Arkady Strugatsky: The Doomed City

Suddenly the ridge was swarming with unbelievable silvery-gray, monstrously ugly ghosts, with thousands of blood-red, glittering eyes, and millions of damp fangs flashing in savage grins, and a whole forest of impossibly long, shaggy arms waving in the air. In the light of the headlamps, the dust rose up over them in a dense wall, and a solid deluge of broken bricks, rocks, bottles, and lumps of filth poured down on the column.

This was too much for Andrei. He ducked into the cabin, huddled into the far corner, and held the tire iron out in front of himself, frozen, as if this were a nightmare. He was totally dazed, and when a dark body obscured the open door, he yelled out, without even hearing his own voice, and started jabbing the iron bar into the soft, terrifying thing that resisted and came creeping toward him, and he kept on jabbing until Izya's plaintive howl -- "It's me, you idiot!" -- brought him to his senses. And then Izya climbed into the cabin, slammed the door behind him, and announced in a surprisingly calm voice, "D'you know what they are? They're monkeys. What bastards!"

Andrei didn't understand him at first, then he understood but didn't believe him. "Is that right?" he said, stepping onto the running board and glancing around.

Right: they were monkeys. Very large, very hairy, very fierce to look at, but not devils and not ghosts, only monkeys. Andrei felt a hot flush of shame and relief, and at the same moment something solid and heavy smashed into his ear so hard that he smashed his other ear against the roof of the cabin.

"Everyone into the trucks!" an imperious voice roared somewhere up ahead. "Stop panicking! They're baboons! Nothing to be afraid of! Get in the trucks and reverse!"

There was sheer pandemonium in the column: mufflers popping, headlamps flaring up and going out, engines roaring unmercifully, clouds of gray-blue smoke swirling up toward the starless sky. A face flooded with something black and gleaming suddenly dove out of the darkness, hands seized Andrei by the shoulders, shook him like a puppy, and shoved him sideways into the cabin, and immediately the truck in front reversed and smashed into their radiator with a crunch, and the truck behind jerked forward and struck theirs like a tambourine, shifting the trash cans and setting them rattling, and Izya tugged on his shoulder and started hassling him: "Can you drive or can't you? Andrei? Can you?" From out of the bluish smoke came a bloodcurdling howl of despair: "They're killing me! Save me!" and the imperious voice kept roaring -- "Stop panicking! The truck at the back, reverse! Move it!" -- and from above, from the left, from the right, hard objects came raining down, clanking across the hood, smashing into the windscreen, and setting it jangling, and horns incessantly honked and hooted, and the abominable shrieking and howling kept getting louder and louder.

Izya suddenly said, "Well, I'll be going..." and, covering his head with his arms beforehand, he climbed out. He was almost run over by a truck hurtling in the direction of the City -- Andrei caught a glimpse of the tallyman's contorted face among the trashcans. Then Izya disappeared, and Donald appeared without his hat, scraped and scuffed, all covered in mud, flung a pistol down on the seat, sat behind the steering wheel, started up the engine, stuck his head out of the cabin, and started reversing.

Apparently some kind of order had been established after all: the howls of panic faded away, engines roared in unison, and the entire column edged backward little by little. Even the hail of rocks and bottles seemed to have died down a little. The baboons jumped up and down and strutted about on the ridge of garbage but didn't come down -- they just yelled from up there, with their dogs' mouths gaping, and derisively turned their buttocks, gleaming in the light of the headlamps, toward the column of trucks.

The truck bowled along faster and faster, spun its wheels again in a mud-filled pothole, shot out onto the road and swung around. Donald changed gears with a grating sound, stepped on the gas, slammed the door, and flung himself back in the seat. Ahead of them, skipping about in the gloom, were the red taillights of trucks headed for the City, going flat out.

We've broken free, Andrei thought in relief, and warily felt at his ear. It had swollen up and it was throbbing. Would you believe it -- baboons! Where could baboons have come from? And such great, hefty ones... and so many of them! There had never been any baboons here... if you didn't count Izya Katzman, that is. And why precisely baboons? Why not tigers? He squirmed in his seat, and at that moment the truck jolted. Andrei went flying up and smashed back down onto something hard and unfamiliar. He stuck his hand under his backside, pulled out a pistol, and looked at it uncomprehendingly for a second. The pistol was small and black, with a short barrel and a ribbed handle. Then Donald suddenly said, "Careful. Give me that."

Andrei handed over the pistol and watched for a while as Donald squirmed around and stuck the gun in the back pocket of his boilersuit. Andrei suddenly broke out in a sweat. "So it was you up there... shooting?" he asked hoarsely.

Donald didn't answer. He blinked their single surviving headlamp as he overtook yet another truck. Several baboons darted through an intersection, right in front of their radiator, but Andrei wasn't interested in them.

"Where did you get a gun from, Don?"

Again Donald didn't answer; he just made a strange gesture with his hand -- an attempt to pull a nonexistent hat down over his eyes.

"I'll tell you what, Don," Andrei said firmly. "We're going to City Hall right now. You're going to hand in the pistol and explain how you got hold of it."

"Don't talk nonsense," Donald responded, screwing up his face. "Why don't you just give me a cigarette instead?"

Andrei mechanically took out his pack. "It's not nonsense," he said. "I don't want to know anything. You kept it quiet -- OK, it's your private business. And anyway, I trust you... But in the City only bandits have guns. I don't want to make anything of it, but basically, I don't understand you... basically, you've got to hand it in and explain everything. And don't go acting like it's all nonsense. I've seen the state you've been in just recently. Better go and tell them the whole story at once."

Donald turned his head for a second and looked into Andrei's face. It wasn't clear what that was in his eyes -- maybe derision, maybe distress -- but at that moment he seemed very old to Andrei, very infirm and somehow haggard.

Andrei felt embarrassed and perplexed, but he immediately pulled himself together and repeated firmly, "Hand it in and tell them everything. Everything!"

"Do you realize those monkeys are headed for the City?" Donald asked.

"So what?" said Andrei, bewildered.

"Yes indeed -- so what?" said Donald, and burst into grisly laughter.

2

The monkeys were already in the City. They were dashing along the cornices of buildings, dangling from lampposts like bunches of grapes, dancing at intersections in macabre, shaggy hordes, clinging to windows, flinging cobblestones torn up out of the road, and pursuing frenzied people who had fled into the streets in nothing but their underwear.

Donald stopped the truck several times to let fugitives up onto the back; the trash cans had been flung off a long time ago. Once a deranged horse, harnessed to a wagon, dashed across in front of the truck, but now there was no one sleeping in the wagon, bundled up in tarpaulin, not any longer; squatting in it, swaying to and fro, waving its massive, long, hairy arms about and wailing stridently, was a huge, burly, silvery baboon. Andrei saw the wagon crash straight into a lamppost and the horse go hurtling on, trailing the snapped traces behind it, while the baboon flitted jauntily across onto the nearest drainpipe and disappeared up onto the roof.