Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

Hansa had annexed some of the adjacent radial line stations, but most of them had been left to themselves and became transformed, with Hansa’s connivance, into grey areas, where people conducted the kind of business in which the disdainful bosses of Hansa preferred not to be implicated.

Naturally, the radial transfer stations were flooded with Hansa’s spies and they had been bought, lock, stock and barrel, by its merchants, but they remained nominally independent. Serpukhov Station was one of these. A train had halted forever in one of the stretches of line leading from it, after failing to reach the next station, Tula. Rendered habitable by the Protestant sectarian believers who now occupied it, the train was indicated on Istomin’s map with a laconic Latin cross: it had become an isolated homestead, lost in a black wasteland. If not for the missionaries roaming round the neighbouring stations, with their insatiable greed for lost souls, Istomin wouldn’t have had any complaints about the sectarians. But in any case these sheepdogs of God didn’t roam as far as Sebastopol, and they didn’t cause any particular hindrance to passing travellers, except perhaps by delaying them slightly with their intense conversations about salvation. And apart from that, the other tunnel from Tula to Serpukhov was entirely clear, so the local convoys used that one.

Istomin ran his glance down the line again. Tula Station? A settlement gradually running to seed, picking up the crumbs dropped by Sebastopolite convoys marching through and the sly traders from Serpukhov. The people lived on whatever they could turn their hand to: some mended various sorts of mechanical junk, some went to the Hansa border to look for work, squatting on their haunches for days at a time, waiting for the next foreman with the high-handed manners of a slave driver. ‘They live poorly too, but they don’t have that slippery, villainous Serpukhov look in their eyes,’ thought Istomin. ‘And there’s a lot more order there. It’s probably the danger that binds them together.’

The next station, Nagatino, was marked on his map with a short stroke of the pen – empty. A half-truth: no one loitered there for long, but sometimes there was a motley swarm of rabble at the station, leading a subhuman, twilight existence. Couples who had fled from prying eyes twined their limbs together in the pitch darkness. Sometimes the glow of a feeble little campfire sprang up among the columns, with the shadows of tunnel bandits and murderers swarming around it. But only the ignorant or the absolutely desperate stayed here overnight – by no means all the station’s visitors were human. If you stared hard into the trembling, whispering gloom that filled Nagatino, you could sometimes glimpse silhouettes straight out of a nightmare. And every now and then the homeless vagabonds scattered, if only briefly, when a bloodcurdling howl rang through the stale air as some poor soul was dragged off into a lair to be devoured at leisure.

The tramps didn’t dare set foot beyond Nagatino, and from there all the way to the defensive boundaries of Sebastopol, it was ‘no-man’s-land’. A strictly notional name – of course, the area had its own masters, who guarded its boundaries, and even the Sebastopolite reconnaissance teams preferred not to come up against them.

But now something new had appeared in the tunnels. Something unprecedented, swallowing up everyone who tried to follow a route that supposedly had been thoroughly explored long ago. And who knew if Istomin’s station, even if it called on every inhabitant who was fit to bear arms, would be able to marshal a force strong enough to overcome it. Istomin got up laboriously off his chair, shuffled over to the map and marked with an indelible pencil the stretch of line running from the point labelled ‘Serpukhov’ to the point labelled ‘Nakhimov Prospect’. He drew a thick question mark beside it. He meant to put it beside the Prospect, but it ended up right beside Sebastopol.

At first glance Sebastopol Station appeared deserted. On the platform there was no sign of the familiar army tents in which people usually lived at other stations. There were only forms vaguely perceived by the light of a few dim bulbs, the anthill profiles of machine-gun emplacements, built out of sandbags, but the firing positions were empty, and dust lay thick on the slim square columns. Everything was arranged to make sure that if an outsider found his way in here, he would be certain to think the station had been abandoned long ago.

However, if the uninvited guest got the idea of lingering here, even for a short while, he risked staying forever. The machine-gun squads and snipers on twenty-four-hour duty in adjacent Kakhovka Station occupied their positions in those emplacements in a matter of seconds and the weak light was drowned in the pitiless glare of mercury lamps on the ceiling, searing the retinal nerves of men and monsters accustomed to the darkness of the tunnels.

The platform was the Sebastopolites’ final, most comprehensively planned line of defence. Their homes were located in the belly of this stage-set, in the technical area under the platform. Below the granite slabs of the floor, hidden away from the prying eyes of strangers, was another storey, with a floor area as large as the main hall, but divided up into numerous compartments. Well-lit, dry, warm rooms, smoothly humming machines for purifying air and water, hydroponic hothouses… When they retreated down here, even further underground, the station’s inhabitants were enfolded in a sense of security and comfort.

Homer knew the decisive battle he would face was not in the northern tunnels, but at home. He made his way along the narrow corridor, past the half-open doors of other people’s apartments, dragging his feet slower and slower as he approached his own door. He needed to think through his tactics one more time and rehearse his lines: he was running out of time.

‘What can I do about it? It’s an order. You know what the situation’s like. They didn’t even bother to ask me. Stop acting like a little child! That’s just plain ridiculous! Of course I didn’t ask to be taken! I can’t do that. What are you saying? Of course I can’t. Refuse? That’s desertion!’ he mumbled to himself, switching between determined outrage and a wheedling, cajoling, affectionate tone.

When he reached the doorway of his room, he started mumbling it all over again. No, there was no way tears could be avoided, but he wasn’t going to back down. The old man pulled his head into his shoulders, readying himself for battle, and turned down the door handle.

Nine and a half square metres of floor space – a great luxury that he had spent five years waiting in line for, shifting about from one dormitory to another. Two square metres were taken up by a two-tier army bunkbed and one by a dining table, covered with an elegant tablecloth. Another three were occupied by a huge heap of newspapers, reaching right up to the ceiling. If he had been a solitary bachelor, then one fine day this mountain would certainly have collapsed, burying him underneath it. But fifteen years earlier he had met a woman who was not only prepared to tolerate this huge pile of dusty junk in her tiny home, but even willing to keep it neat and tidy, so that it wouldn’t transform her domestic nest into a paper Pompeii.

She was prepared to tolerate very many things. The interminable newspaper cuttings with alarming headlines like ‘Arms Race Heats Up’, ‘Americans Test New Anti-Rocket Defence’, ‘Our Nuclear Shield is Growing Stronger’, ‘Provocative Acts Continue’ and ‘Our Patience is Exhausted’, which covered the walls of the little room, like wallpaper, from top to bottom. His all-night sessions, hunched over a heap of school exercise books with a well-chewed ballpoint pen in his hand and the electric light burning – with a heap of paper like that in their home, candles were completely out of the question. His humorous, clownish nickname, which he bore with pride and others spoke with a condescending smile.