Metro 2034

CHAPTER 8 Masks

The cage was still lying where the fat man had knocked it out of her hands. Its little door was slightly open and the rat had fled. ‘Let him go,’ the girl thought. The rat deserved his freedom too.

There was nothing else for it, so Sasha had put on her kidnapper’s gas mask. She thought there were still traces of his stale breath in it, but she could only be glad he’d taken the mask off before he was shot.

Close to the middle of the bridge, the background radiation spiked again

Sasha rattled about in the immense tarpaulin suit like a cockroach larva in a cocoon – it seemed miraculous that it could stay on her. But the gas mask clung firmly to her face, even though it had been stretched across the fat man’s broad features and drooping jowls. Sasha tried to blow as hard as she could, in order to drive the air predestined for the dead man out through the tubes and filters. But looking around through the perspiring circular lenses, she had an eerie feeling that she had climbed into someone else’s body, not just his protective suit. Only an hour ago the soulless demon who had come for her was in here. And now it was as if, in order to get across the bridge at all, she had been forced to become him and take a look at the world through his eyes. Through the eyes of the men who had banished her and her father to Kolomenskoe and kept them alive there for all these years only because their greed was stronger than their hate. Sasha wondered whether, in order to get lost among people like that, she too would have to wear a black rubber mask and pretend to be someone with no face and no feelings. If only that would help her to change on the inside too, and reset her memories to zero… To genuinely believe that she hadn’t been damaged beyond repair, that she could still start all over again.

Sasha would have liked to think these two men had not picked her up simply by chance, that they had been sent to the station especially for her, but she knew it wasn’t true. She found it hard to decide why they had taken her with them – for amusement, out of pity or to prove something to each other. The few words the old man had tossed to her, like a bone to a dog, seemed to hint at sympathy, but he did everything with wary deference to his companion, held his tongue and seemed afraid of being accused of mere common humanity.

And the other one, after giving permission for the girl to go with them as far as the nearest inhabited station, had never even looked in her direction again. Sasha had deliberately hung back and let him go ahead slightly, so she could study him freely from behind. He obviously sensed her gaze on him, immediately tensing up and jerking his head back, but he didn’t look round – perhaps out of tolerance for a young girl’s curiosity, or perhaps because he didn’t want to show that he was paying any attention to her.

From the powerful build and feral agility of the man with the shaved head, which had made the fat man confuse him with a bear, it was obvious that he was a soldier and a solitary. But it wasn’t just a matter of his height or his massive shoulders. He radiated energy, and it would have been just as palpable if he were short and skinny. A man like that could make almost anyone submit to his will, and he would eliminate anyone who disobeyed without compunction. And long before the girl finally mastered her fear of this man, before she even started trying to make sense of him and herself, the unfamiliar voice of the woman awakening within her told Sasha that she would submit too.

The trolley moved forward at an incredible pace. Homer could hardly feel the resistance of the levers, all the strain was taken by the brigadier. For form’s sake, standing there opposite Hunter, the old man also raised and lowered his hands, but the work cost him no effort at all.

The squat Metro bridge was like a millipede fording the murky, turbid river. The concrete flesh was peeling off its steel bones, its legs were buckling under it, and one of its two backbones had slumped and collapsed. Standard, functional and impermanent, it lacked the slightest trace of elegance – like the residential high-rise developments around it, like all of Moscow’s banal, stereotyped suburbs. But gazing round rapturously as he rode across it, Homer recalled the magical movable bridges of St Petersburg and the burnished metal lacework of Moscow’s Crimea Bridge.

In the twenty years he had lived in the Metro, the old man had only come up to the surface three times, and each time he had tried to observe more than he could possibly see during his short period of leave. Tried to bring his memories to life, focus the lenses of his eyes, already turning cloudy with age, on the city and click the rusting shutter of his visual memory. Tried to store up memories for the future. He might never be up on the surface again, at Kolomenskoe, Rechnoi Vokzal or Tyoply Stan – in those miraculously beautiful places that he and so many other Muscovites used to regard with such unjustified contempt.

