(A complement to hibbleton's "The Stranger". Read it first, 'cause it's awesome.)
Itchy Trigger Finger by snarkypants
He's dead. His arms and legs are shaking with fatigue, and the thing shows no signs of tiring, and he thinks that this is it. His shotgun is empty and his Ka-Bar is so far out of his reach it might as well be in the Hamptons.
He hopes that maybe he'll bleed out, and that it'll be quick. He won't become one of them, even if he has to punch an artery himself.
He wishes that there was someone left who would remember him.
He has his thumbs in the thing's eyes, pushing, digging deep with nails he no longer bites, when there are two pops, and the monster is limp on him, two steaming craters in its head.
He identifies the pops as handgun fire—Shots fired! Shots fired!—even as he turns his hands over in front of his face, stupidly wondering how he managed it. Then he shoves the thing to the side and climbs to his feet.
The shooter's a woman, and the part of his brain that catalogs things for later rumination recognizes the Academy firing stance. His reptile brain sees: tits, legs, hips, handgun. He gets a vague impression of dark eyes and dark hair and everything being in the right place. He can't remember the last time he saw a real female; he's seen a few pretty males, of the sort who trade their pretty mouths and their assholes for protection, and even they are a valuable commodity. All of the females are dead or gone to the colonies (which might as well be the same thing), or their men keep them locked up tight.
And here this woman is, in Times Square, holstering her weapon as cool as you please.
"You saved me," he says, and his voice is hoarse with disuse. He's panting and his mouth is dry, and he spits anyway because he can still taste that thing's breath.
She shrugs and turns around, walking away. Her shadow is long and it makes him think of old westerns on TV. "Hey," he calls, but she doesn't stop.
Well, shit.
He gathers his knife and his ALICE pack, reloads his shotgun, and humps it after her, silently, stealthily. He loses her on Amsterdam just as the sun—what he can see of it—is going down.
What he really needs now is a good spot to shelter in place and wait for her to come out tomorrow. There are plenty of abandoned businesses in the area, where he might find something solid to keep to his back with a cage at his front to keep the Infected at bay, but he doesn't relish exploring at dusk, when the few remaining civilians are jumpy and the monsters are becoming increasingly active.
Instead, he finds an overgrown stand of junipers in front of a brownstone, and secrets himself in a corner. His back is covered, his front is obscured, and the shrubs (can't kill these fuckers) mask his smell. He's got enough water in his ALICE pack for two more days, and a few slabs of jerky in his pocket, and so he shrugs into his jacket and covers himself with his tarp, and he hunkers down for the night. He is very, very good at being very still.
So: she's a cop, or at least trained by a cop. She's a good shot. She's independent.
She's attractive, from what he could tell, even though that doesn't matter so much these days.
She doesn't appear to have lost her mind, which does matter these days.
She's got to be pretty fucking tough to survive this long in Manhattan. The lyric "If I can make it there/I'll make it anywhere" runs through his head, but he's not cracked enough to start humming it.
He needs company. Someone to talk to, someone to cover his back. He's not interested in trading protection for cooking or doctoring or sex; the person has to be an equal, able to hold his or her own, and this woman is the first person he's seen who he'd halfway trust with both his life and hers. Hell, she'd used two valuable rounds to save his life without knowing him, and then didn't even try to trade on it. If it's an audition, she's nailed it.
The self-preserving voice in his head notes that she's too good to be true, and he acknowledges that fact. Maybe she's a product of his oxygen-starved brain and he's bleeding out in the gutter in front of what was once the Marriott Marquis.
Because beautiful women with tits and guns and incredible aim and even better timing are too much to hope for anymore. Maybe they always were.
He's not aware of falling asleep, but his eyes open again when the sky grows lighter.
So much for bleeding out. He shrugs.
The streets are quiet, which is how he was able to sleep for so long. His senses are attuned to unusual sounds, even more than when he was in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. No one can sneak up on him when he's asleep.
He gnaws on a chip of jerky, sucks down a few ounces of water, and continues to wait.
She comes out at 1109. It's so quiet he hears the "chunk-chunk" of deadbolts sliding, even though it's maybe a block away. He maintains his position, waiting until he sees her on the sidewalk across the street.
"Hold your fire; coming out."
