Barricade

by Lindsey Black

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He’s so freakin’ short, for starters!’ Matti laughed and Sasha found himself laughing with him, as well as at himself.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Why do you like him?’ Matti asked seriously, turning to watch his profile.

  Sasha pondered the question before turning his head so they were nose to nose.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘That’s what worries me,’ Matti whispered, but he was smiling as if he had a secret. He closed his eyes and turned his face up as the sun came out in full from behind another cloud scurrying through the sky. His skin looked on fire, pale and glowing in the bright light, his hair a golden halo on the grey stones.

  ‘What do you think’s going on in the town?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Matti mused. ‘They’re obviously not from here, and I suspect they’ve come here deliberately, which is odd. This isn’t a major city, or a common breach point. Groups with that sort of firepower usually try a crossing in Germany or China. Somewhere closer to the ocean.’

  ‘Maybe the infection has pushed them inland?’

  ‘Maybe, but then why not try Kazakhstan? The Barricade isn’t manned as heavily there.’

  ‘Maybe they don’t know that?’

  ‘By now everyone knows everything about the Barricade,’ Matti countered. ‘This seems too deliberate. For there to be so many of them hiding … I spoke to Six-Six-Seven. There’s been reports through the districts past Seven-Zero-Zero of movement along the wall, but it died down about a month ago.’

  ‘You think it’s the same group?’ Sasha asked curiously, frowning at a particularly dark cloud that idled by and scattered a few stray droplets of rain across his face.

  ‘I think coincidences are rare,’ Matti said carefully. ‘I think they’re looking for something.’

  ‘Nowak said the crazy Islander rampage guy looking for his wife was named Ioane,’ Sasha mused. Matti was curious enough about the remark that he sat up and frowned down at him, his pale eyes unnerving and calculating.

  ‘That’s weird,’ Matti agreed. ‘Ioane said his name was Samoan. That’s an island. Do you think they’re related?’ He appeared to agree with Sasha about the unlikelihood of that, if his expression was anything to go by.

  ‘I think it’s strange that Ioane showed up and within a matter of days there’s a rogue group in town ready to hunt us down.’

  ‘Well, they weren’t exactly hunting us down,’ Matti reasoned but Sasha knew him well enough to know he was trying to solve a puzzle he suspected had no solution because they didn’t have all the pieces. Something weird had started, and they needed to figure it before it got them killed.

  ‘Moscow are holding, they’re not going to send anyone.’

  ‘That’s not surprising. They never send anyone to the centre.’

  It was true enough. In the twelve years he’d been on the Barricade, Moscow had sent aid to the central districts twice. Once when a group successfully scaled the southern wall in eastern Kazakhstan, and once when a group of Moldovans decided to try and firebomb the Barricade at Kiev.

  ‘The timing’s bad.’ Of all of it - Ines dying, Ioane’s arrival, the influx into the town - that was what was really bothering him.

  ‘The snow’s coming,’ Matti agreed. ‘I’m pretty sure this will be the last we see of the sun for a while.’ Which explained his mini baking session. Matti had grown up in a place where the sun didn’t set for half the year, and didn’t rise for the other. He knew the value of sunlight and luxuriated in it whenever it was available.

  ‘We’ve got enough supplies to get us through a winter, even a long one,’ Sasha confided. ‘But not if there’s extended fighting.’ They would run out of ammunition and medical supplies, and their clothing would suffer. There were only so many times you could sew up the holes in your cargo pants and eventually even super glue and nails failed to hold the soles on your boots.

  ‘Don’t worry about the worst until it happens.’ Matti slapped him on the stomach. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it until then anyway.’

  ‘I can have a plan.’ Sasha rubbed his smarting belly. Matti was stronger than he looked and was about to pinch his thigh when a bright light in the sky caught his attention. Red and soaring in a slight arc, leaving a thin trail of sparks in its wake, the flare was unmistakable.

  ‘Fuck,’ he swore, clambering to his feet and rushing to the southern edge. East of where Enzo and Jett had run into trouble, the flare stuttered in a graceful line before beginning a slow extermination. Matti appeared at his side, looking along the Barricade past the lighthouse to the next tower but it was impossible to know if they were doing anything.