Year by year his Moscow was growing older, falling apart, being eroded away. Homer wanted to stroke the decaying Metro bridge in the same way as the girl at Kolomenskoe caressed the man who had bled to death for the last time. And not just the bridge, but the grey crags of the factory buildings too. He wanted to gaze at them in endless adoration, to touch them, so he could feel that he was really there among them and not just dreaming all this. And also, just in case, to say goodbye to them.

The visibility was atrocious, the silvery moonlight couldn’t force its way through the filter of dense clouds, and the old man had to guess at more than he could observe. But that was okay, he was well used to substituting fantasies for reality.

Completely absorbed in his musings, at that moment Homer wasn’t thinking of anything else. He forgot about the legends that he was going to compose and the mysterious diary that had been harrowing his imagination without a break for so many hours. He behaved just like a child on a holiday outing, gazing in delight at the blurred silhouettes of the high-rises, turning his head to and fro, talking out loud to himself.

The others got no pleasure from the journey across the bridge. The brigadier, who had taken the forward-facing position, occasionally froze and peered in the direction of sounds that came flying up from below. Apart from that, his attention was riveted to the distant point, still invisible to his companions, where the tracks burrowed back into the earth. The girl sat behind Hunter, for some reason clutching her salvaged gas mask with both hands.

It was very obvious that she felt uncomfortable up on the surface. While the team was walking through the tunnel, the girl had seemed quite tall, but the moment they stepped out into the open she shrank into herself, as if she had withdrawn into an invisible shell, and not even the tarpaulin suit taken from the corpse made her seem any bigger, although it was hideously large for her. She was indifferent to the beautiful views from the bridge and most of the time she looked straight down at the floor in front of her.

They rode through the ruins of Technopark Station, which was being built, with careless haste, just before the war – it had crumbled away, not because of the nuclear strikes, but simply from the passage of time – and finally approached the tunnel. In the pale darkness of the night, its entrance was black with an absolute blackness. For Homer, his suit was transformed into a genuine suit of armour, and he was a medieval knight, riding into a fantastic fairytale cave, straight into the dragon’s lair. The noise of the nighttime city was left behind on the threshold of the beast’s abode, at the point where Hunter ordered them to abandon the trolley. All that could be heard now was the tentative rustling of three travellers’ footsteps and their sparse words, fractured by an echo that stumbled across the tunnel liners. But there was something unusual about the quality of sound in this tunnel. Even Homer could clearly sense the enclosed nature of the space, as if they had walked in through the neck of a glass bottle.

‘It’s closed off ahead,’ said Hunter, confirming the old man’s fears.

The beam of Hunter’s flashlight was the first to find the bottom of the bottle: the closed hermetic door loomed up in front of them, a blank wall. Rails glinted faintly, breaking off at the door, and dollops of brownish lubricant oozed from the bearings. Some old planks, dry broken branches and charred pieces of wood had been dumped right beside the door, as if someone had tried to light a fire there recently. The door was clearly in use, but apparently only for coming out from the inside – there were no bells or any other signalling devices on this side of it.

The brigadier looked at the girl.

‘Is it always like this here?’

‘They come out sometimes. They come to us on the other side. To trade. I thought… today…’ She seemed to be making excuses. Had she known there was no access, but kept it secret?

Hunter hammered on the door with the handle of his machete, as if it were a huge metal gong. But the steel was too thick and instead of a resonant chime, it gave out only a feeble clang. That sound almost certainly couldn’t be heard on the other side of the wall, even if there was anybody alive there.

No miracle happened. There was no answer.

In defiance of common sense, Sasha had been hoping these men would be able to unlock the door. She’d been afraid to warn them that the entrance into the Greater Metro was closed – what if they decided to take a different route and abandoned her where they had found her?

But no one in the Greater Metro was expecting them, and breaking open a hermetic door was beyond the power of any human being. The man with the shaved head examined the massive panel of metal, trying to find a weak point or a secret lock, but Sasha knew there weren’t any locks on this side. The door only opened outwards.

‘You stay here, I’m going to reconnoitre. I’ll check the door in the other tunnel and look for ventilation shafts,’ the big man barked. After a short pause he added: ‘I’ll be back’.

