Barricade

by Lindsey Black

  By contrast, Paraklov was quiet and in a mood, though he calmed down whenever he got to shoot. He didn’t talk much and he kept his distance but drank like a fish. Gleba watched him warily, as though he might explode at any moment but Jett could see the nervousness was driven by concern, not fear. Gleba worked hard to maintain a jovial mood among the four, and weirdly Jett found he liked him the least. He didn’t trust him, because he wanted things to be friendly and happy. Jett thought that was suspicious and found himself hovering closer to Enzo instead of participating too heavily in conversation.

  By the time they ran out of paint bombs the wall was a rainbow monolith visible for miles and some of the people in the town came out to stare at it, shoulders slumped and arms pointing. They kept looking back up at the Barricade and Jett imagined they were incredibly confused by the whole thing. They’d tried to mark their territory and the Barricade had responded by contributing with a splash of colour. Well, more like a towering wave, but still.

  ‘This was awesome,’ Nowak sighed happily, tossing an arm around Gleba’s shoulders and pointing him back toward their tower.

  Paraklov and Enzo did a last shot together and parted ways, leaving Jett holding the empty box and staring at Nieminen while he packed up their rifle.

  ‘So, you’re definitely not the Ioane from the stories,’ Nieminen confirmed with a laugh.

  ‘Story?’ Jett tried to concentrate on a single brick in the wall because his head was swimming and he suspected he was maybe going to vomit.

  ‘Yeah, the guys at Six-Six-Nine told me that about twenty years ago this absolute loony guy visited every district on the Barricade looking for his wife.’

  ‘Huh?’ That made no sense. Was he drunk?

  ‘I know, right? Makes you wonder what the idiots in these towns actually think we do up here, that they think we’re holding their wives prisoner or something.’

  ‘That would be super weird,’ Jett mumbled, biting his lower lip to see if he could feel it. He couldn’t. ‘Was there a sedative in the vodka?’

  ‘No, kid … the vodka kinda acts like a sedative, if you drink enough of it.’ Nieminen was laughing at him, but Jett didn’t particularly care, too busy poking at his teeth with his tongue to check they were all there since he couldn’t feel them.

  ‘I’m not the guy from the story,’ Jett confirmed. ‘I only got here like a few weeks back? I don’t quite remember when that was.’ He should not have drunk so much.

  ‘Nah, that dude was some kind of Islander or something,’ Nieminen laughed, reaching out to ruffle Jett’s hair. ‘See you next time, Pavlova!’

  Jett watched him all the way back along the wall, for several kilometres, squinting as he replayed that conversation a few times in his head. Anna roused him from his stupor, leaping at him and nibbling his limp fingers.

  ‘Ioane is Samoan,’ Jett looked down at Anna, confused. ‘Samoa is an island, right?’ Anna whined and licked his hand and he shook himself out of his stupor, turning to head back to the lighthouse.

  Enzo was on the couch when Jett got back and Anna raced straight to him and leapt onto his map, curling up with a satisfied howl. Jett staggered to one of the other couches and fell back into the cushions, pulling his knees up so he could curl around them in the corner.

  ‘The whole room is spinning. Is the tower spinning? Does it do that?’

  ‘No,’ Enzo laughed at him. It was loud and made Jett’s head hurt so he threw his arm over his face to try and hide. He was never drinking again.

  ‘Thanks for today. It was fun.’

  Dubious, Jett peeked out from under his arm but Enzo was lazily sprawled on the couch, looking relaxed and comfortable. He seemed to genuinely mean what he was saying and Jett was momentarily stumped.

  ‘It was your idea,’ he reminded Enzo. Especially the drinking. Jett hadn’t even known about the vodka stash. He wished he still didn’t know about it.

  ‘Of course it was my idea, no way would you conceive of anything fun to do. But thank you for going along with it.’

  There really hadn’t been anything else to do, nor any reason to disagree to it. Sasha had said only that they were not to leave. He had certainly at no point indicated they were not to paint anything. Besides, the town folk did it first.

