Fringe & the Dead Chapter 25: The Doldrums, a fringe fanfic

Chapter 25 - The Doldrums

-February 2009

Peter grunted, and the top half of the infected's head slid off, sliced clean through at a sharp angle. Dark froths of blood erupted, gushing upward, showering across his coat, his face, and turning the sidewalk black at his feet. Spinning at the knees, the infected toppled, seeming to collapse in on itself.

Before the walking corpse could complete its fall, he was already twirling to the side, bringing the sword around in a savage arc and burying the blade in the skull of an undead woman, just above its right ear. The light in the infected's eyes went out, and he ripped the blade free in a putrid spray of blood. He pivoted again to meet the next attacker, thrusting the angled tip through the eye of a third infected rushing in, little more than a boy. A distant thought that they might have all been family rung between his ears, but he paid it no mind; more urgent matters took precedence. Namely, the circle of infected closing in. He kicked the small body off his blade, then rushed to the opposite side of the street. Ahead lay open ground, a gap in the mob that he had foolishly let surround him. Launching off a low bench set back off the sidewalk, he hurtled between outstretched claws that were just a hair too slow, and then charged down a narrow alley bisecting two rows of houses to emerge on the next block.

More infected were gathered on the corner beneath a street sign, bobbing shoulders lurching as they staggered out from between the scree of demolished buildings. Shattered bricks littered the pitted street, clumps of detritus lying here and there. A three-story building lay on its side, as if swatted over by some giant's hand. Bodies that still moved — bodies that had been moving more than likely since the structure's initial collapse — were buried among the rubble, hands and arms protruding, eyes and mouths gaping. More of the dead lurched out of the shadows at his arrival, from within the skeletal remnants of the structures that had somehow been able to withstand the massive blast that had shaken the area. Why the infected were still in them was a question, but the dead told no tales, except for those of hunger and lust.

He rushed to the nearest, lopping off one if its legs with a single, low slice, and then moved on to the next — a wild-haired dead woman wearing a tattered red summer dress — cutting a horizontal slice through the air. There was a slight resistance, a tugging at his wrists and forearms, and then the mop of hair and a leering grin were tumbling past. He kept going, barely even registering the wet splatter across his right cheek or the dull thud echoing off the sidewalk behind him.

Turning to his left, he cut at the face of another trying to sidle its way between a pair of burned-out cars. The infected's face merely separated, lower jaw flopping down upon its chest like some horrific necklace and exposing the inside of its mouth and a mash of chewed flesh stuck fast in the maw of its throat. Surprise ricocheted off the knot of fury that was his inner self. Reversing his swing, Peter slashed a deep gouge into the side its neck, and the jawless head flopped to the side, golden eyes now vertical, blood bubbling up from the exposed throat in great globules that spilled down the neck of its shirt. Jawless and nearly headless, the infected continued forward obstinately, now free of the wreckage, reaching out with cruel fingers. He hacked at it again and again, slicing its shoulders and the stump of its neck to ribbons. Just fucking die! a voice shouted inside his head. Blood splattered the air. Finally, the leering head separated, ragged sinew stretching out like a rubber-band before tearing free and dropping onto the pavement with a disturbingly hollow thunk. He shoved the bumbling and now headless body aside.

Sucking in a gasp of air, he sensed movement at his back and spun around to find another ring of infected closing in. Men and women all, some of which looked as if they'd been living in an elderly home from their wrinkled and dessicated flesh. He counted seven without making a conscious effort to do so, and there were more beyond, converging from all sides. Many more. Beyond the infected, the open expanse of the park was tantalizingly close, and with it, the safehouse they'd taken up in on the far side, and Olivia. Chest heaving and swallowing down gulps of air, he backed away from the approaching undead, until his shoulders bumped up against something solid — an abandoned utility van. He was out of room, and there was no more time. The hands reached in, close enough for him to make out the ragged flesh beneath their fingernails.

