Zombies, Run! Mission Nine: Part Two
Master post
Mission Nine: Part One
Chapter: Mission Nine
Summary: Wounded, alone, and in the dark, Five knows she's not having the best day of it. She has to get home before she's declared lost and locked out, and she seriously doubts there's a spare key under the doormat.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Some description of psychological trauma, shock and PTSD.
Spoilers: Mission eight & nine. Oh, God, spoilers for everything. Avast, here be spoilers.
Mission Nine
A Voice In The Dark: Part Two
Her breath came in short, stuttering bursts as she lost all control for five intense, shocky seconds, frozen still and utterly useless in the deep darkness of the room. Her pulse jackhammered blood relentlessly through her limbs as her eyes followed a panic pattern, searching automatically for the exits. Her stomach tingled and her toes were numb.
Off-balance, only half-awake and easily rattled, it took Five at least half a minute to get herself under control. Up up up, she told herself with brittle firmness, forcing herself slowly to rise. The closet was a constricted space and she moved over-carefully, trying to make up for her complete lack of spatial awareness.
It took more courage than she believed to silently swing the closet doors open and to step out into the empty room, her only companion the slow, almost contemplative scratch of dead nails on the wood of the door. Five’s bones were trembling with the effort of keeping still and of not pelting straight for the window. Noise, now, would get her killed.
She knew this intellectually, but she was having a hard time holding on to the knowledge. Adrenaline washed through her like a static shock, drowning out sense and reason and inviting her, slowly, temptingly, insidiously, to give in to base instinct. To become the hunted. To flee.
Indecision kept her pinned to the carpet of the bedroom, fingers flexing and breath rattling in her ribs, for a full two minutes. Five found herself fighting her own instinct for control, fighting against sublimation in that blind animal panic, and she wasn’t sure how long she would have stayed there along with the rhythmic scratching had her earpiece not crackled, fuzzy and half-perceptible, into life.
“...nner Five, Run… Five,” said a beautifully familiar male voice, sounding bored and resigned. “Can y… me? Runn… ive, come in…”
Signal. Home. The window.
Five took a few shuffling footsteps closer to the window. The signal tried to sharpen, words coming through stronger, but the static was still washing some of it away.
“If you’re there, Runner Five, c… in, come in.”
The clawing at the door was getting louder. It was only a matter of time before it discovered the door handle.
Five’s mind was still a hot mess of fear and hormonal incitement to panic, but it was the familiar reality of Sam that did the most to snap her into the present. Sam. Home, she thought. I want to go home.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” mumbled Sam, blithely oblivious. “Our scanner’s down. It never works... that well at night anyway. A couple of bits of equipment have broken down, so…” He sighed, and Five allowed herself the luxury of three or four quick, deep breaths before walking as calmly as she could to the window. The signal got sharper still.
“Truth is, I - I don’t even know if you’re alive. Odds aren’t good, right? Hey, odds aren’t good for any of us, but I’m still… yeah, well, I guess I’m still alive. That’s all I can say. Runner Five, we… we don’t know where you are…”
Me neither, thought Five, grasping the strap of her rucksack and zipping it securely over her chest.
“We know you didn’t get taken by New Canton, we managed to track that much,” said Sam, and the pessimism in his voice belayed his hopeful words. “But you haven’t come back. It’s the middle of the night, Runner Five, and... there’s a reason we don’t send patrols out at night.”
The door handle squeaked and jolted, as though something unfamiliar with its operation were trying to get in.
“If you’re where we think you might be - to the North - the area’s swarming with zombies, and they often head for us at night.”
Fabulous, Five thought. The toolbox in front of the door jerked with a sharp rattling noise.
“If they get here before you, we’re going to have to bar the gates. There’ll be no way for you to get in, and we’ll have to watch -”
Sam cut himself off abruptly. Five was glad.
“You’re not even my second Runner Five, you know that?” he added, and his tone was funereal. “You’re actually my fourth. I suppose there’s no better reason you’d make it back than any of the others.”
The groans were getting louder. Five did not turn to look.
“But we’ve put the red beacon on the top of the tower, so if you can see it… my best advice is… run.”
The window slid up in its frame with some reluctance, squeaking and getting caught more than once. Five had to use her fist to hammer it the last few inches, and at that, the muffled groaning from the door became a howl.
Five didn't even look back. She threw herself out, palm to the sill and swinging her legs through, and dropped straight to the ground with an ungainly thump. She staggered, collapsed, got up, and went straight into sprint behind the house.
