Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Artyom jumped up, squeezed the receiver against his ear with his shoulder, saluted and stopped counting rather regretfully. The commander walked over to the duty roster, checked his watch, made a note of the time – 9:22 – beside the date – 3 November – signed it and turned to Artyom expectantly.

‘Silence. I mean, there’s no one there.’

‘They don’t answer?’ said the commander, chewing on his lips; he worked his neck muscles and cracked the vertebrae. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘What don’t you believe?’ Artyom asked cautiously.

‘That Dobrynin’s been taken out so fast. Is the epidemic already in Hansa then? Can you imagine the bedlam that must have broken out, if the Ring’s infected?’

‘But we don’t know, do we?’ Artyom responded uncertainly. ‘Maybe it’s started already. We’ve got no contact with them.’

‘What if the lines are damaged?’ The commander leaned down and drummed his fingers on the table.

‘Then it would be like with base.’ Artyom jerked his head in the direction of the tunnel that led to Sebastopol. ‘I dial, and it’s completely dead. But with them at least I get the signal. The equipment’s working.’

‘Base clearly doesn’t need us, since no one comes to our door any more. Or maybe there simply isn’t any base left. And no Dobrynin either,’ the commander said flatly. ‘Listen, Popov… If there’s no one left there, then we’ll all croak soon. And that makes our quarantine pointless. Maybe we should just drop it, what do you think?’ he asked and chewed on his lips again.

‘Definitely not, the quarantine’s essential,’ said Artyom, crossing himself in fright at his own heresy and recalling the commander’s manner of first shooting deserters in the stomach and reading them their sentence afterwards.

‘Essential,’ the commander repeated thoughtfully. ‘Another three feel ill today. Two locals and one of ours. Akopov. And Aksyonov died.’

‘Aksyonov?’ Artyom gulped hard and squeezed his eyes shut.

‘He smashed his head open against a rail. Said the pain was really bad,’ the commander went on in the same even tone. ‘And he’s not the first. It must be one hell of a headache for a man to spend half an hour down on his knees, trying to crack his skull, eh?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Artyom suddenly felt sick.

‘No nausea? No weakness?’ the commander asked considerately, pointing his flashlight into Artyom’s face. ‘Open your mouth. Say “aaaaa”. Good man. I tell you what, Popov, you get through to Dobrynin, and get them to tell you Hansa has a vaccine and the medical brigades will be here soon. And they’ll save all of us who are healthy. And they’ll cure everyone who’s sick. And we won’t be stuck here in this hell for all eternity. And we’ll all go back home to our wives. You’ll back to your Galya. And I’ll go back to Alyona and Vera. Got that, Popov?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Artyom, nodding vehemently.

‘At ease.’

His machete had broken off at the handle, unable to support the weight of creature that collapsed onto it. The blade had pierced so deep into the carcass that they didn’t even try to extract it. And the man with the shaved head, covered in slashes from the beasts’ claws, still hadn’t come round after almost three days.

There was nothing Sasha could do to help him, but she had to see him anyway. If only to say thank you. Even if he couldn’t hear her. But the doctors wouldn’t allow the girl into his ward. They said that all the injured man needed now was peace and quiet

Sasha didn’t know for certain why the man with the shaved head had killed those men on the trolley. If he had fired in order to save her, she could absolve him, but although she honestly tried to believe it, she couldn’t. Another explanation was more plausible: it was easier for him to kill than to ask for anything.

But at Pavelets everything had been completely different. There was no doubt about it: he had come for Sasha and even been prepared to die for her. Did that mean she hadn’t been wrong after all, and some kind of connection really had started developing between them?

When he called to her that time back at Kolomenskoe, she was expecting a bullet, not an invitation to move on together. But when she submitted and looked round, she had noticed the change in him immediately, even though his frightening face was still as impassive as ever: it was in his eyes, as if someone else had suddenly peeped out through the loopholes of those motionless black pupils. Someone who felt curious about her.

Someone to whom she now owed her life. She wondered if she should let him have the silver ring as a hint, the way her mother once did, but she was afraid the man with the shaved head wouldn’t understand the sign. How else could she thank him? To give him a knife to replace the one he had broken defending her was the very least that Sasha could do. When she was struck by this simple idea and stopped dead in front of the bladesmith’s counter, imagining how she would hand him his new knife, how he would look at her and what he would say, she hadn’t forgotten even for a moment that she was planning to buy a killer a weapon that he would use to slit throats and slash open stomachs.

In that moment, for her he wasn’t a bandit, but a hero, not a murderer, but a warrior; and above all, he was a man. And there was another thought, unspoken, not even clearly formulated as yet, swirling round in her head: his knife was broken, he was wounded, he couldn’t wake up. Perhaps if he had a knife that was whole… It was like an amulet… She went ahead and bought it.

So now, standing by his bed, hiding the gift behind her back, Sasha was waiting for him to sense her, or at least sense the presence of the blade. The man with the shaved head twitched and snorted, he started hawking up words, but he didn’t come round: the darkness held him too tight in its grip. Until now Sasha had never spoken his name even to herself, let alone out loud. Before she called him in a loud voice, she whispered that name, as if she was trying it out, and finally made up her mind.

‘Hunter!’

The man with the shaved head went quiet and listened, as if she was somewhere unimaginably far away, and her voice only reached him as a faint echo, but he still didn’t respond. Sasha spoke the name again, louder, more insistently. She wasn’t going to back off until he opened his eyes. She wanted to be his tunnel spark.

Someone in the corridor called out in surprise, boots started scraping across the floor out there and Sasha squatted down and put the knife on the locker at the head of the bed, in order not to waste any more time.

‘This is for you,’ she said.

Steely fingers closed round Sasha’s wrist in a grip powerful enough to crush her bones. The injured man managed to raise his eyelids a little, but his gaze wandered about mindlessly without coming to rest on anything.

‘Thank you,’ said the girl, not even attempting to free her hand from the trap it was clasped in.

‘What are you doing here?’

A large, strapping man in a greasy white coat darted up to her and pricked the man with the shaved head in the arm with a syringe. The patient went limp and the orderly tugged Sasha sharply to her feet, hissing through his clenched teeth.

‘What’s wrong with you, don’t you understand? In his condition… The doctor strictly forbade…’

‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand! He has to have something to cling on to, and your jabs only make him loosen his grip.’

He shoved Sasha hard towards the door, but after flying a few metres, she swung round and flashed her eyes at him stubbornly.

‘Don’t let me see you in here again! And what’s this?’ he asked, spotting the knife.