METRO 2033: The Gospel According to Artyom. (A link to Metro 2034).

  Dmitry Glukhovsky

  THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ARTYOM

  The previously unpublished epilogue

  of Metro 2033

  Metro2033.com

  A couple of white plastic bags borne by the wind stick to my face.

  I take them off my mask's visor and release them – the bags, re-united with the wind, float away like jellyfish.

  No actual animal lives here – not the regular ones, nor the radiation-adjusted mutants.

  Not a single living blade of grass or a leaf for kilometers around… It's just soot and melted iron, ashes and concrete rubble around here. Should the wind bring any seeds here, they, after falling onto this cursed soil, would simply wither and never even get a chance to sprout.

  Even the plastic bags stopping here for a bit of rest don't stay long and soon continue their aimless migration.

  I come here every day and I've long since lost count of the days I spent here.

  I don a heavy hazard suit, put on my gas mask, take my weapon and start my climb up the escalator. At first people used to see me off with unusual stares, a mix of condescension, admiration and mockery. They got used to it soon, and now they pay me no attention at all. I like it better this way.

  I don't even know what am I looking for here myself. I might not even be looking for anything in particular at all. After all, they do say that the murderers are for some reason drawn towards the place where they carried out their crime, so might it just be an acute case of that?

  One thing I know for certain – I'm not going to find any forgiveness or hope here.

  I rabble the dirt with my boot, rummage through the melted iron bars.

  I only find soot instead of forgiveness and ashes instead of hope.

  And I will be coming here until my legs give.

  * * *

  They gave me a hero's welcome.

  They were ragged, they were tattered, bloodied and burned. I came down from a bomb-crippled concrete broadcast tower, but the look in their eyes told me I might as well be coming down from heaven in a shiny chariot.

  All I wanted was to die, so I ripped the gas mask off my face. The air, the polluted and poisoned air, which I wanted to taste for so long, filled my lungs. Yet I felt nothing.

  I stumbled along the street hoping something would just eat me before I got back to the Metro. But the monsters that were quite recently longing for my blood had apparently developed disgust towards it now.

  And when I reached the Metro, a crowd was already waiting for me there.

  They came topside despite the taboo, to see the ground I won back for their children from the demons. And when they saw me breathe surface's frosty air some of them started removing their masks, too. It seemed to them that my victory had already given their long lost world right back to them. What they didn't know was that I'd just destroyed their last chance for salvation. And I never told them.

  I saw a woman with a child among those who came to welcome me back. Didn't she fear for the boy's life? She probably did. Yet, just a few hours before she knew for sure she was going to die. Everybody here, all these worn-out people, until quite recently were ready to die. They stayed at a besieged station for they had nowhere to run. They stayed to defend their home until the end, which was absolutely sure to follow soon. Would people, granted pardon mere moments before their execution, be afraid of catching a cold? They wouldn't be afraid of anything.

  They had no idea their execution was simply replaced with a life sentence.

  The boy being held by his mother had already taken off his improvised gas mask and was waving towards me.

  – Look, Artyom! Look! It's snowing!

  Grey flakes were slowly falling down, covering the brown dirt and the black cracked asphalt. I caught some and rubbed them on my palm.

  – Yahoo! Snow! – the boy was ecstatic.

  – That's just ashes, – I said.

  * * *

  I'm a coward, so I'll be their hero.

  I won't ever muster the courage needed to tell them what had actually transpired. And should I even spill my guts, they'd still never believe me – or they'd think the Dark Ones had actually managed to put my mind under control.

  There are already legends being told about me, and some crazy old man's even writing a book: a boy from a backwater station has to cross all of Metro to save his home along with humanity in general from hellspawn invading from the surface… Having weathered numerous battles and becoming stronger he gets a hold of the powerful weapon devised by the ancestors and strikes the evil abominations down. Trying to escape their fate the despicable creatures assault the boy's mind but he overcomes this final exam, does not yield to the temptation and triumphs…

  Our children won't know how to write, the children of our children won't even know what letters were. There won't be anyone left capable of reading the book about the Metro, but the troglodytes still living in the tunnels will tell this tale one another while sitting around their fires gnawing upon the bones of their enemies for as long as they retain the ability to speak. I have firmly secured an eternal central place in the legends of the cannibal savages for myself. A fitting punishment for my cowardice.

  When asked about how did it all start, I always tell that it all started that day we opened that airlock at the Botanical Gardens. We – meaning yours truly and two of my friends. We were mere kids back then and we had no idea what were we doing. Sure thing, we broke some rules – but has there ever been a boy who never broke any rules?

  Who's brilliant idea it was to visit the abandoned station, who took the others along? I always tell them that I don't remember, that it was either Vitali “the Splinter” or Eugene.

