Metro 2033 - Into the shadows | A Metro short story collection

Part 3 - Memories of a monster

The transformation was complete. Elias was again in a different environment, but only in front of his inner eye.

He was standing in front of the entrance to a subway station. By looking at the sign above the gate, he found out that it was the Cologne/Bonn Airport station.

All around him was pure chaos.

Desperate screams could be heard everywhere and a gigantic mass of people tried to get to the underground.

Elias let his gaze wander over the faces of the people and saw fear and despair. He kept looking around and could see a small group of fully armored police officers dashing towards the cluster of desperate souls. A policewoman raised her submachine gun 5 and fired a salvo into the air. Immediately the situation changed drastically.

Some people tried with even greater effort to get into the station, but were stopped there by more police special forces, while the other half fell away from the entrance. What was supposed to defuse the situation had only made it worse.

Suddenly there was an explosion in the middle of the crowd in front of the subway station. Blood spattered the hall in a high arc, hitting some of the fleeing in the eyes. Pieces of body flew against the airport windows, which had just been polished to a shine.

A suicide bomber had blown himself up in the crowd and dragged everyone around him, including the police officers, into the afterlife.

Some of the people who had just fled had seen this and recognized their chance. They sprinted toward the scene, crossing the field of shredded flesh and lightly burned corpses.

The other group of police officers opened fire on the people.

Elias saw that they were overwhelmed.

A dozen or so people had already disappeared underground, while some on the surface were hit by bullets, causing the mountain of dead, bloody bodies to grow.

Then suddenly a loud siren sounded. At the same moment, the hermetic gates of the station began to close.

The policemen shouted commands to each other and rushed to the closing gate, but reached it too late.

With a dull 'clack' the gate locked and left the others alone outside.

And then it repeated again.

At first all you could hear was the loud roar of a Russian bomber's engines. Next came the loud shots of an anti-aircraft gun.

The last sound in the world before the apocalypse was the tremendous noise of a nuclear explosion and the detonation of a poison gas bomb.

As the brightness of a second sun built up over the airport, Elias heard the black man again.

"I survived." After a short pause, he added, "My kids and my wife didn't."

The area around them abruptly became a black nothing in which the mutant became almost invisible.

"For four months everything was more or less normal. We kind of fought our way through the situation. We looted food from a train that got stuck in the tunnel not far away. However, we had neither gas masks nor weapons. Everyone at the station knew we wouldn't last long. Six men died in the first five days alone. After that there were only twenty-three survivors," he began to tell. "It was almost a miracle that the station's ceiling didn't collapse in the blast. In any case, the radiation was not stopped and the gas penetrated underground via the ventilation system after just a few hours," he continued.

Elias looked into the black man's eyes and thought he could see that they looked sad.

"After four months we ran out of food. First people disappeared. First the children. At the same time it seemed as if the others were less hungry. One day I entered a small room adjacent to a tunnel and saw a woman sitting on the floor hunched over her own child. She heard me and turned around, startled. Her daughter's blood ran down her mouth. I caught a glimpse of the child's bloodied body. The hip was almost completely missing and there was a deep hole where the left cheek should have been.

After that, I never saw that woman again.

In this way the number of people decreased until only eight men and I were left. Our skin changed and some slowly but surely gained the ability to communicate through thoughts. We knew it was the gas. Over a year, our bodies slowly continued to change, until we were all like me now," the mutant ended.

"So there are more of you?" Elias asked.

The black man replied, "There WERE more of us. Then they were shot by people. Since then, I've been the only one of our kind."

Were you shot? Surely not by Dom soldiers? Elias tried to remember if anyone had ever told of such creatures. He couldn't think of anything.

"It wasn't your people," he read his mind. "They came from underground," he added.

The wild. Those who did not want to submit to the Führer.

Suddenly Elias was snapped out of his thoughts when he heard a gun being unlocked behind him.

He slowly turned around with raised hands. In front of him stood his friend from the cathedral troupe: Markus.

Now he aimed his modified Kalashnikov alternately at the black man and then back at him.

"Go to the side, Elias."