Chapter 1: Diversion

Ilia – Day 1 – 12:06

Alexandr and I carefully trudged through the darkened tunnel. Our flashlights facing forward, skipping across the walls as we looked for danger. The revolver in my other hand vaguely followed the movements of the dim (but fully charged) flashlight. The revolver was old but still did its job well. The slightly rusting metal and the worn and splintered wooden handle gave it an unassuming presence but its stopping power was enough to make any bandit think twice. I'd had the weapon for years, ever since a family had given it to me as payment for finding an heirloom of theirs in the abandoned station of Dmitrovskaya. It had served me well over the years, I'd even fashioned a leather holster for it that I attached to my belt. I needed some money to buy more ammo for it, however, as I only had the six rounds in its cylinder and another six to spare.

Sticking to the left-hand side of the tunnel, we cautiously stepped over outcroppings of debris and rusted train tracks where they seemed to randomly divert from their normal central course. Alexandr to my left held his makeshift assault rifle, endearingly named the 'Bastard' by myself, up to his shoulder. The long weapon featured a slim barrel with a polished wooden block strapped to the bottom as a grip. The stock was a lightweight but flimsy collapsible set of two metal bars linked by a crude piece of curved wood at the end to rest his shoulder on. The magazine was placed horizontally half way down the gun and was completely exposed, showing all thirty of the bullets available to Alexandr. The whole weapon was an expensive mess that tended to jam and overheat with an alarming regularity; the exposed magazine probably didn't help much. His flashlight, hastily taped to the side of the rifle, slowly moved across the seemingly never-ending tunnel. We briefly stopped so that he could reach into my small single-strap pack across my back to pull out a manual charger for his weapon's dimming flashlight. We were back to moving through the tunnel again in just under a minute.

We were both quite adapted to exploring the tunnels at this point since we'd made something of a living out of it through selling findings back home in Novoslobodskaya, though I felt that I was slightly stronger than Alex as I was usually the one to get him out of tricky situations. We wore practical clothing; tight-fitting dark shirts with thick trousers that boasted multiple large pockets. The leather gloves and large boots that we wore were annoying and uncomfortable, but they were a must for the harsh environments of the Metro. We'd even cut our almost matching brown hair (with Alexandr's being a slightly lighter shade than mine) short and shaved any facial haired best as we could so that nothing was an irritating distraction. Despite our similarities, Alex was still two years younger than me at twenty-two so I felt like I had to watch over him with care.

Alexandr stopped after a few more minutes and whispered to me, "Ilia, over there." He pointed his light at a green metal door on the other side of the tunnel. "We should check in there."

"Why?" I whispered back, "We're going to Tsvetnoy Bulvar. That's where all of the good shit is supposed to be."

"Come on, live a little." Alex's small grin made its way through the darkness.

"I'd like to live a lot, Alex."

Alex exasperatedly lowered his gun and dramatically sighed before saying, "Come on!" and quietly jogging off towards the door. As he happily skipped over the tracks, I sighed and trudged over to the door. He got to it and stood on the left-hand side as he waited for me. I observed the door's flaky green paint and huge patches of rust all over it before standing on the right-hand side, next to the narrow iron handle that was only screwed in at the top. Alex glanced at me and simply nodded.

He put his left arm on the door and held his gun up with his right, aiming at the opening, about to push the door open. Just before he did, I got his attention and turned my light off in front of him. Rolling his eyes, he reached across his gun and did the same. He got back into position and slowly put some force into pushing the door open. With a muscle-tensing creak, Alex spent about ten seconds carefully opening the door while moving through it gun first. I held my revolver up and followed him.

The room inside extended to the left in a moderately sized square shape, but was completely pitch black apart from the occasional extremely dim red light on the walls and a bright flashlight in the far-left corner. The red lights illuminated little more than the bleak concrete walls they were placed on, some covered in cracks and stains, others devoid of anything of note. The flashlight was a small but bright white light that showed bloodstains and claw marks all over the floor. It was angled down so it didn't show much of the floor, but what it did show was enough to make me want to turn back immediately.

Unfortunately, Alex pressed on. I moved further in and slowly pushed the door to. The skin-crawling creak echoed through the room. We edged further into the room and looked around for a moment as we waited for our natural night vision to kick in.

