Peter snuck back into her office after the others had retired to their own rooms for the night, the soft rapping of his knuckles against the door putting her on edge for reasons she couldn't place or completely ignored. She had the bed made up: futon spread out and taking up most of the space of her sparse office, fluffing her pillow to disguise the fact that her hands were delicately shaking. When Peter let himself in, she noticed he looked just as unsure as she felt, closing the door behind him and looking expectantly expectant, his little pillow mashed in his fist like he'd just robbed a bank.
"Change your mind yet?" he asked as a joke, quietly letting her off the hook if she wanted one. His question burned like a challenge and she was never one to shrink back from any dare, let alone one from Peter Bishop. So in her resolve she flattened her hand into her pillow with the ridiculous pink cover on it, crooked an eyebrow and told him to move his ass already as she crawled under the blankets herself.
Peter watched her burrow under the blanket and into the bed and was unsure for a moment what she wanted him to do. When her ruffled blonde head popped out of the top with the same smirk plastered to her face, he finally made his move and opened the other side of the blanket and shoved himself to squish in beside her.
"Christ, your feet are like ice," he muttered when she brushed against him as they settled. He was repaid with a less than subtle push of her foot against the back of one calf and he wondered how she was able to regulate body heat at all.
"You could always go back to your little couch if it's a problem," she answered sweetly; the lingering frost of her feet against the heated skin of his legs brought the feeling of triumph when he hissed in response. He was warm, and she let herself scrunch in behind him to steal some of his heat, feeling the little thrill of victory when he let her with a puff of a sigh and she decided that maybe this would be okay after all.
"You're lucky that a college futon is still more comfortable than spending a night with Walter." He yawned into his pillow as her skin started to thaw against his back. He felt a little giddy, her breath soft and even against the back of his neck as she fell asleep, and it took a while for him to relax enough for him to drift off to sleep next to her.
Peter had installed the trips to the sirens exactly six weeks between when Olivia blew the face off the first shapeshifter to the military evacuation of Massachusetts and they had decidedly ignored. The sensors covered the outer perimeter of the university and gave them an early warning should danger ever arise, Peter working for two days straight scavenging enough parts from abandoned electronic stores, it ain't looting if we're the last people on earth, he had told Olivia when he emerged from an old Best Buy with each arm wrapped over pillaged spools of wiring and metal.
Astrid demonstrated her extraordinary value by helping him stream enough wiring to cover the necessities of their "base" with them all ending in a giant mess connected to monitors that somehow worked. It helped them all sleep a little better knowing that they'd at least get the heads up if they were about to be infiltrated by flesh-eating zombies. Peter had only managed to install the cameras a few weeks ago when the Resisters started to become more of a growing epidemic than the actual epidemic, growing braver and more ruthless by circumstance. But none of it really summed up to much more than one or two looters poking their noses in, seeing the wall of dead bodies and making their way out again in equal speed.
Tonight, however the sirens were damn useful.
The screeching wakes Olivia first, Peter second as the feed blares over the deathly silence of the lab with painful urgency. Olivia's up like a fireman sniffing out smoke, throwing on clothes before Peter's conscious enough to roll himself out of bed behind her, muttering under his breath as he too dresses.
"Probably just another false trip," he grunts as he slides into the discarded pair of jeans that are crumbled on the floor. He looks to Olivia as she stalks around the room and the urgent nature of her actions makes his heart crank up in speed.
"What?" he asks as he stuffs his head into a long sleeved shirt. The door's thrown open and he has to race after her to keep up with her strides.
Astrid and Walter are already at the camera monitors when they make it out of the office, Walter looking a bit ruffled and Astrid's hands disappearing into the depths of her hair to block the blaring signal. Astrid's eyebrows arch as she watches them emerge together; Walter doesn't notice at all.
"What is it?" Olivia asks as she shoves her way through to watch the grainy images flickering between the grounds outside, little snaps of each side of the exterior of the university. Peter taps some buttons on a keyboard and the noise cuts off, leaving the same still silence they had just a few minutes before.
"Anything?" he asks as they all stare into the monitors like they might sprout grass. Olivia's head shakes, eyes squinting as she tries to see anything beyond the blacks and grays that appear utterly calm.
Peter massages the tight muscles in his neck, already halfway back to Olivia's room so he can fall face first back into bed.
"There is it," Astrid's voice breaks the silence, pointing a finger to the little moving blurb on the screen. "It's on the East side." The image she points at is that of a man: the shapeshifter is fat, squat and round; barely a blip on the bottommost of the camera footage.
It wanders idly into focus, its foot dragging behind it uselessly and half its face missing as it comes fully into screen. Olivia's stomach tightens as Peter's relaxes, it wasn't the first time they'd had a lost zombie. He bumps his way back into the crowd to look.
