Medusa sat with her, quietly, as she finished up cooking the food and tried to compose herself. He broke into a few small coughing fits, and grimaced through whatever black gunk they brought up, but in general it seemed the expectorant had done its job: The cough was improving, and being useful did always make her feel better. She passed him the food when it was cool enough, and he thanked her and ate very clumsily with a spoon. Her mind wandered a bit as she calmed.
'Medusa' was a good name, but would the correct masculine form for such a name be something like 'Medusus?' Or just 'Medus'? The -a ending was feminine in Latin, but only for certain word groups. What was the declension of Medusa? Was it of Greek or Latin origin? Once upon a time, Google would have quickly solved this problem for her. Alas. After a moment's thought, though, she recalled that Medusa-the-Smoker lived in a library, and that libraries were filled with books, books about tiny computers and books about Latin. And now that she felt a little better about Medusa's existence, surely some of those books could reveal to her the mysteries of turning-feminine-Latin-names-masculine to her. Well, that was something to do one day if she should ever become bored.
"Do you know your name?" she asked him after a bit.
"No." He shook his head, and with it his mantle of tentacles. The damage the Green Flu had done to his head was the only reason he had enough apertures for those tongues to exit without actually blocking his mouth; which, consequentially, was the only reason he could talk. "Skill came back, not memory."
"I figured," she sighed. "I guess it doesn't matter, anyway." Being comforted by an awkward Smoker who had apparently sworn off human-nomming for the foreseeable future had growing from alien to endearing, and maybe she really would survive the shock of it. It seemed he wanted something of her—perhaps just to talk? If that was the case, she could help. "Can I ask you some questions?"
"Yes. Can I ask you?"
She nodded. "Yeah. You can go first." He hesitated, and she tilted her head. "Need to use big sentences?" His tentacles all coiled as if surprised or offended. She laughed. "I'm sorry, that was mean of me. But I get to practice talking to Snickers, at least. You take all the time you need."
"'Snickers?' This is what you call your... friend?" She nodded. "He does not eat you either. This is odd?"
"We've been together almost from the beginning of the epidemic. I didn't have very good survival skills, and he was infected but very weak and almost dead. We were lucky we found one another. We wouldn't have made it alone. We are particularly odd in that we travel together. Before meeting you, Snickers was the only other friendly zombie I'd ever heard of."
Medusa stared at her for a moment. Well, he always stared, but she was starting to translate tentacle-to-hypothetical-facial-expression, and it was easier to just read him and not to track each little twitch, flinch, curl, and wave. "You call me a zombie?"
"Your... core temperature is rather lukewarm, you are carnivorous, and you bleed green and black."
Medusa considered this. "That is like a zombie," he admitted.
"Well, no. Zombies are unintelligent, soulless, and eat people, and you are cute, clever, and page through childrens' encyclopedias, so I don't deserve any moral high-horse, and I ought to treat you as human." She stretched up to ruffle what remained of his hair. He flinched a little, but then went still. "Ah... that was one of my questions. Do... do I not look human to you?"
"It is the smell," he answered automatically, as if he had been thinking about it. "It brings adrenaline. Fear, hunger, anger, escape, rivalry, hate. Survival feelings. You are... danger... or... edible... or... something. Something that must be resolved fast." He cocked his head to the side. "The biting one—your 'Snickers'—he must be desensitized to it. He acts like it is not there. If you see through it, you are human."
"It bothers you?" It was sort of disconcerting to sit next to someone who admitted to feeling wild and primitive cannibalistic urges.
"I am cowardly. I fear things. I fear small spaces. I fear being low, on the ground." As he explained this, she came to realize why he'd been terrified of her in the stairway. If flat spaces scared him, why had he repeatedly made the journey on foot to find her? "You have seen... the five? The five biters."
He was talking about the newcomer pack of hunters. "Yeah. I wanted to ask you a question about them, actually. Do they—things like Snickers—have some kind of language? Do they talk to eachother, or... can you understand him at all?"
Medusa straightened a little, though of course his face never changed in expression. "... Yes and no..." he answered slowly. "It is not language, or complex. It is... signals. 'Keep back.' 'Attack.' 'This is mine.' 'Day is coming.' 'Hungry.'" Medusa looked to her. "I have not let them see me."
"You're afraid of them."
"So many! Together? I did not know what to do. If they hunt me, they can corner me. The... tongues..." He tilted his head back and forth. "They gain momentum the farther they go. They do not flex and coil well until extended. I need range. I need a wall, but they can climb walls. I can try to kill them one at a time, but if I fail one grab, they will all come. I..."
"You came to me for protection in numbers?"
A loud thud and a clatter of claws upon the window made both of them jump and, it seemed, their survival instincts were about equally honed; Medusa had let a few tongues slip out for combat, and she had raised her rifle. But then she saw it was Snickers who was entering through the apartment window; and that he was absolutely soaked from top to bottom and seemed utterly put-out.
"What happened?" she burst in relief and dismay.
He paused, one claw raised, the other still on the sill. An annoyed expression peeled open into a sharp-toothed rattle of hostility. He entered the room, croaking, homing in on the intruding Smoker.
"Wait!" she interceded, stepping between him and a retreating Medusa. "Wait, wait, wait, he's not hurting anyone! He wants to help-"
Snickers spat, straightened up, and looked between the two of them. He jerked back an inch with an incredulous yowl, looked rapidly between them again, and then sprinted and lunged at Medusa with a howl! She staggered to the side to tackle him as he jumped, wrapping her arms about his waist.
"Snickers!"
He wormed free, hissed at her, and shrieked at Medusa so loud as to leave the eardrums throbbing. He tried to lunge again. She once more got between them, and this time she smacked the Hunter up-side the head. Medusa, to his credit, did not intervene.
"SNICKERS!" she demanded, because at the end of the day she had the best brain between the two of them, and her cat needed to give her the benefit of the doubt. "What's gotten into you!? You don't have to like him- but you're supposed to listen to me!"
Snickers squeaked at the smack, even as surely she'd done him no harm. He slunk backwards, acting thoroughly wounded. She dropped her shoulders in exasperation and nearly rolled her eyes. "Oh come on. No. Snickers. I've smacked you plenty of times for biting what you shouldn't bite, you know I didn't mean-"
She stepped towards him, but Snickers retreated several steps and howled in such an over-the-top and forlorn way that trying to imagine what dramatics were going through his head was impossible. Clearly someone had just had an absolutely awful day, and was in desperate need of hugs and reassurances he'd been horribly denied by the shock and inconvenience of Medusa's presence.
"Snickers," she pursued him, but instead of yielding to her, he spun about and leaped back into the window. He looked to the left and then to the right, breathing heavily. "What the are you doing!?"
Then she heard it: the far-off 'skree! skree!' of other hunters. The pack. He had the entire pack after him.
"Oh... no. Get- get inside-!" she blurted. "Hurry! Get inside, we'll barricade-!"
Snickers leaped from the window, landed on the obverse wall, and began to climb. "Snickers!" she hissed after him. "Come back!" He looked to her, and then out towards the oncoming hunting pack, and then he quickly scurried up to the rooftop. She heard him roar, and with a gutted sensation she realized he'd made a noisy and critical blunder in drawing attention to their hiding space, and now was going to try and lead them away from her. "Snickers!?" she wailed, but with that her hunter was gone.
"Fuck!"