Metro 2034

CHAPTER 18 Deliverance

The line of men was several dozen metres long. Only the very finest of Sebastopol’s soldiers were in it, each one personally selected by the colonel. Their little helmet lamps twinkled in the gloom of the tunnel, and Denis Mikhailovich suddenly saw the entire combat formation as a swarm of fireflies dashing into the night. Into a warm, fragrant Crimean night, over the cypresses, towards the whispering sea. To where the colonel would like to go when he died.

He shook off the chilly, ticklish sensation, frowned and reprimanded himself severely. He was starting to weaken in his old age after all. He let the last soldier past him, opened a stainless steel cigarette case, took out the one and only hand-rolled cigarette, sniffed at it and struck a flame out of his lighter. It was a good day. Fortune was smiling on the colonel and everything was coming together just as he had planned. They’d got through Nagornaya without any casualties – even the one man who disappeared had caught up with the column again soon afterwards. And everyone was in an excellent mood: going up against bullets was far less frightening to them than floundering in uncertainty and endless waiting. And apart from that, Denis Mikhailovich had let them catch up properly on their sleep just before the expedition. Only he hadn’t been able to get to sleep himself: the colonel had always regarded destiny as a simple sequence of fortuitous events and had never understood how it was possible to put any trust in it. There hadn’t been any news of the little two-man expedition in all the days that had passed since it set off into the Kakhovka Line tunnels. Anything could have happened, after all, Hunter wasn’t immortal. And what right did Denis Mikhailovich have to rely on just the brigadier, who might have gone totally crazy from all his endless battles, and that old storyteller?

He couldn’t wait any longer either.

The plan of action was this: take the main body of Sebastopol’s forces through Nakhimov Prospect, Nagornaya and Nagatino to Tula’s closed southern hermetic door and send a group of saboteurs over the surface to the sealed-off station. Send the saboteurs down into the tunnel through the ventilation shafts to eliminate the guards, if there still were any, and open the door for the assault brigade. And after that it was a simple, routine job, no matter who had captured the station. It had taken three days to locate and clean out the shafts. All that was left for the stalkers to do today was let the saboteurs in. And that was going to happen in a couple of hours’ time. In two hours everything would be decided and Denis Mikhailovich would be able to think about something else again, able to sleep and eat again.

The plan was simple, precise, impeccable. But Denis Mikhailovich had a tense, agitated kind of feeling and his heart was pounding as if he was eighteen years old again, advancing into that mountain village, into his first battle. The colonel cauterised his sense of alarm with the final glow of his cigarette, threw away the tiny butt, pulled his mask on again and strode forward to catch up with the unit.

The brigade soon came up against the steel hermetic door. They could rest here until the assault began and he could run through the carefully spelled out and memorised roles with the section leaders.

Homer had been right about one thing, the colonel thought to himself with a chuckle. It was pointless trying to take a fortress by storm, if you could get it opened up for you from the inside, like the Greeks at Troy. And wasn’t it actually Homer who wrote about the Trojan Horse?

Denis Mikhailovich checked his radiation meter: the background level was low, and he pulled off his gas mask. The section leaders did the same, and then so did the other soldiers. That was fine, let them take a breather.

In Polis there were always plenty of people who had struggled to make the journey here from poor, dark, outlying stations, hanging about or wandering through the galleries and halls with their eyes goggling and their jaws hanging open in admiration. And Homer, circling round Borovitskaya, tenderly stroking the elegant columns of Alexander Garden, scrutinising with loving delight the frivolous chandeliers of Arbat that looked like girls’ earrings, didn’t stand out from them in any way.

His heart had caught a presentiment and wouldn’t let go of it: this was the last time he would be in Polis. What was about to happen at Tula in a few hours would cancel out his entire life, and perhaps even cut it short. The old man had decided to do what he had to do. He would let Hunter kill everyone and burn out the station, and then try to kill him. But if the brigadier suspected treachery, he would wring Homer’s neck in an instant. And perhaps the old man would be killed in the assault on Tula. If so, his death would come soon. But if everything went well, afterwards Homer would become a hermit, so that he could fill up all the white pages between the already written opening of the book and the final full stop, which he would insert with the shot into the back of Hunter’s head.

Would he be able to do it? Would he dare? The mere thought of it was enough to set the old man’s hands shaking. But never mind, it would all work out somehow. He didn’t need to think about it now, too much thinking led to doubts.

And thank God he’d sent the girl away! Homer understood now why he had got her mixed up in his reckless adventure, why he had allowed her to walk into the lions’ cage. He’d got carried away, playing the writer, and forgotten that she wasn’t a figment of his imagination.

