Despite his newly acquired firmness and resolve, Artyom’s heart throbbed unpleasantly when Bonsai shook his hand, wishing him success. Maxim slapped him on the shoulder in a friendly way, and bearded Uncle Fyodor thrust him a half-drunk bottle of his potion, not knowing what else to give him:
‘There you go, buddy, we’ll meet again. And we’ll be alive - we won’t die!’
Comrade Rusakov shook hands once again, and his handsome, manly face grew serious.
‘Comrade Artyom! In parting, I would like to tell you two things. First, believe in your star. As comrade Ernesto Che Guevara said, Hasta la victoria siempre! And second, and most important, NO PASARÁN!’
All the other soldiers raised their right hand in a fist and repeated the slogan: ‘No pasarán!’ There was nothing left for Artyom to do but to also raise his fist and shout the refrain, with just as much resolve and revolutionary fervour: ‘No pasarán!’, although for him personally, the whole ritual was just gobbledygook. But he didn’t want to spoil the solemn moment of his departure with stupid questions. Apparently he did everything right, as comrade Rusakov looked at him with pride and satisfaction, and then solemnly saluted him.
The motor revved louder, and, enveloped in a blue-grey cloud of smoke, accompanied by an escort of delighted children, the trolley vanished into the darkness. Artyom was completely alone again, and farther from home than he had ever been before.
The first thing he noticed, as he wandered along the platform, were the clocks. Artyom counted four of them right away. At the VDNKh, time was something rather symbolic: like books, like attempts to set up schools for the children - a demonstration that the station residents continued to care, that they did not want to degenerate, that they were still human beings. But here, it seemed, clocks played some other kind of role, a much more important one. Wandering about some more, Artyom noticed other strange things. First, there were no living quarters of any kind at the station, except for some hitched-up subway cars on the second track and on into the tunnel. Only a small part of the train was visible in the hall, which is why Artyom did not notice it right away. Tradesmen of every imaginable kind, and workshops were all over the place, but there wasn’t a single tent to live in, not even a simple screen behind which one could spend the night. Some beggars and tramps were lying around on bedding made just of cardboard. People bustling about the station approached the clocks from time to time; some, who had their own watches, would anxiously check them against the red numbers on the display panel, and then go about their business again. If Khan were here, thought Artyom, it would be interesting to hear what he would have to say.
Unlike Kitai Gorod, where people showed lively interest in travellers, trying to feed them, to sell them something, to get them to visit somewhere, here everyone seemed preoccupied with their own affairs. They had no business with Artyom, and his sense of loneliness, which at first was displaced by curiosity, grew stronger and stronger.
Trying to ward off a growing depression, he continued observing his surroundings. Artyom expected to see people here who were somehow different, with their own characteristic facial expressions, since life at a station like this could not help but leave its mark. At first glance, people were bustling about, shouting, working, arguing, just like anywhere else. But the more closely he looked, the more the chills went up and down his spine. There was a startling number of young cripples and freaks: one without fingers, one covered with disgusting scabs, with a crude stump in the place of an amputated third hand. The adults were frequently bald and sickly; there were almost no healthy, strong people to be found. Their stunted, deformed look offered a painful contrast to the dark expanse of station in which they lived.
In the middle of the broad platform, there were two rectangular apertures leading into the depths, the passageway crossing over to the Ring, toward the Hansa. But there were neither Hanseatic border guards, nor checkpoints, as there were at Prospect Mir - and someone had once told Artyom that the Hansa held all its neighbouring stations in an iron fist. No, there was clearly something strange going on here.
So he did not venture to the opposite edge of the hall. For starters, he had used five cartridges to buy himself a bowl of chopped, grilled mushrooms and a glass of putrid, bitter-tasting water. He swallowed the muck with disgust, sitting on an overturned plastic box that had once held empty bottles. Then he went over to the train, hoping to get a bit of a rest there, since his strength was failing, and he had been feeling more and more sick as he looked around. But the subway train was quite different from the one at Kitai Gorod: the cars were all torn up and completely empty, with the seats burnt and fused together; the soft leather sofas had been pulled out and carted off somewhere; there were bloodstains everywhere, and cartridge cases gleamed darkly on the floor. This place was clearly not a proper shelter, but more like a fortress that had withstood more than one siege.
