Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

It was ludicrous even to hope he could get away from Hunter. Moving like a lion, the brigadier overtook the old man in a few long bounds, grabbed hold of his shoulder and shook him painfully.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘We only have to go a little bit further,’ Homer wheezed. ‘I’ve remembered! There’s an access passage from here straight to the Zamoskvorechie Line, just before Kashira Station. We can go through it straight to the tunnel, so we won’t have to go into the station. We’ll bypass it and come straight out to Kolomenskoe. It shouldn’t be very far. Please…’

Seizing his chance, he tried to break free again, but stumbled over the bellbottoms of his trousers and fell flat onto the rails with a crash. He got up again immediately and tried to jerk forward, but Hunter easily held him still on the spot, like a rat on a string, and turned the old man to face him. Leaning down so that the lenses of their gas masks were on the same level, he glanced deep into Homer for a few seconds and then released his grip.

‘All right.’

And now the brigadier dragged him along, not halting again for a single moment. The blood pounding in Homer’s ears drowned out the frenetic chattering of the dosimeters, his legs turned stiff and numb, almost refusing to obey him, his lungs were straining so hard they smarted painfully and felt as if they were about to burst.

They almost missed the black ink blot of the narrow passage. Squeezing into it, they ran for a few more long minutes, until Hunter galloped out into a new tunnel. The brigadier cast a hasty glance around, dived back into the passage and shouted to the old man.

‘Where’s this you’ve brought me to? Have you ever even been here?’

About thirty metres along, to the left of the passage – in the direction they had to follow – the tunnel was blocked from floor to ceiling by a thick curtain of something that looked like cobwebs.

Reluctant to waste his breath on talking, Homer simply shook his head. It was absolutely true, he’d never had any reason to come this way before. And this was hardly the moment to tell Hunter all the things he’d heard about this place.

Throwing his automatic back over his shoulder, the brigadier took a long rectangular hatchet, something like a home-made machete, out of his knapsack and slashed at the sticky white lacework. The dried-out skeletons of flying cockroaches that were stuck in the nets started quivering and rustling like hoarse little bells. The edges of the ragged wound that had been inflicted immediately closed together, as if it was healing up. Turning back the semi-transparent fabric of the web and sticking his flashlight inside, the brigadier lit up the passage. It would take them hours to clear it: the multilayered webbing of sticky threads filled every part of the connecting tunnel for as far as the beam of light could reach

Hunter checked his radiation monitor, made a strange guttural sound and started furiously hacking away the threads stretched between the walls of the tunnel. The cobweb yielded slowly, taking more time than they could afford now. In ten minutes they only managed to move about thirty metres forward, and the threads were woven ever more tightly, choking the passage like a plug of cotton wool.

Finally, at an overgrown ventilation shaft with an ugly two-headed skeleton lying on the sleepers below it, the brigadier flung his hatchet down on the floor. They were stuck in the web, just like the cockroaches, and even if the creature that wove these nets had perished long ago and wouldn’t come for them, they would die soon anyway – from the radiation.

In the few moments while Hunter was trying to decide what to do, the old man remembered something else he had once heard about this tunnel. Going down on one knee, he knocked a few cartridges out of his spare clip, twisted the bullets out using a pen-knife and shook the powder into his palm. Hunter didn’t need any explanations: a few minutes later, back at the beginning of the connecting tunnel, they tipped a heap of grey granules onto a small pad of cotton wool and held a cigarette lighter to it.

The gunpowder snorted and started smoking, and suddenly something incredible happened: the flame from the powder spread out in all directions at once, climbing right up the walls to the distant ceiling, invading all the space of the tunnel. It dashed inwards, devouring the cobweb, a roaring, blazing ring of fire, lighting up the grimy tunnel liners and leaving behind only occasional burnt tatters dangling from the ceiling. The hoop of flame moved towards Kolomenskoe, shrinking rapidly and sucking in air like a gigantic piston. Then the tunnel swerved and the flames disappeared round the bend, trailing bright crimson flashes behind them.

And from the far distance, breaking through the regular drone of the fire, came a call that wasn’t human, something between a despairing howl and a strident hiss. Although Homer, hypnotised by the spectacle, could easily have imagined it.

Hunter tossed the hatchet back into his knapsack and took out two new, unopened canisters for gas masks.

‘I was keeping them for the way back,’ he said, changing his own filter and handing the second canister to the old man. ‘After that fire, the pollution in there now is like the place had just been bombed.’

The old man nodded. When the flames swirled upwards, they’d stirred up radioactive particles that had been settling into the cobweb for years, eating their way into its threads. The black vacuum of the tunnel was now filled with deadly molecules, suspended in the air like millions of tiny underwater mines, and they had blocked off the voyagers’ navigable channel. There was no possible way to avoid them.

They had to break straight through.

‘If only your dad could see you now,’ the fat man scolded her derisively.

Sasha was sitting directly opposite her father’s overturned body, which was lying face down in the blood. Both straps of her overalls had been tugged down off her shoulders, revealing a washed-out singlet with a picture of some jolly little animal. Her kidnapper wouldn’t let her see his face, he seared her eyes with a brilliant beam of light every time she tried to look up. He’d taken the rag out of her mouth, but Sasha still had no intention of asking him for anything.

‘Not like your mother, unfortunately. And I was really hoping…’

The elephantine legs in the blood-smeared knee boots set off again round the column that Sasha was sitting against. Now his voice came from behind her back.

‘Your daddy probably thought that in time everything would be forgotten. But some crimes don’t carry a statute of limitation… Slander. Betrayal.’

His obese figure emerged from the gloom on the other side of her. He stopped, looking down on her father’s body, prodding it contemptuously with his boot. He hacked up spittle and spat out a generous gobbet.

‘It’s a shame the old fellow snuffed it without my help,’ said the fat man, running the beam of his flashlight round the heaps of useless junk that cluttered the bleak, faceless station and halting it on the bicycle with no wheels. ‘A cosy little place you have here. I think if it wasn’t for you, your daddy would have preferred to hang himself.’

While the flashlight was directed away from her, Sasha tried to crawl off to the side, but a second later the beam picked her out of the darkness again.

‘And I can understand him,’ said her kidnapper. With a single bound he was there beside her again. ‘You’ve turned out a fine little girl. It’s just a shame you’re not like your mum. I think he was probably disappointed about that too. Well, never mind,’ he said, knocking her to the floor with the toe of his boot. ‘At least I didn’t waste my time coming all the way through the Metro to get here.’