Homer’s novel would turn out different from the way he had thought of it, it would be about something different. But from the very beginning Homer had attempted to shoulder an impossibly heavy burden. How could all the people be fitted into a single book? Even the crowd through which the old man was walking at the moment would be cramped on a book’s pages. Homer didn’t want to transform his book into a communal grave, with flickering columns of names that dazzled the eyes and bronze letters, behind which it was impossible to glimpse the faces and characters of the fallen.

No, it wouldn’t work. Even his memory, so corroded by the passage of time that it had started springing leaks a long time ago, couldn’t take all these people on board. The pockmarked face of a sweet seller, and the pale, sharp-nosed face of the little girl handing him a cartridge. And her mother’s smile, beaming as bright as the smile of a Madonna, and the lecherous, sticky smile of the soldier walking by. And the harsh wrinkles of the ancient beggars appealing for charity right there, and the laughing wrinkles beside the eyes of a thirty-year-old woman.

Which of them was a rapist, or a money-grubber, or a thief, or a traitor, or a rake, or a prophet, or a righteous man, and which of them still hadn’t found themselves yet – Homer didn’t know all that. It wasn’t revealed to him what the sweet seller was really thinking about when he looked at the little girl, what was really meant by her mother’s smile – the smile of someone else’s wife ignited by the spark of a soldier’s gaze – or how the beggar used to make his living before his legs gave out. And so it wasn’t for Homer to decide who deserved immortal fame and who didn’t.

Six billion people had simply perished: six billion of them! Was it pure chance that only a few tens of thousands had managed to escape?

The engine driver Serov, whose place Nikolai was to have taken a week after the Apocalypse, was a passionate sports fan, who regarded the whole of life as a football match. ‘The whole human race has lost,’ he used to tell Nikolai, ‘but you and I are still running around, haven’t you ever wondered why? It’s because our lives don’t have a final scoreline yet, and the ref’s made us play extra time. And during that time we have to figure out what we’re here for and manage to get everything done, set everything straight, and then take a pass and fly with the ball towards that radiant goalmouth…’ He was a mystic, that Serov. Homer had never asked him if he managed to score that goal, but Serov’s views had certainly convinced Homer that he still needed to set his own personal score in order. And it was from Serov that Homer had acquired the certitude that no one in the Metro was there by accident.

But it wasn’t possible to write about everything!

Should he even carry on trying?

And then, among a thousand unfamiliar faces, the old man saw what he least of all expected to see at that moment.

Leonid took off his jacket and pulled off his sweater, followed by a relatively white T-shirt, which he flung up over his head like a flag and started waving about, taking no notice of the dense swarm of bullets whizzing through the air around him. And something strange happened: the battle trolley started falling back, and still no one opened fire from the frontier post looming up ahead of them.

‘And for that my dear dad would kill me!’ the musician told Sasha after they braked with a ferocious grating sound from full speed to a dead halt right in front of the tank traps.

‘What are you doing? What are we doing?’ Sasha couldn’t catch her breath, she couldn’t understand how they could have survived the chase.

‘We’re surrendering!’ he laughed. ‘This is the entrance to Lenin Library Station, the frontier post of Polis. And you and I are defectors.’

Border guards came running up and took them down off the trolley. When they checked Leonid’s passport they exchanged glances, put away the handcuffs they were holding ready and escorted the girl and the musician into the station. They took them into the watch office and went out, whispering among themselves respectfully, to get their commanding officer.

Leonid, who was sprawling haughtily in a threadbare armchair, immediately jumped up, glanced out of the door and beckoned to Sasha.

‘They’re even worse slackers here than on our line!’ he snorted. ‘There aren’t any guards!’

They slipped out of the room and walked unhurriedly at first, then faster and faster along the passage, finally breaking into a run and holding hands so that the crowd wouldn’t separate them. Their backs soon started itching when they heard the trilling of militiamen’s whistles behind them, but nothing could have been easier than to lose themselves in this huge station. There were ten times as many people here as at Pavelets. Even when Sasha imagined life as it was before the war, while she was taking her stroll on the surface, she hadn’t been able to picture such a huge multitude! And it was almost as bright here as it had been up there. Sasha covered her face with one hand, examining the world through a narrow observation slit between her fingers. Her eyes kept stumbling over things, faces, columns, every one more amazing than the ones that had gone before, and if not for Leonid and his fingers intertwined with hers, she would certainly have stumbled and fallen, completely disoriented. She definitely had to come back here some day, Sasha promised herself. Some day when she had more time.

‘Sasha?’

The girl looked back, and her gaze met Homer’s: he looked frightened, and angry, and surprised. Sasha smiled: apparently she had missed the old man.

