Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) (25 page)

The crowd towered over the girl and the musician who created these wonderful sounds in the distance remained invisible for her. The melody on the other hand seemed to catch up to her, to make her go back, as if it wanted to talk her down.

In vain.

Again it knocked on the door.

Homer rose groaning from his knees, wiped his lips with his sleeve and pulled the chain to flush. On the dirty green fabric of his jacked a brown stain had remained.

It had been the fifth time that he had thrown up in one day even though he actually hadn’t eaten anything.

The symptoms could have had a different cause, he told himself. Why had the speed of the sickness been accelerated at all? Maybe it was because …

“Are you going to be finished soon?” Yelled an impatient voice. It was the voice of a woman.

Oh! Had he misread the letters on the door in his haste? Homer wiped the dirty sleeve over his sweat covered face, put on an unwavering face and pushed the bar to the side.

“Typical drunk!” A woman dressed up to the nines pushed him to the side and shut the door behind her.

Ok, thought Homer. They could believe that he was a drunk, which was a lot better than the truth. He stepped in front of the mirror which was over the sink and put his hot forehead against it. With time he could breathe again, he watched how the glass steamed up and winched: His respirator had slid down and was hanging under his chin.
Hastily he pushed it back in front of his face and closed his eyes. No, he couldn’t consciously think about that he brought death to all humans that he met. To turn back was impossible: When he was infected, as far as he hadn’t
mistaken the symptoms, the whole station was going to die anyways. Starting with the women whose only fault was that she had to go “for little girls” at the wrong time. What would she do if he would tell her that she now only had a month to live at best?

How foolish, thought Homer. Foolish and stupid. He had wanted to make all immortal that crossed his path. Now fate had transformed him into an angel of death and one of the foolish and powerless kind. He felt like somebody had shortened his wings and told him: That an ultimatum of thirty days had been engraved on him. That was as much time as he had to act.

Was that the punishment for him overestimating himself and for his pride?

No he could no longer be silent. And there was only one human which he could open up to. He wouldn’t be able to deceive him for long and it was easier for both when they played with open cards.

With unsure steps he made his way to the hospital.

The room was at the end of the hallway and usually a nurse sat in front of it but now the place was empty. Through the door slit he could hear a broken moaning. He could only
make out single words and as long as Homer listened, he could t put them together to sentences that made sense.

“Stronger … Fighting … Must ... Still sense … Resistance … Remember … Still able … Mistake … Punishment …”

His words were now a barking, as if the pain had become unbearable and hindered the speaker to catch his rushing thoughts. Homer entered the room.

Hunter was lying unconscious, had spread his limbs and turned from one side to the other on a wet blanket. The bandage that pressed the head of the brigadier together had slipped over his eyes, the bony checks were covered in sweat and the unshaven lower jaw hung down limp.

His broad chest raised and lowered itself, struggling like the bellows of a forge that only kept the fire burning in the big body with struggle.

At the head end of the bet stood the girl with her back turned to him, her small hands behind her back. Not at first, but after a closer look he saw the silhouette of a black knife that she was holding cramped through the fabric of her overall.

The ringing.

Again and again.

2235

2236

2237

Artyom (
yes, our Artyom
) counted the sound not because he wanted to justify himself in front of the commander but because he wanted to feel some kind of movement. When he distanced himself from the point where he had started counting so that meant that with every ringing sound the point where this madness was over came closer.

Deceiving oneself? Yeah, probably. But listening to this ringing knowing that it will never stop was unbearable.

Even though at first, it had been the same thing after his very first deployment: Like a metronome it had brought order in the cacophony of his thoughts with its monotone sound, had emptied his head and calmed down his racing pulse.

The ringing cut down minutes of his shift and Artyom felt like he was in a trap made out of time out of which he couldn’t escape. In medieval times there had been such
torture: They had undressed a criminal and sat him under a barrel out of which never endingly water dropped onto his head. The cause was that the poor guy slowly lost his mind.

Where the stretch-table was without success, normal water brought extraordinary results …

Bound to the line of the telephone, Artyom didn’t dare to distance himself just for one second. His whole shift he had tried not to drink so that no important need would lure him from the apparatus. Days before he hadn’t been able to stand staying in the room, slipped out, hastily run to the exit and had returned immediately. Even on the doorstep he had listened and it had run down cold down his back: The frequency hadn’t been right; the signal was now faster than before. That could only mean one thing: The moment that he had waited for was finally here when he had been gone.

Fearful he looked to the door if somebody had watched him and had quickly dialed the number again and pressed his ear against the telephone.

Out of the apparatus the same clicking sound emerged, the ringing started from anew - in the know rhythm.

From that moment the busy sound hadn’t returned and nobody had picked up. Put Artyom didn’t dare to put down the telephone ever again. Only from time to time he put
it from his one already hot ear to his other, cramped trying not to miscount.

He hadn’t said anything to the leadership and he wasn’t even sure if he had heard anything but the eternal rhythm back then. His orders were: Call. For a week there had been only this task. Any violation would bring him in front of the tribunal and there they made no difference between mistakes and sabotage.

