Artyom suddenly felt a sting in his eyes and to his shame, he found that they were wet. He stepped forward and hugged his stepfather.
‘Now, now, Artyom, what’s the matter . . . You’ll be back tomorrow after all . . . Well?’ his surprised stepfather said reassuringly.
‘Tomorrow night if everything goes to plan,’ Alexander Nikolaevich confirmed.
‘Take care of yourself, Uncle Sasha! Good luck!’ Artyom uttered hoarsely, shaking his stepfather’s hand, and he quickly left.
Sukhoi watched him leave in surprise.
‘Why’s he come unglued? It’s not the first time he’s been to Rizhskaya . . .’
‘Nothing, Sasha, nothing, there will be a time when your boy will grow up. Then you’ll be nostalgic for the days when he said goodbye to you with tears in his eyes when he was just going two stations away! So what were you saying about the opinion at Alexeevskaya about the patrolling of tunnels? It would be very handy for us . . .’
When Artyom ran back to the group, the commander had given each person a machine gun and said:
‘So then, men? Shall we sit down for a moment before we go?’ And he sat down on the old wooden bench. The rest of them followed his example silently. ‘OK, God be with us!’ The commander stood up and jumped down onto the path, taking his place at the front of the group.
Artyom and Zhenya, as the youngest members of the group, climbed up onto the cart and prepared themselves for hard work. Kirill and the second volunteer took their places behind, completing the chain.
‘Let’s go!’ shouted the commander.
Artyom and Zhenya leaned on the levers, and Kirill pushed the cart from behind - and it squeaked, shunting forward and then started gliding ahead. The last two guys walked behind it and the group disappeared into the muzzle of the southern tunnel.
CHAPTER 4
The Voice of the Tunnels
The unreliable light of the lantern in the hands of the commander wandered like a pale yellow stain on the tunnel walls, licking the damp floor and disappearing completely when the lantern was pointed into the distance. There was deep darkness ahead, which was greedily devouring the weak beams of their pocket flashlights from just ten paces away. The wheels of the cart squeaked with a whining and melancholic sound, gliding into nowhere, and the breathing and the rhythmic footfalls of the booted people walking behind it punctuated the silence.
The southern cordons were behind them now, the flickering light of their fires had died away long ago. They were beyond the territory of
VDNKh.
And even though the journey from
VDNKh
to Rizhskaya was considered safe, given the good relations between the stations and the fact that there was a sufficient amount of movement between the two, the caravan needed to stay on alert.
Danger was not something that just came from the north or the south - the two directions of the tunnel. It could hide above them, in the airshafts or at the sides in the multiple tunnel branches behind the sealed doors of former utility rooms or secret exits. There were dangers waiting below too in mysterious manholes left behind by the metro-builders, forgotten and neglected by maintenance crews back when the metro was still just a means of transportation, where terrible things now lurked in their depths, things which could squeeze the mind of the most reckless of daredevils in a vice of irrational horror.
That was why the commander’s lantern was wandering along the walls, and the fingers of the people at the back of the caravan stroked the safety locks of their machine guns, ready to fix them into firing mode at any moment and to lunge at their triggers. That’s why they said little as they walked: chatting weakened and interfered with their capacity to hear in the breathing space of the tunnel.
Artyom was starting to get tired already; he laboured and laboured but the handle, descending and then returning to its former place, gnashed monotonously, turning the wheels again and again. He was looking ahead without success, but his head was spinning to the beat of the wheels, heavily and hysterically, just like the phrases he heard from Hunter before he left - his words about the power of darkness, the most widespread form of government in the territory of the Moscow metro-system.
He tried to think about how he was going to get to Polis, he tried to make a plan, but slowly a burning pain and fatigue was spreading in his muscles, rising from his bent legs through the small of his back, into his arms and pushing any complicated thoughts right out of his head.
