Trembling, Artyom approached the man sitting in the booth.

‘Good evening,’ the man returned his greeting.

He was about fifty, but already quite bald, his remaining grey hairs tangled at the temples and the nape of the neck; his dark eyes looked curiously at Artyom, and his unpretentious, laced-up flak jacket could not conceal his rotund stomach. A pair of binoculars hung on his chest, along with a whistle.

‘Have a seat.’ He pointed Artyom to the nearest sandbag. ‘Those guys over there are having a grand old time, leaving me here alone to bore myself to death. So let’s have a chat. Hey, did you hit someone’s fist with your eye…?’

And so the conversation began.

‘As you see, we haven’t been able to do anything halfway decent here,’ the duty officer explained sadly, pointing to the aperture leading to the escalator. ‘You would need concrete here, not iron; we tried iron, but it was no good. In the autumn, every damn thing is swept away by water. First it builds, then it breaks through… It happened several times, and many people perished. Since then, we’ve been getting by like this. Only life is not tranquil here like it is at other stations; we’re always waiting: scum can come crawling in on any given night. During the daytime they don’t bother us, because they’re either sleeping or roaming around on the surface. But it’s after dark that things really get desperate. So, we’ve adapted here, of course, and after eight o’clock, everyone goes into the passageway, where we live, and those left here are mostly the people who keep things going. But wait…’ He broke off, flicked a switch on the console, and the searchlight flared up brightly.

The conversation continued only after the white beam had scoured all three escalators, moved along the ceiling and the walls, and finally died out.

‘Up there,’ pointing toward the ceiling, the duty officer lowered his voice, ‘is Paveletskaya Railway Station. At any rate, it used to be there. A godforsaken place. I don’t even know where its tracks have gone; only that right now something horrible is going on up there. You sometimes hear noises that make your blood run cold. And then when they crawl down…’ He stopped, and then continued after a minute: ‘We call them the newcomers, these creatures that climb down from up there. Out of the train station. So it’s not so horrible. Well, a few times some of the stronger of these newcomers wiped out this cordon. Did you see our train there, the one forced off the tracks? That’s how far they got. We wouldn’t let them go below, where the women and children are; if the newcomers crawled down there, the jig would be up. Our men understood that themselves and so they retreated to the train, dug in there, and finished off a few creatures. But as for themselves… just two out of ten remained alive. One of the newcomers left, crawling off to the Novokuznetskaya station. Some people wanted to go after him in the morning, since the trail of slime he left behind was so thick; but he turned off at a side tunnel, went down, and we didn’t dare follow him. We’d had enough disaster as it was.’

‘I heard that nobody ever attacks Paveletskaya,’ Artyom recalled. ‘Is that true?’

‘Of course,’ the duty officer nodded gravely. ‘Who would bother us? If we weren’t manning the defences here, they would be crawling from here all the way along the line. No, nobody is going to lift a finger against us. The Hansa have given us almost all of that transfer passage, up to the very end of their blockhouse. They gave us weapons, just so that we would protect them. I tell you, they really love to get others to do their dirty work! By the way, what’s your name? I’m Mark.’ Artyom told him his name. ‘Hold it, Artyom, something is stirring over there,’ Mark continued and he quickly switched the searchlight back on. ‘No, I’m probably hearing things,’ he said uncertainly, after a minute.

Artyom was filled, drop by drop, with an oppressive sense of danger. Like Mark, he looked above attentively, but where Mark saw only the shadow of the broken lamp, Artyom thought he detected sinister, fantastic silhouettes, motionless in the dazzling beam of light.

At first he thought it was his imagination playing tricks on him, but one of the strange contours stirred just a bit, as soon as a bit of light passed over it.

‘Wait…,’ he whispered. ‘Try over in that corner, where there’s a big crack, hurry…’

And, as if nailed in place by the light beam, somewhere far off, further than the middle of the escalator, something large and bony froze for a moment, and then suddenly swooped down. Mark grabbed the whistle, which almost leapt out of his hand, and blew it with all his might, and in a second all those sitting around the fire rushed from their places and scrambled into position.

