‘Oh God . . . He won’t even listen to you! What’s pulling you to that place?’
‘Your book,’ Sasha told him with a gentle smile. ‘I know everything in it can still be changed. The ending hasn’t been written yet.’
‘Nonsense! Gibberish!’ Homer babbled in despair. ‘Why did I even tell you about it? Young man, you at least . . .’ He grabbed Leonid by the arm. ‘I beg you, I believe you’re not a bad person and you didn’t lie out of spite. Take her. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You’re both so young and so beautiful . . . You have a life to live! She mustn’t go there, do you understand? And you mustn’t go there. You won’t stop anything either, with your little lie . . .’
‘It isn’t a lie,’ the musician said politely. ‘Would you like me to swear to it?’
‘All right, all right,’ said the old man, brushing aside his protestations. ‘I’m prepared to believe you. But Hunter . . . you’ve only had a brief glimpse of him, haven’t you?’
‘But I’ve heard plenty,’ Leonid said with a wry chuckle.
‘He’s . . . How are you going to stop him? With that flute of yours? Or do you think he’ll listen to the girl? That thing inside him . . . He can’t even hear anything any longer . . .’
‘To be honest,’ said the musician, leaning down towards the old man, ‘in my heart I agree with you. But it’s a young lady’s request! And I am a gentleman, after all.’ He winked at Sasha.
‘Why can’t you understand . . . this isn’t a game!’ Homer burst out, gazing imploringly at the girl and Leonid by turns.
‘I do understand,’ Sasha said firmly.
‘Everything’s a game,’ the musician said calmly.
If the musician really was Moskvin’s son, he genuinely could know something about the epidemic that even Hunter hadn’t heard. Hadn’t heard or didn’t want to tell? Homer suspected that Leonid was a charlatan, but what if radiation really could destroy the fever? Against his own will and against all common sense the old man started gathering together proofs that he was right. Wasn’t this what he had been praying for for the last few days? Then the cough, the bleeding mouth, the nausea – were they merely symptoms of radiation sickness? The dose he had received on the Kakhovka Line must have extinguished the infection.
The devil certainly knew how to tempt the old man! But assuming it was true, then what about Tula, and what about Hunter? Sasha was hoping she could change his mind. And she really did seem to have a strange kind of power over the brigadier. But while one of the parties warring within him might find the bridle the girl was trying to throw over him as soft as silk, it would sear the other like red hot iron. Which of them would be on the outside at the decisive moment?
This time Polyanka chose not to put on a show for him, or for Sasha, or for Leonid. The station appeared to them stark and empty, as if it had given up the ghost long ago. Should Homer take this as a good omen or a bad one? He didn’t know. Possibly the draught that had started up in the tunnels – a shadow of the winds rambling about on the surface – had simply swept away all the stupefying vapours. Or was the old man perhaps mistaken about something, and now he didn’t have any future for Polyanka to tell him about?
‘What does “Emerald” mean?’ Sasha asked out of the blue.
‘An emerald is a transparent green stone,’ Homer explained absent-mindedly. ‘So to say something is emerald simply means that it’s green.’
‘That’s funny,’ the girl said thoughtfully. ‘So it does exist after all . . .’
‘What do you mean?’ the musician asked with a start.
‘Oh, nothing really . . . You know,’ she said, looking at Leonid, ‘I’m going to search for that city of yours too. And I’ll definitely find it someday.’
Homer just shook his head: he still wasn’t convinced the musician was sincere in his repentance for filling Sasha’s head with nonsense and luring her to Sport Station for nothing.
But the girl was still absorbed in her own thoughts: she whispered something and sighed a couple of times. Then she glanced at the old man quizzically.
‘Have you written down everything that happened to me?’
‘I’m writing it.’
‘Good,’ she said and nodded.
