After that it was empty and quiet. There was no more firing outside either. Through the window he could see SaveliI kicking the other men he had knocked down to make sure they’d died for real.
The building turned out to be small.
A corridor and some rooms. All the doors wide open. There was the stairway to the upper floor, and it was the same picture up there. There was a control room, but Artyom had killed the man who understood something about it matter-of-factly as he passed by him.
There was a whole host of buttons and a bristling stubble of switches, and although the letters beside them were Russian, everything was labeled in some kind of gibberish—nothing but abbreviations—and there was no one to make long words out of them.
Artyom sat down on a chair with wheels.
He took off his one-eyed gas mask.
He touched the buttons. Well? Which one of you will connect me with Polar Dawns?
He thought he’d found how to change the frequency. There were the headphones. In the headphones the sea was murmuring: fshshshshsh … fshshshshsh …
Next.
Aaagh-agh … Aaagh-agh …
A TB ward. A black tunnel, filled with naked beast-people. Coughing. Breathing through holes punched in them with picks. They didn’t want to go anywhere. Didn’t want to follow him up. There’s nowhere to go up there, they said. Everything’s bombed; everything’s poisoned; everything’s polluted. Go up there on your own, you crazy fucking man.
Aaagh-agh.
Sma-ack! He swung his fist down into the control panel.
“Work!”
Sma-ack!
“Work, you bastard! Work, you heap of shit! What is it? What were you listening to here? Who were you talking to? All those men in that pit! What are they for? All the men outside! What are they for? Work! Work!”
Sma-ack!
Aaagh-agh …
Fshshshshsh … Fshshshshsh …
Such huge aerials. Real towers! Ten of them! They can broadcast and receive on all wavelengths. Why are you so huge and so deaf you fucking fuckers?
How do you broadcast here? How can I tell the dead world everything? How do I tell it to fuck off, along with all the seven billion dead people in it?
SaveliI came in.
“Well, how are my mum and dad getting on?”
“They’re not! They’re not!”
“Well, does someone answer, at least? Or has all this been a waste of time?”
“Were they wasting their time? What did they do it for?”
SaveliI didn’t answer. He stirred the dead radio operator hopefully with the toe of his boot. But he’d been killed once and for all.
“All right. Then we need to pull out. He could have warned his friends in the trucks. Dead easy. If they come back now, it’s curtains for us. Alexei’s out of it, for instance.”
“Is he alive?”
“Knocked out. They hit him good and hard. I put him in the car. So. Come on. Collect up these guys’ guns and let’s go home. At least we’ll get something out of this little trip.”
Artyom nodded.
There was nothing left to do here. There was nothing left to do anywhere at all, for him.
He got up off the chair with wheels. His legs wouldn’t bend. His eyes were dry. The fingers that were curved at Pushkin Station, shaped to the handle of the barrow, were senselessly set together, as if they were clutching the stock of an automatic rifle: The index finger was extended slightly.
He went over to the radio operator and took his pistol. The radio operator didn’t mind; he let Artyom have it immediately. His uniform was featureless, badgeless. Who are you? Why are you?
He shuffled outside. Took one man’s automatic, then another’s. There’s a machine gun on the roof, he remembered. He didn’t want to go back in there, into this radio center.
The doors of the car were open. Lyokha was groaning as he came round. The airwaves were murmuring tediously in the car’s music system, loud and clear. Just like in the control room. He needn’t have bothered to go in there. He needn’t have killed men he didn’t know. Or taken that sin on his soul when he’d have to account for it in three weeks.
Artyom sat own on the ground and looked round obtusely.
The door of the guardhouse was open. A human arm jutted out from behind it, with the fingers clutching at the asphalt. Next door was the transformer building—a yellow sign on the door, with a lightning bolt. A two-story radio center with a reticent radio operator. What was there to guard here? Why were the two big trucks here? Why build the wind towers? Why dig the pit with the excavator? And drive men out here from the Metro? To feed the dogs? To search for fugitives?
The windmill turbines creaked, produced electricity, poured it into a switchgear room, and charged those damn pylons.
They ground souls into flour, lives into dust.
They creaked so laboriously, winding Artyom’s guts onto their blades: eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee.
And the deaf, useless pylons jutted up over his head.
Eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee, eeee!
He jumped up and limped fast to the transformer building, with the speed of the hate that had erupted inside him. He broke off the lock with his gun butt, kicked the door—it jangled like a cracked bell—and burst in. There was the distribution board: little lamps and switches.
He smashed the barrel of his gun into the board stupidly and clumsily. Little lamps crunched.
“Why, you bastards? Why do you need so much power?”
He grabbed his automatic, holding it like a stick, like a club, and swung the stock hard into the board. Splintered plastic and glass sprayed out; dislodged fuses dropped on the floor and the light went out.
He grabbed a bundle of bright-colored, toylike wires and jerked them towards him.
Inside Artyom, everything was burning; everything was twisted and compacted, and he couldn’t get any relief. He wanted to destroy every last thing in here, tear everything down to the foundations, rip this pointless fucking station to pieces, send the current from the meat grinders into the ground, into the sun, out into space.
