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

word on it: SEVASTOPOLSKAYA.
     
     
     
     
    Ties (Chapter 4)
     
     
    “Dad … dad! It’s me, Sasha!” She loosened the straps of her father’s helmet from his swollen chin. Then she reached for the rubber of the gasmask, pulled it from his sweaty hair and threw it away like a wrinkly, deadly-grey scalp.
    His chest raised and lowered itself heavily, his fingers scrapped over the concrete and his watery eyes looked at her without blinking. He didn’t answer.
    Sasha laid a bag under his head and stormed to the gate. She pushed her thin shoulder against the enormous gate, took a deep breath and crunched her teeth. The ton heavy mountain of iron retreated reluctantly, turned around and fell groaning into its lock. Sasha looked it again and sank to the ground. One minute, all he needed was just one minute for him to catch his breath … Soon he would return to her.
    Every expedition cost her father more strength. It was almost hopeless in the face of their weak harvest. Every expedition shortened his life not by days, but by weeks, yes even months. But it was their need that forced him to do so.
    When they no longer had anything to sell, there was only one thing to do, eat Sasha’s pet rat, the only thing in this hostile station and then shoot themselves. If he would have let her she would have taken his place and would have gone to the surface. How often had she asked him for his gasmask so that she could go up on her own but he remained relentless.
    He probably knew that this with holes filled piece of rubber and its full filters wasn’t any better than a talisman but he would have never admitted that. He lied that he knew how to clean the filters, even after hours of expeditions he acted like he felt fine and when he didn’t want her to see that he was throwing up blood he sent her away to be alone.
    It wasn’t in Sasha’s power to change something. They had driven her father and Sasha into this abandoned part of the metro, they had left them alive, not out of mercy, but out of sadistic curiosity. They must have thought that they wouldn’t even survive a week, but the will and stamina of her father had provided them with what they needed and that they had survived for years. They hated them, despised them, but brought them food regularly. Of course not for free.
    In breaks between expeditions, in these rare minutes when the two sat on the sparse lit fire, her father loved to talk about earlier times. Years ago he had realized that he didn’t
have to fool himself, but when he no longer had a future than at least nobody could take away his past.
    Back than my eyes had the same color as yours, he had said to her. The color of the sky … And Sasha believed to remember these days, these days when the tumor hadn’t bloated his head and when his eyes hadn’t faded, but when they shined like hers now.
    When her father said “the color of the sky” of course he meant azure-blue and not the glowing red clouds of dust that reached over his head when he climbed to the surface.
    He hadn’t seen real daylight in over 20 years and Sasha didn’t know it at all. He only saw it in his dreams, but he wasn’t sure if what he saw was real. What experience people that are blind from birth: Dreaming from a world that is similar to ours? Do they even see anything in a dream?
     
     
     
     
     
    When small children close their eyes, they believe that the entire world has sunken into darkness; they believe that everybody around them is as blind as they are. In the tunnels
humans are as naive as these children, Homer thought. He imagined that light ruled over darkness every time when he turned on his flashlight and then turned it off again. Even the most impenetrable darkness could be full of seeing eyes.
    Since the encounter with the corpse eaters he couldn’t think about anything else. A distraction. He needed a distraction.
    Strange that Hunter hadn’t known what waited for them at the Nachimovski prospect . When the brigadier