“I thought you two would like to have a little more time together,” Dr. Smith said as she backed out of the cellblock, a predatory smile crossing her face.
Oleg pounded on the bars as the cellblock door closed with a hydraulic thunk. “No, you bitch! Come back. Come back and fucking shoot me!”
Tala shut her eyes as Oleg hollered at the door, Diego was looking at her with a lost expression as she slid down the bars of their cell. Tala felt the cold, rough, metal grind along her spine as she clamped furled fists against her ears, sinking to her rump. Squeezing her eyes closed she wanted to block out everything, wanted to be anywhere else. Her cruel mind wandered back to that warehouse, the girl fitting against the canvas as Marcario revelled in her victory. She felt the humidity of the place, felt the leering eyes watching her kill a person and celebrating, the scene spinning around and around. She felt her mind unravelling, like piano strings parting under duress.
Then all she could hear was Oleg, screaming.
Katja blinked away the tears wetting her eyes, her confused synapses fired wildly as a gale of emotion blew through her head. Artyom had his arm draped over her shoulder. It felt wrong, she remembered the night it all fell apart, when she was woken half-drunk by that strident Klaxon. Her flight into the laboratory department, looking for someone-anyone familiar, vaguely trying to escape the sense of wrongness that guided those elongated first moments.
Katja hadn’t been able to put her finger on it at the time, the stark emptiness of the District as she forced her then plump physique up flights of stairs, sweat glistening against a jumpsuit not unlike the one she wore now.
Seeing Arty had broken the dam on her scattered memories. She recalled the blood in the corridor, the quarantine control door opening behind her, falling into unseen arms. Arty’s arms, the same arms that loosely shepherded her into what appeared to be an interrogation room. Two basic padded, baby blue upholstered chairs sat either side of a Formica topped white table, scarred by old cigarette burns and coffee rings. An over-bright strip light fuzzed above her and a half-filled water cooler lay in one corner, the water tilted in counter rotation to the station.
She remembered trying to pull from those arms, sobbing as she was dragged into the control room. Arty’s arms, only she hadn’t known that then. Now those same limbs felt oily and tentacular, exuding the same wrongness as before. An urgent necessity to flee wailed like the station Klaxon in her head, but she didn’t respond, it didn’t make sense. Nothing did, this was Arty. He’d saved her.
His arm slithered away, he pulled the chair out on the one side of the table, legs skittering across the linoleum, then nervously walked around the other side. He braced himself against the tabletop, palms flat, arms rigid. Arty stared at her from across the plastic expanse, lips twisted in a half smile, eyebrows knitted above nostalgic eyes. “Katja, please sit,” Arty said, pushing himself back upright and indicating the chair he’d prepared for her.
Katja sat, fighting the knot in her stomach and the taste of vomit in her mouth. She felt her lips quiver. “Arty,” her voice sounded strained. “What’s happening here? Why did you imprison my friends.” Her mind flickered to the raw sense of rejection from Tala.
Arty stood behind his own chair, fingers busily tapping the top. “My god, it is good to see you again. You have no idea how many hours I have spent thinking about you. I am so glad you are OK.”
“Arty… tell me, please.”
Arty drummed his fingers, the rhythm intensified, then stopped. He turned as if ready to whirl away, then pulled the chair back and sat in one smooth movement. “You look better than I remembered, it has been a very long and lonely four years, Katja. I missed you.”
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.”