Peggy had been in the office when the news first broke. Of course, it wasn't really in the SSR's jurisdiction, but they still had a duty to protect, to control the city's mayhem. To try and find some kind of resolution to it all.

The science team were, ironically, the first to fall ill.

She'd been there when Sousa coughed up blood the first time. He'd been whisked straight into isolation, and the rest of the team had spent hours under medical scrutiny, until they were finally released.

Daniel held on for 78 hours. Others didn't fight so hard.

There was no funeral.

By the time it became obvious there was nothing they could do, three more members of the team were in isolation. The roads out of Brooklyn were jammed with cars that didn't move – many of which had sheets draped over them now, whether as a mark of respect, or to shield the eyes of the young passers by – and the airport was abandoned. The busy Brooklyn streets went from disorder and chaos, to bare and empty in a matter of days.

The virus had spread to other cities by then. Other countries, too. But people weren't to have known.


It takes a moment for Peggy's senses to catch back up with her, but when they do, she moves on autopilot. She notices the dried blood on his top lip, that his skin is grey and translucent, that his eyes are ringed with red. His breath is laboured. His whole body shakes with the effort of moving.

"You have to go," she says, and her voice is so heavy with emotion that she doesn't sound like herself, "please, Howard, you have to go."

"Peg, I couldn't stop looking," he rasps. His eyes stare into nothing, like he's not really seeing her. It's like he's sleep walking; there but still not quite there.

"Howard, please..." a sob escapes her throat as she moves cautiously closer to him.

He chokes, sounding like a car backfiring, and blood dribbles from his chin. Peggy motions to Angie to move back. She's covering her nose and mouth with the scarf that previously held her hair, stumbling back against one of the booths, her eyes alive with fear.

Peggy manages to back him into the doorway, and, in one smooth movement, swings him outside the doors. He loses his footing and falls to his knees, but scrambles back up again, and to Peggy's horror, he's himself again: awake, alive, alert. He's banging on the glass, she can hear him calling her name through it. She shakes it off. Her instinct is to survive. The doors' locking mechanism is broken, and Peggy has to think fast to come up with an alternative, her mind racing.

"Help me move that seat. We need to block the door," she tells Angie, and they hurriedly carry what used to be a booth seat across to the doorway, lodging it between the panels until the doors are stuck in a closed position, airtight.

Once the door is safe, Peggy sinks to her knees, the weight of what she's just done hitting her like a knife to the chest.

"Oh god," she whispers, the tears already coming thick and fast. She'd become almost immune to the horrors this world holds, but now she feels like she's going to vomit, and her head's spinning, tears escaping without her permission.

"You know that guy?" Angie says, sitting quietly beside her.

Peggy nods, wiping tears away desperately, "my oldest friend," a lump forms in her throat, "the most ridiculous man but... my oldest friend."

For a long while, she cries, and Angie holds her, and she wonders if it wouldn't be better to just stay like this. Perhaps her need to survive, to be responsible for everybody else, isn't so damn important after all.

She loses everybody anyway.

Peggy inhales sharply, scrubbing her hands over her face, and turning to face Angie, "I promise I won't lose you," she says, quietly, and she's avoided promises because she hates breaking them, but this one she intends to keep.


They stay in silence, pressed against the wall, for hours.

It's torture: sitting, waiting for him to die. But they don't know the incubation period of this thing, or how long it takes to kill, or anything much about it at all, and it's better to be safe than sorry. At least they can't hear him anymore.

Angie has a way about her that can soothe just about any situation. At first she's quiet, understanding Peggy's need to not talk about this, but after a while they start talking about before and though Peggy's been avoiding thinking about it, she can't help but enjoy Angie's stories. Well, 'enjoy' might not be the right word, but it eases the pain a little. It's been their coping mechanism since the start, since that first night of being trapped in the auto-mat, watching whilst the world outside them burned to nothingness.

"The most killer thing about all of this is that no one'll ever get to see me on stage," Angie says, Peggy leaning against her shoulder, "I mean, I could'a been somethin' before all this, but I feel this has really done wonders for my character work, y'know?"

Peggy laughs, and then can't stop, as she realises how absurd the idea of laughing is, whilst Howard is literally dying outside. She'd feel bad, but a part of her knows this is exactly what he'd have wanted.

"Howard always talked about moving to Los Angeles, opening some kind of motion picture studio," she says, after the laughter dies, "he'd have loved you."

"Ya think?"

Peggy smiles, "oh yes," she looks at the ground and then peers back up at her, noting the bright grin on her face, such a rarity these days; "mind you, I can't promise the type of pictures he'd have been making were the kind you'd want to be in... or the kind I'd want you to be in."


