Original Title
Metro 2035
Copyright © 2015 DMITRY GLUKHOVSKY
Translated by
ANDREW BROMFIELD
Illustrations
Copyright © 2016 DIANA STEPANOVA
Composition, cover design and lettering
Copyright © 2016 ILYA YATSKEVICH
All of the reserved rights are reserved properly.
Brighter past. Darker future.
CHAPTER 1
— MOSCOW HERE —
“It’s not allowed, Artyom.
“Open it. Open up, I tell you.”
“The station master told us … He said not to let anyone out.”
“Do you take me for some kind of idiot? Anyone—who’s that? Who is this anyone?”
“I have my orders! For the protection of the station … Against the radiation. I have my orders. Got that?”
“Sukhoi gave you the order? My stepfather gave you the order? Come on, open up.”
“I’ll get it in the neck on account of you, Artyom …”
“Then I’ll do it myself, if you can’t.”
“Hello … Sanseich … Yes to the sentry post … Artyom’s here … Your Artyom. But what am I supposed to do with him? All right. We’re waiting.”
“Snitched, have you? Good for you, Nikitska. You’ve snitched. Now push off! I’ll open up anyway. I’m going out anyway!”
But another two men darted out of the watch room, squeezed in between Artyom and the door, and started pityingly pushing him away gently. Artyom, tired in advance, with dark rings under his eyes—he still hadn’t recovered from his sortie to the surface the previous day—couldn’t resist the sentries, even though no one had any intention of fighting with him. Curious onlookers started sidling up: grimy little boys with hair as transparent as glass, pasty-faced women with hands blue and steely from constantly washing laundry in icy-cold water, weary farmers from the right-hand tunnel ready to gape mindlessly at anything. They whispered to each other. They were looking at Artyom, but somehow it seemed as if they weren’t; and just what kind of expression was that on their faces?
“He keeps going out there all the time. What’s the point of going?”
“Uh-huh. And every time the door gets flung wide open. And stuff gets siphoned in from up there, you know! Damned madman …”
“Listen, you can’t … You can’t talk like that about him. After all … he saved us. All of us. Your children over there.”
“He saved people, uh-huh. And now what. Is this what he saved them for, then? If he picks up a massive dose of radiation, all of us here get one too … The more the merrier.”
“What the fuck does he go for? That’s the question. It’s not as if there’s anything there. What for!”
Then a new face appeared among all the others: the most important face of all. A neglected mustache, hair already thinning and completely gray, stretched out like a bridge across a bald patch. But the face was drawn exclusively in straight lines, nothing rounded off. And everything else in it was tough and rubbery — too tough to chew on, as if the man had been taken and vulcanized alive. His voice had been vulcanized too.
“Everybody disperse. Did you hear me?”
“There’s Sukhoi. Sukhoi’s come. Let him collect his boy.”
“Uncle Sasha …”
“You again, Artyom? We already talked about this …”
“Open the door, Uncle Sasha.”
“Disperse! It’s you I’m talking to! There’s nothing to gawp at here. And you—come with me.”
Instead of that, Artyom sat down on the floor, on the cold polished granite, and leaned back against the wall.
“That’s enough,” SukhoI mimed soundlessly, speaking with just his lips.” People are whispering as it is.”
“I need to. I have to.”
“There’s nothing there! Nothing! Nothing there to look for!”
“But I told you, Uncle Sasha.”
“Nikita! Don’t stand there gaping. Get on with it. Escort the citizens away.”
“Right, Sanseich. All right, then, who needs a personal invitation? Move it, move it …” Nikitska bantered, sweeping the crowd away.
“What you told me was nonsense. Listen …” SukhoI released the air that was inflating him, went limp, crumpled up and sank down beside Artyom.” You’re butchering yourself. Do you think that suit protects you from the radiation? It’s like a sieve! A cotton frock would be more use!”
“So what?”
