Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘It’s closed off ahead,’ said Hunter, confirming the old man’s fears.

The beam of Hunter’s flashlight was the first to find the bottom of the bottle: the closed hermetic door loomed up in front of them, a blank wall. Rails glinted faintly, breaking off at the door, and dollops of brownish lubricant oozed from the bearings. Some old planks, dry broken branches and charred pieces of wood had been dumped right beside the door, as if someone had tried to light a fire there recently. The door was clearly in use, but apparently only for coming out from the inside – there were no bells or any other signalling devices on this side of it.

The brigadier looked at the girl.

‘Is it always like this here?’

‘They come out sometimes. They come to us on the other side. To trade. I thought… today…’ She seemed to be making excuses. Had she known there was no access, but kept it secret?

Hunter hammered on the door with the handle of his machete, as if it were a huge metal gong. But the steel was too thick and instead of a resonant chime, it gave out only a feeble clang. That sound almost certainly couldn’t be heard on the other side of the wall, even if there was anybody alive there.

No miracle happened. There was no answer.

In defiance of common sense, Sasha had been hoping these men would be able to unlock the door. She’d been afraid to warn them that the entrance into the Greater Metro was closed – what if they decided to take a different route and abandoned her where they had found her?

But no one in the Greater Metro was expecting them, and breaking open a hermetic door was beyond the power of any human being. The man with the shaved head examined the massive panel of metal, trying to find a weak point or a secret lock, but Sasha knew there weren’t any locks on this side. The door only opened outwards.

‘You stay here, I’m going to reconnoitre. I’ll check the door in the other tunnel and look for ventilation shafts,’ the big man barked. After a short pause he added: ‘I’ll be back’.

And then he disappeared.

The old man gathered up the branches and planks that were lying around and lit a puny little campfire. He sat down directly on the sleepers, thrust his hands into his knapsack and started rummaging through his belongings. Sasha crouched down quietly beside him, observing. The old man ran through a strange performance – perhaps for her, or perhaps for himself. He fished a filthy, battered notepad out of the knapsack, cast a wary glance at Sasha, shifted sideways away from her as far as he could and hunched over the paper. Then he immediately jumped up with suspicious agility for his age, to check that the man with the shaved head really had gone: he crept awkwardly about ten steps towards the exit of the tunnel, didn’t find anyone there and decided that these precautions would be sufficient. Leaning back against the door, he screened himself off from Sasha with a sack and immersed himself in his reading.

He read fretfully, droning something indistinctly to himself, then removed his gloves, took out a flask of water and started sprinkling it on his notepad. He read a bit more, then suddenly started rubbing his hands against his trouser legs, slapped himself fretfully on the forehead, touched his gas mask and plunged back into his reading. Infected by his agitation, Sasha abandoned her musings and crept closer: the old man was too engrossed to notice her cautious movements.

Infused with the light of the campfire, his pale green eyes glinted feverishly even through the lenses of the gas mask. Every now and then he surfaced with an obvious effort – for a gulp of air. In these breaks from reading, the old man peered warily at the distant patch of night sky at the end of the tunnel, but it was clear. The man with the shaved head had disappeared completely. And then the notepad engrossed him entirely again.

Now she realised why he had sprinkled the paper with water: he was trying to separate pages that were stuck together. They obviously resisted and once, when he accidentally tore one of them, he cried out as if he had cut himself. He swore, cursing his own clumsiness, and noticed how inquisitively she was examining him. Embarrassed, he adjusted his gas mask again, but didn’t say anything to her until he had read right to the end. Then he skipped over to the fire and flung the notepad into it, without even looking at Sasha, and she sensed that it was pointless to ask any questions now: he would only lie or say nothing. And there were other things that worried her far more just at the moment. Probably an entire hour had passed since the man with the shaved head left. What if he had abandoned them as an unnecessary burden? Sasha moved to sit a bit closer to the old man.

‘The other tunnel’s closed too,’ she said. ‘And all the shafts nearby have been blocked off. This is the only way in.’

The old man looked at her absent-mindedly, clearly struggling to concentrate on what he had heard.

‘He’ll find a way to get inside, he’s got intuition,’ he said, and a minute later, as if he didn’t want to seem impolite, he asked: ‘What’s your name?’

‘Alexandra,’ she replied seriously. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Nikolai,’ he began, reaching out his hand, and then suddenly jerking it back again before Sasha could touch it, as if he had changed his mind. ‘Homer. My name’s Homer.’

‘Homer. That’s a strange nickname,’ Sasha said slowly.

‘It’s just a name,’ Homer said firmly.

Should she explain to him that as long as they were with her the door would stay closed? Although it could easily have been standing wide open, if these two had come on their own. This was Kolomenskoe refusing to let Sasha go, punishing her for what she had done to her father. The girl had run off and stretched her chain to its limit, but she still couldn’t break it. The station had brought her back to itself once, and it would do it again.

No matter how hard she tried to drive these thoughts and images away, they only flew off to arm’s length, like bloodsucking gnats, but always came back, circling round and round her, creeping into her ears and her eyes. The old man was asking Sasha about something else, but she didn’t respond: her eyes were veiled by tears and she could hear her father’s voice in her ears, repeating: ‘Nothing is more precious than human life’. And now the moment had come when she really understood what he meant.

What was going on at Tula was no longer a mystery to Homer. The explanation for everything was simpler and more terrible than he had imagined, but an even more terrible story was only just beginning, now that the notepad had been deciphered. The diary was Homer’s black spot; it was a one-way ticket, and once he had held it in his hand, the old man could never be free of it, even if he burned it.

And besides that, his suspicions concerning Hunter had now been confirmed by substantial, unambiguous proof, although Homer didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with it. Everything he had read in the diary completely contradicted the brigadier’s claims. Hunter was simply lying, and quite deliberately. The old man had to work out what was the motive behind his lies, and if the lies made any kind of sense. The answer to that would determine whether he decided to carry on following Hunter and whether his adventure would turn out to be a heroic epic or a mindless, horrendous bloodbath that left no surviving witnesses.

The first entries in the notepad were dated to the day when the convoy passed through Nagornaya without any casualties and entered Tula without encountering any resistance…

‘The tunnels are quiet and empty almost all the way to Tula. We advance quickly – a good sign. The commander is counting on getting back tomorrow at the latest,’ the dead signal officer reported. ‘The entrance to Tula is not guarded. We sent in a scout. He disappeared,’ he wrote anxiously a few hours later. ‘The commander has decided to advance into the station en masse. We are preparing for an assault.’ And then again, a little while later: ‘We can’t understand what’s wrong… We’re talking to the locals. Things are bad here. Some kind of disease.’ And soon after that he explained: ‘Some people at the station are infected with something… An unknown illness…’ The members of the convoy apparently tried to render assistance to the sick: ‘The paramedic hasn’t been able to find a cure. He says it’s like rabies… They suffer monstrous pain, they’re deranged… They attack other people’. And straight after that: ‘Weakened by the illness, they can’t cause any serious harm. That’s not the real disaster…’ At this point, as luck would have it, the pages had stuck together, and Homer had to sprinkle water on them from his flask: ‘Photophobia, nausea. Blood in the mouth. Coughing. Then they swell up… They are transformed into…’ – the word had been laboriously crossed out. ‘How it’s transmitted is not clear. The air? Physical contact?’ That entry was made the next day. The detachment had stayed on.