‘I’d like to believe it,’ the musician objected.
They passed a hastily abandoned guard post. Embers were still glowing in the extinguished campfire with a greasy, crumpled magazine full of pictures of naked people lying beside it and an abandoned Hansa standard dangled forlornly, half-torn off the wall.
Ten minutes later they came across the first body. The corpse was barely recognisable as human. It had flung its arms and legs out wide, as if it was really tired, and the limbs were so bloated that the clothes on them had split. The face was more terrible than any of the monsters Sasha had seen in her short life.
‘Careful!’ said Leonid, catching hold of her hand to stop her going near the corpse. ‘It’s infectious!’
‘So what?’ said Sasha asked. ‘There’s a cure, isn’t there? Where we’re going, everyone’s infectious.’ They heard a rumble of shots up ahead and shouting in the distance.
‘We’re just in time,’ the musician remarked. ‘It looks like they didn’t wait for your friend either . . .’
Sasha gave him a frightened look, then replied with passionate conviction.
‘It’s all right, we just have to tell them! They think they’re all doomed . . . We just have to give them hope.”
Another corpse lay right by the door, staring into the ground – this time it was human. Beside it the iron box of a field communications device was spluttering and hissing desperately. Someone was clearly trying to rouse the sentry.
Several men were lying, hidden behind scattered sandbags, at the very exit from the tunnel. There seemed to be one machine-gunner and two men with automatics, and that was the entire blocking unit. Further ahead, where the narrow tunnel walls widened out and the platform of Tula Station began, a terrible crowd was raging and seething, menacing the men under siege. It was a jumble of the sick and seemingly healthy, normal people and monsters mutilated by the illness. Some of them had flashlights, others no longer needed light.
The men lying down were guarding the tunnel. But they were running out of cartridges, shots sounded less and less often and the brazen crowd was creeping closer and closer.
‘Reinforcements?’ one of the besieged men asked Sasha. ‘Guys, they got through to Dobrynin! Reinforcements!’
The multi-headed monster became more agitated and pressed forward.
‘People!’ shouted Sasha. ‘There is a cure. We’ve found the cure! You’re not going to die! Please, just be patient!’
The crowd gobbled down her words, burped irritably and started moving forward again towards the men who were trying to hold it back. The machine-gunner lashed it with a fierce burst of fire and several people sat down on the ground with a groan. The other soldiers’ automatics barked briefly. The mass of bodies seethed, advancing implacably, ready to trample the besieged men and Sasha and Leonid, ready to tear them to pieces.
But then something happened.
The flute started to sing, stealthily at first, but then with growing confidence and power. Nothing could have been more stupid and less appropriate in that situation. The soldiers guarding the tunnel gazed at the musician in stupefaction, the crowd roared and laughed and started pressing forward again. Leonid took no notice. Probably he wasn’t playing it for them, but for himself – the same amazing melody that had enchanted Sasha, the same one that always captivated dozens of listeners, luring them to him.
Perhaps it was because no worse way to control the rioting and pacify the sick people could possibly be imagined, perhaps it was the touching idiocy of someone who could do something like this, and not the magic of the flute at all, but the crowd relaxed its pressure slightly. Or perhaps the musician really managed to remind these people who had surrounded him, ready to grind him to dust . . . Remind them of something . . .
The shooting stopped and Leonid stepped forward, still holding his flute. As if he were facing a normal audience that would burst into applause and shower him with cartridges at any moment.
For a split second the girl thought she could see her father among the listeners – smiling and at peace. So this was where he had been waiting for her . . . Sasha remembered that Leonid had told her this melody could ease pain.
There was a sudden, premature rumbling in the metal innards of the hermetic door.
Was the advance unit running ahead of schedule? In that case, the situation at Tula couldn’t be so very difficult after all! Perhaps the intruders had left the station a long time ago, leaving the door locked?
The group spread out and the soldiers took shelter behind the projecting flanges of the tunnel liners. Only four of them remained beside Denis Mikhailovich, right in front of the door, holding their weapons at the ready.
This was it. Now the massive door would slowly move aside and a couple of minutes later forty heavily armed Sebastopolite assault troops would burst into Tula. Any resistance would be crushed and the station would be taken in an instant. It had all turned out a lot simpler than the colonel expected.
Denis Mikhailovich didn’t even have time to give the order to don gas masks.
The column reformed, becoming broader – now it was six men abreast, occupying the whole width of the tunnel. The first rank bristled with the barrels of flamethrowers, the second row held its rifles at the ready. They crept forward like black lava, confident and unhurried.
Peeping out from behind the broad backs of the alien warriors, Homer saw the whole scene in the white light of the searchlights: a handful of soldiers defending the tunnel and two thin figures – Sasha and Leonid – and a host of nightmarish creatures surrounding them. And everything inside the old man seemed to freeze up.
