Metro 2034

CHAPTER 12 Signs

Back home at Kolomenskoe, the surface was very close – only fifty-six shallow steps away. But Pavelets had burrowed much deeper under the ground. As she scrambled up the creaking escalator, mutilated by bursts of machine-gun fire, Sasha could see no end to this climb. All that her feeble flashlight could pick out of the darkness were the shattered glass covers of the lamps along the escalator and the rusty, twisted metal plates on the wall with images of pale, bleary faces and big letters that made up meaningless words.

Why should she go up there? Why should she die?

But who needed her down below? Who really needed her as a person, not as a character in a book that hadn’t been written yet?

Why bother trying to deceive herself any longer?

When Sasha walked away from the empty station at Kolomenskoe, leaving her father’s body there, it felt as if she was carrying out their old plan of escape, carrying away a little part of him in her and helping him to escape at least in that way. But since then she hadn’t dreamed about him even once, and when she tried to summon up his image in her imagination in order to share what she had seen and experienced with him, it came out vague and mute. Her father couldn’t forgive her and he didn’t want to be rescued like this.

Among the books he had found that Sasha managed to leaf through before exchanging them for food and cartridges, she had special memories of an old reference work on botany. The illustrations in it were strictly conventional: black-and-white photographs that had faded with age and pencil sketches. But in all the other books that came her way she didn’t find any pictures at all, and this one was Sasha’s favourite. And the plant she liked more than all the others in the book was the bindweed. No, it wasn’t even that she liked it – she felt sympathy for the bindweed because she recognised herself in it. She needed support in just the same way, didn’t she? In order to grow upwards. In order to reach the light.

And now her instinct demanded that she find a mighty trunk that she could cling to, embracing it and winding herself around it. Not in order to suck the juices out of someone else’s body and live on them, not in order to take away his light and warmth. Simply because without him she was too soft, too flexible and flabby to hold out, and on her own she would always have to trail across the ground.

Sasha’s father had told her she shouldn’t be dependent on anyone or rely on anyone. After all, in their forgotten way station, he was the only one she had to rely on, and he knew he wasn’t immortal. Her father wanted her to grow up as a tall, sturdy pine tree, not climbing ivy: he forgot that this contradicted a woman’s nature.

Sasha would have survived without him. She would have survived without Hunter too. But to her, fusion with another person seemed like the only reason to think about the future. When she wrapped her arms round him on the hurtling trolley, it felt as if her life had acquired a new core. She remembered that trusting other people was dangerous, and being dependent on them was unworthy, and she had to force herself to try to confess her feelings to the man with the shaved head. Sasha wanted to nestle up to him, and he thought she was clutching at his boots. Left without any support, trampled into the ground, she wasn’t going to demean herself by continuing her quest. He had driven her away, banished her to the surface. All right then: if anything happened to her up there, it would be his fault: he was the only one who could prevent it.

The steps finally came to an end and Sasha found herself on the edge of a spacious marble hall with a fluted metal ceiling that had collapsed in places. Incredibly bright beams of greyish-white light were pouring in through the distant gaps, and scattered rays from them even reached as far the nook where she was standing. Sasha switched off the flashlight, held her breath and started furtively creeping forward.

The bullet scars on the walls and marble splinters by the mouth of the escalators testified that human beings had been here at one time. But after only a few dozen steps she reached the domain of different creatures.

The heaps of dried dung, gnawed bones and scraps of skin scattered around the floor indicated that Sasha was at the very heart of the beasts’ lair. Covering her eyes so they wouldn’t be scorched by the light, she walked towards the exit. And the closer Sasha came to the source of the light, the thicker the darkness became in the secluded corners of the halls she was walking through. As she learned to look at the light, Sasha was losing the ability to sense the darkness.

The halls that followed were filled to overflowing with the skeletons of overturned kiosks, heaps of all sorts of incredible junk and the carcasses of machines that had been picked apart. It gradually dawned on her that people had turned the outer pavilions of Pavelets station into a staging post to which they dragged all the goods from the surrounding area, until more powerful creatures had forced them out of here.

