Lauren didn't dream much, or at least, never recalled having done so. It was because the anxiety that held her in a constant chokehold always smothered her memories of them when they arrived. Well, that and the haze that came from constantly passing out in pain.
She got a lot of sleep that way. Insomnia would make her walk, and walking out late would draw in the Civil Protection officers bored on the night shift and eager to test their new batons, and try out this thing called "pistol whipping" that they'd heard so much about. Somehow she always managed to wake up in her apartment, a little worse for wear but her sense of status quo intact. Occasionally it was just the exhaustion that got to her, and that didn't make the pain much better. The day would start on the floor, because there wasn't any room on the couches, and the first thing she'd see was the ceiling. If she was lucky, the shutdown transitioned into real sleep sometime during the night and her head wouldn't hurt so much.
She opened her eyes and there it was, the cracked plaster under a brightening dawn that she'd come to know and despise that signaled the end of any respite from the real world she could desperately grab. It took her a full minute to realize that this was different; she was on a stiff mattress instead of the floor, in a room that had not had its walls knocked out to make a community living space.
What.
A hiss escaped her teeth as she tried to sit up, every bruise, cut, and burn reminding her of their presence with indignant rage.
Bits and pieces of last night floated back into her head; the crash, running away from the recovery dropship (though not what she had been thinking at the time that would have prompted such a ridiculously stupid act), walking through the trees, stumbling into the ghost town, etcetera etcetera. It was all a little fuzzy after the exploding building, but, surprisingly, she was headache free, and that was at least one plus.
Her feet, like everything else, hadn't completely healed from last night. Standing on them caused waves of raw pain in various areas of her legs, never mind just the soles of her feet. In fact, maybe it would be better to sit back down, just ruminate on her stiffness for a while. The springs squealed in protest, and she looked down at herself for the first time, covered in bandages with a slightly inexperienced attempt to clean off all the blood and grit off of her clothes and skin.
Ordinarily, the blankness on how she'd been moved to a living space was normal, but this was outside the reach of anyone with enough upper body strength to lift a corpse up some stairs, and that was a little concerning.
And this room was too small besides. There was hardly enough space for the bed, and she felt as if she only needed to reach up a hand to touch the ceiling. …Well, she tried and she couldn't, but that didn't help. It could drop at any moment, or the walls would inch inward and her organs would crush under her caving in ribcage. The door was open a crack at least. A sliver of light leaked through and gave her a small bit of comfort, though her heart rate still accelerated and her back began to sweat.
This was the second time in a row this week that she'd woken after getting knocked unconscious by something and gotten up in an unfamiliar situation. Days were supposed to be uniform, not, "situation—new situation—knockout—new new situation". The instability was almost maddening. At least a constant, incessant, droning voice about how great the Union was could be tuned out, or the TV unplugged. Nobody even minded if you took a day off, even if you had something resembling a job. You couldn't take a day off from being on the run.
The room was mostly bare, except for the mattress that she was sitting on and a small beside table. A broken picture frame rested on the cool wooden surface, a worn family photo with beaming kids and proud parents, standing like they would in a painted portrait. The kind of family that was probably separated and systematically broken down when the Union arrived. In all likelihood, they were dead or worse, and this, this small picture was all that remained of the pieces that had been thrown to the wind.
It was a just a piece of paper. God, what was wrong with her?
The smell of something cooking drifted into the room, and as an angry dog would her stomach growled on cue. She hadn't eaten since what constituted as breakfast last morning, and it was starting to catch up with her. Deciding that her feet were well enough now to take the floor, she eased herself back up—Ow—and trotted out into a hallway lined with numbered rooms.
Too narrow. She was going to explode all over the walls if she wasn't careful…
This must have been another apartment building. Only a little worse kept than those she'd had to stay in recently, although it didn't have the scuff marks on the floor from hard rubber boots. The cooking aroma was coming from one of the rooms up ahead, as were two voices, only one of them Pen's.
As she approached, little snippets of conversation drifted and reached her ears. The stranger sounded like some sort of diluted English accent, something about kicking hornet nests, and Pen sounded a little choked, like her throat had a lump in it or…
"Knock knock." Lauren announced hoarsely, pushing the door ajar so she could enter.
