Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) Page 6

  The fear of getting old, said Homer condescending to himself. In his time he had read books about psychology. If they would just help him now.

  The corpse eaters on the other hand weren’t afraid of humans. To waste a single bullet for one of these harmless corpse eaters would have been considered a criminal waste at the Sevastopolskaya. The passing caravans tried to ignore them even though the creatures liked to provoke them.

  At this station they had reproduced strongly and the more the group progressed, while bones broke under their boots with a disgusting breaking sound, the more corpse eaters abandoned unwillingly their meal and moved slowly back to their dwellings. Their nests were in inside the trains.

  And for that Homer hated them even more.

  The hermetic gates of the Nachimovski prospect were open. It was said that when you passed the station quickly you would only get a small dose of unhealthy radiation, but you couldn’t stay there for long. So it came that some of the trains were still well preserved: The windshields and windows weren’t broken, through the open doors you could see the dirty but intact seats and also the blue paint of the train was still there. In the middle of the hall was a true mountain of twisted bodies made up by unrecognizable creatures. When Hunter reached them he suddenly stopped.

  Achmed and Homer looked at each other worried and tried to see where the danger came from.

  But the reason for the delay was a different one. On the edge of the mountain of bodies two little corpse eaters gnawed on the skeleton of a dog– you could hear how they creaked and growled pleasurable. They weren’t able to hide in time. Maybe they hadn’t finished their meal or didn’t understand the signals of their older creatures or their greed had overpowered them.

  Blinded by the shine of the light, but still cowering, they started their slow retreat to next wagon when they both suddenly tipped over with a dump sound and hit the ground like two with bowels filled sacks.

  Homer looked at Hunter surprised while he put his heavy army pistol with the long suppressor back into his shoulder holster. The face of the brigadier was as impenetrable and dead as always.

  “Seemed like they had a lot of hunger.” Whispered Achmed. A little bit disgusted, a little bit curios at the dark puddles where the pulpy remains of their dead were skulls liying..

  “Me too.” Answered Hunter with an unclear voice and Homer winched.

  Without turning around Hunter continued walking and Homer seemed to hear silent, greedy growling. It exhausted him, trying not to be tempted to put a bullet into the head of another creature! He talked to himself reassuring until he was the same again. He had to proof himself that he was a grown man that could control his nightmares and didn’t have to act crazy. Hunter didn’t seem to suppress his desire.

  But what did he actually desire?

  The silent demise of the two corpse eaters brought movement to the rest of the pack: The smell of fresh death chased away the boldest and slowest from the train tracks.

  Slowly, croaking and whining they retreated to the two trains, squeezed themselves against the windows or gathered at the two doors and waited. But they didn’t move.

  The creatures didn’t seem to feel anger and you couldn’t recognize any intentions to avenge their killed brethrens or to fend off this attack. As soon as the group would leave the station they would eat the two killed corpse eaters without any hesitation.

  Aggression is a trait of hunters, thought Homer. Who survives on dead bodies doesn’t need it because it doesn’t have to kill. Everything living must die some day and becomes food. They just have to wait.

  In the shine of the lamp they could see their monstrous grimaces looking through the dirty-greenish windows, the tilted built bodies, their hands with long claws; it was like they viewed into a satanic aquarium. In absolute silence hundreds pairs of eyes watched every move of the small group, the heads of the creatures turned fully synchronized with the passing humans movement. The small miss births in their formaldehyde glasses must have probably looked at the visitors of Petersburg’s art chamber the same way, if their eyes wouldn’t have been sewed shut as a precaution.

  Even though the hour of atonement for his godless view of the world came closer and closer for Homer, he couldn’t overcome himself to believe in god or the devil. If there was a purgatory than he was looking straight at it.

