They passed through Warsaw Station – a terrible, eerie place, rusty and mouldy, like a drowned man fished out of the water. The walls, patterned in squares of tiles, were oozing murky water. Through the half-open lips of the hermetic doors a cold wind blew in from the surface, as if someone huge had set his mouth to them from the outside and was giving the station artificial respiration. Their radiation meters fluttered hysterically, telling them they had to get out of there immediately.
Closer to Kashira one of the instruments broke down, and the figures on the other were jammed against the very edge of the display. Homer felt a bitter taste on his tongue.
‘Where’s the epicentre?’
It was incredibly difficult to make out the brigadier’s voice, as if Homer had his head lowered into a bath full of water. He stopped – in order to make the best of this short break – and gestured to the south-east with his glove.
‘Besides Kantemirovo Station. We think the roof of the entrance pavilion or a ventilation shaft was pierced. No one knows for certain.’
‘So Kantemirovo’s deserted then?’
‘And always has been. After Kolomenskoe the entire line’s empty.’
‘But I was told . . .’ Hunter said, then broke off, gesturing to Homer to be quiet, while he tuned in to his subtle, invisible wavelengths. ‘Does anyone know what’s happening at Kashira?’ he asked eventually.
‘How could they?’ The old man wasn’t sure he’d managed to give an ironic note to the adenoidal boom that emerged from his breathing filters like a trombone snorting.
‘I’ll tell you. The radiation there’s so bad, we’ll both be fried to a crisp before we even reach the station. Nothing will do any good. We can’t go that way. We’re turning back.’
‘Back? To Sebastopol?’
‘Yes. I’ll go up onto the surface and try to get there overland,’ Hunter replied thoughtfully, already figuring out his route.
‘Are you going to go alone?’ Homer asked cautiously.
‘I can’t keep rescuing you all the time. I’ll have enough to do saving my own skin. And two of us wouldn’t get through anyway. Even for me there’s no guarantee.’
‘You don’t understand, I need to go with you, I have to . . .’ Homer cast around frantically for a reason, a toehold in logic.
‘You have to die with meaning?’ the brigadier concluded for him indifferently – although Homer knew perfectly well that it was really the filters in the gas mask, screening out any contaminants, letting in only tasteless, sterile air and letting out only soulless, mechanical voices.
The old man squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, trying to recall everything he knew about the contaminated lower end of the Zamoskvorechie branch, about the route from Sebastopol to Serpukhov. Anything at all in order to avoid turning back, to avoid returning to his meagre life, to his false pregnancy with a great novel and timeless legends.
‘Follow me!’ he wheezed suddenly and set off, hobbling with an agility that surprised even him, to the east – toward Kashira, into the very mouth of hell.
She dreamed she was scraping a file across one loop of the steel shackles chaining her to a wall. The file squealed and kept slipping off, and even when she already thought its blade had bitten half a millimetre into the steel, the moment she stopped working, the shallow, almost invisible groove closed up as she watched. But Sasha didn’t despair: she took up her tool again, skinning her palms as she filed away at the unyielding metal, maintaining a strict, regular rhythm. The important thing was not to lose the rhythm, not to stop working even for an instant. In the tight grip of the fetters her ankles had swollen up and gone numb. Sasha realised that even if she could defeat the metal, she still wouldn’t be able to run away, because her legs would refuse to obey her.
Sasha woke up and raised her eyelids with a struggle. The shackles had not been a mere dream: her wrists were restrained by handcuffs. She was lying on the dirty floor of an old mining trolley that squealed with excruciating monotony as it crept slowly along. There was a dirty piece of rag stuffed in her mouth and the side of her head was throbbing and bleeding.
‘He didn’t kill me,’ she thought. ‘Why not?’
From where she was lying all she could see was a small section of the ceiling – the welded joints of tunnel liners drifting by in an irregular patch of light: the trolley was moving along a tunnel. While she tried to get her shackled hands out from behind her back, the liners were replaced by flaking white paint. That alarmed Sasha: what station was this?