Jesus fuck, she thought wildly, fingernails cranked tight into her palms and Sam wittering on uselessly in her ear. A huge groan went up behind her, the unmistakeable sound of zoms on the hunt and zeroing in. She'd made so much noise, but there'd been no choice, it was move or die, and as she scrabbled desperately through the dense thicket of hedges between the houses, she hoped that whatever goddamned creature who'd made such a fuss in the house was the draw. Zoms were attracted to noise, and something was clearly broadcasting the signal for a missed meal.
God, it was dark. So dark. Five fought blindly through the thickset hedge, clawing her way out of the horror behind her. Was she being followed? Had something seen her? God, no, no time to check, just forward forward forward -
Sam was still talking. She picked up the odd word through the backwash of terror - "friend", “undead”, “crazy”, “normal” - but most of it was just background noise against the jackhammer rattle of her pulse, adrenaline beating a cadence into her veins and suffocating the pain of her wounds under layers of terror and self-preservation. The world had narrowed down to the escape ahead and the unknown behind, shocky-white and tasting of lightning.
Five burst out into the next garden and didn't even pause to take stock. After dark, after dark, after dark, she thought, screaming only in the privacy of her skull. Never be out after dark. The full moon was bright enough to cast shadows, but that wasn’t the point, that wasn’t the point -
"D’you think we’ve just forgotten how to be normal?" Sam mused, utterly unaware.
Five sprinted the distance across the next garden and full-speed ploughed into the loose hedge that marked the next property boundary. She forced herself through, lungs sawing at the air for memory of how to breathe, riding the crest of her panic and not quite ready to die for it yet. It took willpower and more effort than she liked to admit merely just to maintain the semblance of control, fingers tearing at dense branches and blankly accepting the stings and scratches of blood-draw as the price for speed.
The roar had gone up behind her. The zoms were agitated. There would be more on the way, according to Sam.
They would swarm.
Five vaulted the next fence with scrabbling hipshot grace, hotly pragmatic, and boosted herself over the next six-foot wall with help from a half-collapsed garden shed. Three gardens - was it enough?
It would have to be.
Five slammed her back against the wall she had just conquered, breathing hard and listening as intently as she dared. The zoms were muttering, roaring and moving. They knew she was here somewhere. Plan, plan, she needed a plan. Where the fuck was home?
Wait - what had Sam said? A beacon? A tower?
The new tower on the radio station?
Wildly, Five scanned the horizon, fingers twitching against the beat of her pulse. The new tower, the one her supplies had helped to build, was a leaning structure that could be clearly seen over the rolling hills of the land and the houses of suburbia. During the daytime, at least.
And now, with no streetlights to turn the sky orange or cars to destroy her night vision -
Yes. There. A faint red point of light, five-odd clicks away and holding steady.
"I called you my friend just before, didn’t I," said Sam unexpectedly into her ear. Five jerked in a violent spasm of surprise, paranoid and twitching. “Is that cool with you? I mean, I’m definitely not you’re friend if you’ve gone grey.”
Five rubbed her hands over her body, the terror making her paranoid that she might have been bitten and simply not noticed. Was she okay? Were there wounds? Even so much as a nail-scratch.
“But… I feel like we have a kind of simpatico,” continued Sam, utterly unaware in the face of her fear. “Something? Not that we’ve ever really talked. I guess we’re talking now. So… yeah, well let’s just talk like normal people.”
Five tried not to laugh, at both herself and Sam. No bite marks. Thank Christ.
“Like… buddies, or something. Before all this, I bet you had a pretty good life.”
Sam seemed happy in his own little world. Five tuned his ramblings out slightly as she listened hard. There was a lot of movement on the street on the other side of the house she was using for shelter. The hedge behind her and the fences around the perimeter of the garden were shielding her, but it was only a matter of time.
Staying out of sight might not be a viable means to escape, she reasoned, trying to think over the sounds of the adrenaline in her eardrums. There were just too many. Speed might be the key; put distance in, let them track her before it became a swarm.
Five resurfaced to hear, “Cake outside and ice-cream in the middle! Or - or was it the other way around?”
The path around the front of the house was clear. God knew what the road was like, but this might be her only chance to run without being bottlenecked. This might be the only chance she had of an escape on her terms.
And her terms were better than the alternative.
“I don’t even remember any more! Wait, wait, hang on, I’ll go check. And, er,” said Sam offhandedly amongst the shuffling noises of feet, “if you’re still Runner Five, keep running.”
Five took it as a sign.
