Fic: A Seahorse Gilt in Gold (the Dear Mrs. Robinson Remix) [The Social Network][1/3]
Eduardo might already be dead. He might have died right after the phone cut off. Schrodinger's Eduardo, both dead and alive in the far away glow of Floridian sunlight.
- the time is come when the day is done, by moogle62
Where were you when you heard?
Where were you when you first truly realized that, from this moment on, everything was going to be different?
Where were you the first moment it dawned on you that this weirdo strain of super-flu that began with a sneeze in the back of a New York City taxi cab was going to accomplish what global warming, gays serving in the military, and the concentrated efforts of the GOP had thusfar failed to do?
Where were you when you stood on the edge of one moment, and the next, and saw civilization collapse?
-
The memories of recent important historical events are permanently scored onto Eduardo's consciousness, same as they are for practically everybody in his generation.
He can tell you where he was when the news of the Columbine shooting cut through the afternoon television broadcast. He can tell you what he was doing when the first plane hit the Twin Towers, his senior year of high school. And likewise, he can tell you exactly what was going on when, on the other side of the globe, the first corpse sat bolt upright on an autopsy table, and the world spun on its axis, swinging that much closer to ending.
-
It's a Monday, and it's Lin Yao's birthday, too early in the morning for the puddles from the overnight rain to have evaporated yet, and Eduardo's soles squelch wetly on the linoleum when he enters the company building. He takes the stairs, briefcase hooked on two fingers and the others folded precariously around a paper bag, his phone to his ear.
He pins it there with his shoulder so he has a hand free to pull open the door for his landing, sliding the hand behind him so it doesn't slam.
"We'll see you soon, right, Eduardo?" His cousin's wheedling is close and warm in his ear; she's been trying to get him to fly out since high holidays, at least. She's been progressively less subtle with each attempt to goad a promise out of him at the end of every call, because it's never easier to get someone to heedlessly agree with you about something than when they're trying to hang up on you.
Don't tell her, but Eduardo's already bought a ticket, plane and rental car booked in a package deal through Expedia (DOT COM, oh come on, like you can resist shouting it, either). He still needs to figure out what he's bringing them as a gift, though; what can he get her son here in Singapore that he can't get in Miami? Something a six-year-old would like?
Making a mental note to make himself an actual note about it, he tells his cousin, "yeah, watch out!" in return, same as he has at the end of practically every conversation he's had with her since he was twenty years old, and hears her chuckle before she pulls the phone away from her ear.
Thumbing the end call button, he looks around, and spares Magnolia a frown.
"Where is everybody?" he asks, shifting his grip so that he's not holding food and briefcase solely in one hand; his knuckles have cramped up.
He glances around the cluster of cubicles, the line of office doors at the far end of the floor standing dark and empty, even his own. It's not National Day -- Eduardo's made that mistake before; came in and sat down and was in his office for a full thirty minutes before he figured out it was a public holiday, and he's still trying to live it down, thank you very much.
Mag shrugs. Her shirt today is the color of seashells, creamy and off-white. "I heard that American flu is making its way down the mainland to us. People are probably staying home as a precaution."
Eduardo frowns -- now that she mentions it, he did see an abnormally high number of people wearing sick-masks on the subway. He hadn't thought anything of it, just attributed it to seasonal sniffles. It's June, sure, but it's hard to predict when these things will make an outbreak.
"Huh," he goes, his brain ticking over and putting the pieces together. "That's right. I remember reading somewhere that China reported a couple cases, but I hadn't realized it's spread that far on this side of the world." He quirks his mouth. "Weird time of year for the flu, yeah?"
Mag shrugs again.
Eduardo shrugs back, and hands her the bag. "These were for Yao, they're his favorite," he says. "Since it's his birthday, but if he's not coming in, then I guess they're ours," and after that, he goes into his office and he sits down to start cleaning off the weekend's backlog.
This is what he'll remember, keen and achingly clear even months and years later -- when he backtracks through his memory, sorting events, this is the day he marks as the last day of his normal life, and he spends it doing completely average things. Lin Yao comes in a little after lunch, sniffing the air in a hopeful way, and, guiltily, neither Mag nor Eduardo mention what happened to his present. Eduardo folds his arms over the partition between the cubicles and watches the man shed his raincoat carefully, pulling his sick-mask down around his neck. It leaves a line of red around his mouth and across the bridge of his nose.
