Barricade

by Lindsey Black

  ‘Sasha,’ Jett warned in a breathless whisper that only made Sasha suck harder, letting him slide down his throat as he came. Sasha laved the sensitive head and watched Jett slowly come down from the high, the red blush fading and the sweat cooling on his skin.

  ‘Fuck,’ Jett finally managed, looking completely destroyed in the best possible way. Sasha shifted back up to lie against his side, kissing his temple, then his cheek, then his mouth. Delighted when Jett kissed him back hungrily, tasting himself on Sasha’s tongue.

  ‘Please do that again,’ Jett begged, still struggling to breathe.

  ‘If you insist,’ Sasha chuckled, moving to do just that and laughing when Jett immediately protested and held him tightly to his chest, laughing.

  ‘Not right now, you’ll kill me!’

  ‘What a way to die, though,’ Sasha joked, pure pleasure thrumming through him when Jett laughed and kissed him, hard and hungry but satisfied.

  ‘Do you want…?’

  ‘No.’ Sasha curled around him, pulling Jett into the curve of his body and pulling the blanket up over them both. He liked having Jett tucked in between him and the wall, safe and warm. ‘I just want to sleep.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jett mumbled. ‘You worked hard all day.’ Sasha didn’t bother to point out all he had done was walk. It certainly wasn’t hard work.

  ‘You had to babysit Enzo. You worked way harder than me.’ He loved the inelegant snort he earned with that remark and kissed the back of Jett’s neck, inhaling the scent of him and sighing in happiness. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been that happy.

  ‘Enzo’s not that bad. It was fun, actually,’ Jett mumbled sleepily.

  ‘You’ve been corrupted,’ Sasha chuckled.

  ‘By who, exactly?’

  ‘Touché,’ Sasha snickered, stroking a hand down Jett’s bandaged side, checking it was still held in place and not bumping against anything that would cause him pain.

  ‘It’s fine, stop stressing about it. I heal really fast.’

  Sasha paused at that, hesitating before he could ask something he couldn’t take back. He didn’t particularly want to know, and he suspected Jett didn’t want to remember. If he’d wanted them to know, he would have said something. And he did say something. He told them he healed fast, and just expected them to believe him.

  He was just waiting for them to hear what he said. If Sasha thought about it, he realised Jett had told them a lot of things since he arrived, sometimes with words and other times with actions. He could see well; it was how he’d shot the deer. He was strong; he’d carted the deer solo back to the wall. He was fast; it was how he’d gotten his attacker into a headlock in the town. He healed fast.

  Sasha knew what testing facility Jett had been raised in. He knew where those sorts of soldiers were made, up by the Siberian border, north of Korea. He had an idea of what life there would have been and he didn’t need Jett to explain it to him. He would make more of an effort to listen in the future, and see the truth of things.

  So instead of asking, he let his hand slide up to cup Jett’s pectoral, using it to anchor them together.

  ‘You’ve got next shift, then me.’

  ‘Can we go together and make out in the lighthouse all night?’

  Sasha laughed and nodded in agreement. They would both be tired but he didn’t care. That sounded perfect.

  So they slept for three hours until Enzo knocked on the door. He had to have knocked on Jett’s first and realised it was empty, which amused Sasha no end. It was also a relief, to know his friends didn’t mind what he was doing. It wasn’t unusual on the Barricade, for friends to go that extra step. Men were stationed for decades, some for life, in the same place with the same people. Sometimes they met people in towns, to the north or south, sometimes their partners travelled to see them from somewhere nearby. But for most it was a cold, lonely existence and they were willing to try to make it work with one another. Sasha had thought Ines and Enzo had such a relationship once, but Ines had put him in his place about that and Sasha had never brought it up again.

  He’d had his own dalliances, particularly with one of the men who used to come through on the supply truck but he’d been reassigned two years ago and Sasha hadn’t been interested in anyone since. He hadn’t been that interested in the truck guy, really. He’d just been lonely, and the guy had been easy.

  Jett wasn’t like that. Sasha knew it was different, that something in him couldn’t keep himself from touching Jett. He suspected his heart had become involved before his head, and that worried him, but there was nothing to be done about it. Time would tell if he’d made a stupid decision.