Peter raised the sword with a snarl, then charged into their midst, roaring to meet them. He slashed downward at the nearest, splitting its skull to the bridge of its nose. Ripping the blade free, he wheeled around, stabbing and cutting and slicing, like hewing limbs from a tree. Hands reached in on his right and left, grasping at his coat. Spinning, he sliced them away, fingers and wrists, arms and legs, heads; anything within reach. Undead blood splattered in his eyes. Sweat beaded on his brow, filtering down through his beard to sting at his cracked lips. With every slice and every blow, the old wound in his left shoulder sang its discomfort in hideous fashion.

All around him the infected cooed adoringly, growling, buzzing in his ears, eyes burning. A scream filled the air. He spun and turned, slashing, piercing glowing eyes, thrusting into gaping mouths. Bodies fell all around him. Stumbling over one, he managed to catch the infected man falling on top of him with the tip of his blade under its chin. He wrenched it aside with a grunt, then scrambled to his feet, slashing upward into the face of an old woman in a flowered nightgown. Its cheek slid off, along with her right ear and a tangle of knotted gray hair.

Something grabbed him from behind, yanking him backward, tearing at the fabric of his coat. A something that felt like teeth. Twisting to the side, he threw a frantic elbow into something solid. Shock ran up his arm, jarring his shoulder. The infected that had latched on to him — what appeared to be a formerly young woman — staggered to the side. As he rammed the sword through the flesh of its cheek, it struck him that something about it seemed familiar in some way, but how exactly he couldn't say. The thought passed in an instant.

Yanking the sword free of the dead woman, he realized that the voice he was hearing was his own, and that he had been screaming for some time, perhaps from the very beginning. He closed his mouth, cutting off the scream with finality. Rawness burned in his throat from the force of it. His arms ached, his hands shook, his fingers unwilling to unclench from the sword's hilt. And the sword itself suddenly seemed impossibly heavy, ten times heavier than it had before. He raised it before him, readying for the next attack.

But there was none. There was nothing.

Except for himself, the street was empty. He was alone, for the moment, at least. It wouldn't last.

Glancing around, Peter let the sword drop to his side. The city was silent, except for a tonal ringing blaring inside his head.

Bodies and body parts lay all around him, horribly maimed, chopped to pieces. Blood was everywhere, buckets of it, rivers, streaming out from beneath the mass of bodies at his feet. Blood, and chunks of sliced flesh. His chest heaved. His breath was a harsh rasp in his ears, contrasting the stark silence of the city. Something dripped into his left eye. He brought his hand up, only for it come away wet, fingertips smeared crimson. Lowering his head, he found himself drenched, stinking of death; even the leather of his boots was sated.

There would be no hiding what he had been up to. Not this time.

Fuck me... Peter glanced down at the sword still gripped in his left hand. Dripping blood, the blade was slightly curved, its single edge flecked with bits of gore. It was a marvel of efficiency when it came to killing. Where have you been all my life?

Looking for something to drink, he'd stumbled upon the katana in a stately Victorian, easily within spitting distance of the eastern edge of campus. Another, slightly shorter blade — a wakizashi, if his memory was correct — was now strapped across his back, both sheathes of lacquered wood held in place by thin cords of red and blue nylon looped over his chest and shoulder. The pair of them had been resting in an ornate stand atop a wide, elegant mantel of dark mahogany, in what appeared to have been a dining room converted into a shrine of some sort. And they were real Japanese swords — as sharp as fucking razors — not the dull-edged theatrical props he'd come across before.

Had their owner been a professor? Perhaps of the East-Asian History. He liked to think so, and that whoever they had been, they approved of the use he was putting them to now. But he would never know for sure, nor did he particularly care.

The swords spoke for themselves. They sang. Songs of death. Of blood.

Of vengeance.

Bending down, he wiped the blade clean on an infected's pants leg, then held it up, studying its razor sharpness, the edge so fine it seemed almost invisible to the naked eye. The long hilt was wrapped in a finely thread fabric—silk possibly, by the feel of it—and of a blue so navy it approached black. Running down either side of the hilt were a pattern of burgundy diamonds, somehow incorporated into the weaves. Intricately etched into the small, circular guard of some dark metal at the base of the blade was a crescent moon surrounded by a field of stars on one half, and a rising sun with rays of light beaming outward on the other. Taken all together, the sword was beautiful, seemingly more a work of art than an instrument of death. Only the deadly gleam along its keen edge spoke otherwise. He wondered what Olivia would think of them. Before the disaster at the lab, he could envision her delight, the faint curl at the corner of her lips, or perhaps a slight widening of her expressive green eyes.

