Murmansk-13

Jamal knew he was safe in the air ducts, two and a half meters above the deck, Jamal knew the infected couldn’t reach him. Several times in the past years, Jamal had held station as the walking remains of the crew frantically pawed the air between them, desperate to pluck him from safety and rend him apart. Several times he’d stared into their savage milky eyes and felt a chill sense of loss creep down his spine, every vestige of their humanity peeled away. In the back of his mind he remembered he needed to find some .25’s – he wouldn’t be reduced to that.

No, Jamal was safe, but if he continued to his objective he would act as a tow, like chum to a shark. Momentary indecision, Jamal listened, somewhere behind him the electric gearing on a door whirred. The motherfuckers are letting them through. If he was going, he’d have to go now, they couldn’t have gotten far in those heavy suits.

Determinedly, Jamal pushed off from the duct walls and loped on all fours, aluminium flexing and popping in his wake. Damn the noise, they could smell them now anyway. He had to put distance between himself and the infected, give himself time and formulate a plan. He couldn’t let them die, they were the only hope.

His vision narrowed. Beneath, the corridors were dimly lit. Shafts of argent neon barely pierced the gloom within the duct, but Jamal bounded on, knowingly headed toward a ten story plummet. Instinctively he slid to a halt, a weak updraft indicating he’d reached the descending shaft, a lightless void in the metal.

He hadn’t come far enough to chance another pause, with the noise and the perspiration of his effort, Jamal knew the infected would be on his position soon. He dried his hands as best as he could manage on the grime slicked hoodie he’d salvaged from a crew cabin months past and eased himself into the shaft of seemingly infinite blackness. He felt the frigid updraft squirm through the bottoms of his trouser legs and waft across his sweat glossed body, threatening to quake his already tired muscles and send him tumbling into the dark.

Spread-eagled, hands and booted feet pressed into the ducts sides, Jamal inched down the shaft. With his eyes shut to the darkness, Jamal focused on his breathing, always on his breathing and not on his muscles that burned and quivered under the burden of his weight.

Two and a half meters to each floor, it took him a minute to squirm down the shaft, almost falling into the recess of the eight floors ducting. He sat and let himself relax for a moment. Got to be quicker, man. As he paused, he listened, but heard nothing but the distant progress of the infected and the gentle passage of old air worrying aluminium.

Happenstance had brought Jamal to this shaft as he gingerly rolled from his perch and began a second decent. He’d brought Gennady news of his sighting – the craft – as soon as he returned to District Four. Empty handed from his run to the warehouse, the enclaves sentries had threatened to lynch him. Jamal protested the significance of his news and was brought to Gennady. Jamal was sure the sentries, Ilya and Boris, had hoped Gennady would dole out a beating to be administered by them, instead he listened fervently to Jamal’s tale of Mikhail and the mysterious vessel recounted in broken Russian. Intrigued, but no less sceptical, Gennady had appointed Jamal envoy of District Four and to establish communications by any means possible. To this end he’d been provided a thousand candle flashlight, a handheld heliostat and an escape suit, all relinquished from an escape pod via the District Four cache. Mercifully they also refilled his water bladder.

Jamal had wound down from Gennady’s eyrie, en route to the emergency airlock in the District Three docking ring tasked, if possible, with a request for the safe passage of the inhabitants of District Four. However, not long after entering District Three, Jamal had sensed a disturbance in the stations fine equilibrium.

It had been over a year since circumstances had required Jamal venture into District Three; on that occasion indentured to stockpile medical supplies for his districts denizens. But in his early nomadic wanderings he’d often stalked the corridors and canteens of the medical laboratories, they had bore the most recent hallmarks of residency. Even in his absence Jamal could perceive the changes around him, changes that indicated he was not alone. Indistinct sounds, snippets of words caught within the stations passage of recycled air. Other sounds as well, sounds indicative of human habitation that carried through the stations very structure so clear after so much absence.