Then Sasha would be by herself for the whole day while her father was hunting. She would hunt the slow dragonflies and flying roaches between the flowers that were as yellow as the linkrusta-wallpapers in the trains.
On her toes she crept over the creaking planks, opened the door a bit and laughed silently.
It had been several years since Sasha’s father had last seen a happy smile on his daughters face. He didn’t want to wake her. His leg was swollen, numb and it didn’t stop bleeding. It was said that the bite of a stray dog never healed …
Should he call her? But he hadn’t been at home for 24 hours. Because before he had left for the garages he had entered an apartment complex that they called a “termite hill”, located two blocks from the station, he climbed to the 15th floor and passed out for some time. All that time Sasha probably hadn’t closed an eye – his daughter never slept while he was away … She deserved the rest. They all lied.
Nothing is going to happen to me.
He really would have liked to know what she dreamt off. He couldn’t even relax in his dreams. Only rarely his consciousness let him revisit his sorrow less youth; normally in his dreams he wandered between the familiar dead houses with their empty inners and a good dream was when found an untouched apartment, full of miraculously preserved machines and books.
Every time he fell asleep he hoped to dream about the past. That time when he had just met Sasha’s mother. When he, only twenty had become the commander of the garrison of the station. Back then the inhabitants thought of the metro as a provisional home and not of the collective barracks for the forced labor under the surface where they sat out a life sentence.
Instead he always ended up in the close past, with the events that happened five years ago. That day that had determined his fate and even worse the fate of his daughter …
Once again he stood there, at the head of his fighters.
He held his Kalashnikov so it was ready to fire, with his officer-makarov he could have only put a bullet into his head. Apart from his two dozen military police marksmen there wasn’t a single human left in the station that was still loyal to him.
The mob raged, swelled in size and shook the barricade with dozens of hands. The first chaotic voices had transformed themselves into a rhythmic choir controlled by an invisible director. They still demanded that he stepped down but soon they would demand his head.
This was no spontaneous demonstration. This was the work of provocateurs. He could have tried to identify and liquidate every single one of them, but now it was already too late. When he wanted to stop the rebellion and remain in power there was only one thing left to do: To open fire on the group. It wasn’t too late for that …
His fingers bracketed around an invisible stock, under his swollen eye lids his pupils twitched restless from one side to the other, his lips moved and formed silent orders. The black puddle he laid in was getting bigger with every minute. And the bigger it got the more life had left him.
“Where are they?”
Something ripped Homer out of the dark sea of unconsciousness. He shook himself like a fish on a hook, he gasped cramped for air and starred at the brigadier with an insane look. The dark, zyclopic colossus still towered over him, the guardians of the Nagornaya and reached with their long fingers after him; without any struggle they would rip out his legs or crush his ribs. They appeared behind Homers closed eyes and only disappeared slowly, even unwillingly when he opened his eyes again.
He tried to jump up again but the stranger’s hand that had held his shoulder with a light grip now held him like the iron hook that had pulled him out of his nightmares again.
He started to breath normally again and concentrated himself scared on the with machine oil covered face and the shiny eyes … Hunter, he was still alive?
Homer carefully turned his head to the left, then to the right: Where they still in the cursed station?
No, this was an empty and clean tunnel. You could almost no longer see the fog of the Nagornaya that had covered the exits anywhere. Hunter must have carried him over a kilometer. Reassured Homer broke down. He asked him again, just to be sure: “Where are they?”
“Nobody is here. You are safe”
“These creatures … Did they knock me unconscious?”
He wondered and held the back of his head.
“No that was me. I had to knock you down, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able get you out of there in your panic.
You could have hurt me”
Finally Hunter loosened his iron grip, stood up stiffly and moved his hand to his officer’s belt where the Stetschkin hung. On the other side hung a leather box and Homer didn’t know what its function was. The brigadier opened it and took out a flat messing bottle. He shook it, opened it and took a deep sip without asking Homer if wanted one too. How he had closed his eyes for a second, it run down cold Homer’s back: His left eye hadn’t fully closed.
“Where’s Achmed? What happened to him?” Homer remembered and he felt cold.
“He’s dead.” His answer almost sounded indifferent.
“Dead.” Homer echoed mechanically.
The moment the giant hand ripped the hand of his comrade out of his he kne No living being could escape its grip. Homer had just been lucky that the Nagornaya hadn’t chosen him. The old man turned around again. He still couldn’t believe that Achmed was gone forever. He stared at his hand, it was scraped and bloody. He hadn’t been able to hold on to him. He didn’t have the strength.
“He knew that he would die.” He said silently.
“Why did they take him out of all of us and not me?”
“There was still life in him.” Answered the Brigadier.
