Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

The musician grabbed his miraculous passport out of the dawdling sentry’s hands and punched him in the jaw, knocking him to the ground. Then he grabbed Sasha’s hand tight and they stepped onto the trolley, which had just drawn level with them. The dumbfounded driver looked round and found himself staring into the barrel of a revolver.

‘My father would be proud of me right now!’ Leonid laughed. ‘The number of times I’ve heard him say I’m wasting my time on nonsense, that I’ll never amount to anything with that blasted whistle of mine! And now at last, here I am behaving like a real man, and he’s not here. Jump!’ he ordered the driver, who was holding his hands up high.

Although they were travelling at speed, the man obediently stepped off onto the rails, howled as he went tumbling over and over, then fell silent and disappeared into the blackness that was chasing hard after them. Leonid started throwing off the load, and the motor snorted more briskly with every bundle that fell onto the rails. The lethargic headlamp on the bow of the trolley blinked weakly as it peered forward, lighting up only the next few metres. A brood of rats darted out from under the wheels and their squealing was like someone scratching on glass, a startled line walker sprang aside and somewhere far behind them an alarm siren started wailing hysterically. The ribs of the tunnel flickered past faster and faster. The musician was squeezing out every ounce of speed the trolley was capable of.

They flew through Frunze Station: taken by surprise, the sentries scattered like the rats, and the trolley was already hundreds of metres away from Frunze before it started howling furiously in unison with Sport Station.

‘Now things will get hot!’ Leonid shouted. ‘The important thing is to slip past the crossover line to the Circle! There’s a large frontier post there… They’ll try to intercept us! We’ll go straight along the branch line to the centre!’

He knew what to worry about: from out of the side branch that had taken them onto the Red Line a powerful searchlight lashed into their eyes as a heavy freight trolley came rushing towards them. Their tracks would converge in a few dozen metres, it was too late to stop. The musician pressed the worn, shiny pedal to the floor and Sasha squeezed her eyes shut. They could only hope the points were set in the right direction and wouldn’t direct them into a head-on collision.

A machine-gun rumbled and bullets whizzed by just centimetres from their ears. There was an acrid smell of burning and heated air, the roar of another motor flared up and faded away, and the trolleys missed each other by a miracle – the battle trolley flew out onto their track only a moment after Sasha’s trolley passed the fork before sweeping on, shuddering, towards Culture Park. The battle trolley had been flung in the opposite direction.

Now they had a short lead that would last them until the next station, but what then? The trolley slowed down – the tunnel had started sloping upwards.

‘Park’s almost at surface level,’ the musician explained to her, looking back. ‘But Frunze is fifty metres down. We just have to get past the rise, after that we’ll pick up speed!’

They even managed to pick up some speed before reaching Culture Park. A proud old station with tall vaults, half-dead and dimly lit, it turned out to be almost uninhabited. A siren started rasping, clearing its rusty throat. Heads appeared above the brick fortifications. Sub-machine-guns started barking after them too late, in helpless fury.

‘We might even stay alive!’ laughed the musician.‘Just a bit more good luck, and…’

And at that moment a small spark glinted in the darkness astern of them, then blazed up more brightly, becoming blinding as it overhauled them… The battle trolley’s searchlight! Thrusting the fierce beam out ahead of it like a lance on which it was straining to impale their ramshackle little vehicle, the battle trolley ate up the distance between them, cutting it back minute by minute. The machine-gun started yammering again and bullets whined through the air.

‘Just a bit further! This is Kropotkin already!’

Kropotkin… Ruled off into squares with identical tents set out in them, neglected and unkempt. Someone’s rough portraits on the walls, painted a long time ago and already blurred and runny. Flags and more flags, so many that they merged into a single ribbon of crimson, a frozen jet spurting out of a fossilised vein.

Just then an under-barrel grenade launcher barked and fragments of marble showered down onto the trolley: one of them slit Sasha’s leg open, but the wound wasn’t deep. Ahead of them small young soldiers started lowering a boom, but the trolley had picked up more speed and smashed it aside, almost flying off the rails itself.

The battle trolley was gaining on them implacably: its motor was many times more powerful and easily pushed the steel-clad behemoth along. Sasha and the musician had to lie down and shelter behind the metal frame of their trolley.

But in just a few moments the sides of the two trolleys would touch, and they would be boarded. Leonid suddenly started taking off his clothes, as if he had lost his senses. A frontier post appeared ahead: a parapet built of sandbags, steel tank traps – the end of the journey. Now they’d be jammed between two machine-guns, between the hammer and the anvil.

In a minute it would all be over.

The line of men was several dozen metres long. Only the very finest of Sebastopol’s soldiers were in it, each one personally selected by the colonel. Their little helmet lamps twinkled in the gloom of the tunnel, and Denis Mikhailovich suddenly saw the entire combat formation as a swarm of fireflies dashing into the night. Into a warm, fragrant Crimean night, over the cypresses, towards the whispering sea. To where the colonel would like to go when he died.

He shook off the chilly, ticklish sensation, frowned and reprimanded himself severely. He was starting to weaken in his old age after all. He let the last soldier past him, opened a stainless steel cigarette case, took out the one and only hand-rolled cigarette, sniffed at it and struck a flame out of his lighter. It was a good day. Fortune was smiling on the colonel and everything was coming together just as he had planned. They’d got through Nagornaya without any casualties – even the one man who disappeared had caught up with the column again soon afterwards. And everyone was in an excellent mood: going up against bullets was far less frightening to them than floundering in uncertainty and endless waiting. And apart from that, Denis Mikhailovich had let them catch up properly on their sleep just before the expedition. Only he hadn’t been able to get to sleep himself: the colonel had always regarded destiny as a simple sequence of fortuitous events and had never understood how it was possible to put any trust in it. There hadn’t been any news of the little two-man expedition in all the days that had passed since it set off into the Kakhovka Line tunnels. Anything could have happened, after all, Hunter wasn’t immortal. And what right did Denis Mikhailovich have to rely on just the brigadier, who might have gone totally crazy from all his endless battles, and that old storyteller?

He couldn’t wait any longer either.

The plan of action was this: take the main body of Sebastopol’s forces through Nakhimov Prospect, Nagornaya and Nagatino to Tula’s closed southern hermetic door and send a group of saboteurs over the surface to the sealed-off station. Send the saboteurs down into the tunnel through the ventilation shafts to eliminate the guards, if there still were any, and open the door for the assault brigade. And after that it was a simple, routine job, no matter who had captured the station. It had taken three days to locate and clean out the shafts. All that was left for the stalkers to do today was let the saboteurs in. And that was going to happen in a couple of hours’ time. In two hours everything would be decided and Denis Mikhailovich would be able to think about something else again, able to sleep and eat again.