METRO 2033 (75 page)

Artyom thought about himself. He had always wanted to believe that once people were able to get out of the metro in order to live again as they had before, they would be able to restore the majestic buildings erected by their ancestors, and settle down in them so as not to squint at the rising sun and to breathe not the tasteless mixture of oxygen and nitrogen filtered by gas masks, but to swallow with delight the air suffused with the fragrances of plants . . . He didn’t know how they smelled before, but it was supposed to be wonderful. His mother had reminisced about flowers. But, looking at the shrivelled body of the unknown girl who didn’t live to see the cherished day when her nightmare ended, he began to doubt that he would. How did his hope to see the return of a previous life differ from hers? During the years of existence in the metro, man had not amassed the strength to climb the steps of the shining escalator leading to his past glory and splendour in triumph. On the contrary, he was reduced, becoming used to the darkness. Most people had already forgotten the absolute authority mankind had once had over the world, others pined for it, and a third group cursed it.

A horn sounded from outside and Artyom threw himself to the window. A very unusual vehicle stood on a patch of ground in front of the kiosks. He had seen automobiles before: in his distant childhood, then in pictures and photographs in books and, finally, during his previous climb to the surface. But not one of them looked like this. The huge six-wheeled truck was painted red. Behind its cab, which had two rows of seats, the metal body of the truck had a white line along the side, and some pipes piled on the roof. Two rotating blue lights blinked. Instead of struggling out of the booth, he shone his flashlight through the glass, waiting for an answering signal. The truck’s headlights flashed on and off several times, but Artyom was unable to leave the kiosk: two huge shadows were diving headlong one after the other. The first grabbed the roof of the truck with its talons and was trying to lift the vehicle up, but it was too heavy. Lifting the vehicle’s body a half metre from the ground, the monster tore off both pipes, squealed with displeasure and dropped them. The second creature struck the automobile in the side with a screech, counting on turning it over. A door swung open, and a man in a protective suit jumped to the asphalt with a bulky machine gun in his hands. Lifting the barrel, he waited several seconds, evidently allowing the monster to come closer, and then let loose a spray of bullets. Offended chirring was heard from overhead. Artyom hastily opened the lock and ran outside. One of the winged monsters was describing a wide circle about thirty metres above their heads, preparing to strike again but the other couldn’t be seen anywhere.

‘Get in the vehicle!’ yelled the man with the machine gun. Artyom raced towards it, scrambled into the cab and sat on the long seat. The machine gunner let off a burst of shots several more times, then jumped onto the footboard, slid into the cab and slammed the door behind him. The vehicle roared off.

‘You feeding the pigeons?’ Ulman hooted, looking at Artyom through his gas mask. Artyom thought that the flying beasts would pursue them, but instead, having flown past about another hundred metres behind the vehicle, the creatures turned back towards
VDNKh.

‘They are defending a nest,’ the fighter said. ‘We’ve heard about that. They would not just have attacked the vehicle like that. They aren’t big enough. Where is it, I wonder?’

Artyom suddenly understood where the monsters had their nest, and why not one living thing, including the dark ones, dared be seen next to the exit from
VDNKh.

‘Right in our station’s hall, above the escalators,’ he said.

‘It that so? Strange, usually they are higher, they nest on buildings,’ the fighter replied. ‘Most likely, it’s another type. Right . . . Sorry we were late.’

It turned out to be rather cramped in the suits and with the bulky weapons in the vehicle’s cab. The rear seats were occupied by some of rucksacks and cases. Ulman had taken the outside seat, Artyom had ended up in the centre, and left of him, behind the wheel, sat Pavel, Ulman’s friend from Prospect Mir.

‘What’s there to excuse? It wasn’t on purpose,’ the driver said. ‘Something the colonel didn’t warn us about. We had the impression a steamroller had passed over the street that runs from Prospect Mir to Rizhskaya. Why that bridge hasn’t collapsed I don’t know. There wasn’t anywhere to hide. We barely got away from some dogs.’

‘Haven’t you seen any dogs yet?’ Ulman asked.

‘I only heard them,’ Artyom responded.

‘Well, we had a good look at them,’ Pavel said, turning the wheel.

‘What about them?’ Artyom was interested in learning from him.

‘It wasn’t anything good. They tore off the bumper and nearly gnawed through the wheel, even though we were moving. They only stopped when Petro took out the leader with the sniper rifle,’ he nodded at Ulman.

