Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

When dawn came up on the surface, the rows of market stalls would stir into life down below, and then he would definitely take a walk along them to get himself a clean exercise book and a ballpoint pen. And he had to hurry: if he didn’t get down on paper the outlines of the future novel that he could see glimmering like a mirage ahead of him, it could melt away, and who could say how much longer he would have to sit on the summit of his sand dune, gazing into the distance and hoping that his ivory tower would start rising up again out of the fine grains of sand and the shimmering, incandescent air?

There might not be enough time.

‘No matter what nonsense the girl might talk, a glance into the empty eye sockets of eternity is certainly a great stimulus to action,’ the old man chuckled to himself. And then, recalling the arches of her eyebrows – two flashes of white on the sombre, grimy face – and the bite marks on her lip, and her tousled, straw-blonde hair, he smiled again.

‘I’ll have to find something else at the market tomorrow as well,’ Homer thought as he fell asleep.

Night at Pavelets Station is always restless. Glimmers of light from the smoking torches flicker across the soot-stained marble walls, the tunnels breathe uneasily and the men sitting at the foot of the escalators talk to each other in voices so low, they can hardly be heard. The station pretends to be dead, hoping the predatory beasts from the surface won’t be tempted by the smell of meat.

But sometimes the most curious of those beasts discover a passage that leads down deep, start sniffing at it and catch the scent of fresh sweat, the beating of hearts, the murmur of blood coursing through veins. And they set off downwards.

Homer had finally dozed off, and the alarmed voices from the far end of the platform filtered into his awareness as dull, distorted echoes. But then a shot rang out, instantly jerking him out of his hazy half-sleep. The old man jumped up, staring around wildly and groping for his gun on the floor of the trolley.

The deafening, thunderous rumbling of the machine-gun was joined by the stuttering of several sub-machine-guns and the alarm in the sentries’ shouts was replaced by genuine terror. Whoever it was they were firing all their weapons at, it wasn’t having any effect. This was no longer coordinated fire at a moving target, but the desperate, ragged shooting of men simply trying to save their own skins.

Homer found his automatic, but he couldn’t make himself go out into the hall; it took all his willpower to resist the temptation to start the motor and shoot out of the station at top speed – it didn’t matter a damn where to. But he stayed in the trolley, craning his neck to make out the battle zone through the crowded line of the columns. Slicing through the yelling and swearing of the sentries trying to defend themselves came a piercing shriek that sounded surprisingly close.

The machine-gun choked and someone gave a terrible scream that was cut short as suddenly as if his head had been torn off. The chatter of sub-machine-guns hammered at Homer’s ears again. But now it was sparse and scattered. The shriek was repeated – it sounded a little further away now… And suddenly the creature that made it was answered by an echo – somewhere close to the trolley.

Homer counted to ten and started the motor with trembling hands: any moment now his companions would come back, and they could go racing off immediately – he was doing it for their sake, not his own… The trolley trembled and smoked as the motor warmed up, and then something flickered between the columns at an unbelievable speed, blurring past and slithering out of view faster than his mind could process the image. The old man grabbed hold of the handrail, set his foot on the accelerator pedal and took a deep breath. If they didn’t come in the next ten seconds, he’d just drop everything and… And then, without even knowing why he was doing it, Homer stepped out onto the platform, holding his useless automatic out in front of him. Just to make sure that there was nothing more he could still do for either of his companions. He pressed himself tight against a column and glanced out into the hall… He tried to scream, but he didn’t have enough air.

Sasha had always known the world wasn’t limited to the two stations where she had lived, but she could never have imagined that the world beyond them could be so beautiful. Dull and bleak as Kolomenskoe was, to her it had seemed like a home, cosy and familiar in every little detail. Avtozavod was haughty and spacious, but cold, it had turned its back on her father and her, rejected them, and she couldn’t forget that.

But in her relationship with Pavelets she could turn a new leaf, and Sasha’s desire to fall in love with this station grew stronger with every minute she spent there. She wanted to fall in love with its light, branching columns, with its huge, inviting arches, with its noble marble covered in darling little veins that made the walls look like someone’s delicate skin… Kolomenskoe was ugly, Avtozavod was too severe, but this station seemed to have been built by a woman, it was playful, even frivolous. Even decades on, Pavelets refused to forget its own former glory. The people who lived here couldn’t be vicious and cruel, Sasha thought. Did she and her father really only have to get past one hostile station in order to find themselves in this magical land? Would it really have been enough for him to live just one more day, in order to escape from his exile and hard labour and be free again? She would have been able to persuade the man with the shaved head to take both of them…

In the distance a campfire flickered, surrounded by sentries, and the beam of a searchlight probed at the high ceiling, but Sasha didn’t want to go that way. For so many years it had seemed to her that once she broke out of Kolomenskoe and met other people, she would be happy! But now Sasha needed only one person – to share her delight and amazement that now the world really was bigger by a whole third and her hope that everything could still be put right. But there probably wasn’t anyone at all who needed Sasha, no matter what she might try to make herself and the old man believe.

So the girl wandered off in the opposite direction, to where a dilapidated train stood halfway into the right tunnel, with its windows broken and doors wide open. She walked inside and along through the train, soaring over the gaps between the carriages as she inspected the first, the second, the third… In the last one Sasha found a seat that had miraculously survived and clambered onto it, pulling up her legs. She looked round, trying to imagine that any moment now the train would start moving and carry her on to more stations, brightly lit and vibrant with human voices. But her faith and imagination weren’t strong enough to set thousands of tons of scrap iron moving. It had all been so much easier with her bicycle. And her attempt to hide failed: skipping from carriage to carriage in her wake, the noise of the battle unfolding in Pavelets Station finally caught up with her. Again?

She lowered her feet onto the floor and dashed back to the station – to the only place where she could at least do something.

The mutilated bodies of sentries were lying by the glass booth with the frozen searchlight, and in the extinguished campfire, and in the centre of the hall – those men had already abandoned any resistance and were running to seek refuge in the passage, but death had overtaken them halfway there.

A sinister, unnatural figure was doubled up over one of the bodies. From that distance it was hard to make it out clearly, but Homer saw smooth white skin, an immensely powerful, twitching neck, and legs bent at too many joints, with impatiently shuffling feet.