‘This is what happened to this trash when it was exposed to the radiation . . . They were exactly right, biological weapons! But they didn’t think what the cumulative effect would be. It’s also good that it stays behind the wall and doesn’t get out into the city . . .’ Melnik was saying.
No one answered him. The fighters had calmed down and listened absent-mindedly.
‘Speak, speak! Don’t be quiet! This crap will stay in your subconscious. Hey, Oganesian! Oganesian! What are you thinking about?’ The stalker shook one of his subordinates. ‘Ulman, dammit! Where are you looking? Look at me! Don’t be quiet!’
‘Sweet . . . It’s calling . . .’ the strong Ulman said, fluttering his eyelashes.
‘Just how sweet! Didn’t you see what happened to Delyagin?’ The stalker slapped the fighter on the cheek with all his might, and Ulman’s lethargic look brightened.
‘Hold hands! Everyone is to take each other’s hand!’ Melnik cried at the top of his lungs.
‘Don’t be quiet! Artyom! Sergey! At me, look at me!’ And a metre below bubbled and seethed that terrible mass that, it seemed, already had covered the whole of the platform. It was becoming ever more persistent, and they were no longer able to withstand its pressure.
‘Guys! Fellows! Don’t give in! But press on . . . altogether! Let’s sing!’ The stalker was not giving up, calling his soldiers to order, handing out slaps in the face or bringing them to their senses with light touches. ‘Rise up, huge country . . . Rise up for a mortal fight!’ he dragged it out, wheezing and out of tune. ‘With the dark fascist force . . . Against their curs-ed hordes . . .’
‘Let noble fu-ry. . . . Boil up like a wave,’ Ulman carried on. It seethed around the train with double the strength. Artyom hadn’t begun to sing along: he didn’t know the words to this song, and anyhow it occurred to him that the fighters had begun to sing, for some hidden reason, about the power of darkness and a boiling wave. No one knew any more words than the first verse and the refrain, except Melnik, and he sang the next quatrain alone, his eyes flashing menacingly and not allowing anyone to be distracted: ‘As two-oo different poles, We are hostile to all! For Wo-rl-d and peace, we battle, They for a reign of darkness . . .’ Almost everyone sang the refrain this time, even little Oleg tried to echo the adults. The discordant choir of coarse, male voices, cracked and hoarse from smoking, resounded, returning in an echo, in the boundless dark hall. The sound of the singing soared to the high arches painted with the mosaic, bounced off them, fell and sank into the teeming, living mass below. And although this picture of seven healthy men, perched on the roof of a train and, while holding hands, singing these senseless songs would have appeared absurd and funny to Artyom in any other situation, now it resembled more a chilling scene from a nightmare. He really, truly wanted to wake up. ‘Let no-o-o-ble fu-ry bo-il up like a wa-a-a-ve. . . . A people’s war is going on, a sa-a-a-cred wa-a-a-r!’ Artyom himself, although he was not singing, diligently opened his mouth and rocked in time to the music. Not having caught the words in the first verse, he even decided that it was about either the people living in the metro, or about the opposition to the dark ones, under whose onslaught his home station was soon supposed to fall. Then in one verse he heard fascists, and Artyom understood it was about the battle of the Red Brigade fighters with the inhabitants of Pushkinskaya . . . When he tore himself away from his reflections, he discovered that the choir had fallen silent. Perhaps even Melnik himself didn’t now the next verses.
‘Guys! Let’s do “Combat”, hey?’ The stalker was trying to persuade his fighters. ‘A combat, my father, my father-combat, You didn’t hide your heart behind the guys’ back . . .’ He had only just started, but then he too fell silent. A stupor enveloped the party. The fighters began to unclench their hands and the circle disintegrated. Everyone was quiet, even Anton who had been raving and muttering the whole time. Feeling a warm and turbid slush of indifference and fatigue filling the emptiness that had occurred in his head, Artyom tried to push it out, thinking about his mission, then telling himself nursery rhymes as he remembered them, then simply repeating: ‘I think, think, think you will not worm yourself into me . . .’ The fighter whom the stalker had called Oganesian suddenly stood up and brought himself to his full height. Artyom lifted his eyes to him with indifference.