But now? Now he wasn't so sure.

Dipping his shoulder, he let the katana's sheathe slide down his arm, and then carefully inserted the blade before moving it back up onto his back. Maybe in movies and TV shows the hero could manage the entire process by feel over their shoulder, but he wasn't about to try it himself. Fingers were in short supply.

Peter felt at the torn fabric of his coat where the infected had tried to gnaw on his shoulder, perilously close to the flesh of his neck, and gulped uneasily. Perhaps he'd been a bit reckless, if not outright foolish. He could admit that much.

We have to talk. She had to understand. The others obviously weren't going to just show up or they would have, if they had made it out of the subway at all. There was no sign of them out in the streets, or anywhere in Cambridge, though he'd yet to venture back into the subways. It was that particular quest that had led him to start going out alone in the first place. Maybe the two of them needed to rethink their priorities. What were they even doing? They had taken the suburban, and left a sign with their current address in its place. And if that weren't enough, the constant stream of smoke drifting up from the chimney should have been. Both were impossible to miss.

He thought back to that day, to the mind-numbing horror turned ecstatic happiness. It hadn't taken long for cold reality to set in however, the possibility that their worst fears had in fact been realized. How many days had they been waiting, each drearier than the last? He had lost count, though he might have been able to make a go of it by lining up the bottles on the table beside the window. It wasn't a harsh thought, nor was there an ounce of blame attached to it. Grief was grief. And how you dealt with it was your business, and no one else's. Certainly not his.

I have to talk to her. Today. He shook his head. He was starting to sound like a broken record.

Peter began a slow jog toward the park at the end of the block, passing through alternating shadows and patches of light falling across the debris-strewn avenue. Empty windows stared down from either side. A glance over his shoulder revealed a number of infected bumbling along in his wake, having at long last caught up with him. He left them behind, slipping through a barricade of abandoned vehicles blocking the intersection and entering the park beyond.

Abraham Lincoln stood proudly ahead, bronze statue nestled among the barren trees. Unblinking sunlight beamed down from a clear sky, warming his damp hair. Wind chimes rung faintly from somewhere to his right, the sound familiar and soothing. Odors of earth and grass and life perfumed the park, with not a hint of death or decay in the vicinity. Wistful gusts of wind rustled pine needles and tumbled handfuls of leaves over patches of tremulous green grass, bouncing them along ever so slowly. Unseasonably warm temperatures had graced them for the last week, setting the city free of the plague of snow and ice and cold fingers and freezing toes. Slowing to a walk, he relished the feel of the day.

He doubted it would last. At least one more major snow storm would strike before winter let up in a month or so, possibly even two. It was all but a certainty. A crow cawed in the distance, and another let out an answering cry of belligerence from a different area of the city. He passed by a weather-beaten playground with empty swings twisting listless in the breeze, rusting monkey-bars and monstrous climbers of wood and metal, tiers packed full of dead leaves. He passed by a plaque a dim memory in his head informed him could not exist, commemorating the late George Washington.

Astrid's face appeared behind his eyes, and his heart clenched at her memory, always quick with her smile. Not once had she complained about her constant care of Walter. Not once. She'd been a true friend, and he hadn't had many of those, not in his adult life, nor his childhood. He wished he could be sure, that there was some evidence that pointed one way or the other, something to show them the way. Anything out of their current listless uncertainty.

Without warning, a ferocious squeal of rage jerked Peter from his thoughts, freezing him mid-step, curdling the blood in his veins. Another furious peal echoed over the city, standing his hair up straight, loosening his bladder. His heart began pounding a marathon in his chest. The roar had been ominously close, possibly even down the very block he'd just exited.

He knew that sound, that roar. He'd heard it before. Downtown. And then again in Allston. He'd hoped to never hear it again.

