Orekhovo Station: Day 1, Sunday, 3:00 PM,MGR: 5
The first thing Mikhail registered was the smell of iodine and bad air. It was a different kind of foulness than the reloader's line. Cleaner, but somehow more clinical and therefore more alien. He lay on a narrow cot made of canvas stretched over aluminum poles, the kind of bed that offered no give, only proof of gravity. He heard the whisper of footsteps on the cracked linoleum floor and the low, constant hum of the ventilation system, a sound that always meant power, and thus, authority.
He opened his eyes to the soft, flickering glow of a single strip light caged behind a wire mesh. Above him, a figure leaned close.
The nurse, a woman named Yelena, had a face etched with the weariness of a hundred near-death experiences. She wore a stained white apron over her heavy coat. Her hands, when they touched his forehead, were surprisingly warm, but rough, like dry leather.
"You're awake, Misha," she said, her voice gravelly and low. She didn't sound kind, just efficient.
Mikhail tried to sit up. A sharp, searing pain tore through his lower back and shoulders, forcing a groan through his teeth.
"Stay put, idiot," Yelena knocking his head, then pressing a hand firmly against his chest. "Don't waste the effort. You fainted, you remember? Full collapse. You're lucky. Gus usually doesn't pay for the cleanup."
"The rounds," Mikhail rasped, the word tasting like rust. "Did we hit the quota?"
Yelena snorted, pulling a battered thermometer from his mouth. "Always the rounds. Never the body. You were close, boy. Two thousand one hundred and seventy-nine. Petrov came through the Armory just before lunch and signed off on the count. You stopped the line for two hours, and still they were close. That's why you're here instead of the scrap heap."
She stepped back and surveyed him, her eyes sharp. "You're fine. Dehydrated. Exhausted. Lead exposure, naturally. The usual Orekhovo disease. "Your heart's strong, but your brain isn't worth the metal it takes to save it.
She opened a metal cabinet and returned with a tin cup and a pill, black and smooth. "Take this. Pain and vitamins. The price of doing business."
He swallowed the pill with the water she provided. It tasted vaguely metallic, like everything else.
"How long?" he asked.
"The break ended twenty minutes ago. You won't be going back. Petrov's orders. One days' rest, or until Gus decides you're needed for heavy lifting.
Lateness, production failure, fainting on the job. The whole package." She gestured toward the door, not unkindly. "Get dressed."
The news, one days' rest should have been a relief, but it's a death sentence. One day of reduced pay, one day of MGR disappearing faster than he could earn them.
As he slipped his hand into his coat pocket, his fingers brushed against the remaining brass shell casings, the only true currency he possessed. He counted them in his mind. The sum was a cold weight in his stomach.
Five MGR.
He left the infirmary, the door swinging shut with a groan, and stepped back into the station's oppressive atmosphere.
It was lunchtime, and the sounds of the Market were amplified: the clang of metal, the shouts of the vendors, the sizzle of frying oil.
Mikhail approached the food stall run by Katerina. She was a fixture in the Market, running a small, smoky grill. Her stall was nothing more than a few bricks forming a fire pit, a grate, and a battered wooden counter.
Katerina was small and deceptively tough. She had the kind of eyes that missed nothing, and she always managed to look marginally less grim than the men she served.
"Look what the cat dragged in," she said, not looking up as she flipped a skewer of dark, lumpy fungus over the flame. "Thought you were done for. Word travels fast when you stop the line."
"Just a nap," Mikhail muttered, leaning on the counter. His back still protested the posture. "Katya. I need the special soup."
"The special it is." She scooped a generous portion of chopped, grilled mushrooms. Dark, fatty, and filling onto a bowl and slid it across the counter. She followed it with a tin cup of bitter, boiling water infused with local mushroom tea.
"That'll be four MGR, a little discount for you" she said.
Mikhail reached into his pocket and handed her four MGR rounds.
He ate slowly, deliberately, savoring the oily, salty taste of the mushrooms. It was the only moment of the day where he could stop being a machine and just be a man consuming calories.
Katerina leaned against the back wall, enjoying a brief lull in the lunch crowd. "I heard Gus screaming about those missing five hundred rounds. Said he'd work you til you bled."
"He did," Mikhail confirmed. He took a long, hot sip of the bitter water. "I only got one MGR now. Which reminds me."
He tilted his head toward her. "Your vodka. The homebrew. Was it really cut with disinfectant? My head was still ringing twelve hours later."
Katerina smiled, a flash of white in the gloom. "You want to know my secrets, Misha? Fine. It's what makes it cheap, and what makes it memorable." She winked. "It's strong enough to strip rust off a bulkhead, or the sense from a fool. You paid fifteen MGR for a good time, Misha. So tell me, did you have a good time?"
