Krueger

The fire was shit.

Not in the sense that it wasn't doing its job, it was... barely, but in the sense that it smelled like burned rubber and old insulation, and the smoke curled sideways instead of up because the draft through the collapsed section of ceiling couldn't make up its mind. The den, what had once been, he suspected, some kind of foreman's office in a mining operation, judging by the rusted lockers still bolted to the far wall, was shelter in the loosest definition of the word. Four walls. Most of a roof. A door that no longer closed properly but which he'd wedged shut with a length of rebar and the sheer stubbornness of a man who refused to freeze to death in his sleep.

Krueger sat with his back against the least-drafty wall, knees loosely bent, the tin can of mystery meat balanced on one knee while he worked at its contents with a folding spoon. The gasmask hung loose around his neck. The white winter coat, grey now with grime along the sleeves, was still buttoned to the throat despite the fire. Old habit. Old necessity. In this world, the cold didn't wait for you to get comfortable.

Outside, the wind moved across the tundra the way it always did, without apology.

He'd stopped counting what month it was sometime last year. Or the year before. Time had a way of dissolving when the sun barely crested the horizon for three hours a day and every morning looked exactly like the one before it: white, grey, silent, and deeply, profoundly indifferent to whether you lived or died.

The ice age, and that was what people called it now, the ones still alive and talking, which were fewer and fewer, had not come gently. It had come the way most catastrophes came: faster than the experts predicted and slower than the survivors remembered. First the winters that didn't end. Then the ones that started earlier. Then the permanent snowpack that crept south like something patient and deliberate, swallowing highways and cities and the particular kind of human arrogance that had once believed infrastructure was permanent.

Krueger had watched civilization dissolve with something that was not quite satisfaction and not quite relief but lived in the neighborhood of both.

He scraped the last of the meat from the tin and set it aside. It had tasted like salt and tin and something that might have once been chicken. He didn't care. Calories were calories.

The radio on the ground beside him, a compact field unit, military surplus, the kind of thing that had been worth almost nothing before and was now worth more than most men's lives, emitted its usual quiet static. He kept it on low. Had kept it on low for three weeks now, ever since he'd picked it up off a dead man outside Łódź who hadn't needed it anymore.

He wasn't sentimental about the radio. He was practical about it.

There were communities. He knew that. Survivors huddled in repurposed warehouses and underground stations and the basements of universities, burning furniture and rationing canned goods and telling each other it would get better. He'd passed through two of them in the last eight months. They'd looked at his tattoos and his gasmask and his KSK-era efficiency with a violence and decided, correctly, that he was more useful as a trading partner than an enemy.

He'd moved on both times.

Communities meant politics. Politics meant someone eventually deciding they were in charge. Someone in charge meant someone eventually deciding Krueger needed to answer to them.

He'd done that once. It hadn't ended well for the civilians.

He ate the last of the salt-chicken and flicked the tin toward the far wall.

The signal came at 22:14 by his watch, which he still wound every morning out of a discipline that had outlasted every institution that had instilled it.

At first he thought he'd imagined it.

Static. Static. Static. And then, beneath it, threaded through it... structure. Pattern. The unmistakable rhythm of something encoded.

Krueger set down the folding spoon very slowly.

He picked up the radio and turned the dial with two fingers.

Encrypted. Military-grade, or something that had learned from military-grade. Not the kind of thing a survivor community threw together with salvaged walkie-talkies. This was deliberate. This was someone who knew what they were doing and didn't want just anyone listening.

He stared at the radio for a long moment.

"Huh," he said, to no one.

In three weeks of carrying the dead man's radio, he hadn't heard anything but static and, once, a woman's voice repeating coordinates in Polish until it went silent mid-sentence. He hadn't gone to the coordinates. He wasn't an idiot.

But this was different. This was encrypted, which meant resources. Resources meant organization. Organization, in this world, meant either something very good or something very bad, and the only way to tell the difference was to get close enough to find out, which was also, conveniently, the only way to get yourself killed.

He'd need someone to crack it. He knew the encryption patterns well enough to recognize the generation of codec, late military, 2020s era, the kind that had proliferated when NATO started handing out communication packages like party favors, but decryption without the paired key was beyond what he could do by hand. He'd need someone technical. Someone still alive and still functional and still motivated by something other than base survival.

Krueger exhaled slowly through his nose.

South.

He'd been thinking about south for a long time. He was surviving here. He was good at surviving here. But good at surviving in permafrost was not the ceiling he intended to die against.

Somewhere south, things were merely bad instead of unsurvivable. Somewhere south, people were still growing food and trading and doing the miserable, stubborn work of rebuilding something.

If that signal was what he thought it might be—

He pressed his tongue against his back teeth.

Don't hope, Krueger. Hoping is for people who haven't been paying attention.

He set the radio down and began methodically sharpening his knife, the whetstone he kept in his left coat pocket worn smooth from use. The fire crackled. The wind pressed against the walls. He ran the blade across the stone in long, even strokes, not looking at it, feeling the edge instead, the way Golem had taught him before everything else had happened, back when the world had been a different kind of cold.

He thought about the signal.

He thought about south.

He kept sharpening.

He heard it at 23:40.

Snow yielding.

Not the wind-shift compression that made snowpack settle at night. Not the groan of the roof under accumulated weight. This was the particular, irregular compression of bodyweight. Footfall. Someone trying, not quite well enough, to be quiet.

Krueger was on his feet in under a second.

The knife went to his belt. His right hand found the icepick where it always leaned, against the wall within arm's reach of wherever he sat, sleeping, eating, breathing, and his hand closed around the shaft with the automatic ease of long practice. He pulled the gasmask up over his face in one smooth motion, the seals settling against his jaw with a familiar pressure.

He moved away from the fire.

This was another old habit: don't stand near your light source. Near your light source you were visible and blind. Away from it, in the dark at the room's edges, you became part of the shadow, and shadows in this world were the only real currency.

He tracked the sounds through the wedged door, through the thin wall, closer now, moving along the exterior. Hesitant. Searching.

Krueger moved.

He slipped through the gap beside the rebar-braced door, the white coat dissolving into the snow-grey dark outside. The cold hit him like a wall, minus thirty, maybe worse.

He circled wide.

The figure was at the side of the structure, moving along the wall with one hand trailing against it for orientation, someone half-blind in the dark, navigating by touch, which meant they hadn't spotted his fire through any gap yet, or if they had, hadn't identified which side of the building to enter from.

He came up behind them in silence.

Then he moved.

One hand seized the back of their collar and the top of their pack and he drove them forward, hard, not enough force to cause serious injury, enough force to make the decision for them, and the figure pitched forward into the snow ravine at the building's edge, the ground dropping two feet into a drift that swallowed them to the waist. He was on the rim above them in the same motion, the icepick raised, the firelight from inside the building throwing faint amber through the gap in the door and catching the metal of the pick's head.

He looked down.

Beneath the gasmask his expression was unreadable.

"Wer bist du (Who are you)?"

He said it flatly. Then, with the slight mechanical patience of a man willing to repeat himself exactly once:

His accent sat heavy on the words, Austrian consonants rounding the English into something that sounded almost bored, which was precisely what he intended. "What do you want. And why—" he tilted the icepick slightly, a small, precise adjustment that caught the light, "—are you sneaking around my camp at midnight in minus thirty."

He did not lower the pick.

He did not move back.

The wind pushed across the tundra and somewhere, inside on the ground, the radio continued its quiet, encrypted transmission, patient and deliberate and full of something that might, if he was lucky, be a way out.

He waited.