  ‘What do you mean I don’t think of fun stuff?’ Jett belatedly replied, struggling to sit up. It made his stomach twist and he gave up trying.

  ‘What was the last fun thing you did?’

  ‘I dunno, I got into a sword fight with a lynx on the way here?’ That had been cool, and he’d enjoyed it, so he supposed that constituted ‘fun’? Sex in the lighthouse was fun, but he was not telling Enzo about that.

  ‘Wait, what?’

  ‘It was trying to eat my jerky.’

  The room was quiet and when he peeked out from under his arm again Enzo was frowning at him, Anna asleep in his lap.

  ‘You’re serious.’

  ‘Yeah, it jumped in the back of the truck to try and get it off me and everything, but then it freaked out in the confined space and all the guys were yelling and I jumped out and the lynx followed me and next thing I knew I’m fighting a lynx. Those things are fast!’ He was slurring his words and moving his hands too much, the motion making him queasy.

  ‘You’re wasted,’ Enzo laughed at him. There was no denying it.

  ‘Do you think they’ll be back tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’ No uncertainty in that answer whatsoever.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘I know them,’ Enzo shrugged. ‘They don’t like being away from home. Matti hates it. He only goes so that someone is with Sasha. And Sasha won’t stay away if he doesn’t have to.’ The look Enzo gave him was telling but Jett was too inebriated to make much sense of it.

  ‘So they’ll be back?’

  ‘Late, probably, but yes,’ Enzo assured him, pushing himself up off the couch and coming over to look down at Jett, hands on hips, exasperated. ‘Come on, you need a shower and to go to bed.’

  ‘But the watch …’

  ‘I’ll keep watch until they arrive, it’ll be fine.’

  ‘But you were on this morning as well,’ Jett tried to argue but couldn’t remember why he was even bothering. A shower sounded good. Bed sounded even better.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Enzo promised him, chuckling as he hauled Jett to his feet and helped him down the stairs to the bathroom.

  ‘I can walk.’

  ‘That is so debatable right now.’ Enzo gently pushed him into the bathroom. ‘Get clean. I’ll go get you some clean underwear from your room and I’ll leave them on the rack, okay?’

  That sounded like a good idea. Jett waved him off and stumbled to the shower, turning on the water before he remembered he was still clothed. Laughing quietly, he struggled to liberate himself from the heavy cloth, tossing the clothes just out of the reach of the warm water and then stepping under, leaning his hands on the wall and letting the water soothe the spinning of his thoughts.

  There was clean underwear when he stepped out, and a fresh, dry towel. Jett left his paint-splattered clothes where he’d taken them off, dried himself as best as he could manage and stumbled back up to his room. He fell face first into the blankets and was just conscious enough to tell himself to never trust Enzo again. Or any drink he concocted. He tried not to focus on how empty the bed felt, cold and scentless.

  14

  C-EFR-NREBUD669-21684501

  ‘You always cant slightly to the left.’

  He knew that. He’d thought he’d compensated enough to hit the target anyway. He was certain he’d made the correct adjustment. He’d calculated everything perfectly, knew his weapon better than his own hands and had set this scope a thousand times himself. Everything had been flawless. Should have been.

  ‘We moved the target. Stop trying to compensate for your weakness. Be better.’

  ‘I hate snow!’

  Iosif Blanter didn’t bother to sigh. There was no point in compl
aining about someone else complaining. They would just complain about you complaining that they were complaining and it would keep spiralling from there. ISO had no time for that sort of nonsense. He’d been trained harder than the others and old habits die hard. Or refuse to perish at all. He’d been trained in reconnaissance for when the time came to move troops south and clean up the mess left behind by the end of the world. Unfortunately, people hadn’t quite finished going extinct south of the Barricade and Iosif remained stationed at District Six-Six-Nine. Which he didn’t really mind, on the rare occasion he was being honest—he’d give his life for the men he served with. It was just annoying when they started complaining about shit.