Not much time had passed while Artyom looked over the train, but when he returned to the platform, he hardly recognized the station. The counters were empty, the hubbub had died down and, except for a few tramps clustered on the platform, not far from the transfer passage, there was not a single living soul to be seen on the platform. It had become noticeably darker; the torches were extinguished on the side where he had come into the station, and only a few were burning at the centre of the hall; but in the distance, at the opposite end, a dying fire was still burning. The clock showed it to be a little after eight in the evening. What had happened? Artyom hurried on as quickly as the pain in his body would allow him. The crossing was closed on both sides, not just with the usual metal doors, but with sturdy iron gates. It was exactly the same on the second stairway, but one of the gates was still half-open, and behind it could be seen solid latticework, welded, like the casements at Tverskaya station, with heavy reinforcement. Behind that had been placed a table, feebly lit with a small lamp, at which sat the guard, a washed-out grey-blue figure.
‘No admission after eight,’ he snapped, when asked permission to enter. ‘The gate opens at six in the morning,’ and turning away, he let it be understood that the conversation was over.
Artyom was taken aback. Why did the life of the station come to an end after eight in the evening? And what was he to do now? The tramps, having crawled into their cardboard boxes, looked positively repulsive, and he didn’t want to go near them; so he decided to try his luck at the fire, which glimmered at the opposite end of the hall.
It was clear even from afar that standing at the fire was no group of tramps, but rather border guards or something of the kind: silhouetted against the fire, they seemed to be strong male figures, with the sharp contours of automatic weapons visible. But what was there to guard, sitting there on the platform itself? Guard posts should be set up in the tunnels, the entrances to the station, the farther away the better, but here . . . If some sort of creature crawled out or bandits attacked, the men on duty would not be able to do anything about it.
But drawing closer, Artyom noticed something else: from behind the fire, a clear, white light flashed, seemingly going upwards, but too briefly, as if cut short at the very beginning, not striking the ceiling, but disappearing, contrary to all the laws of physics, after a couple of metres. The searchlight was illuminated infrequently, in distinct intervals, which is probably why Artyom had not noticed it earlier. What in the world could it be?
He walked up to the fire, politely said hello, explained that he was travelling through, didn’t know about the closing of the gate, and so missed it; he asked whether he might take a rest here, with the patrol men.
‘Take a rest?’ sneered the man nearest him. He was a dishevelled, dark-haired man with a large, fleshy nose; he was not tall, but was seemingly very strong. ‘This is not a place for resting, kid. If you last till morning, you’ll be doing fine.’
To the question of what was so dangerous about sitting by the fire in the middle of the platform, the man said nothing, but only gestured behind him with a nod of the head, to w
here the searchlight was switched on. The others were busy with their conversation and did not pay Artyom the slightest attention. Then he decided he would finally find out what was going on around here, and went over to the searchlight. What he saw there surprised him, but explained a lot.
At the very end of the hall there was a little booth, such as you sometimes see near escalators, for obtaining transfers to other lines. Bags were piled up around it, reinforced here and there with massive iron plates; one of the patrol men was taking the cover off an extremely formidable-looking type of weapon, and the other was sitting in the booth. On it was mounted the very searchlight that was shining upwards. Upwards! With no damper, no barrier here and not even a trace of one, the steps of the escalator began right behind the booth, leading up to the surface. And that was where the beam of the searchlight struck, anxiously probing from wall to wall, as if trying to find someone in the pitch darkness, but only picking up some kind of some kind of brownish lamp-frame and the damp ceiling from which enormous chunks of plaster were peeling off, and beyond . . . Beyond that, one could see nothing.
Suddenly everything fell into place.
For some reason, here the metal damper that usually separated a station from the surface was missing: it was missing both from the platform and from above. Paveletskaya was in direct contact with the outside world, and its residents found themselves under constant threat of attack. They breathed contaminated air, drank contaminated water, which is probably why it tasted so strange . . . That was why there were so many more mutations here among young people than, for example, at the VDNKh. That was why the adults looked so sickly: their skulls exposed and polished to a shine, their bodies worn out and subject to decay. They were gradually being devoured by radiation sickness.
But still that was not all, apparently. How could one explain the fact that the whole station ‘died’ after eight o’clock in the evening, and that the dark-haired duty officer by the fire had said that surviving until morning was a big deal?
