Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) (11 page)

Sasha turned around and went back home where a mountain of broken machines, a screw driver, a blowtorch and to a dynamo machine repurposed bicycle were waiting for her. She sat herself on the saddle, closed her eyes and rode far, far away. She almost forgot that she wasn’t even moving. And the fact that she had refused the easy way out gave her even more strength.

What the devil? Why did we end up here again? Like in a fever, Homer tried to find an explanation for what had happened here.

Suddenly Achmed turned silent; he had seen where Homer had shined his lamp. “It’s not letting me go …” He whispered silently, almost without making any sound.

The fog around them became thicker and thicker, they could almost no longer see each other. Without humans the
Nagornaya
had been asleep, now she awoke again. To new life: The heavy air reacted to their words with almost unnoticeable fluctuations and vague shadows moved in the depths.

No trace of Hunter … A being of flesh and blood couldn’t win the fight against these phantoms; as soon as the station had played enough with them it would swallow them whole.

“Go” Said Achmed. “It wants me. You can’t know it. You haven’t been here as much as I have”

“Stop it!” Yelled Homer, surprised by the volume of his voice. “We got lost in the fog. Let’s go back”

“We can’t go back. You can run as much as you want, you will return to this place again and again if you stay with me. You will get through on your own. Go, I beg you”

“Enough!” Homer grabbed Achmeds hand and dragged him behind him to the tunnel. “In an hour you’ll thank me!”

“Tell my wife …”

An unbelievable powerful force ripped Achmeds hand out of Homer’s grip, up into the fog, into the void.

He wasn’t even able to scream, he just vanished, as if from one second to the other he had been atomized and stopped to exist.

Homer screamed, turned around and shot his precious bullets, one clip after another.

Suddenly he felt a blow to his back, so strong that it had to have been one of these demons and the universe imploded.

Memories (Chapter 5)

Sasha ran to the window and opened it. Fresh air and soft light fell into the room. The window was hanging over an abyss full of soft morning fog. With the first rays of the sun it would disappear and they would be able to see fir covered hills instead of the abyss, green meadows behind them and the matchbox tall buildings and onion formed bell towers.

The early morning was their time. She felt the approaching dawn and stood up half an hour earlier to get on top of the mountains in time. Behind the small, simple, but clean and warm hut a rocky path went up the hill, surrounded by bright yellow flowers and it could happen that Sasha slipped several times on her way up and hurt her knee.

In thoughts she wiped the windowsill that was still wet from the breath of the night with her sleeve. She had dreamt about something dark, disastrous that had crossed her happy life, but the rests of this restless vision disappeared
immediately when the cold wind started to blow over her skin. Now she no longer wanted to think about what had bothered her in her dream. She had to hurry to get to the mountain top in time to greet the sun and then slide down the path, returning to the hut, to make breakfast, wake her father and pack his provisions.

Then Sasha would be by herself for the whole day while her father was hunting. She would hunt the slow dragonflies and flying roaches between the flowers that were as yellow as the linkrusta-wallpapers in the trains.

On her toes she crept over the creaking planks, opened the door a bit and laughed silently.

It had been several years since Sasha’s father had last seen a happy smile on his daughters face. He didn’t want to wake her. His leg was swollen, numb and it didn’t stop bleeding. It was said that the bite of a stray dog never healed …

Should he call her? But he hadn’t been at home for 24 hours. Because before he had left for the garages he had entered an apartment complex that they called a “termite
hill”, located two blocks from the station, he climbed to the 15
^th
floor and passed out for some time. All that time Sasha probably hadn’t closed an eye – his daughter never slept while he was away … She deserved the rest. They all lied.

Nothing is going to happen to me.

He really would have liked to know what she dreamt off. He couldn’t even relax in his dreams. Only rarely his consciousness let him revisit his sorrow less youth; normally in his dreams he wandered between the familiar dead houses with their empty inners and a good dream was when found an untouched apartment, full of miraculously preserved machines and books.

Every time he fell asleep he hoped to dream about the past. That time when he had just met Sasha’s mother. When he, only twenty had become the commander of the garrison of the station. Back then the inhabitants thought of the metro as a provisional home and not of the collective barracks for the forced labor under the surface where they sat out a life sentence.

Instead he always ended up in the close past, with the events that happened five years ago. That day that had determined his fate and even worse the fate of his daughter …

Once again he stood there, at the head of his fighters.

He held his Kalashnikov so it was ready to fire, with his officer-makarov he could have only put a bullet into his head. Apart from his two dozen military police marksmen there wasn’t a single human left in the station that was still loyal to him.

The mob raged, swelled in size and shook the barricade with dozens of hands. The first chaotic voices had transformed themselves into a rhythmic choir controlled by an invisible director. They still demanded that he stepped down but soon they would demand his head.

This was no spontaneous demonstration. This was the work of provocateurs. He could have tried to identify and liquidate every single one of them, but now it was already too late. When he wanted to stop the rebellion and remain in power there was only one thing left to do: To open fire on the group. It wasn’t too late for that …

His fingers bracketed around an invisible stock, under his swollen eye lids his pupils twitched restless from one side to the other, his lips moved and formed silent orders. The black puddle he laid in was getting bigger with every minute. And the bigger it got the more life had left him.

“Where are they?”