It wasn’t easy going: the ground was covered with trenches and holes. The asphalt was cracked and they had to make their way carefully. In one place they got stuck and it took about five minutes to cross a mountain of concrete rubble left from a collapsed bridge. Artyom looked out the window, squeezing the machine gun in his hands.

‘It’s going OK.’ Pavel was talking about the vehicle.

‘Where did you find it?’ Artyom asked.

‘At the depot. In pieces. They weren’t able to fix it, so it couldn’t go to fires while Moscow was burning down. Now we use it from time to time. Not for what it was built for, of course.’

‘Got you.’ Artyom again turned towards the window.

‘We’ve been lucky with the weather.’ Pavel, it seemed, wanted to talk. ‘There’s not a cloud in the sky. That’s good. We’ll be able to see a long way from the tower. If it turns out we reach it.’

‘I’d rather be up there than walking from house to house,’ nodded Ulman.

‘True, the colonel was saying that almost no one lives in them, but I don’t like the word “almost”.’

The vehicle turned left and rolled along a straight, broad street, divided in two by a plot of grass. On the left was a row of almost undamaged brick homes, on the right stretched a gloomy, black forest. Powerful roots covered the roadway in several places and they had to go round them. But Artyom managed to see all this only in passing.

‘Look at it. What a beauty!’ Pavel said with admiration. Straight ahead of them the Ostankino tower supported the sky, rising like a gigantic club threatening enemies brought down long ago. It was a perfectly fantastic structure. Artyom had never seen anything like it even in the pictures in books and magazines. His stepfather, of course, had told him about some Cyclopean structure located only two kilometres from their station, but Artyom hadn’t been able to imagine how it would astound him. For the rest of the way, his mouth was open his mouth in surprise and stared at the grandiose silhouette of the tower, devouring it with his eyes. His delight at seeing this creation of human hands was mixed with the bitterness of finally understanding that nothing like it ever would be created again.

‘It has been so close all this time, and I didn’t even know.’ He tried to express his feelings.

‘If you don’t come to the surface, there’s much you will not understand in this life,’ Pavel responded. ‘Do you at least know why your station is named what it is -
VDNKh?
It means Great Achievements of Our Economy, that’s what. There was a huge park there with all kinds of animals and plants. And this is what I am telling you: you are really lucky that the “birdies” spun their nest right at the entrance to your station. Because, some of these structures have been softened so much by the X-rays now they can’t even sustain a direct hit from a grenade launcher.’

‘But they respect your feathered friends,’ Ulman added.

‘It is, so to say, your roof.’ Both men began to laugh, and Artyom, who couldn’t be bothered to set Pavel straight regarding the name of his station, stared once more at the tower. He noticed that the enormous structure had leaned a little, but it seemed to have attained a delicate balance and hadn’t fallen. How in hell could something put here decades ago remain standing? Neighbouring houses had been swept away, but the tower proudly rose among this devastation, as if it had been magically preserved from the enemy’s bombs and missiles.

‘It’s interesting how it has survived,’ Artyom muttered.

‘They didn’t want to demolish it, most likely,’ Pavel said. ‘Anyhow, it’s a valuable infrastructure. It was twenty-five per cent higher you know, and there was a pointed spire on top. But now, you see, it’s broken off almost right at the observation deck.’

‘But why spare it? Didn’t they really care anymore? Well, I suppose that it might not have gone well with the Kremlin.’ Ulman was doubtful.

Sweeping through the gate behind the steel rods of the fence, the vehicle approached the very foundation of the television tower and stopped. Ulman took the night vision instrument and the machine gun and jumped to the ground. A minute later he gave the go-ahead: everything was quiet. Pavel also crawled out of the cab and, having opened the rear door, undertook dragging out the rucksacks with the equipment.

‘There should be a signal in twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘We’ll try to catch it from here.’

Ulman found the rucksack with the radio transmitter and began to assemble a long field antenna from the multiple sections. Soon the radio antenna reached six metres in height and lazily swung too and fro in the slight breeze. Sitting at the transmitter, the fighter put the headset with the microphone to his head and began to listen for a transmission. Long minutes of waiting wore on. The shadow of a ‘pterodactyl’ covered them for an instant, but after describing a few circles over their heads, the monster disappeared behind the houses; apparently one encounter with armed people had been enough for it to remember a dangerous enemy.

