After Part 19
For Oleksander the road home seemed like a distant taste of his mothers stale homemade bread. He could hear the birds chirping and the sounds of engines running over the hills from the village below. Now he saw only white. The cold harsh Siberia winter that never ends. He and the guards of the north sat in this small fortress of stone here at the edge of the world, guardians of the seeds of the past, in hopes that one day some would have fertile earth to replant them in.
He didn’t volunteer for this job, but it was this or starve to death in the wastelands of what was once Russia. And the food here was edible helicoptered in monthly by the remaining governments of the world. It made him wonder what would happen to all of them here when those governments collapse. Luckily they had developed there own little society here some even growing tomatoes and other small vegetables.
There was a small still set up for the worst moonshine you ever tasted but it did the job on the most lonely of nights.
Oleksander knew that it was probably mostly poision but he drank it anyway and sang songs late into the night. Songs without meaning and some which usually led to fighting of old patriots holding onto some strange obsession with the Soviet Union.
Most days were slow and unsubstational but occasionally someone would come to the outer wall begging to be let in. They would be turned away and if persistent shot from one of the towers. The snipers rotated in 6 hour shifts, and they were all to eager to do something when needed.
Oleksander had never seen inside the vault they were guarding, none of his rank had, but the few scientists who lived there would check on the species daily and sometimes he would hear them speak of disease and blight or progress with an experiment. None of it made any sense to him. He just saw white outside, and meals and bad moonshine to look forward to.
Sometimes when the food delivery came he wished just once, it would include some of his mothers homemade stale bread. But it was mostly cans raided from fallen Norway, full of delicacies he’d rather throw back into the ocean. Then the message came through the usually dormant radio one evening, past midnight.
There would be a visitor coming soon, a scientist, who believed conditions in the southern sahara could sustain life. The news came with it that a security detail would be needed to leave with the scientist. Oleksander knew no matter what he needed to be on the detail leaving with those specimens and that scientist. He knew it was his only chance in this life to possibly see something other than white snow and the inside of this mansion for dead things. He had forty eight hours to make his plan a reality.