When her father said ‘the colour of the sky’, of course he meant the azure sky that lived on in his memory, not the crimson sky that eddied and swirled above him when he went up there at night.
He hadn’t seen daylight for more than twenty years. Sasha had never seen it. Except in her dreams – but how could she be sure the way she imagined it was right? Is the world that people blind from birth see in their dreams like ours? And do they see at all, even in their dreams?
When little children squeeze their eyes shut, they think darkness has swallowed up the entire world. They think everyone else around them is as blind as they are at that moment. ‘In the tunnels, a man is as helpless and naïve as those children,’ thought Homer. ‘He can click his flashlight on and off as much as he likes, imagining that he’s the master of light and darkness, but even the very blackest darkness around him can be full of seeing eyes.’
This thought haunted Homer now, after their brush with the scavengers. He had to take his mind off it somehow, distract himself. ‘Strange that Hunter didn’t know what to expect at Nakhimov Prospect,’ he thought. When the brigadier first appeared at Sebastopol two months earlier, none of the sentries could explain how a man with such a massive figure could have slipped past all the guard posts set up in the northern tunnels without being noticed. Thankfully, the perimeter commander hadn’t asked the duty sentries for any explanations.
But if he didn’t come through Nakhimov Prospect, how had Hunter got to Sebastopol? The other routes to the Greater Metro had been cut off ages ago. The only exception was the abandoned Kakhovka line, where no living creature had been seen in the tunnels for many years – and for good reason. Chertanovo? It was ridiculous to suppose that even such a skilled and ruthless warrior could have made his way alone through that cursed station – and it was impossible to get to it without showing up at Sebastopol first.
If the north and the south were excluded, Homer could only assume their mysterious visitor had reached the station from above. Naturally, all the known ways in from the surface and back out to it were thoroughly sealed off and guarded, but still . . . Could he, for instance, have opened a blocked ventilation shaft? The Sebastopolites thought there was no way the scorched ruins of the concrete-slab high-rises could still throw up someone intelligent enough to disconnect their alarm system. The boundless patchwork chessboard of residential districts was carved apart by fragments of the warheads that fell on the city, and it had been empty for a long, long time. The last human players had abandoned it decades ago, and the horrific, malformed chess figures that roamed across its surface now were playing a new game, by their own rules. Man couldn’t even dream of getting a return match.
Brief excursions in search of anything valuable that hadn’t rotted away in more than twenty years – hasty and humiliating attempts to pillage their own homes – that was all people had the strength for now. Encased in their anti-radiation armour, the stalkers went up there to ransack the skeletons of the nearby low, Khruschev-era buildings for the hundredth time, but they shied away from decisive combat with the new landlords. The most they could do was fire a snarling burst of automatic fire and sit it out in the apartments polluted with rat droppings until the danger had passed – then make a headlong dash for the underground.
The old maps of the capital had lost all resemblance to reality a long time ago. Where once there were wide avenues choked with traffic jams several kilometres long, now there might be gaping precipices or dark, impassable forest thickets. Entire residential areas had been swallowed up by swamps or scorched bald patches. The most reckless stalkers investigated the surface within a radius of up to one kilometre from their home burrows: others were far less ambitious.
The stations that followed Nakhimov Prospect – Nagornaya, Nagatino and Tula – had no exits of their own, and in any case the people living at two of them were too timid to go up onto the surface. It was a mystery to Homer where a living man could have come from in the middle of this wasteland. But he would still have liked to think that Hunter came to their station from the surface. Because there was one other, final possibility for the route the brigadier had followed to reach them. And this possibility came creeping into the godless old man’s mind against his will, while he was trying to control his panting breath and keep up with that dark silhouette rushing ahead so furiously that its feet didn’t even seem to touch the ground.
From below?
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ Ahmed murmured slowly – just loud enough for Homer to make out his words, but too softly for the brigadier, who had pulled ahead slightly, to hear. ‘We’ve picked the wrong time. Believe me, I’ve been in plenty of convoys here – this is a bad day at Nagornaya.’
It was a long time since the bands of petty robbers, who rested from their plunder at dark way stations as far away as possible from the Circle, had dared to come anywhere near the Sebastopol convoys. When they heard the regular tramping of metal-tipped boots announce the heavy infantry’s approach, the only thought in their minds was how to get out of the way as quickly as possible.
No, they weren’t the reason why the convoys were always so well-guarded, and it wasn’t because of the four-handed scavengers at Nakhimov Prospect either. Iron discipline and audacious courage, with the ability to close ranks into a wall of steel in seconds and exterminate any tangible threat with a withering hail of fire would have made the Sebastopol convoys masters of the tunnels from their own guard posts all the way to Serpukhov . . . If not for Nagornaya.
Nakhimov Prospect and all its horrors were behind them now, but neither Homer nor Ahmed felt even a moment’s relief. Nagornaya Station, so plain and unassuming, had been the end of the line for many travellers who failed to take it seriously enough. The poor souls at the next station, Nagatino, huddled as far away as possible from the greedy jaws of the tunnel that led south, to Nagornaya. As if that could protect them . . . As if what crept out of the southern tunnel to garner its harvest wouldn’t bother to prowl a little further in search of prey that suited its taste.