  Sisyphus was damned to fight against gravity, Tantalus sentenced to endure torture through eternal thirst. For Homer in his wrinkled train driver uniform there was a dead station waiting for him, with this monstrous ghost train, filled with its inhabitants, that reminded him of medieval gargoyles and the laughter and mocking of all gods that where seeking revenge. And when the train left the station the tunnel would transform itself, just like in the old metro-legends into a moebius band, a dragon eating it’s on tail.

  Hunter’s had lost all interest in the station and its inhabitants. He left the rest of the hall behind him with quick steps. Achmed and Homer had problems keeping up with the hasting brigadier.

  The old man had the wish to turn around, to scream and to shoot, to do anything that would scare this bold spawn away just like his heavy thoughts. But instead he followed with his head lowered and tried not to step on any rotting body parts. Achmed did as he did. While they fled the Nachimovski prospect nobody thought about looking back.

  The ball of light from Hunters lamp flew from one spot to the next as if it followed an invisible acrobatic through a fatal circus but even the brigadier did no longer pay attention to what the light illuminated.

  In the light of the lamp you were able to see fresh bones and a definitely human head that had been gnawed on for a second and then they disappeared into darkness.

  Right next to it, like a pointless shell laid a steel helmet and a Kevlar vest.

  You could still see the with white color printed word on it: SEVASTOPOLSKAYA.

  Ties (Chapter 4)

  “Dad … dad! It’s me, Sasha!” She loosened the straps of her father’s helmet from his swollen chin. Then she reached for the rubber of the gasmask, pulled it from his sweaty hair and threw it away like a wrinkly, deadly-grey scalp.

  His chest raised and lowered itself heavily, his fingers scrapped over the concrete and his watery eyes looked at her without blinking. He didn’t answer.

  Sasha laid a bag under his head and stormed to the gate. She pushed her thin shoulder against the enormous gate, took a deep breath and crunched her teeth. The ton heavy mountain of iron retreated reluctantly, turned around and fell groaning into its lock. Sasha looked it again and sank to the ground. One minute, all he needed was just one minute for him to catch his breath … Soon he would return to her.

  Every expedition cost her father more strength. It was almost hopeless in the face of their weak harvest. Every expedition shortened his life not by days, but by weeks, yes even months. But it was their need that forced him to do so.

  When they no longer had anything to sell, there was only one thing to do, eat Sasha’s pet rat, the only thing in this hostile station and then shoot themselves. If he would have let her she would have taken his place and would have gone to the surface. How often had she asked him for his gasmask so that she could go up on her own but he remained relentless.

  He probably knew that this with holes filled piece of rubber and its full filters wasn’t any better than a talisman but he would have never admitted that. He lied that he knew how to clean the filters, even after hours of expeditions he acted like he felt fine and when he didn’t want her to see that he was throwing up blood he sent her away to be alone.

  It wasn’t in Sasha’s power to change something. They had driven her father and Sasha into this abandoned part of the metro, they had left them alive, not out of mercy, but out of sadistic curiosity. They must have thought that they wouldn’t even survive a week, but the will and stamina of her father had provided them with what they needed and that they had survived for years. They hated them, despised them, but brought them food regularly. Of
course not for free.

  In breaks between expeditions, in these rare minutes when the two sat on the sparse lit fire, her father loved to talk about earlier times. Years ago he had realized that he didn’t have to fool himself, but when he no longer had a future than at least nobody could take away his past.

  Back than my eyes had the same color as yours, he had said to her. The color of the sky … And Sasha believed to remember these days, these days when the tumor hadn’t bloated his head and when his eyes hadn’t faded, but when they shined like hers now.

  When her father said “the color of the sky” of course he meant azure-blue and not the glowing red clouds of dust that reached over his head when he climbed to the surface.

  He hadn’t seen real daylight in over 20 years and Sasha didn’t know it at all. He only saw it in his dreams, but he wasn’t sure if what he saw was real. What experience people that are blind from birth: Dreaming from a world that is similar to ours? Do they even see anything in a dream?