  ‘We’re up,’ he reassured Enzo, listening to his friend snort through the door and stomp his way back upstairs while he rolled out of bed and set about dressing. Jett woke to his rummaging for clothes and groaned but followed his lead, pulling his clothes back on from the night before. His hair was crazy, sticking up in all directions, his face a little puffy with sleep. Sasha didn’t think he’d ever tire of his grumpy expression and leaned in close to steal a quick kiss while Jett was trying to pull his shirt on.

  There was a thick scarf Matti had knitted him in his closet and when they were ready to go, Sasha grabbed it and wrapped it around Jett’s neck, burying him in woollen layers while Jett glared at him.

  ‘What is this supposed to be?’

  ‘It’s a scarf.’

  ‘No shit. What the hell?’ But Jett was fingering the soft wool and Sasha could tell he liked it.

  ‘It’s warm, and you’re always cold,’ Sasha kissed the corner of Jett’s lips, trying to turn his frown into a smile. ‘Besides, we can share it in the lighthouse.’ Mollified, Jett didn’t take it off and Sasha counted it as a win.

  The tower was cool but not cold, the heating doing its job but fighting a battle against the snow drifting outside. The snow wasn’t heavy, but it was freezing, a gentle breeze bringing it down on an angle that built the flakes up into a ramp against the parapet. They hurried across the walk to the lighthouse, grateful they didn’t have to dig the door out because Enzo had already shoved it open when he left. Inside it was frigid but they hurried upstairs and curled up in the blankets between the bulbs.

  Jett pushed Sasha down and he put his head in his lap, wrapping his arms around one of Jett’s thighs and sighing in contentment. Jett’s low, throaty chuckle made his cock twitch but he was more interested in just soaking up the warmth together while Jett watched the town below and idly trailed his fingers through Sasha’s hair.

  ‘What do you think they want?’ Jett asked softly. Sasha glanced up at his face and found his expression slack, his eyes fixed on minute details of the town no one else could see.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Sasha confessed. ‘In the past they’ve always just wanted to get into Russia, but they have a way in and they haven’t taken it, so I don’t know.’

  Jett hummed softly under his breath, not a set melody but a soft buzz of breath and melancholy. Sasha didn’t think he was even aware he was doing it. The vibrations rattled through his small frame and Sasha felt the gentle tones in his bones.

  ‘What do you think they want?’ He was curious about the answer. Jett was new to the Barricade, and likely had one of the few opinions unbiased by history as a result.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t really know anything about it,’ Jett admitted, smiling down at him as if he thought his having an opinion was somehow foolish. ‘But, I suppose I think they want what everyone wants.’

  ‘To love?’ Sasha grinned but Jett looked confused by the answer and turned his gaze back to the town.

  He looked incredibly sad, and very far away. ‘No. Just … Live. They just want to live.’

  16

  C-SGTM-NREBUD670-21450043

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean, why? Because I said so!’

  Ines just arched a brow at him, shared one of those amused looks with Enzo, snorted offensively and continued to eat hi
s dinner. And Sasha stood there, being ignored, with absolutely no idea what to do. They didn’t teach that at the academy.

  ‘Don’t worry, soldier boy. I’ll get to it when I’m done here. But in the future, maybe think of why someone might want to do what you say, and ask them instead of just assuming they’ll do it and ordering. Works better, gets the job done, and no conscripts dream of murdering your Russian arse in your sleep.’

  Those first years had been hard, for which Sasha was grateful.

  Sergei didn’t bother to knock on the tower door of District Six-Six-Nine. No-one was in their lighthouse, the wall between their towers abandoned. He kicked the snow aside as best he could where it had built up against the heavy wood overnight and hauled it open. It was still early in the morning and the sun was a few hours away but there was enough light to see by. Inside, the heat buffeted him with hazy steam as he stripped off his outer layers and hung them on the drying racks before heading down into the kitchen.

  Empty.

  ‘Hello?’ He bellowed down the spiral stairway and heard a door slam open.

