Murmansk-13

“You have to be quiet though. If the Doctor finds out your gone, well I don’t know what she’ll do,” Jamal admitted, scared for the others more than himself. “Behind the processing desk there’s a conduit, I spied it on the way in. Old habit, not much use to me now. Head downwards, if they flood engineering with the infected then your friends will be in trouble. Bottom of the well down there.”

Hernandez brows knotted. “The infected?” Tor seemed to quail at the word, but remained otherwise insensate.

From the back of the cell, Katja closed her eyes and her features twitched with pain. Once more she was forced to recount a heavily abridged story of Murmansk-13, that an infection had brought the station under quarantine, that those measures had failed under the auspices of the Soviet, that the station had become an ersatz test facility that the Politburo lost interest in and now the infection was on the open market to buyers such as Dr. Smith and her private security consortium.

Jamal watched Hernandez skin blanche as Katja spoke, a couple of times during the retelling Hernandez glanced at his unmoved Captain. The man appeared an empty husk, broken by what he’d seen, what Hernandez may have to face. After a moment, Hernandez sobered. “I just wanted out of here, this shit is grande, ese.”

“Like I said, man, their little experiment is going to kill everyone back home. They’re treating it like a technology they can control…” The words felt heavy, sapping what little he had left and there was something he still had to do. Jamal shrugged, then began pulling himself away from the antechamber, using his fists to lever himself backwards, letting his legs drag uselessly behind.

Hernandez looked at him. “Hey ese, thanks. I think you should keep this, eh?” He pulled the cell key from his long johns and held it out, over the precipice of the duct.

Jamal looked at it, then his legs. “I’ll unburden you, but I don’t think I’ll need it.”

Hernandez tossed him the key, holding his gaze for a moment longer, expression neutral, then re-orientated himself in the tight space of the duct and began pressing against the far grating. Jamal heard the faint sound of thin metal tearing, like someone pushing a knife through an empty Coke can.

Tala watched Jamal backing away. He’d left the key where Hernandez had thrown it. “Where you going?”

“If the Doctor comes back, maybe she thinks she just dropped it, maybe she doesn’t notice the grates or checks the cells,” Jamal paused in his endeavour and shucked his shoulders. He could see in her face, that wasn’t the answer Tala was looking for. “I can’t leave him like that,” Jamal said, gesturing to Oleg. “I want to be the one who deals with him when he turns, and I want the cell locked. I figure, if I’m too weak to finish it… Well, it’s one less infected you guys have to deal with.”

Tala continued to track Jamal as he backed up to the cell and closed the barred door slowly behind himself, the autolock clinking shut – the key out of reach. Her eyes were misty, her lips a wavering line. He could hear Katja crying tenderly, obscured behind the bulkhead. Tala and Jamal locked eyes once more, then each turned away. Tala to comfort Katja, Jamal to lay his friend to rest.

☣☭☠

They’d come in waves and now Nielsen understood the fear that had castrated Tor, shedding the Captain of his desire to live and his sanity. Somewhere behind him, in the corridor, Pettersson did his best to barricade the engineering access way. The Second Engineer finding whatever wasn’t bolted down to buttress the blast doors.

They were designed to be bomb proof, a diamond steel construct with rapid interlocking spars in the case of a core meltdown. They’d also had their power cut and were now just heavy, brushed metal swing doors, the wails of the sickly former crewmen drifted eerily through the clatter of their thumping, clawing hands.

The powerless doors bowed where they met in the middle. The many oddments strewn haphazardly by Pettersson like ritual offerings, were being swept aside in increments with each frenzied push. Pettersson tried valiantly to hold his blockade against the flow.

They’d just begun siphoning the fuel remnants from the alignment rockets supply line when Pettersson heard something. Initially they thought it was Hernandez calling them, trouble, he’d been gone too long. They were partially right.

The sound of hundreds of pairs of feet in varying stages of decomposition, shuffling down the stairwell from Central Command barely forewarned of the horror. But the eerie, needful groans and wails more than chilled the blood as it ghosted down the steps, a bow wave of sound.