Hot, salty sweat dripped onto his forehead, at first slowly, in tiny droplets, and then the drops had grown and became heavier, flowing down his face, getting into his eyes, and there was no chance of wiping them away because Zhenya was on the other side of the mechanism, and if Artyom released the handle then it would land all the effort on Zhenya. Blood was pounding louder and louder in his ears, and Artyom remembered that when he was little he liked to adopt an uncomfortable pose in order to hear the blood pounding in his ears because the sound reminded him of the steps of soldiers on parade. And if he closed his eyes, he could imagine he was a marshal leading the parade and faithful divisions were passing him, measuring their paces, and saluting him. That’s how it was described in books about the army.
Finally, the commander said, without turning around:
‘OK, guys, come down and change places. We’ve reached half way.’
Artyom exchanged glances with Zhenya and he jumped off the cart, and they both, without speaking, sat on the rails, even though they were supposed to be going to the rear of the cart.
The commander looked at them attentively and said sympathetically:
‘Milksops . . .’
‘Milksops,’ Zhenya admitted readily.
‘Get up, get up, there’ll be no sitting here. It’s time to go. I’ll tell you a good little story.’
‘We can also tell you a few stories!’ Zhenya confidently declared, not wanting to get up.
‘Yes, I know all your stories. About the dark ones, about the mutants . . . About your little mushrooms, of course. But there are a few tales you’ve never heard. Yes, indeed, and they might not even be tales - it’s just that no one is able to confirm them . . . That is, there have been people who have tried to confirm the stories, but they couldn’t tell us for sure.’
For Artyom, this short speech had been enough to give him a second wind. Now any information about what happened beyond the Prospect Mir station had great meaning for him. He hurried to get up from the rails and, transferring his machine gun from his back to his chest, he took up his place behind the cart.
With a little shove, the wheels started singing their plaintive song again. The group moved forward. The commander was looking ahead, peering watchfully into the darkness because not everything was audible.
‘I’m interested, what does your generation know about the metro anyway?’ the commander was saying. ‘You tell each other such tales. Someone went somewhere, someone made it all up. One tells the wrong thing to the next who whispers it to a third, who, in turn, stretches the story over a cup of tea with a fourth person, who pretends that it was his own adventure. That’s the main problem with the metro: there aren’t any reliable communication lines. It isn’t possible to get from one end to the other quickly. You can’t get through in some places, it’s partitioned in others where some crap is going on, and the conditions change every day. Do you think that this metro system is all that big? Well, you can get from one end to the other in an hour by train. And it takes people weeks to do that now, and that’s if they make it. And you never know what is waiting for you at every turn. So, we’ve set off for Rizhskaya with humanitarian aid . . . But the problem is that no one - me and the duty officer included - no one is prepared to guarantee that when we get there, we won’t be met with heavy fire. Or that we won’t find a burnt-out station without a living soul in it. Or that it won’t suddenly become clear that Rizhskaya has joined forces with the Hansa and therefore there’s no passage to the rest of the metro left to us anymore, ever again. There’s no exact information . . . We received some data yesterday - but everything is out of date by evening and you can’t rely on it the next day. It’s just like going through quicksand using a hundred-year-old map. It takes so long for messengers to get through with the messages they carry that it often happens that the information’s not needed anymore or it’s already unreliable. The truth is distorted. People have never lived under these conditions . . . And it’s scary to think of what will happen when there isn’t any fuel for the generators, and there isn’t electricity anymore. Have you read Wells’ The Time Machine? Well, there they had these Morlocks . . .’
This was already the second such conversation in the last two days, and Artyom already knew about the Morlocks and about Herbert Wells, and he didn’t want to hear about it all over again. So, disregarding Zhenya’s protests, he resolutely turned the conversation back to its original direction.
‘So, what does your generation know about the metro?’
‘Mm . . . Talking about the devilry in the tunnels is bad luck . . . And about Metro- 2 and the invisible observers? I won’t talk about that either. But I can tell you something interesting about who lives where. So, do you know, for example, that at the place that used to be Pushkinskaya station - where there’s another two pedestrian passages to Chekhovskaya and Tverskaya - that the fascists have now taken that?’
