This barred of tunnel held homers look magically and when he was finally able to take his gaze from it he was thinking that this line wasn’t as lifeless as many thought at the Sevastopolskaya.
Then they passed the Warschavskaya, a horrible rusted and with fungus covered station that looked like a body that had laid to long in water. The with tiles covered walls sweated some kind of murky fluid and through the half opened hermetic door a cold wind blew from the surface as if a giant creature tried to breathe air into this rotten station. The hysterical ticking sound of the Geiger counter exhorted them to leave this place as fast as possible.
They were already approaching the Kaschirskaya when the system stopped working and the indicator stopped at the end of the scale. Homer felt a bitter smell on his tongue.
“Where did it go down?’ Asked Hunter.
The voice of the brigadier was hard to hear as if Homer had put his head into a full bathtub. He stopped, finally he had an excuse for a just short but welcome pause and pointed with his glove to the southeast. “At the Kantemirovskaya. We think that the ceiling and the airshaft went down with it. Nobody knows for certain”
“That means the Kantemirowvskaya is abandoned?”
“Always has been. Past the Kolomenskaya you won’t find a single human soul”
“Somebody once told me …” Started Hunter but then he went silent, made gesture for Homer to be silent as well.
He seemed to feel some kind of invisible wave. Finally he asked: ”Does anybody know what happened at the Kaschirskaya?”
“How?” Homer didn’t know if his sarcastic tone sounded though the filters.
“Then I am going to tell you. The radiation is so high there that we’ll be cooked in a matter of minutes. With radiation suit or without them. We’re going back”
“Back? To the Sevastopolskaya?”
“Yes, there I’ll go to the surface. Maybe I get further from there.” Said Hunter sunken in thoughts. It was as if he was already planning his route.
Homer couldn’t find the right words: “You want to go alone?”
“I can’t always look after you. I have to watch out that I won’t die too. We won’t get through together anyway. It isn’t even sure that I am going to make it alone”
“Don’t you understand? I have to go with you, I want …”
Homer desperately searched for a reason, an excuse.
“… To do something useful before you die?” ended the brigadier the sentence. His tone was indifferent, even though Homer knew that the filter of the gasmasks filtered any fumes out so that only tasteless sterile air came in and mechanical soulless voices as well.
The old man closed his eyes and tried desperately to remember what he knew about the short stub of the Kachochskaya line, about the irradiated Samoskvorezkaya line, about the way from the Sevastopolskaya and to the Serpuchovskaya … Everything but not to turn back, to not return to this lacking life that had nothing to offer to him anymore but false hopes of great stories and legends.
“Follow me!” He croaked and suddenly walked to the east with such speed that even he was surprised. They walked east, to the Kaschirskaya, into the middle of hell.
She dreamt that she was working with a saw on the iron ring to which she was chained to the wall, the tool shrieked and slipped again and again but every time she had gotten one millimeter into the steel the thin scratch grew together again in front of her eyes.
But Sasha didn’t give up. Again she took the saw with her bloody hands and continued to work the unyielding metal.
The most important thing was to continue, to show no weakness, to not stop working and to not rest.
Her chained feet were swollen and numb. Sasha knew that even if she succeeded to beat the iron she wouldn’t be able to flee because she could no longer control her legs …
She awoke and opened her eyelids.
The chains hadn’t been a dream. Sasha’s hands were handcuffed. She was lying on the dirty loading area of the mining railcar that shrieked monotone while it tortured itself forward. In her mouth was a dirty piece of cloth and her forehead hurt and bleed.
He didn’t kill me, she thought. Why?
From the loading area she could only see a part of the tunnels ceiling. In the randomly moving light the welds of the tunnel rips flickered out of the darkness. Suddenly the tunnel segments disappeared and cracked white paint was to be seen.
What kind of station was this?
This was a bad place: Not just silent but deathly silent, not just empty of people but empty of live and also dark. She had always thought that the station on the other side of the bridge would be full of people and noise. Should she have been mistaken?
The blanket over Sasha didn’t move anymore. The kidnapper climbed on the platform cursing, his with iron spikes fitted soles made a strange sound. He seemed to scan his surroundings. He had already taken of his gasmask because suddenly you could hear him mumble: “There you are. It has been a while.” Relieved he breathed out and beat after something – no kicked against something lifeless, heavy:
A full sack?”
Sasha realized. She bit the stinking rag and started to moan dull, her body cramped. Now she knew where the fat man in the radiation suit had brought her and to whom his words were pointed at.
Even the thought to leave Hunter behind was absurd.
With a few predator like jumps he had caught up to him, held on to his shoulder and shook him painfully.
“What’s going with you?”