“The stalkers don’t go up there as much as you do … Have you tried adding up your dose? Well, do you want to live or croak?”
“I’m certain I heard it.”
“And I’m certain it’s just a hallucination you had There’s no one there to send any signals. No one, Artyom! How often do I have to tell you? There’s no one left. Nothing apart from Moscow. Apart from us here.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Do you think I could care less what you believe and what you don’t? But I do care if your hair falls out! I do care if you start pissing blood! Do you want your dick to dry up and drop off?”
Artyom shrugged. He said nothing for a moment, weighing things up. SukhoI waited.
“I heard it. That time on the tower. On Ullmann’s radio set”
“But apart from you, no one else has ever heard it. In all this time, no matter how hard they listened. Empty airwaves. So what then?”
“So I’m going up there, that’s what. That’s all.” Artyom got to his feet and straightened up his back.
“I want grandchildren,” SukhoI said from the floor.
“So that they can live here? Down in the vaults?”
“In the Metro,” SukhoI corrected him.
“In the Metro,” Artyom agreed.
“And they’ll be just fine living here. At least they’ll get born. But this way …”
“Tell them to open up, Uncle Sasha.”
SukhoI looked at the floor. At the black, gleaming granite. Apparently there was something there.
“Have you heard what people are saying? That you cracked up. Back there, on the tower.”
Artyom screwed his face into a smile.
He took a deep breath.
“If you want grandchildren, you know what you should have done, Uncle Sasha. You should have had children of your own. You could have ordered them around. And your grandchildren would have looked like you, not like fuck knows who.”
SukhoI squeezed his eyes shut. A second ticked by.
“Nikita, open the door for him. He can bugger off. Let him croak. Who gives a shit?”
Nikitska obeyed without speaking. Artyom nodded in satisfaction.
“I’ll be back soon,” he told SukhoI from inside the airlock.
SukhoI slid upright along the wall, turned his stooped back towards Artyom and shuffled away, polishing the granite.
The door of the airlock closed and locked with a crash. On the ceiling, a bright-white electric bulb, guaranteed for twenty-five years, lit up and was reflected like a weak winter sun in the dirty tiles that covered everything in the airlock except one metal wall. There was a ragged plastic chair—for taking a breather or lacing up your boots, a chemical protection suit drooping from a hook, a drain set in the floor with a rubber hose sticking up out of it for decontamination. There was also an army knapsack standing in the corner. And a blue phone hanging on the wall, like one from an old telephone booth.
Artyom climbed into the suit—it was too roomy now, as if it wasn’t his. He took a gas mask out of its bag. He stretched the rubber strap, forced it on over his head and blinked, getting used to looking through the hazy little round windows. He took hold of the telephone receiver.
“Ready.”
There was a harsh
grating sound and the metal wall—not a wall, but a hermetic door—started creeping upwards. There was a breath of damp, chilly air from outside. Artyom shuddered. He heaved the knapsack on—it was as heavy as if he’d sat a man on his shoulders.
The battered and slippery steps of the endless escalator led upwards. The Exhibition Metro Station was sixty meters underground. Exactly deep enough not to be shaken by the detonations of aerial bombs. Of course, if a nuclear warhead had struck Moscow, there would have been a crater filled with glass here now. But the warheads had all been intercepted by missiles high above the city; only fragments of them had rained down onto the earth—still radioactive, but they couldn’t explode. So Moscow was still standing almost intact. It even resembled its former self—in the way that a mummy resembles a living king. Arms in place, legs in place, smile …
But the other cities didn’t have interceptor rocket defenses.
Artyom grunted as he settled the knapsack more comfortably, stealthily crossed himself, stuck his thumbs under the loose straps to pull them taut, and started walking up.
* * *
The rain drummed hollowly on the metal of Artyom’s helmet, as if hammering on his head. His waders sank into the mud; rust streamed down in torrents from somewhere above him to somewhere below him; the sky was heaped up with clouds, stifling his breath—and the buildings on all sides stood empty, gnawed down by time. There wasn’t a single soul in this city. It had been like that for twenty years—not a single soul.