  ‘Infirmary!’ Kuznetsov’s voice was clear and sounded unworried so Sergei took his time going down. He found all four members of tower Six-Six-Nine sprawled in chairs throughout the infirmary. Anishin was wrapped in a heavy blanket, looking pale and tired with a blue tinge to his visible extremities. Blanter was similarly pale, but also sported a fresh bandage from wrist to bicep.

  ‘What happened?’ Sergei liked Blanter—he was a fine soldier. He couldn’t imagine many scenarios where Blanter would get injured unless they were attacked, and even then they would need to be outmanoeuvred and that was unlikely.

  ‘Just a mishap on the way home,’ Blanter grumbled.

  ‘I got tangled in some wire, slipped and nearly went over a railing, but …’ Anishin had the sense to look contrite. Blanter had obviously saved him, but got his arm caught in the wire in the process. He was lucky he still had an arm.

  ‘I stitched him up,’ Ivanov assured him. ‘It’ll heal well as long as Iosif does as he’s told.’

  Crazy he might be, but Blanter knew how to follow orders. Sergei wasn’t worried, even if he did have that nagging desire to take the bandage off and check for himself that every stitch was perfect and that the drugs administered were appropriate and adequate. It was hard, to let other people command. He could have insisted, being the commanding officer on their section of the Barricade, but he knew better than to step on toes. In the early days he would have moved Blanter into his tower until he’d healed and then taken the man out for his first recovery scout himself. But times had changed and it wasn’t as dangerous as it had been in the early days of his command. These days he’d loosened the reins but it was hard to watch men get injured. Especially when it was saving someone else from their own stupidity.

  ‘We had Stepanova here yesterday, and Raikkinen,’ Kuznetsov waved a hand at the one empty chair, since Blanter was sitting on the side of the bed. Dyogtin sat and stretched his legs out. He was getting too old for this crap.

  ‘How’s the new kid?’

  ‘Got stabbed in town. Survived, wasn’t infected. Got him cleaned up and seems to be on the mend. But they’ve figured out there’s a tunnel, and there’s something going on down in the town. Step wanted our thoughts on it, I told him what I could but …’ Kuznetsov shrugged and Sergei sighed. They didn’t know a lot. There was a tunnel, yes. The people below were stock-piling weapons, yes.

  But they weren’t attacking and they hadn’t gone north.

  ‘He’s got a good nose for these things,’ Sergei huffed. ‘If Step’s worried …’ They were about to have more trouble than they could handle.

  ‘Moscow’s told us to stop investigating. Stepanova too.’ Kuznetsov rubbed a hand over his beard.

  ‘Same with us,’ Sergei agreed. ‘We’re ignoring it, for now.’

  ‘Weird,’ Ivanov cut in. ‘That they would tell us to stop investigating the possibility of a breach in the Barricade. Isn’t that the whole reason we’re here?’

  ‘Doesn’t make sense, to tell us to stop doing the one thing we’re supposed to do,’ Blanter agreed. He was looking queasy and Sergei had to wonder how much blood the man had lost. But it wasn’t his place to question Ivanov’s work, and he knew Ivanov was a universal donor if they needed more.

  ‘So they probably know something’s going on here,’ Anishin was looking around the room, struggling to keep up with what wasn’t being said.

  ‘They know, and they want it to happen,’ Kuznetsov agreed.

  ‘Or they’re letting it happen, same thing in the end,’ Sergei nodded. ‘They know we’ve got people moving into the town in droves and they’ve told us to stop engaging. They know there’s probably a tunnel, and that it’s not being used yet. Which means they have a suspicion about what the people are doing here, and they’re not sharing it with us.’

  ‘So it’s likely they had something to do with it,’ Blanter reasoned. ‘You think they sent that new kid here on purpose?’

  That had not been what Sergei was thinking, at all. It was startling enough that all he could do was blink at Blanter for a minute while his brain tried to catch up with that train of thought.

  ‘No. But why do you think that?’

  ‘Kid gets shanked on his first recon? Angelo’s not sloppy. He’s definitely not sloppy enough to let his new recruit get shanked on the first mission out after Ines died. Sounds like a set up to me. And then, miraculously, the kid isn’t infected, despite full blood exposure to an infected human populace. And they didn’t just kill them outright, despite the fact they had them severely outgunned and outnumbered. That’s suspicious.’