She freezes mid-step, looking around frantically until she sees him, climbing out of the junipers. She has her rifle trained on him, and he's careful to move slowly, his shotgun on its strap over his shoulder, his hands out, his fingers spread in front of him.
"Goddamn, I should have let that fucker waste you yesterday," she says, but he thinks she's just nervy and annoyed that he got the drop on her.
"Shooting me now'd just be a waste of three rounds of ammo, wouldn't it?" He smiles at her like flirting is something he does every day; his face stretches at the unaccustomed movement.
She swallows and licks her lower lip. "What do you want?"
"I want to talk."
"So talk."
"Get that thing out of my face."
She looks at him for a moment and then safeties the rifle, slinging it over her shoulder. "So talk," she says again.
"What's your name?"
"Olivia," she says brusquely; she doesn't stick out her hand. Her name is old-fashioned, a baroque abundance of syllables in this monosyllabic time. He says the word silently, behind closed lips, feeling its viscosity.
"I'm Elliot."
She nods, crosses her arms over her chest. "So, Elliot. What would you like to see happen here?" Her tone reminds him of his last captain during performance appraisals.
"Share resources, company, look out for each other."
"What about sex?"
He blinks. "Is that an offer? I'm game if you are."
"'If'?" she echoes, wary.
"I had a wife and three daughters, so I don't force anyone. If you want it, I'm interested, but otherwise… I've gotten by without it for this long; I do just fine with the Palmer sisters."
She narrows her eyes at him, all suspicion. "There's plenty of rapists out there who had wives and daughters."
"I'm not one of them," he says, and she blinks at his vehemence.
She laughs suddenly, and she's not very good at it. "Well, aren't you Mr. Sensitive."
He grins then, because in a fairly eventful life no one has ever described him in that way. His wife once said he had all the sensitivity of a bag of hammers. "Yeah, that's me all over. I'll write you a sonnet or some shit. You're a cop, aren't you? What unit?"
Her eyebrows go up; he's surprised her again. "SVU, the one-six."
"Homicide, 107th."
"Queens? Out of your jurisdiction, aren't you?"
He shrugs. "Nothing to keep me there anymore."
She doesn't say she's sorry; she probably isn't, and that's okay. She hasn't survived this long by getting teary-eyed at every sob story she's heard.
"You mentioned resources. What do you have?" she asks.
"I've got safe access to clean water. I've got cache bags with weapons, food and water all over the West Side, and I've got ammo for your SIG."
She's looking him up and down. "Why would you give me the ammo for your service weapon?"
"Lost mine," he says through gritted teeth; the admission still fills him with shame (you never, ever, ever let go of your service weapon).
Perversely, she looks pleased. "What else you got?"
"I'm a Marine; I got your back."
"I thought you were a cop."
"Marine first. What about you? What've you got?"
"I've got shelter, which is a hell of a lot more than you've got. Where have you been staying?"
"Around. Armored vehicle in a parking garage, most days."
"Is it mobile?"
"No."
She chews on her lower lip for a moment. "Okay. Come on." She turns back down Amsterdam in the direction she came from, and he follows. She has her rifle in front of her again, the barrel resting on her left forearm, her forefinger lingering on the trigger guard. "My, uh, neighbors are a bit unpredictable."
When they walk past a burned-out storefront, he hears a cackling, gibbering laugh that raises the hair on the back of his neck. He walks backwards, sweeping his shotgun back and forth, keeping them covered.
"He's harmless, mostly," she says in a whisper from the corner of her mouth. "They would have called him schizophrenic, before."
"Don't the Infected try to get him?"
"I've seen them go yards out of his way to avoid him; I think he smells wrong to them."
"Maybe we should apply for a grant and study it."
She huffs a laugh, and when she turns her head to look at him she has the ghost of a smile on her full mouth.
Well, shit. He's never been particularly good at making women happy, but damn if he isn't hardwired to enjoy it; there's a pleasant bubbling sensation, like carbonation in his veins. He grins back at her.
"Here we are; bunker, sweet bunker."
It's a brownstone, nondescript and solid; there are bars on all the windows, from the basement to the second floor. Someone's gone to town, pissing all over the stoop and front door; the smell is acrid and almost brings tears to his eyes.