But... it's dead... Olivia killed it...

He flailed under a sudden barrage of images. Charlie on his back, life fading from his eyes as he struggled to hold his quivering guts inside his torn body. Savage claws ripping at a hotel room door, rending hardened wood into slivers of kindling all the while an out-of-her-mind Sonia screamed hysterics in his ear. Chaotic bellows of animal rage only inches from his face. The certainty of death, and not a painless one. And then Olivia on her knees, exploding in a blast of fire, of heat, and pain.

Peering back the way he had come, he backed away, slowly. His panicked thoughts devolved into a flood of recurring phrases. Oh shit. Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

In the end, Peter did the only thing he could. The only thing a sane person would or could do.

He ran.

Beating down from a cloudless sky, the sun glinted off unending rows of windshields, and cast the slimmest of shadows upon the streets below. Off in the distance a smattering of treetops and tall roof-lines marked the edge of the Harvard Campus, with the recently-vacated Kresge Building among them.

A flutter of black wings passed before the window from which Olivia kept her daily vigil, spiraling in intricate displays of aerial agility. After several moments, the pair of birds shot upward and vanished from sight, leaving the scene outside her window serene and still once more.

She leaned on her hand, and absently wondered if the weather out there was as pleasant as it looked. It seemed a perfect day. The kind of day she might have once spent her day off browsing the booths at a local street fair if she could find one, or taking a stroll through the rooftop garden at the Cambridge Center. From where she was sitting, it seemed like a perfect day, but she wouldn't know, would she?

When had she last stepped outside? She tried to think back but the days were a blur, in no small part due to the half-full bottle of Jack Daniels on the night stand beside her. Five other bottles of various vintages also crowded the table, all drained to the last drop. Among the empty bottles sat an empty glass, dry on the inside. So far. The glass had been dry all morning, and from the sun's position overhead, it was just past noon.

Olivia reached out for the glass, then paused midway. A faint tremor went through her, vibrating her outstretched hand.

Was it merely habit that she was about to succumb to, or was there a real need? Had there ever been a real need? One she could live with, but the other? The other was unacceptable. It had always been so.

Letting the hand fall to her side, she rose from the chair, stretching out her back. It was habit, she decided. Even still, she crossed the modest bedroom anyway, putting some distance between herself and the amber liquid that had found its way into her glass so often over the last week or so.

She glanced around, taking in the room's contents for the ten-thousandth time. It had been a child's bedroom once upon a time, with a white baby crib tucked into one corner, and a matching changing table and dresser sitting adjacent on either side. High on one azure wall a grinning sun peeked out from behind fluffy white clouds.

A baby's room.

In the mirror above the dresser, her own reflection stared back at her. She had more or less avoided looking at herself in it, but for some reason allowed herself to do so, finally.

Blackish rings marred the skin beneath her eyes. And she was thinner than she should be, wan, her complexion sallow, utterly unlike herself, even taking the end of the world into account.

It wasn't so surprising, she supposed, eying the empty bottles in the mirror, considering how poor her diet had been as of late. Her threadbare ponytail holder barely held her hair in check, hair most of the way down her back. With a sigh, she pulled the bound hair over her shoulder, fingering the split ends. She had thought about chopping it all off, but could never manage to find the energy to so. What difference would it make anyway? Reluctantly, she let the ponytail fall from her grip. Her eyes flicked to the bottle of Jack, then to the empty glass on the table beside it.

For once, the urge to dull the pain, the sorrow, the guilt, the rage and despair—to dull everything, the world itself, if she were being truthful—was only moderate. Perhaps even tolerable. There was still a gaping hole in her heart, of course. A hole in her life that could never be filled. A hole with endless gravity pulling her down, but the feeling that putting the barrel of her Glock in her mouth and pulling the trigger might be preferable to living had faded. Had she finally moved beyond grief's event horizon? Or maybe it was that ending her own life was too much of a bother. Either that or it was too easy. Why should she be allowed such an easy way out? Rachel and Ella certainly hadn't. Her throat clenched with searing pain. Returning to the chair by the window, she almost reached for the empty glass, but instead, movement out in the street below drew her gaze.

