He switched off broadcast mode to let the cities babble instead of him and took off the silenced headphones. had he been broadcasting to no one or whispering at least to someone? He couldn’t tell.
Enough bleating.
Let them listen to the others for themselves. Let them listen to the Earth.
* * *
“Artyom! Some people have arrived! Artyom!”
Artyom grabbed his automatic. Pulled on his mask. Hobbled out of the buffer zone and jabbed his gun barrel at the dust swirling in the creaking wind.
There were three of them standing behind the bars.
All three were holding their hands up, showing that they didn’t want to fight. Their gas masks—they looked like they were homemade—were lowered onto their chests, hanging on their straps. The protective suits, also homemade-looking, didn’t hang loose and baggy, like the crude, standard army ones, but were cut to fit the figure precisely. Two of them were young guys who looked like each other, like brothers. The third was a powerful man with a gray beard and long, gray hair gathered into a bun at the back of his head.
The young guys exchanged glances and smiled.
“They are here after all! They’re here, dad! People. I told you I heard it,” one of them said, glancing round proudly at the older man.
“Hello,” the older man said calmly and confidently.
Artyom didn’t lower his gun.
He looked at these men. The young guys were rosy-cheeked and close-cropped, they’d put their homemade sawn-offs down on the asphalt, and their hands were empty. Artyom could have cut them all down with a single burst through the bars of the gates.
But the outsiders didn’t seem to expect him to do that at all.
The young men smiled. At each other, at Artyom. Like cretins. Not like people from these parts. Their father looked at Artyom calmly, not afraid of anything. His eyes were blue; they hadn’t even faded with age. There was a silver ring dangling from his left ear.
“Who are you?” Artyom droned through his trunk.
“Is this Moscow already? We’re on our way to Moscow.”
“This is Balashikha. What do you want from us?”
“Nothing,” the man answered staidly. “My lads got it into their heads that someone was still alive in Moscow. And they were calling for help. So we got out stuff together and came.”
“Where from? Where are you from?”
“From Murom.”
“Murom?”
“It’s a town. Between Vladimir and Nizhny. Nizhny Novgorod.”
“How many kilometers? From here?”
“Three hundred. Approximately.”
“You walked three hundred kilometers to get here? On foot? Who are you anyway?”
“I’m Arseny,” the gray-bearded man said. “This is Igor and this is Mikhail. My sons. Igor—this one—tells me that he picked up a radio signal from Moscow. Where we’re from they think Moscow was completely burnt out. He convinced his brother. And then the two of them convinced me.”
“What for?”
“Well, it’s like this … As I said, on the radio they were calling for help. Trying to find out where people had survived. And abandoning people in trouble … It’s not Christian. But I can see you’re managing just fine here without us. Maybe we could have some tea? It’s been a long journey.”
“Stay where you are!”
“Sorry,” Arseny laughed. “Is this a high-security facility you have here?”
“What we have here …” Artyom looked round at Lyokha: Lyokha raised his hand—everything’s under control. “… is a facility. Did you see any cars on the road?”
“A pickup drove past, going the other way. We thumbed him, but he shot past like a bat out of hell.”
“Thumbed him?”
“Held our hands out. You know, so he would stop. We wanted to check the way.”
“So he would stop?” Artyom snickered.
“Don’t they do that round here? Give people lifts?”
Artyom didn’t answer. He listened through the wind towers: Was this an ambush?”
“You walked three hundred kilometers to save people you don’t know? Do you expect me to believe that?”
“Okay. We can do without the tea. Let’s move on,” Arseny declared.
“No, Dad, no! What are you saying? Where to?”
“Igor,” Arseny snapped to his son. “Don’t argue.”
“Well at least ask what it’s like in Moscow. Is there really anyone still alive there? Or … You know, mister, I play around with the radio … And I picked something up a few times. Things like: This is Moscow here. Come in, St. Petersburg, or maybe Rostov. What was that?”
“What was that?” Artyom repeated.
He ran his glance over them. Over their strange clothing; their raised, empty hands; their dangling gas masks: single pieces of glass instead of separate eye lenses. And he saw his own reflection. Behind the bars. With a rubber face and round, misted-up eyes. Drunk, wounded, full of painkillers, he gazed into his own suspicious gun barrel.
For some reason he remembered the Dark Ones. That day on the observation platform of the Ostankino Tower. Why did he remember that?
Should he believe or not?
“Wait.”
He went into the guardhouse and slowly and deliberately pressed the button that opened the gates. He heard a creaking sound outside.
There were three of them.
Still standing in the same place, and they hadn’t lowered their hands. Their guns were lying on the ground.
“Come in.”
They exchanged glances again.
“Let’s go inside. You can bring your guns. I’ll … tell you about Moscow. And … there are bodies in there. Don’t be afraid.”
* * *
“I don’t expect you to believe me. I wouldn’t believe it. I’m speaking out loud right now, and I don’t believe it. I can’t understand it. I know it with my mind, but I can’t understand it.”
