The faint knock on the door nearly caused Zoya to cut herself with the scalpel. "Yes?" she called out, annoyed by the interruption.
"Sweetheart," she heard her mother begin, "You have been in there the whole day, are you okay?"
"Yes, mother," Zoya spat in response, "I'll be out in an hour, but can you be a dear and bring Katja?"
Zoya brought her eyes back down to the specimen that lay before her, returning to her work. She placed the scalpel against the smooth skin and applied enough pressure for it to begin to bleed. The animal twitched ever so slightly, so Zoya reached into the drawer to grab the extra paralytic agent – having doctors for parents had its beautiful benefits.
She tried again, making sure to keep the cuts clean and smooth, by starting at the animals' neck and going down to its stomach to get a better look at its anatomy. Until,she was interrupted by the door being forced open by her older sister.
Frustrated, she thrust the scalpel into the animals' throat to let it bleed out and grant it a quick death, then turned around to face Katja, "Must you interrupt me so rudely?" she shouted.
Katja moved closer to the desk Zoya was working on, "I…" a pregnant pause, "Wow, Zoya, this is beautiful," she breathed as she ran her fingers over the dead animal, taking in the sight.
"It would be better had you come in silently and not disrupted my work!" Zoya hissed. "Where are we going to get another one?" She cried as she quickly removed her surgical gloves and mask to dispose of them.
Katja smirked at her naïve sister, "The shelter has many unwanted pets we could experiment on, don't you worry your pretty little face."
Zoya grabbed a clean rag to wipe the scalpel down, placing them on the table to sterilize later, "What a waste…" she shook her head in disgust and took a seat in her chair, "It's your turn to get rid of it."
Both girls turned their heads as the door swung open, revealing their father, with a look of horror on his face once he took a glance at what the girls had been doing.
"What in the hell is going on here?" He shouted as he rushed to the desk, "Did you- Did you do this?" He demanded.
Their mother soon followed in, after hearing the shouts of her husband, and upon entering she wasn't angry, but in shock.
The girls remained silent as they continued to stare at their parents, confused at their reactions. Shouldn't they be proud that their little angels wanted to be like them?
"Both of you! Answer me!" The father continued to demand as he pointed to the dead animal on the desk, "What the hell is going on?"
Katja slowly stepped forward, "Father, it's not what it looks like, I can promise you that. Zoya wants to be like you two! She wants to be a doctor!"
"This isn't the work of a doctor!" The mother chimed in, "This is the work of a monster! We didn't raise you to be like this!" She turned to the father and let the tears slowly fall down her face, disappointed in herself for raising her children to be this way.
Zoya could feel her jaw tighten at being called such a thing, she tried to step forward but her sister threw her arm out to keep her back, "Zoya is not a monster, mother," Katja gritted through her teeth, angry over the description, "She is just a curious is nothing wrong with that. How dare you use such a word on a child of yours! What kind of parent are you?"
She accusingly pointed her finger at her mother as she continued to speak, "Should you not be proud of your child aspiring to be like you? Why don't you pay more attention to your daughters?"
"Enough!" The father interrupted, not being able to hear any more snide remarks to his wife and the mother of his children, "This will not be tolerated anymore," he turned his attention to Zoya, "Doctors do not mangle bodies like this, if you want to become a doctor, you should have come to us instead of finding a stray cat to experiment on."
Zoya bit the inside of her cheek to help the tears fall down faster, "Father," she sniffled, hoping to make her performance more compelling, "I'm sorry, I should've come to you two."
She rushed into her father's arms, "I didn't mean to disappoint you," she muffled, "I just wanted to be like you."
Zoya was weighing the options. She could pull out the handgun they'd scavenged on the roads and try to shoot every single one of them in the head, as was her first instinct when cornered, but the odds of that happening and her surviving were slim to none. Well, now that she thought about it they didn't have very many options. Katja seemed to sense the gears turning furiously in Zoya's head though and touched her fingers to Zoya's wrist, murmuring "easy, easy...".
It was a tense moment, complete silence permeating the air around the group as they decided whether or not to pull their triggers.
The first person to put their gun down was the same man who'd alerted the group to the two girls - Zoya could tell by the Southern twang in his voice when he spoke.
"Humans?" he asked, relief evident in his voice.
"I'm talking, aren't I?" Zoya sniped back.
"I'm sorry - it's just...we were just attacked and we thought for sure you were more walkers."
"That was the sound we heard then. We were on the freeway, heard your gunshots and followed them here," Katja said.
"Shit!" the olive-skinned man with the shotgun Katja had been eyeballing said, quickly lowering his gun and beginning a maddening path of pacing between the trees. "They heard us - that means any walker within a few miles heard us and is on its way here!" he exclaimed. His body was shaking with rage as he tore his fingers through his black waves.