Sometimes Sasha fancied she saw something stirring faintly in the dark corners, but she put it down to her advancing blindness. The darkness huddling there was already too dense for her to distinguish the ugly forms of the sleeping monsters from the mountains of garbage that they merged into.

The monotonous whining of the draught smothered the sound of their heavy, snuffling breathing and Sasha could only make it out when she passed within a few steps of a trembling heap. She listened warily, then froze, gazed hard at the outlines of an overturned kiosk and discovered a strange hump in its jagged profile. She was dumbfounded. The hill that the kiosk was buried in was breathing. And almost all the other mounds surrounding her were breathing as well. In order to make sure, Sasha clicked the switch of her flashlight and pointed it at one of them. The pale little beam landed on fat folds of white skin, ran on across an immense body and disintegrated before reaching the end of it. It was a fellow creature of the monster that had almost killed Sasha on the platform at Pavelets, but it was far bigger than that beast.

In their strange torpid state the creatures didn’t seem to notice her. But then the closest one suddenly growled, sucked in air noisily through the angled slits of its nostrils and started stirring restlessly. Coming to her senses, Sasha put the flashlight away and hurried on. Every step she took through this appalling dormitory cost her a greater and greater effort: the further she moved away from the way down into the Metro the more tightly the monsters were packed together, and the harder it became to find a way through between their bodies. It was too late to turn back. Sasha wasn’t concerned at all about how she could get back into the Metro. Just as long as she could get past these creatures unheard, without alarming a single one of them, and make her way outside, look around and… Just as long as they didn’t awaken from their dormant state, just as long as they let her out of here: she wouldn’t need to look for a way back. Not daring to breathe deeply, trying not even to think – what if they heard her! – she moved slowly towards the way out. A broken tile crunched treacherously under her boots. One more wrong step, an accidental rustle – and they would wake up and tear her to pieces in an instant.

And Sasha couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that only very recently – yesterday, or perhaps even today – she had been wandering between sleeping monsters like this… At least, the strange feeling was familiar to her from somewhere.

She froze on the spot.

Sasha knew that you could sometimes feel someone else’s gaze on the back of your head. But these creatures didn’t have eyes, and what they used to probe the space around them was far more material and insistent than any gaze.

She didn’t need to look round to know that despite all her caution a creature had woken up and was staring hard at her back. But she looked round anyway.

The girl had completely disappeared, but just at that minute Homer didn’t have the slightest desire to go dashing off to search for her, just as he didn’t have any other desires.

The signal officer’s diary might have left the old man a smidgen of hope that the sickness would pass him by, but Hunter had been quite ruthless. In launching into his thoroughly planned conversation with the brigadier, the old man had, in effect, been lodging an appeal against his death sentence. But Hunter hadn’t shown him any mercy – and he couldn’t have done in any case. Homer alone was to blame for what would inevitably happen to him.

Only a couple of weeks or even less. Only ten pages covered with writing. And all the other things that had to be compressed and squeezed into the remaining clean pages of that exercise book with the oil cloth cover. But quite apart from his own desires, Homer also had a duty, and their enforced halt at Pavelets seemed to be coming to an end.

He smoothed out the paper, intending to pick up the narrative from where he had broken off the last time at the sound of the doctors’ shouts. But instead of that his hand traced out the same old question: ‘What will be left after me?’ And what would be left after the unfortunates locked in at Tula, he thought, perhaps despairing, perhaps still waiting for help, but doomed to a cruel reckoning either way. A memory? But there were so few people who could be found to remember anyone.

And memories were a frail mausoleum anyway. Soon the old man would be gone, and everyone he had known would disappear along with him. His Moscow would disappear into nowhere too. Where was he now, on Pavelets Station? The Garden Ring Road was bare and dead now – during the final hours military vehicles had cleared it and cordoned it off, in order to allow the rescue services to go about their work and give the cortèges of cars with flashing lights freedom to move. The thoroughfares and side streets grinned with their rotten, gap-toothed rows of detached buildings… The old man could easily imagine the local landscape, although he had never gone up out of the Metro at this station.

