"You hear it too, right?" Quinn breathed into her ear, and Santana heard her swallow loudly, her hand slowly sliding off of Santana's mouth and resting on her shoulder instead. "You hear it…it's trying to get in."
Santana nodded, her lips thinning together into a firm line, and she tried to take a deep breath, even as she felt goosebumps prickle up and down her skin. She tried to remember what powers, exactly, it was that zombies had. Did they have unnatural strength? Were they smart enough to find and use weapons? If she and Quinn didn't answer, would they simply go away, or would they keep pounding away until the door finally gave under?
Both hands clutched at Quinn's arm, keeping the other girl anchored to her side. She didn't want Quinn out of her immediate reach, let alone out of her sight. Thoughts stumbling and tangling with each other as she tried to come up with the best course of action to take, Santana considered each with certainty that none would work. Hide? Block the door better? Attack back?
But Quinn decided for her. Gently plucking Santana's hands off her arm, reaching to entangle her fingers with hers instead, she whispered to her again, her lips against her ear, "We need to go make sure that it can't get inside. And if it can…we need to deal with the situation."
"Are you crazy?" Santana hissed back to her, shaking her head emphatically. "Deal with the situation, how?"
At this Quinn paused, seeming stumped as to how to respond- or maybe simply not wanting to. She took a breath, then said slowly, "I guess however we need to. But we have to do something, Santana, we have to see what's going on or we'll never have a second's peace today."
"No, we need to not confirm the fact that we exist to whatever is out there," Santana argued, the hand not tightly clinched around Quinn's making dramatic gestures to back up her opinion. "What if it figures out we're in and it tries way harder to get in too? Or what if it goes to rally up its zombie buddies and brings them all back here with it, and they all start surrounding us all over, and we can't do shit to stop them from breaking in because there's too damn many?"
This wasn't an option she had seriously considered until the words left her mouth, but once they had, they were words she couldn't seem to dismiss as a valid possibility. Wasn't that something zombies did, travel in packs? God, why hadn't she watched Walking Dead or Night of the Living Dead or even Zombieland, couldn't she have at least sat through a movie Emma Stone was in, so she could know what the hell she was doing here?!
"We need to know exactly what's going on out there, Santana," Quinn countered. She squeezed her hand, but despite the tension in her back and shoulders, the glint of fear in her eyes, she kept her chin lifted, and she regarded Santana steadily. "We need to know so we can decide what we have to do. I'd rather know than lock myself in a closet and freak out wondering until we don't have any options left at all because the situation it out of our hands."
"Right, and if we KNOW the situation and it just happens to be that we're surrounded by a horde of things that want to fucking eat us alive, once we've ascertained that little piece of info, what exactly do you propose we do?" Santana snapped back at Quinn, no longer bothering to keep her voice down until Quinn gestured frantically, glaring at her and shaking her head. Santana swallowed, biting the inside of her cheeks as Quinn murmured back to her.
"I don't know, Santana, all right, I don't know. But at least we'll know that we need to decide fast."
This was hardly the sort of comforting, assertive plan of action that Santana had been hoping for. But Quinn was already walking forward, tugging Santana with her, and as much as Santana didn't want to follow, she also could think of no better plan than Quinn's to throw out at her.
The thudding noises were continuing, not rhythmic, but uneven, spaced apart. They seemed to be coming from the front of the house, and as the girls approached, Santana felt Quinn squeezing her hand back every bit as tightly as Santana was holding hers, even though the other girl said nothing to her to otherwise convey her nerves. Santana's head swiveled frequently, checking every window they passed by, but it seemed clear as they continued forward that the noises originated from the front door.
Once they reached it, they stood, shaking slightly, hands still tightly entwined, shoulders pressed together as they listened to the continued knocking at the door. Now that they were close enough they could hear scratching noises as well, as though thing outside was trying to claw its way inside if its blows to the door would not work. Santana's mouth was dry as she listened. With a burst of courage she pulled Quinn forward, standing on her toes to look through the peephole, and saw with mixed relief and dread that it was only one zombie standing outside- a man perhaps in his early thirties, no weapon in hand, ignoring the windows on either side of the house in favor of uselessly banging his fists against the door.
"It's only one," Santana reported back to Quinn still in a loud whisper, her shoulders sagging slightly as she stepped back.
Quinn too released a relieved breath, stepping back with Santana, but her relief was short lived, it seemed, for the girls could still hear the knocks, steadily falling against the front door's frame. Santana stood very still, fingers squeezing Quinn's until she could barely tell the difference between her hand and the other girl's as she tried to decide what exactly it was that they should do.
