Chapter Fourteen: Anomaly
Artyom walked quickly after Aleks through the hallways, trying to keep pace. It was as if she was deliberately trying to keep her distance from him as every time he thought he had finally caught up to her speed, she slipped ahead again and around the next corner.
"What is the 'true mission' you mentioned to Nikolai?" Artyom dared, if only to slow her down a little with conversation, though he was genuinely curious.
"I really don't want to talk about it." She said after a sigh, taking her pistol out of its holster and clearing every side-passage as they moved along the long winding hall.
"Is it just about protecting your station? Or something else?" Artyom was nearly at a jog as he began to climb the winding concrete stairwell she had already started ascending. It was littered with debris and garbage and the red emergency lamps flickered weakly.
"Don't you know how it is in the Metro by now? You can't trust anyone." Her tone of voice was unusually hushed and she had finally slowed down somewhat.
Her words stung, and although Artyom tried not to take them personally, the pain quickly turned into confusion and then irritation.
"But you trusted me before. At Venice, on the surface, and at Kuznetsky Most…" he waited a moment, but received no reply, so he decided to be more direct. "Do you not trust me now?"
"I don't think now is a good time, Artyom." She said hurriedly, gripping her weapon stiffly in both hands and slowing her steps at last as they reached the top of the stairs.
"But—" Artyom began with an annoyed look but was halted by a firm barrier against his chest. Did she just hold him back with her own strength? Or was it just that he hadn't been expecting the sudden obstacle? He looked at her indignantly, but she didn't look back at him. "What?"
"Shh!" Aleks hissed at him and dropped to a crouch.
Artyom only then sensed what she had been trying to warn him of. Just outside of the stairwell exit was a veritable battlefield, or rather, the graveyard of one. The air was dank and heavy with the metallic and pungent scent of blood and rotting flesh, it was nauseating to say the least. Aleks covered her nose and mouth with the sleeve of her left hand, slowly edging forward to look more closely at one of the decaying corpses and poking at it with the barrel of her gun.
Quickly reaching for his flashlight, he illuminated the ground just in front of her. With only a small degree of delay, he followed her hand with the beam as she reached reluctantly to overturn the carcass of an unknown being. It looked to him upon first glance to be a different mutation of the generic tunnel lurkers, only with reddened skin and patches of course black hair. Dropping the body, she dared to investigate the pool of blood beside it. Dipping in a finger, she withdrew quickly and held it up for Artyom to see.
"It's cold, but not dry." She said in as low a voice as she could without whispering. "It's been a few hours, maybe."
"But what happened here? Who did this?" Artyom puzzled aloud. He looked behind them at the staircase and didn't notice any trace of blood or any creatures living there, but there were innumerable doorways in the halls that led to god-knows where. They had gone so far along the passage that it wasn't possible that the Red Line had been involved. If the Reds had known about such a thing, wouldn't they have made sure that the door they had come through was sealed off?
"Did anyone at Polis ever mention anything?" She looked back at him, holding up a spent cartridge casing for him to see. It was clearly a battle against humans.
He shook his head solemnly. He had been occupied at D6 ever since its discovery and he hadn't heard any mention of an infested passage near here. After realizing he'd been quiet for a minute too long, he decided to aim the light as far down the corridor as he could. This wasn't a train tunnel, but he could see several offshoots and doors. Who knew how many endless connecting passages there were or where they led to. Either this was an area in the territory of the Reds and had nothing to do with Polis or maybe the Reds had entered this passage trying to reach Polis, just the same as them, and found these creatures living inside. But then that wouldn't explain why it seemed that the defenders had been standing at the other end of the hallway. Could another Ranger have come through here?
In any case it looked to be clear and quiet now, and they needed to keep going. Whoever had fought these strange creatures had definitely killed all of them, and had most likely retreated to wherever they'd come from or had gone on in whichever direction they were originally headed. He could only hope, as they decided to enter the hallway, that the defenders hadn't blocked the tunnel ahead. It wasn't going to be easy getting around to Polis any other way, so that left this rotten passage as their only road.
Aleks kept her pistol drawn, she'd turned on her own light and scanned along the left wall as they crept forward, pausing at each alcove and doorway to make sure it was clear or closed off. Each of them had to also be aware of their footing, as the blood was slippery and the corpses lay strewn at random every few feet.
"W-what is that? Do you hear that? It sounds like…" Aleks whispered, almost tripping over a mutant carcass and quickly trying to correct herself. Her sudden change in behavior was unusual, and that alone put Artyom on edge.
He held himself steady, straining his ears for whatever sound she mentioned, but he didn't hear anything. Turning his attention back to her, he knew something was very wrong; she was moving slower and slower, and it had suddenly started to feel cold.