"Oh!—I-I meant to check up on you. Glad you're okay," Pen sputtered from her seat on a destroyed couch, smearing the back of her fist against her cheeks as inconspicuously as she could. Lauren suspected she'd been completely forgotten in that back room, but that was fine. The man, who was stationed at the window and scanning the street with a modified sniper rifle, turned briefly in her direction and gave a little wave. He didn't look too much older than Pen, with sandy brown hair and a hard glint in his eye that might bring a confused frown to more expressive people.
"How're you feeling?" he inquired, in a way that sounded like he didn't particularly care. "Any amusing twitches crop up overnight?"
"No." She tried her best disapproving glare in place of bemusement at such an odd comment. He cocked an eyebrow and grinned before turning back into his sniper scope, completely unfazed. She decided that he was some kind of lunatic hermit in the making, and it had nothing to do with her general unintimidating-ness, and turned to Pen. "I smelled food."
"Right." She sat up and leaned over, reaching to where they had set up a hotplate and offered a can of something chopped up and brown with a meaty scent. "I know it's not really breakfast food, but we can't be picky, right? I saved some for you in case you were hungry."
Oh. So she hadn't been completely forgotten after all. Lauren didn't know what to say, so instead she appraised the small meal. Canned food, not the packaged food substitute that she'd been eating since…forever ago. The meat was too salty and it might have spoiled somewhere down the line, but even so she thought she might cry and wolfed it down before she did.
There was a jug of water on the floor, she took a swig to wash down the food, it left her mouth with a vaguely sour taste. She almost asked what they'd been talking about, but her attention instead fixated on the window and the little figures marching around outside. "Oh…"
If that one syllable came out a little choked and strangled, it was because she was having a mini heart attack.
Things really were clearer in the light of day, weren't they? Before, her future had seemed so uncertain and unstable. Now that she'd had a night's sleep and restored some of her mental functions, could literally see clearly with the sun shining down on the horrendously maintained pavement outside with Civil Protection officers traipsing over the cracks and weeds…Well, she knew exactly where her future was heading now, but it didn't look to be anywhere good.
"Are you okay?"
Lauren didn't really mean to glare at Pen again—it was instinctual, and to her credit, she stopped before she'd turned all the way around, instead fixing her with a sort of dead eyed look. Floundering for a moment, she gave a curt, "I'm fine". It wasn't very convincing. Not especially because of the manner in which she shortly collapsed, shaking. They were talking again, but she'd gone deaf to them. She was back in the train, or locked in an interrogation room, and this room, spacious as it was, was too small, way too small. Her thoughts muddled, like she was—she was on a boat somewhere…
She flinched rather heavily when the man tapped her on the forehead. "You still in there?"
And she very badly wanted to stab him in the foot.
"It's my bad." Pen mumbled, glancing out towards those little searching figures and then back at her. Lauren felt vaguely, irrationally irritated that she knew why she was upset. "Sorry."
"Don't apologize." The lunatic moved back over to the window and began rifling through a fairly large steel box. "That won't change anything. Besides, that nest was depleting my ammunition, so it's a bit of a win-lose." She imagined he was smirking. "Win for me, lose for you."
"What do we do about Civil Protection?"
"'We'?" He gave Pen a look that bordered on incredulous. "And sacrifice my nice flat? They don't know anything about me."
"You helped us before," she insisted.
"That didn't involve losing my flat."
"We could go out there and tell them there's a guy up here with one of their guns." Pen said, like it was a casual suggestion. Lauren only snickered inwardly.
He gave her an almost maniac glare, for a moment she thought he was about to take a knife to their heads, and then the expression dropped immediately to thoughtfulness. The tone with the jovial lilt returned. "There is a tunnel system set up by some…surviving militants not too far from here. They mentioned needing recruits, and having some extra supplies to toss my way if I happened to find some. I'm sure they'd be willing to take you in. Unless that conflicts with wherever it was you were heading before you went about waking up the dead?"
"Killing the dead." Lauren muttered, sullenly pulling a strand of hair out of her face. "…A-and I don't think they really counted as dead, anyway."
