Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Homer glanced triumphantly at the guard covering his shame with the news sheet: at last he could take a proper look at the phones. The one that was winking all the time had a piece of dirty-white plaster stuck to it, on which someone had scrawled a single word with a ballpoint pen:

‘Tula’.

‘We maintain contact with the Order,’ said the commandant of Dobrynin Station, sweating and cracking his fists, but not daring to raise his eyes to the brigadier. ‘And no one has warned us about this operation. I can’t take this decision on my own.’

‘Then call Central,’ said Hunter. ‘You have time to agree things. But not much.’

‘They won’t give approval. This will endanger the stability of Hansa… Surely you know that comes before anything else for Hansa? And we’ve got everything under control.’

‘What damned stability? If measures aren’t taken…’

‘The situation is stable, I don’t understand what you find unsatisfactory,’ said Andrei Andreevich, shaking his heavy head obstinately. ‘All the exits are covered by guns. A mouse couldn’t get through. Let’s wait for everything to resolve itself.’

‘Nothing will resolve itself!’ Hunter bellowed. ‘If you wait, all that will happen is that someone will get out and run across the surface or find a roundabout route. The station has to be purged! By the book! I don’t understand why you haven’t done it yourselves yet!’

‘But there could be people there who are still well. How do you imagine it happening? Do I order my lads to shoot everyone in Tula and incinerate them? What about the sectarians’ train? And maybe clean out Serpukhov at the same time? Half the men here have kept women there, and illegitimate children… No, let me tell you something! We’re not fascists here. War’s war, but this… Killing sick people… Even when there was swine fever at Belorussia, they took the pigs into different corners one at a time, so that if one was infected, it died, and if it was healthy, it could live, instead of just slaughtering them all indiscriminately.’

‘Those were pigs, these are people,’ the brigadier said flatly.

‘No, no,’ said the commandant and started shaking his head again, splashing sweat about. ‘I can’t do that… It would be on my conscience afterwards. And I… I don’t want the dreams that would come afterwards.’

‘You won’t have to do it yourself. For that there are men who don’t have dreams. All you’ll do is let us pass through your station. Nothing more.’

‘I sent couriers to Polis, to find out about a vaccine,’ said Andrei Andreevich, wiping away his perspiration with his sleeve. ‘There is hope that…’

‘There is no vaccine! There is no hope! Stop burying your head in the sand! Why don’t I see any medical units from Central here? Why do you refuse to call them and ask for the green light to let a cohort of the Order through?’

The commandant remained obstinately silent; for some reason he tried to fasten the buttons on his tunic, fumbling at them with his slippery fingers and then giving up. He walked over to a shabby sideboard, splashed out a glass of some smelly alcoholic infusion for himself and downed it in one.

‘Why, you haven’t informed them,’ Hunter guessed. ‘They still don’t know anything about it. You’ve got an epidemic at the next station, and they don’t know anything…’

‘I answer for something like that with my head,’ the commandant said hoarsely. ‘An epidemic in the adjacent station means compulsory retirement. I allowed it to happen… Didn’t prevent it… Created a threat to the stability of Hansa.’

‘In the adjacent station? At Serpukhov?’

‘Everything’s calm there for the time being, but I caught on too late… Didn’t react in time. How could I know?’

‘And how did you explain all this to everyone? The forces at an independent station? The cordoning off of the tunnels?’

‘Bandits… Rebels. It happens everywhere. It’s nothing special.’

‘And now it’s too late to confess,’ the brigadier said with a nod.

‘It’s not retirement now…’ Andrei Andreevich poured himself a second glass and downed it. ‘It’s the death penalty.’

‘And now what?’

‘I’m waiting.’ The commandant lowered his backside onto his desk. ‘I’m waiting. What if…?’

‘Why don’t you answer their calls?’ Homer put in. ‘Your phone’s blowing its top – they’re calling from Tula. What if…?’

‘It’s not blowing its top,’ the commandant replied in a flat, hollow voice. ‘I turned the sound off. It’s just the light blinking. While it still does that, they’re alive.’

‘Why don’t you answer it?’ the old man repeated angrily.

‘What can I tell them? To hang on and be patient? To get well soon? That help is near? To put a bullet through their heads? Talking to the refugees was as much as I could take,’ the commandant yelled, losing control.

‘Shut up immediately,’ Hunter told him in a quiet voice. ‘And listen. I’ll come back in one day with a squadron. I have to be allowed through all the guard posts without hindrance. You will keep Serpukhov Station closed off. We’ll move on to Tula and purge it. If necessary, we’ll purge Serpukhov too. We’ll pretend it’s a small war. You don’t have to inform Central. You won’t have to do anything at all. I’ll do it… I’ll restore stability.’

The exhausted commandant nodded feebly, as limp as a deflated inner tube from a bicycle tyre. He poured out some more infusion for himself, sniffed at it and, before he drank it, asked quietly:

‘But you’ll be up to your elbows in blood. Doesn’t that bother you?’

‘Blood’s easy to wash off with cold water,’ the brigadier told him.

As they were walking out of the office, Andrei Andreevich filled his lungs with air and summoned the duty orderly in a stentorian voice. The orderly dashed inside and the door slammed shut behind him with a crash. Dropping back a little from Hunter, the old man leaned across the counter, grabbed the black receiver off the phone he’d been watching and pressed it to his ear.

‘Hello! Hello! I’m listening!’ he exclaimed in a loud whisper into the sieve of the mouthpiece.

Silence. Not blank silence, as if the line had been cut, it was a silence that hummed, as if the phone was off the hook at the other end, but there was no one to answer Homer. As if someone there had been waiting for him to answer for a very long time, but hadn’t been able to wait any longer. As if now the other receiver was croaking into the ear of a dead man in the old man’s distorted voice.

Hunter glanced ominously at Homer from the doorway and the old man carefully put the phone back down and meekly followed the brigadier out.

‘Popov! Popov! Rise and shine! Get up, quick!’

The powerful beam of the commander’s flashlight pierced straight though his eyelids, flooding his brain with fire. A strong hand shook him by the shoulder and then the back of it smashed into Artyom’s unshaven cheek.

‘Where’s your gun? Take your automatic and follow me, on the double!’ Of course, they dozed with their trousers on, in full gear in fact. Unwinding the tattered rags in which the Kalashnikov that served as his pillow had been wrapped for the night, Artyom tramped off, still swaying, after his commander. How long had he managed to sleep? An hour? Two? His head was buzzing and his throat was dry.

‘It’s starting,’ said the commander, looking back over his shoulder and breathing stale alcohol fumes into Artyom’s face.

‘What’s starting?’ he asked in fright.

‘You’ll see in a moment. Here, take this clip. You’ll need it.’

Tula – a spacious station with no columns which looked like merely the top of a single, unbelievably broad tunnel, was enveloped in almost total darkness. In a few places feeble beams of light were darting about, but there was no order or system to their movements, no sense at all, as if the flashlights were in the hands of little children or monkeys. Only where would monkeys come from here?