“A little further …” Croaked the old man. “I remember, there is still a tunnel that leads directly to the
Samoskvorezkaya line, even before the Kaschirskaya. If we pass through there we get directly into the tunnel and don’t have to run through the station. We circle it and end up directly at the Kolomenskaya. It can’t be far. Please …”
Homer used Hunters hesitation to rip himself free but one of his legs got caught up in the suit and didn’t move and he fell onto the rails. But stood up immediately after that and continued to set one foot in front of the other. Hunter grabbed the old man with ease as if he was a rat, turn him to his face so that the windows of their gasmasks where at the same height. A few seconds he locked at Homer but then he eased his grip. “Ok.” He growled
From now on Homer dragged the brigadier behind him without stopping for a second. The sound of his blood in his ears sounded over the clicking sound of the Geiger counter, his stiff legs were almost no longer under his control and his lungs seemed to explode, struggling to get air.
He had almost overlooked the deep dark stain of the hole. They squeezed through and ran for another few minutes until they left through another new tunnel. The brigadier looked around hastily, went back into the tunnel and asked the old man angry: “Where did you lead me? Have you even been here before?”
Around another thirty meters to left, into the direction that they had to go, the tunnel had been filled from the floor to the ceiling by something that vaguely reminded him of the web of a spider. Homer didn’t have enough air to breathe so the just shook his head. It was the whole truth, he had never been here. Everything else he had heard about this place he wouldn’t tell hunter.
The brigadier held the assault rifle in his left hand, pulled a long straight knife out of his backpack; it was some kind of self-made machete and started to slice the sticky white mass. The dried shells of flying roaches which hung in the web started to shiver and made sounds like rusted bells.
The edges of the wound started to grow back together immediately. The brigadier raised the half transparent piece of spider web, put his search light through and lit the side tunnel. They would need hours to cut their way through. The sticky web had grown in the tunnel in many layers.
Hunter looked at the Geiger counter, made a strange but disappointed noise and started to rip through the web that was between the walls. The web only gave in reluctantly.
It cost them more time then they had. In around ten minutes they ha
d only gotten around thirty feet and the net became denser and denser, it seemed to block the entry like a big piece of cotton. When they finally passed an overgrown vent where an ugly two headed skeleton laid on the ground the brigadier threw his knife to the ground.
They hung in this web like the roaches and even if the creature that had made this giant web was already dead the radiation would do its job.
While Hunter was looking for an exit Homer suddenly remembered what he had heard about this place. He dropped to his knees, shook a few bullets out of his reserve clip, turned them around, opened them with his knife and shook the gunpowder in to his hand.
Hunter realized immediately. A few moments later they stood at the entrance of the side tunnel again, covered a piece of cotton with the coarse grey powder and held a lighter to it.
The powder hissed and started to smoke and suddenly the unimaginable happened, the small flame began to shoot into all direction at the same time, reached the ceiling, wandered along the walls and filled the entire tunnel.
Greedily it ate the web and rushed into the depths.
Like a roaring ball of fire it moved forwards, lit the dark tunnel segments and left burned pieces on the ceiling.
On its way to the Kolomenskaya the fire got narrower and dragged all the air with it. Then the tunnel turned around and the flame which dragged a purple cape behind it was no longer to be seen.
In the distance Homer believed to hear an inhuman, desperate shrieking over of the deafening sound of the fire.
But the old man was still hypnotized by what he had seen so he didn’t entirely trust his senses.
Hunter but his knife back into his backpack and pulled out two new and sealed filter-boxes for their gasmasks. “They were meant for the way back.” He changed his filter and gave the other box to homer. “Because of the fire the radiation is now as high as back then”
The old man nodded his head. The flame had whirled up radioactive particles that had deposited in the web. In the black vacuum of these tunnels there had to be milliards of death bringing molecules. Uncountable small underwater mines hang in this empty room and blocked their way. They couldn’t move out of the way, there was only one way, directly through them.
“If your father could see you now.” The fat man mocked her.
Sasha was sitting directly in front of her father’s corpse that was laying in facedown his blood.
The kidnapper had opened his overall; he was wearing a bleached t-shirt with some kind of happily laughing animal on it.
Every time she raised her eyes her kidnapper blinded her with his flashlight so that she wouldn’t be able to see his face. He had pulled the cloth out of her mouth but Sahsa didn’t even think about pleading for something.
“You don’t look like your mother. Too bad, I was hoping …” The elephant legs in the high, stained rubber boots wandered for the second time around the pillars. Sasah was leaning on them with her back so she didn’t know what was going on. Now his voice came from behind. “Your father must have thought that in time they would forgive him. But there are crimes that don’t lapse … Like slandering and treason.” His obscure silhouette emerged out of the dark from the other side. He stopped in front of her father’s corpse, kicked at it with his boot and spit out thick slime. “Too bad that the old man already died without my help”
The fat man moved the ray of light through the murky, faceless station where mountains of useless scrap were laying around.
At the bicycle the light stopped. “You got a nice place here. I think if not for you, your father would have already hung himself”
While he lit the station Sasha tried to crawl away but one second later the ray of light caught her.
