Moscow's Subway Horror [satire]

Monsters arrived in Moscow late last year and Vladimir Putin is mad as hell.

The tale of terror began innocently enough. The bureaucrats of the City of Moscow’s Transit Board Authority gave the nod for the refurbishment of the city’s underground rail after years of complaints from riders who called the subway system dingy and depressing.

Drawing upon the swelling coffers of the Russian oil-rich economy, the Board allocated part of their transit budget towards the installation of new lighting, replacement of some rail and the painting of the terminals and tunnels. The lighting and steel rail were manufactured by Russian factories. The paint was imported from China.

The revitalization project was almost completed when strange stories began to circulate about monsters seen in the tunnels. At first the authorities thought that some of the transit employees were sneaking nips of vodka during working hours. An internal investigation was launched; a commission was established.

A senior transit official, Mikhail Dzerzhinsky , oversaw the investigation. He personally reviewed the lurid testimony spilling from the mouths of fearful workers. The reports mushroomed. Passengers complained to the transit police, the media and minor government officials. Overwhelmed, Dzerzhinsky  appealed for help from Moscow’s mayor. But the mayor was unavailable, having slunk out of town to his dacha on the Black Sea with one of his many mistresses.

The crisis reached a boiling point when the wife of a Commissioner of State Affairs claimed to have been confronted by a monster within one of the labyrinth of underground terminals; more than a dozen eyewitnesses corroborated her story.

By then, Dzerzhinsky  had reached his own boiling point. What had started as a farce had now taken on serious overtones. The woman’s husband had been a former apparatchik with the KGB and she was not one to dismiss lightly. Reluctantly, Dzerzhinsky called upon the Moscow police force for assistance.

Meanwhile, forensic experts (called in to determine if any of the construction materials were polluting the air) determined that the paint imported from China was tainted with a mildly toxic radioactive material. It was the same substance used by botanists during the 1950s during experiments to increase crop yields by creating gigantic plants. Records from that time show humongous tomatoes the size of compact cars and watermelons the size of suburban ranch homes.

The information alarmed them. What if the radioactive substance could not only create monstrous plants, but monstrous “other things” as well? Then one of the researchers remarked that the subway system was rife with various types of insects.

A special police team was formed. Unofficially dubbed the “Extermination Squad,” they were under orders to purge the tunnels of the reported monsters. To that end they were equipped with an arsenal of weapons, canisters of potassium cyanide liquid and a few with flamethrowers.

The rumor of gigantic bugs breeding, foraging and attacking subway riders beneath the streets of Russia’s major city spread from the Urals to the Black Sea. The Russian media had a field day whipping up a frenzy with one unsubstantiated report after another designed to pull ratings and readership and increase their advertising revenues.

The fear and speculation sweeping across the Russian Federation reached a critical mass. That is when Vladimir Putin personally became involved.

First, the former president and current premiere, issued a strong protest to the Chinese authorities regarding the tainted paint infused with radioactive material, The Chinese response was the immediate arrest of those responsible. They promised Putin that the culprits—after a fair trial—would be found guilty and executed.

Next, the angry Russian premiere turned his attention to the logistics of ridding the subway system of the roaming monsters, that was if the things even existed. To date all the authorities had were mostly breathless testimonies from traumatized workers and terrified passengers.

The night of November 13, 2009 the first team discovered mutated cockroaches. Using the cyanide the team quickly exterminated the scrabbling monsters. A team member snapped this photograph as part of the official debriefing report.

Somehow the photograph was leaked to the press. The next day’s edition of Pravda featured it on the front page along with a 3,000 word screed designed to make the calmest of citizens cringe with horror.

Putin was furious. At that moment he longed for the days of the Politburo—or better yet, the Czars. He tantalized himself with fantasies of the guilty newsmen being dragged from warm hearths to be thrown grovelling at his feet before he magnanimously banished them to the bleak depths of Siberia instead of having their heads divested from their bodies.

After the Pravda story ran, subway employees (devout members of the Russian Orthodox Church), held a prayer vigil and chanted beseechingly by the train cars asking the Almighty to protect them from the marauding, bloated bugs. Members of the Extermination Squad took photos while the team guarded the prayerful participants holding the vigil from any surprise attacks by the burgeoning bugs.

As the encounters with bugs increased, commuters took it in stride. Some even carrying cameras and snapping photos of bugs invading subway cars. Passengers took this photo of bugs during an early morning commute.

Putin ordered the Mayor of Moscow to let no stone remain unturned in his quest to eradicate the bugs and stem the invasion before it threatened to break out onto the surface. Here the Exterminator Squad shot a photo of a work access tunnel infested with crawling bugs the size of sheep.

As the tide slowly turned in favor of the Russians in their frantic war against the bugs, giant insect egg nests such as the one depicted in the accompanying photo were systematically destroyed by members of the courageous Exterminator Squad.

During the final battle, that Putin himself attended, the Russian forces flushed out the queen beetle. Here is the now famous photo taken of the mammoth queen beetle seconds before it ate the work train Car #4233.

Shortly afterward the Extermination Squad moved in with flamethrowers and burned the querulous queen into a charred, smoking husk. Fumigators were brought in later to rid the subway system of the rancid stink of burned bug carcasses. Unfortunately, the acrid smell still lingers in parts of the tunnels even today.    

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Links

Original Helium.com article: “Moscow’s subway horror“

Source for photos: “The Horror of Subway” [englishrussia.com/?p=2854&f=2l]
© Copyright AYM Communications. 2010