Barricade

by Lindsey Black

‘There’s no infection north of the Barricade. It’s safe.’

  ‘Safe to whom?’ The man laughed, a rich, booming sound, but there was something familiar about the way his head tilted back and to the right just a little. The way his chin jutted and had Sasha biting his tongue.

  ‘Safe for everyone,’ Sasha shrugged. Even if what Jett said was true and there had been breakouts north of the Barricade, they had been controlled and stamped out and he’d never heard of them. As far as he knew it was safe.

  ‘Safe for you, you mean,’ the man reasoned. He was too calm. ‘Safe for Russians. Safe for Citizens,’ he looked at Matti. ‘Safe for Acquired Citizens, like your Private Angelo. Safe for your prisoners of war, and that’s quite impressive isn’t it? To convince your prisoners to willingly serve? How did they manage that, do you think?’

  Because Jett was kind and goofy and just wanted to be a part of something. But Sasha didn’t say that. Besides, who wouldn’t trade a life in camp for training, three meals a day, a warm bed, clean clothes and a job with purpose?

  ‘You don’t want to go north?’

  ‘God, no!’ The man was laughing outright now. ‘I want to go home, you moron, like everyone else! I want to go home to my island and build a little house on the beach and fish and drink coconuts.’

  That did sound ridiculously good. It also just sounded ridiculous. It was a pipe dream; a fantasy. An echo of the past.

  ‘But it’s infected. Right?’

  ‘Of course,’ the man agreed. ‘Everywhere is. Everywhere except Russia. Everything south of your precious Barricade. Have you ever wondered why that is?’

  ‘Control,’ Sasha shrugged. He hadn’t wondered, until Jett mentioned there were breakouts north of it. Now he found himself questioning a whole lot of things.

  ‘Control?’ The man stared at him, incredulous, eyes wide and mouth agape before he doubled over crying, he was laughing so hard. ‘Well, I suppose you’re not wrong about that.’

  No, he wasn’t. He was pretty sure he wasn’t wrong about a lot of things, even though he wished he was.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do you want?’ He countered. ‘You were the one who charged into my town demanding we talk.’

  It was not his town, but Sasha didn’t tell him so.

  ‘I want to know what you want, so we can avoid anyone getting unnecessarily hurt. The death of my friend hurt me greatly. I don’t want to see that happen again. One of your people stabbed my new recruit and I don’t want to see him hurt again.

  The laughter abruptly stopped, replaced with a far too serious expression. Sasha felt his heart sink, as if the oxygen had rushed from it, leaving him weak and struggling. That expression told him everything he needed to know.

  ‘You came out to meet with us when you heard our names,’ Sasha said softly and finally he saw the man flinch. ‘More specifically, you agreed to meet with us when you heard the name Ioane.’

  The man denied nothing, just licked his lips and watched Sasha with near-fevered intensity.

  ‘You are Ioane, are you not?’ Sasha asked for clarification. ‘The one all the rumours are about?’

  ‘There are rumours of me?’ He seemed amused by that but Sasha ignored it.

  ‘The rumours say you are looking for your wife.’

  ‘Well, the Barricade seems a stupid place to look for one,’ the man said softly. He leaned against the cage mesh, seeming suddenly tired and Sasha knew the man knew he knew.

  ‘You’re looking for a cure,’ Sasha said it out loud, but it sounded ludicrous. How much time and money had been spent by all the countries of the world in the pursuit of a cure. Their citizens were still dead. Those countries were gone. There was no cure.

  ‘No, I can make the cure,’ the man disagreed. ‘We have plenty of people to do that. Your man here can do that,’ he waved a hand at Matti who jerked and paid closer attention at the suggestion.

  ‘If you could do that, you would have done it already,’ Sasha said brokenly, hearing footsteps on the stairs and closing his eyes against the inevitable. He knew everything he thought he knew about the world was about to change and there was absolutely nothing he could do to prevent it. Weirdly, he didn’t want to either.

  ‘No, I need the ingredients,’ the man explained. ‘I need …’ But his voice died and his whole body seemed to collapse against the cage mesh, his world crashing in on itself.