As the sun goes down, the eerie silence of the street outside becoming too much to bear, Angie dares a glance out through the sheets. She gasps, pulling Peggy over to the window beside her.

"It's snowing!" she whispers excitedly, eyes wide.

It's easy to be excited for a moment, but then reality hits them: if it's snowing, the temperature is going to drop even further, and they've no heating, nothing but a small tank of hot water to keep them warm. Angie subconsciously draws her shawl – a memento from one of Peggy's first trips into the outside – closer around herself. Peggy's glad to have dry socks.

Peggy frowns, staring into the evening sky, and suddenly a flake of snow hits the window, and she realises, to her horror, that it's not snow at all.

She pulls the sheets closed and clears her throat, "we should eat. It's been a long day."


The supplies that Peggy brought with her are stacked neatly behind the bar, the potato added to the dwindling pile of limp, shrivelled fruit and vegetables, the cans in a pyramid to the other side, along with the rice, two boxes of powdered milk, a small bag of pasta, and a lonely tin of tuna.

They've been using a large metal bucket to create a controlled fire to cook over, burning anything they don't need; empty food packages, old milk crates, ruined clothes, broken pieces of wooden furniture. Angie counts the matches out on the counter, sliding all but one back inside the box and putting it into her apron pocket. She strikes the match first try (she's had a lot of practice), and tosses it into the bucket, flames whooshing to life.

Angie isn't much of a cook. She doesn't really have to be: they eat out of need, not for the taste. She balances a saucepan of water over the bucket, and snips off the bad bits of a pile of mixed vegetables. She chops the potato into quarters. Once the water is boiled, she drops the whole lot in.

"Chef's special," Angie says, grinning over her shoulder at Peggy, whose eyes are back on the gap in the sheets.

Peggy glances at her, her smile only slightly forced. She admires the way Angie can keep smiling, keep cracking jokes, even in times like this. She doesn't know how she would keep going without her.

It's dark outside. It gets darker earlier these days, which makes it difficult to keep track of the time. Peggy's eyes strain to make out shapes, and she exhales, tugging the sheets back into place and pressing her back against the cold wall, her eyes slipping closed. They flash open again merely seconds later, as the image of Howard's pale, deathly glare fills the darkness behind her eyelids.

Angie holds out a bowl of vegetable slop, a moment later, and folds into the seat beside her, propping her own bowl up on her knees.

"Don't eat it all at once," she deadpans, pulling a face as she lifts a spoonful to her face, "God, I hope this tastes better than it looks."

Peggy chuckles, "thank you, darling."

She doesn't mean for the food.


Peggy falls asleep with her head resting awkwardly on Angie's shoulder. Angie doubts it's any more comfortable for her companion than it is for her, but to Angie's credit, she stays still. She listens to Peggy's breathing, watching the rise and fall of her chest. It's comforting. She isn't alone. They'e in this together. It isn't often that she falls asleep with no warning. When she's here, they take shifts. Everything's scheduled down to the second, like a military operation. She supposes it sort of is a military operation. The exhaustion must have finally got too much for her, and Angie couldn't blame her.

As Peggy shifts next to her, moving to lean against the wall instead, Angie lets out a shallow breath. She can't help but be curious, despite the voice in her head echoing curiosity killed the cat. She peels herself away from the wall, pausing only to check on Peggy. She doesn't look peaceful, exactly - she's frowning, even in her sleep - but Angie's glad she's sleeping. She needs it.

She lifts the tarp with hesitation.

She can't make out much. It's dark. The window has a thin covering of… whatever that was that had fallen out of the sky like snow. She squints, trying to see into the darkness, but it's no good.

"I guess it's my shift," Angie whispers, sitting down again beside Peggy. She wraps her shawl around her sleeping friend, snuggles down next to her.

Peggy's heart beating close to her calms her down instantly, and she lets herself concentrate fully on that, on the warmth of Peggy's body. For a moment she can pretend they're somewhere else.


"Wake up!"

She feels firm hands grasping her shoulders, and wakes immediately. That's new, something she's developed only through necessity. It used to take forever to wake her up. She's a deep sleeper. Now she feels like she's permanently at panic stations, on alert.

"Angie," Peggy's voice again, sharper. She squints up at her, shaking off the last wisps of slumber.

"Shit," she says, a moment later, when she's fully awake, "shit I fell asleep."

Peggy looks anxious, but her face softens momentarily, "it's okay, so did I," she says, turning to the window. Now that Angie's awake, she realises it isn't anxiety. It's concentration.

"Look," she breathes, holding the tarp open just enough for Angie to glance through.

"Shit," she says again. That's new too.