Before the war he had been here quite often: he used to arrange to meet his future wife for a date in a café beside the station, then they would go to the evening session in the cinema. And not far from here he had gone through the remarkably superficial medical examination that he was obliged to pay for when he was planning to get his driving licence. And this was the station where he had got into a suburban train when he joined an outing into the summer forest with his workmates, to cook kebabs over a campfire… Looking at the paper ruled off into little squares, he saw the square in front of the station, shrouded in autumn mist, and two towers melting into the haze: the pretentious new office block on the Garden Ring Road – one of his friends worked there – and a little further away, the twisted spire of an expensive hotel, tacked on to an expensive concert hall. Nikolai had checked the ticket prices once: they cost slightly more than he earned in two weeks.

He could see and even hear the jangling, angular, white-and-blue trams, packed with dissatisfied passengers whose annoyance at this harmless crush was so touching. And the Garden Ring Road itself, winking festively with tens of thousands of headlights and indicators, all strung out in a single continuous garland. And the timid, incongruous snow, melting before it could even settle on the asphalt. And the crowd – myriads of electrically charged particles, all energised and clashing together as they darted about in apparent chaos, but each one of them actually moving along its own meaningful path. He saw the ravine between the monolithic Stalinist skyscrapers, from which the great river of the Garden Ring flowed out lazily onto the square, with hundreds and hundreds of aquarium-windows lighting up on both sides of it. And the neon flashes of the signs, and the titanic advertising hoardings, shamefacedly concealing the gaping wound in which they were setting a new multi-storey implant…

Which would never be finished.

Watching all this, he understood that he could never express this magnificent picture in words. Would the only things left out of all this really be the subsided, moss-covered, tombstones of the business centre and the fashionable hotel?

She still hadn’t shown up an hour later, or even three. Feeling anxious, Homer walked round the entire passage, questioned the traders and musicians and spoke with the leader of the Hansa patrol. Nothing. She’d vanished into thin air.

Not knowing what to do with himself, the old man came to anchor again at the door of the room where the brigadier was lying. The very last man he could ask for advice about the girl’s disappearance. But who else did Homer have left now? He cleared his throat and glanced inside.

Hunter was lying there, breathing heavily, gazing fixedly at the ceiling. His right arm – the uninjured one – was lying on top of the blanket and the tightly clenched fist had been grazed on something very recently. The shallow scratches were oozing lymph, staining the bed, but the brigadier didn’t notice.

‘When are you ready to leave?’ he asked Homer, without turning towards him.

‘Me, I could go right now,’ the old man said and hesitated. ‘There’s a problem though… I can’t find the girl. And how can you go, anyway. You’re all…’

‘I won’t die,’ the brigadier replied. ‘And there are worse things than death. Get ready. I’ll be on my feet in an hour and a half. We’ll head for Dobrynin.’

‘An hour will be enough, but I need to find her, I want her to go on with us… I really need her to, do you understand?’ Homer said hastily.

‘I’m leaving in an hour,’ Hunter snapped. ‘With you or without you… And without her.’

‘I can’t think where she could have disappeared to!’ the old man sighed in frustration. ‘If only I knew…’

‘I know,’ the brigadier said calmly. ‘But you can’t bring her back from there, that’s for sure. Get ready.’

Homer backed away and started blinking. He’d got used to relying on his travelling companion’s supernatural intuition, but this time he refused to believe him. What if Hunter was lying again, this time to get rid of an unnecessary burden?

‘She told me you need her…’

‘I need you,’ said Hunter inclining his head slightly towards Homer. ‘And you need me.’

‘What for?’ Homer hissed under his breath, but the brigadier heard him.

‘A lot depends on you,’ said Hunter, blinking slowly, but the old man suddenly got the impression that the heartless brigadier was winking at him, and he broke out in a cold sweat.

The bed gave a long, drawn-out creak as Hunter gritted his teeth and sat up.

‘Leave me,’ he told the old man. ‘And get ready if you want to be in time.’