The conversation drifted, quiet and low, the din of the Market a constant soundtrack. They spoke of the tunnels, the latest raid on a forgotten food depot, and the ridiculous price of real, surface-grade coffee filters. Katerina confided a frustration with her supply, unable to forage and take care of the stall, and the traders were hiking up the price of charcoal. Mikhail told her about the monotonous rhythm of the press, the danger of working with bad powder, and the fear of Gus's scrutiny.
Time stretched, a rare luxury. For half an hour, they were two people sharing a moment of respite, not just a vendor and a consumer. It was a fragile, human moment in a world that valued brass over bone.
He finished the last of his tea. The one MGR in his pocket felt like sand.
"I have to go, Katya," he said, pushing himself off the counter. "Need to disappear before Gus gets ideas."
"Be smart, Misha," she advised, her eyes softening slightly. "And stop buying the full jar. Get the cup instead."
Mikhail returned to the cot and lay down, staring at the dark, pitted roof of a part of a train carriage. Sleep wouldn't come. His body felt too hollow, his mind too alert to the sound of his own poverty.
The klaxon's ragged, metallic shriek announced the close of the day shift. It had been an eleven-and-a-half-hour grind, but the men had pushed through.
Mikhail makes his move back towards the Market, struggling to take out his ID and tax card due to his stiff arm. Mikhail's vote of the guards are just useless, this one has seen him when he return to the cot. Why the need to check again?
The guard returns Mikhail's ID and tax card, "Next" the guard said as he gestures to him to move.
Mikhail walked stiffly toward the Armory entrance. Exhaustion was a damp, chilling cloak. He watched the reloaders, the seven-man crew he was technically a part of emerge from the workshop. They were gaunt figures, dusted grey from powder and lead, their movements mechanical.
Igor led the way. They didn't line up at Gus's office first; they reported to the smaller, reinforced cage beside it, where Petrov waited.
Petrov, a gaunt, perpetually anxious man in a cleaner military coat, flipped through a clipboard. He ignored the stench of sweat and solvent.
"Line up! No pushing!" Petrov snapped, adjusting his spectacles. "You earned your due. Now, your duty."
He looked at Igor. "Igor, Mikhail, and Dmitry. The day's wholesale consignment is ready. The Chief takes delivery first. You sign for the transfer now; you get your chits later."
Petrov pointed at the ammo boxes. The weight of two thousand rounds inside made Igor grunt as he hoisted it. The transfer of the day's profits, the fruits of their crushing labor was now their unpaid labor.
"Move it. Chief's looking for his 5.45 rounds, don't hold him up. Then, the rest of the bulk goes to the Hansa Trader and the Exchange."
Mikhail watched Igor and Dmitry lug the consignment into the darkness of the main tunnels. The exchange of physical rounds for financial credit was kept entirely separate from the workers.
Petrov turned back to the remaining men, holding a book of pre-signed payment chits.
"Right. Your chits." He paid them quickly, not with rounds, but with small, square slips of coarse paper.
"Ivan, full shift." Petrov drop a slip and handed it over. "Eight MGR authorized."
Every man received a chit authorized for 8 MGR.
The men shambled down the corridor, their chits clutched in their fists, and lined up at Anastasia's Kiosk in the middle of the market. The kiosk was a steel cage, fortified and clean, serving as both the station's official Ammo Exchanger and Bank.
Anastasia sat there, impossibly neat in her small space, a ledger open before her.
"Next!" she called.
Ivan pushed his chit across the counter. '8 Military Grade Rounds.'
Anastasia barely glanced at the paper. She didn't need to count, she knew Gus's official worker rate.
"Eight MGR," she announced, counting out eight Military-Grade Rounds and pushing them across the counter.
Mikhail watched, the acid burn of exhaustion mixing with the bile of utter injustice. The rounds were already at the kiosk, ready to be counted into Gus's revenue. The workers were simply being paid with an authorization to collect their pitiful MGR payout.
When the line cleared, Petrov was waiting, holding a single chit.
"Ah, the late sleeper," Petrov called out, his face expressionless. "Your pay."
Mikhail walked forward, his spine stiff.
"You're reported two hours late for the 11.5-hour shift, and you're getting off early," Petrov said, tearing off the chit. "Six hours work. Half pay."
Mikhail took the paper. It read: '4 Military Grade Rounds.'
He walked to Anastasia's booth, now empty except for her. He dropped the chit onto the counter.
"Four rounds," she said, her smile faint, almost pitying. She glanced at the chit and, without further counting, pushed four MGR across the counter.
Mikhail now had his 4 MGR, but he knew the real value of the work he'd delivered to the Chief and the Hansa traders was already lining Gus's pockets many times over. The profit margin was the only clean thing in the Metro, and it wasn't his.
In his pocket, Mikhail was left with five MGR. He was now deeper in the hole than before he had started the week.
