MINOR THREAT

“KONTROL” poster + setlist (1993)

The ancient PA system wakes in a screech of feedback.

Piotr raises his drumsticks. Raps out a quick succession in two sets of triples- ONETWOTHREE, ONETWOTHREE- !

A R K O : CHARACTER DESIGN

He’d never been good at charades. 

Kuba scowled in confusion. “What do you…” He followed her gaze. It took a full minute, but the purpose of her words suddenly struck home. His muscles protested at the mere thought of struggling up a fifty-foot fucking Christmas tree. Irritated, he gestured with spread hands, the universal sign for sorry, what the fuck? (and, somewhat passively-aggressively, in imitation of her cool-eyed be quiet gesture). 

“I don’t climb!” Kuba hissed. “I don’t even know h–”

There came a burble of voices. They froze as one. Suddenly so tense it hurt, Kuba quirked his head to listen back the way they had come. There was nothing but the sigh of cool wind; perhaps some distant animal noises. If he concentrated, he thought there was a walker some way off, stumbling through the undergrowth, but that was no real threat, not unless it was one of the prowler bastards… Kuba slowly turned back to meet the girl’s eyes. There was a flicker in her expression, one he interpreted to mean, See?

With increasing reluctance, Kuba grimaced and looked back up the tree. It seemed awfully high. And difficult. 

“Fine,” he snapped at her. “But I swear to God I’m holding this against you.”

He huffed in frustration and pushed off from the trunk he’d been leaning against. With a nervous glance backwards, Kuba steeled himself. Then he stretched upwards to reach the lowest-slung bough of the pine. His fingers brushed the rough bark. Sticking out his tongue in concentration, Kuba strained upwards, and finally grabbed hold of it. His shoulder burned with the uncomfortable angle.

But it didn’t hurt enough to stop him throwing her a ferociously ungrateful look. Pursing his lips, Kuba glared up at the tree; then, with a monumental effort, he started to haul himself up.

Her silent instructions were not met with the compliance she’d been expecting. The boy’s features darkened, twisting into a bare-faced scowl, and she could hear the serrated edge of irritation flashing in his voice. “I don’t climb!” The hostility almost surprised her. Almost; something flickered in her eyes, but did not flee her face. 

The low murmur of distant voices picked up for a moment and went quiet again, like a wind falling flat. She watched his scowl soften, becoming something more open and afraid, a child’s bewilderment. His eyes searched her's for an answer. The same expression he’d worn by the riverside, the same one she was beginning to resent herself for feeling sorry for, since it’d coaxed her down from her hiding spot and into this disastrous situation in the first place. Arko simply stared back at him, her own face as calm as a settled pool - then she turned on her heel and padded soundlessly back to the pine, leaving him on his own for the second time during their brief interaction. She could help, she could warn. But she certainly couldn’t make someone else’s choices for them. 

The side of the trunk where the knife was still embedded, she left that to him out of courtesy - it was a step-up he probably needed more than she did. Instead, Arko slunk around the base, eyeing the branches above her head. A coil of flaxen rope had appeared out of depths of her jacket and she held one end of the cord in each hand like a homemade jumprope. None of the drooping boughs inspired much confidence. Her eyes finally picked one to aim for - with practiced ease, she tossed up the rope so that it looped over the tip of the branch, and shimmied it down till it was snug at the base. Then, winding the twine shorter and tighter around her fists, she climbed. 

It was more labor-intensive than her previous method. Arko finished the climb with quiet, heavy breathing, squatting down, perched on the tips of her boots. This particular branch couldn’t be trusted to hold her weight without shaking; she straightened up half-way and began making her way towards the other side of the tree, testing each limb with a careful prod of her foot. She finally reached the thick branch where she’d hunkered down before, the one with her penknife directly below it - but there was no sign here of her newfound przyjaciel. Arko glanced around, blinking. Then she looked down. 

He was barely a foot off the ground.

Eyes flashing, Arko unwound the rope again, knotting it quickly around the base of the branch and tossing the rest down so that it fell on him. The urgency that had ignited in her eyes could’ve easily been interpreted as anger - and there was something angry about them, something internally furious, a glow spilling out like the windows of a burning house. One hand mimed gripping the rope, the other closed in a fist above it; she repeated this gesture to him insistently. Those distant voices and heavy footfalls didn’t sound so far-off anymore. Surely he understood what the stakes were for both of them if he didn’t find a way to haul himself up fast.

_________________________

There was a knack to walking in utter silence. Lift your toes gradually from the earth one millimetre at a time; allow them to find a natural route through the grass as they nuzzle each strand of the forest’s hair aside. Let your legs move how they want. They will automatically move in a circular motion, your ankles drawing ovals in the dust that floats on polluted air. Your arms are to move freely by your sides, but be sure not to allow fabric to catch or rustle. As you lower your raised foot to complete the step, place the outer edge of your boot down first — careful to avoid any twigs that could inconsiderately be lying in your wake — and roll your foot in towards the arch. You massage the earth with your foot. Do not smack it; gently push out the knots that burden it. Repeat process.

               It had become instinctive to Otto. He didn’t need to think about his method anymore as his muscles had learnt it. They moved without prompt. Obedient to his survival. The six foot two inches man moved with an unexpected grace through the trees. Grass reached halfway up his calfs. It was a muted green, pale like the colours had been mixed with milk to rid it of its vibrancy. The tree canopy was the same. The dull leaves blocked out sunlight apart from the occasional ray that fell across Otto, lighting him up like a piece of scenery.

