Abide with Me – Chapter 4
by danse
***
"Merlin, for God's sake, you're going to be facedown in your breakfast in a minute," Arthur snapped, rousing Merlin from a fog of drowsiness. He jerked upright, his attention slamming back to the present, and realized he'd likely spent the last several minutes staring fixedly at Arthur's nose.
He dug his spoon back into his cooling porridge.
"Honestly, did you sleep at all?"
He had, in fact, remained in the shed with Mailor until the pearly grey of dawn crept up on him. Merlin had cursed a bit and left the softly dozing Infected to stealthily make his way back up to his bed for a few hours' rest, finally bone-tired. He'd managed two hours before Arthur was banging on his door and making noise about food.
Arthur, for his part, looked maddeningly like he'd spent the whole night sleeping like a baby, the bastard. Merlin jabbed his spoon upright into his flavourless mush and watched it topple in slow-motion to clatter against the rim of the bowl.
"Oh, Merlin, eat your food," Gwen chided him.
He knew that she was being the voice of sense and reason yet again, but continued to stare and poke at it for another several minutes until his friends were finished.
"What's on for today, then?" he asked, stuffing his hands into his pockets as they strolled out of the mess hall, dodging the soldiers milling about on their duties.
"I've been asked to sort out the kitchen and organize lunch," said Gwen.
"I'm helping," Morgana said brightly.
Arthur snorted. "You can cook, can you?"
She glared back. "Well... no. But I'm a champion with a knife." Her smile was the sweetly venomous one she seemed to favour.
"Morgana can chop vegetables with the best of them," Gwen said, "it's just the mixing and cooking bit that she seems defeated by."
Morgana crossed her arms smugly, as if this settled the matter with Arthur the clear loser.
"How about you, then?" Merlin said, nudging at Arthur with his elbow.
"My father wanted to see me," he answered. "I might spend the day with him."
And so Merlin was at loose ends. He debated going back out to the shed for a moment, but in the end he went back up to his musty bedroom for a long nap, instead. At least he had plenty of sleep to catch up on; somehow being in a coma hadn't been very restful.
***
Except for being thrown out of his bed by Morgana for lunch and then Arthur for tea, Merlin was staggered to realize on the way down for breakfast the next morning that he'd slept the better part of twenty hours in the past twenty-four. At least that explained why he felt slightly more alive. Arthur, once again bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and sharp-tongued, nevertheless only had two sarcastic comments for Merlin, one of them having to do with hibernation and the other merely being about his ears.
They trailed behind the girls as they left the mess and Merlin was pleasantly distracted by the idea of a walk about the grounds, followed by another nap, when he heard a commotion from the front of the house.
When a very loud, angry and female voice cut through the din, he and Arthur shared one brief look before taking off at a run.
The tableau was surprising and yet it wasn't: Morgana was in a standoff with Sgt. Blakely and appeared to have a short knife in her hand of unknown origin, possibly the kitchen. Gwen, her braced arm cradled against her chest, stood a pace behind her, where Morgana had likely shoved her out of the way. Gwen looked nearly as angry as Morgana, and clearly would not be the one holding her back from the murder she was about to attempt. Three other marines were ranged around Blakely, their faces unreadable.
"I am going to cut them off and stuff them down your fucking throat, and then I am going to kill you," Morgana hissed, shifting from foot to foot as she stared down Blakely, who unfortunately did not look a fraction as scared as Merlin would be in his place.
The sergeant smiled. "I like them feisty. I'll have you first, then."
Morgana made to lunge, bringing the knife in low in a scarily capable manner, and fucking Blakely even moved back a step, but two marines leapt forward and seized her arms, taking away her knife and forcing her to her knees. The third grabbed Gwen and Blakely stepped up close to Morgana with a smile on his face, even as she showed him all her teeth, and it was going to end so very terribly.
Merlin and Arthur rushed in to intervene and even as he ran for the man holding Gwen by her good arm, Merlin suddenly realized they had just picked a fight with Royal Marines who outnumbered them two to one, that he was unarmed, and that any muscle mass he had once possessed was long since deteriorated. Arthur, at least, had a better-than-nil chance of survival in this.
Two good things happened in the next minute: first, the man he was attempting to enter single combat with had to release Gwen to hit him, which allowed her to slip away, hopefully to somewhere very safe.