‘What are you doing here?’ He couldn’t have asked two young people trying to make a quick getaway a more stupid question.

‘We’re going to Dobrynin!’ she answered, catching her breath and slowing down slightly so the old man could catch up with them.

‘Don’t talk nonsense! You mustn’t… I forbid you to!’ But his prohibitions, gasped out through strenuous puffing and panting, made no impression on her.

They reached the check point at Borovitskaya before the border guards had warned it about their getaway.

‘I have a warrant from Miller! Let us through, and make it quick!’ Homer told the officer on duty coolly.

The soldier opened his mouth, but then without even taking time to gather his thoughts, he saluted the old man and stood aside.

‘Did you just lie?’ the musician asked Homer politely when the checkpoint was far behind them, lost in the darkness.

‘What difference does it make?’ the old man snarled angrily.

‘The important thing is to do it confidently,’ Leonid said appreciatively. ‘Then only the professionals will notice.’

‘To hell with the lectures!’ exclaimed Homer, frowning and clicking the switch of his flashlight, which was already running down. ‘We’ll go as far as Serpukhov, but I won’t let you go any further than that!’

‘That’s because you don’t know!’ said Sasha. ‘A cure has been found for the sickness!’

‘What do you mean, found?’ asked the old man, breaking step and starting to cough. He gave Sasha a strange, fearful kind of look.

‘Yes, yes! It’s radiation!’

‘The bacteria are rendered harmless by the effects of radiation,’ explained the musician, coming to the rescue.

‘But microbes and viruses are hundreds or thousands of times more resistant to radiation than human beings! And radiation impairs the immune response!’ the old man shouted, losing control of himself. ‘What nonsense have you been telling her? Why are you dragging her off there? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen now? None of us can stop him now! Take her away somewhere and hide her! And you…’ Homer turned to Sasha. ‘How could you believe… a professional?’ he said, spitting out the last word contemptuously.

‘Don’t be afraid for me,’ the girl said in a quiet voice. ‘I know Hunter can be stopped. He has two halves… I’ve seen both of them. One wants blood, but the other is trying to save people!’

‘What are you talking about?’ exclaimed Homer, flinging his arms up in protest. ‘There aren’t any different parts any more, there’s a single whole. A monster locked inside a human body! A year ago…’

But the old man’s retelling of the conversation between the man with the shaved head and Miller did nothing to convince Sasha. The longer she listened to Homer, the more certain she became that she was right.

‘It’s just that the one inside him, who kills, is deceiving the other one,’ she said, struggling to find the right words to explain everything to the old man. ‘It’s telling him there’s no choice. One is driven by hunger, and the other by anguish. That’s why Hunter’s so eager to get to Tula – both halves are dragging him there! They have to be split apart. If he’s offered a choice – to save without killing…’

‘Oh God… He won’t even listen to you! What’s pulling you to that place?’

‘Your book,’ Sasha told him with a gentle smile. ‘I know everything in it can still be changed. The ending hasn’t been written yet.’

‘Nonsense! Gibberish!’ Homer babbled in despair. ‘Why did I even tell you about it? Young man, you at least…’ He grabbed Leonid by the arm. ‘I beg you, I believe you’re not a bad person and you didn’t lie out of spite. Take her. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You’re both so young and so beautiful… You have a life to live! She mustn’t go there, do you understand? And you mustn’t go there. You won’t stop anything either, with your little lie…’

‘It isn’t a lie,’ the musician said politely. ‘Would you like me to swear to it?’

‘All right, all right,’ said the old man, brushing aside his protestations. ‘I’m prepared to believe you. But Hunter… you’ve only had a brief glimpse of him, haven’t you?’

‘But I’ve heard plenty,’ Leonid said with a wry chuckle.

‘He’s… How are you going to stop him? With that flute of yours? Or do you think he’ll listen to the girl? That thing inside him… He can’t even hear anything any longer…’

‘To be honest,’ said the musician, leaning down towards the old man, ‘in my heart I agree with you. But it’s a young lady’s request! And I am a gentleman, after all.’ He winked at Sasha.

‘Why can’t you understand… this isn’t a game!’ Homer burst out, gazing imploringly at the girl and Leonid by turns.

‘I do understand,’ Sasha said firmly.

‘Everything’s a game,’ the musician said calmly.

If the musician really was Moskvin’s son, he genuinely could know something about the epidemic that even Hunter hadn’t heard. Hadn’t heard or didn’t want to tell? Homer suspected that Leonid was a charlatan, but what if radiation really could destroy the fever? Against his own will and against all common sense the old man started gathering together proofs that he was right. Wasn’t this what he had been praying for for the last few days? Then the cough, the bleeding mouth, the nausea – were they merely symptoms of radiation sickness? The dose he had received on the Kakhovka Line must have extinguished the infection.