“I can relate.” With one jump her kidnapper stood next to her. “He made a nice lady. But like I said, to bad that she doesn’t look like her mother. It probably bothered him too.
Well whatever.” He kicked her side with his boot so that she fell over. “After all I have crossed the entire metro to get here”
Sasha winced and shook her head.
“You see Petya how easy it was to predict what would going to happen?” Once again he had turned to her father.
“Back then you always brought your rivals in front of the tribunal. And many thanks for the lifelong exile instead of the execution! Well, life is really long and your situation changes. And not always in your favor. I am back even thought it took me ten years longer than planned”
“You never accidently returned to the same place” she whispered her father’s words.
“Too true.” Answered the fat man sarcastic. “Hey who’s there?”
At the other end of the platform you could hear a scraping sound, then something heavy fell to the ground.
Some kind of hissing sound was to hear and another that sounded like steps of a big animal. The silence that followed was deceptive but Sasha and her kidnapper both felt that something approached them.
The fat man unsecured his weapon loudly and went to his knee next to her, he had pressed the stock against his shoulder and sent the flickering spot of light over the pillars.
That something had moved in the for centuries abandoned southern tunnels was scarier than if all the marble statues in the central station would have suddenly come to life.
In the wandering ray of light a blurred shadow appeared for a second, not human, because whether its silhouette nor its speed was of a human. When the ray of light had returned to the same place, strangely there was no trace left of the strange creature. A few seconds the panicky searching light caught it again, now only twenty feet away from them.
“A bear?” Whispered the fat man doubting what he had just seen and pulled the trigger.
The bullets rushed to the pillars, hit the walls but the animal had vanished into thin air at the same time, not one of the shots had reached its goal. Then the fat man switched to pointless auto fire, dropped the Kalashnikov and pressed his hands onto his stomach. The flashlight rolled to the side so the light fell on the heavy, cramped figure from the ground upwards.
Without any haste a human emerged out of the twilight, with astonishing, soft and almost inaudible steps even though he was wearing heavy boots. The radiation suit was even too big for his colossal stature, so that you could actually think that he was a bear.
He didn’t wear a gasmask. The cleanly shaven head that was full of scares reminded of a dried desert. One part of his face had a brave look; if not a bit rough you could have said that it looked handsome if it hadn’t been unmoving like he was dead. It ran down cold Sasha’s back when she had saw him. The other half was just outrageously wounded, a complex network of scars made a mask of pure ugliness out of his face. Still, his appearance would have had something repulsive and not scary if it weren’t for his eyes. An always wandering, half insane stare was the only thing that kept the unmoving face alive. A life without a soul.
The fat man tried to get onto his feet but slipped on the ground and immediately screamed in pain. The colossal man crouched; slowly pointed the long barrel of the suppressed pistol against the back of the fat man’s head and pulled the trigger. The screaming stopped instantly, but the echo wandered around in the tomb of the station for a bit longer, like a lost creature that had been deprived of a body.
The shot had ripped his lower jaw from his head, the kidnapper showed his face to her, which was now a slimy red funnel. Sasha lowered her head and started to cry.
The terrible man pointed the barrel of the gun at her, slowly and sunken in his thoughts. Then he turned around and decided differently. The pistol returned to his shoulder holster and he himself stepped back as if he wanted to distance himself from his doing. He opened a flat flask and put it to his lips.
Now another character stepped onto the small stage that was lit by the fading flashlight of the fat man: An old man. He was breathing heavily and pressed his hand against his rips. He wore the same suit as the killer but moved a lot more clumsily as him. As soon as he had caught
up to his follower he fell to the ground. He didn’t even realize that everything was covered in blood. Only after he had rested and opened his eyes again he saw the two distorted corpses and the completely scared girl.
He had just calmed down his heart and now it started to beat faster again. Before Homer had found words for it he kne He had found her. After all his inconclusive tries he had found the heroine for his novel which had started to take shape in front of his inner eye at night, her lips, hands, her clothing, her smell, her movement and thoughts of the person he had tried to create were now suddenly standing exactly in front of him. In flesh and blood. Directly out of his imagination.
But no, honestly he had imagines her differently, more elegant, with smother edges … And definitely older. She here had too many hard edges and her eyes weren’t filled with warmth but they were splinters of hard ice. But he knew that it had been him who had been mistaken, he hadn’t been able to foresee how she would be. Her chased look, the scared face, and the cuffed hands – it all fascinated him. Of course he knew how to tell many extraordinary stories but to write a tragedy of the likes of which had happened to this young woman was not in his power. Her helplessness, being exposed to the cruel world, her wonderful rescue and the way fate had woven her, his and hunters story together, all that could only mean that he was on the right path.
He believed her before she had said a single word.
Because next to everything this girl possessed a kind of beauty in her confuse, blond, sloppy cut hair, pointy ears, dirt covered cheeks, fragile, exposed, astonishing white shoulders and her childish lips. So that a spontaneous attachment joined his curiosity and pity.
Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) Page 12