"Wait," Astrid says, dropping her eyes to another screen, "there's more."
The screen above shows two more shapeshifters wandering onto the screen. One's following the other as they push their way toward the landscape of Harvard. After them, two more appear, one missing an arm as they scrape along.
"They're traveling together," Astrid murmurs, "how is that possible?" They all look to Walter with the same question-mark face.
"Theoretically, it's not. It must be coincidence." Walter says as his eyes squint against the warbling images on the screen; face brightened by the bright white of the flickering images, looking ghost like in his stillness.
"Can they get in?" Olivia turns to Peter, her voice hushed ike she's afraid that the bodies outside might hear them.
"They don't know what they're looking for." Peter answers though he's barely convincing himself. It's unnerving to watch; bodies who had lives and families and friend all walking along, changed by forces beyond their control making them...this.
"So sad," Astrid says, tuning her uncanny frequency to what they're all not saying.
They're all transfixed by the monitors, allowing it to fill the lab with the glow.
"This is our chance!" Walter exclaims suddenly, catching them all off guard.
"Walter?" Olivia asks a million questions in just his name.
"To capture one," Walter explains as he stalks the lab in his ratty bathrobe and slippered feet, "Peter, we must act quickly."
Twenty-five minutes later Peter and Olivia are pressed against the Wall of Death, the putrid smell of bodies sticking to the fibers of Olivia's hair; the dog catching pole Astrid handmade from PVC pipe and rope looped under Peter's armpit and they're at the ready in the middle of dead night. Olivia feels little security in the pipe and crowbar they have stashed in the waist of their pants, missing the weight of her gun at her hip.
"Have I ever mentioned how I never liked the purple?" Peter huffs as he tightens the knot turning the rope into a noose. Olivia's almost forgotten that the night was anything other than the violet color. They're both clad in as much black as they owned; crouching low and using the wall as a barrier from the listless bodies wandering the grounds. The shapeshifter with the missing arm has broken off from the others; following the length of the wall they're behind, little tuffs of hair hanging loose against skull as he grinds out his steps.
Peter really wishes he were back in bed, even if it was the small cramped futon that he shared with Olivia. He lets himself drift back to the last few days; the heat of her back against his chest, the cold of her feet against the inside of his calves.
"Did it use to be human?" Olivia peers through the darkness, looking for any sign she might recognize. They all look alike. This one's wearing a denim vest stained a dark tar color probably from however it lost its arm.
"Only one way to find out," Peter says conversationally as he pulls out the army blade from inside the pocket to his coat. He holds the dog pole and the butt end of the knife both out to Olivia.
"Lady's choice."
She deliberates for a moment, hand hovering over her options, finally opting to take the dog rope and leaves the blade to Peter.
"Fair enough," he says as he flips the knife to catch the hilt and Olivia has to suppress the eye roll. He pushes back to sit purposely on his haunches to try to get into a frame of mind of kidnapping a fucking zombie.
"When it gets close enough, I'll swipe you hook." He feels crazy, this is crazy, they both know. But with little options, he's not planning on returning to the lab empty handed to do this again.
The night erupts with the pitch of his whistle; two fingers wedged in Peter's mouth and the thing twists its head in their direction, hungry eyes sparking to life as it sees Peter stand from his hiding place. It moves quickly enough that Olivia has to submerge the icy urge to retreat, or to shoot the damn thing, stifling it down and readying the rope and holding her breath as it swings its limbs toward the fresh meat of Peter's face.
"Ready," Peter grinds out to Olivia, the balls of his feet on fire, "on three."
"I'm not trusting any more of your countdowns." Olivia hisses as the shifter's smell catches her; whatever it was, it's been dead for a while. The smell forces itself down her throat and attempts to take her stomach out her mouth.
Peter spares her a sideways smirk, giving her a quick tilt of his head before his arm swoops through the air and into the chest of the body, a flash of red spurting down the already soiled vest. Peter's adrenaline spikes like he just chewed through straight espresso, the knife catching on the denim, the skin underneath giving easily.
"GO!" Peter yells as the body squeals, swiping its single feral arm toward Peter as more blood trickles down its vest. Olivia wrenches the rope around its neck, her body weight back on her heels as she pulls hard despite the angry curl from the one-armed and very pissed off zombie. The PVC pipe slips a little from her grasp as the shifter changes directions, focusing its attention to the person holding the noose around its neck snarling back at them viciously.
Olivia's thankful that Astrid's pipe had enough length on it to keep the shifter's stink far enough away.
Peter makes a little whooping noise at Olivia's success: the euphoric feeling that maybe this would be easier than they thought sparks at his veins and he's delirious. Peter reaches out to help steady the pipe, his other hand stretched around the dagger at the thing's neck, his smile split open from ear to ear.
