Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) (28 page)

“I know where she went.” Said the brigadier indifferent. “But from there you can’t bring her back. Go pack your things”

Homer retreated and blinked with his eyes. He was used to relying on the brigadier’s inhuman abilities but now he refused to believe him. What if Hunter was lying again, this time to get rid of unnecessary ballast?

“She said that you would need her …”

“I need you.” Hunter moved his head in Homers direction. “And you need me”

“For what?” Whispered homer.

“Much depends on you.” The brigadier had heard him.

He slowly closed his eyes and opened them again.

The bed squealed when Hunter rose up with his teeth fletched. “Go now. Pack your things so you’re ready in time”

Before he left the room Homer stopped for a moment and took the red makeup box from the ground. The cover was broken and the hinges were bent and loose.

The mirror was fragmented.

Homer turned around and said to Hunter. “I can’t leave without her”

The chimera was almost twice as big as Sasha. Its head bumped against the ceiling. The claws were almost hanging down to the ground.

Sasha knew how lighting fast these animals moved and with what unbelievable speed they attacked. To reach her it just had to make one big step forward. That would bee enough.

But somehow the animal hesitated. It was no use to shot and Sasha wasn’t even able to raise her rifle. She took one step back, to the exit. The chimera made a groaning sound and walked into the direction of the girl … But nothing else happened. The monster remained there and continued to stare with its blind face.

Sasha dared to make another step, and another.

Without taking her eyes of the animal, without showing fear she approached the exit. The creature kept following her only a few meters in front of her. As if it wanted to keep her company to the door.

Only as Sasha was just ten meters away from the bright opening she couldn’t take it anymore and started to run. The creature screamed and rushed forward.

Sasha almost flew outside and ran with her eyes closed. Until she stumbled and slid on the rough and hard ground. The chimera had to reach her every moment now and rip her to pieces, but her follower hadn’t pursued her. A long minute passed and then another … Around her was nothing but silence.

Sasha kept her eyes closed while she searched in her pockets for the self-made glasses that she had bought from the guard. It was made out of two dark green bottoms from two glass bottles. It was held together by a frame of iron rings and a bit of rubber. You could put the glasses over the round windows of your gasmask.

No she could open her eyes without being blinded by the light. Slowly she opened them. At first hesitantly and with
her head lowered but then with more courage she looked around the strange place she had ended up.

Over her head was the sky. Real sky, bright and far reaching. Here was more light than any artificial light source could ever create.

Everything was covered in an even tone of green. At a few places there were low hanging clouds but between them was a true abyss.

The sun! Through the thin layer of clouds she could see it: A circle as big as a match box, white and so bright that it could burn a hole through Sasha’s glasses at any moment now. Fearful she looked away, waited for a moment and took another stealthy look. It was a bit disappointing: It was nothing but a bright hole in the sky, why all that idolatry?

But no, a certain yes even something that moved her.

When Sasha had left the darkness of the cave in which those creatures had been living the exit had almost shined as bright. What if the sun was just such an exit where you could flee to a place where it was never dark? So she could escape
the ground out of which she had just climbed out? She felt weak, almost unnoticeable warmth from the sun, like from a living being.

Sasha was standing in a desert of stone; all around her were half destroyed old houses. The black windows openings towered teen stories high. There were so many of them, they covered each other and pressed into field of vision so she could see them better.

Behind them were even higher buildings and behind them
even
higher buildings which were towering giants.

Unbelievable but Sasha could see all of them! They were covered in the stupid green color but the earth under her feet, the air under this crazy bright and bottomless sky was real. And then they opened up to unimaginable wideness.

Even though her eyes had always been used to the darkness, they had never been made for it. In the evening hours at the abyss of the metro bridge she had only seen the ugly buildings in the area around one hundredth meters up to the hermetic door. Behind that there had been darkness, so thick that even Sasha who had been born underground couldn’t see through.

She had never really asked herself how big the world was in which she lived. For her there had always been just
this small, dark cocoon, a few hundredth meters into every direction. Behind the buildings there had only been an abyss, it had been the edge of the universe for her, absolute darkness. And even though she knew that in reality the earth was much bigger she had never been able to imagine it. Now she realized that it would have been impossible.

Strangely she wasn’t afraid in midst of this never ending no-man’s-land. When she had climbed back into the metro, she had always felt like she had crawled back into her armor, now it felt like she had left her shell.

At day you could see all dangers from a distance and Sasha had more than enough time to hide and defend herself.

And suddenly she felt the unknown feeling of being at home.

The wind chased round balls of thorny twigs over the plaza, howling monotone through the destroyed lines of houses, blew over her back, brought her new courage and drove her to explore this new world.

She had no choice: To get back into the metro she had set foot into this building were the cruel monsters were and they were no longer sleeping. From time to time their white bodies appeared at the exits and disappeared as fast as they had appeared. It seemed that they didn’t like daylight.

But what would happen if it would become night? If Sasha wanted to see something before her death, all that the old man had described to her, then she had to get as much distance between her and this place as possible.

