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 tunnel, from the station, their flashlights shining - probably patrol members from the three-hundredth metre. Stepping into the light of the fire, they put out their flashlights and sat down.
‘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 tunnel. He says it didn’t look human.’
‘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 tunnel didn’t run very deep at all, so they had almost no protection from the radiation. There were three-legged things, two-headed things and all kinds of weird shit crawling all over the metro from those parts.
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 connected to each other with warm, almost brotherly bonds.
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 tunnels on the dark side of the station without any warning. It was a tunnel that plunged off to the side, a disregarded branch of the primary northern leg, which descended to great depths, only to become lost in the complex network of hundreds of corridors - freezing, stinking labyrinths of horror. The tunnel stretched into the kingdom of rats, where even the most hopeless adventurer wouldn’t dare to go. Even a wanderer who was lost and couldn’t find his way using underground maps and paths, would stop at this threshold, sensing instinctively the black and sinister danger emerging from it, and would have rushed away from the gaping crevasse of that entrance as though from the gates of a plague-infested city.