After that incident they had abandoned all attempts to push beyond Chertanovo Station and were even planning to abandon Sebastopol and join Hansa. But the accursed Chertanovo seemed to be the frontier post marking the precise outer boundary of the human domain in the Metro. Creatures that infiltrated beyond it were a cause of serious annoyance to the Sebastopolites, but at least they could be killed, and with a properly organised defence these attacks could be repelled relatively easily and almost without human bloodshed – provided there was enough ammunition.
The monsters that crept up to the sentry posts were sometimes so large that they could only be stopped with explosive bullets and high-voltage discharge traps. But most of the time the sentries had to deal with beasts that were less frightening, although they were extremely dangerous. These beasts had been given the name of a vampire monster out of a book by Gogol, a word that sounded almost affectionate, like the name of a household pet – ‘upyr’.
‘There’s another one! Up on top, in the third pipe!’
The searchlight, torn off its ceiling anchors, dangled jerkily on a single wire, flooding the space in front of the guard post with harsh white light, picking out the contorted figures of the mutants who were lurking in the shadows, then plunging them back into impenetrable gloom, then glaring blindingly into the eyes of the sentries. Blurred, quivering shadows heaved and surged on all sides, shrinking back and springing forward, slanting and twisting: men cast shadows like fiends, fiends cast shadows like men.
The guard post was very conveniently located at a point where the tunnels converged: shortly before the Final War, the Metro Construction concern had launched a renovation programme that was never completed. At this node the Sebastopolites had set up a genuine little fortress: two machine-gun positions, a barricade of sandbags that was a metre and a half thick, anti-tank hedgehogs and booms on the tracks, electrical traps on the close approaches and a carefully planned signalling system. But when the mutants advanced en masse as they did on that day, it seemed that with just a little more pressure, the defences would collapse.
A machine-gunner stared in amazement at his scarlet-soaked hands, breathing out bubbles of blood through his nose and muttering something in a vague, monotonous tone: the air round his jammed ‘Pecheneg’ was quivering with heat haze. He snorted briefly and fell quiet, nestling his face trustingly against the shoulder of the next man, a massive warrior wearing an enclosed titanium helmet. The next second a blood-curdling shriek rang out ahead of them as an upyr launched into the attack.
The warrior in the helmet rose up above the parapet, pushing aside the bloodied machine-gunner who had tumbled onto him, flung up his sub-machine-gun and fired a long burst. The repulsive, sinewy, matt-grey beast had already flung itself forward, stretching out its knotty front limbs and gliding downwards on taut-stretched folds of skin. The upyrs moved with incredible speed and anyone who hesitated had absolutely no chance – only men with the nimblest feet and fastest hands stood duty on this watch.
The whiplash of lead cut the shriek short, but the dead creature continued falling by inertia and its hundred-kilogramme carcass slammed into the barricade with a dull thud, throwing up a cloud of dust from the sandbags.
‘Looks like that’s it.’
Only two minutes ago the torrent of gruesome creatures gushing out of the immense sawn-off pipes suspended under the ceiling had seemed endless, but now it had dried up. The sentries started cautiously picking their way out from behind the defences.
‘Get a stretcher! A doctor! Get him to the station quick!’
The husky fighter who had killed the final upyr attached a bayonet to the barrel of his automatic weapon and started walking unhurriedly round the dead and wounded creatures littering the battlefield, giving each one a kick in its toothy jaw with the toe of his boot and thrusting the bayonet swiftly and deftly into its eye. Finally, when he’d finished, he leaned back wearily against the sandbags, raised the visor of his helmet and pressed a flask to his lips.
Reinforcements arrived from the station after it was all over. The commander of the perimeter also arrived, with his private’s monkey jacket unbuttoned, breathing hard and cursing his old aches and pains.
‘So where am I supposed to find him three men? Rip them out of my own flesh?’
‘What are you talking about, Denis Mikhailovich?’ asked one of the sentries, peering into his commander’s face incredulously.
‘Istomin insists we send a team of three scouts to Serpukhov. He’s worried about the convoy. But where am I going to get three men for him? Especially right now . . .’
‘So there’s still no news about the convoy?’ asked the large man who was quenching his thirst, without turning round.
‘Not a word,’ the old man confirmed. ‘But it hasn’t really been all that long yet. Which is more dangerous, when you really get down to it? If we strip the south naked today, in a week’s time there’ll be no one left to meet that convoy!’
The husky warrior swayed his head without speaking. And he didn’t respond when the commander carried on muttering for a few minutes and asked the sentries at the post if anyone wanted to volunteer for the team he would have to assign to an expedition to Serpukhov Station, otherwise the station commandant – damn him to hell – would have the old man’s bald head.
There were no problems with selecting volunteers; many of the sentries were already tired of being stuck here, and it was hard for them to imagine anything more dangerous than defending the southern tunnels.
Of the six men who put themselves forward for the expedition, the colonel selected those who, in his opinion, Sebastopol needed least. And this turned out to be a good choice, because none of the three men who were dispatched to Serpukhov ever returned to the station.