But before he cleared out, Homer lingered for a second to pick up the red plastic powder compact lying abandoned in the corner. It had cracks running right across the lid and the hinges had bent open and come apart.

The mirror was shattered to smithereens.

The old man turned back abruptly towards the brigadier.

‘I can’t go without her.’

It was almost twice as tall as Sasha; its head touched the ceiling and its sharp-clawed arms hung down to the floor. Sasha had seen the lightning speed with which these beasts moved and the incredible swiftness of their attack. A creature like this could reach the girl and finish her with a single movement, simply by flailing one of its limbs forward. But for some reason it was taking its time.

Shooting at it was pointless, and Sasha wouldn’t have had enough time even to raise her automatic. She took a hesitant step backwards, towards the way out. The monster gave a low moan and swayed towards the girl. But nothing happened. The monster stayed where it was, keeping its blind, intent gaze fixed on Sasha. She ventured another step. And another. Without turning her back on the beast, without showing it her fear, she gradually moved closer to the way out. The creature plodded after Sasha as if it were spellbound, hanging back just a little, as if it were seeing her to the door.

It was only when the girl, now only ten metres away from the unbearable glow of that gap, couldn’t stand it any more and broke into a run, that the beast roared and dashed forward too. Sasha flew outside, squeezed her eyes shut and dashed on, unable to see anything, until she stumbled and went tumbling across the rough, hard ground. She waited for the monster to overtake her and tear her to shreds, but for some reason her pursuer allowed her to get away. A long, lingering minute passed, and then another. There was silence all around.

Sasha didn’t open her eyes until she had fumbled in her bag and found the home-made glasses she had bought from the sentry – two dark glass bottle-bottoms set in metal rings and mounted on a length of twine. The glasses had to be pulled on over a gas mask, so that the transparent green discs sat precisely on top of the peepholes in the rubber. Now she could look. Slowly parting her eyelids and peeping suspiciously out of the corners of her eyes at first, then gazing more boldly, Sasha looked round at the strange place she had ended up in.

Above her head was the sky. The real sky, bright and immense. Giving more light than any searchlight, illuminated in an even green colour all the way across, masked by low clouds in places and in others opening up into a bottomless abyss.

The sun! She saw it through an attenuated veil of cloud: a round disc the size of a detonator cap, polished to a spotless white and so bright that Sasha felt as if it would burn a hole in her glasses in another moment. She turned her eyes away in fright, waited for a little while and then stole another glance at it. She fancied there was something rather disappointing about it: after all, it was just a blinding hole in the sky, why should it be worshipped like a god? And yet it was enchanting, it attracted and excited her. The opening of the exit from the beasts’ lair had shone almost as brightly for eyes accustomed to darkness; what if, Sasha suddenly thought, the sun was exactly the same kind of way out, an exit leading to a place where it was never, ever dark… And if you could fly to it, you could escape from the earth, in exactly the same way as she had just escaped from under the earth? And the sun also gave out a weak, barely perceptible warmth, as if it were alive.

Sasha was standing in the middle of a bare, stony open space, surrounded by ancient, half-ruined buildings, so high that the black gaps of their windows were piled up in almost ten rows. The number of buildings was almost infinite, they crowded together, concealing each another from Sasha as they jostled to get a better look at her. Peeking out from behind the tall buildings were even higher ones, and behind them she could distinguish the vague outlines of absolutely huge buildings. It was incredible, but Sasha could see them all!

It wasn’t important that they were tinted a silly-looking green, like the ground under her feet, like the air itself and the insanely glowing, bottomless sky – she could see such unimaginably vast distances now.

No matter how long Sasha had trained her eyes to see in the dark, that was not what they were intended for. At night-time all she could see from the cliff beside the Metro bridge were the ugly structures standing a few hundred metres away from the hermetic door. After that the darkness was laid on too thickly and even though Sasha had been born underground, her gaze couldn’t scrape through it.

The girl had never seriously wondered before just how big the world she lived in was. But when she did think about it, Sasha had always imagined a small cocoon of twilight, several hundred metres in each direction, and beyond that a precipice that was final, the edge of the universe, the beginning of absolute darkness.