And then he disappeared.

The old man gathered up the branches and planks that were lying around and lit a puny little campfire. He sat down directly on the sleepers, thrust his hands into his knapsack and started rummaging through his belongings. Sasha crouched down quietly beside him, observing. The old man ran through a strange performance – perhaps for her, or perhaps for himself. He fished a filthy, battered notepad out of the knapsack, cast a wary glance at Sasha, shifted sideways away from her as far as he could and hunched over the paper. Then he immediately jumped up with suspicious agility for his age, to check that the man with the shaved head really had gone: he crept awkwardly about ten steps towards the exit of the tunnel, didn’t find anyone there and decided that these precautions would be sufficient. Leaning back against the door, he screened himself off from Sasha with a sack and immersed himself in his reading.

He read fretfully, droning something indistinctly to himself, then removed his gloves, took out a flask of water and started sprinkling it on his notepad. He read a bit more, then suddenly started rubbing his hands against his trouser legs, slapped himself fretfully on the forehead, touched his gas mask and plunged back into his reading. Infected by his agitation, Sasha abandoned her musings and crept closer: the old man was too engrossed to notice her cautious movements.

Infused with the light of the campfire, his pale green eyes glinted feverishly even through the lenses of the gas mask. Every now and then he surfaced with an obvious effort – for a gulp of air. In these breaks from reading, the old man peered warily at the distant patch of night sky at the end of the tunnel, but it was clear. The man with the shaved head had disappeared completely. And then the notepad engrossed him entirely again.

Now she realised why he had sprinkled the paper with water: he was trying to separate pages that were stuck together. They obviously resisted and once, when he accidentally tore one of them, he cried out as if he had cut himself. He swore, cursing his own clumsiness, and noticed how inquisitively she was examining him. Embarrassed, he adjusted his gas mask again, but didn’t say anything to her until he had read right to the end. Then he skipped over to the fire and flung the notepad into it, without even looking at Sasha, and she sensed that it was pointless to ask any questions now: he would only lie or say nothing. And there were other things that worried her far more just at the moment. Probably an entire hour had passed since the man with the shaved head left. What if he had abandoned them as an unnecessary burden? Sasha moved to sit a bit closer to the old man.

‘The other tunnel’s closed too,’ she said. ‘And all the shafts nearby have been blocked off. This is the only way in.’

The old man looked at her absent-mindedly, clearly struggling to concentrate on what he had heard.

‘He’ll find a way to get inside, he’s got intuition,’ he said, and a minute later, as if he didn’t want to seem impolite, he asked: ‘What’s your name?’

‘Alexandra,’ she replied seriously. ‘What’s yours?’

‘Nikolai,’ he began, reaching out his hand, and then suddenly jerking it back again before Sasha could touch it, as if he had changed his mind. ‘Homer. My name’s Homer.’

‘Homer. That’s a strange nickname,’ Sasha said slowly.

‘It’s just a name,’ Homer said firmly.

Should she explain to him that as long as they were with her the door would stay closed? Although it could easily have been standing wide open, if these two had come on their own. This was Kolomenskoe refusing to let Sasha go, punishing her for what she had done to her father. The girl had run off and stretched her chain to its limit, but she still couldn’t break it. The station had brought her back to itself once, and it would do it again.

No matter how hard she tried to drive these thoughts and images away, they only flew off to arm’s length, like bloodsucking gnats, but always came back, circling round and round her, creeping into her ears and her eyes. The old man was asking Sasha about something else, but she didn’t respond: her eyes were veiled by tears and she could hear her father’s voice in her ears, repeating: ‘Nothing is more precious than human life’. And now the moment had come when she really understood what he meant.

What was going on at Tula was no longer a mystery to Homer. The explanation for everything was simpler and more terrible than he had imagined, but an even more terrible story was only just beginning, now that the notepad had been deciphered. The diary was Homer’s black spot; it was a one-way ticket, and once he had held it in his hand, the old man could never be free of it, even if he burned it.