  ‘I’ll get Enzo.’ Sasha was already running for the tower, taking the stairs three at a time, bursting into Enzo’s room. He was sprawled on his bed, Anna curled up at his side, and looked ready to bellow at him but caught himself when he saw the look on Sasha’s face.

  ‘Flare!’ Sasha snapped and ran back upstairs. Matti was still on top, watching the red light fade and searching the area with binoculars for signs of life. Enzo thundered up behind them, rifle in hand, Anna on his heels. She ran off toward the lighthouse, barking at the streak of light fading in the sky.

  ‘I’m gonna head in that direction and see if I can help,’ he growled, charging through the lighthouse and jogging toward District Six-Six-Seven.

  ‘Do you see anything?’

  ‘Not from this angle, too many buildings in the way.’

  ‘Let’s go.’ Sasha was already heading back to the tower. They’d likely arrive too late to do anything, but he didn’t want to be the guy who waited to see what happened and found out he could have done something.

  Jett was hobbling up the stairs and Sasha frowned, having a fast internal debate with himself. He wanted to send the man back to bed, but that was exactly what Matti had meant when he asked if Sasha could remain impartial. Enzo was on the wall, so Jett needed to be there as well.

  ‘Take a rifle. Enzo needs backup. Stay up top and cover us.’ He didn’t wait for a reply, sprinting downstairs and picturing in his head the best route to take for their estimated position.

  ‘Two teams in trouble within days of each other?’ Matti queried, pulling on his Q-hab dubiously.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ Sasha agreed. ‘I just wish I knew what the fuck it was.’

  11

  APC-ESSI-NREBUD666-21740021

  It was hard to decide if injury was good or bad. On one hand you were injured and that always sucked. On the other, sometimes you got drugs and the world dropped away and you fell, as if trapped in an avalanche with no end. Just falling, the cold gone, the dark a blanket that wrapped you up and stole you into dreams you couldn’t have imagined because the world was never so polite.

  But drugs wore off. Injury was definitely bad.

  When Jett made it outside, Angelo was leaning heavily on the parapet, rifle through the wire, gaze fixed at the gates. Anna was sprawled nearby, on her back, belly to the sun.

  Looking down, Jett watched the gates open and Stepanova and Raikkinen rush out along the southern edge of the Barricade, heading east.

  ‘Where was the flare?’ He scanned the skyline but couldn’t see any trace of it.

  ‘Further east from where we ran into resistance.’ Angelo tracked Stepanova through the sight on his rifle.

  ‘Isn’t so much activity strange for this time of year?’ Jett walked slowly toward the lighthouse, trying not to open his wound, trailing Angelo as he charged through. Anna didn’t bother to follow, happily ensconced in sunlight.

  ‘Strange for any time of year.’ Angelo moved through the lighthouse, trailing Stepanova further along the wall.

  ‘The supply truck ran into a lot of activity as well,’ Jett pointed out. ‘Activity on both sides of the wall is rare too, right?’

  ‘Obviously,’ Angelo growled, clearly frustrated by the questions. Jett shut up and focused on the town, looking for signs of … an
ything. He had no idea what he was searching for. Signs of life? Signs of trouble? Activity of some sort? Clues as to what the people down there were doing? He wasn’t even sure it mattered. What did they care if there was a group of uninfected in the town? It wasn’t illegal to be there, so why all the secrecy and hiding?

  The wound pinched and sent an acute stabbing pain through his hip with each step, so it wasn’t surprising that Angelo ended up so far ahead. Shuffling as best he could with his rifle slung over his shoulder and binoculars in hand, Jett used the time to watch the town.

  It was odd, that it could be so still when there was so much movement. Odd that there was movement on both sides. Odd that people seemed to come from nowhere, for such short periods of time, and then seemed to disappear.

