METRO 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky Page B

tunnel . . . And he sees . . . There’s a train coming into the station. A real train. Its headlights are shining, and blinding him - the wanderer could have been blinded by them so it’s good he covered his eyes with his hand in time. The windows were lit in yellow and there were people inside and this was all going on in total silence! Not a sound! There wasn’t a hum from the engine, not a clatter of wheels. The train glides into the station in total silence . . . You see? The guy sits down, something’s wrong with his heart. And there’s people in the train windows, like real people who are chatting away inaudibly . . . The train, wagon by wagon, is going past him, and he sees in the last window of the last wagon, there’s a seven-year-old child looking at him. Looking at him, pointing at him, and laughing . . . And the laughter was audible. There was such silence that the guy could hear his own heart beating along with this child’s laughter . . . The train dives into the tunnel, and the laughter gets quieter and quieter . . . and goes silent in the distance. And again - emptiness. And an absolute and horrifying silence.’ ‘And then he woke up?’ Artyom asked maliciously but with a certain hope in his voice.
    ‘If only! He rushed back, towards the extinguished fire, quickly gathered up his belongings and ran back to Tulskaya without stopping. He ran the whole way in one hour. It was so scary. You have to think . . .’
    Artyom had gone quiet, frozen by what he’d heard. Silence descended in the tent. Finally, having gathered his wits and coughed, making sure that his voice wouldn’t give him away and crack, Artyom asked Zhenya as indifferently as he could:
    ‘And what, you believe all that?’
    ‘Well, it’s not the first time I’ve heard this kind of story about the Serpukhovskaya line,’ Zhenya replied. ‘Only I don’t always tell you them. It’s not possible to talk about these things with you in a normal way. You start interrupting straight away . . . OK, we’ve sat here for a while you and me, and it’s almost time to go to work. Let’s get ready. We can talk more when we get there.’
    Artyom got up reluctantly, dragged himself home - he needed to get a snack to take to work. His stepfather was still sleeping, it was totally quiet at the station: most people had probably been let off work and there was a little time left until the night shift began. He should hurry up. Going past the guest tent, in which Hunter was staying, Artyom saw that the tent flaps were pulled aside and the tent was empty. His heart skipped a beat. Finally he understood that everything he’d discussed with Hunter hadn’t been a dream, that it had actually taken place, and that the development of events could have a direct impact on him. He knew what fate lay before him.
    The tea-factory was located in a dead-end, at a blocked exit from the underground, where there were escalators leading upwards. All the work in the factory was done by hand. It was too extravagant to waste precious electric energy on production.
    Behind the iron screens that separated the territory of the factory from the rest of the station, there was a metal wire drawn from wall to wall, on which cleaned mushrooms were drying. When it was particularly humid, they made little fires underneath the mushrooms so that they would dry more quickly and wouldn’t get covered in mould. Under the wire there were tables where the workers first cut and then crushed the dried mushrooms. The prepared tea was packed into paper or polyethylene packages - depending on what was available at the station - and they added some extracts and powders to it, the recipe of which was only known to the head of the factory. That was the straightforward process of producing tea. Without the much-needed conversation while you worked your eight-hour shift of cutting and crushing mushroom caps, then it would probably be the most exhausting business.
    Artyom worked this shift with