It turned out to be rather cramped in the suits and with the bulky weapons in the vehicle’s cab. The rear seats were occupied by some of rucksacks and cases. Ulman had taken the outside seat, Artyom had ended up in the centre, and left of him, behind the wheel, sat Pavel, Ulman’s friend from Prospect Mir.
‘What’s there to excuse? It wasn’t on purpose,’ the driver said. ‘Something the colonel didn’t warn us about. We had the impression a steamroller had passed over the street that runs from Prospect Mir to Rizhskaya. Why that bridge hasn’t collapsed I don’t know. There wasn’t anywhere to hide. We barely got away from some dogs.’
‘Haven’t you seen any dogs yet?’ Ulman asked.
‘I only heard them,’ Artyom responded.
‘Well, we had a good look at them,’ Pavel said, turning the wheel.
‘What about them?’ Artyom was interested in learning from him.
‘It wasn’t anything good. They tore off the bumper and nearly gnawed through the wheel, even though we were moving. They only stopped when Petro took out the leader with the sniper rifle,’ he nodded at Ulman.
It wasn’t easy going: the ground was covered with trenches and holes. The asphalt was cracked and they had to make their way carefully. In one place they got stuck and it took about five minutes to cross a mountain of concrete rubble left from a collapsed bridge. Artyom looked out the window, squeezing the machine gun in his hands.
‘It’s going OK.’ Pavel was talking about the vehicle.
‘Where did you find it?’ Artyom asked.
‘At the depot. In pieces. They weren’t able to fix it, so it couldn’t go to fires while Moscow was burning down. Now we use it from time to time. Not for what it was built for, of course.’
‘Got you.’ Artyom again turned towards the window.
‘We’ve been lucky with the weather.’ Pavel, it seemed, wanted to talk. ‘There’s not a cloud in the sky. That’s good. We’ll be able to see a long way from the tower. If it turns out we reach it.’
‘I’d rather be up there than walking from house to house,’ nodded Ulman.
‘True, the colonel was saying that almost no one lives in them, but I don’t like the word “almost”.’
The vehicle turned left and rolled along a straight, broad street, divided in two by a plot of grass. On the left was a row of almost undamaged brick homes, on the right stretched a gloomy, black forest. Powerful roots covered the roadway in several places and they had to go round them. But Artyom managed to see all this only in passing.
‘Look at it. What a beauty!’ Pavel said with admiration. Straight ahead of them the Ostankino tower supported the sky, rising like a gigantic club threatening enemies brought down long ago. It was a perfectly fantastic structure. Artyom had never seen anything like it even in the pictures in books and magazines. His stepfather, of course, had told him about some Cyclopean structure located only two kilometres from their station, but Artyom hadn’t been able to imagine how it would astound him. For the rest of the way, his mouth was open his mouth in surprise and stared at the grandiose silhouette of the tower, devouring it with his eyes. His delight at seeing this creation of human hands was mixed with the bitterness of finally understanding that nothing like it ever would be created again.
‘It has been so close all this time, and I didn’t even know.’ He tried to express his feelings.
‘If you don’t come to the surface, there’s much you will not understand in this life,’ Pavel responded. ‘Do you at least know why your station is named what it is – VDNKh? It means Great Achievements of Our Economy, that’s what. There was a huge park there with all kinds of animals and plants. And this is what I am telling you: you are really lucky that the “birdies” spun their nest right at the entrance to your station. Because, some of these structures have been softened so much by the X-rays now they can’t even sustain a direct hit from a grenade launcher.’
‘But they respect your feathered friends,’ Ulman added.
‘It is, so to say, your roof.’ Both men began to laugh, and Artyom, who couldn’t be bothered to set Pavel straight regarding the name of his station, stared once more at the tower. He noticed that the enormous structure had leaned a little, but it seemed to have attained a delicate balance and hadn’t fallen. How in hell could something put here decades ago remain standing? Neighbouring houses had been swept away, but the tower proudly rose among this devastation, as if it had been magically preserved from the enemy’s bombs and missiles.
‘It’s interesting how it has survived,’ Artyom muttered.
‘They didn’t want to demolish it, most likely,’ Pavel said. ‘Anyhow, it’s a valuable infrastructure. It was twenty-five per cent higher you know, and there was a pointed spire on top. But now, you see, it’s broken off almost right at the observation deck.’
‘But why spare it? Didn’t they really care anymore? Well, I suppose that it might not have gone well with the Kremlin.’ Ulman was doubtful.
Sweeping through the gate behind the steel rods of the fence, the vehicle approached the very foundation of the television tower and stopped. Ulman took the night vision instrument and the machine gun and jumped to the ground. A minute later he gave the go-ahead: everything was quiet. Pavel also crawled out of the cab and, having opened the rear door, undertook dragging out the rucksacks with the equipment.
‘There should be a signal in twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘We’ll try to catch it from here.’
Ulman found the rucksack with the radio transmitter and began to assemble a long field antenna from the multiple sections. Soon the radio antenna reached six metres in height and lazily swung too and fro in the slight breeze. Sitting at the transmitter, the fighter put the headset with the microphone to his head and began to listen for a transmission. Long minutes of waiting wore on. The shadow of a ‘pterodactyl’ covered them for an instant, but after describing a few circles over their heads, the monster disappeared behind the houses; apparently one encounter with armed people had been enough for it to remember a dangerous enemy.
‘And what do they look like anyhow, these dark ones? You’re our specialist on that,’ Pavel asked Artyom.
‘They look very scary. Like… people inside out,’ Ulman was trying to describe them. ‘The complete opposite of a human. And it’s clear from the name itself: the dark ones – they are black.’
‘You don’t say… and where did they come from? No one even heard of them before, you know. What do they say about that?’
‘It doesn’t matter what you never heard of in the metro.’ Artyom hastened to change the subject. ‘Who from Park Pobedy knew anything about the cannibals?’
‘That’s true,’ the driver brightened up. ‘They found people with needles in their neck, but no one was able to say who had done it. What nonsense the Great Worm is! But this is where these dark ones of yours are from…’
‘I have seen him,’ Artyom interrupted him.
‘The worm?’ Pavel asked, not believing him.
‘Well, something like it. A train, maybe. Huge, it bellows so that you block your ears. I didn’t manage to see what happened – it tore right past me.’
‘No, it couldn’t be a train… What would power it? Mushrooms? Trains are driven by electricity. You know what it reminds me of? A drilling rig.’
‘Why?’ Artyom was taken aback. He had heard about drilling rigs, but the idea that the Great Worm who had gnawed the new passages about which Dron had spoken may turn out to be such a machine hadn’t occurred to him. And wasn’t all belief in the worm built on denying machines?
‘Don’t say anything to Ulman about the drilling rig, and the colonel, too: they’ll all think I’m nuts.’ Pavel said. ‘The thing is, I had been gathering information at Polis earlier. I tracked down every plainclothes detective, and in short, I was involved with subversives and the internal threat. And one day an old guy ran into me and he was convinced that in one recess in a tunnel next to Borovitskaya, a noise was constantly heard, as if a drilling machine was operating behind the wall. Of course, I would have immediately determined he was insane, but previously he had been a builder and knew a lot about such things.’