"The States are losing their collective shit," he says contentedly by way of greeting; Lin Yao's never so happy as he is in the face of doom and gloom.
"Oh? About that flu thing?" Eduardo asks.
"Yes. Whatever it is, it's hit them really hard."
He drums his fingers on the partition. "Mag said it's spreading. It's on our hemisphere now." The coworker in question rolls her office chair over in between the cubicles at the sound of her name, her eyebrows lifted. Magnolia's real name is something all vowels and soft consonants that's too complicated for tongues like Eduardo's, ones that are too used to the hard sounds of the Germanic languages. So, unapologetically, she goes by her online RPG handle. She's at least a decade older than Eduardo, but she doesn't look it; short and square with a jawline like a picture frame.
"Yes," says Lin Yao, a little more somber. "There's a lot of conflicting information, but it looks that way. I hope it doesn't come here," he tugs on the rubbers of his sick-mask.
"We're cleanlier here," says Mag immediately, and straightens her shoulders with a hike of her chin, adding in a firm voice, "We're Singapore, not the States. We know how to take care of ourselves and as a nation, we don't give into mass hysteria. We'll be fine."
Lin Yao makes a noise in the back of his throat. Eduardo's pretty sure hysteria is a human condition and isn't confined to one particular geographical area, but he still has non-resident status and Magnolia's family has been living here since the nineteenth century, so he'd lose that argument by default.
"Yes," says Lin Yao, just a beat too late. He's preoccupied now, turning to his computer, and Eduardo can guess why: he met a woman online not too long ago, before even the first strains of this (he assumes) highly contagious flu started appearing in New York last month. She's from Alabama, so he probably won't rest until he knows that America isn't going to fall into the ocean tomorrow, no matter how gleeful he gets at the sight of the country as a whole behaving poorly.
His fingers jitter over the keyboard, plainly eager to tab over and sign into Zoosk (or Facebook to check his inevitable flood of birthday messages) but unwilling to do it with Mag and Eduardo hovering right there.
Eduardo rolls his eyes, but pushes away from the partition and goes back to his office.
Dropping into his chair, he spins around in a lazy circle, and then faces front again, one-handedly opening a new tab. He pulls up Google News and scans the headlines, which seem to be an eclectic mix of theories about this super-flu and what it means now that it's confirmed to have jumped continents, and the assorted general news stories fronted by networks that haven't seemed to have clued in yet, which includes the death of an Iranian peace activist and an announcement about a new upcoming project from Mark Zuckerberg, which makes Eduardo run hot and cold, same as it always does. The preview blurb mentions something about Zuckerberg having seemed withdrawn recently, and how this signals a comeback, but Eduardo doesn't click on the 'read more.'
He checks his bottom desk drawer, rummages until he finds his mask. It's still in its box, black with the Tasmanian Devil printed on it, a relic from the bird flu scare that had hopped to the continent from Japan when Eduardo was still new here. His other choice had been a Hello Kitty one.
Maybe he'll actually take it out and wear it on the subway home, if he gets nervous enough.
-
The epidemic moves too fast for bureaucracy to keep up.
Governments that have stood for centuries topple in a matter of weeks. Reliable news becomes nonexistent, corroded from the inside out, and with it, the lightning-fast information exchange dries up. Civil, legislative, and judicial protocol becomes obsolete, because what the fuck does paperwork matter when it's possible that you will die before you're finished filling out a form?
Eduardo watches all of this happen, sitting on somebody's abandoned desk in the middle of the cubicle forest, listening to Magnolia rattle off conflicting Twitter updates. They come in to work because they have nowhere better to be, but there's nothing to work on. Their supervisors were among the first to vanish, their clients immediately thereafter.
"Well," says Lin Yao at the end of the day, grim-faced and fastening his mask on over his face. "Try not to die overnight, guys."
"Yeah, you too," they tell him, but only a few days later, he stops coming, leaving just four of them: Eduardo, Magnolia, a sales rep from two floors down who got ruthlessly divided from her family when they fell ill, and the janitor, who speaks a version of Singlish so bastardized that Eduardo has more or less given up communicating with him about anything more complicated than "how are you feeling?" and "still have my mind, thank you."
The electrical grid stays standing despite a dwindling healthy population, and the subways keep running, so they keep on coming into work, because this is Singapore. It bore British imperial rule for a century and a half, and can keep calm and carry on with the best of them.
