Metro 2034

CHAPTER 4 Tangled Knots

‘Dad… Dad, it’s me, Sasha!’

She carefully loosened the tight canvas strap restraining the terribly bloated chin and removed her father’s helmet. Thrusting her fingers into his sweat-soaked hair, she hooked out the strip of rubber, pulled off his gas mask and flung it aside like a ghastly, shrivelled grey scalp. His chest heaved painfully, his fingers scrabbled at the granite floor and his watery eyes stared at her without blinking, but he didn’t answer. Sasha put the knapsack under his head and dashed to the door. Bracing her skinny shoulder against the enormous panel of metal, she took a deep, deep breath and gritted her teeth. The massive slab yielded reluctantly and scraped into place with a low grunt. Sasha clanged the bolt home and slid down onto the floor. A minute, just one little minute to catch her breath, and then she’d go straight back to him.

Every new expedition drained more of her father’s strength, and the meagre pickings he came back with couldn’t compensate for the loss. These sallies were draining away what was left of his life not by the day, but whole weeks and months at a time. An exorbitant price that had to be paid: if they didn’t have anything to sell, they’d have no choice left but to eat their tame rat – the only one in this God-forsaken death-trap of a station – and then shoot themselves.

Sasha wanted to take her father’s place. So many times she had asked him for the respirator, so that she could go up there, but he was adamant. Probably he knew the filters on the leaky gas mask had been blocked for so long, it was no more use now than any other good luck charm. But he never admitted that to her. He lied about knowing how to clean the filters, he lied about feeling fine after an hour’s ‘stroll’, he lied about simply wanting to be alone, when he was afraid that she would see him vomiting blood.

Sasha was powerless to change anything. They had driven her father and her into this corner and if they hadn’t finished them off, it was more out of contemptuous curiosity than pity. They hadn’t expected the two of them to last more than a week, but her father’s willpower and sheer grit had kept them going for years. Although they were hated and despised, they were given food regularly – but not, of course, for free.

In the breaks between expeditions, in those rare moments when the two of them sat together beside the stunted, smoky little campfire, her father liked to tell her about the way things used to be before. He had realised years ago that there was no point in lying to himself any longer: he had no future. But no one could take away his past. ‘I used to have eyes the same colour as yours,’ he told her. ‘The colour of the sky.’ And Sasha thought she could remember those days too – the days before the gigantic tumour swelled up on his neck, before his eyes faded and turned colourless, when they were still as bright as her own were now.

When her father said ‘the colour of the sky’, of course he meant the azure sky that lived on in his memory, not the crimson sky that eddied and swirled above him when he went up there at night.

He hadn’t seen daylight for more than twenty years. Sasha had never seen it. Except in her dreams – but how could she be sure the way she imagined it was right? Is the world that people blind from birth see in their dreams like ours? And do they see at all, even in their dreams?

When little children squeeze their eyes shut, they think darkness has swallowed up the entire world. They think everyone else around them is as blind as they are at that moment. ‘In the tunnels, a man is as helpless and naïve as those children,’ thought Homer. ‘He can click his flashlight on and off as much as he likes, imagining that he’s the master of light and darkness, but even the very blackest darkness around him can be full of seeing eyes.’

This thought haunted Homer now, after their brush with the scavengers. He had to take his mind off it somehow, distract himself. ‘Strange that Hunter didn’t know what to expect at Nakhimov Prospect,’ he thought. When the brigadier first appeared at Sebastopol two months earlier, none of the sentries could explain how a man with such a massive figure could have slipped past all the guard posts set up in the northern tunnels without being noticed. Thankfully, the perimeter commander hadn’t asked the duty sentries for any explanations.

But if he didn’t come through Nakhimov Prospect, how had Hunter got to Sebastopol? The other routes to the Greater Metro had been cut off ages ago. The only exception was the abandoned Kakhovka line, where no living creature had been seen in the tunnels for many years – and for good reason. Chertanovo? It was ridiculous to suppose that even such a skilled and ruthless warrior could have made his way alone through that cursed station – and it was impossible to get to it without showing up at Sebastopol first.