For three days now, ever since the scouts had set out in search of the convoy, the colonel had imagined whispering behind his back and sidelong glances from all directions. Even the most animated conversations broke off when he walked by. And in the tense silence that fell wherever he appeared, he seemed to hear an unspoken demand to explain and justify himself.
He was simply doing his job: maintaining the security of the defensive perimeter of Sebastopol Station. He was a tactician, not a strategist. When every soldier counted, the colonel had no right to squander men by sending them out on missions that were dubious, or even entirely pointless.
Three days ago the colonel had been absolutely convinced of that. But now, when he could feel on his own back the lash of every frightened, disapproving, doubting look, his certainty had been shaken. Travelling light, the team should have taken less than twenty-four hours to cover the distance to Hansa and back – even allowing for any possible skirmishes and waits at the borders of independent way stations. And that meant . . .
Giving orders for no one to be allowed in, the colonel locked himself in his little room and started muttering, going over for the hundredth time all the possible versions of what could have happened to the traders and the scouts.
At Sebastopol they weren’t afraid of people – apart from the Hansa army, that is. The station’s bad reputation, the stories of the price its inhabitants paid for survival, first told by a few eyewitnesses, then taken up and exaggerated over and over in the telling by shuttle traders and people who liked to listen to their tall tales, had spread right through the Metro and done their work. Quick to realise the usefulness of this kind of reputation, the station’s commanders had done their best to reinforce it. Agents, travellers, members of convoys and diplomats were given an official blessing to lie in the most terrible terms possible about Sebastopol Station – and in general about everything that came after the Serpukhov stretch of the line.
Only a few individuals were capable of seeing though this smokescreen to perceive the station’s appeal and genuine significance. In recent years there had only been one or two attacks by ignorant bandits attempting to force their way in past the guard posts, and the superbly well-tuned Sebastopol war machine had
decimated the isolated bands without the slightest difficulty.
Nevertheless, before setting off on its reconnaissance mission, the three-man team had been clearly instructed that if any threat of danger arose, they should not engage the enemy, but come back as quickly as possible. Of course, there was Nagornaya Station, a less malign place than Chertanovo, but still very dangerous and sinister. And Nakhimov Prospect Station, with its upper hermetic doors stuck open, which meant it couldn’t be completely closed off against infiltration from the surface. The Sebastopolites didn’t want to detonate the exits there – Nakhimov Prospect’s ‘ascent’ was used by the local stalkers. No one would ever venture to make his way alone through ‘the Prospect’, as it was known at the station, but there had never been a case when a team of three men had been unable to repel the beasts they encountered there
A cave-in? A groundwater breach? Sabotage? Undeclared war with Hansa? Now it was the colonel, and not Istomin, who had to give answers to the wives of the scouts who had disappeared, when they came to him, gazing into his eyes with weary yearning, like abandoned dogs, seeking for some kind of promise or consolation in those eyes. He had to explain everything to the garrison soldiers, who never asked unnecessary questions, while they still believed in him. He had to reassure all the alarmed people who gathered in the evening, after work, by the station clock that had noted the precise time of the convoy’s departure.
Istomin said that in the last few days people kept asking him again and again why the lights had been dimmed at the station and demanding that the lamps be turned back up as bright as before. But in fact no one had even thought of reducing the voltage, and the lamps were burning at full power. The gathering darkness was not in the station, but in people’s hearts, and not even the very brightest mercury lamps could dispel it.
Telephone communications with Serpukhov still hadn’t been restored, and during the week that had passed since the convoy left, the colonel, like many other Sebastopolites, had lost a very important feeling, one that was rare for inhabitants of the Metro – the sense of close companionship with other people.
As long as the lines of communication functioned, as long as convoys travelled to and fro regularly and the journey to Hansa took less than a day, everyone living at Sebastopol Station had been free to leave or to stay, everyone knew that only five stops away from their station lay the beginning of the genuine Metro, civilisation . . . The human race.
It was probably the way polar explorers used to feel, abandoned in the Arctic after voluntarily condemning themselves to long months of battling the cold and loneliness for the sake of scientific research or high pay. The mainland was thousands of kilometres away, but somehow it was still close, as long as the radio worked and every month the rumbling of a plane’s engines could be heard overhead and crates of canned meat came floating down on parachutes.
But now the ice floe on which their station stood had broken away, and with every hour that passed it was being swept further and further out into an icy blizzard in a black ocean, into the void of the unknown.
The waiting dragged on, and the colonel’s vague concern for the fate of the scouts sent to Serpukhov was gradually transformed into the sombre certainty that he would never see those men again. He simply couldn’t afford to take three more soldiers off the defensive perimeter and fling them after the others to face the same unknown danger and, most likely, certain death. But the idea of closing the hermetic doors, cutting off the southern tunnels and assembling a large strike force still seemed premature to him. If only someone else would make the decision now . . . Any decision was foredoomed to prove wrong.