"Artyom, I f-feel…" Her voice waned, and for a moment her lips kept moving as if she were still speaking, but no sound came out. She looked back at him with a blank expression, her head bobbing as she looked as if she had become dizzy, a thin stream of blood dripped from her nose.
He was barely swift enough to catch her before she buckled at the knees and fell sideways; he stuck his leg out to balance himself but then crumpled to the floor anyway. With her body now completely limp, it was a bit of a struggle to shift her into his arms and untangle his legs from underneath her – luckily he hadn't sat in any blood. He leaned his ear down to her mouth and listened for breath, he didn't want to think that some invisible entity of this passage had entered her head… no, it couldn't be like what had happened to Bourbon. His heart raced, her breathing was so barely noticeable that he pressed two fingers to her neck in search of a pulse.
The soft and steady thumping against his fingertips was a welcome relief. He took in a deep breath and sighed, clutching her a bit tighter. He still wasn't able to ascertain exactly what had happened, she mentioned hearing something, but all he could hear was the ambient air in the hallway and maybe the distant hum of the emergency lights in the stairwell behind them. He took up her flashlight from the floor next to them and used it to examine the immediate area. On the ceiling there was a patchy white fungus, but there weren't any wires, holes, or pipes that might explain the interference. If it was something like the broken pipe in the tunnel near Prospekt Mira, or the gasses at Polyanka, then wouldn't he too be affected somehow?
Something inside of him was telling him to go. Certainly Aleks wouldn't regain consciousness until he removed her from this place. Whatever was going on here was not able to sway him, and so he had to get moving while he still could. Shifting her around again, he had her nearly standing up and then carried her over both shoulders like a casualty of war. He reminded himself again that the mutants here had been shot, so it was an unrelated cause that had struck Aleks unconscious. Still, this passageway felt unlucky.
With her modest weight balanced evenly on his shoulders, he scavenged her pistol from the floor and stuck it under his belt. Double checking that he had both flashlights, he quickly made his way down the corridor. The bodies of the red lurkers were more spaced out now, and he supposed that once they had been shot at, not as many of them dared to keep up their advance. Artyom took this as a positive sign and kept walking; he could just barely see a light glowing about twenty meters ahead.
At the end of the hallway a door opened up into a sizeable room of concrete walls and steel beam supports in the center. This room was set up like an outpost, but it was completely deserted. An old radio spouted static and two lanterns were still burning. It struck Artyom as strange that the place was abandoned, but there was a makeshift couch and he decided it would be okay to lay Aleks there while he secured the area.
The first thing he did was go to close the heavy metal door to the cursed passageway they had just come from, but he caught sight of something in the moment just before it was sealed and paused to observe it; a light silvery blue ball as bright as a full moon on the blackest night. It hovered and flickered like lightning, and he knew exactly what it was – an anomaly – the same as those that haunted some of the tunnels most gruesomely affected by death. Khan had explained all about them when they encountered one in the tunnel near Turgenevskaya. He made sure to shut the door quietly, so as not to attract the attention of the being. That must have been what Aleks had spoken of hearing before its energy overpowered her. Thankfully they hadn't come face to face with it, as he had seen firsthand what destruction the being was capable of in the tunnels; burning away whole hoards of nosalises and spider bugs, as it was attracted to movement.
He could breathe a bit more easily now, after understanding what was affecting Aleks. Although the mystery of the battle against the mutants and the reason this outpost was abandoned still lingered. As he crossed the room to check the other doors, Aleks began to stir. He quickly examined one exit and found that it only led to a small room with some kind of generators in it, and so he closed the door. Hoping that the last exit led onwards, he was relieved to find that it opened to another stairway.
"Wh-what… happened?" Aleks moaned, holding a hand to her head as if the lights were too bright.
"There was an anomaly, but it's gone now." Artyom replied coldly, realizing he was still a little bitter about their discussion of trust just ten minutes ago.
"It sounded like… music, then people talking to me all at once." She winced as she sat upright. "Did you hear it?"
"No." He said flatly, not wanting to elaborate. Hearing music didn't exactly coincide with encountering an anomaly, and this caused him to rethink the entire corridor. Was it also haunted?
"Strange." Aleks wiped the blood from her nose with her sleeve and propped both elbows on her knees, using the triangulation to support her head in both hands. She took several breaths and remained quiet. "I thought I saw… no, it's not possible."
Artyom still stood by the door leading to the stairs, suppressing the urge to go and assist her with her injuries and ask her more about her hallucinations. He was again consumed by her retraction of trust, as he thought they had been getting along well together up until they had run into Nikolai and Dmitri again – everything had felt awkwardly misaligned since then. Suddenly, she spoke, and it was as if she had been reading his mind as she began to clear the air on the very subject.
