That was the first.
So no one had eaten them.
And they hadn’t taken his automatic; they’d spurned it. That was strange.
Artyom squatted down and tried to take it. But the dead man’s hands had turned stiff; he’d have to break the fingers. Okay, so keep your rod.
He just unclipped the magazine and found the spare. That even gave him a kind of lift. As if Dietmar had paid him an advance for the operation. Stalkers don’t believe in pillage. What stalkers believe is this: Taking a dead man’s gear is like remembering him in your prayers. Lying there with his gear is depressing and pointless for him anyway. He feels better knowing it will serve a good man.
Artyom felt like moving on quickly.
Where did this martyr get shot from? Why hadn’t his three comrades stopped, picked the wounded man up, and carried him into cover?
They couldn’t have finished him off themselves, could they? Then why had they abandoned the service automatic? Were they in a hurry? He’d have to ask them that.
But he didn’t get a chance.
The second was lying about three hundred meters farther on. On his back, like a star. He had wanted to take one last look at the sky, only he probably didn’t see anything: One lens of his gas mask was shot through, and the other was flooded with something brownish on the inside. And there was a puddle under his back. The same thing, then: First they brought him down, then walked up for the coup de grace.
His friends hadn’t loitered here either.
Artyom fancied he heard something in the distance.
A gust of wind brought a droning sound. Like a motor. He couldn’t really tell: The air hummed too loudly in the filters; the gas-mask rubber blocked his ears.
Artyom quickly took the dead man’s magazine, huddled close to the wall after all, and hurried on, gazing round. It was only half a kilometer now to Okhotny Ryad. Now he just had to avoid croaking anywhere himself.
He didn’t spot the third one immediately; and only with his peripheral vision. This one was cunning; he’d turned off the street and tried to hide in a restaurant. But how could he hide when all the walls were glass? They’d found him and riddled him with bullets. Turned a man into a shapeless sack. They probably dragged him out from under a table and finished him.
Now that was a sound. Definitely.
A roaring motor.
Artyom held his breath. No, it didn’t help. Then he pulled off his gas mask: Who cared what might happen in a year’s time? He turned one ear toward the wind, so it wouldn’t prevent him from hearing. There it was again: a hoarse roaring. Someone stepping on the gas somewhere far away, behind the buildings.
A vehicle. Operational. Who?
Artyom took off like a bat out of hell.
So that was how.
That was why they ran, and why they couldn’t get away.
They were overtaken and finished off one by one, which gave the others a lead of two or three hundred meters, but then they got the next one. But why hadn’t they fired back? Why hadn’t they taken up position in a shop window and tried to fight them off?
Were they still hoping to reach Teatralnaya?
He didn’t want to jolt the knapsack at first, but the roaring suddenly sounded quite distinctly behind his back, from straight along the tunnel of the street. And Artyom started bounding along, not looking round or stopping … Move it, move it! If the jolting set off the blast, that wasn’t as terrifying as if they winged him first and then came to finish him off. So let it go boom.
And then the sound split in two: There were two motors, not one. One straight behind and the other apparently to one side. Apparently. One on one side of street and one on the other. Were they corralling along?
Who could it be? Who?
Should he hide? Dodge into a building? Run and take cover in an apartment? No … On this side of the street there weren’t any residential entrances. Nothing but shopfront fish tanks, burnt-out and empty, with no exits.
Just a bit farther to the turn.
Then there’s Okhotny Ryad … Then skirt round the Duma … And he’d be there.
The fourth stalker wasn’t anywhere on Tverskaya Street, so he must have made it to the turn; that meant Artyom could make it too; he had to make it.
He saw his own shadow in front of him—long and pale. And a strip of light.
They’d switched their headlights on behind him. Or was it a searchlight?
Someone pulled a length of barbed wire down through his throat into his lungs. Pulled it down and jerked it backwards and forwards, using it like a bottle brush to clean out Artyom’s bronchial tubes.
He couldn’t control the urge and looked back as he ran.
It was an off-roader. A wide brute of an off-roader. Tearing along the pavement. The road was choked with rusty metal; there was no way through. Then there was a squeal of brakes and it stopped: Something was blocking its way.
Artyom took a gulp of cold air and turned the corner.
And immediately he heard the other engine off to one side: a hoarse, mosquito buzzing.
A motorcycle.
Ponderous and substantial, the State Duma was like an immense headstone, with its ground floor of gloomy granite and its stony-gray upper sections. Who was buried under it?
The motorcycle shot forward and hurtled along beside him. Without taking his eyes off the road, the rider flung out his left hand and fired a random, glittering burst that chattered along the gravestone walls, ricocheting. Artyom was spared.
And then, without stopping or reducing speed, he also held out his bouncing automatic and blasted a burst somewhere in the general direction of the motorcyclist. A complete miss. But the rider stepped on the gas to avoid putting himself in the path of the blind bullets and shot off in order to swing round somewhere far away.
The roaring started up again behind him. The off-roader had found a way through.
But now Artyom only had a short distance left to cover to Teatralnaya Station and the entrance. Only a hundred meters. Is the entrance open, Lord? Lord Jesus, is the entrance open?
