Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

‘Never mind,’ thought the old man. ‘Better for her to think I’m a drunkard…’ He took a step towards the mirror above the washbasin and leaned his forehead against it. As soon as he recovered his breath, he noticed the glass was steaming up and realised his respirator had slid down and was dangling under his chin. Homer hastily pulled the mask back up onto his face and closed his eyes again. No, thinking about how he was transmitting death to every person he met on his journey was unbearable. But it was too late to turn back now: if he was infectious, if he wasn’t confusing the symptoms, the entire station was already doomed in any case. Starting with this woman, who was guilty of nothing more than getting taken short at the wrong moment. What would she do if he told her now that she would die in a month’s time at the latest? How stupid it all was, thought Homer, stupid and tawdry. He was dreaming of immortalising everyone that life and fate brought him into contact with, but instead he had been appointed an absurd, bald, powerless angel of death. His wings had been clipped and he had been ringed, setting him a fixed term of thirty days, and that had galvanised him into action.

Had he been punished for his presumptuousness, for his arrogance?

No, the old man couldn’t keep quiet about it any longer. But there was only one person in the world he could make his confession to. Homer wouldn’t be able to deceive him for long in any case, and it would make the game simpler for both of them if they showed their cards.

He set off to the hospital wards, walking hesitantly.

The ward he needed was at the very end of the corridor, and usually there was an attendant on duty at the door, but now the post had been abandoned, and staccato wheezing could be heard coming out through the crack. It assumed the rough forms of words, but constructing meaningful phrases out of them was beyond even Homer as he stood there hiding.

‘Harder… Struggle… Must… Still makes sense… Resist… Remember… Still possible… Wrong… Condemned… But still…’

The words merged into a growl, as if the pain had become too intolerable for the man speaking to lasso his scurrying thoughts. Homer stepped inside.

Hunter was lying there unconscious, sprawled across damp, crumpled sheets. The bandages bound tightly round the brigadier’s cranium had crept right down over his eyes, his protruding cheekbones were covered in perspiration and his stubbly lower jaw was hanging open helplessly. His broad chest rose and fell arduously, like a blacksmith’s bellows, struggling to maintain the fire in the body that was too large.

The girl was standing at the head of the bed, facing away from Homer with her thin hands clasped behind her back. The old man didn’t look closely at first, but then he noticed the black knife that almost merged into the fabric of her overalls – she was clutching the handle tightly in her fingers.

A ringtone beep.

Then another. And another.

One thousand, two hundred and thirty-five. One thousand two hundred and thirty-six. One thousand two hundred and thirty-seven.

Artyom wasn’t counting them to impress the commander with his diligence. He had to do it to feel that he was moving in some direction. If he was moving away from the point at which he had begun counting, that meant every beep brought him closer to the point at which this insanity would come to an end. Self-deception?

So okay. But listening to those beeps and thinking they would never break off was unbearable. Although at the beginning, on his very first watch, he had actually liked it: the beeps had introduced order into the cacophony of his thoughts, like a metronome, they had emptied his head, subjugating his galloping pulse to their own unhurried rhythm.

But the minutes that they sliced up became exactly like each other, and Artyom had started to feel that it was true, he was stuck in some kind of time trap and he could never get out of it until the beeps stopped. In the Middle Ages there was a torture like that: they shaved the offender’s head bare and sat him under a barrel with water dripping out, drop by drop, onto the top of his head, gradually driving the poor victim out of his mind. Where the rack was powerless, ordinary water produced excellent results.

Tethered by the telephone wire, Artyom had no right to leave his post for a second. He tried not to drink at all during his watch, so that the call of nature wouldn’t distract him from the beeps. The previous day he’d given in, darted out of the room, rushed to the toilet and then straight back. He paused to listen in the doorway, and his blood ran cold: the speed had changed, the signal was running faster, it had broken away from its usual measured pace. Only one thing could have happened, and he understood that perfectly well. The moment he had been waiting for had arrived when he wasn’t there. Glancing back in fright towards the door – had anyone noticed? – Artyom hastily redialled the number and pressed his ear to the receiver.

The phone clicked and the beeps started up in their usual rhythm. Since then it hadn’t given the ‘engaged’ signal even once and no one had answered it. But even so Artyom didn’t dare put the receiver down, he just moved it from his sweaty ear to his frozen one, trying not to lose count.

He hadn’t told the commander about that incident straight away, and now somehow he didn’t really believe the beeps could have sounded any different. He had been ordered to get through, and for a week now that was what he had been living for. If he violated that order, he would end up at a court martial that saw no difference between a blunder and sabotage.

The phone also told him how much time was left to the end of his watch. Artyom didn’t have his own wristwatch, but he had checked the time from the commander’s when he made his round. The signal was repeated every five seconds. Twelve beeps was a minute. Seven hundred and twenty was an hour. Thirteen thousand, six hundred and eighty was a complete watch. They fell like grains of sand out of one incredibly vast glass flask into another, bottomless one. And Artyom sat in the narrow throat between these two invisible vessels, listening to the time.

The only reason he didn’t dare put the phone down was because the commander could show up at any moment to check on him. But otherwise… What he was doing made absolutely no sense. There was definitely not a single living soul left at the other end of the line. When Artyom closed his eyes, he could see the picture in front of him again…

He saw the commandant’s office barricaded from the inside and its occupant sitting with his face resting on the desk, clutching a Makarov pistol in his hand. Naturally, with his ears shot to shreds, he can’t hear the phone ringing its head off. The men outside haven’t managed to force open the door, but the keyhole and the cracks are still open, and the desperate jangling of the old telephone leaks out through them, creeping through the air above the platform that is heaped up with swollen corpses. There was a time when the ringing of the phone couldn’t be heard above the incessant hubbub of the crowd, the patter of footsteps and the crying of children, but now it’s the only sound that disturbs the dead. The crimson glow of the emergency batteries blinks in its death throes.

A beep.

And another.

One thousand, five hundred and sixty-three. One thousand, five hundred and sixty-four.

No one answers.

‘Report!’

Whatever else about him, the commander certainly knew how to take a man by surprise. Legends circulated about him in the garrison: supposedly the former mercenary had been famous for his skill in handling cold weapons and his ability to dissolve into the darkness. At one time, before he settled down at Sebastopol, he used to massacre entire enemy guard posts singlehanded if the sentries demonstrated even the slightest carelessness.