  Angelo was so far ahead he’d likely be on his way back by the time Jett reached him, so Jett headed back to their tower. He couldn’t do much besides offer a second gun and pair of eyes, and Angelo had that covered. Jett was actually impressed. He’d known Angelo was a highly respected reconnaissance solider with a strong reputation among soldiers on the Barricade, but he still hadn’t expected the reputation to match the man. Enzo moved faster than Jett would have thought possible for someone his size, and he noticed tiny details even moving at speed and made intuitive leaps about cause and effect.

  But maybe it was that focus on the minutiae of their lives that had led to a mistake. Hobbling back through the lighthouse, Jett stuck his head up through the floor and checked the lighting positions, memorising the settings and angles. The ladder pulled at his side and left him gasping as he climbed back down and headed through to the tower.

  The sun had disappeared behind a heavy grey cloud, casting a dark shadow across the Barricade. To the north, the forest was being swallowed by a grumbling wave of heavy shadows. They had an hour at best before the storm would hit.

  The warmth of the tower was always a shock. He tossed his coat over the racks and leaned heavily against the map table, rummaging through those hanging on the wall and pulling down copies of neighbouring districts, lining them up so he could see the entirety of the town and its surrounds.

  Three districts touched on the town. Six-Six-Six was on the western side, primarily residential; Six-Six-Seven was engulfed by the business district, and Six-Six-Eight stretched into an Industrial region of abandoned warehouses and an old airport. District Six-Six-Five covered a small residential suburb and dead farms, and had none of the signs Jett was looking for. Six-Six-Nine was far more interesting, appearing to be surrounded by empty fields and debris from centuries ago.

  Rummaging through the maps again, Jett found a version that pre-dated not only the Barricade but the communist revolution and folded it over to fit alongside the newer copies on the table, comparing landmarks. He was most interested in a small river that ran through the southern side of the town, moving east. A diversion dam lay about forty kilometres south of the Barricade in District Six-Six-Eight, but nothing had been built to account for the change in direction.

  There weren’t enough maps to confirm his suspicions, but he had the real thing just outside the door. He put on his coat and took the District Six-Six-Seven and Six-Six-Eight maps with him, closing the door firmly behind.

  The northern tree line was barely visible through the cloud bank rolling in. Moving as quickly as he could manage without causing himself too much pain, Jett hurried to the lighthouse and climbed up into the lighting rig, reminding himself of the angle of the lights and comparing the area that would be covered on the map. Assuming the lighting was the same in the other districts, he checked which areas of the map would remain dark and memorised where they were on the maps.

  Scuttling down the ladder, Jett hurried out onto the Barricade, spotting the small visage of Angelo several kilometres away, leaning against the wall and following whatever was taking place down below. Jett picked up the binoculars from around his neck and looked down into the town, spotting Stepanova and Raikkinen helping a third figure in a Q-hab suit to the gates of District Six-Six-Seven. Several streets away he spotted more men in suits, tossing bodies into a ditch, and he wondered how old the corpses were, and if they’d died of the Infection.

  He turned the binoculars east, checking the map and searching out landmarks. In the distance he could see a snaking shadow and he followed the line of the river to the dam, a pale structure that could have been anything but was in the right position to have been the diversion.

  Checking the map, Jett followed the landscape north, passing over the roofs of warehouses, some blocked by the multi-story buildings between them and the Barricade, but the main landmarks were easy to find. He was looking for a particular valley to the east of the airfield, and was only mildly surprised to find it was much deeper in reality than on paper.

  He checked the map again before following the landscape north, looking for small signs. Dark patches of ground, abandoned vehicles or machinery, failed overgrowth, unnatural fauna and dead earth. Memorising details he double-checked the position of each against the map, ensuring the lines he was drawing in his mind matched what was supposed to be evident.

  When he looked ahead, he realised Angelo had gone into the tower of District Six-Six-Seven. Checking the bottom of the Barricade he found no sign of their people and realised they must have gone inside as well. If he tried to follow he wouldn’t make it back before the rain, and with all the activity in town he didn’t think Stepanova would appreciate him leaving no-one on watch, so Jett made his way back to the lighthouse to wait.