Looking along an alley formed by damp, naked tree trunks, he could see the immense arch of the entrance to the Exhibition of Economic Achievements. A fine cabinet of curiosities, that was—the embryos of hopes for future greatness transplanted into fake classical temples. Greatness had been due to arrive soon—tomorrow, in fact. Only that tomorrow had never arrived.
A godforsaken death trap, the Exhibition.
A couple of years ago all sorts of vile creatures had lived here, but now even they were gone. It had been promised that any time soon the background radiation level would drop and it would be possible to make a gradual return to the surface—look, there were mutants swarming all over the place up there, and they were alive too, even if they were mangled, mutilated brutes …
The opposite had happened: Having shed its crust of ice, the Earth began breathing and steaming, and the background radiation level skyrocketed. The mutants clung on to life for a while with their massive claws, but those who didn’t make a run for it died, while humans held on here underground, living in the Metro stations, without the slightest intention of dying. Humans didn’t need that much. Humans could teach any rat a thing or two.
The Geiger counter clicked away, counting up Artyom’s radiation dose. Maybe I shouldn’t bring it any more, Artyom thought. It only pisses me off. What difference does it make how much it ticks up? Until I get the job done, it can crackle away as much as it likes.
“Let them talk, Zhen. Let them think I’ve flipped. They weren’t there then … on the tower. They never stick their noses out of that Metro of theirs. How do they know, eh? Flipped … I’d blitz them all to … I explained, didn’t I? At the precise moment when Ullmann had just reeled out the antenna … while he was finding the wavelength … There was something. I heard it! And I didn’t imagine it. Fuck it. They don’t believe me!”
An expressway junction reared up over his head; the ribbons of asphalt had buckled and frozen, shaking off the cars and trucks, which had landed randomly — some on all four feet, some on their backs, — and given up the ghost where they lay.
Artyom glanced around quickly and set off up the rough, protruding tongue of the ramp onto the elevated road. He didn’t have far to go — a kilometer and a half, maybe. The “Tricolor” high-rise apartment buildings jutted up beside the next ramp. They used to be painted in festive white, blue, and red, but time had repainted everything gray, in its own style.
“But why don’t they believe me? They just don’t believe me, that’s all. All right, so no one has heard any call signs. But where are they listening for those call signs? Under the ground. No one’s going to go up on the surface just for that … Isn’t that right? But you just think about it—is it really possible that no one survived, apart from us? In the entire world—no one? Eh? That’s plain bullshit! Well, isn’t it?”
He didn’t want to look at the Ostankino Tower, but there was no way he could avoid seeing it: even if he turned his face away from it, it still loomed up at the edge of his vision, like a scratch on the lens of his gas mask. Black and raw, snapped off at the knob of the observation platform, thrusting up from underground like an arm with a clenched fist, as if someone huge had been trying to clamber up onto the surface, but had gotten bogged down in the red Moscow clay, trapped in the vise-like grip of the earth, caught and crushed.
“When I was up on the tower that time”—Artyom jerked his head stiffly in that direction—“when they were listening, trying to pick up Miller’s call sign … Through all that crackling … I’m prepared to swear on anything you like … it was there! There was something there!”
Two colossal figures soared up over the naked forest—the Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman, grappling in their strange pose, either skating across ice or spinning around in a tango, but not looking at each other, like asexual beings. But then where are they looking? Can they see beyond the horizon from that height? Artyom wondered.
On his left the Big Wheel of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements was still standing, as huge as a cogwheel of the mechanism for turning the Earth. It was twenty years since the wheel, along with the entire mechanism, had stopped dead, and now it was quietly rusting away. The spring had run down.
The figure 850 was written on the wheel: That had been Moscow’s age in years when the wheel was erected. It occurred vaguely to Artyom that correcting the figure was pointless: If there’s no one to count time, then it stops.
