Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

There had been almost no time to pack for the journey, and Homer had only been able to hide away with the diary for a few minutes, not long enough to moisten and unstick the pages fused together with blood. But the old man had leafed rapidly through the other pages, criss-crossed haphazardly with hasty, fragmentary entries. The timeline was disrupted, as if the writer had to struggle to catch the words and had simply set them down on paper wherever he could. To render them meaningful, the old man had to arrange them in the right order.

‘We have no lines of communication. The phone is dead. Perhaps it’s sabotage. One of the exiles, in revenge? Before we got here.’

‘The situation is hopeless. We can’t expect help from anywhere. If we ask Sebastopol, we’ll be condemning our own men. We have to endure it… For how long?’

‘They won’t let me go… They’ve gone insane. If not me, then who? Make a run for it!’

And there was something else too. Immediately after the final entry, calling for the idea of storming Tula to be abandoned, there was a blurred signature, sealed with a bloody fingerprint, like reddish-brown sealing wax. It was a name that Homer had heard before, one he had often spoken himself. The diary belonged to the signal officer of the team sent to Tula a week before.

They passed the opening of a track leading to an engine depot, which would certainly have been plundered, if not for the intense radiation here. For some reason the black, wilted branch line leading to it had been screened off by someone with sections of steel reinforcement bars, welded together rather clumsily and very clearly in a hurry. A metal plate attached to the bars with wire bore a grinning skull and the remains of a warning written in red paint, but it had either faded with time or been scraped off. Homer’s gaze drew him past the barred entrance, deep into this dark well, and he barely managed to scramble back out. The line probably hadn’t always been as empty of life as they believed at Sebastopol, he thought to himself.

They passed through Warsaw Station – a terrible, eerie place, rusty and mouldy, like a drowned man fished out of the water. The walls, patterned in squares of tiles, were oozing murky water. Through the half-open lips of the hermetic doors a cold wind blew in from the surface, as if someone huge had set his mouth to them from the outside and was giving the station artificial respiration. Their radiation meters fluttered hysterically, telling them they had to get out of there immediately.

Closer to Kashira one of the instruments broke down, and the figures on the other were jammed against the very edge of the display. Homer felt a bitter taste on his tongue.

‘Where’s the epicentre?’

It was incredibly difficult to make out the brigadier’s voice, as if Homer had his head lowered into a bath full of water. He stopped – in order to make the best of this short break – and gestured to the south-east with his glove.

‘Besides Kantemirovo Station. We think the roof of the entrance pavilion or a ventilation shaft was pierced. No one knows for certain.’

‘So Kantemirovo’s deserted then?’

‘And always has been. After Kolomenskoe the entire line’s empty.’

‘But I was told…’ Hunter said, then broke off, gesturing to Homer to be quiet, while he tuned in to his subtle, invisible wavelengths. ‘Does anyone know what’s happening at Kashira?’ he asked eventually.

‘How could they?’ The old man wasn’t sure he’d managed to give an ironic note to the adenoidal boom that emerged from his breathing filters like a trombone snorting.

‘I’ll tell you. The radiation there’s so bad, we’ll both be fried to a crisp before we even reach the station. Nothing will do any good. We can’t go that way. We’re turning back.’

‘Back? To Sebastopol?’

‘Yes. I’ll go up onto the surface and try to get there overland,’ Hunter replied thoughtfully, already figuring out his route.

‘Are you going to go alone?’ Homer asked cautiously.

‘I can’t keep rescuing you all the time. I’ll have enough to do saving my own skin. And two of us wouldn’t get through anyway. Even for me there’s no guarantee.’

‘You don’t understand, I need to go with you, I have to…’ Homer cast around frantically for a reason, a toehold in logic.

‘You have to die with meaning?’ the brigadier concluded for him indifferently – although Homer knew perfectly well that it was really the filters in the gas mask, screening out any contaminants, letting in only tasteless, sterile air and letting out only soulless, mechanical voices.

The old man squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to recall everything he knew about the contaminated lower end of the Zamoskvorechie branch, about the route from Sebastopol to Serpukhov. Anything at all in order to avoid turning back, to avoid returning to his meagre life, to his false pregnancy with a great novel and timeless legends.

‘Follow me!’ he wheezed suddenly and set off, hobbling with an agility that surprised even him, to the east – toward Kashira, into the very mouth of hell.

She dreamed she was scraping a file across one loop of the steel shackles chaining her to a wall. The file squealed and kept slipping off, and even when she already thought its blade had bitten half a millimetre into the steel, the moment she stopped working, the shallow, almost invisible groove closed up as she watched. But Sasha didn’t despair: she took up her tool again, skinning her palms as she filed away at the unyielding metal, maintaining a strict, regular rhythm. The important thing was not to lose the rhythm, not to stop working even for an instant. In the tight grip of the fetters her ankles had swollen up and gone numb. Sasha realised that even if she could defeat the metal, she still wouldn’t be able to run away, because her legs would refuse to obey her.

Sasha woke up and raised her eyelids with a struggle. The shackles had not been a mere dream: her wrists were restrained by handcuffs. She was lying on the dirty floor of an old mining trolley that squealed with excruciating monotony as it crept slowly along. There was a dirty piece of rag stuffed in her mouth and the side of her head was throbbing and bleeding.

‘He didn’t kill me,’ she thought. ‘Why not?’

From where she was lying all she could see was a small section of the ceiling – the welded joints of tunnel liners drifting by in an irregular patch of light: the trolley was moving along a tunnel. While she tried to get her shackled hands out from behind her back, the liners were replaced by flaking white paint. That alarmed Sasha: what station was this?

It was a bad place, not just quiet, but desolate; not just deserted, but lifeless, and completely dark. For some reason she had thought every station on the other side of the bridge was full of people and the air everywhere was filled with their shouting and hubbub. So she must have been wrong about that.

The ceiling above Sasha stopped moving. Grunting and swearing, her kidnapper clambered down onto the platform and strolled about with his metal-tipped heels scraping, as if he was studying the surroundings. Then, obviously having removed his gas mask, he growled in a deep, amiable-sounding voice.

‘So here we are then. After all these years!’

Releasing all the air out of his lungs in a long, lingering sigh, he hit out hard at some bulky inanimate object – no, he kicked it with his boot: it looked like a sack, but what was it stuffed with?

When Sasha realised the answer, she sank her teeth into the stinking rag and started bellowing, arching up her body as if she was having a fit. She knew where the fat man in tarpaulin had brought her and who he was talking to like that.