‘Well, it’s time for me. Take care,’ he said taking his leave. The rest dully looked at their comrade, not answering, only the stalker nodded at him. Oganesian approached the edge and unhesitatingly stepped forward. He didn’t even scream, but from below was heard an unpleasant sound, a combination of a splash and a hungry rumbling.
‘It calls . . . It . . . calls,’ Ulman said in a sing-song voice and also began to get up. Artyom was spellbound.
‘I think you won’t worm yourself into me!’ He got stuck on the word ‘I,’ and now he simply repeated it, not even noticing that he was speaking aloud: ‘I, I, I, I, I.’ Then he strongly, irresistibly wanted to look down in order to understand whether the heaving mass there was as deformed as it had appeared to him at first. But had he suddenly been wrong about it? Recalling again the stars on the Kremlin towers, distant and beckoning . . . And here the small Oleg sprang lightly to his feet and, taking a short run, threw himself down with a happy laugh. The living quagmire below chomped quietly, receiving the boy’s body. Artyom understood that he envied him and also intended to follow.
But several seconds later, as the mass closed over Oleg’s head, perhaps at that very moment when it had taken his life from him, his father screamed and regained consciousness. Breathing heavily and exhaustedly looking from side to side, Anton lifted himself and set about shaking the others, demanding an answer from them: ‘Where is he? What’s happened to him? Where is my son? Where is Oleg? Oleg! Olezhek!’ Little by little the faces of the fighters began to regain intelligence. Even Artyom began to become conscious. He was no longer certain what he really had seen as Oleg jumped into the seething mass. Therefore, he didn’t answer, just tried to calm Anton, who, it seemed, felt in a mysterious way that what had happened was irrevocable. And then his hysterics broke into the numbness felt by Artyom and in Melnik, and the others. His agitation and his baleful despair were transferred to them, and the unseen hand firmly grasping their consciousness, was yanked away.
The stalker made several test shots at the bubbling mass, but with no success. Then he told the fighter armed with the flame-thrower to remove the backpack with the fuel from his shoulders and, when told to, toss it as far as possible from the train. Having ordered two others to direct their flashlights on the spot where the backpack would fall, he prepared to fire and gave the go-ahead. Spinning in place, the fighter hurled the backpack and almost flew right after it himself, barely managing to hold on to the edge of the roof. The backpack flew into the air and began to fall about fifteen metres from the train.
‘Get down!’ Melnik waited until it touched the pulsing, oily surface, and squeezed the trigger.
Artyom watched the backpack’s flight while stretched out on the roof. As soon as the shot rang out, he hid his face in the fold of his elbow and grasped the cold armour with all his might. The explosion was powerful: Artyom nearly flew off the roof as the train rocked. A dirty, orange glow of blazing fuel splashing along the platform reached his blinking eyes. Nothing happened for a minute. The squelching and chomping of the quagmire did not weaken, and Artyom was already preparing for it to recover from the annoying unpleasantness and begin to envelop his mind again. But instead, the noise began gradually to move further away.
‘It’s leaving! It’s leaving!’ Ulman bellowed right beside his ear. Artyom lifted his head. In the light of the flashlights he could clearly see that the mass, which recently had occupied nearly the whole huge hall, was shrinking and retreating, returning to the escalator.
‘Hurry!’ Melnik jumped to his feet. ‘As soon as it slides down, everyone behind me, right to that tunnel!’
Artyom was surprised how Melnik could be so ce
rtain, but he wasn’t about to ask, having put the stalker’s previous indecisiveness down to whatever had been controlling his mind. Now the stalker was transformed. He was again the sober, decisive commander who did not put up with any arguments. Not only was there no time to think about it, but he didn’t even want to. The only thing that now occupied Artyom was how to get out of this damned station as soon as possible before the strange being that dwelled in the Kremlin’s basements recovered its wits and returned in order to consume them. The station no longer seemed marvellous and beautiful to him. Now everything here was hostile and repulsive. Even the workers and peasants looked down in outrage from its wall panels. They still smiled, but it was strained and sickly sweet.
