In the distance, a red glow had already appeared. VDNKh like the majority of stations, didn’t have normal lighting and, for thirty years now, people had lived under scarlet emergency lights. Only occasionally were there normal electric light bulbs in their ‘apartments’ – their tents and rooms. And only a few of the wealthiest metro stations were illuminated by the light of genuine mercury lamps. Legends had formed around them, and provincial types, from distant, god-forsaken substations, would nourish the dream for years on end of making it there and beholding this miracle.
At the tunnel exit, they handed over their weapons to the other guards, and signed their names in the ledger. Pyotr Andreevich shook Artyom’s hand before parting and said:
‘It’s about time we hit the sack! I can barely stand on my feet, and you’re probably ready to sleep standing up yourself. Give Sukhoi my warmest regards. He should pay me a visit.’
Artyom said goodbye and feeling the sudden onset of fatigue, took himself off to his ‘apartment.’
Two hundred people lived at VDNKh. Some in the service quarters, but the majority in tents on the platform. The tents were army-issue, now old, tattered, but still intact. They didn’t have to contend with wind or rain underground, and they were well maintained so it was easily possible to live in them. They didn’t lose heat or light, and they even kept out the noise. What more could one ask of one’s housing?…
The tents were tucked up against the wall on either side – both along the tracks, and in the central hall. The platform had been turned into something resembling a street: there was a fairly wide passage along its middle. Some of the tents were large, housing the more numerous families and they occupied the space beneath the archways. But several arches remained free for passage – at each end of the hall, and at its centre. There were other accommodations below the platforms as well, but the ceiling there wasn’t very high, and they weren’t very suitable for habitation. They used them at VDNKh for the storage of provisions.
The two northern tunnels were joined by a side tunnel, several tens of metres beyond the station, which, once upon a time, allowed trains to turn around and head back in the other direction. Now one of these two tunnels was plugged up; the other led to the north, towards the Botanical Garden, and almost to Mytischi. They’d left it as a retreat route in the case of extreme circumstance, and it was there that Artyom had been on watch. The remaining segment of the second tunnel, and the unified stretch between the two tunnels, was designated for mushroom plantations. The rails there had been dismantled and the ground had been tilled and fertilized – they hauled waste products there from the cesspit. Tidy rows of mushroom caps shone white along the tunnel. One of the two southern tunnels had been collapsed as well, at the three-hundredth metre, and they used that area for chicken coops and pigpens.
Artyom’s home stood on the main thoroughfare – he lived there in one of the smaller tents together with his stepfather. His stepfather was an important man associated with the administration. He maintained contact with other stations so the powers that be reserved the tent for him – it was granted to him as his own personal tent, and it was a first-rate one at that. His stepfather would frequently disappear for two or three weeks at a time, and never took Artyom with him, excusing himself by saying that he was occupied with matters too dangerous, and didn’t want to subject Artyom to any risk. He’d return from his trips thinner, his hair unkempt, sometimes wounded. But the first evening of his return he would always sit with Artyom, telling him things that were hard to believe even for a resident of this grotesque little world, and one who was used to unbelievable stories.
Artyom felt the urge to travel himself, but to wander around in the metro for no good reason was too dangerous. The patrol guards at independent stations were very suspicious, and wouldn’t let a person pass with a weapon – and heading off into the tunnels without a weapon meant certain death. And so, ever since he and his grandfather had come from Savyolovskaya, Artyom hadn’t had the chance to take part in any decent excursions. He’d sometimes be sent to Alekseevskaya on business but he didn’t go alone, of course. They went in group, sometimes as far as Rizhskaya. But on top of that, he had one more trip under his belt, about which he couldn’t tell anyone, although he desperately wanted to…
It happened a long, long time ago, when there wasn’t even the slightest hint of the dark ones at the Botanical Garden, when it was simply an abandoned and dark station, and patrols from VDNKh were stationed much further to the north. At the time Artyom himself was still just a kid. Back then, he and his buddies decided to take a risk: during a shift change, they stole past the outer cordon with flashlights and a double-barrelled rifle stolen from someone’s parents, and crawled for a long time around the Botanical Garden station. It was eerie, but it was interesting. In the light of the flashlights, you could see the remnants of human habitation everywhere: ash, singed books, broken toys, torn clothing… Rats darted about, and from time to time, strange rumbling sounds would ring out from the northern tunnel. One of Artyom’s friends – he didn’t even remember who it was anymore but it was probably Zhenya, the most lively and most curious of the three – said, ‘What if we try to take down the barrier and go up to the surface, up the escalator… just to see what it’s like there? To see what’s there?’
Artyom had said right away that he was against it. The recent tales his stepfather told him about people who had spent time on the surface were fresh in his mind, about how afterwards they had long been sick, and about the sorts of horrors sometimes seen up there. But they immediately began to argue that this was a rare opportunity. When else would they manage to make it, with no adults, to an abandoned station, as they had now? And now they had the chance to go up to the surface too, and see, see with their own eyes, what it’s like to have nothing above your head. And, resigning all hope of convincing him nicely, they declared that if he was such a coward, then he could sit down below and wait for them to come back. The thought of staying alone in an abandoned station, and, on top of that, besmirching his reputation in the eyes of his two best friends, was completely unbearable to Artyom. So, summoning his courage, he consented.
To everyone’s surprise, the mechanism that brought the barrier dividing the platform from the escalator into motion actually worked. And it was Artyom himself who managed to start it up after half an hour of desperate attempts. The rusty iron wall moved aside with a nasty grating sound and before their eyes stood the short row of steps of the escalator, leading upwards. Some of the steps had collapsed and, through the yawning gaps, in the light of the flashlights, one could see colossal gears that had stopped years ago, corroded with rust, grown over with something brownish that was moving, just barely noticeably… It wasn’t easy for them to force themselves to go up there. Several times, the steps they stepped on gave way with a screech, and dropped below, and they climbed across the chasm, clinging to the old hulls of the metro lamps. The path to the surface wasn’t long, but their initial determination was evaporating after that first collapsed step; and in order to raise their spirits, they imagined themselves to be real stalkers.
Stalkers…
The word, strange and foreign to the Russian language, had caught on very well nonetheless. Earlier, this was the name given to people whose poverty compelled them to make their way to abandoned military firing ranges, take apart unexploded missiles and bombs and redeem brass casings with those who bought non-ferrous metals. It was also given to those strange people who, in times of peace, climbed around in the sewers. But all of these meanings had something in common: it was always an extremely dangerous profession, always a confrontation with the unknown, the mysterious, the ominous… Who knows what happened at those abandoned ranges, where the radioactive earth, disfigured by thousands of explosions, ploughed with trenches and pitted with catacombs, put forth monstrous sprouts? And one could only guess what might dwell in the sewers of a teeming metropolis once the builders had closed the hatches behind them, leaving those gloomy, narrow, reeking corridors forever.