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

assault-rifle at it.
    Homer looked at around desperately for the brigadier.
    He couldn’t see him anywhere.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    “It is ok. Don’t be afraid” He said again and again. He tried to catch his breath and calm her down. “You know … There are people that are far worse off than we are …” He tried to smile, but he only made a terrible grimace as if his lower jaw had fallen off.
    Sasha smiled back, over her pointed, dirty cheek a salty tear crawled down. At least her father was conscious again after a few hours, enough for her to think about everything.
    “This time I couldn’t find anything.” He croaked.
    “Forgive me. At the end I even went to the garages as well. It was further than I thought. But I found an intact one there. The lock was out of rust free steel, even oiled. Breaking it was impossible, so I used the last demolition charge. I thought, maybe there is a car in there, spare parts and all. I let it explode, went in: Empty. Why did they look it then the bastards? All that noise, I prayed that nobody had heard me.
    But when I got out of the garage there were all these dogs. I thought that’s it … That’s it”. He closed his eyes and went silent.
    Sasha took his hand worried, but he shook his head imperceptible without opening his eyes: Don’t be afraid, everything is fine. He didn’t even have the strength to talk anymore but he wanted tell her everything, why he had returned with empty hands, why they now had to starve for a week until he could get up again.
    But before he was able to do so he fell into a deep sleep.
    Sasha checked the bandages on his shredded leg, wet with black blood and laid a fresh compress on it. She stood up and went to the cage with the rat and opened the small door.
    The animal looked out of its cage distrustful, seemed like it tried to hide at first and then it did Sasha the favor and jumped on the train track and ran around. You can rely on the feelings of a rat: There was no danger in the tunnel. Calmer, the young women returned to the stretcher.
    “Of course you will feel better again. You will be able to walk again” she whispered to her father. “And you will find a garage with a new car in it. We’ll get in together and drive away from here. Ten maybe fifteen stations away. Somewhere, where they don’t know us, where we are strangers. Where nobody hates us. If there is even such a place …”
    Now it was her that told the magical stories that she had heard so many times from him. She repeated it word by word and now that she spoke out the old mantra of her father she believed in it even a hundredth times more. She would nurture him back to health, heal him. Somewhere in this world there had to be a place where they didn’t matter to others.
    A place where they could be happy
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    “There it is! It is looking at me!”
    Achmed shrieked as if it had already grabbed him. He had never screamed like that. Again he fired his assault-rifle until it jammed. There was nothing left from Achmed’s serenity: Trembling he tried to reload a new clip.
    “It is after me … after me …”
    Suddenly you could hear the rattling sound of another automatic rifle. It stayed silent for a second and went off again, this time almost inaudible with salves of three shots. So Hunter was still alive, there was still hope.
    The slamming sound distanced itself and came back again, so it was impossible to say if the bullets found their target.
    Homer was expecting the angry screams of an injured monster, but the station covered itself in mysterious silence;
its inhabitants seemed to have no bodies or they were inviolable.
    The brigadier continued his strange fight at the other end of the station, from time to time the glowing tracer rounds cut through the fog, drunken from the fight against the ghost of Nagornaya he had left his companions alone.
    Homer took a deep breath and put back his head. For some time now he had the need, he had felt