And besides that, his suspicions concerning Hunter had now been confirmed by substantial, unambiguous proof, although Homer didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with it. Everything he had read in the diary completely contradicted the brigadier’s claims. Hunter was simply lying, and quite deliberately. The old man had to work out what was the motive behind his lies, and if the lies made any kind of sense. The answer to that would determine whether he decided to carry on following Hunter and whether his adventure would turn out to be a heroic epic or a mindless, horrendous bloodbath that left no surviving witnesses.

The first entries in the notepad were dated to the day when the convoy passed through Nagornaya without any casualties and entered Tula without encountering any resistance…

‘The tunnels are quiet and empty almost all the way to Tula. We advance quickly – a good sign. The commander is counting on getting back tomorrow at the latest,’ the dead signal officer reported. ‘The entrance to Tula is not guarded. We sent in a scout. He disappeared,’ he wrote anxiously a few hours later. ‘The commander has decided to advance into the station en masse. We are preparing for an assault.’ And then again, a little while later: ‘We can’t understand what’s wrong… We’re talking to the locals. Things are bad here. Some kind of disease.’ And soon after that he explained: ‘Some people at the station are infected with something… An unknown illness…’ The members of the convoy apparently tried to render assistance to the sick: ‘The paramedic hasn’t been able to find a cure. He says it’s like rabies… They suffer monstrous pain, they’re deranged… They attack other people’. And straight after that: ‘Weakened by the illness, they can’t cause any serious harm. That’s not the real disaster…’ At this point, as luck would have it, the pages had stuck together, and Homer had to sprinkle water on them from his flask: ‘Photophobia, nausea. Blood in the mouth. Coughing. Then they swell up… They are transformed into…’ – the word had been laboriously crossed out. ‘How it’s transmitted is not clear. The air? Physical contact?’ That entry was made the next day. The detachment had stayed on.

‘Why didn’t they report this?’ the old man thought, and immediately realised that he’d already seen the answer somewhere. He leafed through the pages. ‘We have no lines of communication. The phone is dead. Perhaps it’s sabotage. One of the exiles, in revenge? They discovered it before we got here, and at first they flung the sick out into the tunnels. One of them? Did he cut the cable?’

At that point Homer looked up from the letters and stared blindly into space. Let’s say the cable was cut. But then why didn’t they come back to Sebastopol?

‘What’s worse is that it takes a week to develop. And what if it’s longer? And from then to death is another week or two. We can’t tell who’s sick and who’s well. Nothing helps. There’s no cure. The death rate is a hundred per cent.’ A day later the signal officer made another entry that was already familiar to Homer: ‘Tula is in chaos. There’s no way out to the Metro, Hansa is blocking it. We can’t go back home.’ On the next page he continued: ‘The healthy were shooting at the sick, especially the aggressive ones. They’ve built a pen for infected individuals… They resist and beg to be let out…’ and after that a brief, terrible phrase: ‘They gnaw on each other…’

The signal officer was frightened too, but the steely discipline in the detachment prevented fear from spilling over into panic. Even at the focus of an epidemic of deadly fever, a Sebastopol brigade remained a Sebastopol brigade. ‘We have brought the situation under control, sealed off the station and appointed a commandant,’ Homer read. ‘All our men are all right, but too little time has gone by.’

The search party dispatched from Sebastopol had reached Tula safely and, of course, got stuck there too. ‘We have taken a decision to remain here until the incubation period is over, to avoid endangering… Or forever,’ the signal officer wrote. ‘The situation is hopeless. We can’t expect help from anywhere. If we ask Sebastopol, we’ll be condemning our own men. We have to endure it… For how long?’

So the mysterious guard by the hermetic door at Tula had been posted by the Sebastopolites. Then it wasn’t surprising that their voices had seemed familiar to Homer: the watch was being kept by men with whom he had defended the Chertanovo line of approach against upyrs only a few days ago! By voluntarily deciding not to return, they hoped to protect their home station from being infected.

‘Most often from person to person, but it’s obviously in the air too. Some men seem to be immune. It started a couple of weeks ago, many have not fallen ill… But there are more and more dead. We are living in a morgue,’ the signal officer scribbled. ‘Who’ll be the next to die?’ he asked, suddenly breaking into a hysterical shriek. But he took himself in hand and continued steadily: ‘We have to do something. Warn them. I want to volunteer to go. Not to Sebastopol. To find the point where the cable is damaged. And get through from there. I have to get a call through.’