It was a bad place, not just quiet, but desolate; not just deserted, but lifeless, and completely dark. For some reason she had thought every station on the other side of the bridge was full of people and the air everywhere was filled with their shouting and hubbub. So she must have been wrong about that.
The ceiling above Sasha stopped moving. Grunting and swearing, her kidnapper clambered down onto the platform and strolled about with his metal-tipped heels scraping, as if he was studying the surroundings. Then, obviously having removed his gas mask, he growled in a deep, amiable-sounding voice.
‘So here we are then. After all these years!’
Releasing all the air out of his lungs in a long, lingering sigh, he hit out hard at some bulky inanimate object – no, he kicked it with his boot: it looked like a sack, but what was it stuffed with?
When Sasha realised the answer, she sank her teeth into the stinking rag and started bellowing, arching up her body as if she was having a fit. She knew where the fat man in tarpaulin had brought her and who he was talking to like that.
It was ludicrous even to hope he could get away from Hunter. Moving like a lion, the brigadier overtook the old man in a few long bounds, grabbed hold of his shoulder and shook him painfully.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘We only have to go a little bit further,’ Homer wheezed. ‘I’ve remembered! There’s an access passage from here straight to the Zamoskvorechie Line, just before Kashira Station. We can go through it straight to the tunnel, so we won’t have to go into the station. We’ll bypass it and come straight out to Kolomenskoe. It shouldn’t be very far. Please . . .’
Seizing his chance, he tried to break free again, but stumbled over the bellbottoms of his trousers and fell flat onto the rails with a crash. He got up again immediately and tried to jerk forward, but Hunter easily held him still on the spot, like a rat on a string, and turned the old man to face him. Leaning down so that the lenses of their gas masks were on the same level, he glanced deep into Homer for a few seconds and then released his grip.
‘All right.’
And now the brigadier dragged him along, not halting again for a single moment. The blood pounding in Homer’s ears drowned out the frenetic chattering of the dosimeters, his legs turned stiff and numb, almost refusing to obey him, his lungs were straining so hard they smarted painfully and felt as if they were about to burst.
They almost missed the black ink blot of the narrow passage. Squeezing into it, they ran for a few more long minutes, until Hunter galloped out into a new tunnel. The brigadier cast a hasty glance around, dived back into the passage and shouted to the old man.
‘Where’s this you’ve brought me to? Have you ever even been here?’
About thirty metres along, to the left of the passage – in the direction they had to follow – the tunnel was blocked from floor to ceiling by a thick curtain of something that looked like cobwebs.
Reluctant to waste his breath on talking, Homer simply shook his head. It was absolutely true, he’d never had any reason to come this way before. And this was hardly the moment to tell Hunter all the things he’d heard about this place.
Throwing his automatic back over his shoulder, the brigadier took a long rectangular hatchet, something like a home-made machete, out of his knapsack and slashed at the sticky white lacework. The dried-out skeletons of flying cockroaches that were stuck in the nets started quivering and rustling like hoarse little bells. The edges of the ragged wou
nd that had been inflicted immediately closed together, as if it was healing up. Turning back the semi-transparent fabric of the web and sticking his flashlight inside, the brigadier lit up the passage. It would take them hours to clear it: the multilayered webbing of sticky threads filled every part of the connecting tunnel for as far as the beam of light could reach
Hunter checked his radiation monitor, made a strange guttural sound and started furiously hacking away the threads stretched between the walls of the tunnel. The cobweb yielded slowly, taking more time than they could afford now. In ten minutes they only managed to move about thirty metres forward, and the threads were woven ever more tightly, choking the passage like a plug of cotton wool.
Finally, at an overgrown ventilation shaft with an ugly two-headed skeleton lying on the sleepers below it, the brigadier flung his hatchet down on the floor. They were stuck in the web, just like the cockroaches, and even if the creature that wove these nets had perished long ago and wouldn’t come for them, they would die soon anyway – from the radiation.