The perimeter commander sighed, opened the door slightly, looked around furtively and called over a sentry.
‘How about letting me have a cigarette? But this is the last one, don’t give me any more, not even if I beg you. And don’t tell anyone, all right?’
Nadya, a thickset, talkative woman in a fluffy dress with holes in it and a dirty apron, brought a hot casserole of meat and vegetables, and the sentries livened up a bit. Potatoes, cucumbers and tomatoes were regarded as very great delicacies here: apart from Sebastopol Station, the only places where you could feast on vegetables were one or two of the finest restaurants of the Circle or the Polis. It wasn’t just a matter of the complicated hydroponic equipment required to grow the seeds that had been saved, there was also the fact that not many stations in the Metro could afford to spend kilowatts of energy on varying their soldiers’ diet.
Even the top command’s tables were only graced with vegetables on holidays, usually the children were the only ones who were pampered like that. It had cost Istomin a serious quarrel with the chefs to get them to add boiled potatoes and a tomato to each of the portions of pork that were due on uneven dates – in order to keep up the soldiers’ morale.
The trick worked: the moment that Nadya, with typical female awkwardness, dropped the sub-machine-gun off her shoulder in order to lift the lid of the casserole, the sentries’ wrinkled faces started relaxing and smoothing out. No one wanted to spoil a supper like this with sour, tedious talk about the convoy that had disappeared and the overdue reconnaissance team.
‘I don’t know why, but I’ve been thinking about Komsomol Station all day today,’ said a grey-haired old man wearing a quilted jacket with Moscow Metro shoulder badges, as he squished potatoes in his aluminium bowl. ‘If I could just get there and take a look . . . The mosaics they have there! To my mind, it’s the most beautiful station in Moscow.’
‘Ah, drop it, Homer, you probably used to live there, and you still love it to this day,’ retorted a fat, unshaven man in a cap with earflaps. ‘What about the stained glass at Novoslobodskaya? And those light, airy columns at Mayakovsky Station, with the frescoes on the ceiling?’
‘I like Revolution Square best,’ a sniper confessed shyly – he was a quiet, serious man, getting on in years. ‘I know it’s all stupid nonsense, but those stern-looking sailors and airmen, those border guards with their dogs. I’ve adored that station ever since I was a kid.’
‘What’s so stupid about it? There are some very nice-looking men depicted in bronze there,’ Nadya said, backing him up in as she scraped the remains off the bottom of the casserole. ‘Hey, Brigadier, look sharp, or you’ll be left with no supper!’
The tall, broad-shouldered warrior, who had been sitting apart from the others, strolled over unhurriedly to the campfire, took his serving and went back to his spot – closer to the tunnel, as far away as possible from the men.
‘Does he ever show up at the station?’ the fat man asked in a whisper, nodding in the direction of the massively broad back, half-hidden in the semi-darkness.
‘He hasn’t moved from this place for more than a week now,’ the sniper replied in an equally quiet voice. ‘Spends the night in a sleeping bag. I don’t know how his nerves can stand it. Or maybe he just enjoys the whole thing. Three days ago, when the upyrs almost did for Rinat, he went round afterwards and finished them off. By hand. Took about fifteen minutes doing it. Came back with his boots covered in blood . . . Delighted with himself.’
‘He’s a machine, not a man,’ a lanky machine-gunner put in.
‘I’m afraid even to sleep beside him. Have you seen what a mess his face is? I don’t even want to look in his eyes.’
‘But I only feel calm when I’m with him,’ the old man called Homer said with shrug. ‘What are you running him down for? He’s a good man, just got maimed, that’s all. It’s only the stations that need to be beautiful. And that Novoslobodskaya of yours, by the way, is just plain tawdry, bad taste. There’s no way you can look at all that coloured glass unless you’re drunk. Stained-glass rubbish!’
‘And collective farm mosaics, covering half the ceiling, aren’t in bad taste then?’
‘Where did you find any pictures like that at Komsomol Station?’
‘Why, all that damn Soviet art is about collective farm life or heroic airmen!’ said the fat man, starting t
o get heated.
‘Seryozha, you lay off the airmen!’ the sniper warned him.
‘Komsomol Station’s garbage, and Novoslobodskaya’s shit,’ they heard a dull, low voice say.
The fat man was so surprised, he choked on the words that were already on the tip of his tongue and gaped at the brigadier. The others immediately fell silent too, waiting to see what would come next: the brigadier almost never joined in their conversations, he even answered direct questions curtly or didn’t bother to answer at all.
He was still sitting with his back to them, with his eyes fixed on the gaping mouth of the tunnel.
‘The vaults at Komsomol are too high, and the columns are too thin, the entire platform can be raked with fire from the tracks, it’s wide open, and closing off the pedestrian passages is too tricky. And at Novoslobodskaya the walls are a mass of cracks, no matter how hard they try to plaster over them. One grenade would be enough to bring the whole station down. And there haven’t been any stained-glass panels there for ages. They’re all broken. That stuff’s too fragile.’
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