  I always lie.

  It is a safe lie, for there's no way to ascertain the truth – both Vitali and Eugene are dead now. And even if they were still alive, they'd cover for me. Just like I'd always covered for them.

  No, it did not start the moment the massive airlock doors shrugged and opened with a grinding sound, opening a road to hell for us and a road to our home for the demons.

  It was a totally different day – a sunny, sparkling-fresh yet warm, filled with incredibly sweet scents that I can't even remember, though I definitely know I never experienced anything like that ever since.

  – So, Artyom, – my Mom smiled to me. – How about going for a walk in the Botanical Gardens? What do you say?

  – Great! – I shouted. – I'm all for it!

  I remember how we rode there in an almost empty Metro carriage – it was a day off after all. I remember how we took a short escalator to the surface, how we exited a spacious glass pavilion and saw a street buried in verdure. I remember the small clouds moving across the limitless sky and soft, cool wind on my face. There was an ice-cream stand right at the exit, so we got in the line.

  – Which are you going to have – a wafer cup or a chocolate chip one?

  – Wafer! Chocolate! Both!

  – You have to choose one, – replied Mom with a shade of strictness. – Can't have them all, you know you're allergic!

  – Well, maybe you could get the chocolate chip one while I get the wafer cup? And then we both share!

  – All right, – she laughed.

  Even eating both ice-creams at once wouldn't have done me any harm that day, for that would basically be the last dessert that I had ever since.

  Then we entered the Gardens and walked along the wide winding alleys until the dinner time. Having lost our way we accidentally found a tiny Japan-themed garden lost in the vast park. A pond filled with the water li
lies, a rickety bridge crossing it and unbelievably beautiful birds swimming around dark mirror-like surface…

  It's actually amazing how much I remember. I remember so much stuff I could easily do without... And yet I forget the most important of all – the sight of her face.

  My mother's face.

  I don't know why or who prohibited me from seeing her eyes, her smile and her hair. I never accepted this prohibition, and for as long as I remember I always wanted to go back to that day – to the whispering alleys, the mandarin ducks, the warm asphalt with sun beams piercing the cover of the trees. Back to my mom.

  And yet, the world I was seeking so desperately is gone forever, and my mother's gone with it. There's nothing left of that world except for that day and two or three rough sketches still stored in my memory: an evening in our flat, cozy light from a lamp, warmth…

  I only wish I could recall her face. The way she looked at me. The way she whispered that I've nothing to fear. The way she'd wink at me. I'd sell my soul just to recall that. I'd do that any day, any time. And I did.

  The Judgment Day came. The righteous and the sinful were called to be rendered to according to their deeds. And we hid from God's sight in the Metro, and we were saved from His wrath and He apparently decided that flushing us out wasn't worth the trouble. Then He went about his business or, perhaps, died, and we stayed on this discarded Earth. And we continued going along its orbit into nothingness.

  The Humanity was executed, while we two were among those given a short reprieve. Hers has proven to be way too short, mine – way too long.

  My mom was devoured by rats. I don't remember that day. But, if I was spared from that memory in exchange for the one about that summer morning in the Botanical Gardens, I'm ready to exchange them back. Do you hear me, whoever you are?..

  I was picked up by a man who thought he'd adopt me. A pity, I was not ready to become his son. We grew closer, and yet we remained strangers forever. The shadow of my mother, whom he was unable to save from the rat onslaught and whom I was unable to bring myself up to die with, remained between us. I never told him a word of reproach, but I could not completely forgive him, either.

  I was like a branch broken off a tree – an attempt to attach me to another trunk failed, since the break-off point was so scarred and all the cells that were supposed to take root and connect me to a new tree were dead. No amount of effort could make the merge happen.

  That's how we'd live together yet apart, he – a loner, me – an orphan.

  I could never see her face even in my dreams. I saw that day wit the mandarin ducks a lot of times, but I never saw mother. Her shape, her voice, her laughter... Everything was vague, trying to concentrate, reaching out was useless – she was ever-elusive, ephemeral. Touching her or holding her was completely impossible.

  * * *

  It was my idea to go visit the Botanical Gardens station. Mine completely. I was afraid to go alone, and I wouldn't have made it that way – somebody had to draw the attention of the guards standing watch in the northern tunnel, otherwise we'd be caught at the very first roadblock.

  I went there to reach the surface. I don't know what did I hope to see there; it was definitely not that long lost summer day with its cerulean sky, not the ice-cream stand still open for business in an open challenge to all the laws of the universe and not rays of sun dancing on the boardwalk.