Something ripped Homer out of the dark sea of unconsciousness. He shook himself like a fish on a hook, he gasped cramped for air and starred at the brigadier with an insane look. The dark, zyclopic colossus still towered over him, the guardians of the
Nagornaya
and reached with their long fingers after him; without any struggle they would rip out his legs or crush his ribs. They appeared behind Homers closed eyes and only disappeared slowly, even unwillingly when he opened his eyes again.

He tried to jump up again but the stranger’s hand that had held his shoulder with a light grip now held him like the iron hook that had pulled him out of his nightmares again.

He started to breath normally again and concentrated himself scared on the with machine oil covered face and the shiny eyes … Hunter, he was still alive?

Homer carefully turned his head to the left, then to the right: Where they still in the cursed station?

No, this was an empty and clean tunnel. You could almost no longer see the fog of the
Nagornaya
that had covered the exits anywhere. Hunter must have carried him over a kilometer. Reassured Homer broke down. He asked him again, just to be sure: “Where are they?”

“Nobody is here. You are safe”

“These creatures … Did they knock me unconscious?”

He wondered and held the back of his head.

“No that was me. I had to knock you down, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able get you out of there in your panic.

You could have hurt me”

Finally Hunter loosened his iron grip, stood up stiffly and moved his hand to his officer’s belt where the Stetschkin hung. On the other side hung a leather box and Homer didn’t know what its function was. The brigadier opened it and took out a flat messing bottle. He shook it, opened it and took a deep sip without asking Homer if wanted one too. How he had closed his eyes for a second, it run down cold Homer’s back: His left eye hadn’t fully closed.

“Where’s Achmed? What happened to him?” Homer remembered and he felt cold.

“He’s dead.” His answer almost sounded indifferent.

“Dead.” Homer echoed mechanically.

The moment the giant hand ripped the hand of his comrade out of his he kne No living being could escape its grip. Homer had just been lucky that the
Nagornaya
hadn’t chosen him. The old man turned around again. He still couldn’t believe that Achmed was gone forever. He stared at his hand, it was scraped and bloody. He hadn’t been able to hold on to him. He didn’t have the strength.

“He knew that he would die.” He said silently.

“Why did they take him out of all of us and not me?”

“There was still life in him.” Answered the Brigadier.

“They feed on human life”

Homer shook his head. “That isn’t fair. He had small children. So many things that hold him here … Well held him here … But I have been looking for those for eternity …”

“Would you eat moss?” Hunter cut off Homer and ended the conversation with him pulling Homer back onto his feet. “We got to keep moving. We’re late”

While Homer ran behind Hunter he tried to figure out why he and Achmed had ended up at the
N
agornaya
. Like a flesh eating orchid the station had clouded their mind with its miasma and lured them back in. But they hadn’t turned around a single time, that much was sure for Homer. So he started to believe in the distortion of space in the tunnels now,
like those simple minded comrades of his on guard duty. The solution was a lot easier. He stopped and slapped himself on the forehead: The connecting track! Some hundred meters behind the
Nagornaya
there was a track for trains to turn around. It turned around at a sharp angle and that’s why they were following the wall blindly had reached the parallel track and then when the wall suddenly disappeared, ran back to the station.

So much for magic! But there was still another thing that needed an explanation. “Wait!” He yelled after Hunter.

But he just continued to march forward as if he was deaf, so the old man had to catch up to him while breathing heavily. When he had caught up to the Brigadier he tried to look him into the eyes and said: “Why did you leave us to our fate?”

“Me you two?”

There was a sarcastic tone in his emotionless, metallic voice. Homer bit himself on his tongue. True, it had been him and Achemd that had ran from the station and left the Brigadier alone with the demons …

The more Homer thought about how raging and helplessly Hunter had fought at the
Nagornaya
the more he realized that the inhabitants of the station hadn’t accepted the
fight that Hunter had tried to force on them. Out of fear? Or had they seen him as a part of the family?

Homer gathered his courage – there was only one question left, the hardest one of all. “At the
Nagornaya
… Why did they ignore you?”

Several minutes passed; Homer didn’t dare to ask again. Then Hunter gave him a short, almost inaudible and grumpy answer: “Would you eat tainted flesh?”

The beauty of the world will redeem you. Her father had once said jokingly.

Sasha had put the colorful teabag back in the pocket of her jacket with a red face. The small quadratic plastic hull that still had a faint aroma of green tea was her greatest treasure. And a reminder that the universe wasn’t just the body of the station and its four tunnels buried twenty meters below the graveyard that had once been Moscow. The teabag was some kind of magical portal that moved Sasha back by centuries and thousands of kilometers. It was so much more, something enormously important.

In the wet climate of the metro paper decayed quickly.

Decay and mold didn’t just eat books and brochures, they destroyed their entire past. Without pictures and chronicles the already limping human mind stumbled and ran into the wrong direction like a man without his crutches.

The hull of the teabag was out of a material that mold and the time couldn’t harm. Sasha’s father had once said that it would take thousands of years before this material would fall apart. So even their decedents would one day inherit this teabag, she thought.

It was, even though it was a miniature, a real picture. A golden frame that was as bright as on the day it came from the conveyor belt surrounded a view that robbed Sasha of her breath. Steep walls of stone, covered in dreamlike mist, a far reaching pine forest that held on the almost vertical mountains, roaring waterfalls that fell down from the highest tip of the mountain into an abyss, a purple shine that spoke of the nearing dawn … In her entire life she had never seen anything more beautiful.