"We…" Pen shot an odd look Lauren's way. "Well, we weren't really going anywhere. Mostly just…away from…them," She gestured to the window. The horrible people-things outside the window.
"Well then you'll have no objections."
"Are you going to send us over dead?" Lauren piped up. Meant it to sound sardonic and ended up more like half-crazed grumbling.
He seemed amused. She hated amusing people. It meant they didn't take her seriously. "I don't think I'd get much for that. No, I'll tell you what—there are a few supplies I don't need here, don't like them, never use them and frankly they just take up space. You take these, and then get out of my hair, right?"
Apparently, his name was Richard. Lauren didn't really care, and she actually didn't want to know, but she couldn't help overhearing when Pen addressed him as such, so there it was. They didn't know each other. They didn't behave as though they did. But they knew each other's names, and to her chagrin Pen had told him hers.
She wanted to talk about how suspiciously convenient it was that he just so happened to be near an escape tunnel, or that they weren't even clear on where they would end up when they finished walking it, but it occurred to her that their escape would consist almost entirely of slinking through dark caverns and surrounded by hastily carved or water cut rock and no sky and she shut up to avoid thinking about it at all. The idea that they might, as some people would say, end up recruited by rogue gun nuts in exchange for supplies didn't bode well with her either, but there wasn't a stellar list of options to go from so she was afraid to complain. Pen had claimed the rifle, citing previous use, which was no surprise, unfortunately leaving Lauren with the…the shotgun.
"This does not bode well…" she'd muttered under her breath as Richard had led them out of his crummy flat. It felt awkward and heavy in her hands, and more than once Pen had to stop leading her to correct her grip. "The kickback might injure you", she'd warned, and Lauren had to stop herself from feeling resentful of getting instructions from a teenager. Ignoring the suggestion that not only would she have to carry a firearm, she'd also have to shoot somebody with it. She told herself it was for intimidation purposes, if they weren't even going to have a shooting range to learn how to use it. Like a CP could be intimidated by her.
She felt like a criminal. Like they were both criminals, sneaking through the streets, hiding in morning shadows of crumbled towers. With the police just around the corner, ready to beat them both to a pulp.
No. The defeatist attitude wasn't going to help anyone. She straightened up and tried to hold her shotgun like she was supposed to.
A brick cracked into the ground behind them and she jumped.
She almost wished they'd be spotted. Just to get it over with. The tunnel system was a great deal farther downtown than where they had started out, and at this rate it would take all day. There was no going straight—they had to duck through side streets whenever possible, crouch through openings made with the decay of time in the buildings, change direction when they saw a CP, even from a distance—which happened a lot. And it was probably the same ones too, just vigilantly searching. Maybe five. That seemed the right number to gang up on two people. The building they had entered at that moment was some kind of office. Had a lobby, reception area, filled with cubicles, picked clean and barren of course, save for the stray paper or coffee cup. A few of the creatures—barnacles, she thought—hung from the ceiling in odd places, making her nauseous with their presence. In a very sad way, they were the only life left there. The only things living in this sad memory.
Not that people had lived in office buildings before, but…
"Hold up, hold up," Pen held up a hand, and they paused just behind a partially open, battered emergency exit doorway. Through the thin space between the door's edge and the wall, with sunlight spilling into the hall where they stood, a figure could be seen pacing around outside. Lauren felt her breath freeze in her throat.
"We need to go through this way…" Pen muttered under her breath, "But let's see if we can find another way out, maybe another hole in the wall…Come on."
Lauren didn't move. Her legs were too stiff. She found herself trying to read the ID code on his right armband when Pen came back for her a few seconds later.
"Lauren, come on. We can go around."
He was so close. She tilted her head to a different angle and caught view of the stunstick in his right hand. A shiver passed over her spine, and a few of the muscles in her face twitched uncomfortably.
"…Laur-"
"I know." She needed to tear herself away, force herself to focus on the task at hand. The pain in her feet, bruises, pulled muscles, physical things. Better than memories. Harder than it should have been, though.
Maybe they could have gotten farther, she would have continued on, but as she turned, she noticed that dot.
A little blue dot. Dancing around on the wall outside, out of everyone's sight but hers. Funny, she'd always thought of those dots as being red...