"You know," offers Mag, drawing it out thoughtfully and watching Eduardo peel back the plastic wrap on a microwavable plate of noodles. "If ... if you have nowhere to go ..."
Eduardo looks up at her. None of them have anybody waiting for them at home, that's kind of why they're here.
"Well, I have a apartment with three bolt locks, so if you wanted to, you could come stay with me until things quiet down," she finishes.
He looks over his shoulder. The sales rep -- who he's pretty sure immigrated here from the Horn of Africa earlier this year, but he doesn't know her name and is too embarrassed to ask, because he thinks it's probably something he should know -- doesn't hesitate before she nods.
"I would like that very much," she says. She has bruised eyes, the whites of them stained through with a color like persimmons.
Magnolia nods back, and looks at the janitor, who tugs at the whiskers on his chin and offers something in Mandarin that makes Mag laugh, a startled hiccup of a sound.
"That would be nice," she says. "Please bring all the guns."
"Yes," the janitor agrees, and they nod an accord.
But when she looks at him, Eduardo shakes his head. "I have a panic room, I'll be okay," he tells her, and it's not an excuse, he really does; it's left over from the days before he learned to channel his anger into something nonviolent. It's been years since he had a fit like that, but the room stays there, a quiet, dark space accessible through the bathroom, a lockbox into which he puts all his insecurities and ugly memories.
Magnolia studies him for a moment, and then she squeezes his shoulder.
"I hope they come find you," she says, and he blinks at her for a moment before he realizes that she doesn't mean they as in the infected, but they as in his family -- the only people who would come to Singapore looking for him.
They only have the one address, after all.
So that's where Eduardo's going to stay.
The next day, when he goes into the office, he pushes one of the chairs over to the window and sits at it, watching the clouds and the movement of the people far down on the sidewalk -- they hurry through the patches of shade and keep their heads down in the sunlight. Nobody takes their masks off, and so from a high-up vantage point, they all look strangely alien with those amorphous things attached to their faces. Nobody else comes in.
-
It started in America.
That's the only thing anybody can pinpoint with any accuracy. In May, a person simply referred to as Ground Zero climbed into the back of a New York taxi cab and then sneezed.
So that was that.
The leading theory is that it started with a mutated breed of fly, one of those annoying kinds that will survive being swatted not once, but twice, still twitching and crawling across flat surfaces, sans guts and legs and even heads. Mutated from what is anybody's guess, but they reckon is has something to do with a particular allele that transfered from the fly to those it bit: it started out as a blood-born disease, interestingly enough.
It jumped from the fly to monkeys, from monkeys to domesticated dogs, and from domesticated dogs to Ground Zero. From Ground Zero, it made the evolutionary leap to becoming airborne. From there, it spread terrifying fast: too fast for CDC, too fast for toxicologists to keep up, too fast for the average human immune system to even realize what was going on. Within forty-eight hours, it goes from incubatory to fatal, and the victims are awarded a single moment of clear lucidity before they flatline, which is always the worst part.
One sneeze in New York causes a hurricane to bear down on the world.
One sneeze, and within two months, Eduardo Saverin learns how to shoot people in the face.
-
In June, America declares a state of national emergency, and starts a quarantine policy immediately thereafter.
New York City is the first to get shut down -- it's easiest to control the flow of people coming in and off of Long Island, after all, but after that, the government has to stretch its armed forces incredibly thin as, one-by-one, it becomes most expedient just to isolate each major metro hub. Blockades dot every highway and every flight gets rerouted to the outlying airfields, where everybody is meticulously scanned for symptoms of the virus; those infected are then separated from their companions, without ceremony or a chance at good-bye.
L.A. goes next -- Eduardo sees the announcement as a scrolling marquee on the subway and feels the chill of it settle uncomfortably in his stomach. Then, Chicago. Detroit and Boston.
June 21, 2011, and the virus makes another astonishing feat of evolution, and mutates again. The first corpse sits bolt upright in a camp within the city borders of Balitmore. Like the fly that just won't die no matter the damage done to it, it crawls across the autopsy table, its unhinged maw gaping hungrily open. It kills one coroner and three aid workers before they blow its head off its shoulders with a pulse charge.
If you have loved ones within the affected areas, broadcasts every American television station, every radio show, every dot-gov website. Do not try to contact them at this time.
They are beyond your reach.
They cannot be helped until such a time that a vaccination or a cure can be arranged. Thank you for understanding.