Bad things were happening at Serpukhov. The Hansa guard at the entrance had been doubled and the morose, taciturn soldiers flatly refused to let Homer and the others through. Neither the cartridges that the musician jangled under their noses nor his document made the slightest impression on them. The situation was saved by the old man, who demanded to be connected with Andrei Andreevich. A long half-hour later a signal officer arrived, unreeling a thick wire, and Homer menacingly announced into his telephone receiver that the three of them were the advance guard of a cohort of the Order. This half-truth was enough to get them escorted through the hall, which was stuffy, as if all the air had been pumped out of the station, and entirely sleepless, even though it was the middle of the night, to the reception office of the commandant of Dobrynin.
He met them at the door in person, dishevelled and lathered in sweat, with sunken eyes and breath that stank of stale alcohol; the orderly wasn’t in the room. Andrei Andreevich looked round nervously and, not seeing Hunter, he snorted impatiently.
‘Will they be here soon?’
‘Yes, soon,’ Homer told him confidently.
‘Serpukhov could mutiny at any moment,’ said the commandant, wiping his face as he strode round the reception office. ‘Someone let the cat out of the bag about the epidemic. No one knows what to be afraid of, they’re lying and saying that gas masks won’t help.’
‘They’re not lying,’ Leonid put in.
‘The guard post in one of the southern tunnels to Tula has mutinied, the entire unit. Mangy cowards . . . In the other tunnel, where the sectarians are, they’re still holding position . . . Those fanatics have besieged them, howling about Judgement Day . . . The ruckus is starting up even here, in my own station! And where are our rescuers?’
There was the sound of ranting and swearing in the hall, people yelling and guards blaspheming. Before his question had even been answered, Andrei Andreevich squeezed back into his lair and started clinking the neck of a bottle against a glass in there. On his orderly’s counter a little red light lit up on one of the phones, as if it had just been waiting for the commandant to leave the room: it was the phone with the word ‘Tula’ scrawled on a strip of sticking plaster.
Homer hesitated for a second before stepping towards the desk: he licked his dry lips and took a deep breath . . .
‘Dobrynin Station here!’
‘What shall I tell them?’ Artyom asked doltishly, looking round at the commander.
The commander was still unconscious: his cloudy eyes looked as if they’d been curtained off and were shifting about restlessly right up under his forehead. Sometimes his body was shaken by a vicious cough. His lung’s punctured, thought Artyom.
‘Are you alive?’ he shouted into the receiver. ‘The infected men have broken out!’
Then he remembered they didn’t know what was happening at Tula. He had to tell them, explain everything. Out on the platform a woman squealed and a machine-gun rumbled. The sounds slipped in through the crack under the door, and there was nowhere to hide from them. The person at the other end of the line was answering him, asking questions, but he couldn’t hear them properly.
‘You have to block their way out!’ Artyom repeated. ‘Shoot to kill. Don’t let them get near you!’
He realised they didn’t know what the sick people looked like. How could he describe them? Bloated, with cracked skin, stinking? But then, the ones who had only got infected recently looked like normal people.
‘Shoot everyone you see,’ he said lifelessly.
But didn’t that mean that if he tried to get out of the station, they’d shoot him too, that he’d condemned himself to death? No, he’d never get out. No one healthy was left at the station . . . Artyom suddenly felt unbearably lonely. And afra
id that the man listening to all this at Dobrynin wouldn’t have enough time now to talk to him.
‘Please don’t hang up!’ he told him.
Artyom didn’t know what to talk about with the stranger, and he started telling him about how long he’d been trying to get through and how he’d thought there wasn’t a single station still left alive in the whole Metro. What if he’d been calling into the future, when no one had survived, he thought, and he said that too. He didn’t have to be afraid of anything at all now. Just as long as he had someone to talk to.
‘Popov!’ the commander wheezed behind his back. ‘Have you contacted the northern guard post? The hermetic door . . . Is it closed off?’
Artyom looked round and shook his head.