"Something wrong with your plumbing?" he asks; no one has plumbing these days, but he's curious about the piss.
"The schizophrenic guy? I give him food so he'll pee on my steps."
"Kinky."
She rolls her eyes. "It's an experiment, and it's working so far." She pulls a ring of keys out of her pocket and unlocks one deadbolt, and then another, and another.
"Where did you get all the keys?"
"I installed new locks from the hardware store. They came with keys."
"Without power tools? I'm impressed."
She shrugs. "I've been here for a while."
They're in the foyer now, and she deadbolts the steel-reinforced door behind them, sliding steel bars into steel d-brackets, locking them in.
She moves slowly, looking for anything that might be disturbed. Even though she left here less than half an hour ago, she's cautious, and he respects that.
When she's satisfied they go up the staircase, and again she unlocks deadbolts and then locks them in.
"Come on; I'll show you around." She leads him to what must have been the dining room. "This is the armory." There are boxes of ammo stacked on the breakfront, sorted by gauge and type of weapon. A motley assortment of firearms hangs from hooks on the wall. Some are military issue, some are police issue, and some are lawful expressions of Second Amendment civilian rights.
"Kitchen." She's got a small woodstove, vented to the outside with a convoluted snake of flex-duct. Lots of canned food on shelves. Jerrycans, marked "POTABLE" and "GREY". "Don't confuse the water cans; I have to be sparing with the bleach," she says.
"Bedroom." The door is heavy, like the entry door downstairs, and she's bolted sheet steel over the windows. There are more d-brackets and bars that fit across the door when it's closed and locked, and there's a few grenades resting in a straw-filled crate beside the double bed, the way his wife used to put out bowls of potpourri.
"Cozy."
"This is the Alamo. I've reinforced the walls and ceiling with Rebar; it's not impenetrable, but it'll slow the bastards down." She motions towards the hall. "Bathroom. I use the water left after washing to flush waste."
She leads him back out to the living room. There is a couch—threadbare—and a couple of chairs, and a 40-inch LCD TV sitting ignored, like a black hole in the wall. She's got stacks and stacks of books, and masses of candles (they look suspiciously like the kind he used to light at church).
He picks up a book, looking at the spine. The Urban Victory Garden. Property of the NYPL. He looks at her. "Theft? And you, a public servant."
She snorts. "Write me a ticket. So, what've you got to contribute to the household?"
He empties his pockets. She looks approvingly at the jerky, sniffs it. "This is beef. Did you make this?"
"Trade."
"What'd you trade?"
"I put down an Infected."
She makes a noncommittal noise, but her mouth pulls to the side.
He has a fire steel, which she likes, a wad of lint for tinder, aspirin. In his ALICE pack he has the aforementioned bottles of water and a pound of dried beans. A tin of fishing hooks. His mess kit. A pair of mostly-clean socks, the tarp and a wool sweater.
"Is this it? You said you had more."
"I do. I've got dried fruit and more beans, lentils, more jerky. I've even got some kerosene. But it's all in my cache bags."
"Which are…?"
"Secure. Elsewhere."
She narrows her eyes at him, and he wants to see her smile again; she's got a beautiful smile, big pearly teeth like in the old toothpaste ads.
"Tell me why I shouldn't kill you right here and now?"
"Because you like me."
"I shot my own mother in the head. And I loved her."
"But I'm not infected."
He has her there; her mouth tightens like it's drawn up with a string. At this point he thinks he may want her trust even more than he wants pussy. Perhaps because trust seems at least possible, while pussy has become the stuff of legend, like the Internet or the Easter Bunny. He remembers being too tired to fuck his wife, and isn't that ridiculous?
She hustles him into the bathroom. "Strip."
He unlaces his boots and pulls them off, and peels off his socks. His feet are chalky white and probably smell pretty cheesy; he doesn't test this theory.
He stands and shrugs out of his jacket, pulls his wife-beater over his head. Her gaze never leaves him, lingering over his tattoos: the crucifix on his upper arm, the EGA on his forearm. "Huh. You were a Marine."
"Still am."
"Whatever."
"You didn't believe me?"
She shrugs. "Why should I?"
He unbuttons his jeans, unzips carefully, and slides them down.
