Imagine, all you’ve ever known are the dank tunnels of the Moscow subway system. You were raised there, amid the shacks and hovels of a city’s survivors, attacked daily by vicious mutant animals, short on food and water, rarely venturing above-ground lest you succumb to radiation—or, more likely, other scavengers.

And then one day you leave, and you find out it didn’t have to be that way, that there’s life outside Moscow. There are places the nuclear bombs didn’t touch, or at least left a lighter impression, where people live on almost like nothing happened.

Such relief, to have made it out alive. Such disappointment, that it didn’t happen sooner.

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