“As long as I have to, granddad!” Artyom promised as convincingly as he could. “You wait here. I’ll go and get the guard.”
After that, while they were waiting for the teacher—the overseers were wary of crippling Homer now, and a little of his immunity had rubbed off on Artyom—they had time to say a few more things to each other.
“It’s good you’re getting out, granddad. It’s good that you’re going to write. You probably won’t just write his book, you’ll carry on with your own too, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“You will. For sure. It’s right that people should leave something behind them in this world. That was a good idea of yours.”
“Drop that.”
“No, listen … I can’t tell you everything here now … I just wanted to tell you about the Dark Ones, the most important things. You were going to write about them in your book, weren’t you?”
“What about them?”
“The Dark Ones, granddad … They weren’t what we thought … They weren’t demons, they weren’t a threat to everything. They were our only salvation. And another thing … I was the one who opened the gates into the Metro for them. I was still little then. There was this one day from my childhood that I just couldn’t forget … And so …”
And so, when he goaded Vitalik and Zhenka, two other kids just like him, into playing at stalkers and going to visit the abandoned Botanical Gardens, even though children were strictly forbidden even to set foot in the tunnels, and when he turned the handle of the locking screw on the hermetic door, opening the way up to the surface, and when he went first, dashing up the collapsed steps of the escalator—how could he explain it?—it was because he wanted to see his mother, the mother from that day with the ducks and the ice cream; he was on his way to meet her, because he had missed her so badly. The others had trudged up, following Artyom’s lead, simply because it was frightening to be alone.
And the Dark Ones … The Dark Ones didn’t see him from the outside; they saw him immediately from the inside: a solitary orphan who had gotten lost in their world. They saw him and … made him their pet? No, they didn’t tame him: They adopted him. But he thought they had tamed him: He was afraid that they would put him on a chain, that they would teach him to obey commands, and they would use him against people. He was afraid they wanted to be his masters. But they didn’t want that. They simply felt sorry for him, and in their pity, they took care of him. And with the same compassion, they were willing to save all the people under the ground, but the people had become too brutalized already. The Dark Ones needed an intermediary, an interpreter. And Artyom had been picked up and adopted by them. He could sense their language— could have learned to translate it into Russian. That was his mission in life: to be a bridge between the new man and the old man.
But Artyom took fright. He was afraid to trust; he was afraid of the voice in his head, the dreams, the images. He didn’t trust them, he didn’t trust himself, and he turned to a different mission—to find a way of wiping out the Dark Ones—only because he was afraid of letting them inside himself, of listening to them and doing what they said. It was easier to find some missiles that hadn’t been used in the war and exterminate every last one of the Dark Ones. To cauterize the spot where a new, rational human being had appeared with a bright orange flame. The Botanical Gardens. The very place where Artyom had walked hand in hand with his mother as a four-year-old.
Before Artyom allowed the missiles to be launched, before he gave Miller the coordinates, he still had one second. And for that second he let the Dark Ones inside himself after all: And then—not in order to save themselves, but out of pity for him, knowing that Artyom wouldn’t cancel their execution in any case—the last thing they showed him was his mother. Her smiling face. They told him, in her voice, that they loved him and forgave him.
He could still have put everything right then. Stopped Miller. Cut off the radio set … But he felt afraid again.
And when the missiles started falling … There was no one to love Artyom anymore. And there was no one he could ask for forgiveness. And his mother’s face disappeared forever. And the Botanical Gardens became molten asphalt and black charcoal: square kilometers of black charcoal and soot. There was nowhere for Artyom to go back to.
He walked down the Ostankino Tower and went home, to Exhibition Station—he was greeted as a hero, as a savior. As a saint who had conquered a monstrous dragon. But he carried on being afraid: if not of going insane, then of becoming known as a madman. And he didn’t tell anyone, apart from his Anya and Miller, what had really happened up there. He didn’t tell anyone else that he might have destroyed mankind’s last chance of reclaiming the Earth. He confessed to two people, and neither of them believed him.
And it was only afterwards, a year later, that he started remembering: While he and Ullman were uncoiling the aerial on the Ostankino Tower, something else seemed to flicker in the radio set before Miller came on. There was some kind of call sign … But Artyom didn’t have the headphones: He could have imagined it.
But if he just imagined it, then …
Then there was no hope. It was all irreparable. Irrecoverable. With those clumsy fingers of his, slimy from mushrooms, he had strangled the only hope left for himself and everyone else. He did it. Artyom had condemned the people at the station and throughout the Metro to life in prison. Them, and their children, and their children’s children.
But if there was at least just one place in the world where people had survived …
Just one …
“Just one.”
“Nikolaev. NikolaI Nikolaev.”
“Go! Come on. I’ll see you to the door. Maybe they won’t send me packing.”
“Is it all true?” Homer held on to Artyom’s arm, as if Artyom was helping the old man along; but in fact it was the old man who was helping Artyom.
“Yes. I told you as quickly … as I could. To get it all said in time.”