The devil certainly knew how to tempt the old man! But assuming it was true, then what about Tula, and what about Hunter? Sasha was hoping she could change his mind. And she really did seem to have a strange kind of power over the brigadier. But while one of the parties warring within him might find the bridle the girl was trying to throw over him as soft as silk, it would sear the other like red hot iron. Which of them would be on the outside at the decisive moment?

This time Polyanka chose not to put on a show for him, or for Sasha, or for Leonid. The station appeared to them stark and empty, as if it had given up the ghost long ago. Should Homer take this as a good omen or a bad one? He didn’t know. Possibly the draught that had started up in the tunnels – a shadow of the winds rambling about on the surface – had simply swept away all the stupefying vapours. Or was the old man perhaps mistaken about something, and now he didn’t have any future for Polyanka to tell him about?

‘What does “Emerald” mean?’ Sasha asked out of the blue.

‘An emerald is a transparent green stone,’ Homer explained absent-mindedly. ‘So to say something is emerald simply means that it’s green.’

‘That’s funny,’ the girl said thoughtfully. ‘So it does exist after all…’

‘What do you mean?’ the musician asked with a start.

‘Oh, nothing really… You know,’ she said, looking at Leonid, ‘I’m going to search for that city of yours too. And I’ll definitely find it someday.’

Homer just shook his head: he still wasn’t convinced the musician was sincere in his repentance for filling Sasha’s head with nonsense and luring her to Sport Station for nothing.

But the girl was still absorbed in her own thoughts: she whispered something and sighed a couple of times. Then she glanced at the old man quizzically.

‘Have you written down everything that happened to me?’

‘I’m writing it.’

‘Good,’ she said and nodded.

Bad things were happening at Serpukhov. The Hansa guard at the entrance had been doubled and the morose, taciturn soldiers flatly refused to let Homer and the others through. Neither the cartridges that the musician jangled under their noses nor his document made the slightest impression on them. The situation was saved by the old man, who demanded to be connected with Andrei Andreevich. A long half-hour later a signal officer arrived, unreeling a thick wire, and Homer menacingly announced into his telephone receiver that the three of them were the advance guard of a cohort of the Order. This half-truth was enough to get them escorted through the hall, which was stuffy, as if all the air had been pumped out of the station, and entirely sleepless, even though it was the middle of the night, to the reception office of the commandant of Dobrynin.

He met them at the door in person, dishevelled and lathered in sweat, with sunken eyes and breath that stank of stale alcohol; the orderly wasn’t in the room. Andrei Andreevich looked round nervously and, not seeing Hunter, he snorted impatiently.

‘Will they be here soon?’

‘Yes, soon,’ Homer told him confidently.

‘Serpukhov could mutiny at any moment,’ said the commandant, wiping his face as he strode round the reception office. ‘Someone let the cat out of the bag about the epidemic. No one knows what to be afraid of, they’re lying and saying that gas masks won’t help.’

‘They’re not lying,’ Leonid put in.

‘The guard post in one of the southern tunnels to Tula has mutinied, the entire unit. Mangy cowards… In the other tunnel, where the sectarians are, they’re still holding position… Those fanatics have besieged them, howling about Judgement Day… The ruckus is starting up even here, in my own station! And where are our rescuers?’

There was the sound of ranting and swearing in the hall, people yelling and guards blaspheming. Before his question had even been answered, Andrei Andreevich squeezed back into his lair and started clinking the neck of a bottle against a glass in there. On his orderly’s counter a little red light lit up on one of the phones, as if it had just been waiting for the commandant to leave the room: it was the phone with the word ‘Tula’ scrawled on a strip of sticking plaster.

Homer hesitated for a second before stepping towards the desk: he licked his dry lips and took a deep breath…

‘Dobrynin Station here!’

‘What shall I tell them?’ Artyom asked doltishly, looking round at the commander.

The commander was still unconscious: his cloudy eyes looked as if they’d been curtained off and were shifting about restlessly right up under his forehead. Sometimes his body was shaken by a vicious cough. His lung’s punctured, thought Artyom.

‘Are you alive?’ he shouted into the receiver. ‘The infected men have broken out!’

Then he remembered they didn’t know what was happening at Tula. He had to tell them, explain everything. Out on the platform a woman squealed and a machine-gun rumbled. The sounds slipped in through the crack under the door, and there was nowhere to hide from them. The person at the other end of the line was answering him, asking questions, but he couldn’t hear them properly.