Although she knew the earth was actually far bigger than that, Sasha couldn’t imagine what it looked like. And now she realised there was no way she could have done that anyway – simply because it was impossible to picture it, never having seen anything like it before. And the strange thing was that somehow she didn’t feel at all afraid to stand in the middle of this boundless wasteland. Before, when she crept out of the tunnel onto the cliff, she felt as if she had been dragged out of her protective shell, but now it seemed more like an eggshell that she had finally hatched out of. By daylight any danger could be spotted at a great distance, and Sasha would have more than enough time to hide or prepare to defend herself. There was also another timid feeling that she was unfamiliar with – as if she had come home. The draught drove tangles of prickly branches across the barren space, whistled dejectedly in the crevices between the buildings and shoved Sasha in the back, demanding that she be more daring, ordering her to set out and explore this new world.

She really had no choice anyway: to get back down into the Metro, she would have to go back into the building swarming with those fearsome creatures – only they weren’t sleeping anymore. Sometimes white bodies flickered momentarily in the dark wells of the entrances and immediately disappeared: they obviously de-tested the daylight. But what would happen when night fell? She had to get as far away from here as possible before that happened if she intended to see at least something of what the old man had described so vividly, before she died.

And Sasha moved on.

She had never felt so little before. She couldn’t believe that these gigantic buildings could have been built by people the same height as she was. Why did they need all this? Probably the final generations before the war had degenerated and shrunk in size… nature had prepared them for a harsh existence in the cramped tunnels and stations. But these buildings had been erected by the present squat human beings’ ancestors – as mighty, tall and statuesque as the buildings they lived in.

She came to a broad open patch: the buildings moved apart here and the ground was covered with a cracked grey crust that looked like stone. In a single bound the world became even more immense: from here Sasha had a view of distances that thrilled her heart and set her head spinning.

Squatting down by the mildewed, mossy walls of a castle with a blunt clock tower that propped up the clouds, she tried to picture to herself how this city must have looked before life abandoned it.

Striding along the road – and there was no doubt that it was a road – were tall, beautiful people in bright-patterned clothes that made the most festive costumes of the residents of Pavelets look wretched and stupid. Scurrying along in the vivid crowd were cars, exactly like the carriages of the Metro’s trains, but absolutely tiny, only big enough for four passengers. The buildings weren’t so sombre: their windows weren’t black, gaping holes, they glittered with cleanly washed glass. And Sasha saw light little bridges running between facing houses here and there at various heights. And the sky wasn’t so empty – incredibly huge aeroplanes drifted slowly across it, with their bellies almost touching the roofs. Her father had explained to her that they didn’t have to flap anything in order to fly, but they appeared to Sasha as lazy behemoths with fluttering dragonfly wings that were almost invisible and only shimmered slightly in the greenish rays of the sun.

And it was raining too.

Supposedly it was just water falling from the sky, but the sensation was absolutely incredible. It didn’t just wash away dust and weariness – the jets of hot water from a rusty shower head could do that: the sky water cleaned people on the inside, granting them forgiveness for the mistakes they had made. This magical cleansing washed the grief out of hearts, it renewed and rejuvenated, bringing the desire to carry on living and the strength to do it. Everything was just as the old man had said…

Sasha believed so strongly in this world that under the pressure of her childish sorcery it started breaking through into reality around her. She could hear the light chirring of transparent wings high in the air, and the cheerful babble of the crowd, and the regular tapping of wheels and the humming of the warm rain. The melody she had heard in the passage the day before came back to her and wove itself into this chorus… She felt a painful pricking in her chest.

She jumped up and ran along the very centre of the road against the stream of people, skirting round the sweet little carriage-cars that were stuck in the throng, holding her face up to the heavy raindrops. The old man was right: this really was a wonderful fairytale place, breathtakingly beautiful. Scrape away the patina and mould of time, and the past started to shine – like the coloured mosaics and bronze panels at abandoned stations.