If you exist, it must be open! Do you exist?
The final, fourth soldier was lying right in front of the doors; not even lying, but sitting, with his back slumped against the locked panels of wood. Sitting there dejectedly, looking at his bullet-riddled stomach, at his hands, at the life that had flowed out through his fingers.
Artyom darted up to the doors and tugged on one, then another, and another.
The hysterical motorcycle came back from its banking turn, getting louder and louder. Then the square off-roader drifted wide round the corner; armor-plated, was it? Artyom had never seen any like that. No one in the Metro could have any like that. None of the ragged-trousered subterranean empires had anything like it.
He pressed his back against the doors and raised his automatic, trying to catch the narrow windscreen in the dancing sight. No point in even firing at something like that. A tiny figure appeared on the roof of the off-roader, like a target in a shooting gallery or a jack-in-a-box. A sniper. A bullet zipped by, making a neat hole in the glass. That was it, the end, he was done for. He fired a wild burst.
An entire bracket of floodlights lit up on the roof of the off-roader, lashing at his eyes and blinding him. Now he couldn’t even take aim. Unless he fired up into the air.
This was the end. It would all be over in a moment.
Just as soon as the sniper caught Artyom in his little circle. Artyom screwed up his eyes.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
The motorcycle shot out to a convenient distance and spluttered into silence. Artyom tried to get a peep, shading his eyes with his hand. No, both vehicles were undamaged, just standing motionless, and Artyom was standing in their crossed beams of light.
“Hey! Don’t fire!” he called out to them in a squeaky voice.
He put his hands up. Take me prisoner, please.
They couldn
’t give a damn what he was croaking about. They consulted soundlessly among themselves. And refused to take him prisoner.
“Who? Who are you?”
Sixty-seven. Sixty-eight. Sixty-nine.
Suddenly the motorcycle darted away with a puff of blue petrol fumes and zoomed off out of sight. Then the armored car did the same: Doused its searchlights, reversed, swung round, and disappeared into the twilight.
So you exist after all, eh? Don’t you? Or else what the fuck was that?
In his joy and disbelief he prodded the last poor bastard, the fourth one, with his boot: You didn’t get lucky like that, eh? The man slumped and slid down the door. He had a bag with wires sticking out of it on his side. A mine. I could have punished you for that right now, he told Artyom. Don’t rile me.
Artyom apologized, but he didn’t repent.
He remembered something and frisked the dead man.
Then he ran round the vestibule; come on, come on, before the guys in the armored car change their minds. He tugged on all the doors again: At least one of them had to be open! And he found it, on the other side. He clambered inside and ran straight down the slippery steps before he squatted down to catch his breath. Only there did he start believing he wasn’t about to die. That he wasn’t going to die right now.
The steps had led him to a chamber with turnstiles and a ticket office.
There were two ways out. Down the empty, sagging escalator to Okhotny Ryad Station and along a gallery to somewhere: to Teatralnaya Station. Artyom’s worst fear was that the Reds could have set up a patrol here and it would finish off what the guys in the off-roader had started. But the connecting passage wasn’t guarded: apparently they just locked the hermetic gates down below, at the station, and didn’t even come up to the surface, to avoid getting poisoned: just like back home at Exhibition.
Artyom took out the mine and looked at it. How could it be activated?
The mine was as stupid and ugly as power. It was power, granted to Artyom over a still-uncounted number of people.
What should he do with it?
* * *
A jog along the corridor to the entrance of Teatralnaya Station. Everything there was closed, blocked off and walled up too. But a door had been left so that stalkers could go up on top. Artyom squeezed into his gas mask and hammered on that door with all his manic strength. Someone took five minutes climbing up from below. Then they didn’t want to open up and interrogated Artyom from behind the shutter; they didn’t believe he was alone. Eventually they opened up a little crack—for his ID—and Artyom thrust the passport he had confiscated from the dead man into it.
“Open up and quick! Open up, or I’ll complain to the ambassador. Open up, I say, do you hear? I almost got bumped off out here. An active service officer of the Reich. It’ll be on your head! Open up, you bastard!”
They opened up, and they didn’t even make him take off his gas mask to check his face against the passport. It’s good to have an entire ogres’ state behind you! It’s good when you stride along and an Iron Legion marches in step with you! You can live with confidence!
Artyom didn’t let the sentries gather their wits, didn’t let them inspect the knapsack; he grabbed the passport back and tumbled down the stairs. He just shouted to them over his shoulder that he had an important mission and lackeys like them didn’t need to know any more about it.
As soon as he reached the bottom, he turned a corner and hid in order to shed his skin like a snake, changing the green protective one for his own usual one. He tucked the rubber away somewhere temporarily, but didn’t abandon the radio set.
In forty minutes he had to contact Dietmar. That meant he had forty minutes here to find Pyotr Sergeevich Umbach, the man who had heard on the airwaves that people had survived somewhere else too. And yank that man out of this station before the Reds—or the Browns—came bursting in.