Tears would have helped. But something had died in his eyes, and the tears couldn’t get started.
“Hey! Come here! Artyom!”
He walked out of the dark transformer building—tense and dissatisfied, still not free from that loathsome, stupid blackness. His ears were ringing. He had the rusty taste of blood in his mouth again.
He saw SaveliI waving his arms to him from the wide-open Japanese auto.
For some reason SaveliI didn’t have his gas mask on.
“What?” Artyom shouted, trying to shout over the ringing.
The stalker answered him in an inaudible whisper and beckoned.
“Eh?”
“Come here, you blockhead!”
The wrinkles on Savelii’s face had arranged themselves in a strange pattern. As if he was smiling. Or maybe as if he was terrified out of his wits. His smile was insane, with a metal glint to it.
“What?”
“Can’t you hear it?”
Artyom finally hobbled as far as the car. He frowned. Now what?
Something coming out of the car, from inside it … Something …
He gave the stalker a wild, crazy glance, jumped into the front seat, and started fumbling with trembling hands, missing the buttons: How could he turn it up?
“Is this your disk? Are you taking the piss, you bastard?”
“Cretin!” SaveliI laughed, looking in through the open window. “Can’t you tell the Prodigy from Lady Gaga?”
The music flowed out of the speakers.
Soft and fuzzy, tangled up with hissing—and absolutely nothing like any music that Artyom had heard in the Metro. Not a guitar, not a broken-down piano, not mournful hymns in deep voices about the Day of Victory: It was some kind of humorous antics, buffoonery, not music—but it was jaunty and sprightly, lively. He felt like dancing to this song. And it was ove
rlaid with the familiar fshshshshsh … fshshshshsh. It was the radio, not a disk. Definitely the radio. Music! Not call signs, but music! Somewhere people were listening to music! And playing it! They didn’t say, We’ve more or less managed to survive over here, but have you survived over there? They put on music for other people to dance to.
“What is it?” Artyom asked.
“The radio, fuck it,” SaveliI explained to him.
“But what city?”
“Fuck knows which one.”
Artyom pressed a button to change the wavelength. What if there was something else somewhere?
It tuned in immediately. Immediately. In a single second.
“Come in, come in! This is St. Petersburg. This is St. Petersburg …”
Artyom couldn’t reply right now, so he rushed on. He heard jarring speech in a strange language, as if someone had stuffed his mouth with mushrooms and was trying to talk.
“English!” SaveliI nudged him in the shoulder where he’d been shot. “English? Savvy? Even those bastards have survived!”
Aaaagh-agh …
“Berlin … Berlin …”
“Kazan … Can you hear me? Hearing you loud and clear! This is Ufa …”
“Vladivostok to Mirny Island.”
Fshshshshsh … fshshshshsh …
“Greeting to the citizens of Sverdlovsk and the district … Who can hear …”
Surfeited on the sounds of the airwaves, Artyom fell back, drunk, from the radio. He goggled at the stalker, and his tongue could barely even mumble.
“What is this? How did this happen? What is this?”
“What did you do?”
“I smashed … The distribution board. Disconnected it, I suppose. I tried to disconnect it.”
“Well look, you must have done it.”
“I don’t … I don’t understand.”
“Well, what else could it be?”
“Eh, what?”
“What do you think those pylons are?”
Artyom tumbled out of the car, threw back his head, and gazed at the masts propping up the sky. They looked exactly the same as half an hour ago, only now they were dead.
“So what?”
“You switched them off, blockhead, and the radio came on! The whole earth just opened up! And what does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!”
“They’re jammers!”
“What?”
“Jammers! They create interference! They’re putting out interference at full power on all frequencies!”
“But how come?”
“And jamming all the airwaves! Everything! The whole world! Like in Soviet times!”
“The whole world?”
“Shtop being sho dumb …” Lyokha pleaded feebly from the backseat with a mouth that wouldn’t close.
“The whole world, brother! All of it! Have you realized at least that the whole world is alive? We just think it’s not there! And this is why we think that! But it is there! Have—you—got—that?”
CHAPTER 16
— THE FINAL BROADCAST —
“Wotto I do wif vis?” Lyokha asked, struggling to get his bitten tongue round the words.
“What sort of question is that?”
Artyom looked round at him as if he was seeing him for the first time. Lyokha was lounging back with his gas mask pulled up onto his forehead. Liquid was flowing out of his mouth, and he was holding an open bottle of home brew. Savelii had given it to him to disinfect his wound.
“Give me some too.”
Artyom swigged, but it didn’t help. Lyokha’s сrushed teeth grated in Artyom’s mouth. He looked at the neck of the bottle: It was completely red. He took another swig.
“Let’s go!” SaveliI plonked down onto his animal pelt.
“Where to?” Artyom turned his head towards the stalker.
“Hello! Where to? What do you mean, where to?”
“Back? To Moscow?”