Mikhail turned the MGRs over in his palm, their brass surfaces clean and glinting faintly in the harsh light. They felt cold. They felt like a joke. They felt like the only thing that mattered.
He had five MGR and one day of forced rest ahead of him. He needed 13 MGR by the end of the week, and more for food.
He looked back at the Armory. The work would kill him eventually, but the lack of work would kill him faster.
He had to find a way to turn the six MGR into at least fifty.
Orekhovo Station: Day 1, Sunday, 8:00 PM,MGR: 5
His first instinct was to risk the tunnels. But Tsaritsyno, flooded and contaminated, filled with tons of weird plant life and mutants.
The fear was immediate, an icy hand on his neck. He had never been beyond the first checkpoint. His experience was limited to the secured tunnel near the main Orekhovo guard post. Anything further are abandoned stations.
The guards at the barricade were silent, mostly bored. They are not here watching for the Red Line, the Reich. They are watching for the creeping plant life that had come so close to overrunning the station from the south.
Their job is to ensure no mutants enter the station or idiots walking into the highly contaminated zones like Tsaritsyno and Kantemirovskaya while the Demolition Corps manage a slow, creeping biological disaster.
Some heard there is still a settlement at Kolomenskaya but they are near dead.
If he couldn't leave, he had to make money here. His goal was the Market, but his mind was not on food. Food cost MGR he didn't have.
He walked past the stalls, the smell of coal smoke and cooked rat making his empty stomach ache. He passed the butcher, the tinker, and the weapons repairman. He could hear the low, wet cough of the rail worker in the next stall and the dull static of the Chief's radio bleeding through the concrete.
Above him, the main power line—pulled taut and humming with effort—cast a sickly yellow-green glow from its low-wattage sodium bulbs. Every flicker, every momentary dimming when the communal heater clicked on down the line, was a visual reminder: the light, like the air, was rationed, and he was low on the list. Freedom was a space where the ceiling didn't constantly leak cold, dark water.
He had six days left until the guard starts pounding doors. Thirteen MGR end of the week.
He reached Katerina's grill. She was already busy with the dinner crowd, smoke coiling around her face as she tended to the fungus skewers.
"You got paid already, Misha?" Katerina called out, her eyes twinkling with a mix of curiosity and amusement. "Can't stay away from the pretty girls and the cheap drinks, can't you?"
Mikhail leaned against the counter, keeping his voice low. "Pretty girls, yes. But I'm on forced holiday, Katya. Gus thinks one day of resting the body prepares the brain for more punishment while I need more MGR."
Katerina wiped her hands on her apron, her expression hardening slightly as she looked around. She knew his situation was desperate.
"I only need a cook, not a bodyguard," she said.
"I don't mind being your cook and bodyguard." He joked.
"Dream on, big boy," she retorted. She reached out and landed a quick, targeted thump right on his bicep. Mikhail winces in pain as his arm is still recovering.
He knew the arithmetic of this place. The thirteen MGR tax was a constant. The moment you fell behind, your cot became someone else's, and the only bed left was the cold, damp floor near the sewage line. He had to multiply this five MGR, or starve trying.
Katerina hesitated to ask "The fungus I required going into the damp zones near the service tunnels. To make the type of soup, I need wild mushrooms I cannot get from the station. It's dirty, and it's full of big rats."
"I do not know much about mushrooms but I'll try to forage the fungus." Mikhail winces through the pain, "If I bring you enough, you pay me in food. One hearty meal, and a tin of tea. Deal?"
"Deal." she cheered with hope in her eyes. "Now get out of here." waving her spatula.
Mikhail moved with a slouch, the weak light from the platform barely touching the dark mouth of the northern tunnel. He was heading for the post guarding the tracks.
A guard, a bulky shadow wrapped in surplus military padding, stepped out from the sandbagged position. The beam of his aging hand lantern cut across the gloom, catching the dust motes and the water dripping from the ceiling.
"Halt, citizen! Where in the blight are you going?" The guard's voice was flat, bored, yet held the necessary edge of authority. He thumbed the bolt on his antique Kalash.
"Fungi run, Comrade," Mikhail replied, keeping his voice level. "Just heading out and find some wild mushrooms."
The guard squinted, his eyes adjusting to Mikhail's face. "Right. Check in at the ledger, sign your life away, and be on your way." he smirked "When you come back, yell 'Prost', that's the password."
Mikhail shuffled past the post, the stench of unwashed uniforms and stale cigarette smoke heavy in the narrow gap.
The work was demanding, messy, and unpredictable, replacing the press's rhythmic brutality with a new kind of terror. The only illumination came from the eerie, bright glow of the radioactive luminescent mushrooms. They didn't feel like a natural life source; they felt like diseased growths fueled by the tunnels' unseen contamination.
The air was heavy with humidity, the floor slick with slime. When he looked back, the platform's weak safety light had vanished entirely, swallowed by the genuine, ancient dark.
