Downloads/Приходите в подполье.mp4
Magnitudes darker than the soot-caked countenance of the man who forms this video's subject, the footage captures a vertically shot view of arched concrete walls and steel rail lines leading off into an impenetrable vale of black.
The man, enwrapped within an olive-green military uniform and clutching a rifle, stands framed within this utilitarian warren of grime and rust, the beam of radiance from his weapon light quivering across his face as his hands shiver.
In the background, you can pick up a low murmur of voices along with a fainter series of reverberant clinks and clangs, the latter of which are drowned out as the soldier's lips part in a croaky monologue, thickly seasoned by an eastern European accent.
"Я 2-й лейтенант российских вооруженных сил Гавриил Фадеев, и я записываю это сообщение для всех, кто еще находится в городе.
Поверхность больше не безопасна; силы армии развалились.
Если вы на это способны, уходите под землю, в линии метро.
Мы с моими людьми установили периметр в туннелях, ведущих к Чистым Прудам."
As the video trundles onwards, a level of peculiar distortion grows evident in the footage.
It almost seems like, at points, micro-second-long clips of a second film perspective have been embedded into the tape, struggling to grow visible over the original footage before flashing by in a blur of brown, red, and gray hues—too fast to properly catch.
You're about to fast-forward the tape before, suddenly, as though in a hard-won breakthrough, the view of the soldier dissolves and is replaced by a different perspective of the man, presented within an alternative version of the tunnel.
At least… you think what you're seeing is meant to be the tunnel.
It looks far more like the pulsating interior of some beast's esophagus, and you have to do your best to link that flailing, flesh-stripped thing immersed waist-deep in a bubbling brown slurry in the frame's center with anything remotely human.
It stands, held upright by a bulbous white appendage extending from the ceiling and smothering the oozing remnants of its head.
"ЭТО ЛОЖЬ, ЭТО ЛОЖЬ," the thing that is and isn't a man screams, before a club-like limb extends from the white mass, plows through its chest in a shower of bone and mangled lungs, and the tape jumps back to the soldier.
"Приходите на линии метро," the man croaks.
"У нас есть тепло.
У нас есть еда.
Мы позаботимся о вас."
He smiles at the camera.
Half of his face stays limp.