The others lowered their weapons as well, though none were stupid enough to completely ignore the two girls.
"I'm Katja Sankt, and this is my sister Zoya," Katja said, taking over the pleasantries from her sister who was looking over the scene with a predator's eye.
"Rick, Rick Grimes," the man closest to them said, putting a name to the man Zoya called in her head "Southern Accent Guy".
"That's Shane," he said, pointing to the angry, pacing man.
"- And that's my wife Lori and our son Carl," he continued, gesturing to a long, brown-haired woman with her hand on her freckled son's shoulder. Carl gave a friendly enough smile but Lori was too exhausted and overwhelmed to offer more than a small tilt of her lips.
"- Dale," he said while pointing out an older man in a fisherman's hat. Katja was immediately reminded of the nights she and Zoya spent playing Left 4 Dead and wondered if Dale was as badass as Bill.
"- Glenn," a name which belonged to a young Asian boy who smiled good-naturedly at them despite the exhaustion that lined the rest of his face.
"- T-Dog" a black man who was looking worriedly at Shane's violent pacing.
"- Daryl," Rick said, acknowledging a shifty-looking redneck in a cut-off shirt holding a cross-bow like it was attached to his arm. He gave Katja a hard look as if daring her to say something. She just smiled.
"- Jim" a sick looking man who gave them a weak smile.
"- Carol and her daughter Sophia" a woman with close-cut, dark hair holding on to a brown-haired girl.
"- Jacqui" a black woman with her arms around a crying blond woman's shoulders as they knelt over something on the ground.
"- and...Andrea..." Rick finished, his voice trailing off as he indicated the crying blond woman. He got closer to the girls' and spoke lowly. "Her sister...got bit during the attack. Died pretty quickly."
"Has she come back?" asked Zoya.
"No, not yet." It was obvious that Rick didn't want to think about that moment.
"Alright, we've got bigger problems than introductions here Rick," interjected Shane, stomping up to the trio with his knuckles white around his shotgun. Katja could feel the violence radiating off of him and was impressed despite herself. "We can't stay here - there could be a herd on the way right now."
"I know, I know...but we can't travel at night, there are too many of them on the roads," Rick replied.
"Look," Shane said, tilting his head down and trying to modify his voice to something calmer. "I, uh, I don't know if you've noticed, but we're standing out in here in the dark and we just got attacked. We're not safe here and we're not safe out there! But at least if we get moving we have a chance."
Rick looked to the group as they righted upended tables and put things back where they belonged. His hand went to the back of his head, rubbing it in anxiety.
Zoya was surprised when she heard her sister talking.
"Look, I think my sister and I can help you if you don't mind us joining you. We might know somewhere you can go. But even if you leave tonight we still have to pack up and figure out what to do with..." she pointed towards Andrea leaning over her sister's body, pushing T-Dog away when he tried to attend to the body.
"We pack up and get ready to move tomorrow. We need to bury these people Shane," Rick said quietly.
Shane just looked at him in disgust and stalked off towards his tent, presumably to begin packing.
"Sorry about that," Rick said. The girls just shook their head to indicate that it was fine and Rick moved off to talk to Lori.
The girls, left to their own devices, found a comfortable patch of earth that had avoided the blood-letting and sat cross-legged. They opened their backpacks and began emptying them, making it look as if they were sorting the goods they scavenged that day.
"Why the fuck did you offer to help them?" Zoya hissed. "We don't need more asses to cover!"
"But we do need all the things they have - did you see all the guns! All the food? We could survive for weeks with the things they have squirreled away," Katja replied, keeping her expression neutral despite the excitement in her voice. "If we lead them to the CDC we can have it all to ourselves."
Zoya smiled at her sister, a wicked grin that made her appear so much like the devil that for a second Katja wasn't sure she was looking at Zoya anymore.
"Sister, have I mentioned that I love you lately?"
It started with miniscule things, such as using magnifying glass on small insects when Zoya was 12 and Katja was 14. However, as soon as Zoya hit her teenage years, things started to change.
At around the age of 14, Zoya was caught watching animal torture videos online by her parents, her computer was taken away and she screamed, begged, and pleaded for her parents to believe that it was only for "research".
It started to get worse though, for both girls. Zoya started getting a strange fascination with fire, almost always volunteering to start the bonfires whenever the family would go camping, squealing in delight when she'd throw something in it. Katja, on the other hand, was becoming less and less emotional around the family and was beginning to spend nearly all of her time with her younger sibling. Their parents figured it was a normal teenager thing, but were surprised that their daughters were that close.