  Viktor Anishin could have won awards for whining. Gold medals. He was a few years younger than Iosif and was one of the newest recruits on the Barricade but he liked to pretend he was wise. Every year when winter looked set to return Viktor started saying ‘tomorrow’. The snows would come tomorrow, and eventually he was always right. At some point the snow did arrive ‘tomorrow’.

  Then Viktor started his daily complaints about snow. Did they know it was cold? Did they know it made everything wet? Did they know it melted and made a mess? Did they know the storm was getting heavier? Did they know how hard it was going to be to get the door open in the morning? Could they imagine walking through the sludge in a few days? Crawling through the banks?

  Iosif went out of his way to work with anyone except Anishin whenever they had to leave the tower. Usually he could convince Ivanov to go with him but today Jussi was needed on watch because District Six-Seven-Zero were all out roaming and they wanted medical officers in the towers.

  Which was awesome, if Iosif was … well, he was rarely honest. But when Dyogtin left his tower you knew something crazy was going to happen and lately Dyogtin had been out of his tower more often than in. Iosif had spent a whole week roaming with Saami and Lebedev and he’d learned more from the two of them in a day than he’d garnered from his own team in years. There was no fooling age and experience.

  ‘This is going to be absolute slush by tomorrow!’ Anishin was kicking a particularly thick bank of snow that had built up over the gutter of the drain they were currently camped out in. It wasn’t ideal, and if it rained they were going to have to move fast or risk being washed away in flash flooding, straight into the sewers. But it was good cover, closed in cement with a clear exit if needed. It also provided an adequate wind break, not that Anishin would have thought of that yet.

  ‘Eat your food.’

  ‘You mean my slop.’ Anishin poked at the admittedly tasteless rehydrated jerky in soup mess he had in his bowl and sighed. Iosif bit his tongue and deliberately slurped the liquid from his spoon.

  ‘How can you stand being out here all the time?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s nothing here.’ Anishin hunkered down against the cement wall of the drain and looked around as if something exciting might leap from the dark and break up the monotony. ‘Don’t you get bored?’

  ‘The tower’s boring.’

  ‘The tower has good food, and heating, and our stuff, and people.’

  ‘I’m a person.’

  ‘You know what I mean, Blanter! Out here it’s cold and miserable and we’re not even doing anything. How can you stand it? You’re always out here!’

  Iosif arched a brow at him and wondered what side of social nicety pointing out you didn’t really like people actually fell on.

  ‘I like my job,’ Iosif tried to explain in hushed tones, just in case anyone was nearby. The cement would make the sound carry and they should try to limit that as much as possible. ‘I trained for reconnaissance, not to sit in a tower all day. I like being out here. I like the quiet. I like the job, like searching for stuff or sneaking into places and bringing back information.’ He smirked then, making sure Anishin saw his teeth. ‘And I like the snow.’

  ‘You’re hilarious,’ Anishin grumbled, stabbing at his food some more.

  ‘And you’re a whiny bitch,’ Iosif muttered, turning to look down the drain line to where he’d heard a faint scuffle. He relaxed immediately, seeing a familiar hulking shadow in the lines of the darkness.

  It didn’t surprise him that Anishin was apparently oblivious to their company. He’d been fine on their search of the warehouses but had they run into trouble Iosif suspected he would have been doing all of the work and hauling Anishin out of trouble. As it was they’d found quite a cache of weapons and Kuznetsov was definitely going to reward him with the best cut of meat for a week but the job left Iosif feeling flat. He couldn’t celebrate all of the clever things he’d done when Anishin didn’t even realise he’d done half of them.

  A minute later Kollig Lebedev manifested from shadow to man, startling Anishin enough that he dropped his soup, spilling it into the slush running through the bottom of the drain and cursing under his breath.

  ‘Blanter,’ Lebedev acknowledged, but he was frowning down at Anishin’s empty bowl. ‘Quite the night.’

  ‘Mmm. A lot of noise coming from the town.’

  ‘More people over there means less people over here.’

  That got Iosif’s attention. His heart hammered in his chest, blood roared to life in his ears and heat infused his face. More work?

  ‘Raid?’ Iosif would do anything to go break into something. Anything to get away from the complaining. Also, he’d really like to show off in front of someone who would know exactly how good he was at what he was doing.