A few quick breaths re-oxygenated her blood and then she was sprinting out from behind the house and into the main drag of the road, feet kissing the tarmac and ears ringing with the sudden roar of groans that erupted. They were everywhere, shuffling brokenly toward her, arms outstretched and jagged teeth reflecting the starlight.
Five did a quick headcount. Ten immediately on her trail, five more looking to join the pack, and untold numbers on the road ahead. The ones ahead of her were shambling towards the road, but she’d be past them before they could become an immediate threat. It was the idea of the swarm that worried her the most; being pincered by a hive-mind capable of no greater thought than “brains” did not appeal.
Her arm had begun to throb. Five stuffed the pain down and kept her muscles tight. The road left no place to hide and the moonlight even less so, stark and unforgiving, a silver eye on the proceedings of the path. Still, Five reasoned as she forcibly stopped herself from sprinting, that meant that the zoms were easier to spot, too.
Being actively chased was not fun, but the panic baying just south of her control would leave her dead. Five tried to focus on navigation, working out routes and paths that followed the eye-line of the unblinking red light some distance away.
Twenty zombies, now. The groans were getting louder, and would attract more attention.
And then, disgustingly cheerful:
“OK. Hi, right, so, yeah. Erm, two things.”
Oh, Sam.
Five pinned her flagging hope to his voice, frightened to find how close to tears she was, how close to breaking. This. This, the mess with New Canton, her badly-bandaged wounds, the short sharp shock of their guns, the chase, oh God, the zoms -
A little too near to the bone.
So she screwed all her courage to the cadence of his voice, chirpy and inappropriately optimistic. She wasn’t on her own out here, she reminded herself fiercely. Just - just beat the swarm to the gate. That’s all there was to it.
“Aye,” Sam bumbled on, “I was right. It was cake outside and ice-cream inside. And bee, apparently, checking this is not a good reason to wake Janine up in the middle of the night, okay? Got it?”
Yes, Sam.
“So, erm, where were we? Ah, yeah, before.”
Five picked up her pace a little. The road was curving around to the left and speed would be necessary. Lurkers had a tendency to pounce like wildcats, all roaring and saliva and blood-borne infection. Sam was talking in a low soothing hum, rambling about his life… before.
“Wanna know what I did before this?” he asked gleefully, as Five nipped on to the pavement to avoid a legless crawler, darting with as much agility as she had without spilling speed. “Well, I imagine you’re brimming over with enthusiasm. With these ‘mad skillz’” - the mocking air quotes audibly dropped into place - “I bet you think I was DJ or a radio host or something, right?”
Five didn’t waste processing power on the statement. She knew it was rhetorical.
“Uh-uh! I was a student, man! Fourth year! Engineering degree. I was, just for the record, really, really, really -”
Five dodged a triplet of zoms. They were short, stubby, and gangrenous. One was still clutching the remains of a cricket bat. They reached out to her as she passed, fingers clawing, bones bearing muscles that had long since disintegrated beyond dexterity. She tried not to shudder.
“- terrible at it.”
Five lost herself in Sam’s story; a failing degree, a disappointed father - “he’s Chinese, he was all ‘you have dishonoured the family’,” - a desire to be in the radio booth, dreams and accomplishments never recognised or approved of by his family. Despite it all, her heart-rate was trying to wind up into full panic mode; the groans of the zoms were non-stop, the trail of fifty behind her collecting more at an exponential rate. God, she’d have to think of a back-up plan soon.
“What’s really, really bad,” said Sam’s voice, self-loathing evident in every syllable, “is some days - some days I’m grateful for all this. Hah. Because I don’t have to get up in the morning and go to classes and pretend - pretend I care about engineering, right?”
Fuck you, thought Five with feeling, feeling uncharitable and half-way to sobbing, the only constant being the sound of her feet on the road. Maybe Sam heard it on some freaky psychic level.
“I’ll be right back,” he said in a low voice, and then went silent.
Five let out a breath. Jesus. ‘Bare-you-innermost’ hour on Radio Abel.
The cynicism brought her back to herself, a little. Right: problem at hand - too many zoms. Solution: let them disperse. Priority: speed and cover. She still had the woods to go, yet. She might lose some of them through the twisting paths and the darkness would at least keep her hidden.
But before that, she had the open fields and the moonlight with which to contend.
Jesus.
She gritted her teeth, fought the nausea rolling in thick waves from her skull, and paid attention to the pricking of the hair rising on the nape of her neck. It might be the only thing keeping her alive.
Nerves rattled her limbs. She pressed on.