It turned out there was another searchlight there. It was weaker, but cleverly combined with an unusual heavy machine gun. Artyom had never seen anything like it: the weapon had a long barrel with a bell muzzle at the end; the trailer was shaped like a web; and the cartridges moved along inside the greased and shining ammunition belt.

‘Over there, around the tenth-metre!’ The husky, thin fellow who had been sitting near Mark searched about for the newcomer with the beam. ‘Give me the binoculars… Lekha! At the tenth, on the right side!’

‘There it is! We’re all here, baby, so sit still,’ muttered the gunner, aiming the weapon at the hidden black shadow. ‘I’ve got him!’

A deafening rumble of machine-gun fire burst out; a lamp was blown to smithereens at the tenth-metre; and above, something let out a piercing shriek.

‘Looks like we caught him,’ declared the husky fellow. ‘OK, give me some more light… There it is, lying there. Finished, the vermin.’

But from above, for a long time, heavy, almost human, groans could be heard, leaving Artyom on edge. When he proposed finishing off the newcomer to put it out of its misery, they replied:

‘If you want, go on, kill it. We aren’t a shooting gallery here, kiddo; we keep track of every cartridge.’

Mark was relieved of duty, and went over to the fire with Artyom. Mark lit up a cigarette from the fire, and Artyom began to listen to the general conversation.

‘Look, Lekha was telling us yesterday about the Hare Krishnas.’ A massive man with a low forehead and a powerful neck was speaking in a low, deep voice. ‘They sit at Oktyabrskoye Pole and want to get into the Kurchatov Institute to blow up the nuclear reactor and bring enlightenment for everybody, but they have not yet got their act together to do it. Well, that reminded me of what happened to me four years ago, when I was still living at the Savelovskaya. One day I was getting ready to go to the Belorusskaya. My connection was at the Novoslobodskaya, so I went straight through the Hansa. So, I got to Belorusskaya, quickly went to the man I needed to meet, we dealt with our affairs, and I figured we ought to celebrate with a drink. So he says to me, you’d better be more careful, drunks often vanish around here. And I say to him: Give me a break, and I won’t take no for an answer. So he and I killed a bottle together. The last thing I remember is that he was crawling around on all fours and crying, “I am Lunokhod-1, the lunar rover!” Then I wake up – Mother of God! – tied up, gagged, my noggin shaved, lying in some kind of closet, probably in what used to be a cop shop. What a disaster, say I to myself. After half an hour, some devils come in and drag me to the hall by the scruff of the neck. I had no idea where I was; all the signs carrying place names had been torn down, the walls were smeared with something, the floor bloody, the fires burning, almost the whole station had been dug up, and there was a deep pit below, at least twenty metres, if not thirty. There were stars drawn on the floor and ceiling, all in a single line, you know, the way children draw. Well, I’m wondering, have the Reds got me? Then I turned my head around – not quite. They brought me over to the pit, lowered a rope, and told me to climb down it. And prodded me with an assault rifle. I looked in – there were people piled up at the bottom, digging the pit deeper with pieces of scrap metal and shovels. The earth was being hoisted up with a winch, loaded into wagons, and carted off somewhere. Well, there was nothing I could do, I decided, as long as those fellows were there with their assault rifles – crazy guys, all of them tattooed from head to toe – a criminal enterprise of some kind. Probably I had landed in the Zone. And it’s as if these authorities are digging out, they want to escape. And these petty hooligans are their hired hands. But then I realized: that’s all nonsense. What kind of metro zone has no cops? I tell them I’m afraid of heights, that I crash down right onto my head, and that they won’t get much use out of me. They conferred among themselves and set me to work loading wagons with dirt that had been brought up from below. The scumbags cuffed me, chained me, and now they expect me to load their wagon? Pfft! But still, I couldn’t figure out what they were doing. The job, to put it mildly, was not an easy one. I was lucky,’ he shrugged his gigantic shoulders, ‘but there were some weaker guys there, so whenever someone collapsed into the dirt, the skinheads would pick him up and drag him off to the stairway. Then I went past one time, and I took a look. They had one guy there, a real blockhead, the type who used to stand in Red Square, where the heads rolled, and he had a good-sized axe stuck in him; there was blood everywhere, and heads were impaled on poles. I nearly puked. No, I think to myself, I’d better get out here before they kill me and make me into a stuffed animal.’