She stopped on the bank of a green river: the bridge that had once spanned it broke off almost as soon as it began, there was no way she could get across to the other side. The magic had run out. The picture that seemed so real, so vivid only a moment ago, faded and disappeared, and in a second all that was left of the beautiful phantom world were the empty buildings, turned stale and dry by age, the cracked skin of the roads, hemmed in along the margins by grass that was two metres tall, and the wild, impenetrable thickets that had swallowed up the remains of the embankment for as far as the eye could see.

And Sasha suddenly felt so hurt and resentful that she would never see that world with her own eyes, that she would have to choose between dying and going back to the Metro, that there wasn’t a single statuesque giant in bright-coloured clothes left anywhere in the world. That apart from her there wasn’t a single living soul on that immensely wide road leading away to the distant point where the sky crept down onto the abandoned city.

The weather was fine and settled. With no rain. Sasha didn’t even feel like crying. It would be really fine now simply to die.

And as if it had heard her wish, high above her head a huge black shadow spread its wings.

What should he do if he had to choose? Let the brigadier go and abandon his book, stay at the station until he found the missing girl? Or forget about her forever and follow Hunter, erase Sasha from his novel and lurk like a spider in its web, waiting for new heroines to come along?

The old man’s rational mind forbade him to separate from the brigadier. If he did, then what sense did his entire expedition make, what sense was there in the deadly danger to which he had exposed the entire Metro? He simply had no right to put his work at risk – it was the only thing that justified all the sacrifices already made and still to come.

But in that moment when he picked the broken mirror up off the floor, Homer had realised that to leave Pavelets without finding out what had happened to the girl would be an act of genuine betrayal. And sooner or later that betrayal would inevitably poison the old man and his novel. He would never be able to erase Sasha from his memory.

Whatever Hunter might tell him, Homer had to do everything possible to find the girl, or at least make certain that she was no longer alive. And the old man set about the search with renewed vigour, occasionally asking people he met what time it was.

The Circle Line station was out of the question – she couldn’t have got into Hansa without any documents. The gallery of rooms and apartments under the connecting passage? The old man searched it from one end to the other, asking everyone he met if they had seen the girl. Eventually someone replied uncertainly that they thought they had run into her, dressed in tarpaulin protective clothing… And from there Homer, unable to believe his ears and his eyes, traced Sasha’s route to the gun post at the foot of the escalator.

‘So what’s it to me? If she wants to go, then let her. I flogged her some good glasses,’ the sentry in the booth answered him lethargically. ‘But I won’t let you through. I’ve already had an earful from the corporal. The Newcomers’ nest is up there. Nobody goes through here. I even thought it was funny when she asked to be let through.’ His pupils, as wide a pistol barrels, prodded at space, without hitting the old man at all. ‘You’d better get along to the passage, granddad. It’ll be getting dark soon.’

Hunter knew! But what did he mean when he said the old man wouldn’t be able to bring her back? Perhaps she was still alive?

Stumbling in his agitation, Homer hurried back to the brigadier’s ward. He ducked under the low lintel of the little secret door, hobbled down the narrow steps, swung the door open without knocking…

The room was empty: no sign of Hunter or his weapons, nothing but the ribbons of bandages dyed brown with dried blood scattered about on the floor, and the empty flask lying there abandoned. And the perfunctorily decontaminated protective suit had disappeared from the closet too.

The brigadier had simply abandoned the old man, like a dog he was tired of, to punish him for his obstinacy.

Her father had always been convinced that people were given signs. They just had to know how to spot them and read them. Sasha glanced up and froze in astonishment. If someone wanted to send her a sign at this very moment, they couldn’t possibly have thought of anything more eloquent.

Not far from the broken-off bridge, an old round tower with an elaborate tip rose up out of the dark thickets; it was the tallest building in the area. The years had not treated it kindly: deep cracks snaked across its walls and the tower was listing dangerously. It would have collapsed long ago, if not for a miracle. Why hadn’t she noticed it sooner?