A figure in a black and red coat was racing toward the house, weaving a path through stopped cars and trucks, far down the block on the edge of the park. Peter. Something deep inside her and hovering on the edge of her awareness relaxed, unclenched.

Olivia exhaled, letting out a measured breath. He was back. Hours earlier, she had caught a glimpse of him moving away from her, winding through that same stopped traffic. He'd left without a word or a look. Had they even spoken to each other at all that day? What about the day before? She didn't think so. What was there to say? Not many words passed between them during the light of day anymore. She wondered where he'd gone without her. She wondered what he did while she sat by the window, slowly drowning in her grief, turning inward on herself. It wasn't like they needed much in the way of supplies. After all, there was only the two of them, now.

They had been filled with such hope early on. She could almost feel it even still, or the memory of it, perhaps. That hope had persisted while they'd searched the tunnel system and then the subways to no avail, from the impassable station at Porter Square where the tunnel had somehow collapsed entirely, to Harvard Square to the south, where the path to the surface had seethed with limitless infected. And then, after the days of waiting for their loved ones to appear turned into a week, and then two, they'd been faced with certain, harsh realities. And the hope had withered into despair.

A furious part of her had wanted to know why Peter was still able to function, still able to go on as before. It was Ella, and Rachel. His own father. Didn't he have a heart? Didn't he care? She understood him a little better, now. He was hurting, just as she was, and dealing with it in the only way he knew how.

To run. To move, to stay in motion. Just as how he had dealt with all the tragedies in his life. Only there was nowhere for him to run to, not anymore.

At night, under the cover of darkness, when they would eventually find their way into each other's arms, when no words were needed, when there was only flesh and the insistent need to feel something, anything, Peter's eyes told his story, glistening in the moonlight as she shuddered above him. Perhaps hers did, too. But they never spoke of it; they never spoke of anything.

The cycle of sex and silence they'd fallen into was probably unhealthy. Every particle of her being screamed that it was not the right way. But it was all she could do, all she could manage. It was a thread of normalcy she could cling to, a tuft of grass on the face of a cliff. In this moment, it was enough, and she prayed it was enough for him also. If they could just both hold on until the storm passed them over. That was what she told herself, at least, when she rolled away from him, when she sensed his hand reaching out to touch her, only to fall short. And so the cycle continued.

Refocusing her gaze on the street below, she searched for Peter. At first she couldn't find him among the refuse, but then she spotted him, only much closer than she'd expected. His wiry form dashed out from behind a conversion van, leaping onto the hood of a sedan parked perpendicular to the sidewalk, and then off, bounding forward without slowing, long legs pumping up and down. He was still running. Running as if his life depended on it.

Or running for his life.

Olivia frowned, rising up from her chair. As he drew near, she leaned in close to the glass for a better look. He was still sprinting, full tilt. Her frown deepened. Something wasn't right. She could see it in his manner, in the desperate edge to every movement he made, every shift of his hips, every pump of his arms. She could make out his features, the shadow of his beard across his cheeks. A pair of somethings bobbed up and down over his right shoulder, and she leaned even closer to the window, clouding the glass with her breath.

What are those? she wondered, and then gripped the window sill, digging her fingernails into the soft wood. What is that on his face? Smears of something dark covered his cheeks, above his beard, on his forehead. He drew closer, until she could see his eyes. Is that... blood?

Biting off a gasp, she sprang to her feet, knocking the chair over in her haste. The chair thudded on the carpet, forgotten, as she raced out of the room and down a short hallway ending with a set of narrow stairs down to the first floor. She flew down the steps, feet hardly touching a tread, charged through a living room where a weak fire burned in the fireplace, and then threw wide the front door.

Peter was staggering up the steps in front of her, chest heaving, eyes wide open, whites glaring all around. And it was blood, she saw to her horror, splattered across his face, dried rivulets staining his brow.

"Where the hell have you been?" she blurted before she could stop herself, even as she took in his appearance. Her hand flew to her mouth. The blood was not just on his face. It was everywhere, all over him. He was drenched in it, coat and jeans saturated, even down to his boots, which gleamed wetly. A foul odor drifted off of him, vestiges of death and rot.