‘You have to block their way out!’ Artyom repeated. ‘Shoot to kill. Don’t let them get near you!’

He realised they didn’t know what the sick people looked like. How could he describe them? Bloated, with cracked skin, stinking? But then, the ones who had only got infected recently looked like normal people.

‘Shoot everyone you see,’ he said lifelessly.

But didn’t that mean that if he tried to get out of the station, they’d shoot him too, that he’d condemned himself to death? No, he’d never get out. No one healthy was left at the station… Artyom suddenly felt unbearably lonely. And afraid that the man listening to all this at Dobrynin wouldn’t have enough time now to talk to him.

‘Please don’t hang up!’ he told him.

Artyom didn’t know what to talk about with the stranger, and he started telling him about how long he’d been trying to get through and how he’d thought there wasn’t a single station still left alive in the whole Metro. What if he’d been calling into the future, when no one had survived, he thought, and he said that too. He didn’t have to be afraid of anything at all now. Just as long as he had someone to talk to.

‘Popov!’ the commander wheezed behind his back. ‘Have you contacted the northern guard post? The hermetic door… Is it closed off?’

Artyom looked round and shook his head.

‘Dumb bastard,’ the commander barked, hacking up blood. ‘Useless jerk… Listen to me. The station’s mined. I found these pipes… Up on top… A drain for ground water. I laid charges… we’ll set them off and flood the whole damn station. I’ve got the contacts for the mines here in the radio room. We have to close the northern door… And check if… And check if the southern one’s holding. Seal off the station. So the water doesn’t spread any further. Close it off, have you got that? When everything’s ready, you tell me… Is the line to the guard post working?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Artyom said and nodded.

‘Just don’t you forget to stay on this side of the door,’ said the commander, stretching his lips into a smile and breaking into furious coughing. ‘That wouldn’t be a comradely thing to do.’

‘But what about you? You’ll be here?’

‘Don’t funk it, Popov,’ said the commander, narrowing his eyes.

‘Every one of us is born for something. I was born to drown these bastards. You were born to batten down the hatches and die like an honest man. Got that?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Artyom repeated.

‘Get on with it, then!’

The phone went dead.

By some whim of the telephone gods, Homer had heard almost everything the duty officer at Tula said to him quite well. But he hadn’t been able to make out the last few phrases, and then the connection had broken down completely.

The old man looked up. Andrei Andreevich’s heavy carcass was looming over him; his blue tunic had acquired dark patches under the armpits, his fat hands were trembling.

‘What’s going on there?’ he asked in a hoarse, faint voice.

‘Everything’s got out of control.’ Homer gulped hard. ‘Move all your free men to Serpukhov.’

‘Can’t be done,’ said Andrei Andreevich, pulling his Makarov pistol out of his trouser pocket. ‘There’s panic at the station. I’ve posted all the loyal men at the entrances to the tunnels on the Circle, to make sure at least that no one disappears from here.’

‘You can reassure them!’ Homer responded hesitantly. ‘We’ve found out… The fever can be cured. By radiation. Tell them.’

‘Radiation?’ The commandant pulled a sour face. ‘Do you really believe that? Then fire ahead, you have my blessing!’ He saluted the old man buffoonishly, slammed the door shut and locked himself in his own office. What should Homer and the girl and the musician do now? They couldn’t even escape from here. But where were the other two? The old man went out into the corridor, pressing his hand against his pounding heart. He ran into the station, calling out her name. He couldn’t see them anywhere. Dobrynin was in chaos: women with children and men with bundles were besieging the weakened cordons and looters were darting about among the overturned tents, but no one was paying any attention to them. Homer had seen this kind of thing before: next they’d start trampling on those who had fallen, and then shooting at unarmed people.

And at that very moment the tunnel gave a groan.

The wailing and clamouring stopped, replaced by loud exclamations of surprise. The extraordinary, powerful sound was repeated. It was like the roaring battle trumpets of a Roman legion that had lost its way in the millennia and was advancing against Dobrynin Station.

Soldiers started scurrying about, moving aside barriers, and something immense emerged from the mouth of the tunnel… A genuine armoured train! The heavy head of the cabin, jacketed in steel that was studded with rivets, with heavy calibre machine-guns protruding from the slits of two gun ports, then a long, lean body and a second horned head, facing in the opposite direction. Not even Homer had ever come across a monster like this.

Sitting on the raven-black armour plating were faceless idols. Indistinguishable from each other in their full-protection suits, Kevlar vests and outlandish gas masks, with backpacks behind their shoulders, they didn’t seem to belong to this time or this world at all.