"He…he didn't see me through the keyhole," she said to Quinn with cautious optimism that she didn't truly feel. "And…and he doesn't seem to be making a dent in the door…and I don't see any weapons…do you think he's too stupid to go for the windows instead?"
She was wanting Quinn to answer in the affirmative rather than genuinely asking her opinion, but Quinn didn't oblige her.
"I think he might figure it out, even if it takes a while," Quinn whispered back to her, squeezing her hand back almost as tightly. "And I think I can't stand listening to him for as long as that might take. He's making enough noise that other zombies might hear him and come join him, San, and they might not all be as stupid as he is."
That possibility hadn't even occurred to Santana. She heard her breath escape her in a loud whoosh as she considered this, her palm beginning to sweat against Quinn's.
"You…you really think that more of them might come if they hear him?"
"Yes," Quinn said quietly, nodding. "They don't seem very bright, but if they hear noise and see motion, even stupid creatures are naturally drawn to that."
Santana processed this too, not at all liking the unspoken conclusion that Quinn was drawing up for her. If this zombie making noise was going to bring more, then it would become a much more serious problem than they were currently facing. One zombie they could handle…but a whole crowd, surrounding the house on all sides…
She shuddered, her shoulder pressing closer into Quinn's instinctively for her added warmth before she asked her, "So…what the hell are we supposed to do?"
"Kill it," was Quinn's answer, slow in coming, but sure. "We have to kill it, Santana. It's the only thing that will keep us safe."
Scoffing, Santana shot her a withering look, eyebrows raising. "Right, just kill it. And how exactly do you propose we do that, invite it inside and then stab it?"
"We wouldn't have to invite it inside," Quinn corrected. "All we have to do is open the door enough and then back inside and lock it again."
It took Santana another several minutes to attempt to process this. No matter how she turned it over in her mind, she couldn't seem to picture this without any number of catastrophic results coming into the equation in her thoughts. She shook her head, eyeing Quinn with disbelief as she voiced out loud her own visualization.
"So you think that we should open the door, beat this thing to death with some kind of weapon, pray like hell that nothing else hears and comes running or that he doesn't just knock it out or our hands and rush up and scratch or bite us and force his way in, then lock the door again and hope nothing else follows up after him? Is that your plan here?"
Quinn didn't bother to defend herself or rise to the bait of Santana's sarcastic tone. Instead, she just met her gaze with a challenging look of her own, raising an eyebrow in mirror of hers.
"Do you have a better one?"
As Quinn had no doubt intended for it to, this stopped Santana in her tracks. The truth was that she didn't. She didn't even have a plan that was equally unwelcome, except for maybe hiding back in Quinn's bedroom again and waiting to see if something or someone would break in. For a few seconds she struggled, defiant, trying to come up with something, anything that she could throw back at Quinn as a retort. But when it became clear to her that she in fact that nothing, she sighed, letting her shoulders rise and fall in a jerky shrug.
"No. I don't. So I guess we do this."
"I can do it," Quinn told her, her voice a little more gentle in tone now that Santana was conceding to her way of thinking. "Just stand back, and have my back, and we'll get this over with."
She kept hold of Santana's hand as she backed up towards the living room, her eyes scanning its interior for any potential weapons. Santana's eyes fell onto the fallen poker near the wall, still stained with Brittany's blood, and she swallowed heavily, her stomach flipping upside down. But although Quinn too looked towards it, her eyes skidded away, and she picked up instead a clean, unused second poker from its stand by the fireplace.
"Let's go," she said, but Santana heard the change in her voice, its sudden breathless quality, and when Quinn let go of her hand, Santana saw that her hand was shaking. "Come on."
She lead the way back to the front door, where the zombie's thudding blows against it could still be heard, loudly enough to grate at Santana's nerves. Santana stayed just behind Quinn, grasping hold of the knife she had darted into the kitchen to secure for herself and nervously fingering its handle. She told herself that Quinn knew what she was doing. She had to. Quinn was going to take care of this, it was going to be okay.
But as Quinn slowly approached the door, Santana could see that her hands were shaking so badly they were barely keeping their grip on the poker. Her face had gone almost pure white, her eyes large and bright in her face, and her lips were pressed together into a line so thin they nearly disappeared. As Quinn raised the poker to shoulder level, her arms seemed more unsteady than ever, and Santana's heart seized, watching her.
