Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034

The crowd gobbled down her words, burped irritably and started moving forward again towards the men who were trying to hold it back. The machine-gunner lashed it with a fierce burst of fire and several people sat down on the ground with a groan. The other soldiers’ automatics barked briefly. The mass of bodies seethed, advancing implacably, ready to trample the besieged men and Sasha and Leonid, ready to tear them to pieces.

But then something happened.

The flute started to sing, stealthily at first, but then with growing confidence and power. Nothing could have been more stupid and less appropriate in that situation. The soldiers guarding the tunnel gazed at the musician in stupefaction, the crowd roared and laughed and started pressing forward again. Leonid took no notice. Probably he wasn’t playing it for them, but for himself – the same amazing melody that had enchanted Sasha, the same one that always captivated dozens of listeners, luring them to him.

Perhaps it was because no worse way to control the rioting and pacify the sick people could possibly be imagined, perhaps it was the touching idiocy of someone who could do something like this, and not the magic of the flute at all, but the crowd relaxed its pressure slightly. Or perhaps the musician really managed to remind these people who had surrounded him, ready to grind him to dust… Remind them of something…

The shooting stopped and Leonid stepped forward, still holding his flute. As if he were facing a normal audience that would burst into applause and shower him with cartridges at any moment.

For a split second the girl thought she could see her father among the listeners – smiling and at peace. So this was where he had been waiting for her… Sasha remembered that Leonid had told her this melody could ease pain.

There was a sudden, premature rumbling in the metal innards of the hermetic door.

Was the advance unit running ahead of schedule? In that case, the situation at Tula couldn’t be so very difficult after all! Perhaps the intruders had left the station a long time ago, leaving the door locked?

The group spread out and the soldiers took shelter behind the projecting flanges of the tunnel liners. Only four of them remained beside Denis Mikhailovich, right in front of the door, holding their weapons at the ready.

This was it. Now the massive door would slowly move aside and a couple of minutes later forty heavily armed Sebastopolite assault troops would burst into Tula. Any resistance would be crushed and the station would be taken in an instant. It had all turned out a lot simpler than the colonel expected.

Denis Mikhailovich didn’t even have time to give the order to don gas masks.

The column reformed, becoming broader – now it was six men abreast, occupying the whole width of the tunnel. The first rank bristled with the barrels of flamethrowers, the second row held its rifles at the ready. They crept forward like black lava, confident and unhurried.

Peeping out from behind the broad backs of the alien warriors, Homer saw the whole scene in the white light of the searchlights: a handful of soldiers defending the tunnel and two thin figures – Sasha and Leonid – and a host of nightmarish creatures surrounding them. And everything inside the old man seemed to freeze up.

Leonid was playing astoundingly, miraculously, with more compelling inspiration than ever before. The horde of ugly, misshapen creatures was listening to him greedily and the soldiers had half-risen from their lying positions in order to see the musician more clearly. And his melody divided the enemies like a glass wall, keeping them apart, preventing them from grappling with each other in a final, deadly skirmish.

‘Stand by!’ one of the dozens of black men ordered – but which one?

The entire front rank went down on one knee together and the second row raised its sniper’s rifles.

‘Sasha!’ Homer shouted.

The girl swung round sharply towards him and screwed her eyes up against the blinding brightness. Holding her open hand out in front of her, she walked against the torrent of light flooding out of those flashlights as slowly as if she were fighting a tempestuous wind. Scalded by the bright rays, the crowd grumbled and groaned, bunching tighter together…

The aliens waited.

Sasha walked right up to their formation.

‘Where are you? I need to talk to you, please!’

No one answered her.

‘We’ve found a way to cure the disease! It can be cured! You don’t have to kill anyone! There’s a cure!’

The phalanx of black stone statues remained silent.

‘Please! I know you don’t want to… You’re only trying to save them… And yourself.’

And then a dull voice rang out above the battle formation, as if it wasn’t coming from any single individual.

‘Stand aside. I don’t want to kill you.’

‘You don’t have to kill anyone! There’s a cure!’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘I beg you!’ Sasha shouted, straining her voice into a shriek.

‘The station has to be purged.’

‘Don’t you want to change everything? Why are you doing the same thing you’ve already done once? That other time, with the Black Ones? Why don’t you want forgiveness?’

The idols didn’t respond any more; the crowd started creeping closer.

‘Sasha!’ Homer whispered imploringly to the girl, but she didn’t hear him.

‘There’s no way to change anything. No one to ask forgiveness from.’ The painful words finally came. ‘I raised my hand against… Against… And I’ve been punished.’

‘It’s all inside you!’ Sasha shouted, not giving up. ‘You can vindicate yourself! Prove your case! Why can’t you see that it’s the mirror? It’s the reflection of what you did then, a year ago! And now you can act differently… Listen to me. Give me a chance…

And earn yourself a chance!’

‘I have to destroy the monster,’ the formation said hoarsely.

‘You can’t!’ Sasha shouted. ‘No one can! It’s in me, it’s sleeping in everyone! It’s a part of our soul, a part of our body… And when it wakes up… You can’t kill it, you can’t slaughter it! You can only lull it back to sleep.’

A grubby soldier slipped through the misshapen creatures and squeezed past the frozen black ranks to the hermetic door and the iron box of a transmitter. He grabbed the microphone and shouted something into it. But then a silencer champed briefly and the soldier fell silent. Sensing blood, the crowd immediately came to life, swelling up and roaring savagely.

The musician put the flute to his lips and started playing, but the magic had dissipated; someone shot at him, he dropped his instrument and grabbed his stomach with both hands.

Fire flickered on the flared muzzles of the flamethrowers. The phalanx sprouted new gun barrels and took a step forward.

Sasha dashed towards Leonid, ready to smash herself against the crowd that had already closed around him where he lay and didn’t want to let the girl have him.

‘No, no!’ she shouted, unable to restrain herself any longer. And then, alone against hundreds of nightmarish monsters, alone against a legion of killers, alone against the whole world, she said stubbornly:

‘I want a miracle!’

Thunder rumbled in the distance, the vaults shuddered, the crowd shrank together and retreated, and the aliens also started backing away. Fine rivulets of water ran across the ground, the first drops started falling from the ceiling and the dark streams gurgled louder and louder.

‘A breach!’ someone howled.

The black men hastily moved away from the station, withdrawing to the hermetic door, and the old man ran with them, looking round at Sasha. She didn’t move. The girl held up her palms and her face to the water gushing down on her… and laughed.