The train stopped. The aliens encased in armour paid no attention to the curious onlookers who came running up: they flew down onto the platform and lined up in three ranks. Swinging round as one man in perfect synchronisation, like a machine, they lumbered off towards the connecting passage to Serpukhov, and their tramping drowned out the awed whispers and the children’s crying. The old man hurried after them, trying to spot Hunter among the dozens of warriors. They were all almost the same height, their anonymous bulletproof jumpsuits fitted without a single wrinkle, stretched taut across their massively broad shoulders, and they were all armed in the same menacing fashion: backpack flamethrowers and nine-millimetre sniper’s rifles with silencers. No insignia, no coats of arms, no badges of rank. Probably he was one of the three striding along at the front?

The old man ran along the column, waving his hand, glancing into the observation slits of the gas masks and always encountering the same impassive, indifferent gaze. None of the aliens responded, no one recognised Homer. So was Hunter even with them? He had to show up, he had to!

The old man didn’t see either Sasha or Leonid on his way through the passage. Could good judgement really have prevailed, and the musician have hidden the girl somewhere out of harm’s way? If they would just wait out the bloodbath somewhere, then afterwards Homer would come to an agreement with Andrei Andreevich, provided the commandant hadn’t already blown his brains out.

The formation forged ahead, slicing through the crowd, and no one dared to stand in its way, even the Hansa border guards silently made way for it. Homer decided to follow the column – he had to make sure that Sasha wouldn’t try to do anything. No one tried to drive the old man away, they took no more notice of him than of some mutt barking after a hand trolley.

As they stepped into the tunnel, the three men at the head of the column lit up their million-candle-power flashlights, burning out the darkness ahead. None of them spoke and the silence was oppressive and unnatural. It was their training, of course, but the old man couldn’t help feeling that in honing the skills of the body, these men had suppressed the skills of the soul. And now he was observing a perfected killing machine, in which none of the elements had a will of its own, and only one, who from the outside was indistinguishable from all the others, carried the programme of action. When he gave the order ‘Fire!’ the others would commit Tula to the flames, and likewise any other station, together with everything still living in it.

Thank God, they didn’t march through the line where the sectarians’ train was stuck. The unfortunates had been granted a brief respite before their Day of Judgement: the warriors would annihilate Tula first, and only turn on them afterwards. Obeying some signal that Homer couldn’t see, the column suddenly slowed down. A moment later, he realised what was happening: they were already very close to the station. The silence was as transparent as glass, with someone’s heartrending howls scraping on it like a nail…

And there was another sound, absolutely incongruous and barely audible. Trickling out drop by drop, making the old man doubt his own reason, miraculous music greeted the alien visitors.

The phone had swallowed up the old man completely and Sasha decided she couldn’t find a better moment to run for it. She edged out of the reception room, waited for Leonid outside and led him after her – first to the passage to Serpukhov, and then into the tunnel that would take them to the people who needed them. To the people whose lives she could save.

The tunnel that would also reunite her with Hunter.

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ Sasha asked the musician.

‘Yes,’ he said with a smile, ‘but I suspect that I’m finally doing something worthwhile.’

‘You don’t have to go with me, you know. What if we die there? You could just stay at the station and not go anywhere!’

‘A man’s future is concealed from his knowledge,’ said Leonid, holding up his finger in a professorial gesture and puffing out his cheeks.

‘You decide for yourself what it’s going to be,’ Sasha retorted.

‘Oh, come on,’ the musician laughed. ‘We’re all just rats running through a maze with little sliding doors in the passages. Whoever it is that’s studying us sometimes pulls them up and sometimes pushes them down. And if the door at Sport Station is down right now, there’s no way you’re going to get in there, no matter how hard you scratch at it. And if there’s a trap after the next little door, you’ll fall into it in any case, even if you can sense that something’s wrong, because there isn’t any other way to go. The choice is basically keep on running or croak in protest.’

‘Don’t you resent having a life like this?’ asked Sasha, knitting her brows.

‘I resent the fact that the way my spine is constructed doesn’t allow me to raise my head and look at whoever’s running the experiment,’ the musician responded.

‘There isn’t any maze,’ said Sasha, biting her lip. ‘And rats can even gnaw through cement.’

‘You’re a rebel,’ Leonid laughed. ‘And I’m a conformist.’

‘That’s not true,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You believe that people can be changed.’

‘I’d like to believe it,’ the musician objected.

They passed a hastily abandoned guard post. Embers were still glowing in the extinguished campfire with a greasy, crumpled magazine full of pictures of naked people lying beside it and an abandoned Hansa standard dangled forlornly, half-torn off the wall.

