Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Waking instantly and feverishly checking his automatic, Artyom suddenly realised what had happened. They hadn’t been able to hold them! Or maybe it still wasn’t too late?

Another two soldiers, still puffy and hoarse from sleep, darted out of the watch office and joined them. Along the way the commander scraped together the remainder, everyone who could still stand on his feet and hold a gun. Even the ones who were already coughing a bit.

A strange, sinister cry pervaded the thick, stale, expired air. Not a scream, not a howl, not a command… A groan pouring out of hundreds of throats – straining in agony, full of despair and horror. A groan punctuated by a meagre jangling and scraping of iron that came from two, three, ten places at the same time.

The platform was cluttered with torn, sagging tents and capsized kennels for living in, constructed out of sheets of metal and pieces of Metro-carriage cladding, all jumbled together with plywood counters and people’s abandoned belongings. The commander strode on, parting the heaps of garbage like an icebreaker moving through icepacks, with Artyom and the other two trotting along in his wake.

A truncated train standing on the right-hand track loomed up out of the darkness: the light in both carriages was off, the open doors had been clumsily blocked with pieces of mobile barriers, and inside… On the other side of the dark window panes a terrible mishmash of humanity was heaving about, seething and simmering. Dozens of hands had grabbed the bars of the frail barriers and were swaying, shaking and rattling them. Occasionally the machine-gunners in gas masks who were posted at each of the exits skipped up to the black, gaping mouths of the doors and raised their gun butts, but they didn’t dare to beat the prisoners, let alone shoot them. In other places, on the contrary, the sentries tried to reason with the raging human sea squeezed into the metal boxes and calm it down.

But did the people in the carriages still understand anything?

They had been herded into the train because they started running away from the special sections of the tunnels, and because there were already too many of them – more than the healthy men.

The commander rushed past the first carriage, and the second, and then Artyom saw where they were going in such a great hurry. The last door, that was where the abscess had ruptured. Strange creatures had flooded out of the carriage – barely able to stand, mutilated beyond recognition by the swellings on their faces, with puffy, appallingly thick arms and legs. No one had managed to get away yet: all the free sub-machine-gunners were converging on the door.

The commander tore through the cordon and walked forward.

‘I order all patients to return to their places immediately!’ he exclaimed, pulling his officer’s Stechkin pistol out of its holster.

The infected man closest to him raised his cumbersome, swollen head with a struggle, in several stages, and licked his cracked lips.

‘Why are you treating us like this?’

‘You are aware that you are infected with an unknown virus. We’re looking for a cure… You just have to wait for it.’

‘Looking for a cure,’ the man repeated after him. ‘That’s funny.’

‘Get back into the carriage immediately.’ The commander clicked off the safety catch of his revolver. ‘I’ll count to ten, then I’ll shoot to kill. One…’

‘You just don’t want to leave us without hope, so that you can control us. Until we all die anyway…’

‘Two.’

‘It’s a day now since they gave us any water. Why give dead men anything to drink?’

‘The sentries are afraid to approach the bars. Two of them have been infected like that. Three.’

‘There are lots of bodies in the carriages already. We’re trampling on people’s faces. Do you know how a nose crunches? If it’s a child’s, then…’

‘There’s nowhere to put them! We can’t burn them. Four.’

‘The next carriage is so cramped, the dead are still standing beside the living. Shoulder to shoulder.’

‘Five.’

‘For God’s sake, shoot me, will you? I know there isn’t any cure. I’m going to die soon. Then I won’t feel my insides being scraped raw with coarse sandpaper and soaked in alcohol…’

‘Six.’

‘And set alight. It feels like my head’s full of worms that are eating away my brain and my soul bit by bit from the inside… Yum-yum, crunch, crunch, crunch…’

‘Seven!’

‘You idiot! Let us out of here! Let us die like human beings. What makes you think you have the right to torture us like this? You know that you’re probably already…’

‘Eight! This is all a safety measure. So that others can survive. I’m prepared to croak, but not one of you plague dogs is going to leave here. Get ready!’

Artyom flung up his automatic and set the sight on the nearest sick person. Oh God, he thought it was a woman… Swollen breasts stuck out under the T-shirt that was dried into a reddish-brown crust. He blinked and turned his gun barrel towards a shambling old man. The crowd of monsters started muttering and pulled back at first, trying to squeeze back in through the door, but it couldn’t – more and more infected people were oozing out of the carriage like fresh pus, groaning and weeping.

‘You sadist! What are you doing! You’re going to shoot living people! We’re not zombies!’

‘Nine!’ The commander’s voice turned dull and hollow.

‘Just let us go!’ the sick man yelled hoarsely, reaching his arms out towards the commander as if he were conducting a choir, and the whole crowd surged forward, following the sweep of his fingers.

‘Fire!’

People started flowing towards Leonid immediately, the moment he put his lips to his instrument. The first sounds drawn out of the barrel of his flute were tentative and impure, but still enough to set the people gathered around smiling and clapping in approval, and when the flute’s voice grew firmer, the faces of his listeners were transformed, as if the dirt had fallen away from them.

This time Sasha was awarded a place of distinction – beside the musician. Now Leonid was not the only one with dozens of eyes gazing at him intently, some of the admiring stares came her way. At first this made the girl feel awkward – after all, she didn’t deserve their attention and gratitude, but then the melody picked her up off the granite floor and carried her along with it, distracting her from her surroundings, in the same way that a good book or a story told by someone can captivate you and make you forget about everything.

The same melody floated through the air again – Leonid’s own composition, untitled. He started and ended every one of his performances with it. It could smooth out wrinkles and whisk the dust off the windowpanes of glazed eyes, lighting little icon lamps on the other side of them. Sasha already knew the melody, but Leonid opened up new, mysterious little doors in it, discovering new harmonies, and the music sounded new and different. As if she had been gazing at the sky for a long, long time, and suddenly, through an opening in the white clouds, she had glimpsed a boundless, bottomless, delicate-green expanse.

Suddenly she felt a prick that startled her and brought her back down under the ground ahead of schedule. Sasha spun round in fright. So that was it… Towering above the crowd, Hunter was standing slightly behind the other listeners with his head thrown back. The sharp, barbed blade of his gaze was thrust into her, and if he released his grip briefly, it was only in order to stab the musician too. Leonid took no notice of the man with the shaved head – or at least, he gave no sign that anything was interfering with his playing.

Strangely enough, Hunter didn’t leave, and he didn’t make any attempt to take her away or break off the performance. He waited until the final notes, then moved back and disappeared. Abandoning Leonid, Sasha immediately forced her way into the crowd, trying to keep up with the man with the shaved head. He stopped not far away, in front of a bench on which Homer was sitting, looking dejected.