‘Dumb bastard,’ the commander barked, hacking up blood. ‘Useless jerk . . . Listen to me. The station’s mined. I found these pipes . . . Up on top . . . A drain for ground water. I laid charges . . . we’ll set them off and flood the whole damn station. I’ve got the contacts for the mines here in the radio room. We have to close the northern door . . . And check if . . . And check if the southern one’s holding. Seal off the station. So the water doesn’t spread any further. Close it off, have you got that? When everything’s ready, you tell me . . . Is the line to the guard post working?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Artyom said and nodded.
‘Just don’t you forget to stay on this side of the door,’ said the commander, stretching his lips into a smile and breaking into furious coughing. ‘That wouldn’t be a comradely thing to do.’
‘But what about you? You’ll be here?’
‘Don’t funk it, Popov,’ said the commander, narrowing his eyes.
‘Every one of us is born for something. I was born to drown these bastards. You were born to batten down the hatches and die like an honest man. Got that?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Artyom repeated.
‘Get on with it, then!’
The phone went dead.
By some whim of the telephone gods, Homer had heard almost everything the duty officer at Tula said to him quite well. But he hadn’t been able to make out the last few phrases, and then the connection had broken down completely.
The old man looked up. Andrei Andreevich’s heavy carcass was looming over him; his blue tunic had acquired dark patches under the armpits, his fat hands were trembling.
‘What’s going on there?’ he asked in a hoarse, faint voice.
‘Everything’s got out of control.’ Homer gulped hard. ‘Move all your free men to Serpukhov.’
‘Can’t be done,’ said Andrei Andreevich, pulling his Makarov pistol out of his trouser pocket. ‘There’s panic at the station. I’ve posted all the loyal men at the entrances to the tunnels on the Circle, to make sure at least that no one disappears from here.’
‘You can reassure them!’ Homer responded hesitantly. ‘We’ve found out . . . The fever can be cured. By radiation. Tell them.’
‘Radiation?’ The commandant pulled a sour face. ‘Do you really believe that? Then fire ahead, you have my blessing!’ He saluted the old man buffoonishly, slammed the door shut and locked himself in his own office. What should Homer and the girl and the musician do now? They couldn’t even escape from here. But where were the other two? The old man went out into the corridor, pressing his hand against his pounding heart. He ran into the station, calling out her name. He couldn’t see them anywhere. Dobrynin was in chaos: women with children and men with bundles were besieging the weakened cordons and looters were darting about among the overturned tents, but no one was paying any attention to them. Homer had seen this kind of thing before: next they’d start trampling on those who had fallen, and then shooting at unarmed people.
And at that very moment the tunnel gave a groan.
The wailing and clamouring stopped, replaced by loud exclamations of surprise. The extraordinary, powerful sound was repeated. It was like the roaring battle trumpets of a Roman legion that had lost its way in the millennia and was advancing against Dobrynin Station.
Soldiers started scurrying about, moving aside barriers, and something immense emerged from the mouth of the tunnel . . . A genuine armoured train! The heavy head of the cabin, jacketed in steel that was studded with rivets, with heavy calibre machine-guns protruding from the slits of two gun ports, then a long, lean body and a second horned head, facing in the opposite direction. Not even Homer had ever come across a monster like this.
Sitting on the raven-black armour plating were faceless idols. Indistinguishable from each other in their full-protection suits, Kevlar vests and outlandish gas masks, with backpacks behind their shoulders, they didn’t seem to belong to this time or this world at all.
The train stopped. The aliens encased in armour paid no attention to the curious onlookers who came running up: they flew down onto the platform and lined up in three ranks. Swinging round as one man in perfect synchronisation, like a machine, they lumbered off towards the connecting passage to Serpukhov, and their tramping drowned out the awed whispers and the children’s crying. The old man hurried after them, trying to spot Hunter among the dozens of warriors. They were all almost the same height, their anonymous bulletproof jumpsuits fitted without a single wrinkle, stretched taut across their massively broad shoulders, and they were all armed in the same menacing fashion: backpack flamethrowers and nine-millimetre sniper’s rifles with silencers. No insignia, no coats of arms, no badges of rank. Probably he was one of the three striding along at the front?