Ten minutes later they came across the first body. The corpse was barely recognisable as human. It had flung its arms and legs out wide, as if it was really tired, and the limbs were so bloated that the clothes on them had split. The face was more terrible than any of the monsters Sasha had seen in her short life.

‘Careful!’ said Leonid, catching hold of her hand to stop her going near the corpse. ‘It’s infectious!’

‘So what?’ said Sasha asked. ‘There’s a cure, isn’t there? Where we’re going, everyone’s infectious.’ They heard a rumble of shots up ahead and shouting in the distance.

‘We’re just in time,’ the musician remarked. ‘It looks like they didn’t wait for your friend either…’

Sasha gave him a frightened look, then replied with passionate conviction.

‘It’s all right, we just have to tell them! They think they’re all doomed… We just have to give them hope.”

Another corpse lay right by the door, staring into the ground – this time it was human. Beside it the iron box of a field communications device was spluttering and hissing desperately. Someone was clearly trying to rouse the sentry.

Several men were lying, hidden behind scattered sandbags, at the very exit from the tunnel. There seemed to be one machine-gunner and two men with automatics, and that was the entire blocking unit. Further ahead, where the narrow tunnel walls widened out and the platform of Tula Station began, a terrible crowd was raging and seething, menacing the men under siege. It was a jumble of the sick and seemingly healthy, normal people and monsters mutilated by the illness. Some of them had flashlights, others no longer needed light.

The men lying down were guarding the tunnel. But they were running out of cartridges, shots sounded less and less often and the brazen crowd was creeping closer and closer.

‘Reinforcements?’ one of the besieged men asked Sasha. ‘Guys, they got through to Dobrynin! Reinforcements!’

The multi-headed monster became more agitated and pressed forward.

‘People!’ shouted Sasha. ‘There is a cure. We’ve found the cure! You’re not going to die! Please, just be patient!’

The crowd gobbled down her words, burped irritably and started moving forward again towards the men who were trying to hold it back. The machine-gunner lashed it with a fierce burst of fire and several people sat down on the ground with a groan. The other soldiers’ automatics barked briefly. The mass of bodies seethed, advancing implacably, ready to trample the besieged men and Sasha and Leonid, ready to tear them to pieces.

But then something happened.

The flute started to sing, stealthily at first, but then with growing confidence and power. Nothing could have been more stupid and less appropriate in that situation. The soldiers guarding the tunnel gazed at the musician in stupefaction, the crowd roared and laughed and started pressing forward again. Leonid took no notice. Probably he wasn’t playing it for them, but for himself – the same amazing melody that had enchanted Sasha, the same one that always captivated dozens of listeners, luring them to him.

Perhaps it was because no worse way to control the rioting and pacify the sick people could possibly be imagined, perhaps it was the touching idiocy of someone who could do something like this, and not the magic of the flute at all, but the crowd relaxed its pressure slightly. Or perhaps the musician really managed to remind these people who had surrounded him, ready to grind him to dust… Remind them of something…

The shooting stopped and Leonid stepped forward, still holding his flute. As if he were facing a normal audience that would burst into applause and shower him with cartridges at any moment.

For a split second the girl thought she could see her father among the listeners – smiling and at peace. So this was where he had been waiting for her… Sasha remembered that Leonid had told her this melody could ease pain.

There was a sudden, premature rumbling in the metal innards of the hermetic door.

Was the advance unit running ahead of schedule? In that case, the situation at Tula couldn’t be so very difficult after all! Perhaps the intruders had left the station a long time ago, leaving the door locked?

The group spread out and the soldiers took shelter behind the projecting flanges of the tunnel liners. Only four of them remained beside Denis Mikhailovich, right in front of the door, holding their weapons at the ready.

This was it. Now the massive door would slowly move aside and a couple of minutes later forty heavily armed Sebastopolite assault troops would burst into Tula. Any resistance would be crushed and the station would be taken in an instant. It had all turned out a lot simpler than the colonel expected.

Denis Mikhailovich didn’t even have time to give the order to don gas masks.

The column reformed, becoming broader – now it was six men abreast, occupying the whole width of the tunnel. The first rank bristled with the barrels of flamethrowers, the second row held its rifles at the ready. They crept forward like black lava, confident and unhurried.

Peeping out from behind the broad backs of the alien warriors, Homer saw the whole scene in the white light of the searchlights: a handful of soldiers defending the tunnel and two thin figures – Sasha and Leonid – and a host of nightmarish creatures surrounding them. And everything inside the old man seemed to freeze up.

Leonid was playing astoundingly, miraculously, with more compelling inspiration than ever before. The horde of ugly, misshapen creatures was listening to him greedily and the soldiers had half-risen from their lying positions in order to see the musician more clearly. And his melody divided the enemies like a glass wall, keeping them apart, preventing them from grappling with each other in a final, deadly skirmish.