Second, another marine had appeared in the fray, and since he was shouting at Blakely, he was likely on Merlin's side. This, he thought as he dodged a punch, probably evened things up considerably.
Then Merlin's opponent, who apparently was a private named White, hit him in the jaw and everything went downhill from there.
Merlin staggered back, reeling from the pain, and tried not to fall over. White swung at him again and he ducked, taking a blow meant for his stomach on the shoulder instead, which still hurt like hell but he stayed on his feet. Instincts from a brief period as a teenage hoodlum kicked in and he landed two fast punches on White's stomach and the side of his ribcage before White, who had nearly 100 pounds on Merlin, caught his fist and squeezed, using it to push him to his knees as the pressure on his fingers became white-hot pain. Merlin gritted his teeth.
Morgana, who had apparently been able to escape her captors and also was not possessed of the good sense to run like hell, appeared behind White, grabbed his ear, and twisted hard with a look of malice on her face, until he cried out and released his grip on Merlin. Merlin decided that fighting with honour was right out the window and dove on White, taking advantage of his distraction to knock him flat onto his back, pin his arms under his knees, and start beating him round the head before he had time to react or fight back.
Morgana ran back to Arthur and Merlin looked up from his ministrations long enough to see that Arthur and the nice marine had knocked one of Morgana's assailants unconscious and were now brawling with Blakely and the other one. Blakely landed a punch on Arthur that knocked him several steps backwards, Merlin winced in sympathy, and then suddenly White had pulled an arm from under Merlin's knee and seized him round the neck, choking him.
Spots were blooming in his vision when Maj. Penn's strident voice cut through the fight, rendering everyone motionless.
"Blakely! Lott! What is the meaning of this?"
Merlin, wheezing, turned to face Penn. Their helper—Lott, was it?—stood at attention along with the other three marines who were still conscious. The fourth, damn him, seemed to be coming around as well.
"Sir," said . Lott, facing straight ahead and bleeding freely from a split lip, "the sergeant and these three privates were harassing—" He was cut off by Uther's imperiously raised hand.
"Sgt. Blakely," he said instead, "what happened here?"
Blakely gave Merlin, Arthur, and even the still-murderous Morgana a glare as he replied. "They attacked us unprovoked, sir."
Morgana made a choked-off noise and Arthur laid a hand on her arm. "Father," he started, but Uther silenced him as well.
"Where is the other one?" he asked, and more marines who had appeared on the scene pointed behind Merlin. He turned slowly, dreading, and there was Gwen, held between two more soldiers. Half of her hair had been knocked from its ponytail and hung in her face.
The major nodded to himself. "Sergeant."
Blakely stood at attention.
"Arrest these two and Lott." He gestured at Arthur, who stared at him in shock, and Merlin, who might have gasped if he could breathe without pain in his throat.
Morgana clenched her hands into fists, her face going stony, but she was seized again before she could move, and suddenly there were guns pointed at Merlin and urging him up to stand next to Arthur and . Lott. Moore, who was apparently a Corporal, and Blakely, who had a possibly-permanent smug look on his face now, stayed with them, guns trained, as everyone else filed away in a startlingly quiet manner, dragging Gwen and Morgana off with them to who knew where.
The major strolled over to them with a thoughtful look on his face.
"I promised them women," he said.
***
They had been left in a demolished toilet, Merlin and Lott chained to the enormous radiator along one wall and Arthur to a naked pipe that ran from floor to ceiling in the far corner. After the first hour, they'd all slumped to the floor and gotten as comfortable as they could.
"They're all fucking mad," Lott moaned. "All of them. Especially the major. The other sergeant, he blew his brains out a week ago, you know."
"How do you know you're not the mad one?" Arthur asked in a bored tone that made the hair stand up on Merlin's arms.
Lott glared. "Your own father's chained you up like a criminal for defending a woman from a bunch of animals, and you'll be dragged out and shot alongside us, as if you were the animal. You tell me if I'm the mad one."
Merlin snatched his head up from the reverie he'd fallen into.
"Wait. Shot? Don't you lot do court-martials or something? You don't execute people anymore, surely." His voice rose a bit high by the end, but he was probably allowed some hysteria after the week he'd had, and being chained to a radiator.
Lott leaned back as if he were in a soft chair and not sitting on bits of broken tile.