Then several days passed, filled with invisible conflict with the commander of the convoy, silent arguments with other soldiers and mounting despair. The signal officer gathered his strength and recorded in his diary everything that he tried to make them see.

‘They don’t understand how things look from Sebastopol. We’ve been blockaded in for a week now. They’ll send another three men, who won’t be able to go back either. Then they’ll send a large assault team. Declare general mobilisation. Everyone who comes to Tula will be in the risk zone. Someone will get infected and go running home. And that will be the end. I have to prevent an assault! They don’t understand…’ Then another attempt to get the commandant to see sense, as fruitless as all the others before it. ‘They won’t let me go… They’ve gone insane. If not me, then who? Make a run for it!’

‘I pretended that I had calmed down, that I was willing to wait,’ he wrote a day later. ‘I went on duty at the hermetic door. I shouted that I was going to find the break in the cable and ran. They fired on me. A bullet lodged in my back.’

Homer turned the page.

‘Not for myself. For Natasha, for little Seryozha. I wasn’t thinking of trying to save myself. Let them live. So Seryozha can…’ At this point the pen was jerking about in his weakened hand: perhaps he added this later, because there was no more space, or because he no longer cared where he wrote. Then the disrupted chronology was restored: ‘Thank God, they let me through Nagornaya. I have no strength left. I walk on and on. Then I faint. How long was I asleep? I don’t know. Is there blood in my lung? Is it the bullet or have I got the sickness? I can’t…’ The curve of the letters straightened out into a slithering line, like a dying man’s encephalogram. But then he came round again and finished the sentence: ‘I can’t find where the damage is.’

‘Nakhimov. I made it. I know where the phone is. I’ll warn them… They mustn’t! Save… My wife, I miss…’ He splashed his thoughts out on to the paper less and less coherently, punctuated with scarlet blobs. ‘I got through. Did they hear me? I’ll die soon. Strange. I’ll fall asleep. No more bullets. I want to fall asleep before these… They’re standing round me, waiting. I’m still alive, go away.’

The ending of the diary seemed to have been prepared in advance, written in triumphantly vertical handwriting – the appeal not to storm Tula and the name of the man who had given his life to prevent it happening. But Homer could tell that the last thing the signal officer had written before his signal faded away forever was: ‘I’m still alive, go away’.

A heavy silence enveloped the two people huddling close to the flames. Homer had stopped trying to lift the girl’s mood. He sat there without speaking, stirring the ashes with a stick while the sodden notepad died the stubborn death of a heretic and he tried to ride out the storm that was raging inside him

Fate was mocking him. How he had longed to solve the mystery of Tula! How proud he had been of finding the diary, how it had flattered his vanity to come so close, all on his own, to unravelling all the knots in this story. And now? Now that he had the answers to all the questions in his hands, he cursed himself for his curiosity.

Yes, he was breathing through his respirator when he picked up the diary at Nakhimov Prospect, and he was wearing a full-protection suit now as well. But no one knew exactly how the disease was transmitted!

What a fool he had been to scare himself with not having much time left! Yes, it had spurred him on, helped him to overcome his laziness and conquer his fear. But death was contrary, it didn’t like people who tried to dictate to it. And now the diary had set him an absolutely definite deadline: a few weeks from the day of infection to death. Perhaps even an entire month! But there was so much he still had to get done in those pitiful thirty days.

What should he do? Confess to his companions that he was sick and go away to turn up his toes at Kolomenskoe – if not from the sickness, then from hunger and radiation? But if he was already incubating the terrible disease, then Hunter and the girl, with whom he had shared the same air, must be infected too. Especially the brigadier – when he spoke to the sentries on the cordon at Tula, he had come very close to them.

Or should he hope that the sickness would pass him by, just keep his head down and wait? Not simply lie low, of course, but continue this journey with Hunter – so that the swirling tornado of events that had picked the old man up wouldn’t drop him again, and he could carry on drawing inspiration from them.