The building was girded round by an absolutely gigantic bind-weed plant. Of course, its trunk was many times thinner than the tower, but it was more than thick enough and strong enough to hold up the building that was falling apart. The amazing plant wound round the tower in a spiral: thinner branches ran off from the main trunk, and even thinner ones ran off from them, and all together they formed a net that prevented the building from crumbling.

Of course the bindweed had once been as weak and flexible as the youngest and most tender of its shoots was now. It had once clutched at the ledges and balconies of a tower that seemed eternal and indestructible. If the tower hadn’t been so tall, the bindweed wouldn’t have grown so large.

As Sasha gazed spellbound at that rescued building, everything acquired meaning for her again and the desire to fight returned. It was strange, after all, absolutely nothing had changed in her life. But suddenly, despite everything, a tiny shoot of that bindweed had broken through the grey crust of despair in her soul – a green shoot of hope. There might be some things that she could never put right, some deeds that were impossible to undo, that could never be retracted. But in this story there were still many things that she could change, even if she didn’t yet know how. The important thing was that her strength had come back to her.

And now it seemed to Sasha that she had also guessed the reason why the grim monster had let her get away unharmed: someone invisible had held the ferocious beast back on a chain in order to give the girl another chance.

And she was grateful for that. She was ready to forgive, ready to assert what she believed and fight for it again. And all she needed from Hunter was the very slightest hint. Just one more sign.

The setting sun suddenly went out, but immediately flared up again. Sasha flung her head back just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the black silhouette that had hurtled over her head, obscuring the sun’s light for an instant and immediately disappearing from view.

A shrill whistling sound and an ear-splitting howl sliced through the air as the massive hulk lunged down at Sasha out of the sky, missing by only a tiny margin. At the last moment, instinct prompted the girl to fling herself full length on the ground, and that was the only thing that saved her. The outlandish monster skidded along the ground on its outstretched leathery wings, then gave a mighty flap to gain height and started turning in a broad half-circle as it moved in for another attack.

Sasha grabbed her automatic, but immediately abandoned the idea as useless. Not even a burst fired pointblank could knock a carcass like that off course, and it was senseless even to think of bringing it down – she would have to hit it in the first place! The girl dashed back towards the open space from which she had set out on her brief journey, without even thinking about how to get back into the Metro.

The flying monster gave its hunting call and came hurtling at her again. Sasha got her feet tangled in the fat man’s trousers and tumbled face down onto the road, but squirmed round and fired a short, snarling burst. The bullets discouraged the beast, but they didn’t do it any harm at all. In the few seconds she had won herself, the girl managed to get to her feet and dash towards the nearest buildings, realising at last where to find cover from the predator.

There were two shadows circling now, keeping themselves in the air with heavy flaps of broad, webbed wings. Sasha’s calculation was simple: to squeeze up against the wall of any building. The flying monsters were too large and unwieldy to get her there: and after that… She had nowhere to run to in any case.

She made it! She pressed herself against the wall, hoping that the beasts would give up on her. But they didn’t; they had cornered more inventive prey than this before. First one and then the other of the nightmarish creatures landed on the ground about twenty steps away from the girl and started moving towards her, dragging their folded wings behind them.

A burst of automatic fire didn’t frighten, but only infuriated them; the bullets seemed to lodge in their thick, matted fur without reaching the flesh. The beast closer to Sasha snarled balefully, revealing crooked, needle-sharp teeth under the black lip on its upturned snout.

‘Get down!’

Sasha didn’t even bother wondering where the distant voice had come from, she just flung herself face down on the ground. There was a loud explosion very close to her and she was buffeted and scorched by a blast of hot air. A second blast followed immediately, and that was followed by frenzied squealing and the receding sound of flapping wings.

She raised her head timidly, coughed to force the dust out of her lungs and looked around. Not far away the road was gashed open by a fresh crater and splattered with dark, oily blood. A scorched leathery wing, torn out by the roots, was lying near her, with several more charred, shapeless chunks beside it.

A man with a massive, powerful figure, dressed in a heavy protective suit, was striding steadily across the stony space towards Sasha, holding himself erect.

Hunter!