And then, June 24, 2011. London reports its first case; a window-washer whose son attends American university faints at work and plummets twenty-five stories to the pavement below, where his body bursts open on impact, splattering fourteen pedestrians with viscera and infected blood.
June 25. A woman in Tokyo dies on the City Local train and then rises again, going for the jugular of her neighbor, all before the train even reaches its next stop.
Three days after Lin Yao's birthday, a little girl who could not have been a day over twelve walks into a hospital in the eastern Jurong district with red-shot eyes and a runny nose, and dies before a doctor can make room in his schedule to see her. She is Singapore's first official death. Her name is Vera.
-
You know, there aren't really words that do it justice; what it's like to look at that list of quarantined cities as it grows and grows and realize that everyone you know who lives there is dead, or will shortly be dead, or has been given up for dead. You will never see them again, you will never talk to them again, you will never be able to remember them without immediately remembering that they're gone.
Eduardo stands in front of the flat-screen television in the faceless lobby of his office building, eyes ticking over city name after city name, and grief knots hard at that soft spot directly under his ribs.
He knows so many people.
New York, New York.
Good-bye Mr. Wenninghoff, the portly, friendly, toad-looking man who gave Eduardo that internship. Good-bye Christy, his ex-girlfriend, who hates him for the exact same reasons he hates Mark Zuckerberg; hindsight is 20/20 and thinking he used to be that person still makes him cringe. Good-bye Eitan, who stuck close to Eduardo throughout their Phoenix Club pledges and transfered to Columbia the following semester. Good-bye to that cashier from the deli where Eduardo used to grab breakfast before dawn; her eyes, in certain lights, had been violet.
Los Angeles, California.
Good-bye, Sean Parker, sorry that not even your paranoia can protect you against the flu.
Boston, Massachusetts.
Good-bye, Harvard. Good-bye, Mr. Summers, and your horribly contradictory graduation speeches. Good-bye, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, sorry you never got a chance to compete in the London Olympics. Good-bye, Erica Albright and Billy Olsen and the man with the salt-and-pepper mustache who whistled Blue Danube as he vacuumed in between the stacks at Widener.
Chicago, Illinois.
Good-bye, Julia, who sat behind him in World History in high school and got a full-ride to Notre Dame. Good-bye, the democratic representative from Yemen who Eduardo talked to on the phone at work three weeks ago. Good-bye, Patricia, the campaign intern who wanted him to re-elect the president for the upcoming term -- he remembers he had just let her keep talking, unwilling to inform her that he didn't have American citizenship any more than he had Singaporean citizenship, and instead just promised his vote.
London, England, United Kingdom.
Good-bye, landscape artist who once sat next to Eduardo on a flight that one time, whose name he'll never know.
The entire Bay Area, California, from San Francisco to San Jose.
Good-bye, Capcom International and all the business associates his firm had there. Good-bye, everybody at Apple and the Googleplex and Amazon and Yahoo. Good-bye, Dustin -- did anybody ever remember to get you a T-Rex cake for your birthday, the way you confessed you really wanted that one time? Good-bye, Chris and Chris's boyfriend (Eduardo never did learn his name.) Good-bye, Mark Zuckerberg, it's weird to think that you're dead and Eduardo is not.
Paris, Buenos Aires, Brasilia.
Toronto, Seattle, Mecca, and Mumbai.
All the faces of all the people Eduardo has ever met, talked to, yelled at on the television, read about on the Internet, all present there behind his eyelids; a hundred, a thousand, five hundred million people, dead or sick or unaccounted for.
And then.
And then there's Singapore; a city so prosperous that it declared itself its own country and succeeded. It's the second most densely-populated nation in the world after Monaco, and when all other big cities go dark and fade into static, it stays standing, the last megalopolis stronghold on the Eurasian continent.
Six years ago, Eduardo followed a job offer that came right on the heels of the tsunami, and became one more face lost among the hundred thousand refugees from the Indonesian islands, and he never left.
Singapore is home. It's the most amazing place he's ever been, he'll admit it, and that's even including the post-graduation trip he took to see the Grand Canyon at sunrise, and that includes the Harvard CS lab, with Mark Zuckerberg standing across from him with a $18,000 check in his hands and a look on his face that Eduardo cannot, to this day, describe. Singapore makes him feel even more amazing than those things.
He stays.
-
For lack of anything more appropriate, or maybe as a last-ditch attempt at end-of-the-world humor, the term "zombie" gets coined to describe the reanimated corpse of an epidemic victim.