In the few moments while Hunter was trying to decide what to do, the old man remembered something else he had once heard about this tunnel. Going down on one knee, he knocked a few cartridges out of his spare clip, twisted the bullets out using a pen-knife and shook the powder into his palm. Hunter didn’t need any explanations: a few minutes later, back at the beginning of the connecting tunnel, they tipped a heap of grey granules onto a small pad of cotton wool and held a cigarette lighter to it.
The gunpowder snorted and started smoking, and suddenly something incredible happened: the flame from the powder spread out in all directions at once, climbing right up the walls to the distant ceiling, invading all the space of the tunnel. It dashed inwards, devouring the cobweb, a roaring, blazing ring of fire, lighting up the grimy tunnel liners and leaving behind only occasional burnt tatters dangling from the ceiling. The hoop of flame moved towards Kolomenskoe, shrinking rapidly and sucking in air like a gigantic piston. Then the tunnel swerved and the flames disappeared round the bend, trailing bright crimson flashes behind them.
And from the far distance, breaking through the regular drone of the fire, came a call that wasn’t human, something between a despairing howl and a strident hiss. Although Homer, hypnotised by the spectacle, could easily have imagined it.
Hunter tossed the hatchet back into his knapsack and took out two new, unopened canisters for gas masks.
‘I was keeping them for the way back,’ he said, changing his own filter and handing the second canister to the old man. ‘After that fire, the pollution in there now is like the place had just been bombed.’
The old man nodded. When the flames swirled upwards, they’d stirred up radioactive particles that had been settling into the cobweb for years, eating their way into its threads. The black vacuum of the tunnel was now filled with deadly molecules, suspended in the air like millions of tiny underwater mines, and they had blocked off the voyagers’ navigable channel. There was no possible way to avoid them.
They had to break straight through.
‘If only your dad could see you now,’ the fat man scolded her derisively.
Sasha was sitting directly opposite her father’s overturned body, which was lying face down in the blood. Both straps of her overalls had been tugged down off her shoulders, revealing a washed-out singlet with a picture of some jolly little animal. Her kidnapper wouldn’t let her see his face, he seared her eyes with a brilliant beam of light every time she tried to look up. He’d taken the rag out of her mouth, but Sasha still had no intention of asking him for anything.
‘Not like your mother, unfortunately. And I was really hoping . . .’
The elephantine legs in the blood-smeared knee boots set off again round the column that Sasha was sitting against. Now his voice came from behind her back.
‘Your daddy probably thought that in time everything would be forgotten. But some crimes don’t carry a statute of limitation . . . Slander. Betrayal.’
His obese figure emerged from the gloom on the other side of her. He stopped, looking down on her father’s body, prodding it contemptuously with his boot. He hacked up spittle and spat out a generous gobbet.
‘It’s a shame the old fellow snuffed it without my help,’ said the fat man, running the beam of his flashlight round the heaps of useless junk that cluttered the bleak, faceless station and halting it on the bicycle with no wheels. ‘A cosy little place you have here. I think if it wasn’t for you, your daddy would have preferred to hang himself.’
While the flashlight was directed away from her, Sasha tried to crawl off to the side, but a second later the beam picked her out of the darkness again.
‘And I can understand him,’ said her kidnapper. With a single bound he was there beside her again. ‘You’ve turned out a fine little girl. It’s just a shame you’re not like your mum. I think he was probably disappointed about that too. Well, never mind,’ he said, knocking her to the floor with the toe of his boot. ‘At least I didn’t waste my time coming all the way through the Metro to get here.’
Sasha shuddered and shook her head.
‘See how unpredictable everything is, Pete,’ he said, talking to Sasha’s father again. ‘There was a time when you used to have your rivals in love court-martialled. Thanks, by the way, for not having me executed, merely banished for life. But life is long, and circumstances change. And not always to your advantage. I’ve come back, even if it has taken me ten years longer than I planned.’
‘It’s never an accident when someone goes back somewhere,’ Sasha whispered, repeating her father’s words
‘How very true that is,’ the fat man jeered. ‘Hey, who’s there?’
At the far end of the platform something bulky and ponderous rustled and fell, then there was a kind of hissing sound and the stealthy footsteps of a large animal. When silence fell again it was a false silence, frayed and tattered. Like her kidnapper, Sasha could sense something moving towards them out of the tunnel.