“They feed on human life”
Homer shook his head. “That isn’t fair. He had small children. So many things that hold him here … Well held him here … But I have been looking for those for eternity …”
“Would you eat moss?” Hunter cut off Homer and ended the conversation with him pulling Homer back onto his feet. “We got to keep moving. We’re late”
While Homer ran behind Hunter he tried to figure out why he and Achmed had ended up at the Nagornaya. Like a flesh eating orchid the station had clouded their mind with its miasma and lured them back in. But they hadn’t turned around a single time, that much was sure for Homer. So he started to believe in the distortion of space in the tunnels now, like those simple minded comrades of his on guard duty. The solution was a lot easier. He stopped and slapped himself on the forehead: The connecting track! Some hundred meters behind the Nagornaya there was a track for trains to turn around. It turned around at a sharp angle and that’s why they were following the wall blindly had reached the parallel track and then when the wall suddenly disappeared, ran back to the station.
So much for magic! But there was still another thing that needed an explanation. “Wait!” He yelled after Hunter.
But he just continued to march forward as if he was deaf, so the old man had to catch up to him while breathing heavily. When he had caught up to the Brigadier he tried to look him into the eyes and said: “Why did you leave us to our fate?”
“Me you two?”
There was a sarcastic tone in his emotionless, metallic voice. Homer bit himself on his tongue. True, it had been him and Achemd that had ran from the station and left the Brigadier alone with the demons …
The more Homer thought about how raging and helplessly Hunter had fought at the Nagornaya the more he realized that the inhabitants of the station hadn’t accepted the fight that Hunter had tried to force on them. Out of fear? Or had they seen him as a part of the family?
Homer gathered his courage – there was only one question left, the hardest one of all. “At the Nagornaya … Why did they ignore you?”
Several minutes passed; Homer didn’t dare to ask again. Then Hunter gave him a short, almost inaudible and grumpy answer: “Would you eat tainted flesh?”
The beauty of the world will redeem yo
u. Her father had once said jokingly.
Sasha had put the colorful teabag back in the pocket of her jacket with a red face. The small quadratic plastic hull that still had a faint aroma of green tea was her greatest treasure. And a reminder that the universe wasn’t just the body of the station and its four tunnels buried twenty meters below the graveyard that had once been Moscow. The teabag was some kind of magical portal that moved Sasha back by centuries and thousands of kilometers. It was so much more, something enormously important.
In the wet climate of the metro paper decayed quickly.
Decay and mold didn’t just eat books and brochures, they destroyed their entire past. Without pictures and chronicles the already limping human mind stumbled and ran into the wrong direction like a man without his crutches.
The hull of the teabag was out of a material that mold and the time couldn’t harm. Sasha’s father had once said that it would take thousands of years before this material would fall apart. So even their decedents would one day inherit this teabag, she thought.
It was, even though it was a miniature, a real picture. A golden frame that was as bright as on the day it came from the conveyor belt surrounded a view that robbed Sasha of her breath. Steep walls of stone, covered in dreamlike mist, a far reaching pine forest that held on the almost vertical mountains, roaring waterfalls that fell down from the highest tip of the mountain into an abyss, a purple shine that spoke of the nearing dawn … In her entire life she had never seen anything more beautiful.
She could sit there for a long time, with the teabag in her hand and just look at it. The mist in the morning that covered the mountains held her view magically. And even though she had read all the books that her father had brought from his expeditions before they sold them, the read words did not suffice to describe what she felt looked at these one centimeter tall mountains and breathing in the smell of the pine needles. It was a world so far from their reality but it had a strong pull …
The sweet longing and the eternal expectation of what the sun would see first … The endless thoughts about what was behind the sign with the brand of the tea: A strange tree?
The nest of an eagle? One of those houses that held on the slope and in which she would live with her father?
It was him that had given her the teabag when she was five years old. Back then with content, because it was a real rarity.
He had wanted to surprise her with real tea and she had gathered all her courage to drink it like medicine.
But the plastic hull had fascinated her from the very start. Back then he had explained her that it wasn’t a very artful illustration: A conventional Chinese province, just good enough for the print of a teabag. But teen years later Sasha still viewed it with the same eyes as on the day she had gotten the gift from her father.
Her father on the other hand thought that the teabag was just a shabby replacement for the whole world. And every time she fell into this trance and looked at this badly drawn fantasy he felt the unspoken accusation for their mutilated, bloodless life. He tried to hold her back every time, without any success. With almost anger he asked her for the hundredth time what she liked about this old packaging for a gram of tea. For the hundredth time she put it back into her pocket and answered embarrassed:”Father … I think it is beautiful!”
If Homer hadn’t been there Hunter wouldn’t have stopped for a second, but Homer needed three times as long for the way. He would have never moved so secure and self-confident through the tunnel. For the transit through the Nagornaya the group had paid a terrible price, but at least two out of three had made it. And all three could have survived if they wouldn’t have been lost in the fog. The price wasn’t higher than usual: Nothing had happened there that hadn’t happened before, neither at the Nachimovski prospect nor at the Nagornaya.