“When I get you out of here, you’ll tell me the whole story, right? With all the details?” Homer glanced into his eyes. “So that it’s all there in the book, so that nothing gets confused …”
“Of course. When you get me out. But that’s the most important part. I just … wanted to tell you. Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll write it all down like that?”
“Yes, I’ll write it like that.”
“Good,” said Artyom. “That’s right.”
Ilya Stepanovich was standing there impatiently, examining the beast-people; maybe he was wondering what was the best way keep them out of his textbook. He was glad to see Homer and smiled as he laid a padded jacket across his shoulders. The old man held out his hand to Artyom in farewell.
“Till the next time, then?”
The teacher’s face twitched: He knew there wouldn’t be any next time, but he didn’t want to argue with Homer.
Artyom knew too, and he didn’t want to argue either.
“Ilya Stepanich!” he called to the teacher as he led the old man away to live.
The teacher looked back over his shoulder reluctantly. The guards came to life and raised their barbed-wire whips above Artyom.
“How’s your wife? Did she have the baby?” Artyom asked, speaking clearly. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
Ilya Stepanovich’s face turned gray, and he aged instantly.
“A stillborn girl,” he said soundlessly, but Artyom understood anyway, from his lips.
The door slammed shut, and a whip stung Artyom sweetly across the shoulders. The blood started. Good. Let it flow. Let everything inside come out.
When they served the slops, Artyom didn’t simply eat.
He ate in memory of Dietmar.
* * *
It was good that he had seen the old man out.
It was good that he had convinced the old man that he could get Artyom out of here.
It was good that he hadn’t allowed himself to be conv
inced. At least he didn’t twitch anymore when the door clanged. He didn’t hope for anything; he didn’t count the days. It was easier that way, outside of time.
And it was good, too, that he’d been able to tell Homer the most important thing, about himself and the Dark Ones. That he’d had enough minutes and enough breath to do it. Now it wasn’t so terrifying to be left here, forgotten.
Something was happening out there, at the other stations: maybe war. But it didn’t affect Schiller Station at all. Everything here carried on as usual: Living space ate away at the ground, the tunnel to Kuznetsky Most was fed earth and human beings and kept creeping closer and closer to the station. Artyom was getting weaker, but he was still trying to live. Lyokha the broker was like a walking skeleton now, but was still stubbornly trying to outlast Artyom.
They didn’t talk to each other any longer. There was nothing left to talk about. There were some men who tried to escape, who attacked the barbed wire and the guards with their picks—they were all shot, together with a few randomly chosen others, to put a fright into everyone. After that they were all afraid of trying to escape; they were afraid to talk about it, they were even afraid to think about it.
Artyom kept himself to himself: After “lights out,” as he arranged himself on someone else’s body in the sleeping trench, he locked his eyes shut and imagined that his head was lying on the knees of that lovely, naked girl Sasha; and he stroked his own hair, not feeling the weight of his own hand. He imagined her showing him the city up on the surface. Without Sasha he’d have had no choice but to croak.
After sleeping the regulation four hours, he got up and ran and lifted and tossed and trundled and dumped. And walked and crawled and fell. And got up again. How many days? How many nights? He didn’t know. The barrow was only half-full now. He couldn’t cart away more than that. It was a good thing the freaks had been cut down to half their weight by the atrocious food, or he couldn’t have lifted them and buried them.
In the afternoons he also had a secret amusement: Artyom knew that no one had battered that wall over there, because the passage with the social housing lay just on the other side of it. He had calculated where Ilya Stepanovich and Narine’s cozy little apartment was located. Once a day Artyom glanced round furtively and ran over to that wall and knocked on it: rat-a-tat-tat. The guards didn’t hear it. Ilya Stepanovich didn’t hear it. Artyom himself didn’t hear the knocking; but even so, every time he split his sides in paroxysms of wild, soundless laughter.
But then, in the middle of eternity, when they had already stopped waiting for it, deliverance arrived. A terrible deliverance.
The war butted its way through into their little world.
The door slammed rapidly again and again, and Schiller Station was filled with well-fed men in the uniform of the Iron Legion. The freaks and beast-people stopped pottering about and froze, gaping obtusely at their visitors. With their numbed brains working reluctantly, they began assembling the words dropped by the new arrivals into a mosaic.
“The Reds have taken Kuznetsky Most!”
“They’ve deployed troops from the Lubyanka! They’ll break through this way!”
“Any moment now! Orders are to block off the tunnel.”
“Where are the demolition men? What’s holding up the demolition men?”
“The tunnel to Kuznetsky Most has to be mined! As far as possible from the station!”
“Where are the explosives? Where are the demolition men?”
“They’re coming! Almost here already! The vanguard, their machine-gunners. Come on! Move it!”
“Cut it! Cut the cable! Lay the mines as far as possible from the station.”
“Farther on! Now!”
Sweaty demolition men came running in, dragging heavy crates of explosives; the beast-people still didn’t understand anything. Artyom watched the fuss through his usual scraped, perspiring polythene. None of this seemed to concern him.
“We don’t have enough time! Too close! We have to gain more time somehow! Time!”
“What can we do? How? They’ll be here soon! Superior forces! We’ll lose the station! It mustn’t happen!”
Then someone was inspired.