One second before the crack of the shot, Lauren saw the faint beam come into alignment with the officer's skull based gas mask. Her eyes turned away and she heard what sounded like the loud whine of a camera flash from somewhere as he fell, hard to notice from so far away. Especially above the really annoying, high pitched tone of a broken CP radio. She'd only heard it once before—a few anticitizens had ganged up on an officer with a couple beer bottles, a long time ago. Of course they'd been filled with more holes than stereotypical Swiss cheese a few seconds later and then burned as an example to others, and it was actually really demoralizing, but before that it had been…well, not entertaining. Inspiring? Memorable? Better than all the graffiti staining the community center.
The point was that now she found the noise exceedingly unnerving. It took Pen gripping her arm and nearly pulling it out of its socket to get her moving. The rest of them, they all had to have heard it, the shot. There could be no sneaking now; they'd all be actually looking now. A relief, certainly. Wasn't she just thinking that all of this was too easy?
The brick was open farther ahead, and the two came barreling through. Pen knew the way, it would have made sense to follow her, but fear/alarm/general urgency did not get along with sense, and by the time Lauren knew she was alone it was too late.
There was another shot. Two out of five. Maybe it wasn't best to gauge her odds by imagined numbers. It didn't matter how many were left, she would still run the whole way. But now she didn't know where she was going.
That bastard. He did this on purpose.
Farther downtown. Which way was downtown? She picked a direction and stuck with it. Perhaps it was some residual electricity from last night (Zombies that could shoot lightning, where had that come from?), her skin was buzzing with…fear? Probably. Not the dull ache of living in oppression, but the fatal jolts that threw off aim and fumbled trigger fingers. It was why she was sprinting when she really shouldn't have been.
There was—one of the—them—ahead of her, she needed to stop. Intersection, dammit, no close buildings in front and the one behind was locked when she tried it. She turned left, scrambled back when she saw a fried headcrab limping along and shot off in the other direction. Her shoulders scraped against a brick wall when she stopped to breathe, and she found herself lost again. Was it…left? Just around the corner, another skeletal heap of glass and mortar. With a bell. A church?
Keeping the gun close to her belly, she moved up against what looked like the most stable wall and tried to deaden her heart rate. Think of her objectives.
Footsteps. Loud footsteps.
She froze behind her insufficient cover and hoped he wouldn't turn around. Just keep walking, and don't turn around. Slowly, she pulled herself up to look, get a glimpse of the officer and see him half walking and half lolloping about like he was investigating some noise complaint and not hunting down two fugitives.
Noise complaint. Exploding building. Harhar.
Her vision was a little bleary, but the morning sharpened her perceptions, somewhat—they caught a glint of metal from the object in his hand as he sauntered away. Metal, blood and wood. That wasn't a stun stick.
Was…was that her axe? Was the officer loafing around with her axe? She didn't even remember dropping it. He had seen her axe, lying out in the street somewhere, and just picked it up.
Okay, he wasn't paying much attention to his surroundings, it seemed. Maybe she could sneak past him. She could do that, right?
No, not...not really.
Trying to be as quiet as she knew how and feeling her arms and legs protest (Muscle control? She had been in a train crash yesterday. Blasphemy), she crouched down again and tried to maneuver as best she could out of his range of vision. So focused was she on this that the scuffling to her right didn't register until the noise was coming almost directly into her ear. She turned to look, absently, like it'd be a pigeon or something normal. A teacup pig, for all it mattered.
No, it was what Pen had called a houndeye. Houndeye with all the eyes, coming closer to her, like some deranged puppy dog. Unblinking, shiny eyes, right in her face--
She swiped out her foot and sent the thing sprawling. Which was a bad move because it squealed. Very loudly. Shuddering, it righted itself and scampered off, brainless and oblivious of the damage it had just caused. She cringed.
The white, ghoulish face snapped around in her direction.
"Hey!"
Her mind blanked out in panic as he reached for the weapon hanging at his belt, she felt herself pull the trigger, doubling over as the shotgun slammed hard into her abdomen. When the intense pain died down and presence of mind to look up returned, the officer was gone—gone, dead, down, what was the difference?—in a slowly growing pool of blood, his radio blaring like a flatlining heart monitor.