The wall of stacked bodies is awkward, waist-high and making it infinitely more difficult to leverage than Olivia and Peter had anticipated. The denim-vested zombie suddenly stops thrashing does something neither of them had experience before: opening its mouth letting a loud and feral wail that echoes in the darkness and everything freezes as they watch. It's loud; too loud. The wave of confidence Peter had up until now crackles.
"What was that?" Olivia asks before her boots slips as the shifter propels itself backward, nearly taking her over the wall before Peter's able to fist enough fabric from the front of her jacket to keep her rooted in place.
"You used to be a lot more solid," Peter grunts as he nearly dislocates his arm hauling her backward. He's still got his left hand fixed with the blade, taking little swipes at the shifter when it gets too close; drawing a new screech each time he does.
"And this was supposed to be easy." Olivia shouts back, sweat stinging her eyes as the body continues thrashing against their combined weight. It pulls back again viciously and Peter's distracted by the new body shuffling its way a few yards away and he loses his grip on the pipe.
The distraction is enough for the zombie to gain enough leverage to pull itself back again, Peter's shifted focus to the now three new shifters making their way toward them and his knees hit the barricade before he can catch himself from being wrenched forward, taking the bodies with them as they fall.
Olivia saw they were losing ground, ready enough to cut ties and get the hell back inside the safety of the lab. She didn't noticed the new mass of shifters closing in until too late, riding the tidal wave of decaying bodies down with Peter and she loses her grip on the pole all together when Peter abandons his hold.
She's for a moment disoriented by the fact that she was: one, rolling in decomposing body parts, and two, that when looking up there are at least twenty more shapeshifters appearing over the outskirts of the perimeter that she hadn't noticed before.
"Not good," Peter mutters as he attempts to find solid enough ground to push himself up, fingers digging into the soft flesh on faceless bodies. He'd managed enough to hold tight to the blade as he fell, the crowbar digging painfully into his back but it's all lost to the dizzying terror now cranking in his chest. The zombie they captured now freed and staggering back toward them, the noose and PVC pipe hanging down its front like an outrageously oversized tie.
"Not good," Peter repeats, his voice rising pitch as he grabs Olivia by the scruff of her neck to haul her up too, both slipping and stepping across more bodies that keep tumbling over to put distance between the non-dead bodies that have spotted them.
Their caught shifter gets close enough to reach an arm toward Peter's throat and he's barely able to twist enough to swipe its hand with the blade, causing another howl and the rest of the shifters that hadn't yet notice them do now.
"Fuck!" Olivia shouts, her pipe feeling about as helpful as a popsicle stick and she follows Peter's dead sprint; racing to the entrance of the lab with her blood pounding loudly in her ears as they attempt to outrace the undead.
Peter shimmies the crowbar from his belt and swings it wildly at a shifter with a young girl's face, cracking through skull when it gets too close, crumpling silently under contact and is instantly crushed under the feet from the others trampling over her to get to them.
Olivia makes it to the door first, running so fast that she's pretty sure she would have gone straight through the brick if she hadn't stomped on the brakes at the last minute; prying open the barrier with strength she didn't think she had left. She's a rubber band that's close to snapping, the pounding in her ears a ringing viciously as she screams for Peter to hurry the hell up, throwing her shoulder into the heavy wood frame to scrape it another few inches wide. She's halfway into the hallway and waiting with every nerve on fire for Peter.
"Let's go!" She thunders as he takes another backward swing to catch another one in the chest, barely slowing it down before he's back to running. She's filled to the brink with horrible pressure, her head a tight squeeze; focusing on Peter's hard steps as he makes his way back to her, outlined in the violent purple light of night, shapeshifter after shapeshifter clumsily pouring through the breach of the fallen wall.
The poundings so fierce that her vision blots the briefest of moments, the quick flashbulb of a camera that blinds her even as she squeezes them shut to sag against the pallet.
When she can finally open them again she finds Peter red faced as he shouts at her, arms waving madly as he runs at her but she can't hear him over the commotion and the thumping of the rushing blood inside her skull.
"TURN YOUR GODDAMNED HEAD-" she catches but it's too late, she's been so focused on Peter that she's completely forgotten about her surroundings, missing the fat shapeshifter that's barely a foot behind her and she somehow she recognizes it from the camera, its face descending toward her and the shock blooms tightly in her chest.
There's a pop behind her eyes that goes off like a shotgun and her ears roar with the wave of churning pain in her head. and she can barely keep herself upright. She's unable to see anything except the same blinding light over the vicious pull of heat from her chest and the sound of Peter's startled cry mixed with the smell of burnt hair. Something rams hard into her side, pushing her and the she pops again, this time the shock isn't so intense and she lets the pain ripple its way through her; out of her and she blindly hopes it's enough to kill her quickly. She hears another sound but it is worlds away, a faint echo and then everything goes black.