Leonid was playing astoundingly, miraculously, with more compelling inspiration than ever before. The horde of ugly, misshapen creatures was listening to him greedily and the soldiers had half-risen from their lying positions in order to see the musician more clearly. And his melody divided the enemies like a glass wall, keeping them apart, preventing them from grappling with each other in a final, deadly skirmish.
‘Stand by!’ one of the dozens of black men ordered – but which one?
The entire front rank went down on one knee together and the second row raised its sniper’s rifles.
‘Sasha!’ Homer shouted.
The girl swung round sharply towards him and screwed her eyes up against the blinding brightness. Holding her open hand out in front of her, she walked against the torrent of light flooding out of those flashlights as slowly as if she were fighting a tempestuous wind. Scalded by the bright rays, the crowd grumbled and groaned, bunching tighter together . . .
The aliens waited.
Sasha walked right up to their formation.
‘Where are you? I need to talk to you, please!’
No one answered her.
‘We’ve found a way to cure the disease! It can be cured! You don’t have to kill anyone! There’s a cure!’
The phalanx of black stone statues remained silent.
‘Please! I know you don’t want to . . . You’re only trying to save them . . . And yourself.’
And then a dull voice rang out above the battle formation, as if it wasn’t coming from any single individual.
‘Stand aside. I don’t want to kill you.’
‘You don’t have to kill anyone! There’s a cure!’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘I beg you!’ Sasha shouted, straining her voice into a shriek.
‘The station has to be purged.’
‘Don’t you want to change everything? Why are you doing the same thing you’ve already done once? That other time, with the Black Ones? Why don’t you want forgiveness?’
The idols didn’t respond any more; the crowd started creeping closer.
‘Sasha!’ Homer whispered imploringly to the girl, but she didn’t hear him.
‘There’s no way to change anything. No one to ask forgiveness from.’ The painful words finally came. ‘I raised my hand against . . . Against . . . And I’ve been punished.’
/>
‘It’s all inside you!’ Sasha shouted, not giving up. ‘You can vindicate yourself! Prove your case! Why can’t you see that it’s the mirror? It’s the reflection of what you did then, a year ago! And now you can act differently . . . Listen to me. Give me a chance . . .
And earn yourself a chance!’
‘I have to destroy the monster,’ the formation said hoarsely.
‘You can’t!’ Sasha shouted. ‘No one can! It’s in me, it’s sleeping in everyone! It’s a part of our soul, a part of our body . . . And when it wakes up . . . You can’t kill it, you can’t slaughter it! You can only lull it back to sleep.’
A grubby soldier slipped through the misshapen creatures and squeezed past the frozen black ranks to the hermetic door and the iron box of a transmitter. He grabbed the microphone and shouted something into it. But then a silencer champed briefly and the soldier fell silent. Sensing blood, the crowd immediately came to life, swelling up and roaring savagely.
The musician put the flute to his lips and started playing, but the magic had dissipated; someone shot at him, he dropped his instrument and grabbed his stomach with both hands.
Fire flickered on the flared muzzles of the flamethrowers. The phalanx sprouted new gun barrels and took a step forward.
Sasha dashed towards Leonid, ready to smash herself against the crowd that had already closed around him where he lay and didn’t want to let the girl have him.
‘No, no!’ she shouted, unable to restrain herself any longer. And then, alone against hundreds of nightmarish monsters, alone against a legion of killers, alone against the whole world, she said stubbornly:
‘I want a miracle!’
Thunder rumbled in the distance, the vaults shuddered, the crowd shrank together and retreated, and the aliens also started backing away. Fine rivulets of water ran across the ground, the first drops started falling from the ceiling and the dark streams gurgled louder and louder.
‘A breach!’ someone howled.
The black men hastily moved away from the station, withdrawing to the hermetic door, and the old man ran with them, looking round at Sasha. She didn’t move. The girl held up her palms and her face to the water gushing down on her . . . and laughed.
‘It’s rain!’ she shouted. ‘It can do anything! We can start everything all over again!’
The black brigade moved outside the door and Homer went with it. Some of the aliens pushed hard on the door, trying to close off Tula and hold back the water. The slab of metal yielded and started moving slowly. The old man went dashing back to Sasha, left in the drowning station, but he was grabbed and flung out.
And then one of the black figures suddenly darted up to the narrowing gap, thrust his arm through it and shouted to the girl.
‘Come on! I need you!’
The water was already waist-deep: the light blonde head suddenly slipped under the surface and disappeared.
The black man jerked his arm back and the door closed.
But the door didn’t open. A tremor ran through the tunnel and the echo of an explosion crashed into the other side of the steel barrier and rebounded from it. Denis Mikhailovich pressed himself against the metal and listened. He wiped the dampness off his cheeks and glanced in surprise at the ceiling that was also exuding moisture.
‘Pull out!’ he ordered ‘It’s all over here.’
Epilogue
Homer sighed and turned the page. There wasn’t much free space left in the exercise book – only a couple of pages. What should he put in, what should he sacrifice? He held his palms out to the campfire, to warm his frozen fingers and comfort them.