  Sasha looked over at Jett and Enzo as they came off the stairs, blinking at their visitor. The man stared at Jett as if he were a ghost. As if time had suddenly tossed him back and forth like a small boat in an ocean and he’d sunk to the bottom like a grain of sand that weighed the world.

  ‘God, you look so much like your mother.’

  19

  APC-ESSI-NREBUD666-21740021

  If you were willing to walk for four days beyond the facility and scale a glacier you would find a small, forgotten lake Jett was certain never melted. The surface was smooth as glass, polished by the wild winds that screamed when the storms raged in late autumn and early spring.

  In mid-winter the lake was silent. The sky was perfectly clear and the stars were like a reflection of the moonlight on snow, diamonds spilled across the tundra’s mirror. He didn’t dare to close his eyes, watching the foxfire bloom from the inky well and streak into vivid blue and green. At its fiercest it swirled in red and orange, a sky on fire.

  It felt like being struck by lightning. Or how Jett had always imagined being struck by lightning would feel. It burned, hot and cold, aching and raw. He’d never seen the person in front of him in his life, but he still knew who it was. He’d wondered, in that way all orphan’s wonder, who his parents had been. He’d lain awake at night and pondered all the reasons they might have given him up, or all the things that could have happened to separate them.

  He’d cried when he learned his mother was dead. A scientist had told him when he’d finally gotten up the courage to ask why he was alone and why they were doing things to him and the man had just told him, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Because his mother was dead and because they could. Simple as that. Complications from birth were common in camps.

  It had taken years to shift his thinking from the tragedy of his mother’s death to the absence of his father, but for those questions there had been no answers. At first, the tiny pieces of the puzzle hadn’t added up. An acquired citizen. Married to a prisoner of war. Only, she hadn’t been a citizen of North Korea and he only moved to Russia to be with her. She’d wanted to help her parents, back home, and he’d refused to let her go alone while the Infection was spreading across the globe. Not because he was afraid she would get sick, but because the sickness was making monsters of good people and he feared what monsters would do. So he’d followed her, and she’d been taken and he had searched for her anyway, knowing it was likely useless. And it had been. She had died, not six months after he saw her last.

  And here he was, in the cage, staring at him as if he were a ghost and Jett couldn’t think of anything to say. All those nights of imagining that moment, of standing in front of a parent and begging for an explanation were pointless. He already knew their story, and he didn’t blame them for anything. He also didn’t know them, and so he found himself empty. Thoughtless.

  ‘Jett?’ Enzo was looking from him to the man in the cage and back, over and over but Jett couldn’t think of anything to say. The emptiness was a cold lump inside, spreading through his chest and out into his limbs rendering him a silent sentinel to the pain on that stranger’s face.

  It was Sasha who rescued him, wrapping him up in warm arms and turning him away, hiding him against a familiar chest and suffocating him in warmth.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Enzo demanded and it was enough to break the spell. Jett took deep breaths, letting the shock bleed from his body before he risked a glance. At Enzo, not the stranger.

  ‘That’s my father.’

  ‘Your … Excuse me?’

&
nbsp; ‘It’s his father,’ Sasha’s voice was a deep, gentle rumble against Jett’s ear, calm and soothing. Jett wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, or rather he hadn’t expected anything because he had never thought this could happen but now that it was he knew Sasha was being incredibly calm, and that was unexpected somehow.

  ‘Is this the real reason you asked to come to the tower?’ Matti sounded angrier than all of them. Anger sounded foreign on his tongue and it was startling enough that Jett pulled back from Sasha, just far enough to see the men around him. Matti was in front of the cage, glaring through the mesh, somehow looking even taller than usual but his father had eyes only for him. It was as if Matti wasn’t even there.

  ‘I heard my name, and I had to see. Had to know if it was just coincidence, or …’ He sighed, fingers catching in the fine spun steel as he leaned into it, trying to get closer. ‘You really look exactly like her, it’s uncanny.’