A minute or two later and we could just about make out the larger obstacles in our path. The centre had a metal mesh square structure that stretched from the floor to the almost seven-foot-high ceiling. Inside, there seemed to be old electrical equipment and several dials showing incomprehensible readings. Other than that, and the usual debris and spider webs that covered everywhere in the Metro, the room was relatively bare. Pipes came from the machine in the centre and led to the far wall which was subsequently covered in more pipes that seemed to lead to no place in particular.

"Seems clear," Alex whispered, staring at the room before him. He looked at me, expecting a response, to which I simply nodded. He stretched his arm over to his flashlight, keeping his weapon as level as he could, and flicked it on.

"Alex!" I angrily hissed. "Turn that shit off!"

"Relax. There's nothing here." He spoke in a slightly louder tone than was currently comfortable. I glared at him for a few moments before he completely ignored my stare and said, "Watch my back, I'm going to check out that light."

I muttered the word 'fuck' under my breath and had a look through the small gap in the ajar door. I could barely see thirty feet in front of me but everything seemed quiet.

A couple of minutes passed before Alex piped up again.

"Ilia!" I shot him an angry glare as his uncomfortably loud voice reached my ears. "Get over here, there's something cool you should see." I checked that we weren't being watched outside again and quietly closed the door fully, lowering the metal latch that rested in its iron holder on the concrete next to the door, locking it from the inside. I turned my flashlight on and made my way over to him.

Bouncing my light across the cracked and broken concrete floor revealed a littering of spent bullet casings as well as the occasional bloodstain. These got more and more concentrated as I got closer to Alex until I finally arrived at the mysterious flashlight. Shining my torch towards him revealed the source; the body of a Fourth Reich soldier lay slumped in the corner of the room. Alex turned off the flashlight that was taped to the side of the young man's thick and heavy but severely damaged combat helmet. His youthful face was petrified in a constant look of terror with blood spattered across its entirety. His neck had a massive gash through it, revealing the crimson internals within. His thick grey clothing and body armour was completely ruined and covered all over with large amounts of blood from the brutal cuts and lacerations. By his side was an AK-74M snapped in half with ammo strewn all around him. Alex was trying to amass all of these bullets so that he could use them in his own gun. Overall, the soldier was very well equipped, but most of it was completely ruined.

I knelt down next to the fallen soldier and asked Alex, "What do you think the Nazis were doing this far from Chekhovskaya?"

"Fuck knows. But look! Bullets!" He excitedly pointed at one of the soldier's trouser pockets and pulled out two partially full magazines. He was right to be excited, these were military grade bullets; the main currency of the Metro. They were highly sought after simply because they were the best at killing and they were much rarer than the 'dirty' bullets we used in our day to day lives. They were made before the bombs dropped and it was incredibly difficult to make more of the same quality. Due to their value, they were generally only used as ammunition in the most dire circumstances.

"How many?" I tried to hold back any sound of excitement, likely not successfully though.

"There's about forty… fifty here." He kept rummaging through the poor soldier's pockets "We're fucking rich, Ilia!" It was unfortunate that I wasn't fazed by this. Corpses of varying decomposition were the norm for our lives. We would often explore the parts of tunnels that most were too afraid to go down and so often saw the results of previous explorations. We weren't necessarily braver than most, Alex tended to just assume everything would be fine and I, for some reason, went along with it.

"Alex, you watch my back I'll check through this guy," I instructed. He gave me a look of mild confusion, "You've got the machine gun, you do the fighting."

"I found the guy, I'm going to check his fucking pockets."

I gave him a brief look of resignation before standing up and muttering, "Then why do you get the fucking machine gun?"

Just about hearing me ask this, he replied, "Because I spent my hard-earned bullets on it!"

"Yeah," I began, adding a small pause for emphasis, "while I spent my hard-earned bullets on food, maps, lighters, flashlights and the recharger for the both of us." I felt my voice raise slightly as I said this. He averted his gaze and kept rifling through the pockets of the soldier. He was a stubborn one, he knew I was right but he would never admit it.

Resigned to my fate, I shined my flashlight over to the door and began to move towards it. As I idly bounced my light across the room I briefly spotted another door on the left-hand wall, barely noticeable with the dim red light above it hardly reaching it. Lighting it up with my light and moving towards it revealed a once similarly green-coloured door that was nearly entirely covered in brown-orange rust. Only a few flakes of green paint remained and the rust had gotten so bad that there was a small, sharp looking hole in near the centre of it. I crouched down to its level and shined my light through it. It seemed as if there was a narrow concrete service tunnel that stretched beyond the reach of my light.

"Alex!" I called across the room as I stepped back from the door and looked towards him, "You know when you 'checked out the room'?"

