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 earth behind this metro hunk of metal mockingly showed no tracks at all, hinting that the carriage had gotten here by some inexplicable means. Maybe it had fallen from the sky, or — one! two! three! — sprung out of Nowhere, to deposit its passengers smack in the middle of Nowhere, in the land of Never.
There was no sign of movement anywhere.
“Of all the places to end up!” everyone thought, and started doing something about it.
Three men, glancing back over their shoulders, trudged off in the direction we’d apparently come from, judging by the rear of the carriage. Two trade-school kids, hesitating a moment, followed after them. The sixth passenger, the one who’d smashed the windows in the carriage, sat down on the sand and, clutching his bloody hands to his head, froze. Playing at despair, maybe. Or fighting off pain. He was all wrong, somehow — lanky, brittle, nondescript. Another passenger — gloomy, twitchy, a jacket over a wife-beater — dropped out of sight. Seemed to step behind the carriage and vanish. The women — one, two, three, four! — scattered off to the sides, though not straying far from each other.
I surveyed the heaps of sand and made up my mind. Whistling, “This is the day evil gets grabbed by the throat, this is the day all the good ones get lucky…” I set off toward a hill rising half a kilometer away. I figured I’d survey the surroundings.
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 rolled over, stared up at the crystal overhead, and realized I was going to be stuck in these sands. There was no way out. The thought of my inevitable end came to me plain and clear. In my gut, in my very innards, I felt it: my strength was draining into the sand, my body was giving out. A little more, and I’d be carrying the questions I was asking myself straight into the grave…
