense rats, poisoned by pollution… What other explanations could he find for the fact that Tula had been transformed into a black hole that sucked everything into it and let nothing back out?

And now, when he heard a normal human voice as they approached Tula, he didn’t know what to think. Had the station simply been captured? But who could grind several assault units from Sebastopol into dust, who would have exterminated all the tramps who converged on the station out of the tunnels and not let even women or old men go?

‘Thirty steps forward!’ said the distant voice.

It sounded incredibly familiar, so familiar that if Homer only had time, he could have identified who it belonged to. Could it be one of the Sebastopolites?

Cradling his Kalashnikov in his arms, Hunter started meekly counting out the steps: at thirty of the brigadier’s steps, the old man had taken fifty. Ahead of him he could vaguely make out a barricade that seemed to be crudely assembled out of random items. And for some reason its defenders weren’t using any light.

‘Turn out the flashlights!’ someone commanded from behind the ragged heap. ‘One of you two – another twenty steps forward.’

Hunter clicked the switch of his flashlight and moved on. Left alone again, Homer didn’t dare disobey the voice. In the sudden darkness he squatted down on a sleeper, as far out of harm’s way as possible, felt warily for the wall and pressed himself against it.

The brigadier’s steps fell silent at the measured distance. Homer heard voices: someone interrogating Hunter in a voice he couldn’t make out and the brigadier barking abrupt replies. The situation was heating up: tense, but restrained tones were replaced by abuse and threats. Hunter seemed to be demanding something from the invisible guards, and they were refusing to do as he wanted.

Now they were shouting at each other, almost at the top of their voices, and Homer thought he would be able to make out the words any moment now. But he heard just one word clearly, the final one:

‘Judgement!’

And then an automatic started stuttering, interrupting the men’s argument, followed by the rumble of an army Pecheneg machinegun, spitting a burst of fire in Homer’s direction. The old man threw himself on the ground, jerking back the breech of his gun, not knowing if he ought to fire, and at whom. But it was all over before he could even take aim.

In the short pauses between the chattering of the guns, the depths of the tunnel echoed to a long, drawn-out scraping sound that Homer could never possibly have confused with anything else. The sound of a hermetic door closing. Confirming his guess, a steel slab weighing tons upon tons slammed home into its groove ahead of him, cutting off the shouting and the rumble of shots at a stroke.

Shutting off the only way out into the Greater Metro.

Severing Sebastopol’s final hope.

A moment later Homer was willing to believe he had imagined everything – the amorphous outlines of the barricade at the end of the tunnel and the voice that had seemed so familiar, distorted by the old megaphone. All sounds had been extinguished together with the light, and now he felt like a condemned man with a bag over his head, ready for execution. In the impenetrable darkness and sudden silence, the entire world seemed to have disappeared: Homer reached up and touched his own face, trying to convince himself that he hadn’t dissolved into this cosmic blackness.

Then he gathered his wits, fumbled around for his flashlight and launched the trembling beam forward – to where the invisible battle had been played out only minutes earlier. About thirty metres from the spot where he had waited out the fight, the tunnel came to a dead end, cut off by an immense steel shutter that filled its entire height and breadth, like the fallen blade of a guillotine.

His hearing hadn’t deceived him: someone really had activated the hermetic door. Although Homer knew about it, he didn’t think it could still be used – but apparently it could.

With his eyes weakened by all his paperwork, Homer didn’t immediately spot the human figure pressed up against the wall of metal. He held his automatic out in front of him and backed away, thinking it must be one of the men from the other side who had been lost overboard, but then he recognised the figure as Hunter.

The brigadier wasn’t moving. Streaming with perspiration, the old man hobbled towards him, expecting to see streaks of blood on the rusty metal. But there weren’t any. Although he had been fired on by a machine-gun at point blank range in the middle of a bare, empty tunnel, Hunter was unhurt. He had his flattened and mutilated ear pressed up against the metal, sucking in sounds that only he could hear.

‘What happened?’ Homer asked cautiously as he walked up.

The brigadier didn’t even notice him. He was whispering something, but whispering to himself, repeating words spoken by someone who was there , behind the closed door. Several minutes went by before he tore himself away from that wall and turned to Homer.

‘We’re going back.’

‘What happened?’ Homer asked again.

‘There are bandits in there. We must have reinforcements.’

‘Bandits?’ the old man exclaimed in bewilderment. ‘But I thought I heard…’

‘Tula has been captured by the enemy. We have to take it. We need men with flamethrowers.’

‘Why flamethrowers?’ asked Homer, completely confused now.

‘To make certain. We’re going back.’ Hunter swung round and strode off.

Before the old man followed him, he inspected the hermetic door carefully and pressed his ear to the cold steel, hoping that he could listen to a snatch of conversation too. Silence…