She clears her throat. "Don't believe in underwear in Queens?"
"No laundry; wasn't able to wash them or replace them. After a while, they just make things worse."
He sits on a plastic chair in the chilly tiled room, covering his privates with his hands as she inspects his hair and beard for lice, using a fine-toothed comb dipped in some pungent oil. She holds a small LED flashlight in her mouth as she checks. She stands in front of him, leaning in close, and her tits are right in front of his face, close enough to bite or nuzzle. He smells the tang of her perspiration, and something else, something pungent and female and earthy, and he has to swallow hard.
"You're clear up top," she says after removing the flashlight, and it takes him a moment to remember what she's talking about. "Move your hands."
"What?"
"You're not staying here without being checked for body lice. Move your hands."
He moves his hands and she kneels between his knees, raising his feet to the lip of the bathtub behind her so she has access to his balls. Her hands are warm and soft as she arranges him, lifting his half-hard dick out of the way, combing his pubic hair from one side to the other, touching his balls so gently, and despite the cold of the room and the plastic chair under his ass it isn't very long at all before he's fully erect.
She is doing this on purpose, as payback for surprising her on the street. He knows it, and she knows it, and it doesn't even have to be acknowledged between them.
"Are you finished yet?" he asks, gritting his teeth.
"Jus' 'bout." She doesn't bother to remove the flashlight this time, and seeing her with her lips pursed around the metal cylinder is like torture. He sees saliva gathering at the corners of her mouth, then she releases the flashlight into her hand. She exhales gustily on him and his cock jumps. "All clear."
"You wouldn't want to do anything about that while you're down there, would you?" he asks in a strangled voice, and she looks up at him, all innocence.
"About what?" she asks, as though she hasn't seen anything amiss. She stands, still bracketed between his legs and glares at him until he lowers his foot. "I'll bring you warm water in a minute so you can wash up."
When he's finished she gives him a worn but clean pair of sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt inviting her to "Ask Me About My Grandchildren!" in pseudo-childlike primary-colored script. The sweatpants are kind of snug on him; if she ever wears them she must swim inside them.
His clothes are in a bucket where they're soaking in hot water. She's already told him that if he wants them clean and dry he's going to do the washing and wringing and hanging.
Olivia—he'll have to get used to thinking of her as a person, not just a concept—heats some tomato sauce, shreds up some of his jerky in it, and she spoons it onto some sort of a tough, hollow flatbread that also serves as a dish, saving the water she'd use on washing up.
"Huh… I haven't seen this in years," he says, and when she looks at him with confusion, clarifies. "Shit on a shingle. Takes me back to Boot Camp."
"You're welcome to take over cooking whenever you'd like," she says tartly.
"It means unidentifiable meat in sauce over bread; no criticism implied."
He can't tell if his explanation mollifies her or not. Her concoction is edible, if bland. He lets it sit for a while, to let the acid in the tomato sauce begin to break down the bread so he can get his teeth through it.
"Christ, I miss takeout," she says; she's chewing hard, on either the jerky or the bread.
He doesn't join in; the list of things he misses is full of people, of ideas, not things. Things like faith or the rule of law, or his family.
Warm and clean, with a full belly, safer than he can remember being in a long time, he falls deeply asleep on the couch, and doesn't move for hours. He awakens with a gasp, flailing, and she's reading by candlelight across from him: Basic Sanitation Principles and Practices.
"Better?"
He's not sure; he feels disoriented and hung over and he scowls, rubbing his face. "Yeah."
"Good. I'm going to bed, and I'm not leaving you out here alone with all my stuff." She stands and carries the votive to the bedroom. "Come on."
"Yes, ma'am," he says, and he's being only slightly sarcastic. He yawns and stretches; he's sorer than he'd realized from the fight and a night curled up on the ground.
She sets the candle down on the bureau and begins the process of locking them in.
"Where do you want me?" he asks, but she doesn't answer him. "On the floor, or…?"
She turns, facing him, and her hair is concealing her eyes. She raises her arms and pulls her shirt over her head, leaving her in her bra and cargo pants.
His mouth goes dry. "Okay."
She reaches behind her back and unfastens her bra, and tosses the garment to the floor.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but her breasts are spectacular. He's breathing much more quickly now, and he's so out of practice he's afraid he's going to humiliate himself by coming in his pants like a kid.
