They flew through Frunze Station: taken by surprise, the sentries scattered like the rats, and the trolley was already hundreds of metres away from Frunze before it started howling furiously in unison with Sport Station.
‘Now things will get hot!’ Leonid shouted. ‘The important thing is to slip past the crossover line to the Circle! There’s a large frontier post there . . . They’ll try to intercept us! We’ll go straight along the branch line to the centre!’
He knew what to worry about: from out of the side branch that had taken them onto the Red Line a powerful searchlight lashed into their eyes as a heavy freight trolley came rushing towards them. Their tracks would converge in a few dozen metres, it was too late to stop. The musician pressed the worn, shiny pedal to the floor and Sasha squeezed her eyes shut. They could only hope the points were set in the right direction and wouldn’t direct them into a head-on collision.
A machine-gun rumbled and bullets whizzed by just centimetres from their ears. There was an acrid smell of burning and heated air, the roar of another motor flared up and faded away, and the trolleys missed each other by a miracle – the battle trolley flew out onto their track only a moment after Sasha’s trolley passed the fork before sweeping on, shuddering, towards Culture Park. The battle trolley had been flung in the opposite direction.
Now they had a short lead that would last them until the next station, but what then? The trolley slowed down – the tunnel had started sloping upwards.
‘Park’s almost at surface level,’ the musician explained to her, looking back. ‘But Frunze is fifty metres down. We just have to get past the rise, after that we’ll pick up speed!’
They even managed to pick up some speed before reaching Culture Park. A proud old station with tall vaults, half-dead and dimly lit, it turned out to be almost uninhabited. A siren started rasping, clearing its rusty throat. Heads appeared above the brick fortifications. Sub-machine-guns started barking after them too late, in helpless fury.
‘We might even stay alive!’ laughed the musician.‘Just a bit more good luck, and . . .’
And at that moment a small spark glinted in the darkness astern of them, then blazed up more brightly, becoming blinding as it overhauled them . . . The battle trolley’s searchlight! Thrusting the fierce beam out ahead of it like a lance on which it was straining to impale their ramshackle little vehicle, the battle trolley ate up the distance between them, cutting it back minute by minute. The machine-gun started yammering again and bullets whined through the air.
‘Just a bit further! This is Kropotkin already!’
Kropotkin . . . Ruled off into squares with identical tents set out in them, neglected and unkempt. Someone’s rough portraits on the walls, painted a long time ago and already blurred and runny. Flags and more flags, so many that they merged into a single ribbon of crimson, a frozen jet spurting out of a fossilised vein.
Just then an under-barrel grenade launcher barked and fragments of marble showered down onto the trolley: one of them slit Sasha’s leg open, but the wound wasn’t deep. Ahead of them small young soldiers started lowering a boom, but the trolley had picked up more speed and smashed it aside, almost flying off the rails itself.
The battle trolley was gaining on them implacably: its motor was many times more powerful and easily pushed the steel-clad behemoth along. Sasha and the musician had to lie down and shelter behind the metal frame of their trolley.
But in just a few moments the sides of the two trolleys would touch, and they would be boarded. Leonid suddenly started taking off his clothes, as if he had lost his senses. A frontier post appeared ahead: a parapet built of sandbags, steel tank traps – the end of the journey. Now they’d be jammed between two machine-guns, between the hammer and the anvil.
In a minute it would all be over.
CHAPTER 18
Deliverance
The line of men was several dozen metres long. Only the very finest of Sebastopol’s soldiers were in it, each one personally selected by the colonel. Their little helmet lamps twinkled in the gloom of the tunnel, and Denis Mikhailovich suddenly saw the entire combat formation as a swarm of fireflies dashing into the night. Into a warm, fragrant Crimean night, over the cypresses, towards the whispering sea. To where the colonel would like to go when he died.
He shook off the chilly, ticklish sensation, frowned and reprimanded himself severely. He was starting to weaken in his old age after all. He let the last soldier past him, opened a stainless steel cigarette case, took out the one and only hand-rolled cigarette, sniffed at it and struck a flame out of his lighter. It was a good day. Fortune was smiling on the colonel and everything was coming together just as he had planned. They’d got through Nagornaya without any casualties – even the one man who disappeared had caught up with the column again soon afterwards. And everyone was in an excellent mood: going up against bullets was far less frightening to them than floundering in uncertainty and endless waiting. And apart from that, Denis Mikhailovich had let them catch up properly on their sleep just before the expedition. Only he hadn’t been able to get to sleep himself: the colonel had always regarded destiny as a simple sequence of fortuitous events and had never understood how it was possible to put any trust in it. There hadn’t been any news of the little two-man expedition in all the days that had passed since it set off into the Kakhovka Line tunnels. Anything could have happened, after all, Hunter wasn’t immortal. And what right did Denis Mikhailovich have to rely on just the brigadier, who might have gone totally crazy from all his endless battles, and that old storyteller?
He couldn’t wait any longer either.