  Perhaps, somewhere inside that little boy I was then, inside that dirty-faced matryoshka sporting a buzz cut and carrying a rusty shotgun, there was another matryoshka – a happy three-year-old that was fond of ice-cream and still believed in miracles. And was still hoping to meet his mother who'd left him and whom he'd missed greatly up there, on the surface. Lots of new layers have grown on my core since then, like the year rings of a tree. The boy with the shotgun was encased within a shy bookworm of a teenager, he, in turn, was enveloped by a naïve and adventure-hungry young man, and now they are all imprisoned inside an ugly soul of a burnt and scarred man without an age. This is the final layer, one that I'll never be able to shed, crack or destroy; that's just what I am now. And yet I still know that somewhere deep inside, beneath all those layers, that three-year-old boy is hiding. Hiding and hoping.

  I told the guys we're going to play stalkers, and that was enough to get them to follow me.

  The Botanical Gardens station was dark and empty; the floor was littered with fragments of somebody's lives: torn tents, broken dolls, smashed dishes… Rats were all around, gnawing on whatever they could hope to digest. Suffocating dust hung thick in the air, dulling all the sounds and smelling of hopelessness. If hell – I mean, real hell – exists, it probably looks not unlike the Botanical Gardens station that day.

  It was me again who'd proposed opening the airlock. Vitali was scared speechless of the damned station, and even Eugene said he was not sure we should do that when I put my hands on the levers. I was too close to my goal, to that day, to that world, to listen to them and stop.

  Sure thing, now I always tell people it was Eugene's idea to go up there. Ask him yourselves if you don't believe me.

  The door actuator was in a bad state but it still worked.

  – Follow me! – I was carrying the shotgun while Eugene had the flashlight.

  Everybody had enough courage to climb the unsteady steps into the top pavilion of the station, overgrown with thick moss that was stirring gently, as if breathing. Then our team broke down. Vitali couldn't make himself go outside. Eugene made a few steps and froze still. But my legs were moving by themselves.

  The night sky was clear and shone with thousands of stars – but I didn't come there for the sky.

  What did I come for?

  At first I'd just look around irresolutely, comparing the half-decomposed, horribly disfigured Earth with the beautiful yet so vague memories and dreams of mine, as if trying to identify a corpse of a really close relative fallen victim to a horrible accident. Finally, noticing a faint resemblance, I went faster...

  …and turned around a corner…

  Up the street the multieyed mutant skulls of the abandoned residential buildings were baring their teeth at me. Down the street half of the world was occupied by the dense forest the Botanical Gardens, apparently the only place in the city that's actually profited form the radiation, turned into. Several white plastic bags were floating around in the wind. They say such bags may take up to five hundred years to decompose... Heartrending howling cries could be heard from nearby, as if something was being eaten alive – but I didn't pay any attention to those.

  – Artyom! Where are you going?! Artyom!

  I didn't even look back, and Eugene, my best friend, was too scared to follow me.

  …a hundred meters further…

  And then I saw that ice-cream stand. The rainbow colors it was once sporting were long since washed away with the rains and was further discolored by the night. Its windows were broken, contents overturned and sullied. It somehow shrunk and withered, and looked almost nothing like the magic gourmet palace of my past, just as a man struck with cancer looks nothing like his former self.

  I touched the stand and shut my eyes tightly, trying to imagine my mom telling me to choose one of the two ice-creams. I even whispered “pretty please!”.

  And then I knew I won't ever be able to recall her. Even if I were to enter the menacing thicket of the Gardens and find those very alleys, that very pond and that very bridge, staying alive all along... I would amount to exactly nothing.

  I felt loneliness, such as I'd never felt before.

  But there I was, still touching the abandoned stand as if waiting for my queue to arrive. Not that I didn't know perfectly well that it was never going to.

  I was an orphan. I was alone in the whole world.

  That was probably the moment when the reprieve I was given ran out. I didn't hear a thing – the beasts moved almost completely silently. Some kind of an animal sixth sense, which usually gets extremely keen when you live in the Metro,
prompted me of their presence, so I opened my eyes.

  A pack of wild dogs, filthy and covered with ulcerations... I was encircled and had my back to the stand's wall, there was nowhere to run, and I would never be able to outrun them anyway. Looking in their eyes I knew that there was no hope of scaring them away or taming them. The surface at the time was not yet brimming with all the sick and distorted life that's so abundant there now. The dogs got lucky – they'd found me, and they had to devour me as soon as possible, before hunger made them go for each others throats.

  – Shoot them! – Eugene cried out from somewhere – You do have the gun!

  I came to and pointed the shotgun at the largest beast, pulling the trigger. All I heard was a dry click. I pulled the second trigger, and the shotgun didn't fire again. The shells must have gone bad due to all the humidity, and I had no reloads.