After all, if Nikolai Ivanovich, that decrepit, useless, mediocre citizen of Sebastopol and former engine driver’s mate, that caterpillar crushed against the ground by the force of gravity, was dying because he had unsealed that cursed diary, then Homer, the chronicler and myth-maker, the short-lived, bright-winged mayfly, had only just appeared in the world. Perhaps he had been sent a tragedy worthy of the pens of the great, and now it was entirely up to him to see if he could manifest it on paper in the thirty days that had been granted to him.

Did he have any right to ignore this chance?

Did he have any right to become a hermit, forget about his legend, voluntarily abandon genuine immortality and deprive all his contemporaries of it too? Which would be more criminal and more stupid – to carry the blazing torch of the plague through half the Metro or to burn his manuscripts and himself with them?

As a vain and cowardly man, Homer had already made his choice, and now he was only searching for arguments to support it. What would be the point of mummifying himself in the vault at Kolomenskoe in the company of two other corpses? He wasn’t cut out for feats of heroism. And if the Sebastopol soldiers at Tula were prepared to enlist in the ranks of the dead, that was their choice and their right. At least they didn’t have to die alone. And what good would it do if Homer sacrificed himself? He couldn’t stop Hunter in any case. The old man had been spreading the disease without knowing what he was doing, but Hunter had known everything perfectly well since that encounter at Tula. That was why he had insisted on the total extermination of all the station’s inhabitants, including the men from the Sebastopolite convoys. That was why he had mentioned flamethrowers.

And if they were both already sick, the epidemic would inevitably affect Sebastopol. In the first instance the people they had been with. Elena. The station commandant. The commander of the perimeter. Their adjutants. Which meant that in three weeks’ time the station would first be decapitated and overwhelmed by chaos, and then the pestilence would scythe down everyone else. But how could Hunter expect to avoid infection? Why go back to Sebastopol, even though he realised that the illness could have been transmitted to him as well? It was becoming clear to Homer that the brigadier was not acting on intuition, but implementing some kind of plan, step by step. Until the old man had spoiled his game.

So Sebastopol was doomed in any case, and the expedition was completely meaningless now? But even in order to return home and die quietly beside Elena, Homer would have to complete his round-the-world voyage. The journey from Kakhovka to Kashira had been enough to put their gas masks out of action, and the protective suits had absorbed tens, if not hundreds, of roentgens – they had to be disposed of as soon as possible. He couldn’t go back the same way he had come. What should he do?

The girl was sleeping, shrunk up tight into a ball. The fire had finally swallowed the plague-infected diary, consumed the final branches and gone out. To save the batteries of his flashlight, the old man decided to sit in darkness for as long as he could manage it.

No, he had to carry on following the brigadier. He would avoid everyone else, in order to reduce the risk of infection, dump his knapsack here with all his bits and pieces, destroy his clothing… He would hope for mercy, but still count down the thirty days. He would work on his book every day without taking any time to rest. ‘It will all work out somehow,’ the old man kept telling himself. ‘The important thing is to follow Hunter, not to fall behind. That’s if he shows up again…’

It was more than an hour since the brigadier had disappeared into the blurred opening at the end of the tunnel. When he reassured the girl, Homer was by no means certain that the brigadier would definitely come back to them.

The more the old man learned about him, the less he understood him. It was impossible to trust the brigadier, but just as impossible to doubt him. He was impossible to analyse, he didn’t fit the pattern of normal human emotions. Trusting him was tantamount to surrendering yourself to a force of nature. But Homer had already done it: there was no point in regretting it now, it was too late.

In the pitch darkness the silence didn’t seem so dense. Strange mutterings and whispers were hatching through its smooth shell, something howled in the distance, something rustled. In some sounds the old man fancied he heard the shambling, drunken footfalls of the corpse-eaters, in others he heard the slithering of the phantom giants at Nagornaya, and in some the cries of dying men. Before even ten minutes had passed, he surrendered.

He clicked the switch and shuddered.