“Back, back? Are you crazy? Forward! To Ekaterinburg! Home!”
“Right now?”
“Right now, friend! Right now! Before those fiends come back.”
Artyom thought for a moment. He stuck his head out of the car and spat in the dust.
“What about the people?”
“What people?”
“Well, in the Metro. The people in the Metro. What will they do? What’s going to happen to them?”
“What’s supposed to happen to them?”
“Well, they have … They have to be told. They have to find out. That we’re not alone. That there are jammers. That they can go wherever they like!”
“That’s what I’m talking about, ‘wherever you like.’ Don’t you get it? We have a chance right now. All the roads are open. A full tank of diesel and the canisters back there. We’ve got a head start. We picked up plenty of guns and cartridges! It’s a now-or-never situation.”
“But those big trucks really will come back. And they’ll fix everything. And the jammers will start working again. And everything will be the same way it was. Then what? Won’t anyone find out that there’s a whole world out there? That they can up come out of the Metro?”
“Those who heard it, heard it, okay? They’ll figure things out for themselves. Well? Are you coming?”
“But who did hear it? No one’s even bothering to listen …”
“Well, fuck them, then.”
“You can’t say that!”
“Oh, yes I can. This is the Sverdlovsk Region speaking! How long have I been waiting for that? What Metro? What’s the Metro got to do with anything? This is it, my day. I’ve got to get moving. This is what I was waiting for—exactly what I was waiting for and preparing for!”
Artyom pushed the door with his foot and got out of the car. He threw his head back and looked up at the pylons that were silent now. Lyokha slurped down booze without saying anything.
SaveliI spun a knob on his radio. A jabbering voice with burred Rs spoke out of it.
“Paris, damn it,” said the stalker. “Eh? How do you fancy shooting off to Paris?
“I fancy it,” said Artyom.
“To join the faggots.” SaveliI roared with laughter at duping Artyom like that. “What’s stopping you?”
“My stepfather’s in the Metro. My wife’s in the Metro. And as well as that … Everything I have is in the Metro. I can’t just not tell them anything, can I? Just go away and leave them there?”
The stalker turned the key; the motor started chugging.
“Well, it’s up to you. I don’t have a stepfather in the Metro, or a stepmother. Apart from whores, I don’t have anyone in the Metro. And whores aren’t likely to just jump up and go dashing off anywhere. The darkness is handier for them.”
“How do you know that? Whores or not whores …”Artyom’s blood was beginning to boil. “No one will stay stuck in the Metro of their own free will! People think there’s nowhere for them to go to! Those Red bastards have locked people in the Metro, and they’re keeping them there. They’ve hidden the whole planet from them! How do you feel about that?”
“I don’t give a shit.”
“You don’t give a shit?”
“To hell with the whole damn place. I really don’t give a shit, believe it! I don’t give a shit for the Metro. For the people. For whoever is keeping someone else somewhere for some reason. That’s no business of mine any longer! I know something else too. If we hang about here for another ten minutes, we’ll all be dog food. I say stop playing the God-almighty hero. Fasten your seatbelt and let’s go.”
“I can’t,” Artyom answered in a low voice after a moment’s thought. “I can’t go to damn-blasted Paris when everyone I have is in there … And I have to get them out. To tell them … Everyone. They’re being tricked! Everything they do, it’s all a waste of time! The tunnels … The fighting … The worms … The whole thing, don’t you see? It’s all for nothing. The ‘living space’ … The war … The mushroom plague … The famine. Forty
thousand people! Live people, all of them! Not just my stepfather, not just … All the others. All the people! I have to let them out.”
“You do as you choose,” SaveliI replied.
Artyom paused for a moment. He reached his hand out to Lyokha and took another swig of crushed teeth.
“And you do as you choose,” he said.
“So what are you going to do?”
Artyom’s head was splitting. He shrugged.
“I’ll stay here. I’ll try to break them. The pylons.”
“How can you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they have grenades or something here.”
“Uh-huh. Now he wants a grenade. Served up on a plate. Okay, there’s no point. It you want to croak, I’m not your comrade.”
Artyom nodded.
“Hello, up there in the gallery!” SaveliI turned to Lyokha. “Who are you with?”
“I’ll stay here for now,” the first apostle said with his red lips. “I’m not so fast.”
“Well, then, fuck you both,” SaveliI said conclusively. “At least let me take a look at your shoulder.”
“You’re supposed to be eager to leave.”
“I’ve got bandages and neat alcohol, and you’ve got nothing but your bare ass.” SaveliI sighed. “I wouldn’t get high-and-mighty if I was you. And get a couple of these painkillers down you. Past the sell-by date, but the doctors say the important thing is to believe. A goodbye present.”
The bullet had passed right through. They splashed alcohol on the wound and bandaged it up. That would do it. Lyokha let them rinse out his mouth too. And he put his faith in the painkillers.
“That’s what you get for interfering,” the stalker told Artyom. No one’s going to let you save everybody. The Lone Ranger, fuck it.”
Artyom didn’t want to talk about it.
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