Dmitry Glukhovsky - Metro 2034 English fan translation (v1.0) (docx) by Dmitry Glukhovsky

only the light fell differently on his face.
    They could see it now too, a few hundred meters further than Hunter: A thick, pale white fog crawled at them on the ground, danced around their feet, crawled up their legs and then filled the tunnel up to their waist … It seemed like they were climbing into an ice-cold and hostile ocean. They stepped deeper and deeper over an oblique ground, until the murky water would finally go over their heads.
    You couldn’t see anything anymore. The beams of their flashlights got stuck in the fog like flies in a net of a spider. After they had finally fought themselves through the emptiness they felt exhausted and defeated. Noise, dimmed like by a pillow came through the fog. Every move cost them a lot of strength as if they didn’t walk on concrete but on thick mud.
    Breathing became harder, not because of the humidity but because of the bidder stench of the air. They had to overcome themselves to breathe in the air and they couldn’t shake the feeling that in reality they were breathing in the breath of a giant, strange creature that withdrew oxygen from the air and replaced with its toxic fumes.
    Homer put on his gasmask, just in case. Hunter gave him a quick look, reached into his bag and put on his generic rubber mask as well. Only Achmed was once again without a gasmask.
    The brigadier stopped and listened with his shredded ear to the Nagornaya , but the thick white soup hindered him to decipher the noises from the station and create a picture of the situation. It sounded like something heavy had fallen to the ground far away, followed by a long sigh, in a pitch that was too low for a human, yes even for every other creature.
    Then they heard something scrapping hysterically and shrieking like if a giant hand bent the thick iron pipes on the ceiling to a knot.
    Hunter twitched with his head, as if he was trying to shake of dirt from his head and instead of a short machine pistol he was now using an army-Kalashnikov with a double magazine and a mounted grenade-launcher. “Finally.” He said.
    At first they didn’t realize that they had already entered the station; the fog in the Nagornaya was as thick as milk. While Homer looked through the glass of his gasmask he felt like a diver that was on board of a sunken ocean cruiser.
    You could only see the mosaic through the fog for a few seconds at a time and then it swallowed them again: It were seagulls that had been pressed with coarse soviet metal templates. Fossils, thought Homer, the fate of humanity and their creations … But will somebody dig us up one day?
    The fog around them was alive, floated in different directions, twitching. Sometimes dark images emerged from the fog, a dented wagon of a train and a rusty cabin, a scaly body or head of mythological creature. Homer shuddered while thinking who had filled the seats all these decades.
    He had heard much about what was going on at the Nagornaya but he had never seen anything face to face …
    “There it is, to the right!” Screamed Achmed and ripped on the old man’s sleeve. Out of his self-made suppressor sounded a silent shot.
    Homer turned around with such speed, nobody would have thought he still had it in his rheumatic body, but his blurred beam of light illuminated only a part of the metal covered pillars.
    “Behind! Behind us!” Achmed shot another salve. But his bullets only shredded the rest of the marble plates that once decorated the walls of the station. Whatever he had seen
through the blurry dim lights had already vanished, seemingly unharmed.
    He must have breathed in too much of that stuff, thought Homer. But one second later he saw something in the edge of his field of vision … Something gigantic, crouching because the four meter high ceiling of the station was too low for its size and it was unimaginable maneuverable. For an instance it emerged out of the fog, became visible again and disappeared, a long time before the old man was able to point his