  It was nice, that someone had made the small nest in among the lights. He could lean against one of the light fixtures and stretch his leg out so no pressure was placed on his side. He spread the maps out on his thighs and traced the lines with his finger, hoping he was right so he didn’t look like a complete idiot but also hoping he was wrong because that would mean they were in a whole lot of shit.

  In the distance he saw his team emerge from the next tower, carrying their Q-hab suits and gear. They weren’t hurrying, so Jett assumed everything had gone fine and no one was hurt. He didn’t look too closely at the relief he felt at that, not wanting to acknowledge he was concerned.

  ‘You okay up there, Pavlova?’ Raikkinen called up when they finally arrived.

  ‘I have a name,’ he snapped, but it lacked heat. ‘And I’m fine.’

  He spotted Raikkinen and Angelo hurrying along the wall to the tower, carrying all of the gear, and a moment later the hatch slammed open and Sasha stuck his head up. He didn’t want to think too hard about why his stomach fluttered when Sasha smiled at him, climbing into the nest and wrapping him in strong arms. He hadn’t allowed himself to be worried while Sasha was outside the Barricade, but having him solid in his arms made his chest ache.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ he realised.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Sasha rumbled in his ear and Jett allowed himself to relax, breathing in the scent of him and huddling closer against his warmth. Sasha surprised him by pulling back and undoing his jacket, but then he folded Jett inside and closed him in a hot cocoon. ‘Better?’

  ‘’s nice,’ Jett whispered.

  ‘What is all this?’ Sasha nodded to the maps on Jett’s lap but for a moment all Jett could concentrate on was his closeness and the warm breath ghosting against his temple.

  ‘I have a theory,’ Jett admitted, shifting so he was leaning in against Sasha’s side and could share the maps across both of their laps. ‘You’re not going to like it.’

  ‘About the people in town?’

  ‘Probably,’ Jett agreed but he pulled the map of District Six-Six-Nine out and pointed to a point to the south-east of the Barricade. He liked the way Sasha pulled him closer so he could lean over him to get a closer look. Sasha’s brows dropped low over his eyes, casting long shadows over his face when he concentrated, eyes darting across the area of the map, reading the details.

  ‘The airport? I’ve never been there, but a few of the guys from Six-Six-Seven h
ave been that far east with some Six-Six-Eight guys. I can ask the district if they’ve seen any activity lately.’ But he was waiting, knowing there was more to it.

  ‘The airport was originally for local domestic flights and private charter, before it was converted for military use during the revolution.’ He’d guessed from the layout, but it was similar to a lot of airfields he’d seen with a developed commercial side and then a separate runway and smaller hangers for specific charter use.

  ‘Right.’ It was nice, how he just waited and didn’t push him for the information, letting him get his thoughts in order.

  ‘So what was the biggest export from Eastern Ukraine?’

  ‘Coal,’ Sasha surmised, frowning as he lifted the map to examine the finer details more closely. ‘There’s old mines scattered all the way across the east, but they collapsed them all when they built the Barricade.’

  ‘They collapsed all of the legally marked mines,’ Jett corrected. ‘But half of the mines were basically run by Mafia-style organisations. And they built a diversion dam on the river … here,’ he pointed to the dam. ‘But there’s no reason for the diversion, unless…’

  ‘Unless they were mining, which they were … here,’ Sasha poked the map where a coal mine was clearly marked.

  ‘But the Ukraine had a booming illegal coal trade that was in crisis with the rise of nuclear power and clean energy right before the revolution.’

  ‘You think they’ve opened an old mine shaft,’ Sasha surmised. ‘And they’re going under the wall.’

  ‘You think so too,’ Jett realised. Of course he did. It was the only logical conclusion.

  ‘I just wasn’t sure where,’ Sasha acknowledged. ‘But I think you’re right. I was confused by the attacks on the supply truck, because it was coming from the west and the movement we’ve been seeing is to the east. But the tunnel could come out anywhere. It could be north and they could be cutting back over to intercept the truck, or it could come out somewhere to the west, there’s nothing but forest up there. It’s a needle in a haystack.’