The plan of action was this: take the main body of Sebastopol’s forces through Nakhimov Prospect, Nagornaya and Nagatino to Tula’s closed southern hermetic door and send a group of saboteurs over the surface to the sealed-off station. Send the saboteurs down into the tunnel through the ventilation shafts to eliminate the guards, if there still were any, and open the door for the assault brigade. And after that it was a simple, routine job, no matter who had captured the station. It had taken three days to locate and clean out the shafts. All that was left for the stalkers to do today was let the saboteurs in. And that was going to happen in a couple of hours’ time. In two hours everything would be decided and Denis Mikhailovich would be able to think about something else again, able to sleep and eat again.
The plan was simple, precise, impeccable. But Denis Mikhailovich had a tense, agitated kind of feeling and his heart was pounding as if he was eighteen years old again, advancing into that mountain village, into his first battle. The colonel cauterised his sense of alarm with the final glow of his cigarette, threw away the tiny butt, pulled his mask on again and strode forward to catch up with the unit.
The brigade soon came up against the steel hermetic door. They could rest here until the assault began and he could run through the carefully spelled out and memorised roles with the section leaders.
Homer had been right about one thing, the colonel thought to himself with a chuckle. It was pointless trying to take a fortress by storm, if you could get it opened up for you from the inside, like the Greeks at Troy. And wasn’t it actually Homer who wrote about the Trojan Horse?
Denis Mikhailovich checked his radiation meter: the background level was low, and he pulled off his gas mask. The section leaders did the same, and then so did the other soldiers. That was fine, let them take a breather.
In Polis there were always plenty of people who had struggled to make the journey here from poor, dark, outlying stations, hanging about or wandering through the galleries and halls with their eyes goggling and their jaws hanging open in admiration. And Homer, circling round Borovitskaya, tenderly stroking the elegant columns of Alexander Garden, scrutinising with loving delight the frivolous chandeliers of Arbat that looked like girls’ earrings, didn’t stand out from them in any way.
His heart had caught a presentiment and wouldn’t let go of it: this was the last time he would be in Polis. What was
about to happen at Tula in a few hours would cancel out his entire life, and perhaps even cut it short. The old man had decided to do what he had to do. He would let Hunter kill everyone and burn out the station, and then try to kill him. But if the brigadier suspected treachery, he would wring Homer’s neck in an instant. And perhaps the old man would be killed in the assault on Tula. If so, his death would come soon. But if everything went well, afterwards Homer would become a hermit, so that he could fill up all the white pages between the already written opening of the book and the final full stop, which he would insert with the shot into the back of Hunter’s head.
Would he be able to do it? Would he dare? The mere thought of it was enough to set the old man’s hands shaking. But never mind, it would all work out somehow. He didn’t need to think about it now, too much thinking led to doubts.
And thank God he’d sent the girl away! Homer understood now why he had got her mixed up in his reckless adventure, why he had allowed her to walk into the lions’ cage. He’d got carried away, playing the writer, and forgotten that she wasn’t a figment of his imagination.
Homer’s novel would turn out different from the way he had thought of it, it would be about something different. But from the very beginning Homer had attempted to shoulder an impossibly heavy burden. How could all the people be fitted into a single book? Even the crowd through which the old man was walking at the moment would be cramped on a book’s pages. Homer didn’t want to transform his book into a communal grave, with flickering columns of names that dazzled the eyes and bronze letters, behind which it was impossible to glimpse the faces and characters of the fallen.
No, it wouldn’t work. Even his memory, so corroded by the passage of time that it had started springing leaks a long time ago, couldn’t take all these people on board. The pockmarked face of a sweet seller, and the pale, sharp-nosed face of the little girl handing him a cartridge. And her mother’s smile, beaming as bright as the smile of a Madonna, and the lecherous, sticky smile of the soldier walking by. And the harsh wrinkles of the ancient beggars appealing for charity right there, and the laughing wrinkles beside the eyes of a thirty-year-old woman.
Which of them was a rapist, or a money-grubber, or a thief, or a traitor, or a rake, or a prophet, or a righteous man, and which of them still hadn’t found themselves yet – Homer didn’t know all that. It wasn’t revealed to him what the sweet seller was really thinking about when he looked at the little girl, what was really meant by her mother’s smile – the smile of someone else’s wife ignited by the spark of a soldier’s gaze – or how the beggar used to make his living before his legs gave out. And so it wasn’t for Homer to decide who deserved immortal fame and who didn’t.
Six billion people had simply perished: six billion of them! Was it pure chance that only a few tens of thousands had managed to escape?
The engine driver Serov, whose place Nikolai was to have taken a week after the Apocalypse, was a passionate sports fan, who regarded the whole of life as a football match. ‘The whole human race has lost,’ he used to tell Nikolai, ‘but you and I are still running around, haven’t you ever wondered why? It’s because our lives don’t have a final scoreline yet, and the ref’s made us play extra time. And during that time we have to figure out what we’re here for and manage to get everything done, set everything straight, and then take a pass and fly with the ball towards that radiant goalmouth . . .’ He was a mystic, that Serov. Homer had never asked him if he managed to score that goal, but Serov’s views had certainly convinced Homer that he still needed to set his own personal score in order. And it was from Serov that Homer had acquired the certitude that no one in the Metro was there by accident.
But it wasn’t possible to write about everything!
