Unease hung in the air. I glanced at my watch.
Twenty-three twenty-two.
I should have been fast asleep in bed, but instead I was racing through a tunnel.
— Excuse me, is Kashirskaya the next stop? — asked the girl sitting next to me.
— Yes.
— Could we have missed it?
— Maybe.
Anything was possible. Nothing surprised me anymore. Nothing except one thing: who needed me to be born in an unpredictable country at an unpredictable time. Everything else was small stuff, including a train that had lost its way in the metro.
— What the hell is this! — a woman’s shriek tore through the rattle of the wheels.
The shrieking came from a woman of a certain age, a mane of chestnut hair over a turquoise blouse dotted with sequins.
— Indeed, what the hell? — a man of intellectual appearance — tie around his neck — backed her up.
Those two phrases struck a spark of panic. Passengers jumped to their feet, started jabbing the emergency intercom buttons and yanking the emergency brake. At the end of the carriage, someone started pounding fists on the glass.
The commotion drew the attention of passengers in the second carriage. The quick-witted ones tried to reach the drivers’ cab.
Nobody managed anything.
The emergency brake turned out to be a dummy. The passengers in the second carriage kept their calm. The door to the drivers’ cab wouldn’t open.
— Open up, you bastards! — shrieked the most active of those pounding on the cab door. — I need to get off! Ah!!! Open the door!!!
— We gotta tear this fucking door off its hinges! — the collective decision lent purpose to their actions.
Three men lined up at the door. The biggest of the crowd, in a beige windbreaker and police-issue trousers with thin red stripes, took a step back… paused… and, with a running start, kicked the lock!!! The door cracked but didn’t open.
Screw it!
Another kick! And another!
Crack! Crack! Bam!!!
The door burst open and… damn it!... No one! Absolutely no one!!! The cab was empty and dark.
I couldn’t see from where I sat, but the reaction of the ones who’d broken in said it all!
— Who’s driving this train? Where are we going? Huh?!
Hysteria swept the carriage. At that same moment — I swear, I caught it out of the corner of my eye! — the lights of the second carriage went out. Either the power failed, or it had turned off somewhere, or it had simply vanished, swallowed by the tunnel.
With a shout of either “let it go” or “let me out!” someone smashed a window… and then what?...
Nothing.
Stale air crept into the carriage, and the panic faded away. Passengers slumped onto the benches like miners after a record-breaking shift.
Time passed. The wheels clattered. The carriage swayed. The runaway train raced onward.
Nothing happened.