  When small children close their eyes, they believe that the entire world has sunken into darkness; they believe that everybody around them is as blind as they are. In the tunnels humans are as naive as these children, Homer thought. He imagined that light ruled over darkness every time when he turned on his flashlight and then turned it off again. Even the most impenetrable darkness could be full of seeing eyes.

  Since the encounter with the corpse eaters he couldn’t think about anything else. A distraction. He needed a distraction.

  Strange that Hunter hadn’t known what waited for them at the Nachimovski prospect. When the brigadier turned up at the Sevastopolskaya two months ago, none of the guards could explain how a man with such extraordinary stature was able to pass every single of the northern guard posts unnoticed. It was their luck that the commander didn’t want an explanation how Hunter got through without them noticing.

  But when he didn’t get to the Sevastopolskaya over the Nachimovski prospect, how did he get there? All other ways to the big metro had already been severed. The abandoned Kachovskaya line, in its tunnels they hadn’t seen a single living being in the last years. Impossible. The Tschertanovskaya? Ridiculous. Not even a skilled and relentless fighter as Hunter would be able to fight himself through this cursed station. Also it was impossible to get there without showing up at the Sevastopolskaya first.

  So the north, south and east were out of the question.

  Now Homer had only one hypothesis left: The mysterious guest came from the surface. Of course all known entrances and exits of the station had been carefully barricaded and were guarded at all times, but … He could have opened one of the vents. The inhabitants of the Sevastopolskaya didn’t suspect that there was still somebody that had the intelligence to trick their warning system located in the burned concrete ruins. An endless chess board made out of several stories high apartment complexes that had been torn down by the shrapnel of the war heads was already deserted and empty. The last players had already given up playing decades ago and left the distorted and scary figures crawling around on the surface. They now played their own game with their own rules. Looking at it from of the view of humanity, a rematch wasn’t possible.

  Short expeditions searching for everything useful that hadn’t decayed over the last twenty years, hastily; shameful raids through their own houses were the only things they were still capable off. In rubbers suits that protected the stalkers from radiation they climbed up to search the skeletons of the former buildings for the hundredth time,but nobody dared to fight the current inhabitants determent enough to wipe them out.

  You might shot a machine-pistol salve at them, retreat into a nearby dirty apartment and run straight back to the rescuing entrance of the metro when the danger had passed.

  The old maps of the capitol city had lost every reference to reality. Where back then cars had been stuck in traffic for miles, now there were canyons covered in impenetrable black brushwood. Where once housing areas were, there were now swamps or just empty burned land.

  Only the boldest stalkers dared to venture further than a mile from their entrances to the metro, most were satisfied with less.

  The stations past the Nachimovski prospect – the Nagornaya, Nagatinskaya and Tulskaya – had no open entrances and the humans on those two stations didn’t even think about going to the surface.

  So from where in this wasteland hunter was supposed to have emerged from, was an absolute mystery for Homer.

  But there was a last possibility where the brigadier could have come from. This possibility made the old atheist unable to breathe and he follow the dark silhouette of Hunter that moved through the darkness as if it didn’t even touch the ground.

  He came from underground. (Referring to the “gate”)

  “I have a bad feeling about this.” Said Achmed hesitantly and so quiet that Homer almost wasn’t able hear him.

  “It isn’t the right time to be here. Believe me; I have traveled with many caravans. There is something brewing at the Nagornaya …”

  The small groups of bandits that always retreated back as far as possible from the ring line right away after each raid.

  They took their breaks in dark stations but never dared to attack the caravans of the Sevastopolskaya.

  The instant they heard the constant thunder of the studded boots, which announced the arrival of the heavy infantry of the Sevastopolskaya, they got out of their way immediately.

  Not because of the bandits or the corpse eaters at the Nachimovski prospect these caravans were protected so well.