Having jumped pell-mell to the platform, they tore to the opposite end of the station. Anton had come to completely and ran as fast as the others, so that now nothing was delaying the party. After twenty minutes of mad racing through the black tunnel, Artyom began to gasp, and even the others had begun to tire. The stalker allowed them to slow to a quick march.
‘Where are we going?’ Artyom asked, overtaking Melnik.
‘I think right now we are beneath Tverskaya . . . We should exit soon toward Mayakovskaya. We’ll sort it out there.’
‘But how did you know which tunnel to enter?’ Artyom was curious.
‘It was shown on the map we found at Genshtab. But I only recalled that at the last moment.’
As they arrived at the station, everything flew from their heads. Artyom pondered. Had his delight with the Kremlin station, with the pictures and the sculptures, and its space and magnitude come to nothing? Or was it some trickery, evoked by the terrible entity lurking in the Kremlin? Then he remembered the disgust and fear that the station had inspired in him when the drug had dissipated. And he began to doubt that these were his real feelings. Maybe the ‘doodlebug’ forced them to feel an irresistible desire to run from there at breakneck speed when they caused it pain? Artyom was no longer sure of his true feelings. Did a monstrous creation of his mind release him or did it continue to dictate thoughts to him and inspire his emotional experiences? At what moment did Artyom fall under its hypnotic influence? And was he sometimes free to make his own choices? And could his choice ever be free? Artyom again recalled the meeting with the two strange residents of Polyanka.
He glanced back: Anton was walking two paces behind him. He no longer badgered anyone about what happened to his son. Someone had already told him. His face had hardened and gone dead, his gaze was turned inward. Did Anton understand that they were only a step away from rescuing the boy? That his death had become a ridiculous accident? But it had brought the others through. Accident or victim?
‘You know, we all most likely were saved only thanks to Oleg. It is because of him that you . . . regained consciousness,’ he said to Anton, not specifying how this had come about.
‘Yes,’ Anton agreed indifferently.
‘He told us that you served in the rocket forces. Strategic.’
‘Tactical,’ Anton replied.
‘The “Tochka” and the “Iskander”.’
‘And multiple fire systems? “Smerch”, “Uragan”?’ having held back a little, the stalker, who had been listening to their conversation, asked.
‘I can operate those, too. I was a career soldier, and they taught it to us. And everyone was interested in it. Everyone wanted to try it. Until I saw what it led to.’
There was not the smallest sign of interest in his voice, and there was no uneasiness regarding the fact that his secret was known to strangers. His answers were short, mechanical. Melnik, nodding, again moved away from them, going on ahead.
‘We need your help very much,’ Artyom said, carefully testing the waters. ‘Understand, we have terrible things happening at VDNKh,’ he began. And he immediately stopped short: after what he had seen in the last twenty-four hours, what happened at VDNKh, however awful, didn’t seem like anything exceptional, capable of overwhelming the metro and finally destroying man as a biological species. Artyom considered this thought, and reminded himself that it could be coming from the strange entity. ‘We have some creatures getting through from the surface,’ he continued, having collected his thoughts. But Anton stopped him with a gesture.
‘Just say what has to be done, and I will do it,’ he uttered colourlessly. ‘I have the time now . . . How can I return home without my son?’
Artyom nodded nervously and walked away from the man leaving him along with his thoughts. Now he felt unclean, seeking help from a man who had just lost a child . . . He had been deprived of him through his, Artyom’s, fault . . .
He caught up with the stalker again. Melnik was clearly in a good mood. Having left the party stretched out behind him, he was humming something to himself and, seeing Artyom, smiled at him. Listening to the melody Melnik was trying to reproduce, Artyom recognized that very song about the sacred war they had been singing on the roof of the train.
‘You know, at first I decided this is the song for our war with the dark ones,’ he said, ‘and then I understood that it is about fascists. Who composed it? The communists from the Red Line?’
‘This song is already about a hundred years old, if not a hundred and fifty.’ Melnik shook his head.