On to Part Three.
Mission Nine: Part One
Chapter: Mission Nine
Summary: Wounded, alone, and in the dark, Five knows she's not having the best day of it. She has to get home before she's declared lost and locked out, and she seriously doubts there's a spare key under the doormat.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Some description of psychological trauma, shock and PTSD.
Spoilers: Mission eight & nine. Oh, God, spoilers for everything. Avast, here be spoilers.
Mission Nine
A Voice In The Dark: Part Two
Her breath came in short, stuttering bursts as she lost all control for five intense, shocky seconds, frozen still and utterly useless in the deep darkness of the room. Her pulse jackhammered blood relentlessly through her limbs as her eyes followed a panic pattern, searching automatically for the exits. Her stomach tingled and her toes were numb.
Off-balance, only half-awake and easily rattled, it took Five at least half a minute to get herself under control. Up up up, she told herself with brittle firmness, forcing herself slowly to rise. The closet was a constricted space and she moved over-carefully, trying to make up for her complete lack of spatial awareness.
It took more courage than she believed to silently swing the closet doors open and to step out into the empty room, her only companion the slow, almost contemplative scratch of dead nails on the wood of the door. Five’s bones were trembling with the effort of keeping still and of not pelting straight for the window. Noise, now, would get her killed.
She knew this intellectually, but she was having a hard time holding on to the knowledge. Adrenaline washed through her like a static shock, drowning out sense and reason and inviting her, slowly, temptingly, insidiously, to give in to base instinct. To become the hunted. To flee.
Indecision kept her pinned to the carpet of the bedroom, fingers flexing and breath rattling in her ribs, for a full two minutes. Five found herself fighting her own instinct for control, fighting against sublimation in that blind animal panic, and she wasn’t sure how long she would have stayed there along with the rhythmic scratching had her earpiece not crackled, fuzzy and half-perceptible, into life.
“...nner Five, Run… Five,” said a beautifully familiar male voice, sounding bored and resigned. “Can y… me? Runn… ive, come in…”
Signal. Home. The window.
Five took a few shuffling footsteps closer to the window. The signal tried to sharpen, words coming through stronger, but the static was still washing some of it away.
“If you’re there, Runner Five, c… in, come in.”
The clawing at the door was getting louder. It was only a matter of time before it discovered the door handle.
Five’s mind was still a hot mess of fear and hormonal incitement to panic, but it was the familiar reality of Sam that did the most to snap her into the present. Sam. Home, she thought. I want to go home.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” mumbled Sam, blithely oblivious. “Our scanner’s down. It never works... that well at night anyway. A couple of bits of equipment have broken down, so…” He sighed, and Five allowed herself the luxury of three or four quick, deep breaths before walking as calmly as she could to the window. The signal got sharper still.
“Truth is, I - I don’t even know if you’re alive. Odds aren’t good, right? Hey, odds aren’t good for any of us, but I’m still… yeah, well, I guess I’m still alive. That’s all I can say. Runner Five, we… we don’t know where you are…”
Me neither, thought Five, grasping the strap of her rucksack and zipping it securely over her chest.
“We know you didn’t get taken by New Canton, we managed to track that much,” said Sam, and the pessimism in his voice belayed his hopeful words. “But you haven’t come back. It’s the middle of the night, Runner Five, and... there’s a reason we don’t send patrols out at night.”
The door handle squeaked and jolted, as though something unfamiliar with its operation were trying to get in.
“If you’re where we think you might be - to the North - the area’s swarming with zombies, and they often head for us at night.”
Fabulous, Five thought. The toolbox in front of the door jerked with a sharp rattling noise.
“If they get here before you, we’re going to have to bar the gates. There’ll be no way for you to get in, and we’ll have to watch -”
Sam cut himself off abruptly. Five was glad.
“You’re not even my second Runner Five, you know that?” he added, and his tone was funereal. “You’re actually my fourth. I suppose there’s no better reason you’d make it back than any of the others.”
The groans were getting louder. Five did not turn to look.
“But we’ve put the red beacon on the top of the tower, so if you can see it… my best advice is… run.”
The window slid up in its frame with some reluctance, squeaking and getting caught more than once. Five had to use her fist to hammer it the last few inches, and at that, the muffled groaning from the door became a howl.
Five didn't even look back. She threw herself out, palm to the sill and swinging her legs through, and dropped straight to the ground with an ungainly thump. She staggered, collapsed, got up, and went straight into sprint behind the house.
