The carriage slowed, braked… stopped dead. The doors flew open, and a hiss came from the speakers: — Ge-e-e-et out! This train goesss no farther. Ssss-sss!..
The passengers stirred. What was this?
Ah, they were being kicked out!
We jumped down onto the sand. Men first, warily, then the women, with a delay and some helping hands. Everyone hoped to see something familiar and reassuring.
No such luck.
Not even the smallest thing resembling a Moscow Metro station could be found. Dunes under a red sky, and nothing else.
Where to go? How to get back?
No idea.
The guy who’d broken down the door to the driver’s cab glanced under the carriage. The horror in his “Aw-fuckin’-hell!” made the rest of us follow suit.
This couldn’t be happening!
This could not be happening, ever, under any circumstances.
Under the carriage, instead of rails, ties, and gravel, there was sand, swallowing the wheels completely. The virgin ground behind this metro hunk of metal mocked us with the absence of tracks. It hinted that the carriage had gotten here inexplicably. Maybe it had fallen from the sky, or maybe it had sprung out of Nowhere to set its passengers down in the middle of Nowhere, in the land of Never.
“Of all the places to end up!” everyone thought, and started doing something about it.
Three men trudged off in the direction we had rolled in from, judging by the rear of the carriage. Two trade-school kids followed after them. The sixth passenger, the one who had smashed the windows in the carriage, sat down on the sand and froze, clutching his head in his bloodied hands. Playing at despair… Or fighting off the pain. Altogether ungainly: long, brittle, nondescript. Another passenger – gloomy, twitchy, a jacket over a wife beater – dropped out of sight. Stepped aside and was gone. The women scattered about near the carriage.
I surveyed the heaps of sand and made up my mind. Whistling: “This is the day evil is taken by the throat, this is the day all the good ones get lucky...” I set off toward a hill that rose half a kilometer away.
Between the carriage and the hill lay a small, unremarkable heap of sand. I scrambled up it briskly, came down it even more briskly, and in the hollow beyond realized that climbing sixty or seventy meters up crumbling sand was going to turn into an hours-long ordeal. But what could I do? I clawed my way up toward the beckoning summit. In a minute I’d covered a dozen meters and collapsed flat on the ground. To hell with everything and everyone! Stand down! Stay put!
I realized I would stay here forever. This was my grave.