If the north and the south were excluded, Homer could only assume their mysterious visitor had reached the station from above. Naturally, all the known ways in from the surface and back out to it were thoroughly sealed off and guarded, but still… Could he, for instance, have opened a blocked ventilation shaft? The Sebastopolites thought there was no way the scorched ruins of the concrete-slab high-rises could still throw up someone intelligent enough to disconnect their alarm system. The boundless patchwork chessboard of residential districts was carved apart by fragments of the warheads that fell on the city, and it had been empty for a long, long time. The last human players had abandoned it decades ago, and the horrific, malformed chess figures that roamed across its surface now were playing a new game, by their own rules. Man couldn’t even dream of getting a return match.

Brief excursions in search of anything valuable that hadn’t rotted away in more than twenty years – hasty and humiliating attempts to pillage their own homes – that was all people had the strength for now. Encased in their anti-radiation armour, the stalkers went up there to ransack the skeletons of the nearby low, Khruschev-era buildings for the hundredth time, but they shied away from decisive combat with the new landlords. The most they could do was fire a snarling burst of automatic fire and sit it out in the apartments polluted with rat droppings until the danger had passed – then make a headlong dash for the underground.

The old maps of the capital had lost all resemblance to reality a long time ago. Where once there were wide avenues choked with traffic jams several kilometres long, now there might be gaping precipices or dark, impassable forest thickets. Entire residential areas had been swallowed up by swamps or scorched bald patches. The most reckless stalkers investigated the surface within a radius of up to one kilometre from their home burrows: others were far less ambitious.

The stations that followed Nakhimov Prospect – Nagornaya, Nagatino and Tula – had no exits of their own, and in any case the people living at two of them were too timid to go up onto the surface. It was a mystery to Homer where a living man could have come from in the middle of this wasteland. But he would still have liked to think that Hunter came to their station from the surface. Because there was one other, final possibility for the route the brigadier had followed to reach them. And this possibility came creeping into the godless old man’s mind against his will, while he was trying to control his panting breath and keep up with that dark silhouette rushing ahead so furiously that its feet didn’t even seem to touch the ground.

From below?

‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ Ahmed murmured slowly – just loud enough for Homer to make out his words, but too softly for the brigadier, who had pulled ahead slightly, to hear. ‘We’ve picked the wrong time. Believe me, I’ve been in plenty of convoys here – this is a bad day at Nagornaya.’

It was a long time since the bands of petty robbers, who rested from their plunder at dark way stations as far away as possible from the Circle, had dared to come anywhere near the Sebastopol convoys. When they heard the regular tramping of metal-tipped boots announce the heavy infantry’s approach, the only thought in their minds was how to get out of the way as quickly as possible.

No, they weren’t the reason why the convoys were always so well-guarded, and it wasn’t because of the four-handed scavengers at Nakhimov Prospect either. Iron discipline and audacious courage, with the ability to close ranks into a wall of steel in seconds and exterminate any tangible threat with a withering hail of fire would have made the Sebastopol convoys masters of the tunnels from their own guard posts all the way to Serpukhov… If not for Nagornaya.

Nakhimov Prospect and all its horrors were behind them now, but neither Homer nor Ahmed felt even a moment’s relief. Nagornaya Station, so plain and unassuming, had been the end of the line for many travellers who failed to take it seriously enough. The poor souls at the next station, Nagatino, huddled as far away as possible from the greedy jaws of the tunnel that led south, to Nagornaya. As if that could protect them… As if what crept out of the southern tunnel to garner its harvest wouldn’t bother to prowl a little further in search of prey that suited its taste.