The old man ran along the column, waving his hand, glancing into the observation slits of the gas masks and always encountering the same impassive, indifferent gaze. None of the aliens responded, no one recognised Homer. So was Hunter even with them? He had to show up, he had to!
The old man didn’t see either Sasha or Leonid on his way through the passage. Could good judgement really have prevailed, and the musician have hidden the girl somewhere out of harm’s way? If they would just wait out the bloodbath somewhere, then afterwards Homer would come to an agreement with Andrei Andreevich, provided the commandant hadn’t already blown his brains out.
The formation forged ahead, slicing through the crowd, and no one dared to stand in its way, even the Hansa border guards silently made way for it. Homer decided to follow the column – he had to make sure that Sasha wouldn’t try to do anything. No one tried to drive the old man away, they took no more notice of him than of some mutt barking after a hand trolley.
As they stepped into the tunnel, the three men at the head of the column lit up their million-candle-power flashlights, burning out the darkness ahead. None of them spoke and the silence was oppressive and unnatural. It was their training, of course, but the old man couldn’t help feeling that in honing the skills of the body, these men had suppressed the skills of the soul. And now he was observing a perfected killing machine, in which none of the elements had a will of its own, and only one, who from the outside was indistinguishable from all the others, carried the programme of action. When he gave the order ‘Fire!’ the others would commit Tula to the flames, and likewise any other station, together with everything still living in it.
Thank God, they didn’t march through the line where the sectarians’ train was stuck. The unfortunates had been granted a brief respite before their Day of Judgement: the warriors would annihilate Tula first, and only turn on them afterwards. Obeying some signal that Homer couldn’t see, the column suddenly slowed down. A moment later, he realised what was happening: they were already very close to the station. The silence was as transparent as glass, with someone’s heartrending howls scraping on it like a nail . . .
And there was another sound, absolutely incongruous and barely audible. Trickling out drop by drop, making the old man doubt his own reason, miraculous music greeted the alien visitors.
The phone had swallowed up the old man completely and Sasha decided she couldn’t find a better moment to run for it. She edged out of the reception room, waited for Leonid outside and led
him after her – first to the passage to Serpukhov, and then into the tunnel that would take them to the people who needed them. To the people whose lives she could save.
The tunnel that would also reunite her with Hunter.
‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Sasha asked the musician.
‘Yes,’ he said with a smile, ‘but I suspect that I’m finally doing something worthwhile.’
‘You don’t have to go with me, you know. What if we die there? You could just stay at the station and not go anywhere!’
‘A man’s future is concealed from his knowledge,’ said Leonid, holding up his finger in a professorial gesture and puffing out his cheeks.
‘You decide for yourself what it’s going to be,’ Sasha retorted.
‘Oh, come on,’ the musician laughed. ‘We’re all just rats running through a maze with little sliding doors in the passages. Whoever it is that’s studying us sometimes pulls them up and sometimes pushes them down. And if the door at Sport Station is down right now, there’s no way you’re going to get in there, no matter how hard you scratch at it. And if there’s a trap after the next little door, you’ll fall into it in any case, even if you can sense that something’s wrong, because there isn’t any other way to go. The choice is basically keep on running or croak in protest.’
‘Don’t you resent having a life like this?’ asked Sasha, knitting her brows.
‘I resent the fact that the way my spine is constructed doesn’t allow me to raise my head and look at whoever’s running the experiment,’ the musician responded.
‘There isn’t any maze,’ said Sasha, biting her lip. ‘And rats can even gnaw through cement.’
‘You’re a rebel,’ Leonid laughed. ‘And I’m a conformist.’
‘That’s not true,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You believe that people can be changed.’
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