Trembling, Artyom approached the man sitting in the booth.
‘Good evening,’ the man returned his greeting.
He was about fifty, but already quite bald, his remaining grey hairs tangled at the temples and the nape of the neck; his dark eyes looked curiously at Artyom, and his unpretentious, laced-up flak jacket could not conceal his rotund stomach. A pair of binoculars hung on his chest, along with a whistle.
‘Have a seat.’ He pointed Artyom to the nearest sandbag. ‘Those guys over there are having a grand old time, leaving me here alone to bore myself to death. So let’s have a chat. Hey, did you hit someone’s fist with your eye . . . ?’
And so the conversation began.
‘As you see, we haven’t been able to do anything halfway decent here,’ the duty officer explained sadly, pointing to the aperture leading to the escalator. ‘You would need concrete here, not iron; we tried iron, but it was no good. In the autumn, every damn thing is swept away by water. First it builds, then it breaks through . . . It happened several times, and many people perished. Since then, we’ve been getting by like this. Only life is not tranquil here like it is at other stations; we’re always waiting: scum can come crawling in on any given night. During the daytime they don’t bother us, because they’re either sleeping or roaming around on the surface. But it’s after dark that things really get desperate. So, we’ve adapted here, of course, and after eight o’clock, everyone goes into the passageway, where we live, and those left here are mostly the people who keep things going. But wait . . .’ He broke off, flicked a switch on the console, and the searchlight flared up brightly.
The conversation continued only after the white beam had scoured all three escalators, moved along the ceiling and the walls, and finally died out.
‘Up there,’ pointing toward the ceiling, the duty officer lowered his voice, ‘is Paveletskaya Railway Station. At any rate, it used to be there. A godforsaken place. I don’t even know where its tracks have gone; only that right now something horrible is going on up there. You sometimes hear noises that make your blood run cold. And then when they crawl down . . .’ He stopped, and then continued after a minute: ‘We call them the newcomers, these creatures that climb down from up there. Out of the train station. So it’s not so horrible. Well, a few times some of the stronger of these newcomers wiped out this cordon. Did you see our train there, the one forced off the tracks? That’s how far they got. We wouldn’t let them go below, where the women and children are; if the newcomers crawled down there, the jig would be up. Our men understood that themselves and so they retreated to the train, dug in there, and finished off a few creatures. But as for themselves . . . just two out of ten remained alive. One of the newcomers left, crawling off to the Novokuznetskaya station. Some people wanted to go after him in the morning, since the trail of slime he left behind was so thick; but he turned off at a side tunnel, went down, and we didn’t dare follow him. We’d had enough disaster as it was.’
‘I heard that nobody ever attacks Paveletskaya,’ Artyom recalled. ‘Is that true?’
‘Of course,’ the duty officer nodded gravely. ‘Who would bother us? If we weren’t manning the defences here, they would be crawling from here all the way along the line. No, nobody is going to lift a finger against us. The Hansa have given us almost all of that transfer passage, up to the very end of their blockhouse. They gave us weapons, just so that we would protect them. I tell you, they really love to get others to do their dirty work! By the way, what’s your name? I’m Mark.’ Artyom told him his name. ‘Hold it, Artyom, something is stirring over there,’ Mark continued and he quickly switched the searchlight back on. ‘No, I’m probably hearing things,’ he said uncertainly, after a minute.
Artyom was filled, drop by drop, with an oppressive sense of danger. Like Mark, he looked above attentively, but where Mark saw only the shadow of the broken lamp, Artyom thought he detected sinister, fantastic silhouettes, motionless in the dazzling beam of light.
At first he thought it was his imagination playing tricks on him, but one of the strange contours stirred just a bit, as soon as a bit of light passed over it.
‘Wait . . . ,’ he whispered. ‘Try over in that corner, where there’s a big crack, hurry . . .’
And, as if nailed in place by the light beam, somewhere far off, further than the middle of the escalator, something large and bony froze for a moment, and then suddenly swooped down. Mark grabbed the whistle, which almost leapt out of his hand, and blew it with all his might, and in a second all those sitting around the fire rushed from their places and scrambled into position.