Travelling through Nagornaya Station, you always had to trust to luck, the place was so capricious and inconsistent. Sometimes it let travellers pass, merely frightening them with the bloody stains on its walls and fluted steel columns – as if someone had tried to escape by climbing up them. But the reception it gave the next group, literally only minutes later, would make the survivors think the loss of only half their comrades was a victory. It could never be sated. It had no favourites. It defied observation and study. For the inhabitants of all the stations around it, Nagornaya embodied the whim of fate. And it was the greatest ordeal of all for men who set out on the journey from Sebastopol to the Circle and back.

‘Nagornaya couldn’t have done it all on its own…’ Ahmed was superstitious, like many of the Sebastopolites, and he always spoke about this station as a living creature.

Homer didn’t need to ask what he meant – he had also been wondering how Nagornaya Station could have swallowed up the convoys that had disappeared and all the scouts sent out to search for them. ‘All sorts of things have happened, but for so many men to disappear at once,’ he agreed, ‘it would have choked on them .’

‘Don’t talk like that!’ Ahmed exclaimed, clicking his tongue angrily at Homer and flinging his hands up in alarm – or perhaps he was holding back the slap that the old man was obviously asking for. ‘It won’t choke on you, that’s for sure!’

Homer let that go and reined in his resentment. He didn’t believe Nagornaya could hear what they said and hold it against them. Not at this distance, anyway. Superstition, it was sheer superstition! If you tried to pay homage to all the idols of the underworld, you were bound to fail, you couldn’t avoid offending someone. Homer had stopped worrying about that kind of thing long ago, but Ahmed thought differently. He pulled a set of prayer beads – made of blunt pistol bullets – out of the pocket of his uniform jacket pocket and started twirling the string of lead through his dirty hands and fluttering his lips, praying in his own language to atone for Homer’s offences against Nagornaya. But the station didn’t seem to understand him, or perhaps it was already too late for apologies.

Hunter detected something with his supernatural sense of smell and waved his gloved hand, killing the pace. He sank down slowly onto the ground. ‘There’s fog up there,’ he said curtly. ‘What’s that?’

Homer and Ahmed exchanged glances. They both understood what it meant: the hunt was on, and now they would need all their luck to reach the northern limits of Nagornaya alive.

‘How can I put it?’ Ahmed replied reluctantly. ‘It’s breathing.’

‘What is?’ the brigadier asked him coolly and shook his knapsack off his shoulders, evidently planning to select the appropriate calibre from his arsenal.

‘Nagornaya Station,’ said Ahmed, switching to a whisper.

‘We’ll see about that,’ Hunter said with a contemptuous, crooked grin.

But no, Homer had only imagined the brigadier’s mutilated face coming to life: it had remained as immobile as ever – the grin was only a trick of the light.

A hundred metres further on the other two saw it: a heavy white mist creeping over the ground towards them, first licking at their boots, then twining round their knees, then flooding the tunnel waist-high. It was as if they were slowly walking into a cold, hostile, ghostly sea, sinking deeper and deeper with every step they took across its deceptively sloping bottom, until they were totally submerged in its murky waters.

They couldn’t see a thing. The flashlight beams got stuck in this strange mist like flies in a cobweb: they forced their way a few steps forward, then ran out of strength, went limp and hung there in mid-air – feeble, submissive captives. Sounds were hard to make out, as if they were forcing their way through a feather mattress, and it even became harder to move, as if the team really was walking over a silty sea bed, not a line of railway sleepers.

It got harder to breathe too, but not because of the humidity – it was the unusual, tart aroma that had appeared in the air. The men felt reluctant to let it into their lungs, it made them feel as if they were drawing into themselves the breath of some huge, alien creature that had already extracted all the oxygen from the air and saturated it with poisonous exhalations.

To be on the safe side, Homer pulled his respirator back over his face. Hunter gave him a quick glance, then lowered his hand into the canvas bag hanging under his shoulder, tugged open a strap and slapped a new, rubber mask over his usual one. Ahmed was the only one left without a gas mask – he had either forgotten it in his haste or decided not to bother.