She was scared. Quinn was scared, and she was not in control at all. She was scared, and she might make huge mistakes because of it. She was scared, and that might mean that she would fail, and that would leave Santana all alone.
"Stop!" she blurted, and Quinn froze, almost dropping the poker with her startled response to Santana's voice. Santana gentled her tone with some effort, coming forward and resting her hand on Quinn's wrist.
"Quinn…I'll do it. Let me."
Quinn paused, looking back at her, and again Santana noted just how brightly her eyes were glinting back at her, the feelings they seemed to be just barely keeping in check that she had not noticed before. Quinn regarded her, seeming to be struggling to come to a decision, and then let her head incline in a jerky nod.
"Okay. Okay…just…be careful."
Her hands were still shaking when she passed the poker to Santana, and for the first few seconds Santana almost gave it back to her, telling her never mind, that she was backing down from her own offer. It felt strangely light in her hands, almost like nothing at all, and as she adjusted her grip, squeezing it until her knuckles went white and cracked loudly, she was aware of Quinn taking her knife in her hands and positioning herself behind her for back up. Santana tried to breathe through the anxiety now filling her chest and throat, terrified that she would give in and back away…but with one inner push of bravery she stepped forward, unlocked the door, and flung it open.
The zombie had not expected this; perhaps it did not realize that there were other people behind the door, or within the home. It stumbled back, its jaw hanging slackly, and Santana saw that one of his arms was barely attached to his body, the strong scent of blood and decay hitting her nostrils. She wanted to gag, but she steeled herself against the odor, steeled herself instead to act. Raising the poker high, she shoved it forward, aiming for the zombie's skull as she let out a loud cry of effort and aggression to drive herself.
She would have expected more force needed to pierce its skin, let alone break through its skull and into its brain, but perhaps the zombie had begun to rot enough that its skin was already soft and giving way. Whatever the case, Santana only needed to give one good shove of the poker for it to hit its mark, with the zombie collapsing in a heap on the porch. She jumped back with a disgusted gasp, pulling the poker with her as she went and nearly dropping it on the step entirely. For a few moments she stood, almost frozen in place as she stared at the figure before her, the poker loose in her grasp, but then she felt Quinn's hands at her waist, tugging her backward. She let herself be pulled inside, let the soiled poker drop to the ground right in front of the doorway as Quinn hurriedly relocked and wedged the chair back under the doorknob. She didn't realize how heavily she was breathing, how badly she was shaking, how wide her eyes were in her face until Quinn's voice registered, muffled but audible, and she felt the girl's hands on her arms, saw her face peering close to her own.
"Santana, come sit down…you need to drink something, I think, you look like you're about to faint…"
Santana let her lead her back towards the living room without quite realizing that she was following along with her, feeling lightheaded and not entirely present in the moment. She let Quinn tug her down to a seated position on her couch, and was not quite aware that Quinn had left the room until she returned with a glass of water, holding it up in front of her face. Only then did she start to feel more alert within her own body, more in tune with her surroundings. She shook her head at Quinn, batting her wrist away from her, and her face screwed up with irritation when Quinn brought the glass of water back again, silently insisting that she drink. She didn't want to drink anything, the problem wasn't that she was thirsty. The problem was that she had just deliberately stuck a poker through the skull of something that had once been a someone, that she had done it deliberately, with full intention of causing it to stop moving forever, and as this realization came over her more thoroughly, she found that she couldn't quite stop herself from starting to tremble heavily, couldn't stop her thoughts from drifting back to her father, to her mother…to Brittany.
She couldn't look at Quinn. She knew, now more than ever, why Quinn had done what she had done, that it had, as much as she hated it, been entirely necessary. But knowledge now of its necessity didn't make it any easier for her to accept what she herself had done without remembering in all too vivid visualization just how Brittany's eyes had looked when another poker had broken through her skin.
Santana's muscles jerked when Quinn's hand hesitantly touched her arm, and she pulled away from her, drawing her arms in as close against her torso as she could manage, making herself small and difficult to touch as possible. She didn't look Quinn in the eye, not wanting to see any concern for her that might linger. Instead she stepped down hard on anger and irritation, a much more comfortable emotion, and shook her head at Quinn, her voice holding a definite edge as she spoke to her.
"Stop touching me, stop hovering over me, I'm fine. Just leave me alone!"
