Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

He met them at the door in person, dishevelled and lathered in sweat, with sunken eyes and breath that stank of stale alcohol; the orderly wasn’t in the room. Andrei Andreevich looked round nervously and, not seeing Hunter, he snorted impatiently.

‘Will they be here soon?’

‘Yes, soon,’ Homer told him confidently.

‘Serpukhov could mutiny at any moment,’ said the commandant, wiping his face as he strode round the reception office. ‘Someone let the cat out of the bag about the epidemic. No one knows what to be afraid of, they’re lying and saying that gas masks won’t help.’

‘They’re not lying,’ Leonid put in.

‘The guard post in one of the southern tunnels to Tula has mutinied, the entire unit. Mangy cowards… In the other tunnel, where the sectarians are, they’re still holding position… Those fanatics have besieged them, howling about Judgement Day… The ruckus is starting up even here, in my own station! And where are our rescuers?’

There was the sound of ranting and swearing in the hall, people yelling and guards blaspheming. Before his question had even been answered, Andrei Andreevich squeezed back into his lair and started clinking the neck of a bottle against a glass in there. On his orderly’s counter a little red light lit up on one of the phones, as if it had just been waiting for the commandant to leave the room: it was the phone with the word ‘Tula’ scrawled on a strip of sticking plaster.

Homer hesitated for a second before stepping towards the desk: he licked his dry lips and took a deep breath…

‘Dobrynin Station here!’

‘What shall I tell them?’ Artyom asked doltishly, looking round at the commander.

The commander was still unconscious: his cloudy eyes looked as if they’d been curtained off and were shifting about restlessly right up under his forehead. Sometimes his body was shaken by a vicious cough. His lung’s punctured, thought Artyom.

‘Are you alive?’ he shouted into the receiver. ‘The infected men have broken out!’

Then he remembered they didn’t know what was happening at Tula. He had to tell them, explain everything. Out on the platform a woman squealed and a machine-gun rumbled. The sounds slipped in through the crack under the door, and there was nowhere to hide from them. The person at the other end of the line was answering him, asking questions, but he couldn’t hear them properly.

‘You have to block their way out!’ Artyom repeated. ‘Shoot to kill. Don’t let them get near you!’

He realised they didn’t know what the sick people looked like. How could he describe them? Bloated, with cracked skin, stinking? But then, the ones who had only got infected recently looked like normal people.

‘Shoot everyone you see,’ he said lifelessly.

But didn’t that mean that if he tried to get out of the station, they’d shoot him too, that he’d condemned himself to death? No, he’d never get out. No one healthy was left at the station… Artyom suddenly felt unbearably lonely. And afraid that the man listening to all this at Dobrynin wouldn’t have enough time now to talk to him.

‘Please don’t hang up!’ he told him.

Artyom didn’t know what to talk about with the stranger, and he started telling him about how long he’d been trying to get through and how he’d thought there wasn’t a single station still left alive in the whole Metro. What if he’d been calling into the future, when no one had survived, he thought, and he said that too. He didn’t have to be afraid of anything at all now. Just as long as he had someone to talk to.

‘Popov!’ the commander wheezed behind his back. ‘Have you contacted the northern guard post? The hermetic door… Is it closed off?’

Artyom looked round and shook his head.

‘Dumb bastard,’ the commander barked, hacking up blood. ‘Useless jerk… Listen to me. The station’s mined. I found these pipes… Up on top… A drain for ground water. I laid charges… we’ll set them off and flood the whole damn station. I’ve got the contacts for the mines here in the radio room. We have to close the northern door… And check if… And check if the southern one’s holding. Seal off the station. So the water doesn’t spread any further. Close it off, have you got that? When everything’s ready, you tell me… Is the line to the guard post working?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Artyom said and nodded.

‘Just don’t you forget to stay on this side of the door,’ said the commander, stretching his lips into a smile and breaking into furious coughing. ‘That wouldn’t be a comradely thing to do.’

‘But what about you? You’ll be here?’

‘Don’t funk it, Popov,’ said the commander, narrowing his eyes.

‘Every one of us is born for something. I was born to drown these bastards. You were born to batten down the hatches and die like an honest man. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Artyom repeated.

‘Get on with it, then!’

The phone went dead.

By some whim of the telephone gods, Homer had heard almost everything the duty officer at Tula said to him quite well. But he hadn’t been able to make out the last few phrases, and then the connection had broken down completely.

The old man looked up. Andrei Andreevich’s heavy carcass was looming over him; his blue tunic had acquired dark patches under the armpits, his fat hands were trembling.

‘What’s going on there?’ he asked in a hoarse, faint voice.

‘Everything’s got out of control.’ Homer gulped hard. ‘Move all your free men to Serpukhov.’

‘Can’t be done,’ said Andrei Andreevich, pulling his Makarov pistol out of his trouser pocket. ‘There’s panic at the station. I’ve posted all the loyal men at the entrances to the tunnels on the Circle, to make sure at least that no one disappears from here.’

‘You can reassure them!’ Homer responded hesitantly. ‘We’ve found out… The fever can be cured. By radiation. Tell them.’

‘Radiation?’ The commandant pulled a sour face. ‘Do you really believe that? Then fire ahead, you have my blessing!’ He saluted the old man buffoonishly, slammed the door shut and locked himself in his own office. What should Homer and the girl and the musician do now? They couldn’t even escape from here. But where were the other two? The old man went out into the corridor, pressing his hand against his pounding heart. He ran into the station, calling out her name. He couldn’t see them anywhere. Dobrynin was in chaos: women with children and men with bundles were besieging the weakened cordons and looters were darting about among the overturned tents, but no one was paying any attention to them. Homer had seen this kind of thing before: next they’d start trampling on those who had fallen, and then shooting at unarmed people.

And at that very moment the tunnel gave a groan.

The wailing and clamouring stopped, replaced by loud exclamations of surprise. The extraordinary, powerful sound was repeated. It was like the roaring battle trumpets of a Roman legion that had lost its way in the millennia and was advancing against Dobrynin Station.

Soldiers started scurrying about, moving aside barriers, and something immense emerged from the mouth of the tunnel… A genuine armoured train! The heavy head of the cabin, jacketed in steel that was studded with rivets, with heavy calibre machine-guns protruding from the slits of two gun ports, then a long, lean body and a second horned head, facing in the opposite direction. Not even Homer had ever come across a monster like this.

Sitting on the raven-black armour plating were faceless idols. Indistinguishable from each other in their full-protection suits, Kevlar vests and outlandish gas masks, with backpacks behind their shoulders, they didn’t seem to belong to this time or this world at all.