Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

The train stopped. The aliens encased in armour paid no attention to the curious onlookers who came running up: they flew down onto the platform and lined up in three ranks. Swinging round as one man in perfect synchronisation, like a machine, they lumbered off towards the connecting passage to Serpukhov, and their tramping drowned out the awed whispers and the children’s crying. The old man hurried after them, trying to spot Hunter among the dozens of warriors. They were all almost the same height, their anonymous bulletproof jumpsuits fitted without a single wrinkle, stretched taut across their massively broad shoulders, and they were all armed in the same menacing fashion: backpack flamethrowers and nine-millimetre sniper’s rifles with silencers. No insignia, no coats of arms, no badges of rank. Probably he was one of the three striding along at the front?

The old man ran along the column, waving his hand, glancing into the observation slits of the gas masks and always encountering the same impassive, indifferent gaze. None of the aliens responded, no one recognised Homer. So was Hunter even with them? He had to show up, he had to!

The old man didn’t see either Sasha or Leonid on his way through the passage. Could good judgement really have prevailed, and the musician have hidden the girl somewhere out of harm’s way? If they would just wait out the bloodbath somewhere, then afterwards Homer would come to an agreement with Andrei Andreevich, provided the commandant hadn’t already blown his brains out.

The formation forged ahead, slicing through the crowd, and no one dared to stand in its way, even the Hansa border guards silently made way for it. Homer decided to follow the column – he had to make sure that Sasha wouldn’t try to do anything. No one tried to drive the old man away, they took no more notice of him than of some mutt barking after a hand trolley.

As they stepped into the tunnel, the three men at the head of the column lit up their million-candle-power flashlights, burning out the darkness ahead. None of them spoke and the silence was oppressive and unnatural. It was their training, of course, but the old man couldn’t help feeling that in honing the skills of the body, these men had suppressed the skills of the soul. And now he was observing a perfected killing machine, in which none of the elements had a will of its own, and only one, who from the outside was indistinguishable from all the others, carried the programme of action. When he gave the order ‘Fire!’ the others would commit Tula to the flames, and likewise any other station, together with everything still living in it.

Thank God, they didn’t march through the line where the sectarians’ train was stuck. The unfortunates had been granted a brief respite before their Day of Judgement: the warriors would annihilate Tula first, and only turn on them afterwards. Obeying some signal that Homer couldn’t see, the column suddenly slowed down. A moment later, he realised what was happening: they were already very close to the station. The silence was as transparent as glass, with someone’s heartrending howls scraping on it like a nail…

And there was another sound, absolutely incongruous and barely audible. Trickling out drop by drop, making the old man doubt his own reason, miraculous music greeted the alien visitors.

The phone had swallowed up the old man completely and Sasha decided she couldn’t find a better moment to run for it. She edged out of the reception room, waited for Leonid outside and led him after her – first to the passage to Serpukhov, and then into the tunnel that would take them to the people who needed them. To the people whose lives she could save.

The tunnel that would also reunite her with Hunter.

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Sasha asked the musician.

‘Yes,’ he said with a smile, ‘but I suspect that I’m finally doing something worthwhile.’

‘You don’t have to go with me, you know. What if we die there? You could just stay at the station and not go anywhere!’

‘A man’s future is concealed from his knowledge,’ said Leonid, holding up his finger in a professorial gesture and puffing out his cheeks.

‘You decide for yourself what it’s going to be,’ Sasha retorted.

‘Oh, come on,’ the musician laughed. ‘We’re all just rats running through a maze with little sliding doors in the passages. Whoever it is that’s studying us sometimes pulls them up and sometimes pushes them down. And if the door at Sport Station is down right now, there’s no way you’re going to get in there, no matter how hard you scratch at it. And if there’s a trap after the next little door, you’ll fall into it in any case, even if you can sense that something’s wrong, because there isn’t any other way to go. The choice is basically keep on running or croak in protest.’

‘Don’t you resent having a life like this?’ asked Sasha, knitting her brows.

‘I resent the fact that the way my spine is constructed doesn’t allow me to raise my head and look at whoever’s running the experiment,’ the musician responded.

‘There isn’t any maze,’ said Sasha, biting her lip. ‘And rats can even gnaw through cement.’

‘You’re a rebel,’ Leonid laughed. ‘And I’m a conformist.’

‘That’s not true,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You believe that people can be changed.’

‘I’d like to believe it,’ the musician objected.

They passed a hastily abandoned guard post. Embers were still glowing in the extinguished campfire with a greasy, crumpled magazine full of pictures of naked people lying beside it and an abandoned Hansa standard dangled forlornly, half-torn off the wall.

Ten minutes later they came across the first body. The corpse was barely recognisable as human. It had flung its arms and legs out wide, as if it was really tired, and the limbs were so bloated that the clothes on them had split. The face was more terrible than any of the monsters Sasha had seen in her short life.

‘Careful!’ said Leonid, catching hold of her hand to stop her going near the corpse. ‘It’s infectious!’

‘So what?’ said Sasha asked. ‘There’s a cure, isn’t there? Where we’re going, everyone’s infectious.’ They heard a rumble of shots up ahead and shouting in the distance.

‘We’re just in time,’ the musician remarked. ‘It looks like they didn’t wait for your friend either…’

Sasha gave him a frightened look, then replied with passionate conviction.

‘It’s all right, we just have to tell them! They think they’re all doomed… We just have to give them hope.”

Another corpse lay right by the door, staring into the ground – this time it was human. Beside it the iron box of a field communications device was spluttering and hissing desperately. Someone was clearly trying to rouse the sentry.

Several men were lying, hidden behind scattered sandbags, at the very exit from the tunnel. There seemed to be one machine-gunner and two men with automatics, and that was the entire blocking unit. Further ahead, where the narrow tunnel walls widened out and the platform of Tula Station began, a terrible crowd was raging and seething, menacing the men under siege. It was a jumble of the sick and seemingly healthy, normal people and monsters mutilated by the illness. Some of them had flashlights, others no longer needed light.

The men lying down were guarding the tunnel. But they were running out of cartridges, shots sounded less and less often and the brazen crowd was creeping closer and closer.

‘Reinforcements?’ one of the besieged men asked Sasha. ‘Guys, they got through to Dobrynin! Reinforcements!’

The multi-headed monster became more agitated and pressed forward.

‘People!’ shouted Sasha. ‘There is a cure. We’ve found the cure! You’re not going to die! Please, just be patient!’