‘Stand by!’ one of the dozens of black men ordered – but which one?

The entire front rank went down on one knee together and the second row raised its sniper’s rifles.

‘Sasha!’ Homer shouted.

The girl swung round sharply towards him and screwed her eyes up against the blinding brightness. Holding her open hand out in front of her, she walked against the torrent of light flooding out of those flashlights as slowly as if she were fighting a tempestuous wind. Scalded by the bright rays, the crowd grumbled and groaned, bunching tighter together…

The aliens waited.

Sasha walked right up to their formation.

‘Where are you? I need to talk to you, please!’

No one answered her.

‘We’ve found a way to cure the disease! It can be cured! You don’t have to kill anyone! There’s a cure!’

The phalanx of black stone statues remained silent.

‘Please! I know you don’t want to… You’re only trying to save them… And yourself.’

And then a dull voice rang out above the battle formation, as if it wasn’t coming from any single individual.

‘Stand aside. I don’t want to kill you.’

‘You don’t have to kill anyone! There’s a cure!’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘I beg you!’ Sasha shouted, straining her voice into a shriek.

‘The station has to be purged.’

‘Don’t you want to change everything? Why are you doing the same thing you’ve already done once? That other time, with the Black Ones? Why don’t you want forgiveness?’

The idols didn’t respond any more; the crowd started creeping closer.

‘Sasha!’ Homer whispered imploringly to the girl, but she didn’t hear him.

‘There’s no way to change anything. No one to ask forgiveness from.’ The painful words finally came. ‘I raised my hand against… Against… And I’ve been punished.’

‘It’s all inside you!’ Sasha shouted, not giving up. ‘You can vindicate yourself! Prove your case! Why can’t you see that it’s the mirror? It’s the reflection of what you did then, a year ago! And now you can act differently… Listen to me. Give me a chance…

And earn yourself a chance!’

‘I have to destroy the monster,’ the formation said hoarsely.

‘You can’t!’ Sasha shouted. ‘No one can! It’s in me, it’s sleeping in everyone! It’s a part of our soul, a part of our body… And when it wakes up… You can’t kill it, you can’t slaughter it! You can only lull it back to sleep.’

A grubby soldier slipped through the misshapen creatures and squeezed past the frozen black ranks to the hermetic door and the iron box of a transmitter. He grabbed the microphone and shouted something into it. But then a silencer champed briefly and the soldier fell silent. Sensing blood, the crowd immediately came to life, swelling up and roaring savagely.

The musician put the flute to his lips and started playing, but the magic had dissipated; someone shot at him, he dropped his instrument and grabbed his stomach with both hands.

Fire flickered on the flared muzzles of the flamethrowers. The phalanx sprouted new gun barrels and took a step forward.

Sasha dashed towards Leonid, ready to smash herself against the crowd that had already closed around him where he lay and didn’t want to let the girl have him.

‘No, no!’ she shouted, unable to restrain herself any longer. And then, alone against hundreds of nightmarish monsters, alone against a legion of killers, alone against the whole world, she said stubbornly:

‘I want a miracle!’

Thunder rumbled in the distance, the vaults shuddered, the crowd shrank together and retreated, and the aliens also started backing away. Fine rivulets of water ran across the ground, the first drops started falling from the ceiling and the dark streams gurgled louder and louder.

‘A breach!’ someone howled.

The black men hastily moved away from the station, withdrawing to the hermetic door, and the old man ran with them, looking round at Sasha. She didn’t move. The girl held up her palms and her face to the water gushing down on her… and laughed.

‘It’s rain!’ she shouted. ‘It can do anything! We can start everything all over again!’

The black brigade moved outside the door and Homer went with it. Some of the aliens pushed hard on the door, trying to close off Tula and hold back the water. The slab of metal yielded and started moving slowly. The old man went dashing back to Sasha, left in the drowning station, but he was grabbed and flung out.

And then one of the black figures suddenly darted up to the narrowing gap, thrust his arm through it and shouted to the girl.

‘Come on! I need you!’

The water was already waist-deep: the light blonde head suddenly slipped under the surface and disappeared.

The black man jerked his arm back and the door closed.

But the door didn’t open. A tremor ran through the tunnel and the echo of an explosion crashed into the other side of the steel barrier and rebounded from it. Denis Mikhailovich pressed himself against the metal and listened. He wiped the dampness off his cheeks and glanced in surprise at the ceiling that was also exuding moisture.

‘Pull out!’ he ordered ‘It’s all over here.’