Murmansk-13

Katja gritted her teeth. Her tone hardened. “The last time you saw me I was in a drug induced coma, so yeah. I’m a little better looking. But I feel like shit and I want to know why. What’s happening here?”

Arty’s face slackened. Katja had believed Arty was preparing to place himself in a comatose state, to circumvent the outbreak and await rescue. He hadn’t. His face had lived a decade in the four years Katja slept, his tousled mop of curly hair thinned and receded. Not so much as to reveal any evident bald patches, but enough that it no longer possessed its youthful volume. The roots showed the lightest mottling of grey and lines almost deep enough to cast shadows cleaved the once smooth skin of his forehead. Arty lowered his gaze, dark bags evident beneath his old horn rimmed glasses, the frame showing signs of repair and damage. “I wish you had stayed asleep Katja,” he said, barely whispering, then rubbed his face with the meat of his palms.

“Why?”

Arty didn’t reply at first, but slowly recalibrated his gaze, lifting his head. The motion was affected and purposeful, his eyes fixated on Katja, boring into her. “Because I could have saved you. I had saved you. I had always cared about you Katja, but I always thought you felt I was too good for you.”

Katja stifled the absurd notion to laugh despite the mounting sense of danger. Arty had always exuded an almost autistic air of pomposity and an aura of self import before the outbreak, but now those traits were transmitted in a manner that seemed fundamentally mangled. She thought about the Captain of the Riyadh, Ilya and Kirill. The station worked on different people in different ways, but ultimately they all ended up broken, cracked like rocks, the fissures in different places but the net result the same. Was that what had drawn herself and Tala together? Just another method of fracturing the being.

Four years suddenly felt like four years as Katja cast her mind back, the techs had rarely ever socialized with the scientists and doctors themselves. Where they desired long discourses on theory and practice, the techs wanted to get drunk, happy to revel as the stations steerage. Only ambitious toadies ever tried to crack the scientific clique from the tech caste, hopeless wannabes who were quickly kicked to the curb by their senior peers. The female techs were, at best, fucktoys for some of the scientists and doctors, and then only if they were younger and perkier than the small band of nurses and assistants that outranked them.

Not that Katja had ever invited such advances, increasingly overweight and blotchy skinned, she’d nonetheless had her share of bed partners both male and female during her four month contract. One male science assistant and the rest techs like herself, it was a means to pass the time and workout. Exorcise the consuming loneliness of Murmansk-13 through mindless rutting.

But she also didn’t think of Arty as superior to her in anyway, nor attractive. He was scholarly, bordering on intense, not her type or anybodies really. Up until the outbreak Arty had been little more than an acquaintance, the sort that would smile and say hello in passing so long as they were not in educated company. The thought he’d harboured secret affection for her only renewed the internal dread that had numbed under the cruel attentions of Ilya, when she’d awaited death, tortured and forced upon, willing her mind to flight.

Then she’d thought of her Dad and their mansion in Gorky, one of the nicest in the suburbs, away from the blokovi apartments. When he would return home with gifts and they could be a family, at least for a little while, before the endless arguments which preceded his inevitable leaving.

Arty was staring at her, rheumy eyes wrought with emotion. He’d spoken. “I could have gotten you off here,” he repeated.

“What do you mean?”

Arty just shook his head. “Those people, you consider friends…” he let the sentence float away into emptiness, then pulled a fragile plastic cup from the cooler and filled it. He offered the water to Katja and she took it, sipping the surprisingly cold liquid. She’d forgotten how thirsty she’d become, unable to remember when she’d last drunk. The cold water made her feel heady. “Tomorrow, you and your friends will die, and I cannot save you, not now Dr. Smith and Ildar are involved.”

Katja felt the water clot in her throat, she coughed causing her to crush the cup. Water skittered in droplets across her velour jumpsuit and splashed on the deck. “Why?” She gasped.