Eduardo isn't sure if that makes all the zombie lore a premonition, or a self-fulfilling prophecy. Were the Zombie Walk enthusiasts and the survivalists and the organic food proponents right and it was always inevitable, or did the zombie apocalypse happen because if you treat something like it's inevitable, then it will be?
-
And then it breaks.
-
He wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone on his floor screaming.
He hears it loud and piercingly clear, coming through his propped-open window, which distorts his attempt to orient which direction it's coming from. He jolts upright, sleep-dazed and blinking.
For a moment afterwards, everything is quiet: he can hear the soft rustle of the overhanging creeping plants from the apartment above as the wind stirs them. He's too far up off the ground to hear the sounds of the streets -- the near-constant pulse of the ambulance siren, the police patrolling in their slow-moving vans with their automated quadrilingual broadcast summoning all personnel who think they might be infected or who have been in contact with the infected to please report for vaccination.
'Vaccination,' of course, being the loosest translation of the word. The sales rep who saw her entire family taken said they simply line them up in the police station and shoot them as a precaution, since it's the quickest way to stop them from rising postmortem.
Wait, no, there! He wasn't imagining it.
The scream comes again, high and eerily distinguishable in the middle of the night, a woman's voice canted up on a single syllable.
If it's a word she's trying to scream, she never gets to finish it: it goes muffled, then quiet again, and Eduardo's rolling out of bed before his brain catches up to what the rest of him is doing. He pads through his apartment in the dark, scooping up a heavy-duty hammer that's been lying out on one of his bookshelves for months, a leftover from a bathroom renovation project that never did go anywhere beyond the contemplation stages.
He flips the lock on his door and goes out into the hall. It's only half-lit; a decision on part of the apartment supervisors in a bid to preserve what little electricity is left.
"Hello?" he calls, looking left, then right. "Hey, are you all right? Um --" he doesn't really know how to ask the same question in any of the other common languages, so he just settles for cycling through "hello?" in each of them.
He gets as far as the stairwell before he hears it: the sound of something going thump and a long, slow drag of a heavy thing going across a carpet. It's a suspicious noise at the best of times, but at the end of the world, it's downright hair-raising. Eduardo tightens his grip on his hammer, keeping still and listening hard.
Behind him, a door opens, and he spins around.
As far as first encounters with zombies go, there probably isn't really any okay way for it to happen, but standing here and realizing he is watching the reanimation of some poor woman's corpse sends his brain gibbering right out of his head in panic. She looks fresh; her hair freshly-washed and tangled around her shoulders, her skin still the color of pale beans, but her eyes have milked over and there's blood flecking her mouth.
Blood-born again? he finds himself thinking, like he isn't staring down a corpse who is now looking at him with the dawning realization that Eduardo is fresh meat. In the name of expediency, did it mutate from airborne back to ... because they bite, and it kills pretty much immediately. Zombie-manufacturing virus.
Oh holy shit, I'm dead, he thinks immediately after, and swings the hammer.
Eduardo never did sports in high school -- he was more of an AcaDeca, Chess Club, math geek type -- so the blow goes wide, and the once-a-woman sidesteps it easily. She throws him a look that is, for a zombie, incredibly unimpressed, and maybe this is why Eduardo could never keep a significant other. Do you think maybe it's one of those things that's imprinted on the human genome, to try and find a mate that you know can protect you against the zombie apocalypse?
"Shit," says Eduardo, because this is why he will die alone.
The zombie bares her teeth triumphantly; her gums are lacerated and bleeding.
And then --
"Duck!" comes a yell from down the hall, and Eduardo doesn't even think before he hits the carpet, hands flying to cover his head. He's never heard a gunshot up this close before; it's terrifyingly loud, and he will never, ever, for as long as he lives, forget what it's like to hear the bullet hit skin, hit muscle, hit bone. The woman drops to the carpet, ungainly; bits of her blood fleck the backs of Eduardo's shaking hands.
"Okay, get up," says the voice; a hand now, under his elbow, thick blunt nails and a heavy ring that reminds him of his father's, hauling him up. "I like it better when their heads explode. Sometimes a bullet to the brain isn't enough, remember that."
"Right," goes Eduardo, and manfully refrains from passing out from residual terror until they're behind a locked door once again.