  Their bone hard training, absolute fearlessness, their ability to close themselves to a iron fist in seconds and to destroy every possible threat in a hail of bullets, all that could have made the convoys of the Sevastopolskaya the undisputed rulers of the tunnels up to the Serpuchovskaya – if there wasn’t the Nagornaya.

  The horrors of the Nachimovski prospect were behind them, but nor Homer or Achmed felt the slightest relief. The seemingly inconspicuous, yes even ugly Nagornaya had become the end station of many that hadn’t treated her with caution. Those poor schmucks that ended up at the neighboring Nagatinskaya coincidentally tried to stay as far away from the greedy mouth of the tunnels of the Nagornaya.

  As if that would save them. As if what crawled out of the tunnel, searching for prey, was to sluggish to crawl a little bit further and still chose a victim of its taste …

  As soon as you entered the Nagornaya you could rely on nothing but your luck, because this station didn’t play by the rules. Sometimes it let you pass silently and the travelers looked horrified at the bloody marks on the walls and pillars where someone had tried to climb up in their hopelessness.

  And just a few moments after that the station could give a group a welcome, that loosing half of the men was considered as a victory.

  The station was always hungry. It didn’t favor anybody. It didn’t let anybody explore it. For the inhabitants of the neighboring stations the Nagornaya embodied pure arbitrariness of fate. She was the most difficult challenge for all that embarked on their way from Sevastopolskaya to the ring line and the other way around.

  “So many missing people … It couldn’t just have been the Nagornaya alone.” Said Achmed with superstition, like many residents of the Sevastopolskaya he spoke of the Nagornaya like if it was a creature and not station.

  Homer knew what Achmed meant. He had thought about it a lot of times if it couldn’t have been the Nagornaya that was responsible for the missing recon team. He nodded his head and added: ”If so I hope it suffocated on them …”

  “What did you just say?” Hissed Achmed angry. His hand twitched in Homers direction, as if he wanted to strike the old man, but he didn’t.

  “She is not going to suffocate on you to be sure!”

  Homer took the insult silently. He didn’t believe that the Nagornaya was able to hear them or that she was now angry at them. At least not at this distance …

  Superstition! Nothing but superstition!
It was impossible to count all the idols of the underground – you always stepped one of them on the foot. Homer didn’t think about them anymore. Achmed on the other hand thought differently.

  Achmed took a rosary made out of empty makarov cartridges out of his jackets pocket and started to slide the lead idols through his dirty fingers. At the same time his lips moved silently in his own language, he probably asked Nagornaya for forgiveness for Homers sins.

  Hunter had felt something with his supernatural senses. He gave them a signal with his hands, slowed down and got to his knees.

  “There is fog.” Mumbled Hunter and breathed in the cold air through his nose. “What is there?”

  Homer and Achmed looked at each other. Both knew what that meant: It was open season. Now they needed a lot of luck get to the northern border of the Nagornaya alive.

  “How am I supposed to explain that to you?”Answered Achmed unwillingly.

  “It is the breath …”“Whose breath?” Asked Hunter unimpressed and put his bag on the ground so that he could choose the right weapon for this job.

  Achmed whispered:”The breath of the Nagornaya”

  “We’ll see” Said Homer contemptuously and made a grimace. It seemed like Hunters distorted face came back to life; in reality it was motionless as always – only the light fell differently on his face.

  They could see it now too, a few hundred meters further than Hunter: A thick, pale white fog crawled at them on the ground, danced around their feet, crawled up their legs and then filled the tunnel up to their waist … It seemed like they were climbing into an ice-cold and hostile ocean. They stepped deeper and deeper over an oblique ground, until the murky water would finally go over their heads.

  You couldn’t see anything anymore. The beams of their flashlights got stuck in the fog like flies in a net of a spider. After they had finally fought themselves through the emptiness they felt exhausted and defeated. Noise, dimmed like by a pillow came through the fog. Every move cost them a lot of strength as if they didn’t walk on concrete but on thick mud.