  ‘Well, when you put it that way,’ Ivanov muttered, scratching his head. ‘You think they wanted to knife him but not kill him … You think they wanted a sample of blood.’

  ‘Looks that way. Gets sent here from who the fuck knows where, supply truck gets attacked the whole damn way, then all of a sudden the town gets a massive influx of psychos stockpiling weapons and digging holes and crap? I’m telling you it’s got something to do with the new guy.’

  ‘You said his name was Ioane? He’s definitely not related to the nutter who came by a few decades ago?’ Sergei looked over to Kuznetsov for confirmation, only because no one else had been there back then. Half of them had barely been born in those days and the Barricade had been a very different place.

  ‘The new kid’s apparently Korean, so I’m going with nope.’

  ‘How’s a Korean kid get a Samoan name?’ Blanter was determined they see his side of the argument. And agree with him.

  ‘How do you know its Samoan?’ If Anishen was always this confused it was amazing they hadn’t thrown him off the wall yet.

  ‘I looked it up,’ Blanter shrugged, like it was nothing. To him it wasn’t. He’d been trained to think anything was suspicious and to know everything there was to be known about anything. Someone had mentioned the old Islander, Blanter had thought the new not-Islander suspicious … Sergei was curious what else Blanter had decided was worth researching but was almost afraid to ask.

  ‘Maybe he’s half caste?’ Ivanov speculated, cutting between Anishin and Blanter before they could get into an argument, which looked likely by the colour rising in both their otherwise pale faces.

  ‘Well, when you meet him you can ask him.’ Blanter trailed his fingers over his bandage and winced. ‘Don’t suppose I can have some more drugs and a time out? I need sleep.’

  ‘Go ahead.’ Kuznetsov waved at the door. ‘I’ll put you on last watch, otherwise I expect you to be sleeping.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘He’s just a barrel of laughs,’ Sergei grinned once he was certain Blanter was out of hearing. ‘Lebedev is very impressed with him. I think he almost wants to trade Saami.’

  ‘Blanter’s a good egg,’ Kuznetsov agreed. ‘Good head on his shoulders, but I wouldn’t mind having Saami over here either. If you ever want to swap for a week, Io
sif would love the experience.’

  ‘He’s all about experience,’ Anishin grumbled and Dyogtin was sure to glare longer than was comfortable before he spoke.

  ‘He saved your life. I’ve been told he was also instrumental in the work you did down at the river dam, and that he managed to help Aibokov out of a situation that could have ended poorly for all of us. Before you disparage the work of others, perhaps make sure your own is above reproach.’

  There was silence while each man let that sink in.

  ‘What about his theory that this nonsense has to do with the new kid somehow?’ Kuznetsov never lost sight of the important things.

  ‘I think he’s right, I just have no idea why. For now, I have a tunnel to find, and you have an injured soldier to cover for and no doubt a report to make to Moscow. I’ll come over if I think we need to discuss anything. You do the same.’

  ‘Of course,’ Kuznetsov agreed, pushing himself up out of the chair and following Sergei back to the top floor, watching him hurriedly dress in his cold weather gear.

  ‘Take care. If there’s a tunnel, it’s in your district.’

  ‘I know. Those abandoned mine shafts were always going to be a problem. Don’t worry, Anatoly will figure out which one’s open. He’s like a damned mole with that sort of thing. Watch over Step, he’ll do everything he can to stop whatever’s going on.’

  ‘It’s Stepanova. It’s like watching you all over again,’ Kuznetsov grumbled, shoving the door open. Cold air spilled in with icy fingers. ‘Watch your step, old man.’

  ‘Right-o Santa.’

  17

  APC-ESSI-NREBUD666-21740021

  A fist to the face woke him. He rolled, kicked out by reflex and swept the legs out, pushed up and stood over the form already pushing up, trying to get to him again. Jett slammed his elbow into the lower back, drove his knee up a second later, see-sawing the body between his limbs. It fell to the floor with a dull thud and the room was quiet. He didn’t breathe heavy, there were no panting gasps in the sudden stillness. He prodded his swelling cheek and walked away.