She pulls her pants and underwear off and moves to the candle, as if she's going to blow it out.
"—Wait!"
She flinches, and the wary look is back in her eyes.
"Don't. I want to see you." He swallows.
She looks at him with huge, dark eyes before she climbs on the bed, sitting with her back against the headboard.
He picks up the candle and sits at the foot of the bed; the flickering light illuminates the fine bones of her feet and the taut muscles of her calves. The hair on her legs is dark, but sparse and fine. She has a puckered, red scar on her thigh, and he traces it with his fingertips.
She shivers.
"Cold?" he asks, and she nods. "Do you want me to stop?"
She shakes her head like she's trying to dislodge a fly, and he moves closer. The glass of the votive is pleasantly warm in his fingers. He coaxes her knees open with a nudge from his hand, and there she is, spread out before him, and holy Lord (he still has a reflexive moment of guilt at the blasphemy).
Elliot can't remember the last time he made love to his wife. Literally can't remember it. He remembers being vaguely dissatisfied with their routine, the all-too-predictable order of kissing and then groping, then negotiating for oral, and missionary, again? He can't remember if she came. The virus had struck no more than two or three days later, and that was it.
He remembers a woman in his precinct, a records clerk with whom he'd had a regular flirtation. They'd even met once for coffee and innuendo after their shift, but it hadn't gone any further; she started dating one of the investigators from the DA's office after that. He might have thought about her as his cock moved inside of his wife.
He'd been alive then, but not really living his own life. What a waste.
He moves the candle closer to her, so he can see everything. He touches the frill of her inner labium, enjoying the seashell contour and color and scent, and she sighs. He puts the votive in her hand for safekeeping, and then he takes her ass in his hands and dives in to her pussy like a little kid eating a slice of watermelon.
She tenses under him, her hips rocking. He has to hold on tight; she jumps once, and her pubic bone hits his nose hard enough to make him see stars for a moment. She comes almost immediately, so quietly that he almost misses it, and after giving her a moment to recover he concentrates his effort on her clit, sucking, drawing on her, because if he's causing an orgasm he wants to know about it.
She comes again, no more loudly than the first time, but this time she grips his head in her hands, holding his mouth in place until the spasms subside. When she relaxes again she releases him, and her limbs drop, boneless, to the mattress.
He's so hard that he's leaking, and thrusting against the bed is almost as uncomfortable as it is pleasurable.
"So, I can stay?" he asks, kissing her belly.
"Yeah," she says, as though it was never in question, and he wipes his face on her thigh. "Oh, yeah. I'd love to keep you tied to my bed for a few months." He freezes, clenching his fists, and she looks at him with concern. "That's a joke; I wouldn't do that to anyone."
He nods, rolling to his side; his erection isn't quite so desperate now and he adjusts the lay of his sweatpants. "If… something happens, I need to be free to defend myself, and… and you, if you need it."
"I understand." She nods towards the tent in his sweatpants. "You wouldn't want me to do anything about that, would you?"
As an icebreaker it turns out to be surprisingly effective. He's undressed in a few seconds and she climbs on top of him. And for as long as they're joined it never occurs to him to imagine anyone else or any other life.
She blows out the candle and the room is utterly dark. There's no ambient light from the street, no light from the bathroom or digital alarm clock. It's so quiet he can hear the click of his eyelids when he blinks.
"My wife, Kathy, she was bitten at the hospital where she worked. She didn't make it. My youngest daughter, Lizzie, was exposed to the virus at school, and she died a few days later. My son, Dick, joined up with the Guard and went off with them in a truck, God knows where; I haven't heard from him. My oldest, Maureen, was at college; I haven't heard anything from her, either, so I have to assume the worst. I left them a letter at the house, just in case.
"My second daughter, Kathleen. She was with me, but she… she had problems. Some guys attacked her, raped her; she couldn't handle it. Shot herself with my SIG. I threw it in the river." He sits with this admission for a while. It's the first time he's told anyone the whole story, and despite the loss and the shame and the failure it just feels so damn good to say all of their names out loud again.
It's silent for so long that he begins to think she may have fallen asleep. "I'm sorry, Elliot," she says, finally.