The dour, ugly skyscrapers that had once looked white, blue, and red expanded to fill half the world. Very close. The tallest buildings in the area, if he discounted the broken tower. The very thing. Artyom threw his head back and fixed his gaze on the summit. His knees immediately started aching.
“Maybe today …” Artyom asked without a question mark—not forgetting that the sky’s ears were plugged with clouds of cotton wool.
No one up there heard him, of course.
An entrance hall.
Just an ordinary hallway.
The entry phone is an abandoned orphan; the metal door has no electric power; there’s a dead dog in the doorkeeper’s glass aquarium; the letter boxes clatter tinnily in the draught, with no letters or junk mail in them: Someone collected everything and burned it long ago, to warm their hands up a bit, at least.
At the bottom of the wall are three gleaming German lifts, standing wide open with their stainless steel innards glittering, as if he could just get into any one of them right now and ride straight up to the top of this tower block. Artyom hated them for that. And beside them—the door of the fire escape stairs. Artyom knew what was behind that. He had counted them already: forty-six floors on foot. Mount Calvary was always climbed on foot.
“Always … On foot …”
The knapsack weighed an entire ton now, and that ton pressed Artyom down into the concrete, making it hard to walk, hindering his stride. But Artyom strode on anyway, like a clockwork toy; and he spoke like a clockwork toy too.
“So what if they didn’t … have any intercept … missiles … All the same … there must have been … People must have … Somewhere … It’s not possible that only here … only in Moscow … in the Metro … The Earth’s still there … It hasn’t split apart … The sky’s clearing … It’s just not possible … for the entire country … and America … and France … and China … and Thailand or some other place like that … What did they ever do to anyone … ? There was no reason to …”
Of course, in all his twenty-six years of life, Artyom had never been in either Franc
e or Thailand. He had hardly seen anything of the old world at all; he was born too late. And the geography of the new world was scantier—the Exhibition Metro Station, the Lubyanka Metro Station, the Arbat Metro Station … The Circle Line. But when he examined the mold-blighted photographs of Paris and New York in the rare tourist magazines, Artyom felt in his heart that these cities were still there, still standing somewhere, that they hadn’t disappeared. Maybe they were waiting for him?
“Why would … Why would only Moscow be left? It’s not logical. Zhen! Do you understand? It’s not logical! And that means … It means we simply can’t pick them up … Their call signs … We can’t … Not yet. We just have to carry on. We can’t give up. We mustn’t …”
The tower block was empty, but it still made sounds, it still had a life: The wind flew in through balconies, slammed doors, wheezed in the lift shafts, muttered something in other people’s kitchens and bedrooms, pretending to be the owners who had come back home. But Artyom didn’t believe it any longer; he didn’t even look round, and he didn’t pay any visits.
He knew what was behind those restlessly banging doors: plundered apartments. All that was left were snapshots scattered across the floor—the dead strangers had had themselves photographed as mementoes for no one—and incredibly cumbersome furniture that was impossible to take anywhere, not into the Metro or the next world. In other buildings the windows had been blown out by the shockwave, but here there were storm windows, and they had survived, though in twenty years they had all acquired a coating of dust, as if they had been blinded by cataracts.
Earlier on in some apartment or other he sometimes came across the former owner, nuzzling the trunk of his gas mask against some toy and weeping through it nasally, not able to hear anyone approaching from behind. But now it was a long time since he had come across anyone. One of them had been left lying here with a hole in his back beside that idiotic toy of his, and the others had glanced at him and realized that there wasn’t any home up here on the surface—that there wasn’t anything here at all. Concrete, bricks, slush, cracked asphalt, yellow bones, the decayed dust of everything, and the radiation too, of course. It was like that in Moscow, and in all the rest of the world. There was no life anywhere, except in the Metro. It was a fact. Everyone knew it.