From behind me, I heard a faint and inquisitive, "Yeah," from an unmoving Alex.

"You missed an entire fucking door."

He turned around to look at me. "Huh. So I did." He thought for a second, "Is it anything interesting?"

"Luckily for you, it seems pretty uninteresting." I stared at him for a while, expecting him to catch on. When it was clear that he wouldn't, I sighed and aggressively explained. "There could have been anything behind this door! Nosalises are everywhere, you need to be fucking careful around here."

"Alright, alright!" Alex said defensively while holding his arms up, attempting to alleviate himself of all blame. "Sorry, man. I'll do it next time." He thought for a moment. "So, what's behind there?"

I quickly shrugged before going to pull back on the rusting handle, this one attached at both ends. I gripped it and wrenched it back, expecting the door to come with it. The sound of the rusting metal screws breaking accompanied the door handle shearing completely off. I briefly looked at the handle in mild confusion as Alex let out a small chuckle.

Stepping back and dropping the broken handle, I tried to shrug off the mild embarrassment and readied myself for a kick. I lifted my leg up and, with one swift move and a loud grunt, I pushed my foot forward and smashed it into the door, just below the hole. I quickly pulled my leg back and watched as the bottom half of the door nearly completely crumbled and fell apart with some of the larger pieces of rusting metal dragging other pieces with them. The shearing of metal was accompanied by the clanging of pieces falling onto the hard concrete floor. The sounds echoed through the room and down the corridor.

The moment that this ended, we heard a horrifying sound. Multiple roars and screeches penetrated the walls from the large tunnel that we were once in. They persisted for a few seconds as both Alex and I turned our flashlights off. Immediately recognising the sound as that of a nosalis horde, I darted behind the electrical equipment in the centre and gestured to Alex that he should do the same in an attempt to put a wall between us and the tunnel door. He scrabbled around for his gun and rushed over to me. We reached the wall and sat back against it, clutching our weapons and listening to the commotion outside intently.

I could hear Alex breathing nervously to my right, to which I had to quickly jab my elbow into him to make him realise he was being loud. He stopped, held his gun close, and closed his eyes as he tried to listen to everything happening outside. I noticed that his trigger discipline was worrying but I couldn't do anything about it at that moment. We heard the creatures outside running around in the tunnel, it sounded like there were hundreds of them. We could hear their heavy footsteps rushing across the floors, walls and ceilings of the tunnels. They kept roaring at each other as they hunted us.

One of them clearly latched on to where we were because we heard it crash into the door. The hinges of the door and the screws of the latch creaked and moaned as they deformed under the pressure being put on them. Another hit gave a higher pitched screech from the door. I looked around my cover at the door and saw a small gap forming in between the hinges of the door when the door had bent out of shape under the force of the beast. A third hit enlarged the gap and I caught a glimpse of the abomination's long, slick and dark brown arm. Its muscles flexed as it crashed into the metal. The sharp edges of the rust had cut into its skin and a small amount of blood ran down its arm but it didn't care at all, it was focused on the door. I quickly hid my body from view as the creature smashed into the door a fourth time. I could hear the door deforming; it was nearing its breaking point. The monster seemed to know this. In amongst all of the movement outside, I could hear the creature rearing up for one final strike. It snarled and roared loudly as it rushed up to the door, smashing into it with all of its weight. The door let out an ear-piercing screech as the hinges and screws bent and eventually sheared off. The door flew into our room and crashed down onto the floor, scraping across the concrete and landing on the floor with a huge, echoing crash.

We could hear beast slowly enter the room, snarling as it went. Its huge fists and feet hit the floor one after the other with blunt and heavy thuds as it analysed the room. Both Alex and I pulled our legs in closer so that they wouldn't show to the darkness-adapted nosalis. It approached us, slamming its feet into the floor even harder to give itself an intimidating presence. It grasped the corner of the mesh just above my head with its right hand, both Alex and I slowly and silently turned our heads to look up at it. Its three claws were thick, long and incredibly sharp. They bent and deformed the mesh as it gripped and pulled itself forward to look around. I held my breath as a bead of sweat dripped down my face. I placed my finger on the trigger of my revolver and slowly aimed it upwards at where the mutant was about to be, my hand quivering slightly as I did so.