"They've been shooting deserters and criminals since the end of the first week," he said dully. "There's a pile in the forest. You saw the bodies at the roadblock, didn't you?"
Merlin shuddered and Arthur looked pale.
"We'll be taken out at gunpoint and shot like dogs. And your friends...." He didn't finish that thought and Merlin was glad for it.
Lott laughed, without a trace of humour.
"Penn thinks there's a way out of this for any of us. That we'll get through somehow, that it's global. There's no fucking way. No one's come to help this country and you know why?" He shifted, rattling bits of tile. "They've fucking quarantined us. A little island: what else would they do? They're waiting for us all to die."
"Perhaps," Arthur said finally, "but that's no reason for us to die like this or for Gwen and Morgana to suffer. How can we get out of this?" He asked Lott.
Lott shrugged. "It'll probably be Blakely and Moore, maybe one more. We might be three against two, but we're in restraints and they'll be armed."
Arthur frowned thoughtfully. Merlin shifted in his seat, trying to ease the chafing of his wrists in the handcuffs. It might be wise to prepare for death, he thought.
He had about half an hour to do so, in the silence of their makeshift cell, before Blakely and Moore predictably trooped in, their rifles at the ready. It was, he thought, not enough time to do it properly. Blakely stood watching them, finger on the trigger, while Moore freed them all from the fixtures and then there was a gun barrel digging in between Merlin's shoulder blades as they were herded into the corridor like sheep, their hands bound in front of them.
Jab, jab, jab went Moore's gun in his back as they went down the stairs, out into the overcast and cooling outdoors, past the car still parked in the drive and onto a distressingly well-worn path into the forest. They rounded a bend and there was the scatter of fly-ridden, rotting corpses Lott had described, another twenty yards away. Already at this distance, the stench of death coated Merlin's throat and he gagged, just a little.
Arthur and Lott were right in front of him, and he looked up from his stumbling feet in time to see them nod at each other, just slightly. He raised an eyebrow; what was that about?
Blakely called a halt when they reached the pile. "Turn around," he said. "I want to see your faces when I stick you like pigs."
"A bayonet?" Lott cried. "You don't even have the decency to shoot me, you fucking prick?"
"I'm your superior officer," Blakely said.
"Suck my cock," Lott spat.
As they turned, Arthur caught Merlin's eye and raised an eyebrow, probably trying to give him a significant look. Merlin didn't get it, and raised an eyebrow back, hoping his face showed confusion and not some accidental take on, 'yes, I understand completely.' From Arthur's eye-roll, he succeeded in that.
Merlin switched his attention to Moore and Blakely just in time to see Lott raise his arms, handcuffs rattling, and run screaming at them both, spittle flying like a madman. They both stared at him, raising their weapons.
"Merlin, run!" Arthur shouted, before running for the trees.
Merlin looked round quickly and dove into a mass of bodies, holding his breath and praying that no one had seen him and he wouldn't vomit. Lott's scream of rage turned to one of pain as the guns were fired repeatedly. Then there was quiet. Merlin strained to use his peripheral vision and saw Blakely whirl on Moore.
"They've fucking run off now, you stupid cunt! I can't believe you let Lott outsmart you!" he shouted.
"Should we find them?"
"Yes, we should bloody find them! The major will have us out here in cuffs next if we don't!"
They both turned away and Merlin seized his chance to roll to his feet and slip into the woods. He moved quickly and quietly over the wet leaves and less than a minute later, heard Blakely order Moore to search the corpses, which was followed by a barrage of gunfire, likely aimed at the corpses.
Merlin kept moving, aiming deeper into the trees as he made his way around to where Arthur had gone. They met in front of a mossy, stone wall. It was crowned with razor wire.
"Still in one piece," Arthur whispered. "Not bad for an idiot." He nodded upwards. "Over we go."
Merlin looked up. "You go first."
Arthur rolled his eyes and reached up the wall, stretching the chain of his handcuffs as he climbed the juts of stone like a monkey. At the top, he paused, his hands gripping spaces on the top, and then did a neat flip that launched him over the deadly-looking coils. There was a thump on the other side. Merlin sighed and moved over to where Arthur had climbed up.