The fat man snapped the breech of his gun, went down on one knee beside the girl, pressed the butt into his shoulder and ran a trembling spot of light over the closest columns. Hearing the southern tunnels come to life after they had been empty for decades was as spine-chilling as seeing the marble statues waking up in one of the central stations of the Metro.
A blurred shadow flitted across the beam of light just as the beam was turning away – it wasn’t human, though – the shape was wrong and the movements were too agile. But when the light moved back to the spot where the mysterious creature had just been, there was no trace of it. A minute later the beam, fluttering wildly in panic, caught it again – only twenty steps away from them.
‘A bear?’ the fat man whispered in disbelief, pressing the trigger.
Bullets lashed into the columns and started rattling against the walls, but the beast seemed to have dematerialised, and not a single shot found its target. Then the fat man suddenly stopped firing senselessly, dropped his automatic and pressed his hands to his stomach. His flashlight rolled off to one side, casting a cone of light that crept across the floor and lighting up his corpulent, hunched-over figure from below.
A man stepped unhurriedly out of the gloom, walking with incredibly soft, almost soundless steps in his heavy boots. In a protective suit that was too large even for a giant like him, he really could have been taken for a bear. He wasn’t wearing a gas mask: his scar-furrowed face and shaved head looked like a scorched desert. Part of the face, with hard, coarsely defined, manly features, was even rather handsome, but it looked dead somehow, and Sasha couldn’t repress a shudder when she looked at it. The other half was simply repulsive – a complicated tangle of scars transformed it into the half-mask of a folk-tale monster, perfect in its ugly deformity. But even so, apart from the eyes, his appearance was repellent, rather than frightening. A half-crazed, prowling, probing gaze enlivened the stiffened face. Enlivened it, but didn’t bring it to life.
The fat
man tried to get to his feet, but immediately collapsed on the floor, screaming in pain, shot through both the knees. Then the gunman squatted down beside him, put the silencer on the end of his long pistol barrel against the fat man’s head and pulled the trigger. The howling broke off instantly. But for a few seconds the echo wandered under the vaults of the station like a lost spirit, bereft of its body.
The shot had thrown the fat man’s chin up, and now Sasha’s kidnapper lay there turned towards her. Instead of a face he had a damp, gaping, crimson crater. Sasha huddled back and started whimpering in horror. Slowly and thoughtfully, the terrible gunman turned the gun barrel on her.
Then he looked round and changed his mind: the pistol disappeared into its holster and he stepped back, as if trying to disown what he had done. He opened a flat flask and took a pull from it.
A new character appeared on the small stage illuminated by the dead man’s fading flashlight: an old man who was breathing heavily, clutching at his ribs. He was dressed in the same kind of suit as the killer, and looked absolutely absurd in it. When he caught up with his companion, the old man immediately collapsed on the floor in exhaustion, not even noticing that everything around him was awash with blood. It was only later, when he came round and opened his eyes, that he saw the two mutilated bodies and the mute, terrified girl hemmed in between them.
Homer’s heart had only just calmed down, but now it leapt again. He couldn’t express it in words yet, but he already knew for certain: he had found her. After so many nights spent in fruitless attempts to picture his future heroine, trying to imagine her lips and her wrists, her clothes and her aroma, her movements and her thoughts, he had suddenly met a real person who matched all his requirements perfectly. Of course, until now he had imagined her quite differently . . . More elegant, more well-rounded and certainly more grown-up. She had turned out to be much more sinewy, she had too many sharp corners and, glancing into her eyes, instead of languorous, enveloping warmth, the old man encountered two cold splinters of ice. She was different, but Homer knew it was his mistake, he had failed to guess what she ought to be like. Her trapped look, her face distorted by fear and her manacled hands intrigued the old man. He might be a master at retelling yarns, but he hadn’t been granted the talent to write tragedies of the kind that this girl must have suffered. Her helplessness and hopelessness, her miraculous rescue and the way her destiny had been woven into their story meant that he was on the right track.
Metro 2034 Page 13