Travelling through Nagornaya Station, you always had to trust to luck, the place was so capricious and inconsistent. Sometimes it let travellers pass, merely frightening them with the bloody stains on its walls and fluted steel columns – as if someone had tried to escape by climbing up them. But the reception it gave the next group, literally only minutes later, would make the survivors think the loss of only half their comrades was a victory. It could never be sated. It had no favourites. It defied observation and study. For the inhabitants of all the stations around it, Nagornaya embodied the whim of fate. And it was the greatest ordeal of all for men who set out on the journey from Sebastopol to the Circle and back.
‘Nagornaya couldn’t have done it all on its own . . .’ Ahmed was superstitious, like many of the Sebastopolites, and he always spoke about this station as a living creature.
Homer didn’t need to ask what he meant – he had also been wondering how Nagornaya Station could have swallowed up the convoys that had disappeared and all the scouts sent out to search for them. ‘All sorts of things have happened, but for so many men to disappear at once,’ he agreed, ‘it would have choked on them .’
‘Don’t talk like that!’ Ahmed exclaimed, clicking his tongue angrily at Homer and flinging his hands up in alarm – or perhaps he was holding back the slap that the old man was obviously asking for. ‘It won’t choke on you, that’s for sure!’
Homer let that go and reined in his resentment. He didn’t believe Nagornaya could hear what they said and hold it against them. Not at this distance, anyway. Superstition, it was sheer superstition! If you tried to pay homage to all the idols of the underworld, you were bound to fail, you couldn’t avoid offending someone. Homer had stopped worrying about that kind of thing long ago, but Ahmed thought differently. He pulled a set of prayer beads – made of blunt pistol bullets – out of the pocket of his uniform jacket pocket and started twirling the string of lead through his dirty hands an
d fluttering his lips, praying in his own language to atone for Homer’s offences against Nagornaya. But the station didn’t seem to understand him, or perhaps it was already too late for apologies.
Hunter detected something with his supernatural sense of smell and waved his gloved hand, killing the pace. He sank down slowly onto the ground. ‘There’s fog up there,’ he said curtly. ‘What’s that?’
Homer and Ahmed exchanged glances. They both understood what it meant: the hunt was on, and now they would need all their luck to reach the northern limits of Nagornaya alive.
‘How can I put it?’ Ahmed replied reluctantly. ‘It’s breathing.’
‘What is?’ the brigadier asked him coolly and shook his knapsack off his shoulders, evidently planning to select the appropriate calibre from his arsenal.
‘Nagornaya Station,’ said Ahmed, switching to a whisper.
‘We’ll see about that,’ Hunter said with a contemptuous, crooked grin.
But no, Homer had only imagined the brigadier’s mutilated face coming to life: it had remained as immobile as ever – the grin was only a trick of the light.
A hundred metres further on the other two saw it: a heavy white mist creeping over the ground towards them, first licking at their boots, then twining round their knees, then flooding the tunnel waist-high. It was as if they were slowly walking into a cold, hostile, ghostly sea, sinking deeper and deeper with every step they took across its deceptively sloping bottom, until they were totally submerged in its murky waters.
They couldn’t see a thing. The flashlight beams got stuck in this strange mist like flies in a cobweb: they forced their way a few steps forward, then ran out of strength, went limp and hung there in mid-air – feeble, submissive captives. Sounds were hard to make out, as if they were forcing their way through a feather mattress, and it even became harder to move, as if the team really was walking over a silty sea bed, not a line of railway sleepers.
It got harder to breathe too, but not because of the humidity – it was the unusual, tart aroma that had appeared in the air. The men felt reluctant to let it into their lungs, it made them feel as if they were drawing into themselves the breath of some huge, alien creature that had already extracted all the oxygen from the air and saturated it with poisonous exhalations.
To be on the safe side, Homer pulled his respirator back over his face. Hunter gave him a quick glance, then lowered his hand into the canvas bag hanging under his shoulder, tugged open a strap and slapped a new, rubber mask over his usual one. Ahmed was the only one left without a gas mask – he had either forgotten it in his haste or decided not to bother.
The brigadier froze again, pointing his tattered ear towards Nagornaya, but in the dense white murk he couldn’t make out the snatches of sound coming from the station clearly enough to assemble them into a complete picture. Something really massive seemed to tumble over with a crash, someone gave a long whoop on a note too low for a man – or for any kind of animal. There was a hysterical scraping of metal, as if a hand was tying one of the thick pipes running along the wall into a knot.
Hunter tossed his head, as if he were throwing off some kind of dirt that was sticking to it, and the short automatic pistol in his hand was replaced by a military Kalashnikov with twin clips and an under-barrel grenade launcher. ‘At last,’ he murmured to himself.
They reached the station without even realising it. Nagornaya was flooded with fog as thick as pig’s milk: gazing at it through the misted lenses of his gas mask, Homer felt like a scuba-diver who had swum into a sunken ocean liner.
