Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

That it could be put into reverse.

No doubt about it, the brigadier definitely created a special kind of field round himself, a field that diverted any kind of danger away from him. And what was more, he seemed to know it. The journey back to Nagornaya took them less than an hour. The line didn’t offer them any resistance at all.

Homer had always felt that the scouts and shuttle traders from Sebastopol, and all the other ordinary people who plucked up the courage to enter the tunnels, were alien organisms in the Metro’s body, microbes that had infiltrated its circulatory system. The moment they stepped beyond the frontiers of the stations, the air around them became irritated and inflamed, reality ruptured and all the incredible creatures ranged against man by the Metro suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

But Hunter wasn’t an extraneous body in the dark stretches of tunnel, he didn’t trigger the Leviathan’s resentment as he journeyed through its blood vessels. Sometimes he would switch off his flashlight, becoming just another patch of the darkness that filled the tunnel’s space, and seemed to be caught up by invisible currents that carried him onward twice as fast. Struggling with all his might to keep up with the brigadier, Homer shouted after him, and then Hunter came to his senses, stopped and waited for the old man.

On the way back they were even allowed to pass through Nagornaya in peace. The murky vapours had dispersed, the station was sleeping. They could see every centimetre of it lying open to view now, and it was impossible to imagine where it could have concealed those spectral giants. Just an ordinary, abandoned station: incrustations of salt on the damp ceiling, a soft, feathery bed of dust spread out across the platform, obscenities scribbled with charcoal on the smoky walls. But then other details caught the eye: strange scrapes left on the floor by some frantic, scrabbling dance, crusty, reddish-brown spots on the columns, ceiling lights that looked scraped and battered, as if someone had rubbed hard against them. Nagornaya flashed by and they went flying on. As long as Homer could keep up with the brigadier, he felt as if he too were enclosed in a magical bubble that rendered him invulnerable. The old man was amazed at himself – where was he getting the energy for such a long forced march?

But he had no breath left for making conversation. And in any case, Hunter no longer condescended to answer his questions. For the hundredth time in that long day Homer wondered why the taciturn and pitiless brigadier needed him at all, if he spent all his time trying to forget about him.

The foul smell of Nakhimov Prospect crept up and enveloped them. This was a station that Homer would gladly have dashed through as quickly as possible, but instead the brigadier slowed down. The old man was almost overcome by the stench, even in his gas mask, but Hunter sniffed it in, as if he could distinguish specific notes in the Prospect’s oppressive, choking bouquet of odours.

This time the corpse-eaters dispersed respectfully as they advanced, abandoning half-gnawed bones and dropping scraps of flesh out of their mouths. Hunter walked to the precise centre of the hall and up onto a low heap, sinking calf-deep in flesh. He cast a long, slow glance round the station and then, still dissatisfied, abandoned his suspicions and moved on, without finding what he was looking for.

But Homer found it.

Slipping and falling onto his hands and knees, he startled away a young corpse-eater who was eviscerating a soaking-wet bulletproof vest. Spotting the Sebastopol uniform helmet that went tumbling aside, Homer was blinded by the condensation that instantly coated the lenses of his gas mask on the inside.

Repressing the impulse to gag and puke, Homer crept over to the bones and raked through them, hoping to find the soldier’s ID tag. But instead he spotted a little notepad, smeared with thick crimson blood. It opened immediately at the last page, with the words: ‘Don’t storm the station, no matter what’.

Her father had got her out of the habit of crying when she was still little, but now she had no other answer for fate. The tears streamed down her face of their own accord and a bleak, high-pitched whine rose up from her chest. She realised straight away what had happened, but it took her hours to come to terms with it.

Had he called for her help? Had he tried to tell her something important before he died? She couldn’t remember the exact moment when she sank into sleep and wasn’t entirely sure that she was awake now. After all, there could be a world where her father hadn’t died, couldn’t there? Where she hadn’t killed him with her weakness and egotism.

Sasha held her father’s hand – already cold, but still soft – between her palms, as if she was trying to warm it, trying to persuade him, and herself, that he would find a car, and they would go up onto the surface and get into it, and drive away. And he would laugh like the day when he brought home that radio with the music CDs.

At first her father sat there with his back leaning against the column and his chin braced against his chest – he could have been taken for someone in a doze. But then his body started slowly slipping down into the puddle of congealed blood, as if it was tired of pretending to be alive and didn’t want to deceive Sasha any longer.

The wrinkles that always furrowed her father’s face had almost completely smoothed out now.

She let go of his hand, helped him lie more comfortably and covered him from head to foot with a tattered blanket. She had no other way of burying him. She would have liked to take her father up onto the surface and leave him lying there, gazing up at the sky that would turn bright and clear again one day. But long before that his body would become the prey of the eternally hungry beasts that roamed about up there.

Here on their station no one would touch him. There was no danger to be expected from the deadly southern tunnels – nothing could survive in there except the winged cockroaches. And to the north the tunnel broke off at a rusty, half-ruined Metro bridge with only a single track still intact.

At the other end of the bridge there were people, but none of them would ever dream of crossing it out of mere curiosity. They all knew what was on the far side: a lookout station on the edge of a scorched wilderness – with two doomed exiles living in it.

Her father wouldn’t have allowed her to stay here alone, and there wasn’t any point in it anyway. But Sasha also knew that no matter how far she ran, no matter how desperately she tried to break out of the torture cell she had been condemned to, she would never be completely free of it.

‘Dad, forgive me, please,’ she sobbed, knowing that she could never earn his forgiveness.

Sasha took the silver ring off his finger and put it in the pocket of her overalls. She picked up the cage with the quiet, subdued rat and stumbled off to the north, leaving a trail of bloody footsteps behind her on the granite. When she climbed down onto the rails and walked into the tunnel, an unusual omen occurred at the empty station that was now a funeral bark. A long tongue of flame emerged from the mouth of the opposite tunnel, straining towards her father’s body – but it couldn’t reach it and retreated back into the dark depths, reluctantly conceding that Sasha’s father had a right to his peace now.

‘They’re coming back! They’re coming back!’

Istomin took the telephone receiver away from his ear and gazed at it distrustfully, as if it was some animate creature that had just told him a ridiculous fairytale.

‘Who’s coming back?’

Denis Mikhailovich jumped up off his chair, spilling his tea, which settled on his trousers in an embarrassing dark stain. He cursed the tea and repeated the question.