‘And what do they look like anyhow, these dark ones? You’re our specialist on that,’ Pavel asked Artyom.

‘They look very scary. Like . . . people inside out,’ Ulman was trying to describe them. ‘The complete opposite of a human. And it’s clear from the name itself: the dark ones - they are black.’

‘You don’t say . . . and where did they come from? No one even heard of them before, you know. What do they say about that?’

‘It doesn’t matter what you never heard of in the metro.’ Artyom hastened to change the subject. ‘Who from Park Pobedy knew anything about the cannibals?’

‘That’s true,’ the driver brightened up. ‘They found people with needles in their neck, but no one was able to say who had done it. What nonsense the Great Worm is! But this is where these dark ones of yours are from . . .’

‘I have seen him,’ Artyom interrupted him.

‘The worm?’ Pavel asked, not believing him.

‘Well, something like it. A train, maybe. Huge, it bellows so that you block your ears. I didn’t manage to see what happened - it tore right past me.’

‘No, it couldn’t be a train . . . What would power it? Mushrooms? Trains are driven by electricity. You know what it reminds me of? A drilling rig.’

‘Why?’ Artyom was taken aback. He had heard about drilling rigs, but the idea that the Great Worm who had gnawed the new passages about which Dron had spoken may turn out to be such a machine hadn’t occurred to him. And wasn’t all belief in the worm built on denying machines?

‘Don’t say anything to Ulman about the drilling rig, and the colonel, too: they’ll all think I’m nuts.’ Pavel said. ‘The thing is, I had been gathering information at Polis earlier. I tracked down every plainclothes detective, and in short, I was involved with subversives and the internal threat. And one day an old guy ran into me and he was convinced that in one recess in a tunnel next to Borovitskaya, a noise was constantly heard, as if a drilling machine was operating behind the wall. Of course, I would have immediately determined he was insane, but previously he had been a builder and knew a lot about such things.’

‘But who would need to dig there?’

‘No idea. The old man raved on that some miscreants wanted to dig a tunnel through to the river so that all Polis could bathe, and he had somehow overheard their plans. I immediately gave a warning only no one believed me. I rushed to look for this old man in order to present him as a witness, but he, as luck would have it, had got lost somewhere. An agent provocateur, maybe. And maybe,’ Pavel looked carefully at Ulman and lowered his voice, ‘he really heard how the military are digging something secret. And they buried my old man at the same time. Since then I have had ideas about a drilling rig and they are putting me down as a nutcase. It’s hardly worth saying that they begin to taunt me straight off about the rig.’ He went quiet, looking searchingly at Artyom: what was his attitude to his story?

Artyom vaguely shrugged his shoulders.

‘Not a damned thing heard, empty air!’ the approaching Ulman spat angrily. ‘We can’t get it from here, son of a bitch! We have to get higher: Melnik most likely is too far away.’

Artyom and Pavel immediately started picking up. No one wanted to think about other explanations for why the stalker’s team hadn’t made contact. Ulman folded the antenna into sections, put the radio into the rucksack, lifted his machine gun onto his shoulder and walked off first toward the glass vestibule that was concealed behind the television tower’s mighty pillars. Pavel handed one case to Artyom, took the knapsack and rifle himself, cracked the vehicle’s doors and they followed Ulman.

Inside it was quiet, dirty and empty: people, apparently, once ran from here in a hurry and never returned again. The moon surprisingly shone through the broken, dusty glass onto overturned benches and the broken counter of the ticket office, onto the security post, with the remnants of a service cap forgotten in haste, and onto the broken turnstiles at the entrance, and illuminated stencilled instructions and cautions for visitors to the television tower. They turned off their flashlights and, looking around a little, found the exit to the staircase. The useless elevators that had been able to take people up in less than a minute stood on the first floor with their doors flung feebly open. Now the team was approaching the most difficult area. Ulman explained that they had to get to a height of more than three hundred metres. Artyom did the first two hundred steps with ease. Weeks of travelling around the metro had toughened his legs. He began to flag at three hundred and fifty. The winding staircase stretched upwards, and there was no perceptible difference between the floors. It was damp and cold inside the tower, and, apart from naked concrete walls, all that could be seen was abandoned equipment rooms, through the occasional open door.