  It was true; there was little evidence of his influence on Jett’s genes. A darker tint to his skin, a flatter face, perhaps some of his height, but for the most part it was his Korean heritage that showed and for that Jett found himself strangely grateful. He didn’t know this man, and didn’t want to share the face of a stranger.

  ‘So you had no intent of a parley,’ Matti demanded clarification.

  ‘No … yes, of course I did. He’s it, don’t you see? He is what we came here for!’

  Jett found he didn’t like being pointed at, or being the topic of conversation. But he was relieved when Sasha tugged him back behind him, as if to shield him, and it was amazing when Enzo stepped up beside Sasha and pulled a knife from his hip belt, taunting. Matti still stood there glaring and Jett realised his rage wasn’t for the regulations they had been convinced to break but was in fact fear on Jett’s behalf. They were protecting him. He was one of them and for the first time in his life Jett understood what it meant to belong.

  ‘In the story you were looking for your wife,’ Sasha sounded nothing like the man who whispered sweet things in Jett’s ear while they were falling asleep.

  ‘For a time, I was.’ His gaze was still fixed on Jett, his eyes wide and wild, as unbelieving as Jett felt.

  ‘For a time?’ Enzo pushed, checking the edge on his knife, as if he didn’t already know it would draw blood.

  ‘So many years passed, I knew she was gone. But I knew she wasn’t the only one, and that there were others. As more time passed there had to be so many more and if I could just find one we could fix everything!’

  ‘You know you sound completely insane, right?’ Enzo checked.

  ‘So many more what?’ Sasha demanded. Jett admired the way his shirt fit across his broad shoulders and the way his muscles bunched with his frustration. It was very clear the man cared a great deal.

  ‘Immunes! Are you completely daft? We were looking for someone immune!’

  It was funny, really, the way they all froze and Jett wondered if they had that same sense of being struck by lightning. But it wasn’t a shock to him because he’d known he was immune his whole life so when they turned to face him, ashen and visibly shaken he was able to just blink at them and shrug.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ Matti hissed. ‘How is that even possible?’

  Again, all Jett could do was shrug. He wasn’t a scientist, he just knew he couldn’t get sick. He felt shaky, unable to process what was happening.

  ‘Did they do it to you at the facility?’ Enzo looked like he was about to lunge forward and check him over for some kind of stamp to prove the validity of the claim, but he stayed back because Sasha stepped forward and his hands cupped Jett’s face. He was so warm and strong and Jett met his gaze and smiled because his eyes were such a beautiful blue, like the sky setting with the midnight sun. He looked worried but fascinated and he was simply the most beautiful man Jett had ever seen. Not smiling was not an option.

  ‘I was born like this,’ Jett assured him clearly. ‘So was my mother, and my grandfather and—you get the idea?’

  ‘How is that possible?’ Sasha exhaled heavily but his thumbs stroked Jett’s cheeks and he leaned forward to press their foreheads together. Jett loved being able to feel his breath on his skin.

  ‘The Russians have had the vaccine all along,’ Ioane told them coldly, fingers straining against the cage, as if he could press through it and reach his son.

  ‘What are you talking about? They would have used it before now if they had it,’ Matti reasoned, but he looked uncertain of his own words and Ioane only laughed at him. As if it were the greatest joke in the world.

  ‘Of course they have. They’ve used it for themselves. There isn’t an aristocrat in Russia who’s not immune. They’ve kept the immune locked in their facilities for generations, synthesising the vaccine.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous! They would have given it to everyone by now,’ Enzo grunted, but he too didn’t sound convinced by his own assertions.

  ‘You don’t get it! You’re all so blind, so faithful to a regime that doesn’t care about you at all!’ Ioane pushed back away from the cage, shaking his head and laughing so hard his whole body shook. ‘Think about it. They’ve had a vaccine from the very beginning, but did they give it to you? No. They need you to fear the Infection so you’ll happily give your life to defend their wall, no questions asked. They need you so terrified of what’s south of the wall that you never question what’s happening north of it. Fear has always been the tool used to control people, and you’re no different. You’re just so indoctrinated, you don’t even realise you’re afraid.’