The ascent was thankfully nearly as easy as Arthur had made it look, if he tried to follow the same path. When he reached the top, though, it was trickier. Frankly, he didn't think he could execute that tidy flip without leaving half of his skin and organs decorating the top of the wall. Finally, with some manoeuvring, he got one foot up alongside his hands and leaped over the shiny coils, muttering a prayer to anyone listening as he did so. His arm caught a barb on the downward side, rending the thick fabric of his jumper and slicing his skin so neatly that he felt nothing for several seconds. But then he was hanging on the outside of the wall by a sleeve that refused to tear all the way, dangling two feet above the ground with both arms caught above his head, with blood running ticklishly down to his armpit as the pain set in.
Arthur sauntered over and looked up at him with his arms crossed over his chest.
"Merlin."
"Shut the fuck up and help me down; I'm bleeding."
Surprisingly, Arthur did. Merlin's sleeve bunched up and caught on the handcuff (which was digging into his skin and pressing against the bones of his hand in a horrible way), so it had to be torn lengthwise from the razor wire tears, and then Arthur was forced to rip the entire jumper off to free Merlin.
Merlin had never been gladder to touch the ground. He rubbed at his wrists as the cuffs slid back to a less uncomfortable position. There was blood all over the fucking place, and Arthur swooped in to seize his arm before he could so much as flinch.
"I don't think we'll have to amputate," he said after a moment, holding the arm up to the grey daylight, and Merlin wasn't sure if that was a joke or not.
"Hang on," Arthur said, and then ripped the sleeves clean off his own button-down shirt, awkwardly tearing them into strips to get past his cuffs and then wrapping them around Merlin's arm. "It's not clean, but it should keep you from leaving a trail of blood," he said, patting Merlin's shoulder. "Let's go."
And with that, Arthur trooped off away from the wall and into the woods.
Merlin stared after him a moment in pure disbelief. There were Infected in those woods. And the sky was turning the colour of a bruise; it was going to piss an unholy amount of rain. The Infected were going to come out of the woods and murder them horribly. Arthur ignored Merlin's unvoiced but perfectly sane arguments and kept stumbling stubbornly through the trees, pushing aside leafy branches with both hands as he went. Merlin sighed and followed.
"Where are we going, anyway?" he asked when he'd finally caught up, narrowly avoiding tripping headlong into the dirt a few times on the way.
"Back to the roadblock," Arthur answered. "There should be something there to get the cuffs off with."
"We're going back for Morgana and Gwen, right?"
"Of course we're fucking going back. But we need a plan, first, or we'll just have put off our deaths a bit."
Merlin was silent for a moment. "Lott's dead," he said finally.
"Yes." And there was a voice devoid of emotion.
"Did you two plan for that to happen?" Merlin asked, remembering their silent conversation of nods.
"He chose to sacrifice himself for the cause, yes. It won't have been in vain."
Probably, Merlin thought, Lott's choice to die had been at least slightly selfish. He didn't know, of course, but he thought it would be difficult to join a revolt against your own unit, against men you'd risked your life with. That, and Lott had been slightly madder than he'd claimed, but Merlin was going to keep that thought to himself.
They walked on, Merlin jumping at every shadow and rustle of leaves that didn't sound like them, but no Infected showed themselves, even as the rain started, gently for now. Eventually they stumbled out onto a road and discovered that they were several hundred yards down the road from the roadblock. They made for it, and Merlin noticed that they were sticking close together as if by unspoken agreement, and he decided that was alright with him as he scanned the tree line for movement.
The shack door stood open as it had been left, but Merlin couldn't stop himself from running over to check for Infected inside, anyway. It was empty, so if any were lurking, they had to be in the tank or in the trees. He walked back over to Arthur, who was kicking at rocks with a look of concentration.
"What--" he started, but Arthur picked up a large stone with both hands and pointed with his boot at another on the ground.
"Lay your handcuff chain across that," he said.
Merlin should have asked why, but he didn't, and then he was rapidly pulling his head back as Arthur brought his stone down rather hard at Merlin's hands, and Merlin had to force himself not to yank his hands away reflexively as the stone met chain and stone with a noise that made the hair stand up on his arms.
A few more swings and several deep breaths from Merlin later, Arthur had managed to shatter one of the links, freeing one cuff from the other. Merlin sat back on his heels, pulling his hands apart and swinging the ends of chain around.
"Bit too bondage for me, I think," he said thoughtfully.