The brigadier froze again, pointing his tattered ear towards Nagornaya, but in the dense white murk he couldn’t make out the snatches of sound coming from the station clearly enough to assemble them into a complete picture. Something really massive seemed to tumble over with a crash, someone gave a long whoop on a note too low for a man – or for any kind of animal. There was a hysterical scraping of metal, as if a hand was tying one of the thick pipes running along the wall into a knot.

Hunter tossed his head, as if he were throwing off some kind of dirt that was sticking to it, and the short automatic pistol in his hand was replaced by a military Kalashnikov with twin clips and an under-barrel grenade launcher. ‘At last,’ he murmured to himself.

They reached the station without even realising it. Nagornaya was flooded with fog as thick as pig’s milk: gazing at it through the misted lenses of his gas mask, Homer felt like a scuba-diver who had swum into a sunken ocean liner.

The similarity was emphasised by the embossed panels decorating the walls: seagulls imprinted into metal by a crude, artless Soviet stamp. More than anything else they resembled the imprints of fossilised organisms exposed on the ruptured surfaces of rock strata. ‘Fossilisation – that’s the fate of man and his creations,’ Homer thought briefly. ‘But who’ll dig them up?’

The miasma filling the air around them was alive – it flowed and quivered. Sometimes patches of darkness condensed out of it – at first Homer thought he saw a mangled and twisted carriage or a rusty sentry box, and then it was the scaly body or head of some mythical monster. He was afraid even to imagine who might have occupied the crew’s quarters and settled into the first-class cabins in the decades that had passed since the shipwreck. He’d heard a lot about things that had happened at Nagornaya, but he’d never come face to face with…

‘There it is. Over there, on the right!’ yelled Ahmed, tugging the old man by the sleeve.

There was the muffled pop of a shot fired through a homemade silencer.

Homer swung round at a speed that was impossible with his rheumatism, but his blunted flashlight lit up nothing except a section of column faced with ribbed metal

‘Behind us! There, behind us!’ Ahmed fired a short burst, but his bullets merely crumbled the remnants of marble slabs that had once covered the walls of the station. Whatever features Ahmed had spotted in the trembling mirage, their owner had dissolved back into it unharmed.

‘He’s breathed too much of this stuff,’ thought Homer.

And then, out of the very corner of his eye, he saw something… Gigantic, hunched over – because the station’s fifteen-foot ceiling was too low for it – something unbelievably agile for its immense size, breaking out of the fog on the very boundary of visibility and swaying back in again before the old man could train his automatic on it.

Homer looked round helplessly for the brigadier. He was nowhere to be seen.

‘Okay. Okay. Don’t worry,’ her father reassured her, halting to rest between the words. ‘You know… somewhere in the Metro right now there are people who are far more afraid…’

He tried to smile, but it turned out terrifying, like a skull with a jaw that has come adrift. Sasha smiled back, but a salty dewdrop crept down across her sharp, soot-stained cheekbone. At least her father had come round – and the few hours that seemed so long had given her time to think everything through again.

‘A real failure this time, I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I decided to go to the garages after all. But it turned out to be too far. I found one completely untouched. A stainless steel castle, covered in oil. I couldn’t break in, so I attached a charge, the last one. I was hoping there’d be a car inside, spare parts. And when I blasted it opened, it was empty. Nothing at all. So why did they lock it, the bastards? And that thunderous noise… I was praying no one would hear. Then I walked out of the garage and I was surrounded by dogs on all sides. I thought that was it… I thought I was done for…’

Her father lowered his eyelids and stopped talking. Feeling alarmed, Sasha grabbed hold of his hand, but he just swayed his head gently, without opening his eyes, as if to tell her: Don’t worry, everything’s okay. He was too weak even to speak, but he wanted to tell her how it happened, he needed to explain why he’d come back empty-handed, why they would have a tough week now until he got back on his feet. But sleep overcame him before he could tell her.