The tunnels were constantly damp, the floor slick with slime and debris. The silence was punctuated only by the scurry of large, plump sewer rats and the sickening drip of water falling from the ceiling.
Then he heard it.
Not rats.
Not water.
A faint tic-tic-tic, like claws tapping lightly against concrete — brief, testing sounds.
Lurkers.
Mikhail froze, one knee half-bent, his gloved fingers tightening around the satchel. His breath fogged the air in front of him, rising like smoke and hanging there far too long.
He stayed still.
Very still.
He remembered what the guards said: Lurkers don't charge what they can flank. They circle first. They push you into a blind spot. They wait for the stumble.
Another tic-tic, this time from the right. Then one from the left, lighter, as if made by a younger animal.
Pack.
He still couldn't see them — he never saw them — but he felt the shape of their attention like a pressure on his back. The dim, sickly mushroom glow cast greenish halos across the slime-coated corridor, but nothing moved in it. Just the idea of movement.
They chirped softly in the dark: short, birdlike clicks.
Communicating.
Positioning.
Mikhail slowly crouched, easing his satchel into the crook of his arm. He didn't want to run; running drew them in like blood in water. And he didn't want to swing first; that only provoked them unless you hit clean.
The silence stretched.
A pebble rolled somewhere in the black ahead. Something had nudged it.
Not a rat. Rats moved fast. This moved with patience.
Then, behind him, something scraped the concrete — a fast, low scrape, too heavy for a rat, too deliberate to be random.
The Lurkers were closing in.
Mikhail's nerve snapped.
He bolted.
His boots splashed through filthy puddles as he sprinted in the dark, breath tearing through his throat. The tunnel magnified every sound — his footfalls, his panting, the frantic slapping of water — all of it loud enough to wake the dead.
Behind him, claws clicked rapidly.
Closer.
Matching his speed.
He didn't look back.
The faint glow of the guard post lantern appeared ahead like a dying star. He lunged for it, legs burning, lungs screaming.
The clicks intensified behind him, then began to retreat as he neared the faint glow of the guard post. A single, sharp rak! bark echoed once, then silence. The creatures had stopped at the edge of the light, as if some invisible boundary repelled them.
The guard post loomed ahead, lanterns weak but alive. Mikhail lunged behind the nearest sandbags, stumbling inside, chest heaving, heart hammering. Two rifles swung instantly in his direction, barrels cutting through the dim. The dark beyond the barricade was empty, but the terror lingered in his chest.
"Halt, runner. Password!." The guard yelled.
"Prost!" Mikhail yelled, still trembling.
The shift had changed. A new guard, young and jumpy, stood behind barricade. The moment Mikhail finished the word, the youth didn't hesitate. The guard leveled his rifle, a Barstard SMG, the sharp, unmistakable clack of the safety coming off echoed in the tunnel.
"What in the hell did you just say?" the guard demanded, his voice tight with raw adrenaline. "You think this is funny? You a Nazi sympathizer?"
Mikhail froze, the blood running cold in his veins. He held his hands out, dropping his satchel. "Wait! No! It's the clearance word! The guard on the previous shift—"
"I heard the clearance word, and it wasn't some fash dog-whistle! That's German! You trying to sneak spies past us? Get on your knees, now!" The muzzle of the rifle wavered slightly, focused directly on Mikhail's chest.
"It was a joke," a deeper voice cut in, laced with heavy resignation. It was the older, pockmarked guard from before, stepping out from the shadows near the barracks entrance, a half-eaten dry ration in his hand.
He walked over and cuffed the jumpy young guard hard on the side of the helmet. "Put the gun down, idiot! It was a joke for Ivan and me. It means 'cheers' on the surface, but it's just a bit of fun to scare the runners."
The young guard lowered the weapon slowly, his face flushed with confusion and shame.
The pockmarked guard spat onto the ground, the sound landing near Mikhail's boot. "Get inside, runner. You're lucky my shift was long enough to still hear the shot." He turned to the shaking youth. "Next time, kid, use your brain before you empty a whole clip into a guy holding dinner." He winked darkly at Mikhail, his expression utterly cynical. "Good gag, though, wasn't it?"
Mikhail simply nodded, trembling from adrenaline and retrieved his satchel just before he threw up . He hurried past, the adrenaline still thrumming in his ears, realizing the guards' dark, bored cruelty was often more dangerous than the tunnels themselves.
A sudden wave of nausea struck him, heavy and insistent, clawing up from his hollow stomach. He doubled over, hands clutching his knees, the damp air thick and choking. He bent further, gagging violently, but nothing came. The pit of his stomach was empty, dry as old sand. His throat burned, raw from the effort, and a faint taste of bitter bile lingered on his tongue.
Orekhovo Station: Day 1, Sunday, 10:00 PMMGR: 5