Arthur rolled his eyes and set down his stone to wipe sweat and rainwater from his brow.
"Okay, your turn," he said after a moment, laying the chain of his handcuffs carefully across the wet and battered rock on the ground. "Try not to miss."
"Thanks much, you twat," Merlin muttered, grabbing the hammering rock and raising it up several inches above his target, closing one eye to aim.
The rock slipped a surprising amount when he brought it down, and although it hit the chain, it also bounced off wildly and he nearly hit his own knee. Arthur snorted, and Merlin spared him a glare before trying again, more carefully.
It took more hammering to break Arthur's cuffs than it had Merlin's, which Arthur pointedly did not comment on and which Merlin was willing to attribute to his own cuffs having been of inferior quality. At any rate, they were both freed now and the rain was beginning to show more promise of the torrential downpour Merlin was expecting, so they ducked into the shack to work out a plan. The shack smelled vile, possibly because of the body still on the roof, so Merlin hoped their plan would come together quickly.
"If we go in as we are, we won't last five minutes," Arthur said, "even if Blakely has reported us dead. We need some kind of distraction to allow us to go find the girls and free them from wherever they're being held."
Merlin nodded; knowing Morgana, wherever they were being kept was well-fortified and utterly free of anything that could be used as a weapon.
"I'm open to suggestions," Arthur complained.
Merlin widened his eyes. "What, Rambo needs help now? You haven't got a secret weapon cache round here anywhere?"
He got the vee for that one, deservedly, and settled down to think. The stench in the shack seemed to get worse as the rain came down harder.
Then he smiled, slowly, enjoying the slightly worried look that appeared on Arthur's face at that.
"I think," he said, "I have it."
"What?"
Merlin shook his head; he dared not explain. "You go in and find Morgana and Gwen and leave the distraction to me."
Arthur stared at him. "What the fuck are you planning? You will not be getting yourself killed, after all this!"
The anger was frankly flattering. "I'll be fine," he said. "Just get yourself a good weapon and get in and out as fast as you can, and everything will be fine. If you can find some keys for a getaway vehicle, too, that wouldn't go amiss."
"Starting a shopping list, are you," Arthur muttered, but he was already going back outside, so Merlin allowed himself a brief, smug expression as he followed Arthur back into the rain.
Merlin found a pry bar and Arthur a rusty tire iron to serve as weapons and the trip back through the woods to the house seemed much faster, and although Merlin spent the whole journey clutching his pry bar and waiting for an Infected to run screaming at him from behind a large tree, none appeared. At the wall again (a different stretch, for there was no jumper to be seen hanging from the wire at the top), they split up with only a nod, Arthur making for the front of the house as Merlin ran toward the back garden.
He thanked whoever might be listening for the rain as he climbed the wall again and began flattening the wire with his pry bar, because it was now coming down so hard that he would never be seen from a distance, even if someone were looking for him. It was, however, making his grip terrible, and he nearly plummeted to the ground while trying to boost himself up to the top of the wall; he saved himself with his torn and bloody arm and was rewarded with a jolt of searing pain.
The ground on the other side was soft mud and he rolled on impact, coming up a uniform shade of brown. Merlin shook his dripping fringe out of his eyes and looked round; he was, thankfully, already in the back garden and no one was there to shoot at him. He made for the shed at a jog, the mud sucking at his trainers. Mailor hissed softly at him as he opened the door and stepped inside, leaving a wet trail behind him.
He raised a palm and the Infected marine calmed, staring tranquilly at him as he edged closer, holding his weapon in a death grip.
"Easy there," he crooned, trying to forget that he was talking to a zombie as one talks to a skittish horse. "Easy...."
He slipped around behind Mailor, to the scraped and bloodstained rear wall where his chain was bracketed to cement, and took the pry bar in both hands. Steadfastly projecting calm, steady thoughts, Merlin stared at Mailor with his iron bludgeon held in front of him, waiting for a sign that the Infected was no longer under his thrall. Mailor kept staring, his eyelids drooping, and so Merlin took a deep breath and turned away to pry the chain loose from the wall.
After a few moments' struggle, he broke a rusty link near the join and Mailor jerked as the end of his chain hit the floor, unused to the slack. He looked at Merlin, his nostrils flaring, and Merlin hurriedly put a palm up again.
"Go," he said.
Mailor went.
*****