So she started running.

She had never felt so small. It seemed unbelievable that these giant buildings had been created by humans of her size. For what had they needed them? Had people been prepared by nature for the hard life in the narrowness of the tunnels and the stations?

These buildings on the other hand must have been built by the proud ancestors of the small humans they were now. They must have been powerful, tall and imposing like their buildings in which they had lived.

Now the buildings stepped aside and the earth was covered in a stony, grey and at some parts splintered crust.

In just one small moment the world had become even bigger: From here it opened the view into the distance so that Sasha’s heart stopped and her head began to spin.

She leaned against the with fungus and moss covered wall of a building, which simple clock tower seemed to support the clouds and tried to imagine how the city had looked when it was still alive…

Over the street, this was a street without a doubt, tall, beautiful humans stepped in their colorful clothes which even made the most colorful dresses at the
Pavelezkaya
look poor and laughable.

Through the glittering masses automobiles moved like the wagons of the trains in the metro, but they were smaller so that only four passengers could fit into them.

The houses had looked less dark. In the windows had been clean glass and no darkness. Sasha saw small bridges that had been attached to the houses at different heights. (
balconies
).

The sky hadn’t been empty as well: Planes of indescribable size swum through the clouds and their bellies almost touched the roofs of the houses. Her father had once explained that while they were flying they didn’t waggle their wings but that they remained still, but in Sasha’s imagination they had been like giant dragonflies, their wings almost invisible, flattering around and weakly reflecting the green rays of the sun.

And it rained.

It was just water that fell from the sky, but the feeling was overwhelming. This heavenly water didn’t just wash down dirt and tiredness, that had done the hot rays of
the self made shower, no this water cleaned from the inside but gave you forgiveness for all your mistakes. It was a magical bath, which burned away all bitterness out of their hearts, renewed them and made them young again. Giving her the wish to live and the power to do so at the same time. Just like the old man had said …

Sasha believed so hard in this world, she wished so hard for it so that she could finally see it. She already heard the slight sound of the transparent wings in the sky, the happy twittering of the masses, the gradual beating of the iron wheels and the rushing sound of the warm rain. And suddenly she remembered the distant melody that she had heard yesterday …

She felt a painful sting in her chest. She jumped up and ran onto the street, to the stream of people, ran around the small wagons that were stuck in the crowd and held her face into the heavy drops. The old man had been right: It was wonderful here, almost like out of a fairy tail. You just had to scratch away the mold of time and the past started to glitter and see the colorful mosaics and the bronze reliefs of the stations.

At the other shore of the green river she stopped. The bridge which had once stretched over it had broken down
right at the beginning of the bridge, the other shore was out of her reach.

The magic disappeared.

The picture which just a few moments ago had been so real and colorful fainted and went away. The dried up, empty houses, the cracked open skin of the streets, the two meter high grass at the edges, the wild impenetrable grove, the rest of the street next to the river bank, as far as her eye reached, it was all that was left of her beautiful phantom world.

Sasha felt hurt from the inside that she would never see this world with her own eyes. She now only had the choice between death and the return to the metro. Nowhere in the world was still one of those tall humans in their colorful clothes.

She was the only human soul on this broad street, which ended at a far away point, there were the sky and the deserted road met each other.

The weather was good. No rain.

Sasha couldn’t even cry. Now she just wanted to die.

As if it had heard her wish, far over her a black shadow opened its wings.

What should he do? To let the brigadier go, to give up on his book and stay at the station until he had found the girl? Or should he take her out of his novel forever, follow hunter and wait like the spider in its nest until a new heroine got caught in his net?

Reason forbade Homer to separate himself from the brigadier. For what else had he made the journey, for what else had he been exposing the entire metro to a deadly danger? He had no right to wager his work, the only thing that justified all those sacrifices, the once already made and the coming ones.

But when he picked up the broken mirror from the ground he realized: When he left the
Pavelezkaya
without knowing the fate of the girl he was betraying her. A betrayal that would sooner or later seek revenge in his book. He would never be able to get Sasha out of his memories.

Whatever Hunter said, Homer had to do everything to find the girl, or at least convince himself that she was still alive.

So the old man doubled his effort. The ring line?

Can’t be, without documents they would never let her through to Hanza. Through the gate? Homer searched from the beginning of the station to its end, asking everybody who passed him if they hadn’t seen a girl pass them. She must have worn a radiation suit. Homer didn’t believe his ears.

Finally he had followed Sasha’s footsteps to the guard at the end of the escalator.

“That’s not my problem.” Answered the guard in his cabin tired. “She can go wherever she wants. I even gave her some good glasses … You can’t go through there now though, I already got in trouble for letting her through. Up there our nightly visitors have their nest. Nobody goes there.

When she asked me I almost started laughing.” His pupils were as big as the end of a pistol and starred into the distance without noticing Homer (
the guard is
high
as hell
).

“Go back grandfather, it is going to be dark soon”

Hunter had known! But what had he meant when he had said that Homer wouldn’t have been able to get her back from there? Was she still alive?