The old man had asked to be posted to the southern watch. He worked better here, facing the tunnels, than among the heaps of dead newspapers at home at Sebastopol, no matter how well Elena guarded his peace and quiet.
The brigadier was sitting a little distance away from the others, right on the very boundary of light and darkness. Homer wondered why he had chosen Sebastopol. Evidently there was something about this station after all . . .
Hunter had never told the old man who it was that appeared to him that time at Polyanka, but Homer knew now that what he himself saw wasn’t a prophecy, but a warning.
The water receded from flooded Tula Station after a week and what remained was drained out with huge pumps brought in from the Circle. Homer volunteered to go there with the first scouts.
Almost three hundred bodies. Forgetting his revulsion, forgetting absolutely everything, he rummaged through those terrible bodies, searching for her, searching . . .
Afterwards he sat for a long time at the spot where he saw Sasha for the last time. The spot that he had made his dash for, too late to save her . . . or to die with her.
And the sick and the healthy shuffled past him in an endless procession – towards Sebastopol, to the healing tunnels of the Kakhovka Line. The musician hadn’t lied: radiation really did halt the disease. Perhaps he hadn’t lied at all? Perhaps there was a genuine Emerald City somewhere and it was just a matter of finding the door? Or perhaps he had reached that door, but he still didn’t deserve to have it opened for him? ‘And when the waters receded . . .’ had turned out to be too late.
But it wasn’t the Emerald City that was the Ark. The genuine Ark was the Metro itself. The final haven that gave shelter from the dark, stormy waters to Noah and Shem and Ham: the man of God, the indifferent man and the scoundrel. All the animals two by two. Everyone whose final scoreline hadn’t been decided yet, or whose bills still hadn’t been paid.
There were too many of them, and they definitely wouldn’t fit into this novel. The old man had almost no empty pages left in the exercise book. His book wasn’t an ark, it was a little paper boat, it couldn’t take all the people on board. But Homer thought that in his tentative lines he had come very close to getting something very important down on those pages. Not about all those people, but about man.
The memory of the departed didn’t disappear, thought Homer. Our whole world was woven out of other people’s deeds and thoughts, just as each of us was made up of countless little pieces of mosaic, inherited from thousands of ancestors. They had left a trace behind them, they had left a little particle of their soul for their descendants. You just had to look for it.
And his little boat, made out of paper, out of thoughts and memories, could sail the ocean of time endlessly, until someone else picked it up and examined it and realised that man had never changed, that he had remained true to himself, even after the death of the world. And the flames of the celestial fire that was once implanted in him had fluttered in the wind, but not gone out.
His personal score had been amended now.
Closing his eyes, Homer was back in a resplendently bright station, flooded with light. Thousands of people had gathered on the platform, wearing smart clothes that belonged to a time when he was still young, when no one ever thought of calling him Homer, or even addressing him politely as Nikolai Ivanovich, and now they had been joined by people from here, who had lived in the Metro. Neither group was surprised by the other. They all had something in common.
They were waiting for something, all gazing anxiously into the dark vaults of the long, long tunnel. The old man recognised those faces now. His wife and children were there, and his workfellows, and his schoolmates, and his neighbours, and his two best friends, and Ahmed, and his favourite movie actors. Everyone he still remembered was there.
And then the tunnel lit up and a Metro train slid soundlessly out of it into the station – with living windows blazing with light, with polished sides, with lubricated wheels. The driver’s cabin was empty: hanging inside it was a freshly ironed tunic and a white shirt. That’s my uniform, the old man thought. And my seat.
He climbed into the cabin. Opened the doors of the carriages. Tooted the whistle. The crowd flooded inside, occupying the seats. There were places for everyone: the passengers were smiling now, feeling reassured. The old man smiled too. Homer knew that when he wrote the
final full stop in his book, this sparkling train, full of happy people, would set off from Sebastopol straight into eternity.
The old man was suddenly jerked out of his magical vision by an inhuman groan somewhere very close. Homer shuddered and grabbed his automatic.
It was Hunter groaning. The old man half-stood, about to go over and check on the brigadier, but then he groaned again . . . On a slightly higher note . . . Then again . . . this time slightly lower . . .
Homer listened, unable to believe his ears, and shivered.
Hoarsely and clumsily, the brigadier was trying to pick out a melody. When he missed a note, he went back and repeated it stubbornly, trying to get it right. He was tracing out the melody softly. Like a lullaby.
It was the same melody that Leonid had never given a title to.
Homer never did find Sasha’s body at Tula.
What else?
Also By Dmitry Glukhovsky from Gollancz:
METRO 2033
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Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Original text copyright © Dmitry Glukhovsky 2009
English translation copyright © Andrew Bromfield 2013
All rights reserved.
The right of Dmitry Glukhovsky to be identified as the author of this work and of Andrew Bromfield to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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