BURIED. ALIVE.

Prologue to Metro 2033

It is now two decades since the entire planet was convulsed by the
Final War, which flashed across the continents, engulfing all of them
in an instant, to close the final chapter in our history. Deployed
in this war, the most advanced technologies and greatest
discoveries of the human genius drove the human race back
into caves, submerging civilization forever in the impenetrable
gloom of a final Dark Age.

Nowadays, in the year 2033, no one can recall what triggered the
hostilities. Absurd. But if you think for a moment, what does it
matter who started it? Those who unleashed the war were the first
to die… And the inheritance they left to us was a smoldering ember
that used to be called the Earth.

The entire world lies in ruins. The human race has been
almost completely exterminated. Cities that were not totally
demolished have been rendered uninhabitable by radiation.
According to rumor, beyond the city limits lie boundless
expanses of scorched desert and dense thickets of mutated forest.
But what really is there, no one knows.

The airwaves are empty, and when the few remaining radio
operators tune in for the millionth time to the frequencies on
which New York, Paris, Tokyo and Buenos Aires once used to
broadcast, they hear nothing but a dismal howl. More than twenty
years have passed since that day when the final plane took off.
And now all the railroad tracks, corroded and pitted with rust,
lead into nowhere. The great construction projects of the age
are ruins, demolished before they were ever completed, and the
skyscrapers of Chicago and Frankfurt have been reduced to rubble.
 The historic districts of Rome lie smothered in moss and fungus,
the Eiffel Tower, gnawed through by reddish-‐brown leprosy, has
snapped in half. And the memories of humankind’s former
glory are overgrown by the weeds of fiction and fantasy.

It is only twenty years since the war ended before it had even
begun. But in those twenty years the world has changed beyond
all recognition. Man has not been able to reclaim it or
reestablish himself as its master. The planet has new masters
now, and the human race is condemned to huddle in burrows,
consoling itself with memories.

The radiation and viruses with which some human beings

attempted to eradicate others have brought new creatures into
the world. And now they rule by right over the desolate Earth.
The mutants are far better adapted to this new world than human
beings. The human era is almost over.

But the survivors refuse to believe it.

There are not many of us left, only a few tens of thousands,
out of seven billion human beings. We don’t know if there were
others who survived in some other place, on the other side of the
world, or if we are the last humans on the planet. We live
in the Moscow Metro.
A very long time ago, the Russian capital’s subway was conceived as
a gigantic bomb shelter, with the capacity to save hundreds of
thousands of lives in the event of nuclear war. Every station in
it was designed as a hermetically sealed bunker and built hundreds
of feet below ground level. Artesian wells and storage depots for
food, medicine and weapons were constructed in the tunnels. In
the 1950s, everyone thought Judgment Day was tomorrow, but
they were a little too hasty…
Although the world was hovering on the threshold of destruction
at that time, it managed to stave off catastrophe. But the
trajectory followed by history winds round in a spiral, and the next
time humankind found itself on the brink of the precipice, it tumbled
headlong into it. When the world came crashing down, the Moscow
 Metro became the final refuge of the human race before its
disappearance into oblivion.
From the moment when the early warning system registered the
launch of hostile rockets and Muscovites once again heard the
wailing of sirens that had been forgotten after so many decades of
peace, they would have just seven minutes to run to the nearest
Metro station. Exactly seven minutes after the alarm signal, the
hermetic gates with which every station in the Moscow Metro
was fitted would close for ever, cleaving like the blade of a
guillotine through families, friendships and destinies.
Those who had managed to battle their way into the Metro
would be saved. The others would face an agonizing death from
the effects of radiation sickness, poison gas and biological weapons.
We had known all this since we were children. But we didn’t
believe that war could happen in our lifetime – and we forgot about
it.
Everyone who was in the Metro that day was there by chance. We
were simply going about our business – office workers, janitors,
bankers who didn’t want to get stuck in traffic jams, military
personnel, prostitutes, scientists, college and school students,
pensioners, housewives with children… We were on our way
home, to visit friends, to work, to the grocery store, we had
decided that the Metro was quicker or cheaper, and that saved our
lives. We didn’t deserve to be saved: many of us regard our survival
not as a reward, but as a curse.
In the early days there were some who tried to break through to the
surface, who wanted to find their children, fathers or wives. Later
we realized there was no one left up there. No human beings, at
least…
Of the five hundred thousand who survived on that day, no more
than fifty thousand of us are left now. The hermetic seals protect us
against radiation and monsters from the surface, the dilapidated
filters purify our water and air. Dynamos built by handymen
generate electricity, underground farms cultivate mushrooms and breed
pigs: like humans, they don’t need light to live and – like humans
– they are prepared to guzzle any kind of garbage in order to
survive for one more day.
The central control system disintegrated long ago, and the Metro
stations have turned into dwarf states, each with its own ideology
and religion, although the factor that unites people at some of them
is no more than a functional water filter. The stations make war on
each other, plot and intrigue, band together in federations and
confederations… We continue to pretend that nothing has happened
and try to live the way people used to live. As if we haven’t
noticed that our entire, huge world has shrunk to the tiny
proportions of a toy model, to the scale of the Moscow Metro.
But our world has no tomorrow. There is no place in it for dreams,
plans and hopes. People here laugh at dreamers. Dreamers die first.
Here instincts take priority over feelings, and the most powerful
instinct of all is to survive. To survive at any price.
It may be true that our time is over. That human beings were once
the ultimate stage of evolution, but now their place is at the
bottom of the food chain. That we have no tomorrow. But we
still have today, and even if legions of fiends from hell attack us,
we will not surrender without a fight.
Don’t write us off too soon.
We’ll keep fighting right to the end.
To the bitter end.

Artyom
 Table of Contents
METRO 2033. THE PROLOGUE to the postnuclear dystopia