Sasha checked the bandage wrapped round his torn calf – it was soaked through with black blood – and changed the compress that was already hot. She straightened up, went over to the rat’s little house and opened the tiny door a crack. The little beast peeped out warily and hid again, but then it did what Sasha was hoping for and scrabbled out onto the platform to stretch its legs. The rat’s intuition never let it down: the tunnels were quiet. Reassured, the girl went back to the stretcher bed.

‘You will definitely get up, you’ll walk again,’ she whispered to her father. ‘And you’ll find a garage with an entire car in it, all in one piece. And we’ll go up there together, get into it and drive far away from here. Ten, fifteen stations away. To where no one knows us, where we’ll be strangers. Where no one will hate us. If there is a place like that anywhere…’

She was telling him the same magical fairytale that she had heard from him so often, repeating it word for word, and now, as she recited this old mantra of her father’s, she believed in it a hundred times more powerfully. She would nurse him back to health, she would cure him. There was a place in this world where no one could give a damn about them. A place where they could be happy.

‘There it is! There! It’s looking at me!’

Ahmed squealed as if he had already been seized and dragged away, he screamed as he had never allowed himself to scream before. His automatic roared again, then stuttered and choked. Ahmed’s usual composure deserted him completely and he trembled violently as he tried to insert a full clip into the slot.

‘It’s chosen me… Me.’

Somewhere nearby another automatic barked briefly, fell silent for a second and then chattered again in clipped, three-shot bursts. Hunter was still alive after all, so there was still hope. The chattering moved away and then came closer, but it was impossible to tell if the bullets had found their mark. Homer strained his ears in vain for the furious roar of a wounded monster. The station was enveloped in oppressive silence; its mysterious residents seemed to be either immaterial or invulnerable.

Now the brigadier was waging his strange battle at the far end of the platform, where fiery strings of tracer bullets repeatedly flared up and faded away. Enthralled by his fight with phantoms, he had abandoned his men to their fate. Homer took a deep breath and looked up, cautiously giving in to the desire that had been tormenting him for several long moments already. He could feel that gaze all too clearly with his skin, the top of his head, the fine hairs on his neck – a cold, leaden, crushing gaze – and he couldn’t fight his foreboding any longer.

Right up under the ceiling, high above their heads, another head was hovering in the fog. A head so immense that at first Homer didn’t realise what he was looking at. The titanic creature’s body remained hidden in the dense gloom of the station, leaving its monstrous face suspended, swaying in the air above the tiny little men brandishing their useless weapons: strangely, it seemed in no hurry to attack, allowing them a brief respite.

Numb with horror, the old man sank to his knees, resigned to his fate, and the automatic rifle tumbled out of his hands, clanking pitifully against a rail. Ahmed howled and screeched hideously. The creature shifted forward effortlessly, and all the space in front of them was blotted out by its dark body, as huge as a cliff. Homer closed his eyes, readying himself, saying goodbye… He had only one thought left, one regret – a bitter thought searing through his mind: ‘I haven’t finished yet!’

And at that very moment the grenade launcher spat fire and the pressure wave slammed into his ears, deafening them, leaving behind a subtle whistling sound that went on and on. Gobbets of burnt flesh came showering down. Ahmed, the first to gather his wits, tugged the old man to his feet by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away. They ran forward, stumbling over sleepers and getting up again without feeling any pain. They clung to each other, because it was impossible to make out anything through the milky haze even at arm’s length. They raced along as if it was not mere death pursuing them, but something infinitely more terrible – the final extinction and utter annihilation of their bodies and souls.

Demons pursued them, invisible and almost completely silent, but only one step behind, escorting them without attacking, toying with them, allowing them the illusion of escape.

Then the chipped marble walls gave way to the lining of the tunnel: they’d made it through Nagornaya! And the guardians of the station were left behind, as if they had reached the limit of the chains to which they were attached. But it was still too soon to stop. Ahmed strode on in front, feeling for the pipes on the walls, groping for the way ahead and goading on the old man, who was stumbling along, and kept trying to sit down.