  ‘Not quite.’ When Lebedev grinned it looked like a wild animal was going to devour your young, before you’d even managed to have any. ‘Was hoping you boys might help us with a little project down by the dam. We’ve got the boys from Six-Eight down there …’

  ‘Hell yes.’ Iosif didn’t even care what it was. No way was he missing out on the fun.

  ‘Will we get wet?’ Anishin looked from one of them to the other, earnest.

  ‘You will now,’ Lebedev promised. Definitely unimpressed.

  It probably wasn’t nice to howl with laughter in Viktor’s face, but Iosif had never been accused of being nice.

  15

  C-SGT-NREBUD666-21651666

  He was starving. It was different to hunger. He was used to being hungry, wasn’t even sure he’d felt full in his life. Hungry was the day to day growling in his stomach and the nagging awareness in the back of his head that he’d kill for a slice of bread. After hunger came a period of rage that settled into a quiet despair. Then came euphoria and a sense of invincibility. They liked it when you were in that place, when they could trick you into doing things you wouldn’t have done if you’d just had that piece of bread. But the euphoria would fade. It segued into a weary, sluggish slide toward weakness. At the bottom of that slide was starvation.

  Sasha stared at the loaf of bread in his hands, took a deep breath and broke it into pieces. Handed out the small parcel to each member of his team and grinned at their ravenous delight. His stomach didn’t have the heart to growl. Starving.

  Enzo’s silhouette was visible in the lighthouse whenever the lights spun in a particular direction. Sasha and Matti spotted him when they were two kilometres from home and it was a welcome relief. The night air was frigid and a new bank of cloud was coming in from the north, threatening another snowfall. Not wanting to get caught on top of the Barricade if the wind picked up, they lengthened their stride and pushed home.

  The door opened as they approached the lighthouse and Enzo ushered them in, looking tired but relaxed.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, Step,’ Enzo pat his shoulder and closed the door behind them. ‘We had a fun, relaxing day bonding with Nieminen and the guys.’

  That brought Sasha to a complete stop and he eyed Enzo dubiously. Their ideas of relaxing differed greatly.

  ‘What do you mean with Nieminen?’

  ‘We all hung out on the Barricade, you’ll see.’

  ‘He didn’t say any
thing,’ Matti shrewdly noticed. ‘Just waved us on through the tower after checking what we found out.’

  ‘Maybe he wanted it to be a surprise?’

  ‘Wanted what to be a surprise?’ Sasha was growing agitated. The last time Enzo had a relaxing day, he and Ines had taken a large inflatable mattress from one of the houses in town down to the river and floated around in their Q-hab suits all afternoon with some home brew. Neither of them knew how to swim and Matti ended up having to save them when Ines fell in, risking them all being exposed to the infection.

  ‘You’ll see in the morning,’ Enzo assured him. ‘Did you find out anything?’

  Sasha didn’t like that thought at all. What did that even mean? Find out in the morning? He wanted to argue immediately, but they were all tired and in the end Enzo was right. Whatever it was, he would find out in the morning. He pushed open the opposite door and headed out toward the tower.

  ‘What, I don’t get to know?’ Enzo called out after him, momentarily confused.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, let’s have dinner and sit down and talk about it as a team,’ Matti reasoned, pushing Enzo out the door and following after.

  ‘That might prove difficult,’ Enzo nervously noted.

  ‘Where’s Jett?’ Sasha immediately turned to glare and knew something was amiss when Enzo looked north at the clouds, as if he actually cared about the weather. It was going to snow, obviously. Weather sorted.

  ‘He’s drunk. Right?’ Matti was grinning. ‘You got him wasted?’

  ‘Uh…’

  ‘He got him wasted,’ Matti confirmed, his laughter low and dry.

  Frustrated, Sasha stormed the rest of the way to the tower, tossed his pack on the drying rack and left it to clean out later. He hung his coat and stomped downstairs, ignoring Anna’s excited howl and moving down to Jett’s room, not even bothering to knock.