  Jett watched him and thought it would be easy to think he was insane, if he’d had anything at all to lose. But he didn’t. His father had lost everything and was just telling the truth, as plainly and simply as he knew it, and Jett knew it was true because he was immune.

  ‘But why let everyone die? They could have sold the vaccine, made millions. Russia would be the richest country in the world,’ Matti argued, looking for any holes in the logic.

  ‘They don’t need to be the richest country,’ Ioane sighed, slumping suddenly, looking old and tired. ‘They’re the only country left. Which was exactly what they wanted when they released the virus.’

  ‘That’s quite the accusation,’ Matti hissed but Jett could tell by his expression that Matti had thought about it before, and wondered where it came from. At some point, he’d come to the same conclusion and so it wasn’t a shock to him now.

  ‘And yet it’s true. They made the virus, they made a vaccine and they gave the vaccine to themselves and the virus to the world and now there is no one left, just Russia and a hundred thousand empty cities.’

  They were silent, each lost in their own thoughts. All Jett could concentrate on was Sasha’s heavy breaths against his cheek and the heat in his hands against his skin. He let Sasha push him back against the wall, let him crowd around him, closing him in. He didn’t care that the others saw him wrap his arms around Sasha and pull him in close, wishing only that they could be closer still. He wanted to tear the man’s clothes from his body and demand to be inside him, or have him inside, he didn’t care which, as long as they were one person instead of two. He settled for thrusting his tongue deep into Sasha’s mouth and tasting the familiarity of him.

  He hadn’t realised, until there was only Sasha in front of him, drowning him in affection, how badly wounded he was. His heart ached knowing his father had searched for him not to find his son but to find a cure. He knew it was selfish, to be angry about his father searching for something to save the world, but the pain was real nonetheless.

  Pulling back, Jett took deep breaths, kissed the corner of Sasha’s sweet mouth one more time and then walked around him, back to the cage to stare at the man inside.

  ‘You said you had people who could synthesise a vaccine.’

  ‘Yes!’ His father gripped the cage again, staring at Jett, beseeching. ‘We just need samples of your blood and we can make it.’

  ‘No,’ Jett refu
sed immediately. ‘They will tell Matti how to do it. We’ll make it here.’

  ‘Fine! That’s fine, whatever you want. Anything you want.’ For some reason Jett didn’t feel he was being sincere.

  ‘It might not work, or … it could have strange side effects.’ He had no idea how such things work, but he knew he wasn’t the way he was when he was born.

  ‘They did things to you,’ his father whispered, expression crushed with the realisation. ‘What did they do to you?’

  ‘What do you care? You’re no different. Everyone wants something, it’s not surprising you’re the same.’ He reminded him, horribly, of Blanter at the facility. Blanter who cared only for what he took from you. Blanter, to whom you were merely a resource to be mined.

  ‘No!’ His father shook his head and his dreadlocks swayed in a strangely mesmerising pattern around his shoulders. ‘No, you don’t understand. I didn’t even know you existed! I had no idea until I heard your name on the street. Jett was your grandfather’s name, and I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence. You look exactly like her!’

  ‘And yet that’s not what brought you here, is it?’

  ‘Jett …’

  ‘You heard the new recruit came from the tundra, right? You found out what district they dropped me off in and you all gathered here. You weren’t looking for me, you were just looking for a cure.’ Jett had no idea what to do. He wasn’t sure any of them did. He was blindsided when Matti ran a soothing hand through his hair and squeezed his shoulder, drawing his gaze from the man in the cage.

  ‘Enzo and I will go with him and get instructions. It’ll be okay.’

  Had he been worried? Jett supposed he had, if Matti was trying to reassure him. He felt numb and too stupefied to know his own mind but Matti was right; someone was going to have to go back to the townspeople and get instructions. It would be foolish for Jett to go, he was too valuable a commodity and that would make him a target. Why give them the instructions if they could just take the immune? And Sasha was too valuable a hostage if it all went wrong, so the decision to send Enzo made sense. But Jett was pleased because he needed Sasha with him, just because.