‘What happened to the brigadier?’ Homer croaked, tearing off his stifling gas mask as he walked.

‘When the fog ends, we’ll stop and wait. That must be soon now, very soon! Only another two hundred metres… Get out of the fog. The important thing is to get out of the fog,’ Ahmed kept intoning. ‘I’m going to count the steps…’

But after two hundred steps, and even after three hundred, the haze enveloping them was still as dense as ever. ‘What if it’s spread all the way to Nagatino?’ thought Homer. ‘What if it’s already gobbled up Tula and Nakhimov Prospect?’

‘It’s not possible… I must… Not far to go now…’ Ahmed mumbled for the hundredth time and suddenly froze on the spot. Homer ran into him and they both tumbled to the ground.

‘There’s no more wall,’ said Ahmed, stroking the sleepers, the rails, the rough, damp concrete of the floor in dumb bewilderment, as if afraid that any moment now the ground would treacherously slip away from under his feet in the same way as his other support had vanished.

‘Here it is, what’s wrong with you?’ said Homer groping around for the slope of a tunnel liner, then grabbing hold of it and cautiously getting to his feet.

‘Sorry,’ said Ahmed and paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘You know, back there at the station… I thought I’d never get away from the place. The way it was looking at me… Looking at me, you know. It had decided to take me. I thought I’d be left there forever. And never buried.’

He had to struggle to force the words out, he didn’t want to let them out for a long time – he was ashamed of screaming like a woman. He wanted to make excuses – and he knew there couldn’t be any excuses. Homer shook his head.

‘Drop it. I pissed my pants, and it’s not bothering me any. Come on, we must be almost there now.’

The pursuit had been called off, they could get their breath back. They couldn’t run any longer in any case, and they wandered along, clutching at the walls as blindly as ever. Advancing towards deliverance step by step. The worst of the terror was behind them, and although the murk was still not receding, sooner or later the predatory draughts of the tunnels would bite into it, shred it and drag the shreds into the ventilation shafts. Sooner or later they would reach a place where there were people and wait there for their delayed commander.

It happened sooner than they could possibly have hoped – maybe because time and space were both distorted in the fog. A cast-iron ladder appeared, running up the wall onto a platform, the round cross-section of the tunnel gave way to a right-angled one and a hollow appeared between the rails – a safe refuge for passengers who fell onto the track.

‘Look at that,’ whispered Homer. ‘It looks like a station! A station!

‘Hey, is there anyone there?’ Ahmed yelled as loud as he could. ‘Hey lads! Is anyone there?’ he yelled, overwhelmed by senseless, triumphant laughter.

The yellowish, exhausted beams of their flashlights picked slabs of marble, gnawed away by time and people, out of the hazy gloom. Not one of the bright-coloured mosaics – the pride and joy of Nagatino – had survived. And what had become of the stone-faced columns? Could this really be…?

No one answered Ahmed, but he didn’t despair and carried on calling cheerfully: it was obvious enough, the people had taken fright at the fog and run off – but they couldn’t fool him like that! Meanwhile Homer kept searching anxiously for something on the walls, licking at them with his fading beam of light, while suspicion chilled his blood.

And then at last he found it – iron letters screwed into the cracked marble: NAGORNAYA.

Her father believed it was never accidental when people went back to a place. They returned in order to change something, in order to put something right. Sometimes, he believed, God himself takes us by the scruff of the neck and brings us back to the spot where we accidentally escaped his watchful eye, in order to enforce his sentence – or give us a second chance. That was why, he explained, he would never be able to return from exile to their native station. He had no strength left to take revenge, to struggle, to prove anything. He had long ago stopped wanting anyone’s contrition or remorse. In the old story that had cost him his former life and almost ended his life completely, everyone had got what they deserved, he said. As things turned out, they had been condemned to eternal exile – Sasha’s father didn’t want to put anything right, and in any case the Lord never called into this station.