"Santana," Quinn said, her voice quiet, but Santana couldn't stand then to hear anything like logic from her, let alone sympathy. She had to get away from it, she had to draw herself apart from it or she knew she was going to be unable to keep breathing, let alone get through the rest of her day. If she let Quinn touch her now, if she let her talk to her softly or let herself have any space at all to feel, then she would shatter, she just knew it. She would melt into a puddle of feelings, just as she had so many times the day before, and she didn't want that, she couldn't stand to let that happen, not today…not again. Didn't Quinn see that she couldn't stand to keep feeling so much, that she couldn't stand to let herself be comforted? Couldn't she see that it was taking everything she had to hold herself into one fragile piece, with a cracked and translucent shell she desperately pretended was hard and impenetrable?
"Don't touch me," she spat back out at Quinn, getting to her feet with such suddenness in motion that she knocked into Quinn's legs, almost shoving them aside so she could stand. "Just leave me alone."
Quinn didn't try to follow after her, at least not at first, as Santana strode with quick steps down the hallway, not even sure where she was going until she had already closed the bathroom door behind her. She didn't lock it; it was, in fact, her hope that Quinn would somehow magically realize that she did in fact not want to be alone, not really, that being alone meant that the barely marginal sense of safety and security she felt in her presence at times was completely missing when she couldn't see exactly where Quinn was. But her pride would not allow for her to call back to her, to admit to her that she hadn't truly meant what she had said, so instead Santana got a washcloth and soaked it with cold water, starting to wipe her face and her hands again and again until she could barely feel the texture of the cloth against her skin.
She wasn't just washing actual blood or dirt or germs that her hands' surface might presently show. She was trying to scrub from herself the memory of the poker in her hands, of the exact amount of force it had taken to drive it through the skull of what used to be another human being, but her hands couldn't seem to forget the poker's weight, the feeling of blood splattered across their skin.
She couldn't look at herself in the mirror. If she saw her eyes, reflecting all the thoughts and feelings she was trying so hard to shove down, or her chin, quivering with her effort to hold back tears, she wouldn't be able to stay even slightly composed. So she looked at her hands alone, and she ignored the fact that she could hear Quinn, shifting her weight slightly outside the bathroom door, and simply concentrated on the washing, trying to take solace in the simple task.
She knew she had been in there entirely too long to be able to reasonably explain her absence, so when Santana finally gathered herself enough to emerge, chin lifted in an effort to appear composed and even defiant, she didn't even try. Instead, she brushed back Quinn without really acknowledging her presence outside the door, making her way back to her bedroom without really knowing what it was that she intended to do there. She ignored Quinn as the other girl followed her, at least until she questioned her aloud, eyebrow raised.
"Right, so you're gonna ignore what just happened then?"
"Why not?" Santana shot back, barely sparing her a glance over her shoulder. "You do when it's you."
Making a decision for herself in that moment, as much to try to continue avoiding Quinn as because it was really what she wanted to do, she pushed back the blankets of her bed, crawling fully dressed beneath the covers. When Quinn continued to watch her, arms crossed over her chest, Santana turned her back to her, not wanting to see her lips purse up in what she could only assume was judgment.
"I'm going to sleep," she announced, even as her eyes remained open; she knew that Quinn couldn't tell that from where she stood in the doorway. "We didn't sleep for shit last night, and if we can't do anything today, I'm making up for it now."
She heard Quinn sigh, her footsteps approaching her, and then there was a dip in the mattress as Quinn sat beside her. Santana tried to continue ignoring her, but she felt herself tense, expecting Quinn's hand to touch her at any moment, maybe even to grasp her and try to pull her up. But instead she simply spoke, her voice softer than Santana had expected.
"Santana…you know that just going to sleep doesn't make any of this any less real."
"No," Santana blurted before she could quite stop herself, fiercely shaking her head and curling her knees more tightly against her chest. "But it makes reality go away for a few hours. Seems like a damn good deal to me."
She expected Quinn to argue with her, to tell her that she needed to get out of bed and start facing facts about the world as it was now. She thought that the other girl would tell her that they had to make plans, that they had to develop a course of action and carry it out. She thought Quinn would take her by the shoulders and haul her up, that another fight would break out between them that she didn't know she had the energy to take part in.
But instead, Quinn slowly pulled the covers back and slid in bed behind Santana. Instead, she lay beside her on her back, just close enough so that her shoulder touched Santana's, and although she didn't speak to her or touch her any more intimately than this, just the fact that she was so close, that Santana could hear her breathing beside her, was enough that in spite of her initial thoughts against it, she found herself drifting off into a light doze after all, her spine in physical contact with Quinn's side.