-
His rescuer's name is Charlie. At least, that's how he introduces himself when Eduardo comes to, waiting to hand him a piping-hot cup of jasmine tea, complete with a neat slice of lemon clinging to the lip of the cup. The way he says it makes Eduardo think of the way Dustin used to tell the girls at parties that he was the Dustinator -- it sounds more like a code name than anything Eduardo's going to find on the guy's birth certificate.
Eduardo knows him, vaguely; they've passed each other once or twice coming in and out of the elevator. He lives two doors down.
He's on the older side of forty; his hairline is receding and he has a pair of reading glasses that he keeps tucked into the breast pocket of his ski jacket. He's a poly-Asian mix of ethnicities that Eduardo can't distinguish from each other just by looking at him. He was born and raised in Hong Kong, he says, and his apartment has the dusty, caught-in-amber neatness of a frequent traveler.
"What do you do for a living?" Eduardo asks him for the sake of politeness, squeezing the lemon into his tea.
"I'm an assassin," Charlie answers pleasantly.
Eduardo chokes.
Coughing, he winces his way through the taste of lemon going out his nose, and pounds on his chest until he gets his air back. Charlie waits, his expression mild, and then offers him a smile when he looks up, incredulous.
"There's an official term for it, of course, that I use when I'm filling out my taxes, but assassination is basically what it amounts to," he continues. He waves a hand around, encompassing the apartment. "Technically, this is just one of my crashpads; it's not really built for long-term residence. It's not uncommon for people of my profession to have places like this; Singapore is a great place to hide."
This, actually, is true: 42% of Singapore's population has some form of non-resident status, like Eduardo, so they disappear seamlessly, two foreign faces in a sea of them.
Gingerly, Eduardo takes another sip of his tea.
"I was on assignment, but both my mark and my employers were picked off by the virus early on, and I just didn't see the point in returning to base to get a new one, so," he spreads his palms open, as if to say, here I am.
"I ... didn't know any of that," Eduardo manages; he's sitting on the sofa of a professional killer wearing only his boxers. It's not the most dignified meeting he's ever been a part of, and that's even generously including the ones Zuckerberg fucked up for him, way back in New York.
"There's really no point in keeping it a secret anymore, now is there?" Charlie acknowledges, his lips quirked wryly. "And I would like at least one person to know the truth; it's the most precious commodity I have left."
He's considerate enough to let Eduardo finish his tea, which he does in slow, grateful sips. His head throbs dully; leftover from the adrenaline of almost being kabobed by a member of the walking undead or a souvenir from hitting the carpet like a spineless ton of bricks, he doesn't know, but the warmth of the tea helps. The longer he sits here, bare knees pressed together, the more embarrassed he feels about his behavior. Eduardo is a Saverin, Saverins do not faint.
When finished, he sets the teacup down on the coffee table. Charlie turns to him again.
"If you don't mind my asking," he starts. "What are your plans for surviving what's coming?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"She's not going to be the last zombie you have the pleasure of meeting," Charlie continues, gesturing towards the door. "Even Singapore will teeter and fall and be overrun, and they've already infiltrated where we live. How long do you think we're going to have? I want to know just how you plan on holding them at bay with that sissy baseball swing of yours."
"Hey," Eduardo protests, without much heat, because he has a point. Eduardo's skill set runs the gauntlet of mathematics, finances, and talking nice with people much more powerful and influential than he is: it's not the kind of skill set that keeps you alive in case of zombie apocalypse.
"I have a panic room," he says, after a beat.
Charlie smiles; there are, surprisingly, laugh lines that cut into the corners of his eyes.
"So do I," he says.
-
It's not a panic room so much as it's a stainless steel, reinforced armory, accessible through the back of the walk-in pantry.
"You underestimate exactly what I meant when I said this was a crashpad," says Charlie, wry, watching Eduardo squint against the strip-wall lighting, his eyes then going enormous as he realizes what he's looking at. There's a whole selection of guns propped up on hooks on the wall, the same way some men like to hang up deer heads, sleek and black and deadly-looking, ranging from long-range sniper rifles to simple handguns with the silencers attached. "It's a safe house for me to regroup and reload. We keep it well-stocked."
Well-stocked is a good way of putting it. In addition to the guns, Charlie has a comprehensive first-aid kit and a whole stack of boxes, filled with chalky high-fiber protein bars and vitamin water.
"You really are set for the end of the world," he says admiringly.