‘What - what fascists?’ Zhenya asked, puzzled.
‘Real fascists. A while ago, when we still lived there,’ the commander pointed upwards, ‘there were fascists. There were also skinheads who called themselves the RNE, and others who were against immigration, and there were all kinds of different types, since that was the trend in those days. Only a fool knows what these acronyms mean, now no one remembers, and they themselves probably don’t even remember. And then, it seemed, they disappeared. You heard and saw nothing of them. And suddenly, a little while ago, they turned up again. “The metro is for Russians!” Have you heard of that? Or, they say: “‘Do a good deed - clean up the metro!” And they threw all the non-Russians out of Pushkinskaya, and then from Chekhovskaya and Tverskaya. In the end they became rabid and started punishing people. They have a Reich there now. The fourth or the fifth . . . Something like that. They haven’t crawled any further yet, but our generation still remembers the twentieth century. And what fascists are . . . The mutants from the Filevskaya line, basically, exist in actual fact . . . And our dark ones, what are they worth? And there are various sectarians, satanists, communists . . . It’s a chamber of curiosities. That’s what it is.’
They went past the broken down door to an abandoned administrative room. Maybe it was a lavatory or maybe before it was a refuge . . . Full of furniture: iron bunk-beds and crude plumbing - it was all stolen long ago and nowadays no one tried to get into those dark empty rooms scattered along the length of the tunnels. There’s nothing there . . . But truth is, you never know!
There was a weak blinking light ahead. They were approaching Alekseevskaya. The station was minimally populated, and the patrol consisted of one person, at the fiftieth-metre - they couldn’t allow themselves to go any further. The commander gave the order to stop at forty metres from the fire that had been lit by the patrol at Alekseevskaya - and he turned his flashlight on and off several times in a precise sequence, giving the patrol a signal. A black figure was delineated by the light of the flames - a scout was coming towards them. From far off, the scout yelled, ‘Halt! Don’t approach!’
Artyom asked himself: Could it be possible that one day they wouldn’t be recognized at a station with whom they considered themselves to have friendly relations, and they would be met with hostility?
The person was approaching them slowly. He was dressed in torn camouflage trousers and a quilted jacket which displayed the letter ‘A’ in bold - apparently from the first letter in the station’s name. His hollow cheeks were unshaven, and his eyes gleamed suspiciously, and his hands were nervously stroking the body of an automatic machine gun that was hanging from his neck. He looked them right in the face and smiled - he recognized them and, with a little wave showing his trust, he pushed the machine gun onto his back.
‘Great, guys! How are you doing? Is it you guys heading to
Rizhskaya?
We know, we know, they warned us. Let’s go!’
The commander started to ask the patrolman something but it was inaudible, and Artyom, hoping that he also wouldn’t be heard, said quietly to Zhenya:
‘He looks overworked and underfed. I don’t think they want to join forces with us because they’re having the good life.’
‘Well, so what?’ His friend responded. ‘We also have our interests in the matter. If our administration is pursuing it then it means there’s something they want from it. It’s not out of charity that we are coming to feed them.’
They went past the campfire at the fiftieth-metre where a second patrolman was sitting, dressed just like the one who had met them, and their cart rolled towards the station. Alekseevskaya was badly lighted and the people that lived there looked sad and seemed to speak little. At
VDNKh,
they looked on guests with friendliness. The group stopped in the middle of the platform and the commander announced a smoking break. Artyom and Zhenya stayed on the cart to protect it and the others were called to the fireside.
‘I’ve never heard about the fascists and the Reich,’ Artyom said.
‘I’ve heard that there were fascists somewhere in the underground, ’ Zhenya answered, ‘but they only said that they were at
Novokuznetskaya
.’
‘Who told you?’
‘Lekha did,’ Zhenya admitted reluctantly.
‘He’s told you a lot of other interesting things,’ Artyom reminded him.