Murmansk-13

In one shadowy corner a long disused truck bore the scars of carnage from the final time its engine was fired up. The runners soon learnt that the forklifts racket only drew unwanted attention.

Spaceward, great slated viewports bathed the floor space in blurry blocks of red light. The cubed light skittered into the racks and diffracted into bloody shards. A single large circular corridor ran off into the distance, to the docking ring, a byway for newly arrived freighters that would never come.

These days the racks were emptier, the spoils higher. For the runners, foraging grew more dangerous but it was a job Jamal embraced. Running broke the endless tedium of life on the station, the ceaseless waiting for what, nobody knew anymore. Hope of rescue had been abandoned by all but the most deluded and their apparent overseers had grown quiet since Murat had disappeared. Death, it seemed, was all that awaited them whether through some catastrophic failure of the station, the mundane expenditure of their finite resources or the sickness.

Jamal wasn’t sure why he helped perpetuate their existence, other than running provided a fatalistic thrill. They needed supplies to continue surviving and while Jamal grew indifferent to life, running provided a purpose, a means to an end and possibly a means to his own end. Either result was a net win. Or at least he tried to convince himself that. For whatever reason, Jamal’s nagging instinct to survive always dragged him from one dangerous situation to another without ever letting him lose.

Thirty seven convicts had pulled themselves through the emergency airlock, little realizing they’d exchanged one form of imprisonment for another, far worse. Four would make it no further than the service corridor, their injuries from the crash and space exposure too severe. The remnants quickly divided into clans. Most stuck to familiar groups – gangs from their hometowns or gangs from their Gulags. None of the Slavs wanted to ally with the American monkey, the English speaker. Their ethno-patriotic bigotry undiluted by their incarceration by Mother Russia.

After a day the various groups sallied forth from the service corridor unaware what awaited beyond.

He’d watched as a group of badly injured crash survivors, covered in lesions and one suffering from decompression sickness, sought medical assistance. One of their number had managed to override the quarantine shutdown that had frozen all the automatic systems onboard. They’d taken a single step forward before the wave of crazed people had broken over them, rending flesh from bone, tearing tendons and cartilage. He’d listened to his fellow survivors screams, the snap and pop of their bodies; paralyzed as gore washed across the bulkheads. Then one of the attackers had cast his tache-noir striped eye on him. The fierce keening of the clamouring mob had chased him deep into the exposed wiring conduits that would become his sanctuary.

That had been day two, post crash. Jamal spent the next three ensconced in the stations hidden maze of multi-coloured wires and yellow insulating substrate.

In the weeks that followed the survivors maintained solitary packs, scavenging the leftovers of the rapidly abandoned station while avoiding its sickened denizens.

As numbers began to dwindle, the ravaged gangs converged on District Four-Stations Administration and its large, mostly unadorned, office spaces. Few of the offices appeared to have ever been used and the haul from the myriad canteens and kitchenettes was meagre. Still, the position was defensible, barricades were built and a modicum of order established.

Weary, Jamal watched the preparations from afar, in his metallic warrens; waiting to see how it would play out and not expecting a welcome. The situation reminded him of The Lord of the Flies.

Sure enough, limited means resulted in fights under the omnipresent gaze eye of the security cameras. A deep sense of paranoia pervaded from whoever was watching the images, from the roaming packs of infected station personnel and from one another.

The untenable conditions resulted in a split. One group remained in District Four, the other migrated to District Seven and the habitation blocks of the Station’s Plant. Over a series of months Jamal watched roaming individuals come in to the separate parties – some were station personnel, others; survivors like he who had been reluctant to enter the first troubled community.

Jamal knew he would never last alone, the claustrophobia of the wiring conduits was almost total after four months, although he’d long since lost count of the days in the permanent pallid light of the ducts. He would be the final one to come in – and the first to be rejected.