"Yes," Charlie admits. "I'll survive, I imagine. Now," and he crosses the room, studying the guns before picking up a semi-automatic. "This one will do; it doesn't have as bad a recoil as some of the others. Do you want to learn how to use it?"
Eduardo thinks of the noise it made, bullet breaking apart that zombie's skull and burying itself deep into her brain, the blood that's dried into flecks on the backs of his hands. He thinks of how helpless he felt, watching her approach with blood in her teeth. He's no use to his family if he doesn't survive to see them again.
"Yes, please," he says, and holds out his arms for the gun.
-
They lock the doors and shutter the windows. Eduardo's antsy about leaving his apartment unattended -- the whole reason he turned down Mag's invitation to hole up and hide was so that his family could find him -- but in the end, he just sticks a post-it underneath his room number indicating where he can be found, should anyone come looking for him.
After that, they don't leave, not for anything. At night, when the sounds outside the door become too horrible to bear for a second longer, they tell each other stories: Eduardo still has dozens of good ones about Harvard, about the mistakes he made when he first moved to Singapore and met the culture shock (including the story about how he went into work on National Day, which makes Charlie cramp up in his bunk, he's laughing so hard,) and even, at one quieter point, about Facebook.
"Don't take this the wrong way," Charlie says, at the end of that saga. "But I kind of already knew that about you."
Eduardo cuts a glance in his direction, quizzical.
"You're not exactly a nobody, Eduardo."
He snorts at that. "I am now."
With all the patience of an elementary school teacher, Charlie first teaches Eduardo how to shoot; how to brace his feet and absorb the kickback of a police-grade handgun, and an ornate silvery gangster's pistol, then a shotgun, then a rifle. Eduardo's long arms fit the shotgun best, timberwood grip slotting neatly into the cradle of his shoulder. He resists the urge to make a Clampett family joke every time he successfully puts a bullet into the target ring.
They pass the worst of it this way; Charlie coaching and Eduardo learning. He picks things up fast, always has, and it's especially helpful in this scenario.
A love of dystopian fiction on long international flights turns out to be something they have in common, so between the two of them, they have a piecemeal understanding of what kind of world they can expect when they next set foot outside those doors. In addition to basic marksmanship, Eduardo learns how to pick locks and how to wrap a shirt around a bar of soap or a brick and use it as a slingshot to break through windows.
"It's necessary," says Charlie grimly, the second time broken glass slices into Eduardo's wrists. "By now, the zombies probably count as the dominant species on this planet, so you're going to have to carrion supplies from the dead for the rest of your life."
"That will work for awhile," Eduardo agrees. "But even stockpiled canned goods and vacuum-sealed rations have an expiration date."
"Yes," says Charlie, and they don't discuss it further.
He teaches Eduardo how to hotwire a car, which Eduardo tried to do once on a dare his senior year. That was the first time he wound up in county lock-up -- not his finest moment -- so he's determined to get it right this time around.
(Strangely, Charlie also puts a concentrated effort into making sure that Eduardo knows the differences between American-made cars and all others, which Eduardo doesn't get, since there aren't exactly a lot of those in Singapore, but he goes along with it.)
It is weeks of dawn-to-dusk training before Eduardo shows noticeable signs of improvement, the motions becoming life-savingly reflexive, and he can't help the flare of pride that warms the pit of his chest when Charlie holds up a cut-out of Charlie Chaplin from a poster in the guest bedroom with a bullet right between his eyes and says, with genuine warmth, "Excellent work, kid."
It's not easy -- not for Eduardo, and not for Charlie, who doesn't want to give up the secrets of his trade very easily.
It costs him a lot to be as honest as he is, even Eduardo can see that, and a part of him wants to repay that in some way. Which is why, one night, after Charlie pours him a congratulatory glass of wine (they've been trying not to run the sinks for fear of attracting attention to themselves, so the glass is spotty as all get out, but Eduardo accepts it anyway, because alcohol is alcohol,) he finds himself blurting out something he's never really told anyone, not in so many words.
"I'm gay, you know," he says, because Charlie's right: there isn't a lot of mystery to Eduardo Saverin, and this is one of the secrets he still has left to own up to.
Cut off mid-conversation, Charlie blinks at him.
"As a parade," Eduardo clarifies. "As daisies and sunshine and squirrels and chipmunks. Gay as all those things. That's me." It's one of those things that didn't really occur to him to wonder about, not for the longest time. For the good portion of his adolescence and young adulthood, he just worked under the assumption that he hadn't found a girl good enough for him yet. Then, upon realizing the astounding arrogance of that thought, flipped to the other extreme, trying to find a woman he could pretend to be good enough for. He was, as they say, a bit oblivious.