Jesus fuck, she thought wildly, fingernails cranked tight into her palms and Sam wittering on uselessly in her ear. A huge groan went up behind her, the unmistakeable sound of zoms on the hunt and zeroing in. She'd made so much noise, but there'd been no choice, it was move or die, and as she scrabbled desperately through the dense thicket of hedges between the houses, she hoped that whatever goddamned creature who'd made such a fuss in the house was the draw. Zoms were attracted to noise, and something was clearly broadcasting the signal for a missed meal.
God, it was dark. So dark. Five fought blindly through the thickset hedge, clawing her way out of the horror behind her. Was she being followed? Had something seen her? God, no, no time to check, just forward forward forward -
Sam was still talking. She picked up the odd word through the backwash of terror - "friend", “undead”, “crazy”, “normal” - but most of it was just background noise against the jackhammer rattle of her pulse, adrenaline beating a cadence into her veins and suffocating the pain of her wounds under layers of terror and self-preservation. The world had narrowed down to the escape ahead and the unknown behind, shocky-white and tasting of lightning.
Five burst out into the next garden and didn't even pause to take stock. After dark, after dark, after dark, she thought, screaming only in the privacy of her skull. Never be out after dark. The full moon was bright enough to cast shadows, but that wasn’t the point, that wasn’t the point -
"D’you think we’ve just forgotten how to be normal?" Sam mused, utterly unaware.
Five sprinted the distance across the next garden and full-speed ploughed into the loose hedge that marked the next property boundary. She forced herself through, lungs sawing at the air for memory of how to breathe, riding the crest of her panic and not quite ready to die for it yet. It took willpower and more effort than she liked to admit merely just to maintain the semblance of control, fingers tearing at dense branches and blankly accepting the stings and scratches of blood-draw as the price for speed.
The roar had gone up behind her. The zoms were agitated. There would be more on the way, according to Sam.
They would swarm.
Five vaulted the next fence with scrabbling hipshot grace, hotly pragmatic, and boosted herself over the next six-foot wall with help from a half-collapsed garden shed. Three gardens - was it enough?
It would have to be.
Five slammed her back against the wall she had just conquered, breathing hard and listening as intently as she dared. The zoms were muttering, roaring and moving. They knew she was here somewhere. Plan, plan, she needed a plan. Where the fuck was home?
Wait - what had Sam said? A beacon? A tower?
The new tower on the radio station?
Wildly, Five scanned the horizon, fingers twitching against the beat of her pulse. The new tower, the one her supplies had helped to build, was a leaning structure that could be clearly seen over the rolling hills of the land and the houses of suburbia. During the daytime, at least.
And now, with no streetlights to turn the sky orange or cars to destroy her night vision -
Yes. There. A faint red point of light, five-odd clicks away and holding steady.
"I called you my friend just before, didn’t I," said Sam unexpectedly into her ear. Five jerked in a violent spasm of surprise, paranoid and twitching. “Is that cool with you? I mean, I’m definitely not you’re friend if you’ve gone grey.”
Five rubbed her hands over her body, the terror making her paranoid that she might have been bitten and simply not noticed. Was she okay? Were there wounds? Even so much as a nail-scratch.
“But… I feel like we have a kind of simpatico,” continued Sam, utterly unaware in the face of her fear. “Something? Not that we’ve ever really talked. I guess we’re talking now. So… yeah, well let’s just talk like normal people.”
Five tried not to laugh, at both herself and Sam. No bite marks. Thank Christ.
“Like… buddies, or something. Before all this, I bet you had a pretty good life.”
Sam seemed happy in his own little world. Five tuned his ramblings out slightly as she listened hard. There was a lot of movement on the street on the other side of the house she was using for shelter. The hedge behind her and the fences around the perimeter of the garden were shielding her, but it was only a matter of time.
Staying out of sight might not be a viable means to escape, she reasoned, trying to think over the sounds of the adrenaline in her eardrums. There were just too many. Speed might be the key; put distance in, let them track her before it became a swarm.
Five resurfaced to hear, “Cake outside and ice-cream in the middle! Or - or was it the other way around?”
The path around the front of the house was clear. God knew what the road was like, but this might be her only chance to run without being bottlenecked. This might be the only chance she had of an escape on her terms.
And her terms were better than the alternative.
“I don’t even remember any more! Wait, wait, hang on, I’ll go check. And, er,” said Sam offhandedly amongst the shuffling noises of feet, “if you’re still Runner Five, keep running.”
Five took it as a sign.