               Ironically, despite the grace he now moved with, he was no object for admiration and awe. He was scruffy looking with smears of mud distorting his silhouette and patches sewed onto his clothing to hold it together. It looked like the gaffer tape that covered his body was his foundations, but that helped him keep silent. Any zips, straps, or buckles were taped to his body or rucksack to stop them from jingling or tapping. His knuckles were covered by woollen fingerless gloves and the lower half of his face was concealed by layers of cloth that stopped him inhaling the worst of the dust and ash as he skipped through the forest.

               Forests always took him back to his childhood. Nights spent under canvas with his father. Afternoons spent climbing trees as high as possible before the trunk got too narrow. Mornings spent fishing in a river, ankle deep in rushing flumes. They grew nostalgia for Otto which was one reason he preferred to be in a forest these days. Another was that you had shelter — there was always somewhere to hide.

               Otto slowed his pace to scour the area. His hazel eyes glinted as he turned them, occasionally catching them in the light. As he turned his head, he spotted a human shape sat on the forest floor. Without thought he silently moved to take cover behind the trunk of a tree. Peering around, he studied the person. Slight in build, eyes closed, vulnerable. Were they asleep? Were they dead? They looked too poised to be without breath in their lungs.

               He knew he had an opportunity here to steal supplies and he momentarily considered it. A shake of his head. He couldn’t steal from a lone traveller. When you walked alone, the only supplies you had were the ones you carried on your back — without it you were dead. The person looked peaceful, separate from the world that surrounded them. He couldn’t take that from them. Sometimes Otto hated that his morals still ruled his actions.

               For safety, Otto reached to the metre of metal piping that hung from his rucksack. He gave it a twist and a tug and the quick release knot gave way. He stepped out from the cover of the tree and kicked his foot against the ground to make his presence known. Slow blinking and a stare. “You could have been mince meat,” he said in German, his thick accent padding out the words. Then in a stumble of English from not using it for too long he added, “Walkers aren’t about to be kind.” Otto glanced over his shoulders and then crouched down to be at the same eye level as the stranger.

The man who stepped into the patch of sunlight struck her, for a moment, as something familiar - a ghost borne out of the past and into the present, a memory knocked loose from wherever it still lived inside of her. She’d once seen men like this on the streetcars in Rzeszów: their faces wind-chapped, the skin of their hands cracked like old leather, their clothing patched and threadbare and hanging off them as loose as a scarecrow’s. Their palms, outstretched, hoping for the weight of a few loose coins. Their eyes, seeking out a face that would not immediately turn away, would not quickly drop its gaze to rifle through a purse or scan the Sunday paper or stare out the window, eyes fixed intently on the grey Socialist towers rolling by in the rain.

In that life, Arko would’ve taken him for a beggar. She would have pitied him for his haunted eyes and his taped-up clothes and his palpable air of hunger. But in this life, she was hungry too. Her eyes were ringed with dark crescents, as if day-old bruises had been thumbprinted there, and the sharpness of her cheekbones hinted at gauntness- but it was her eyes that were the hardest aspect of her face. They shone at him like flint.

“Du hättest Hackfleisch sein können.”

She recognized German only by the contours of its sounds, not by its meaning. The only language offerings at school had been Polish and Russian, of course, and a little English, but the teachers had never really put their back into that one. They’d had scarce material to teach it from, and the result had become a clumsy, mangled pseudo-language with English words and Russian grammar, a useless hybrid she’d all but forgotten by now. Even in the days of her distant youth, screaming along to Western hardcore at all those underground punk shows, she’d only ever learned the words phonetically.

She sized him up with a quick up-and-down sweep of the eyes. The gesture made no effort to conceal its purpose. He was bigger than her, sure, but most people were. Her gaze flickered to the pipe in his hand. Not a gun. Not even a long blade with some reach to it, like her own. It was a close-contact, blunt force weapon- to be of any use, he’d have to get closer to her first. And she could be gone between heartbeats, if she needed to be.

He spoke again. The words sounded more like English and less like German this time, though it was hard to tell the difference with his accent. Maybe he’d noticed the band patches on her jacket - MINOR THREAT stitched in black thread on a square of canvas that’d once been white, THE PISTOLS sewn in on her sword arm’s sleeve, a litter of other patches too faded to read - and thought it would be a common tongue between them. Still, Arko blinked at him without any response. But her gaze was not uncomprehending, nor confused.

There’d been one word that she recognized: walkers.

Ever so slightly, her eyes narrowed. When he crouched down, she wasn’t looking at him anymore, but at some indefinite thing beyond his shoulder -  at the long, still shadows that fell between the trees, and the faint tremble of branches in the breeze. Her brow creased minutely.

If there were really walkers headed this way, she would hear them from a mile off. Her silence afforded her that certain advantage. And it wasn’t like walkers were the most subtle predators - they stumbled and lurched through the forest like drunks spilling out of the tavern on New Year’s Eve, crashing through the dry undergrowth, emitting their keening moans to replace the birdsong that had once carried through the air. But what they lacked in finesse, they often made up in numbers- Arko had watched them, from her safe perches high in the trees, as they passed through in packs that could be anywhere from fifty to a hundred strong. Maybe more. After all, there was no shortage of human debris scattered throughout the world for the infection to feed on. The war had created an almost infinite supply of bodies.