The telephone helped him to orientate how long he still had to sit here. Artyom didn’t have his own watch, but the commander had told him, looking at his watch, that the signal repeated itself every five seconds. Twelve sounds were one minute, 720 an hour, 13 680 a whole shift. Like small grains of sand they dropped down from one part of a giant hourglass into another bottomless container. And between the two glasses, directly in the neck Artyom was stuck and listened to time.

Also he didn’t put down the receiver because the commander could return every second to check on him.

Otherwise … What he did was absolutely pointless.

At the other end of the line apparently nobody seemed to be still alive.

He saw the from the inside barricaded office of the head of the station and him pressing his face against the plate of the table, the makarov still in his hand. With his shot through ears he could no longer hear the ringing sound. The ones that were on the other side of the door hadn’t been able to break through, but through the keyhole and the door slit the desperate ringing crawled over the train platform where all the bloated bodies were lying … For a time you hadn’t been able to here the ringing, the noise of the crowd, of the steps, the crying of the children had been too loud, but now it only disturbed the rest of the dead. The gradually dying emergency aggregates still spread their red blinking light.

The ringing.

Again.

2563

2564.

No reaction.

Gifts (Chapter 11)

Your report! You could say what you wanted; the commander was always good for a surprise. In the entire garrison they told legends about him. Once a mercenary he was skillful with knives and was known that nothing could turn his attention away from his tasks. Back then before he had settled down at the
Sev
astopolskaya
he had massacred the outer guard post of an enemy station alone, using the slightest mistakes of the guards.

Artyom jumped up, pressed the receiver against his ear with shoulder, saluted and stopped, not without some regret, counting. The commander approached the schedule of duty, locked at his clock and put next to his thumb, 3
^rd
November and the numbers 9:22, signed and turned to Artyom.

“My report: Nothing. I mean, nobody picked up”

“Silence?” The commander crackled with his jaws and loosened his neck muscles. “I just can’t believe it”

“What?” Asked Artyom worried.

“That it has already hit the
Dobryninskaya
. Could the epidemic have already hit Hanza? Do you understand what is going if it has hit the ring line?”

“But we don’t know anything for sure.” Answered Artyom. “Maybe it has already started. We have no contact to them.”

“What if the line is damaged?” The commander lowered his head and started to knock on the table.

“But then there was still a line to the base.” Artyom nodded his head into the direction of the tunnel that lead to the
Sevastopolskaya
. “That one is completely dead. Here we get at least ringing. That means the line is still working”

“Only that the base seems to no longer need us.” Said the commander calm. “You can’t see anybody from there at the door. Maybe the base is no more. And no more
Dobrynin
skaya
. Listen to me, Popov, when nobody is alive there anymore, we die very soon and all of us as well.

Nobody is going to come to our help. Why still keep the quarantine up? Maybe we should forget about all this shit, what do you think?” Again his jaws moved.

Artyom was shocked. What heresy! He didn’t want to but he had to think about the commander’s habit to shot deserters into the stomach before reading them their sentence.

“No commander, the quarantine is necessary”

“What you don’t say … Today alone three have become sick. Two from here and one of us. And Akopov is dead”

“Akopov?” Artyom swallowed and closed his eyes. His mouth felt dry.

“Beat his head in on the track.” Continued the commander with the same calm voice.” He had said that he couldn’t take the pain anymore. Not the first case. It got to hurt like hell when you try for half an hour to beat in your skull or what?

“Yes, sir.” Artyom turned his head.

“And what’s with you? Nausea? Weakness?” asked the commander worried and shined his small flashlight into Artyom’s face. “Open your mouth and say >Ahhh<. Good.

Listen up, Popov. You see that finally somebody picks up. Somebody has to pick up, Popov, at the
Dobryninskaya
and they shall say that Hanza has a vaccine and are reading sanitary brigades who are going to be here soon. And that they are going the get the healthy out. And heal the sick. And that we don’t have to stay in this hell forever. That we will get back to our wives. And you to your Galya and I to Alyona and Vera, understood?”

“Yes, sir!” Artyom nodded his head cramped.

“At ease”

His long knife hadn’t been able to resist the weight of the falling down beast and had broken exactly over the handle. The blade had penetrated deep into the chest of the creature so that they hadn’t even tried to get it back out of it.

The bold one who had been scared by the claws of the beast had been unconscious for almost three days.

Sasha couldn’t help him but she still had to see him.

At least to think about him, even though he couldn’t hear her.

But the doctors didn’t let her to him. They said the injured man needed rest before all.

She didn’t know exactly why the bold one had killed the people on the railcar. But if he had shot to save her then that was enough of a reason to her. She tried to believe in it but she couldn’t. Probably there was a different explanation:

Instead of asking, he rather killed.

At the
Pavelezkaya
it had been different: He had followed Sasha and had been ready to die for her. Was there actually a connection between them?

Like back then, at the
Kolomenskaya
when he had yelled after her, she had waited for a bullet not the question to come with them. But when she had turned around she had recognized a change in him, even though his scary face hadn’t moved a bit. It had been his eyes: Suddenly she had seen somebody else through the black pupils and looked at her.