"Listen, it's not that I don't trust you. I do. But then, I don't know much about you. You don't know very much about me… and this true mission, it isn't defined yet." Artyom had already turned his head around curiously to look at her. With her head still in her hands, she spoke softly and sincerely. "It's more like an idea, a hope. Wishful thinking. So, I can't go around telling everyone about it before I've figured out what to do. Okay?"
Not knowing what to say, he could only prove he had heard the confession by going over and standing across from her. She seemed to understand that he was listening.
"Anyway, right now the priority is to get to Colonel Melnik and then I can worry about everything else once I return to Avtozavodskaya." Aleks looked up at him and blinked a few times, seeming to shake the last of her affliction away and stared at him with renewed clarity.
"We're almost to Polis, now. This looks like one of our outposts." He said softly, offering her his hand. She forced a smile through a somber expression and placed her hand in his, he helped her to her feet. "These stairs should go onto the grey line, I think."
"You first this time." Her face went dead serious, with a hint of apprehension in her eyes.
Artyom did as requested and took the lead, although at a much slower pace than they had coming up from Prospekt Marx. He took the steps partly sideways, holding out an arm for her to hold onto, in case she became dizzy again. She was rubbing at her ear with her other hand, complaining that it was ringing.
This stairway was much shorter, only a few flights down led to another metal door that spat them out into a pitch black tunnel. He had correctly assumed that it was the northern border of Aleksandrovsky Sad, but wasn't sure which way it was to the actual station. Switching on his flashlight, he scanned the ribs of the tunnel for markings or signs. Just ten meters down to their left was a barricade made of sandbags and metal barrels, on one of which was painted the letter symbol of Polis. It must have been an outer position in the tunnels that lead to the Reich territory in the other direction, and things with the Nazis had been calm lately, so they might not see a patrol of Kshatriya for another hundred meters or more depending on how far the station was from here.
"It's this way." Artyom made a motion with the flashlight, feeling suddenly very confident and comfortable in this tunnel. It was dry and warm and quiet here, with no trace of any of the horrors they had seen in the transfer passage.
Aleks didn't reply, but stayed very close to his side as he navigated around the barricade; he could barely feel the pressure of her arm around his, though she was definitely leaning on him for support. Remembering that he still had her pistol in his belt, he thought of turning to give it back to her, but then thought it might be better to wait until they reached the border checkpoint just in case they decided to search her.
He couldn't believe that they were so close now. The journey he had been on since losing his way at the church outpost was almost as difficult as the first one he'd undertaken to reach Polis the first time he set out for it, although the companionship was infinitely more interesting and he hadn't been captured or thrown in jail at any point. He was happy and proud to have helped Aleks however he could along the way, though not suspecting that she would have had the same difficulties if she had to traverse through the Metro on her own as he did. She had a good sense of not only herself, but her surroundings, and also the direct training and influence that Hunter had given her – and that man could slip through the most dangerous stations and tunnels without even being seen or heard.
"Stop! Identify yourselves!" A young man's voice called out, dispelling Artyom's memories.
Both Artyom and Aleks halted in their tracks; Artyom raised his arms halfway into the air and only heard the rustle of clothing as Aleks must have done the same. He wondered if she had noticed the ten or so glowing green eyes watching them as they had approached. The clicking of machine gun bolts and safety switches echoed off the walls.
"I am a Spartan Ranger, Artyom Alekseyevich, and I'm escorting this woman to see Colonel Melnik." Artyom replied loudly and clearly.
"Proceed towards the light; we will check your documents." The voice replied calmly and then the impermeable darkness was split with a crack of warm light as a door was heard creaking open.
Artyom thought he must not have met any of these guards before, or else they might have recognized him and dispensed with the formalities. None the less, he obeyed the order and slowly walked forward to the one lamp burning in a room off to the side of the tracks. Here, a large man in dark green clothing sat behind a small table. He bore the two headed eagle tattoo of the Kshatriya of Polis, but Artyom didn't know him. Slowly reaching in his pocket for his passport, he slipped the man the document and then turned to Aleks for hers.
"Ah, Artyom! The Colonel told us to watch out for you. He was expecting you yesterday. Go on in to the station, someone will radio in for you." The guard gave a knowing smile, handed them back their passports, and waved them onwards without asking anything extra about Aleks. Artyom had never looked at her passport himself to see where it had been issued, but it had checked out in any case.
Striding confidently, although inside disbelievingly, he led Aleks into the next hall which bypassed the hermetic lock at this station. Apparently they didn't open the big door unless there was a cart or caravan; it was probably more secure that way, Artyom guessed.
Although she shielded her eyes with one hand, Aleks didn't seem to be too bothered by the bright electric lamps at Aleksandrovsky Sad station as Artyom had been at his first arrival. He had to wear dark glasses for days and still wasn't completely used to the lights even after that. Still, Aleks looked at the whole vestibule with amazement in her eyes, and he knew that this was truly her first time entering the grand unified stations of Polis. At long last, he was home again.