The rescue plan – to find a car that hadn’t rotted away in over two decades, repair it, fuel it and break out of the narrow circle in which fate had imprisoned them – that plan had been no more than a bedtime story for a long time already.

For Sasha there was another way back to the Greater Metro. When she went down to the bridge on the set day to exchange the clumsily repaired devices, blackened jewellery and mouldy books for food and a few cartridges, sometimes they offered her a lot more.

Training the trolley’s searchlight on her slightly angular, boyish figure, the shuttle traders winked at each other and smacked their lips, beckoning to her and shouting promises. The little girl seemed wild – she glowered at them with her head down, tensed up like a spring, concealing a long-bladed knife behind her back. The loose-fitting man’s overalls couldn’t blur the bold, clear lines of her body. The mud and engine oil on her face only made her blue eyes shine even more brightly, so brightly that some men turned their own eyes away. The white hair, artlessly trimmed with the same knife that was always clutched in her right hand, barely covered her ears, the gnawed lips never smiled.

Soon realising that petty gifts were poor bait for taming a wild wolf, the men on the trolley tried to bribe her with freedom, but she never answered them even once. They decided the girl must be dumb. It was easier like that. Sasha knew perfectly well that no matter what she agreed to, she could never buy two places on the trolley. People had too many accounts for her father to settle, and they couldn’t possibly be paid.

Faceless and with adenoidal voices in their black military gas masks, they weren’t simply enemies to her – she couldn’t see anything human about them, not a single thing that could have set her dreaming, not even at night, even in her dreams.

And so she simply set the telephones, irons and kettles down on the sleepers, moved back ten steps and waited for the shuttle traders to take the goods, fling the bundles of dried pork down on the track and toss her a handful of cartridges, deliberately scattering them out of spite, so they could watch as she collected them, crawling on her hands and knees.

Then the trolley slowly sailed off into a different world and Sasha turned round and went home, where a heap of broken household appliances was waiting for her, along with a screwdriver, a soldering iron and an old bicycle converted into a generator. She mounted it, closed her eyes and hurtled away, far off into the distance, almost managing to forget that she could never move from the spot. And the fact that she had made her own decision to reject the offer of pardon lent her strength.

What the hell? How had they ended up back here? Homer feverishly racked his brains for an explanation. Ahmed suddenly shut up when he saw where Homer was shining his flashlight.

‘This station won’t let me go,’ he said in a hoarse, low voice.

The fog enveloping them had grown so thick, they could barely see each other. Nagornaya had slumbered while the men were away, but it had awoken now: the heavy air fluctuated subtly in response to their words and vague shadows stirred in its depths. And not a single sign of Hunter… There was no way a creature of flesh and blood could win a battle against phantoms. As soon as the station was weary of toying with them, it had shrouded them in its acrid breath and swallowed them alive.

‘You go,’ Ahmed gasped despairingly. ‘I’m the one it wants. You don’t know, you almost never come here.’

‘Stop talking drivel!’ the old man snapped, surprising even himself with the loudness of his voice. ‘We just lost our way in the fog. Let’s go back!’

‘We can’t leave. Run as hard as you like, you’ll end up back here, if you’re with me. You can break out on your own. Please, go.’

‘Stop it, that’s enough!’ Homer grabbed hold of Ahmed’s wrist and dragged him towards the tunnel. ‘You’ll thank me for this in an hour!’

‘Tell my Gulya…’ Ahmed began.

An incredible, monstrously powerful force tore his hand out of Homer’s hand, jerking it upwards into the fog, into extinction. He had no time to cry out, he simply disappeared, as if he had instantaneously disintegrated into atoms, as if he had never existed. The old man screamed and howled for him, spinning round on the spot as if he’d lost his mind, wasting clip after clip of precious cartridges. Then a crushing blow that could only have been struck by one of the local demons landed on the back of his head and the universe imploded.