A few quick breaths re-oxygenated her blood and then she was sprinting out from behind the house and into the main drag of the road, feet kissing the tarmac and ears ringing with the sudden roar of groans that erupted. They were everywhere, shuffling brokenly toward her, arms outstretched and jagged teeth reflecting the starlight.
Five did a quick headcount. Ten immediately on her trail, five more looking to join the pack, and untold numbers on the road ahead. The ones ahead of her were shambling towards the road, but she’d be past them before they could become an immediate threat. It was the idea of the swarm that worried her the most; being pincered by a hive-mind capable of no greater thought than “brains” did not appeal.
Her arm had begun to throb. Five stuffed the pain down and kept her muscles tight. The road left no place to hide and the moonlight even less so, stark and unforgiving, a silver eye on the proceedings of the path. Still, Five reasoned as she forcibly stopped herself from sprinting, that meant that the zoms were easier to spot, too.
Being actively chased was not fun, but the panic baying just south of her control would leave her dead. Five tried to focus on navigation, working out routes and paths that followed the eye-line of the unblinking red light some distance away.
Twenty zombies, now. The groans were getting louder, and would attract more attention.
And then, disgustingly cheerful:
“OK. Hi, right, so, yeah. Erm, two things.”
Oh, Sam.
Five pinned her flagging hope to his voice, frightened to find how close to tears she was, how close to breaking. This. This, the mess with New Canton, her badly-bandaged wounds, the short sharp shock of their guns, the chase, oh God, the zoms -
A little too near to the bone.
So she screwed all her courage to the cadence of his voice, chirpy and inappropriately optimistic. She wasn’t on her own out here, she reminded herself fiercely. Just - just beat the swarm to the gate. That’s all there was to it.
“Aye,” Sam bumbled on, “I was right. It was cake outside and ice-cream inside. And bee, apparently, checking this is not a good reason to wake Janine up in the middle of the night, okay? Got it?”
Yes, Sam.
“So, erm, where were we? Ah, yeah, before.”
Five picked up her pace a little. The road was curving around to the left and speed would be necessary. Lurkers had a tendency to pounce like wildcats, all roaring and saliva and blood-borne infection. Sam was talking in a low soothing hum, rambling about his life… before.
“Wanna know what I did before this?” he asked gleefully, as Five nipped on to the pavement to avoid a legless crawler, darting with as much agility as she had without spilling speed. “Well, I imagine you’re brimming over with enthusiasm. With these ‘mad skillz’” - the mocking air quotes audibly dropped into place - “I bet you think I was DJ or a radio host or something, right?”
Five didn’t waste processing power on the statement. She knew it was rhetorical.
“Uh-uh! I was a student, man! Fourth year! Engineering degree. I was, just for the record, really, really, really -”
Five dodged a triplet of zoms. They were short, stubby, and gangrenous. One was still clutching the remains of a cricket bat. They reached out to her as she passed, fingers clawing, bones bearing muscles that had long since disintegrated beyond dexterity. She tried not to shudder.
“- terrible at it.”
Five lost herself in Sam’s story; a failing degree, a disappointed father - “he’s Chinese, he was all ‘you have dishonoured the family’,” - a desire to be in the radio booth, dreams and accomplishments never recognised or approved of by his family. Despite it all, her heart-rate was trying to wind up into full panic mode; the groans of the zoms were non-stop, the trail of fifty behind her collecting more at an exponential rate. God, she’d have to think of a back-up plan soon.
“What’s really, really bad,” said Sam’s voice, self-loathing evident in every syllable, “is some days - some days I’m grateful for all this. Hah. Because I don’t have to get up in the morning and go to classes and pretend - pretend I care about engineering, right?”
Fuck you, thought Five with feeling, feeling uncharitable and half-way to sobbing, the only constant being the sound of her feet on the road. Maybe Sam heard it on some freaky psychic level.
“I’ll be right back,” he said in a low voice, and then went silent.
Five let out a breath. Jesus. ‘Bare-you-innermost’ hour on Radio Abel.
The cynicism brought her back to herself, a little. Right: problem at hand - too many zoms. Solution: let them disperse. Priority: speed and cover. She still had the woods to go, yet. She might lose some of them through the twisting paths and the darkness would at least keep her hidden.
But before that, she had the open fields and the moonlight with which to contend.
Jesus.
She gritted her teeth, fought the nausea rolling in thick waves from her skull, and paid attention to the pricking of the hair rising on the nape of her neck. It might be the only thing keeping her alive.
Nerves rattled her limbs. She pressed on.
On to Part Three.