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.
Igor, his neighbour on the prisoner transport, had emerged as the preeminent autocrat of the District Seven band. The burly Russian still bore the scars of the accident, a deep indentation in his skull that would surely have rendered another human being dead. Igor had leered over Jamal when he’d sought asylum. Old prison tattoos gleamed with sweat, darkened by the red emergency lights – Plant was hot, Plant was unfriendly.
Rapid Russian had drizzled from Igor’s drawn lips, his eyes fixed on Jamal. Whether the words were meant for Jamal, he would never know – he’d long forgotten them by the time he’d learnt the language – but the familiar zoological gesticulations from Igor’s coterie suggested they weren’t friendly. He’d quickly turned tail when Igor started grinding his sausage fingered fist into his meaty palm.
Igor, the man he’d saved.
It would be three more months before Jamal would approach Gennady and District Four, dulled of mind and malnourished. Seven months spent in the ducts before he was reluctantly accepted and his talents for traversing the service ways of the station would become a desired skill set. Between him and Mikhail, the runners were born an exclusive caste.
Now Jamal watched Mikhail, far below. A miniature figure dancing in and out of the giant racks, a brief play of shadows, the glint of his outline all that betrayed his position. Mikhail was Igor’s man, Igor’s runner. Both Districts had quickly learnt that foraging parties did not have the required stealth to subvert the stations control or the attention of the stations infected. The two acted as a symbiotic defence system. For the most part, locked down automatic doors kept the diseased crewmembers at bay, other times some Unseen Hand would unleash all hell and long dormant doors would spring to life. Then the putrid smell of decaying flesh would herald doom. The key was to avoid alerting either.
Mikhail and Jamal were the best. Subsequently, they were rivals.
Mikhail was a light-footed Muscovite, long blonde hair and chiselled features belied his petit frame. He was younger and more agile than Jamal, but he didn’t know the station like Jamal did, hadn’t spent as much time in the stations wilderness. Jamal had been a running back in high school, albeit a small one. He was powerful, at least after sometime recovering from his months in solitude. Jamal could count on his strength to get him out of a bind, he was also a better beast of burden as a result. Mikhail looked like he would snap in a breeze. A whippet.
Still, after four years running against Mikhail he’d come to admire him. They were specialists, eking out an existence on a decaying station for thankless employers. Jamal suspected he and Mikhail would prevail to the end together but they could never meet or talk, the paranoia was all too ubiquitous. Distantly he hoped Mikhail admired him. He doubted it though.
Jamal thumbed the inert junk gun in his pocket, digging into his thigh. He’d been out of .25’s for a year. A couple of pocket pistols had been liberated from the guards during the escape, ammunition had been found intermittently in office desks through the years. The survivors knew there was an armoury, but Weapons was District Twelve, a suicidal distance. Jamal also knew Mikhail carried one, but he suspected he was out of ammo as well. A junk gun was only good for two purposes, attracting attention or shooting yourself. Still, he imagined Mikhail would kill him if he had the opportunity. At the least it would tip the scales in favour of District Seven in the interminable battle of attrition.
He chose not to test Mikhail’s resolve.