“Cool.” Igor or Mikhail even clapped his hands. “Now this is life! Things are really moving. And will you show us the Metro? Murom’s such a rotten hole. Nothing ever happens there!”
Artyom didn’t answer.
“Well then …” Arseny tugged on his earring. “Are you going to stay here until they kill you?”
“I have to. I’ll try to hold out for as long as I possibly can. Basically … That’s the story with Moscow. Maybe they didn’t have time to send a signal when we stormed them. But they’ve heard everything now for sure. They’ll be here soon. Go home. It’s not your concern. Afterwards … You can come back sometime. If you want to. When it’s all over here. And you’d better not go along the road.”
Arseny didn’t move. Igor and his brother squirmed restlessly on their hard stools. Their father was smoking with Artyom, and the sons looked at him enviously but didn’t dare to ask for a cigarette.
“I don’t want to go home, Dad!” Mikhail or Igor protested in a light bass voice. “Let’s stay. I’d like to help.”
“There’s no point,” said Artyom. “How many men do they have? Maybe twenty. Maybe more. And they’ll be prepared. Even five of us won’t be able to hold out. And then … It’s the Red Line. Thousands of people live on it. It has an army. A genuine army.”
“Let’s stay, Dad.”
“Go. Don’t stay. Go and tell the people there … in that Murom of yours. Can you really breathe outside without a filter?”
“Yes.”
“And vegetables … Do they grow? Normally?”
“We cover them to protect them against the rain. The rain’s dangerous. We purify our water, but otherwise, yes. Tomatoes. Cucumbers.”
“Tomatoes, that’s fantastic.”
“It’s weird to hear about communists. And about fascists. Like something out of the last century.”
Artyom shrugged. Now he wondered how he hadn’t guessed right from the start that these three men couldn’t be scouts from the outpost. They looked nothing li
ke people from the Metro. Nothing at all. As if they they’d just flown in from Mars.
“Back there, what … do you believe in?”
“We live in the monastery there, not in the actual town. We have an old, beautiful monastery, on the riverbank. The Holy Trinity monastery. A genuine fortress. You know, a white fortress with sky-blue domes. An incredible place. It’s impossible not to believe in God there.”
“And in yourself, basically,” Igor or Mikhail barked fervently.
“You’re lucky.” Artyom smiled at them raggedly. “We don’t have a monastery. We don’t even have ourselves. There’s fuck all left.”
Arseny screwed his cigarette butt into a crumpled tin that had contained some kind of prehistoric fish and got up.
“You have to tell people this. You have to tell them about everything, and you’re wasting time on us. Go.”
“I’ll see you off.”
“No need. You … tell people. And we’ll do our best to let you talk for as long as possible.”
* * *
“They’re coming. I can see them from the pylon! They’re coming! Is that them?”
The wind grew tired and the creaking died away. Suddenly it was quiet outside—cotton-wool-muffled quiet, like on the Garden Ring Road. And the only sound in this silence came from motors that didn’t seem menacing, still far away, droning in high voices.
“How many of them are there?” And without waiting for an answer, Artyom set off up into the sky again himself.
He glimpsed them in a gap between the high-rises—one, two, three—and then they disappeared. Three trucks for certain, maybe more. Yes, there were more! Another two! Five identical trucks, coming this way from Moscow. The bedraggled prefabricated buildings hid them and cut off the sound. They probably had about ten minutes left to travel.
How many people were in those trucks? Fifty men could get in. They had machine guns on their roofs. And there were probably snipers too. They’d fire simultaneously, if they stormed the place … None of Artyom’s troops would even have time to blink. They’d all be mown down. And fed to the dogs.
Ten minutes. He had to get down then. And start his final broadcast.
So he’d have time to say everything. Arseny and his sons and Lyokha would buy him a little bit of time, those good people. And now—no more irrelevant chatter.
Could anyone pick him up or not? Moscow hadn’t replied even once. But they didn’t need a two-way radio to listen, did they? A receiver was enough. Let them say nothing, just as long as they were listening.
Artyom thought he heard another whoosh of sound in the distance.
He turned his ear towards it. Screwed up his eyes …
From the east, out of nowhere, out of Russia, a little dot was hurtling towards the outpost: a column of dust. It was farther from the turn to the radio center than the trucks, but it was rushing along faster. Who?
Never mind crawling down; it was time for him to jump! But Artyom couldn’t let the dot go until it grew a little bit. Something … Gray? Silvery! Not a dot, more like an automatic rifle bullet—a long shape: a station wagon!
Savelii?
In his hurry, his feet slipped on the thin reinforcement bars. The alcohol and painkillers were fizzling out already, and it wasn’t too easy to move now. He lost a few seconds. He wanted to explain everything to Igor-Mikhail, but he realized it would be quicker if he did everything himself. They were both waiting down in the yard—jumpy, frightened, and joyful.