The similarity was emphasised by the embossed panels decorating the walls: seagulls imprinted into metal by a crude, artless Soviet stamp. More than anything else they resembled the imprints of fossilised organisms exposed on the ruptured surfaces of rock strata. ‘Fossilisation – that’s the fate of man and his creations,’ Homer thought briefly. ‘But who’ll dig them up?’
The miasma filling the air around them was alive – it flowed and quivered. Sometimes patches of darkness condensed out of it – at first Homer thought he saw a mangled and twisted carriage or a rusty sentry box, and then it was the scaly body or head of some mythical monster. He was afraid even to imagine who might have occupied the crew’s quarters and settled into the first-class cabins in the decades that had passed since the shipwreck. He’d heard a lot about things that had happened at Nagornaya, but he’d never come face to face with . . .
‘There it is. Over there, on the right!’ yelled Ahmed, tugging the old man by the sleeve.
There was the muffled pop of a shot fired through a homemade silencer.
Homer swung round at a speed that was impossible with his rheumatism, but his blunted flashlight lit up nothing except a section of column faced with ribbed metal
‘Behind us! There, behind us!’ Ahmed fired a short burst, but his bullets merely crumbled the remnants of marble slabs that had once covered the walls of the station. Whatever features Ahmed had spotted in the trembling mirage, their owner had dissolved back into it unharmed.
‘He’s breathed too much of this stuff,’ thought Homer.
And then, out of the very corner of his eye, he saw something . . . Gigantic, hunched over – because the station’s fifteen-foot ceiling was too low for it – something unbelievably agile for its immense size, breaking out of the fog on the very boundary of visibility and swaying back in again before the old man could train his automatic on it.
Homer looked round helplessly for the brigadier. He was nowhere to be seen.
‘Okay. Okay. Don’t worry,’ her father reassured her, halting to rest between the words. ‘You know . . . somewhere in the Metro right now there are people who are far more afraid . . .’
He tried to smile, but it turned out terrifying, like a skull with a jaw that has come adrift. Sasha smiled back, but a salty dewdrop crept down across her sharp, soot-stained cheekbone. At least her father had come round – and the few hours that seemed so long had given her time to think everything through again.
‘A real failure this time, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I decided to go to the garages after all. But it turned out to be too far. I found one completely untouched. A stainless steel castle, covered in oil. I couldn’t break in, so I attached a charge, the last one. I was hoping there’d be a car inside, spare parts. And when I blasted it opened, it was empty. Nothing at all. So why did they lock it, the bastards? And that thunderous noise . . . I was praying no one would hear. Then I walked out of the garage and I was surrounded by dogs on all sides. I thought that was it . . . I thought I was done for . . .’
Her father lowered his eyelids and stopped talking. Feeling alarmed, Sasha grabbed hold of his hand, but he just swayed his head gently, without opening his eyes, as if to tell her: Don’t worry, everything’s okay. He was too weak even to speak, but he wanted to tell her how it happened, he needed to explain why he’d come back empty-handed, why they would have a tough week now until he got back on his feet. But sleep overcame him before he could tell her.
Sasha checked the bandage wrapped round his torn calf – it was soaked through with black blood – and changed the compress that was already hot. She straightened up, went over to the rat’s little house and opened the tiny door a crack. The little beast peeped out warily and hid again, but then it did what Sasha was hoping for and scrabbled out onto the platform to stretch its legs. The rat’s intuition never let it down: the tunnels were quiet. Reassured, the girl went back to the stretcher bed.
‘You will definitely get up, you’ll walk again,’ she whispered to her father. ‘And you’ll find a garage with an entire car in it, all in one piece. And we’ll go up there together, get into it and drive far away from here. Ten, fifteen stations away. To where no one knows us, where we’ll be strangers. Where no one will hate us. If there is a place like that anywhere . . .’
She was telling him the same magical fairytale that she had heard from him so often, repeating it word for word, and now, as she recited this
old mantra of her father’s, she believed in it a hundred times more powerfully. She would nurse him back to health, she would cure him. There was a place in this world where no one could give a damn about them. A place where they could be happy.
‘There it is! There! It’s looking at me!’
Ahmed squealed as if he had already been seized and dragged away, he screamed as he had never allowed himself to scream before. His automatic roared again, then stuttered and choked. Ahmed’s usual composure deserted him completely and he trembled violently as he tried to insert a full clip into the slot.
‘It’s chosen me . . . Me.’
Somewhere nearby another automatic barked briefly, fell silent for a second and then chattered again in clipped, three-shot bursts. Hunter was still alive after all, so there was still hope. The chattering moved away and then came closer, but it was impossible to tell if the bullets had found their mark. Homer strained his ears in vain for the furious roar of a wounded monster. The station was enveloped in oppressive silence; its mysterious residents seemed to be either immaterial or invulnerable.
Now the brigadier was waging his strange battle at the far end of the platform, where fiery strings of tracer bullets repeatedly flared up and faded away. Enthralled by his fight with phantoms, he had abandoned his men to their fate. Homer took a deep breath and looked up, cautiously giving in to the desire that had been tormenting him for several long moments already. He could feel that gaze all too clearly with his skin, the top of his head, the fine hairs on his neck – a cold, leaden, crushing gaze – and he couldn’t fight his foreboding any longer.
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