“Drive the freaks out into the tunnel!”
“What?
“The freaks. Put them in the tunnel! They’ll take the brunt of it! With their picks! And their spades! They’ll delay the Reds. And while they’re being hacked down, we’ll have time to lay the mines!”
“They won’t fight! Look at them …”
“A blocking detachment, then! We’ll drive them in … Solovyov! Bormann! Fang! Drive them in! Come on! Every second counts, you shit-eaters! Move it!”
The guards started whistling their whips and chains through the air, tearing away the diggers clinging to the walls who had turned to stone, herding them together and channeling them into the mouth of the tunnel. Only a moment ago there was an insuperable barrier here—three layers of barbed wire. But now the cobweb was dangling down in untidy clumps and there turned out to be a tunnel behind it. With another set of tracks to Kuznetsky Most. And somewhere deep in that tunnel something bad was brewing.
The stupefied beast-people trudged into the tunnel, gazing round in helpless confusion at the overseers: What did they want from them? Each of them was holding the tool that he always worked with: The pick workers had picks; the hammer workers had hammers. Artyom would have gone in with his barrow, but it got in other people’s way, jabbing at them below the knees, and it didn’t know how to move over the sleepers, so Artyom was ordered to abandon it. He left it behind and walked on empty-handed. His hands felt awkward; they wanted a tool to hold. His fingers were stiff, curved, and callused now, so that the handles of a barrow or the haft of a spade fitted into them neatly.
The ones shambling at the back were lashed and squeezed in by men with automatics. The men with automatics were followed by sappers dragging crates and unreeling cables.
“Where are we going? What for?” the naked prisoners bleated, staring into the darkness or looking round at the torches and gun barrels of their escorts.
But as all of them were about to be dragged into that black, gaping hole straight ahead, the echoes of a distant “hooraaaah” came seeping out of it, together with the fine trickles of water alongside the rails.
“What? What’s that in there?”
“Where are we going? Are they setting us free?”
“They say they’re setting us free! Someone in there said something!”
“Shut up! Shut up, all of you! Move! Move, you dumb brutes!”
“… oooaaaah …”
“Did you hear it? Did you hear that? We won’t even get a hundred meters with these creeping lice … They’re barely even hobbling along! This is sabotage!”
“Here! Here! Start laying the mines here!”
“Drive the freaks farther in! Drive them into a bayonet charge!”
“… hoorraaaaaaaaaaah …”
“We don’t have time. Here! In front of these ones!”
The sappers halted and busied themselves with their equipment. They opened up their crates and started taking out briquettes, attaching them to the walls of the tunnel and setting them in indentations in the tunnel liners.
Someone nudged Artyom in the back with a gun barrel. He started moving his feet faster, and the anxious demolition men were left behind. Whips whistled through the air, and million-watt torches shone between the figures shambling into darkness—tracing out far-reaching, hunchbacked shadows on the sleepers—and a bullhorn barked, spurring them on.
“Hey you! All of you! A great deed lies ahead of you! You are destined to save the Reich! A horde of freaks is advancing against us! Red cannibals, who will stop at nothing! Today, at this very moment, you can earn forgiveness! You can pay with blood for the right to call yourselves human beings! They will destroy the Reich, and then the entire Metro. There is no one else to stop them now, except you! They wanted to stab us in the back, but t
hey didn’t know that you were covering our back! They are better armed, but you also have weapons! You have nothing to lose and therefore nothing to be afraid of!
“Me … Where? I won’t go! I won’t! I won’t! I don’t know how to fight!”
There was a loud crash. The echo of the shot swallowed the echo of the scream. And immediately, without even waiting for everyone in the herd to understand what had happened, the automatics started slamming into the backs of the dawdlers’ heads. Someone let out his last breath and expired. Someone whom the blow had failed to kill howled. A woman started squealing. The man next to Artyom looked round, a bullet whistled, and he tumbled to the ground with a gurgle in his throat.
“Forward, you scumba-ags! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare try to stop!”
“They’re killing us! Don’t stop! They’re shooting! Run!”
Artyom shoved against someone’s crooked back, pushed forward through the jam, reached down, pulled a young boy out from under all the feet, immediately forgot about him, and then, constantly glancing round at his pursuers, started squeezing through towards the center—to safety.
“Forward! Forward!”
People fell facedown on the rails, their deaths pushing the ones ahead of them in the back like dominoes—some stumbled and others surged forward, towards the vague and terrible “HOORRRAAAAAH” that seethed and eddied towards them along the tunnel, like groundwater that has broken through into a working mine.
“We’re not sheep!” someone at the front roared out suddenly; one of the freaks. “We won’t just give up like this!”
“Come on! We won’t surrender!”
“Death to them!”
“Kill them!” someone else in the crowd howled. “Forward! For-ward!”
And slowly, like the flywheel of a locomotive or a sick man recovering consciousness, the entire long, naked crowd—the shaggy, battered beast-people with their picks and hammers—began picking up speed, searching inside themselves for the strength to raise their tools above their heads so that they could kill someone before they were killed themselves.
“Death to them! We won’t surrender! Forward!”
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