Murmansk-13

“I’ve been having them too,” Tala said absentmindedly, picking up the closed thread of discussion without any real interest in it. Her eyes scouring the bulkheads and deckheads for modes of escape, just as she’d done in District Four, in Gennady’s room, before Kirill’s coup. “Bad dreams…”

They’d been safest running. Every time they’d stopped they found themselves under threat, either by the mindless infected or the unspooling human populace. But now they were trapped, imprisoned and where was left to go? They hadn’t eaten since the uprising in District Four and the only thing Katja had drunk since then was poisoned. Even if they could get out of the cells, the station would be abandoned, either to the infected or scuttled altogether. The cleanup party would surely disable Tala’s ship. Surely leave them trapped as the station tumbled apart into the ether. The final human tenants of Murmansk-13.

Katja tried to staunch her train of thought as hope vented from her system like atmosphere from a compromised fuselage. The strength to fight ebbed away as a steady thread of panic threatened to override her sedative free system. Tala squeezed Katja faintly into her body, sensing the febrile saturation of hopelessness wracking her body. Reawakened nerve endings converted the touch to a calming salve. “We’re not dead yet,” whispered Tala.

☣☭☠

The undying neon lights stripped time of any context. Katja blinked raw eyes against the light and realised she’d been placed on the steel cot, staring up at the seamless deckhead. She’d fallen asleep again, a mercifully dreamless sleep providing a darkened cocoon for a mind no longer capable of processing the tedious and terrorizing wait for death.

Beyond her field of sight she sensed activity. Katja turned on the formless mattress to see Tala and Diego cautiously hovering near the bars like animals in a zoo, watching the hydraulic cellblock doors. Katja braced herself against the harbingers of doom, tried to make herself as small as possible in the tiny exposed cell. She heard the hydraulic hiss of the doors and squeezed her eyes closed.

She wished she’d remained asleep, perhaps that had been Tala’s hope.

“Hernandez?” Tala and Diego spoke the name in union – an incredulous question. Katja peered through clenched eyelids, daring to hope for a stay of execution.

“Hola pendejo,” said a short man with a small head in an EVA suit, green palm emblem on the sleeves. Dr. Smith walked at close distance behind him with her gun pointed at the back of his skull. It didn’t appear to affect his mood as he waved cheerily to his co-captives. Hernandez shared a similar skin tone to Diego, but his face bore a distinctly indigenous quality partially concealed by a lock of dark greasers hair. “Hola mi chica, it’s good to see you. Hoy, what happened to your face?” He spoke quickly, with a soft, nasally voice. His question addressed Tala.

Something about the coquettish way Tala masked her damaged features with her hand, turning from the man’s gaze, irked Katja. She watched the tough Filipinas light brown skin darken under his scrutiny. It was an act so incomprehensible and uncharacteristic of the Tala she knew that her stomach fluttered beneath a rush of hopeless inadequacy.

As Tala shyly hid the injuries she’d gained, usually in protecting Katja and now oblivious to her, Katja recalled her words ‘You don’t know me.’ Her actions now lent credence to those words. Katja snapped her eyes shut and turned away, either pretending to sleep or as an act of petulance, it didn’t really matter, nobody was paying her attention anyway.

With her eyes closed, Katja allowed her mind to unravel. In truth she was confused, awaiting death and trying to control a gnawing jealousy that served no purpose. She’d almost told Tala she loved her, but that was absurd. What was Tala to her? An exotic bodyguard? Perhaps it would be best to view her in such simple light, try and banish the depth of feeling that had blossomed amongst danger and decay.

They both had layers and histories, pasts that would take years to untangle. And there were no years, not even days. That thought diluted the jealousy, turning it into an ache of sadness. A dull mourning of lost potential.

“Are you going to tell me where the other two are?” Katja could picture the spite filled Dr. Smith threatening Hernandez with her gun. In the pristine self enclosed darkness of her reverie she could detect a foreign trace in the doctors high-born accent, Katja could feel it threatening to awake something in her memory from a time still boxed off in the tangled cells of her brain. Frustrating and lost.

“I already told you, didn’t I?” Hernandez chewed out the question and spat it in the doctors face. To an observer of the discourse, the quaver in his voice would be lost beneath the veneer of bullishness, but Katja could hear his fear as she listened.

“Have it your way,” the doctor said, bored with her newest toy.

“You going to ice me?”

“Worse, move.”