It turned out there was another searchlight there. It was weaker, but cleverly combined with an unusual heavy machine gun. Artyom had never seen anything like it: the weapon had a long barrel with a bell muzzle at the end; the trailer was shaped like a web; and the cartridges moved along inside the greased and shining ammunition belt.
‘Over there, around the tenth-metre!’ The husky, thin fellow who had been sitting near Mark searched about for the newcomer with the beam. ‘Give me the binoculars . . . Lekha! At the tenth, on the right side!’
‘There it is! We’re all here, baby, so sit still,’ muttered the gunner, aiming the weapon at the hidden black shadow. ‘I’ve got him!’
A deafening rumble of machine-gun fire burst out; a lamp was blown to smithereens at the tenth-metre; and above, something let out a piercing shriek.
‘Looks like we caught him,’ declared the husky fellow. ‘OK, give me some more light . . . There it is, lying there. Finished, the vermin.’
But from above, for a long time, heavy, almost human, groans could be heard, leaving Artyom on edge. When he proposed finishing off the newcomer to put it out of its misery, they replied:
‘If you want, go on, kill it. We aren’t a shooting gallery here, kiddo; we keep track of every cartridge.’
Mark was relieved of duty, and went over to the fire with Artyom. Mark lit up a cigarette from the fire, and Artyom
began to listen to the general conversation.
‘Look, Lekha was telling us yesterday about the Hare Krishnas.’ A massive man with a low forehead and a powerful neck was speaking in a low, deep voice. ‘They sit at Oktyabrskoye Pole and want to get into the Kurchatov Institute to blow up the nuclear reactor and bring enlightenment for everybody, but they have not yet got their act together to do it. Well, that reminded me of what happened to me four years ago, when I was still living at the Savelovskaya. One day I was getting ready to go to the Belorusskaya. My connection was at the Novoslobodskaya, so I went straight through the Hansa. So, I got to Belorusskaya, quickly went to the man I needed to meet, we dealt with our affairs, and I figured we ought to celebrate with a drink. So he says to me, you’d better be more careful, drunks often vanish around here. And I say to him: Give me a break, and I won’t take no for an answer. So he and I killed a bottle together. The last thing I remember is that he was crawling around on all fours and crying, “I am Lunokhod-1, the lunar rover!” Then I wake up - Mother of God! - tied up, gagged, my noggin shaved, lying in some kind of closet, probably in what used to be a cop shop. What a disaster, say I to myself. After half an hour, some devils come in and drag me to the hall by the scruff of the neck. I had no idea where I was; all the signs carrying place names had been torn down, the walls were smeared with something, the floor bloody, the fires burning, almost the whole station had been dug up, and there was a deep pit below, at least twenty metres, if not thirty. There were stars drawn on the floor and ceiling, all in a single line, you know, the way children draw. Well, I’m wondering, have the Reds got me? Then I turned my head around - not quite. They brought me over to the pit, lowered a rope, and told me to climb down it. And prodded me with an assault rifle. I looked in - there were people piled up at the bottom, digging the pit deeper with pieces of scrap metal and shovels. The earth was being hoisted up with a winch, loaded into wagons, and carted off somewhere. Well, there was nothing I could do, I decided, as long as those fellows were there with their assault rifles - crazy guys, all of them tattooed from head to toe - a criminal enterprise of some kind. Probably I had landed in the Zone. And it’s as if these authorities are digging out, they want to escape. And these petty hooligans are their hired hands. But then I realized: that’s all nonsense. What kind of metro zone has no cops? I tell them I’m afraid of heights, that I crash down right onto my head, and that they won’t get much use out of me. They conferred among themselves and set me to work loading wagons with dirt that had been brought up from below. The scumbags cuffed me, chained me, and now they expect me to load their wagon? Pfft! But still, I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. The job, to put it mildly, was not an easy one. I was lucky,’ he shrugged his gigantic shoulders, ‘but there were some weaker guys there, so whenever someone collapsed into the dirt, the skinheads would pick him up and drag him off to the stairway. Then I went past one time, and I took a look. They had one guy there, a real blockhead, the type who used to stand in Red Square, where the heads rolled, and he had a good-sized axe stuck in him; there was blood everywhere, and heads were impaled on poles. I nearly puked. No, I think to myself, I’d better get out here before they kill me and make me into a stuffed animal.’
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