“Get up to the second floor! You can fire from the windows!” he ordered the brothers. “Lyokha! Watch the road!”
He opened the gates, and instead of making his radio broadcast, ran out onto the highway. Right now there were only five of them, and Artyom was going to broadcast, but if SaveliI got here in time, he would count as two. But was he coming back to them? What had he left behind?
There was a ringing sound in both his ears.
The trucks folded together into one, like a deck of cards. Rushing along with their lights on, not trying to hide.
From the opposite direction the low-slung station wagon was flying straight towards the trucks, as if it was going to shatter itself against them.
The meat-grinding blades had halted, waiting for a delivery of men.
Artyom waved to Savelii: Come on, we’re waiting! And he ran back into cover.
The roaring of the large trucks was already quite distinct when Artyom heard a squeal of brakes on the highway: the station wagon bullet got there first, twisted itself into the turn at full speed, and squeezed in through the gates as they were closing.
It was SaveliI after all.
“Savelii!”
“I er … decided to postpone my vacation …” he explained with his head in the car trunk as he pulled out the large bag with the machine gun. “We’ll finish off this job first, and then I’ll go.”
Artyom wanted to hug SaveliI and kiss his wrinkled skin.
“Lousy damn heroics,” he said to him instead.
“We’ll pump the diesel out of their KamAZ trucks!” the stalker said with a wink.
“Diesel,” Artyom echoed. “Are you driving on diesel?”
“That’s right.”
“Give me the canister.”
“Wotchawant?”
“Give me the canister! Come on! Diesel! Give me some diesel!”
He tore the large plastic flask of murky liquid out of Savelii’s hands and galloped off with it to the comatose excavator, glancing round all the time at the wall—where would they come over it? At the same place Artyom had?
“Get that down you!” Artyom poured a gulp of liquid rainbow from the canister into the excavator’s dry throat. “Gulp it down! You wanted some too, right? Even with the ground teeth and the blood mixed in. Let’s all get wasted here, before it’s all over. The soldier’s shot of vodka before the action.” He climbed up onto a caterpillar track.
“What are you doing?” SaveliI was loitering nearby, down below.
“I’m going to uproot those fucking pylons!” Artyom tied the wires together—cautiously, soundlessly and prayerfully, as if he was talking to a mine.
The trucks were already roaring right there, at the turn. Then they cut out. Were they offloading the assault force?
He pressed a pedal.
Come on! Co-ome o-on!
The excavator jerked spasmodically.
It snorted. Roused itself. Roared. Woke up. Came alive. Alive!
There were the levers. Two in front and two more, one each side of the seat. Artyom touched one and the boom moved upwards. He touched another and it swung round, slamming its teeth into the wall—smack!
“Those two levers!” SaveliI yelled to him. “At the front! Like in a tank! Get out! Get out, you bonehead! Let me do it!”
He scrambled up onto a track at the second try and shoved Artyom to make him clear out of the cabin. He grabbed hold of the levers.
“Move aside! Or I’ll splat you!”
He moved his hands apart and the excavator—all fifty tonnes or however many it was—started turning round, as if was whirling into a dance, and started spinning round on the spot.
“Beau-eautiful! I missed my caterpillars!” SaveliI laughed. “Where do we start?”
“From the ones farthest away! Start with the farthest ones! Get it away from here!”
Outside the concrete wall, the men without any insignia had probably already scattered; maybe they were already uncoiling grappling hooks; and the snipers were weaving nests in the branches of trees. One second too long now, and he’d be too late forever.
He ran to the radio center, forgetting about his knee. That’s it! That’s it!
He thought he glimpsed men’s shadows through the trees. Someone darted past the gates.
“There’s a radio in there! And there’s a voice! They’re trying to call you!” Mikhail-Igor shouted from upstairs.
“They’re surrounding us! Spreading out all around! Shall I fire?” Lyokha called from the roof
.
The resurrected excavator crawled slowly past the control room, enveloped in sooty smoke, with its only arm, covered in cadaverous spots, already raised to strike.
“Come in! This is urgent!” the headphones squealed in a mosquito-voice.
So who’d got the urge to call right now?
Why didn’t you say anything sooner, instead of keeping mum?
Artyom couldn’t breathe. He threw his hand out, flung open the window, and started breathing sweet smoke: And then he heard a nasal voice from a megaphone.
“We order you! To leave! The building! Immediately! And! Lay down! Your weapons! We promise! To spare! Your lives! Otherwise!”
“That one! The farthest!” Artyom gestured through the window.
The excavator clattered its rusty bones and trudged off where it had been told to go. Would it be strong enough? Would it have enough rainbow?
“Artyom!” the headphones on the table chirped, gathering all their strength. “Can you hear me, Artyom?”
He picked them up too slowly—he didn’t want to put them on his head and block his ears with them.
The machine gun on the roof stuttered … To frighten them off? Or had they launched the assault?
“Who is this?”
“Artyom! It’s me! It’s Letyaga! Letyaga, Artyom!”