‘They composed it first for one war, then adapted it for another. It’s good that it is suitable for any war. As long as man is alive, he will always deem himself to be the light of the world, and consider his enemies as the darkness. And they will be thinking like that on both sides of the front,’ Artyom added to himself. ‘Whatever it means.’ His mind again flashed to the dark ones. ‘Maybe it means that people, let’s say the VDNKh inhabitants, are the evil and darkness for them?’ Artyom thought better of it and forbade himself to think of the dark ones as ordinary enemies. If one open the door for them only half way, nothing would hold them back . . .
‘So you were saying about this song that it is eternal,’ Melnik unexpectedly spoke. ‘That dawned on me, too. In our country all eras are much the same. Take people . . . You won’t change them in any way. They’re as stubborn as mules. So, it would seem the end of the world is already at hand and you cannot go outside without an anti-radiation suit, and every kind of trash that earlier you only saw at the cinema has multiplied . . . No! You don’t impress them! They’re the same. Sometimes it seems to me that nothing has ever changed. Well, I visited the Kremlin today,’ he smiled wryly, ‘and I was thinking: there’s not even anything new there. I’m not even certain when they hit us with this crap: thirty years ago or three hundred.’
‘Were there really such weapons three hundred years ago?’ Artyom was doubtful, but the stalker didn’t reply. They’d seen two or three depictions of the Great Worm on the floor, but there had been no sign of the savages themselves. The first drawing had put the fighters on their guard, and they’d regrouped in such a way that it was easier to defend themselves, but the tension had dissipated after they’d encountered the third drawing.
‘They weren’t jabbering nonsense. Today was a holy day and they stay at the stations and don’t go into the tunnels,’ Ulman noted with relief.
Something else occupied the stalker. By his calculations, the missile unit was very close by. Checking the hand-drawn map every minute, he absently repeated:
‘Somewhere here . . . Isn’t this it? No, not that corner, but where is the pressurized gate? We ought to be approaching it already . . .’
Finally, they stopped at a fork: to the left was a dead end with a grille, at the end of which they could see the remains of a pressurized gate, and to the right, as far as the light of the flashlight could reach, there was a straight tunnel.
‘That’s it!’ Melnik determined. ‘We’re there. Everything tallies with the map. There, behind the grille, the tunnel has collapsed like at Park Pobedy. And that must be the passage into which they took Tretyak. So . . .’ Illuminating the map with his pocket flashlight, he thought aloud, ‘The line goes directly from this fork to the div
ision, and this one, to the Kremlin, we came from there, right.’ Then he climbed behind the grille with Ulman and they wandered around the dead end for about ten minutes, inspecting the walls and ceiling with the flashlight.
‘OK! There’s a passage in the floor this time, a round sort of top, similar to a sewer manhole,’ the returning stalker reported. ‘Everyone, we are there. Take a break.’
As soon as everyone had removed their rucksacks and had sprawled out on the ground, something strange happened to Artyom: despite the awkward position, he fell asleep instantly. Either the fatigue accumulated in the last twenty-four hours had taken its toll or the poison from the paralysing needle was producing some side effects.
Artyom again saw himself, asleep, in the tent at VNDKh. As in his earlier dream, it was gloomy and abandoned at the station. Artyom knew beforehand what would happen to him now. Already accustomed to saying hello to the little girl who was playing, he didn’t ask her about anything, heading instead directly toward the tracks. The distant cries and entreaties for mercy didn’t frighten him. He knew that he was seeing the unwelcome dream again for another reason, one that concealed in the tunnels. He was supposed to uncover the nature of the threat, reconnoitre the situation and report about it to his allies from the south. But as soon as he was shrouded in the darkness of the tunnel, his confidence in himself and in the fact that he knew why he was here and how he had to go on vaporized. He was as frightened as when he went beyond the limits of the station alone for the first time. And exactly as then, it wasn’t the darkness itself nor the rustle of the tunnels that scared him, but the unknown, the inability to foretell what danger the next hundred metres of the line concealed.
Vaguely recalling how he had behaved in previous dreams, he decided not to give in to fear this time, but to go forward, until he met the one who was concealed in the dark, waiting for him.