So it wasn’t because of the tunnels that lead to the Tulskaya? Now they were completely silent, but it was a disastrous and tense silence. Sure: Even at a totally unknown station Hunter could feel dangers that waited for them hundredths of meters in advance. But was it possible that his intuition would leave him exactly here, here were at least a dozen experienced fighters had suffered the same fate?
Approaching the Nagatinskaya he hoped he would have the solution for all the secrets … Homer struggled to keep his thoughts together because they ran to fast.
Still, he tried to think about what waited for them at the station that he had once loved so much. The myth gatherer imagined that the legendary satanic legation had emerged at the Nagatinskaya or that the inhabitants had been eaten by migrating rats on their way for food through the tunnels that humans couldn’t pass through. Even if Homer would have been alone he wouldn’t have turned around for anything in the world. In all these years at the Sevastopolskaya he had forgotten to fear death. When he had embarked on this journey he had known that it could be his last journey and he was ready to sacrifice his remaining time for it.
A mere half an hour after the encounter with the monsters of the Nagornaya they had become the horrors of his memories.
Even more, while he listened to his thoughts, he felt faint movement in the deeps of his soul: Somewhere deep down inside him something had been created or awoken, the thing that he had wanted so much. That what he had searched for on his dangerous adventures, that which he had never been able to find at home …
Now he had a real reason to delay death with all his power. He would allow it after his work was done.
The last war had been more brutal than all that had come before it and it had only taken a few days. Since the Second World War three generations had passed, the last veterans had died and the living didn’t fear war anymore. The collective insanity that had robbed millions of humans of their humanity had once again become a simple political instrument.
The fatal game had become more like routine with every day that had passed and in the end there was no more time to make the right decision. The ban of using atomic weapons was dropped under the table in the heat of the fight:
In the first act of the drama they had hung their rifle on the wall and in the one before the last they had actually fired it. It didn’t matter who had pulled the trigger first anymore.
All big cities on the earth were turned into ashes and rubble at the same time. Even the few that had an anti-rocket shield were destroyed; they remained intact from the outside but radiation, chemical and biological weapons killed the majority of the population instantly. The unstable radio transmission between the few survivors ended after a few years. From that moment the world had ended for the inhabitants of the metro and neighboring lines.
While before the earth had been explored and colonized now it had returned to the borderless ocean of chaos and oblivion of ancient times. The small islands of civilization sank into the depths, one after another, without oil or power humanity returned to the Stone Age.
An age of terror began.
For century’s scientist have tried to return history from its almost destroyed papyri, parchments and foliants. With the invention of the press newspapers have continued to weave the fabric of history. And then the chronics of the last centuries almost no longer had any gaps in it: Almost every gesture, every move of those who controlled the world had been carefully documented.
Now the presses of the world had been destroyed with a single blow, or they had been abandoned. The looms of history stood still. In a world without a future they were no longer needed. The shreds of this fabric were only held together by a single, thin thread.
In the first years after the disaster Nikolai Ivanowitsch had tried to find his family in the overcrowded stations. It had been in vain. He had abandoned all hope already but alone and lost as he was he now stumbled through the darkness of the underground because in this kind of afterlife he didn’t know what to do with himself. The thread of Arianne – the sense of life – that could have showed him the exit out of this never ending maze had fallen out of his hand.
In his longing for the pas
t he had began to collect the newspapers, to remember and to dream.
He searched the articles and reports to find out if they could’ve prevented the apocalypse. One day he started to write down the events in his station in some kind of article.
And so it happened that Nikolai Ivanowitsch had found a new thread: He decided to become chronicler of the metro, author of the youngest history, from the end of the world to his own. His disorganized, aimless collection had now a purpose: To restore the damaged fabric of time and continue to weave it further.
The others saw Nikolai Ivanowitsch’s passion for harmless nonsense. Out of his own will he sacrificed his pay for old newspapers and turned every corner of his personal space into an archive. He volunteered for guard duty, because there at the fire at meter 300 wild men told themselves the craziest stories like little boys, where he caught every granule of truth about the rest of the metro. Out of the myriad of rumors he filtered out the facts and wrote them down in his books.
Even though this work distracted him he knew how useless it was. After his death all these reports would turn do dust without any care. The day he wouldn’t return home they were only good to make fire anymore.
From the yellowed paper only smoke and ash would remain, the atoms would enter new connections and forms, to be short: You couldn’t destroy the material. But what he really tried to preserve would, all that unimaginable, ethereal that was on these pages would be lost forever.
Humans worked that way: What stood in the school books remained in their heads up to graduation. And when they forgot the learned afterwards they did it with a true sense of relief. The memories of men were like the sand of the desert. Numbers, dates and names of unimportant people disappeared in it without a trace, as if you would have thrown a stick into a wandering dune.
Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) Page 8