The monster's head came into view as it scanned the surroundings ahead of it. Its tiny orange eyes quickly darted around as its large head slowly and ominously moved from left to right. It opened its huge mouth and snarled, showing its multiple sets of jagged and spiky teeth. The skin around its mouth looked as if it had been pulled back revealing the dark pink muscle below but it didn't seem to bother the creature. It leant forward, placing its left arm on the ground and bending the mesh in its right hand's grip even further. The wound it had sustained slowly dripped a dark crimson blood on the floor but it didn't pay attention to that at all. We didn't move a muscle.

After searching the immediate area, the creature prepared to move forward until it was stopped by the heavy footsteps of another entering the room. Its head darted around so that it was looking over the shoulder opposite to us. The other nosalis seemed to stop and snarl as the first let go of the mesh and intimidatingly turned its body to face it. The snarling and growling grew louder as the beasts competed for their prizes. This seemed to go on for an age but was likely only actually for half a minute or so.

The visible back legs of the monster suddenly disappeared as it almost seemed to bark and pounce towards the other creature. The other one yelped but appeared to fight back. We could hear them both scrabbling around, biting and attacking each other. Every time they did any damage, a piercing cry reverberated through the room. Amongst all of this, I tapped Alex on the shoulder, held my finger up to my lips, indicating to him that he should be quiet, and pointed in the direction of the second door to the right of us. He nodded, cautiously looked around to his right and quickly but quietly darted over to the door, keeping his head low and his gun high. I followed shortly after and looked over at the creatures just in time for one of them to launch itself at the other with all of its power, firing both of them out of the doorway and into the tunnel beyond.

Alex didn't even look, he reached the door as fast as he could, threw his gun through the gap, and crawled through. The gun clattered loudly on the concrete floor but, fortunately, the creatures were distracted with their fight. As soon as he could, he grabbed his gun and leapt upright, moving further into the corridor as he did. Once the way was clear, I quietly scrabbled under as well, picking myself up at the other end to find that Alex had rushed off a good distance down the tunnel without his light on. I could still hear the creatures fighting as I rushed forwards to meet back up with him.

I cautiously but quickly moved forwards in the dark, whispering his name a few times to try and get his attention so that I could catch up to him. I was worried he had just run off and I wouldn't find him again. Feeling the wall for stability, I rounded a corner and stopped. I could hear the distant fighting of the beasts but nothing seemed to be coming closer to me. I pulled my flashlight back out and flipped it on to have a look at the way ahead of me. Suddenly, in front of me was Alex's face staring straight at me. Startled, I jumped back and said 'fuck' slightly louder than I would have wanted. Keeping the torch facing towards him, I checked the corridor I had just come down to make sure nothing had heard my expletive. When I couldn't hear anything moving towards us, I turned back to Alex and just said, "We should get the fuck out of here."

He nodded frantically, switched his light on and moved carefully down the corridor with me following. We were both panting heavily as we did so, amazed that we were both still alive. We didn't talk as we moved down the narrow and oppressive concrete corridor, instead just listening for any movement around us. We kept our lights in front of us and glanced over the miscellaneous pipes and electrical equipment that ran across the occasionally cracked walls.

After nearly ten minutes of slow walking, we came across an open doorway on the right of the corridor just at the edge of our flashlight range. Alex and I looked at each other, turned our flashlights off and edged forward, shaking with fear as we did so. We listened out for any movement as we approached. Nothing.

Alex reached the door and pushed his back against the wall next to it. He closed his eyes and psyched himself up before opening his eyes again and tentatively pushed his head around the corner. I heard him breathe a sigh of relief as he stepped out and aimed his gun through the doorway.

He took a step in, turned his flashlight on and whispered, "Seems clear." I also turned my light on and peered through the doorway to assess the situation. This seemed like it was a small maintenance room. There was a multitude of pipes across the walls with various valves and dials, many of which were broken. I shone my light at the floor which revealed a large and dirty sleeping bag laid out in the back-left corner and several empty tins of food scattered around the room, all of which was covered in a thin layer of dust. This had clearly been used as a home for someone a long time ago. The open door was very similar to the others we'd encountered but seemed to have fared much better, there were very few patches of rust and the handle looked relatively secure.

"Let's have a rest before we carry on," I whispered to Alex. He nodded and sat down on the sleeping bag against the wall, putting his gun on the ground and turning off his flashlight as he did. I tentatively pushed the door to a close and locked it with the same latch design that was on the other door.

Exhaling heavily, I sat down next to Alex. I turned my flashlight off and put both it and my revolver on the ground before resting my head on the concrete wall behind me, closing my eyes and just saying, "Fuck."