Artyom peeped out to see if they were chasing him. No, they weren’t. They’d already forgotten about Artyom and gone back to their own business. They probably had more important business than arresting saboteurs. What could that be?
And that was when he remembered what Teatralnaya Station was all about.
The small, cozy, low central hall of the station, with its ceiling quilted in rhomboids like a bedspread, was the auditorium of a theater, almost completely filled with seats and also with tables—at the front, closer to the stage hidden by the closed velvet curtains. The arches were also curtained off, only not with velvet, but with whatever could be found. The rectangles of the route indicators hanging from the ceiling glowed with dull, ineffectual light, but the list of stations had been replaced by a flamboyant inscription: WELCOME To THE BOLSHOI THEATER!
The people here lived in Metro trains standing on both tracks; one had actually been standing at the station when all the electricity in the world was cut off, and another had just stuck its nose into the tunnel on its way to Novokuznetsk. It had all worked out pretty snugly. Better than scaffolding above water. And better than social housing with hell on the other side of the wall.
Although these trains didn’t go anywhere and the view from their windows was always the same—either gray stone or straight into the ground—the locals led a lighthearted life: They laughed, joked, and pinched each other on the backside without taking offense. As if they were simply waiting in their carriages for the driver to apologize at any moment over the loudspeakers for the twenty-year delay, and then the train would set off and, without getting lost anywhere, arrive at the next station and also, of course, at the very day from which they had set out: the last day before the end of the world. And in the meantime they’d gotten the hang of living here.
Grubby children were running around, all bright and quick-witted: They fought, using plastic insulation piping as swords, flung convoluted phrases torn out of some half-decayed plays at each other, battled to the death, giggling and squealing, over a stolen cardboard stage prop painted with gouache.
The people here, however many there were, all lived off the theater. Some acted, some painted scenery, some fed the customers, some ushered out the drunks. Bespectacled women wandered the platforms, fanning themselves with swatches of tickets, touting them in cracked, trembling voices: “Today’s performance! Today’s performance! The final seats!” They walked over to the edge of the platform and glanced into the tunnel to Novokuznetsk: How many more fools would it bring them?
But Artyom felt an urge to go to the other end and look in the opposite direction.
At the other end both tunnels led to Tver Station. To the Reich. Somewhere there in the darkness, the columns in black uniforms had already been drawn up, ready to march, and were waiting. It would take them fifteen minutes at a goose step. And if they flew in on a petrol-powered trolley, only two. After Artyom told Dietmar over the radio that everything was ready, two minutes would go by and the avant-garde assault units would be here.
At the center of the hall two stairways ran off in opposite directions, above the tracks. Both led to passages to Red Line stations. One to Okhotny Ryad, to which the communists had given back its old name of Marx Prospect. The other to Revolution Square, which used to be part of the Arbat-Pokrovsk line, but after the first war with Hansa the Reds had traded Lenin Library for it.
Both passages were fenced off with moveable metal barriers. Standing behind each barrier were several Red Army men in washed-out green uniforms and an officer wearing a peaked cap; their cap badges were enamel stars that age had turned raspberry-red. They stood facing each other, ten paces apart, swapping jokes, but those ten paces were the territory of a neutral station, over which they had no authority. And in addition, even up in the gallery, they were part of the audience of the BolshoI Theater.
That was how Teatralnaya lived: squeezed between the Red Line’s two neighboring outposts and the Reich. Between the hammer and the anvil. But somehow it had always managed to rebound from the blows of fate, spinning round and deceiving the cold iron, avoiding war and
preserving its neutrality. It had managed to do that for a long time: until this very day.
And seemingly only Artyom could sense the stormy electrical charge in the air today: The others didn’t understand; they couldn’t see the imminent and inexorable bloodbath. Strolling along beside the stranded trains with their young ladies, railway officers on leave with swastikas on their sleeves managed to pass quite amicably by faded-green officers with raspberry-red stars, who had just been toasting the health of Comrade Moskvin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Lenin Metropolitan, in the theater buffet, only one step away. They all had tickets jutting out of their breast pockets in the same way. All of them were getting ready to go to the show.
Ah no, not all of them. Some of them were getting ready to do something else: When the signal came, cut off the passages to Okhotny Ryad and slit people’s throats. In addition to the central passage, there were two others: one at the rear of the station, at the very end of the platform, and another up above, via the vestibule. It was difficult to block off all three instantaneously. Dietmar’s idea was audacious.
But Artyom’s own goal was twice as difficult to achieve.
Since that conversation beside the toilet Dietmar hadn’t left Artyom alone with Homer for a single second. The old man hadn’t been able to tell him what the radio operator looked like or what kind of work he did or where he lived. So now find him, Artyom: whoever he is, wherever he is. And in half an hour.
“Excuse me.” He stuck his head into a compartment belonging to strangers.” Does Pyotr Sergeevich live her? Umbach?”
“Who? I’ve never heard of—”
“My mistake.”
He butted into the next compartment.
“Pyotr Sergeevich? Umbach? I’m his nephew …”
“I’ll call the guards. Barging into people’s homes! Tanya, are the spoons locked away?”