Or was that the ringing in her ears? Maybe it was both. Gunshots were loud.
A mismatched, horrid feeling of joy uncurled in her stomach, and she quickly quelled it.
No, no, she would not call murder fun. Never. It was a symptom of living under someone's boot, like a lot of the things that were currently wrong with her. Not healthy. Not therapeutic.
Stomach still lurching from the shotgun recoil and bile in her throat, she adjusting her grip and set off to find Pen. Her shoes splashed through some of the blood, and she pretended not to notice. Had she really spent a good chunk of yesterday with it smeared all over her face? Eugh.
Well. It had been her own blood, which was marginally less disgusting.
It still looked like downtown, she thought she was going in the right direction. She passed by bloodstains on the walls—still wet and glistening. Escalating from that there was a corpse up ahead. Did that mean she should follow this street? Well, it was a headcrab zombie with the head still on. She should take that as a good sign. She could get good signs. Every once in a while. It wasn't impossible-
Giving out a frustrated sigh, her pace moved into a slow stroll. She peeked around every corner she came to for corpses and caught sight of a few smashed headcrabs. The path led up to rather well preserved town hall; she let the shotgun swing in her arms as she turned towards it. Another shot rang out, with the camera flash whine, her face twitched again, but she was still stuck in her strut.
There was no one inside. A few footprints on the floor, though. She lightly walked in the steps, feeling her muscles loosen up a little. Farther along, through the other side, to the backyard.
It was outside, but only for the lack of ceiling. High brick walls warded off trespassers, and a few disarmed, rigged up pistols aimed for her forehead. She ducked through, her feet sinking into the dug up dirt.
Lauren took a breath, tightened and dropped her shoulders again, and saw those familiar strawberry blonde pink, bouncy curls. She didn't want to be so relieved, but…there it was. Pen was fiddling with some control panel near horizontally placed steel doors that some idiot with a sniper rifle must've put down, moving in a flustered flurry and her hair all over the place.
"Hey there."
She whirled around, eyes flaring open—wow, Lauren didn't think they could get that wide-running over and locking her in a hug that knocked the air out of her lungs.
Recoiling slightly, she didn't know if she should pat her on the back or what, but Pen pulled away after a second and wiped her cheeks.
"Sorry," she half-mumbled, half nervously laughed. "I thought I'd—y'know, abandoned you. To die."
Lauren blinked. "Your vote of confidence is…inspiring?"
Pen snickered a little at that, sniffled, and turned back to the control panel. "I've almost got this set up. No one followed you right?"
"No…" She didn't…think they had…Why be covert when you were better armed and better trained than the target?
"Good." Pen fiddled with a lever on the control panel, frowning. "Richard said there were two ways to open it; keys—which, uh, he didn't give me—and some, er…" She punched in a few buttons. "…combination I could use to—to hack it. Almost got it."
"There's no rush." The words came out a little quickly. "I mean…no—no rush."
The doors popped open and Lauren's throat went dry. Pen gave her that look again—not the odd one, the uncomfortably concerned one. "Are you going to be okay?"
Lauren tried to laugh that off, and it came out as a strangled chuckle. "Uh huh, yeah. Well, it's—it's…" She was just going to have to deal with it. Not because of any backbone she might have gotten back, but because if there was one thing that she feared more it was getting caught. Or looking weak in front of strangers. "Not a problem…"
This was her life now. Yay for freedom and all that jazz.
To prove her dedication, Lauren took a stumbling step into the hole, steadying herself on the stairs down. Pen hopped in past her, clicking a switch and lighting up the way with flickering, broken lights, stringed along with thin wires making tangled shapes over the walls.
It was terrible. It was so terrible. Pen made her way to a little red button off to the side, probably to close off the path. Lauren fidgeted and looked back.
"Wait—wait just a minute…"
One last look at the sky—one last look at rolling, puffy clouds lightly cloaking the sunlight, spreading pink shades of orange as the dawn ended and oh God she was going to miss it so much she'd never see it again, she could see herself dying down here under incandescent bulbs and no one would care not. A. One.
"Okay." Before she could change her mind.
Her chilly fingers curled around stinging shoulders, and as the opening slid shut she withdrew and tried to contain herself.