Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘Thank you. I thought you were the same as him,’ she told Homer.

‘I don’t think there are any other men like that,’ the old man replied.

‘Are you two friends?’

‘Like a sucker fish and a shark,’ he said with a grim smile, thinking that was exactly the way it was: Hunter devoured people, but occasional bloody scraps of human flesh came his way too.

‘How do you mean?’ she asked, half-sitting up.

‘Where he goes, I go. I don’t think I could manage without him, and he… Perhaps he thinks that I’ll absolve him somehow. Although no one really knows what he thinks.’

‘But why can’t you manage without him?’ asked the girl, moving to sit closer to the old man.

‘I have the feeling that while I’m with him, my inspiration… won’t desert me.’ Homer tried to explain.

‘Inspiration – I read somewhere that means “breathing in”,’ said Alexandra. ‘But why do you want to breathe that? What good will it do you?’

Homer shrugged.

‘It’s not what we breathe in, it’s what’s breathed into us,’ he replied.

‘I think that as long as you breathe death, no one will kiss your lips. They’ll be scared of the rotten corpse smell,’ she said, drawing something on the dirty floor with her finger.

‘When you see death, it makes you think about many things,’ Homer remarked.

‘You don’t have any right to summon death every time you need to think,’ she objected.

‘I don’t summon it, I just stand there… and then it hasn’t really got anything to do with death… or not only with death,’ the old man countered. ‘I wanted a story to happen to me, a story that would change everything. I wanted something to happen in my life. To shake me up. And clear out my head.’

‘Did you have a bad life?’ the girl asked sympathetically.

‘A boring one. You know, when one day’s like any other, they fly by so fast and it seems like the last one is really close already,’ Homer tried to explain. ‘You feel afraid of not getting anything finished. And every one of those days is full of a thousand little things to be done. Do one, take a break, and it’s time to start on the next one. You have no time or strength left for what’s really important. You think: never mind – I’ll start tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes, it’s always just one long, endless today.’

‘Have you seen many stations?’ She didn’t seem to be following what the old man was telling her at all.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, puzzled. ‘All of them, probably.’

‘And I’ve seen two,’ the girl sighed. ‘First my father and I lived at Avtozavod, then we were exiled to Kolomenskoe. I always wanted to see at least one more. It’s so strange here…’ She ran her eyes along the line of arches. ‘As if there were a thousand gateways, and not even any walls between them. And there they are, all open for me, but I don’t want to go through. And I’m afraid.’

‘So he was your father? That man, the other one…’ Homer hesitated. ‘Did they kill him?’

The girl retreated back into her shell of silence for a long time before she responded.

‘Yes.’

‘Stay with us,’ said the old man, plucking up his nerve. ‘I’ll have a word with Hunter, I think he’ll agree. I’ll tell him I need you, for…’ He shrugged, not knowing how to explain to the girl that now she had to inspire him.

‘Tell him he needs me ,’ said Sasha.

She jumped down onto the platform and wandered away from the trolley, stroking every column as she walked past it.

There was absolutely nothing coy about her, she didn’t flirt at all. Along with all kinds of firearms, she seemed to despise the standard female arsenal – those sweet little glances and heart-melting gestures, those fluttering eyelashes that can raise a hurricane and those half-smiles for which a man would sacrifice himself or kill another. Or was it that she simply didn’t know yet how to use these weapons?

Whatever the reason, she could manage without them. A single dagger thrust from those eyes of hers had made Hunter reverse a decision, a single movement from her had snared him in a net and kept him from killing. But had that thrust really pierced through his armour into the soft flesh? Or did he need her for something? That was probably it. It seemed strange to Homer even to imagine that the brigadier had any vulnerable spots, that he could even be pricked, let alone wounded.

Homer simply couldn’t sleep. Although he had swapped the stifling black gas mask for a light respirator, he still found it just as hard to breathe and the vice that was crushing his head hadn’t slackened its grip. Homer had dumped all his old things in the tunnel. He had scrubbed his hands clean with a piece of grey soap, washed off the dirt with greenish water from an old fuel can and made a voluntary decision always to wear a white face mask from now on. What else could the old man do to avoid danger to people he was with?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all now, not even going into the tunnel and reducing himself to an abandoned heap of rotten rags would do any good. But today’s close brush with death had suddenly taken him back twenty years, to the days when he had just lost everyone he loved. And that had given his plans a new, authentic meaning.

If it was up to Homer, he would have erected a genuine monument to them. But they surely deserved at least a basic headstone. Born decades apart, they had all died on the same day: his wife, his children, his parents.

And there were all his classmates from school and friends from the technical college. His favourite movie actors and musicians. And all those people who were still at work that day, or had already got home, or were stuck somewhere halfway in the traffic jams.

The ones who died immediately and the ones who tried to survive, lingering for a few more days in the poisoned, half-ruined capital, scraping feebly at the locked hermetic doors of the Metro. The ones who disintegrated instantly into atoms, and the ones who swelled up and crumbled away while still alive, devoured by radiation sickness.

The scouts who went up onto the surface first couldn’t get to sleep for days after they returned from their mission. Homer had met some of them round the campfires at transfer stations, he had looked into their eyes and seen streets like frozen rivers swollen with dead fish, imprinted on those eyes forever. Thousands of stalled cars with dead passengers choked the avenues and the highways leading out of Moscow. Dead bodies were lying everywhere. Until the city’s new masters arrived, there was no one to clear them away.

To spare themselves, the scouts tried to avoid the schools and kindergartens. But to lose your mind, it was enough to catch a single frozen gaze from the back seat of a family car. Billions of lives were broken off simultaneously. Billions of thoughts were left unspoken, billions of dreams were left unrealised, billions of grievances were left unforgiven. Nikolai’s little son had asked him for a big set of coloured felt-tip pens, his daughter had been afraid to go to her figure skating lessons; before she went to sleep, his wife had described in vivid detail how they would spend a short holiday by the sea together, just the two of them. When he thought that these little wishes and desires were the last they had, they suddenly became exceptionally important. Homer would have liked to carve an epitaph for each one of them. But humanity certainly deserved at least one epitaph for its gigantic mass grave. And now, when he himself had almost no time left, Homer felt he could find the right words for it.

He still didn’t know what order to arrange them in, what he would use to bind them together, how he would embellish them, but he could already sense that the story unfolding before his very eyes would have a place for every restless, troubled soul, for every single feeling and every crumb of knowledge that he had gathered so painstakingly, and for him too. No plot could have suited his purpose better.