Страница 2 из 136
‘And what happened to Begovaya?’ Artyom’s voice sounded unusual, unlike him.
‘Nothing happened to them. They saw what the deal was, and exploded the tu
Pyotr Andreevich fell silent, gazing into the fire. Artyom gave a loud cough and said,
‘Yeah… I should’ve shot the thing, of course… I was an idiot.’
A shout came from the south, from the direction of the station:
‘Hey there, at the four-hundredth metre! Everything OK there?’
Pyotr Andreevich folded his hands into the shape of a megaphone and shouted in reply:
‘Come closer! We’ve got a situation here!’
Three figures approached in the tu
‘Hi there, Pyotr! So it’s you here. And I’m thinking to myself – who’d they send off to the edge of the earth today?’ said the senior patrolman, smiling and shaking a cigarette from his pack.
‘Listen, Andryukha! One of my guys saw someone up here. But he didn’t get to shoot… It hid in the tu
‘Didn’t look human? What did it look like, then?’ Andrey turned to Artyom.
‘I didn’t even see it… I just asked for the password, and it ran right off, heading north. But the footsteps weren’t human – they were light, and very quick, as if it had four legs instead of two…’
‘Or three!’ winked Andrey, making a scary face.
Artyom choked, remembering the stories about the three-legged people from the Filevskaya line where some of the stations went up to the surface, and the tu
Andrey took a drag of his cigarette and said to his men, ‘All right, guys, since we’re already here why don’t we sit down for a while? If any three-legged things crawl up on these guys again, we’ll lend a hand. Hey, Artyom! Got a kettle?’
Pyotr Andreevich got up and poured some water from a canister into a beat-up, soot-covered kettle, and hung it over the flame. In a few minutes, the kettle began to whistle as it came to a boil. The sound, so domestic and comforting, made Artyom feel warmer and calmer. He looked around at the men who were sitting at the fire: all of them strong dependable people, hardened by the challenging life they led here. You could trust men like these; you could count on them. Their station always had the reputation for being the most successful along the entire line – and that was all thanks to the men gathered here, and to others like them. They were all co
Artyom was just over twenty years old and had come into the world when life was still up there, on the surface. He wasn’t as thin and pale as the others who’d been born in the metro, who wouldn’t dare go up to the surface for fear of radiation and the searing rays of the sun, which are so ruinous for underground dwellers. True, even Artyom, as far as he could remember, had been on the surface only once, and then it was only for a moment – the background radiation there had been so bad that anyone who got a bit too curious would be completely fried within a couple of hours, before he’d even managed to enjoy a good stroll, and see his fill of the bizarre world that lay on the surface.
He didn’t remember his father at all. His mother had been with him until he was five years old. They lived at Timiryazevskaya. Things had been good, and life had gone smoothly and peacefully, until Timiryazevskaya fell victim to a rat infestation.
One day, huge, grey, wet rats poured from one of the tu
No one bothered the rats. No one descended into their dominions. No one dared to violate their borders.
They came to the people.
Many people perished that day, when a living torrent of gigantic rats – bigger than had ever been seen at either the stations or in the tu
Only a few men remained alive. No women, no old men or children – none of the people who would normally have been saved first, but rather five healthy men who had managed to keep ahead of the death-wreaking torrent. And the only reason they’d outrun it was because they’d happened to be standing near a trolley, on watch in the southern tu
He saw that she was handing him a child’s hand, a small, chubby hand, and he grabbed the hand without even thinking that he was saving someone’s life. And, pulling the child behind him and then picking him up and tucking him under his arm, he raced off with the frontru