Suspicions arose when their high school called the parents in for a conference to discuss the lack of social activity the girls had with other students, and because of one specific incident. The students were instructed to do a research project on any subject of their choice, and Zoya happened to choose do to it on serial killers. The reason for the meeting was that not only the students were convinced, but the teacher as well, that Zoya wasn't merely interested in serial killers and psychopaths – but that she seemed to idolize them.
Zoya tried to play it off that she was just very passionate about the subject and it was the main reason she wanted to become a psychiatrist, and fortunately, she succeeded in diverting her parents' suspicions – for a short while.
It wasn't too long before others noticed. Before the girls had perfected their skills - learned how to do the things they enjoyed without drawing attention to their activities, how to go about life as if everything was perfectly normal - they had drawn some attention in their neighborhood. A neighbor, nosy and home often, had seen the two girls - 18 and 20 then - sneaking into the woods at night and found it strange.
She had shown up at the front door of their home and told their parents what she had seen. After being confronted about it, Katja and Zoya pretended they had been sneaking out to see friends at parties - the paltry excuses that would be expected of them. Katja however, couldn't abide a tattletale.
When the police asked the woman lying in the hospital what had happened to her she just stared at them mutely, replaying the scene over and over again until she felt as if she might go insane. Maybe she was already insane. All she could feel was the pain - the horrible, terrible, indescribable pain - of a knife slicing through her skin over and over again until she was numb, bleeding out on her kitchen floor. If her husband hadn't come home early from work that night she would be dead.
She could only remember a black mask, shiny and terrifying in the dim light. The person never spoke.
They didn't need to. The blade spoke louder than words ever would.
The woman, fearing her life, waited until the hype died down before confronting the parents about her suspicions of nearly being hacked by their daughters. The parents refused to believe this, claiming the woman was simply traumatized from the attack, but inside – it was eating away at them. They'd been concerned with their daughters' actions the past couple of years, but neither could believe it.
When word got around to the girls that the woman had accused them, the girls devised a plan to quiet the woman once and for all. They planned a vacation out of town, making sure to pay for everything with credit cards to keep records as an alibi. Katja kept their parents at bay, while Zoya gathered the proper supplies and disguise.
The two girls returned, happy and tan as ever from their trip to Jacksonville, when their parents shared the news of the woman's death – a morphine overdose. Fortunately for the girls, the death was never investigated due to the mental instability of the woman from the attack, so it was believed that she'd done it herself.
Regardless, the parents touched on the subject with their daughters. Both flat out denied everything, but to comfort their parents they volunteered to go see the best psychiatrist in Georgia, if that'd be any help. The parents, ignorant to their daughters' manipulation, went along with the idea and drove them to Savannah.
On the way there, in the silent car ride, Katja shared a quick glance with Zoya before leaning forward to use the seatbelt as a garrote on her father. Before their mother could scream, Zoya put her in a quick headlock, applying pressure to her neck to cut off blood flow and knock her out. Katja keeping enough pressure for her father to stay conscious, moved to his ear to give him orders, "Accelerate and follow everything I say."
Once they'd hit the right speed to cause a lethal collision, Katja tightened the seatbelt and Zoya reached for the wheel, turning it to cause the car to collide with the nearest vehicle on the opposite side of the freeway.
The accident was deadly, they'd suffered minor injuries such as broken bones and bruises, but the parents were crushed and their bodies badly mangled to where the girls couldn't identify them. As soon as they'd recovered and the money was settled, the girls took everything they had and moved to Florida to pursue their careers.
It was these very same parents, intelligent doctors who had provided the girls with all they needed (though perhaps did not pay as much attention as they had worked there, doctors searching for cures for the worlds ailments. They also knew the protocol, how the CDC would proceed should something go wrong...
The two watched the families packing, stowing all the little possessions that meant enough to carry on their backs, meant enough to slow themselves down with. Katja wondered what it would be like to be attached to photos, to knick-knacks - to something besides the cold eternity of gunmetal and steel blades.
When they thought of the fate they were leading these people to, there was little in the way of feeling. They would survive that much longer with the supplies these people had. That was the only thing that mattered.
Dale seemed to realize that the girls had no where to sleep and at some point in the evening brough them sleeping bags and offered them a spot in his RV if they wanted it. Both declined politely without hesitation, prefering to keep to themselves. They set up their own little camp against a few tree stumps and settled in to sleep.
Andrea's keening kept them up all night.
AUTHORS' NOTE
Thank you for the reviews guys! We hope you enjoyed this chapter. :)
Give our individual stories a look - information on them is in the first chapter.
Next time we'll see some crazy stuff starting with the group!