Hunter was standing two steps away from him with his arms crossed on his chest, staring at the sleeping girl. Blinded by the sudden light, he put his hand over his eyes and said calmly:

‘They’ll open the door now.’

Sasha was dreaming: she was alone at Kolomenskoe again, waiting for her father after one of his ‘strolls’. He was late, but she had to wait for him, help him take off his outer clothes, pull off his gas mask, feed him. The table was already laid for lunch and she didn’t know what to busy herself with. She wanted to leave the door leading to the surface, but what if he came back at the very moment when she wasn’t there? Who would open it for him? And there she was, sitting on the cold floor beside the door, and the hours flew by, the days came and went, and he still didn’t return, but she wouldn’t leave her place until the door… She was woken by the hollow clang of a bolt opening – a bolt exactly like the ones on the door at Kolomenskoe. She woke up with a smile – her father had come back. Then she looked round and remembered everything.

The only real part of her rapidly fading vision was the screeching of the gigantic latches on the metal door. A minute later the immense slab started vibrating and moving slowly. A beam of light poured through the widening crack and diesel fumes seeped out. The entrance to the Greater Metro…

The door gently moved aside and slipped into its groove, revealing the insides of the tunnel that led to Avtozavod Station, and then on to the Circle. Standing on the rails, with its engine growling, all ready to go, was a large motor trolley with a front floodlight and several riders. In the hairlines of their machine-gun sight the men on the trolley saw two travellers wincing at the light and covering their eyes.

‘Hands!’ a voice shouted.

Sasha followed the old man and obediently raised her hands. This time the motor trolley was the same one that used to come out across the bridge on trading days. The team on it knew all about Sasha’s story. And now the old man with the strange name would regret taking the shackled girl from the empty station without bothering to ask how she came to be there.

‘Take off your gas masks, present your documents,’ the voice ordered from the trolley.

As she revealed her face, she castigated herself for being so stupid. Nobody could set her free. No one had annulled the sentence passed on her father – and on Sasha along with him. Why had she believed that these two could take her into the Metro? Did she think she wouldn’t be noticed at the frontier?’

‘Hey, you! You can’t come in here!’ She had been recognised immediately. ‘You’ve got ten seconds to disappear. And who’s this? Is this your…’

‘What’s going on?’ asked the old man, bewildered.

‘Don’t you dare! Leave him alone! It’s not him!’ Sasha shouted.

‘Clear off!’ the man with an automatic told her in an icy voice. ‘Or we’ll shoot… To kill.’

‘At a girl?’ a second voice asked uncertainly.

‘I told you…’ said the first man, snapping the breech of his automatic in anticipation.

Sasha backed away and squeezed her eyes shut, preparing to meet death for the third time in the space of a few hours. Something gave a quiet chirrup and then fell silent. The final order never came: the girl couldn’t bear to wait any longer and she half-opened one eye.

The engine was still smoking, with its blue-grey fumes drifting through the torrent of white light pouring out of the projector, which was pointing up at the ceiling.

They were all lying on the trolley or beside it, like gutted dolls: limply dangling arms, unnaturally twisted necks, shattered bodies.

Sasha turned away. The man with the shaved head was standing behind her with his pistol lowered, examining the trolley that had been transformed into a meat chopping board. He raised the barrel and squeezed the trigger again.

‘That’s all now,’ he boomed, satisfied. ‘Take off their uniforms and gas masks.’

‘What for?’ the old man asked with a shudder.

‘We’re getting changed. We’ll drive through Avtozavod on their trolley.’

Sasha froze, gazing dumbfounded at the killer: inside her, fright struggled against admiration, revulsion mingled with gratitude. He had just killed three men as if it was nothing, breaking her father’s most important commandment. But he had done it to save her life – and the old man’s, of course. Could it be a coincidence that he had saved her for the second time? Was she confusing sternness with cruelty?

She knew one thing for certain: this man’s fearlessness made her forget his deformity.

The man with the shaved head went over to the trolley first and started tearing the rubber scalps off his fallen enemies. Then suddenly he staggered back from the motor trolley as if he had seen the devil in person, holding out both arms in front of himself and repeating one word over and over again…

‘Black!’