Charlie absorbs this, putting the bottle down on the carpet and giving Eduardo one long once-over. "Really?" he goes, a little disbelievingly. "You look completely normal."
Eduardo tries not to resent that. He reminds himself that Charlie comes from a completely different generation, learning how to stereotype coming out of the cradle, and so he squares his shoulders.
"Funny," he deadpans. "We usually do."
After a pause, Charlie says, "You do know it's illegal here, right?"
You're an assassin, Eduardo thinks at him exasperatedly. I never thought you guys would be the closed-minded type.
"Wow, look at us," he says out loud, so acidly he could strip the paint from the walls. "Aren't we a pair of hardened criminals."
Whatever's going on in Charlie's head, this finally manages to break through it, because he tilts his head and gives a sardonic smile, like he's just now realizing how hypocritical it would be to judge Eduardo on his life choices. He lifts his glass, acknowledging, and they toast on it.
-
Charlie has good wine, rose-colored and thick.
Eduardo likes Charlie a lot. He likes the wine more, sometimes, but he really does like Charlie.
-
Finally, though, he has to ask.
"Why are you teaching me all this?"
Charlie pauses in the middle of demonstrating how to strip and clean the long-range sniper rifle, which he calls Cherry in tones of deep affection. Slowly, he puts it back down on its stand and regards Eduardo thoughtfully.
"Well," he says, after a beat. "These are the most basic skills you'll need in order to survive in whatever world we'll find outside the door. You certainly aren't intending on staying here in the peninsula, are you?"
"I'm not?"
"Of course not," Charlie sounds confident. When Eduardo just levels a look at him, the corner of his mouth quirks. "If the people you love don't come to you, then you must go to them, and that's exactly what you're going to do."
-
"Why me?" Eduardo asks at another point.
"Why you what?"
"Why did you pick me?" he pushes his chair around, leaning forward to prop his elbows up on his knees. "You could have left me at the mercy of our neighbor and just locked yourself into this room and not come out again until we were all dead. Of all the people you could have rescued and took under your tutelage, why me?"
He doesn't think he's going to get an answer, but he waits anyway, watching the muscles shift in Charlie's back as he works.
When he answers, it's when Eduardo least expects it.
"You were the only one who came when she screamed." He turns his head, meeting Eduardo's gaze head-on, and there's something fathomless in that look. "That's why I really fucking want you to live, kid. A woman, screaming, obviously in pain and terrified, and you were the only one that came to see if she was okay."
-
It's some messy, endless bit of time in the middle of July when the news reaches them through the grapevine: there's a flight out of Singapore for anyone who can make it and tests clean of infection. They're going to shut down the airport after that, because there aren't enough people left to run it properly, but this last flight is heading towards --
"Miami!" Charlie says triumphantly, all but buzzing his way around the apartment. "Mr. Saverin, it's time to leave the nest. We are getting you on this plane!"
It's been almost an entire month since Eduardo was last outside; they dress him in clean, sturdy clothes -- jeans and a jacket with deep-well pockets, the last remaining shirt and undershirt that they have, and sneakers meant for covering long distances at great speed. Charlie has him hotwire a car right out on the sidewalk as practice. Eduardo's not sure what he was expecting; dead bodies heaped up on every corner or zombies wandering helter-skelter in every direction, but it's none of those things.
Everything is quiet and still, and for Singapore, that's about twenty times worse.
The expressway is quiet, too, cars parked messily on both sides of the roads. Some still have their doors hanging open, like their owners simply forgot that they left the stove on but intended to return. They skirt around those without a word.
At the airport, Charlie hands him a carry-on, full of miscellaneous, innocent-looking parts that can, in case of in-flight emergency, be assembled into a rifle, which makes Eduardo feel kind of badass, like some grown-up version of the kid with the coolest Transformer toy; during one of their long insomniac streaks, Charlie had him do exactly that, twelve times in a row. Eduardo says thank you, and holds onto the handle so hard his knuckles go white.
They hold each other's eyes.
"Fuck, kid," says Charlie emphatically, and embraces Eduardo hard, pounding him on the back like he's trying to hammer the imprint of his fist into Eduardo's bones.
Eduardo leans into it, just for a moment.
part two: florida -->