Should he even carry on trying?
And then, among a thousand unfamiliar faces, the old man saw what he least of all expected to see at that moment.
Leonid took off his jacket and pulled off his sweater, followed by a relatively white T-shirt, which he flung up over his head like a flag and started waving about, taking no notice of the dense swarm of bullets whizzing through the air around him. And something strange happened: the battle trolley started falling back, and still no one opened fire from the frontier post looming up ahead of them.
‘And for that my dear dad would kill me!’ the musician told Sasha after they braked with a ferocious grating sound from full speed to a dead halt right in front of the tank traps.
‘What are you doing? What are we doing?’ Sasha couldn’t catch her breath, she couldn’t understand how they could have survived the chase.
‘We’re surrendering!’ he laughed. ‘This is the entrance to Lenin Library Station, the frontier post of Polis. And you and I are defectors.’
Border guards came running up and took them down off the trolley. When they checked Leonid’s passport they exchanged glances, put away the handcuffs they were holding ready and escorted the girl and the musician into the station. They took them into the watch office and went out, whispering among themselves respectfully, to get their commanding officer.
Leonid, who was sprawling haughtily in a threadbare armchair, immediately jumped up, glanced out of the door and beckoned to Sasha.
‘They’re even worse slackers here than on our line!’ he snorted. ‘There aren’t any guards!’
They slipped out of the room and walked unhurriedly at first, then faster and faster along the passage, finally breaking into a run and holding hands so that the crowd wouldn’t separate them. Their backs soon started itching when they heard the trilling of militiamen’s whistles behind them, but nothing could have been easier than to lose themselves in this huge station. There were ten times as many people here as at Pavelets. Even when Sasha imagined life as it was before the war, while she was taking her stroll on the surface, she hadn’t been able to picture such a huge multitude! And it was almost as bright here as it had been up there. Sasha covered her face with one hand, examining the world through a narrow observation slit between her fingers. Her eyes kept stumbling over things, faces, columns, every one more amazing than the ones that had gone before, and if not for Leonid and his fingers intertwined with hers, she would certainly have stumbled and fallen, completely disoriented. She definitely had to come back here some day, Sasha promised herself. Some day when she had more time.
‘Sasha?’
The girl looked back, and her gaze met Homer’s: he looked frightened, and angry, and surprised. Sasha smiled: apparently she had missed the old man.
‘What are you doing here?’ He couldn’t have asked two young people trying to make a quick getaway a more stupid question.
‘We’re going to Dobrynin!’ she answered, catching her breath and slowing down slightly so the old man could catch up with them.
‘Don’t talk nonsense! You mustn’t . . . I forbid you to!’ But his prohibitions, gasped out through strenuous puffing and panting, made no impression on her.
They reached the check point at Borovitskaya before the border guards had warned it about their getaway.
‘I have a warrant from Miller! Let us through, and make it quick!’ Homer told the officer on duty coolly.
The soldier opened his mouth, but then without even taking time to gather his thoughts, he saluted the old man and stood aside.
‘Did you just lie?’ the musician asked Homer politely when the checkpoint was far behind them, lost in the darkness.
‘What difference does it make?’ the old man snarled angrily.
‘The important thing is to do it confidently,’ Leonid said appreciatively. ‘Then only the professionals will notice.’
‘To hell with the lectures!’ exclaimed Homer, frowning and clicking the switch of his flashlight, which was already running down. ‘We’ll go as far as Serpukhov, but I won’t let you go any further than that!’
‘That’s because you don’t know!’ said Sasha. ‘A cure has been found for the sickness!’
‘What do you mean, found?�
�� asked the old man, breaking step and starting to cough. He gave Sasha a strange, fearful kind of look.
‘Yes, yes! It’s radiation!’
‘The bacteria are rendered harmless by the effects of radiation,’ explained the musician, coming to the rescue.
‘But microbes and viruses are hundreds or thousands of times more resistant to radiation than human beings! And radiation impairs the immune response!’ the old man shouted, losing control of himself. ‘What nonsense have you been telling her? Why are you dragging her off there? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen now? None of us can stop him now! Take her away somewhere and hide her! And you . . .’ Homer turned to Sasha. ‘How could you believe . . . a professional?’ he said, spitting out the last word contemptuously.
‘Don’t be afraid for me,’ the girl said in a quiet voice. ‘I know Hunter can be stopped. He has two halves . . . I’ve seen both of them. One wants blood, but the other is trying to save people!’
‘What are you talking about?’ exclaimed Homer, flinging his arms up in protest. ‘There aren’t any different parts any more, there’s a single whole. A monster locked inside a human body! A year ago . . .’
But the old man’s retelling of the conversation between the man with the shaved head and Miller did nothing to convince Sasha. The longer she listened to Homer, the more certain she became that she was right.
‘It’s just that the one inside him, who kills, is deceiving the other one,’ she said, struggling to find the right words to explain everything to the old man. ‘It’s telling him there’s no choice. One is driven by hunger, and the other by anguish. That’s why Hunter’s so eager to get to Tula – both halves are dragging him there! They have to be split apart. If he’s offered a choice – to save without killing . . .’
Metro 2034 Page 33