Peter's head whipped around. He cast a long glance down the street behind him before turning back to her, nostrils flaring. "We need to get inside," he said between breaths.

There was no mistaking the fear in his voice. Olivia peered past him, squinting, but saw nothing untoward, only the empty street, the same houses and structures that had always been there, the same groups of cars and trucks parking in meandering lines. He stepped forward, taking hold of her arm, and propelled her firmly back through the open doorway. When they were both inside, he shot another look out at the street, then closed the door, and carefully, she observed with a note of alarm.

Mystified by his odd behavior, Olivia stared up at him. In most cases, an elbow in the ribs was an appropriate response to being manhandled, if not for the intense aura of panic he was radiating.

"What is it, Peter? What's happened?" He turned back to her, and her eyes darted to the pair of objects sticking up over his shoulder. Handles with a slight curve to them, wrapped in strips of fine cloth, held in place by thin ropes or twine looped across his chest. Her first thought was that he was wearing swords, as ridiculous as it seemed.

Peter sighed, blowing out a long exhale. He leaned back against the paneled door and stared down at his hand. It was shaking. He was shaking. He clenched his hand into a white-knuckled fist, and then lifted his head. "I was on my way back," he said with a swallow, "when I heard it. You didn't hear it, did you?"

"Hear what? I didn't hear anything. What are you talking about?"

Wetting his lips, he swallowed again. "It was that thing. That creature — the one that killed Charlie. Or one just like it. I'll never forget the sound of it."

Olivia froze, muscles tensing all at once. For an interval, she couldn't breathe, as the air seemed to compress in her lungs and a sickly knot settled deep in the pit of her stomach. Charlie's face hovered on the back of her eyeballs. She met Peter's gaze.

"Are you certain?" she asked in a cautious voice. The blood was freezing in her veins, turning solid. "Are you positive it was the same... thing?"

Peter snorted, lips curling into a weak smile that fractured the sheen of dried blood on his left cheek. "Well, I didn't see the whites of its eyes, if that's what you're asking, but that sound it made in the hotel? The one that sounded like a cross between a pissed off dinosaur and a fucking lion? That's what I heard."

Its eyes didn't have whites, she thought in a daze. They were just black, all the way around. "You... you said it was dead," she whispered, trying and failing to banish Charlie's bloodied face. "You said that I... that I burned it." They hadn't spoken too much of Allston, and of what had happened there. The subject was still painful, even now.

"It is dead, Olivia. Or at least the one that attacked us is. Believe me, I saw its body with my own eyes—what was left of it, at least. It was well-done, and then some."

"So then there must be more of them," she murmured, shaking her head and glancing around as if one of the monstrosities could be hiding in a darkened corner of the living room. "Where can they be coming from?"

"When you were unconscious, I described the first one to my... to Walter, and he thought it could be a successful chimera." As she opened her mouth to inquire exactly what that was, he smiled and added, "A new species, created by blending two or more unrelated species together into one twisted whole."

"So what, you're saying it's man-made?" she gasped.

"I'm saying Walter said it could be. Beyond that, I don't know."

"Why would someone do that?"

"Why the hell do mad scientists do anything?" he countered. "My guess is because they can. Cause they're ahead of the curve, ahead of the laws, and there's no one to stop them."

"So someone is out there right now, making up unnatural creatures and just... letting them run loose? Great. That's all we need."

"Not necessarily," Peter mused, idly scratching at the bloodstain on his cheek. "Could be that whoever made them is dead, just like everyone else. Maybe they got free somehow in all the chaos. All it would have taken is for some looter to open up the wrong door and... bam. That's all she wrote. The bright side is that if it is a chimera, there can't be too many of them. They're not easy to make. Impossible to make, I would have said, but then I thought it was impossible for a baby to grow into an old man in under an hour, so what do I know? Maybe there's only one left now."

Olivia grunted. "One is one more than I ever want to see again." She captured Peter's gaze. "Do you think it was tracking you?"

Peter lifted his shoulders, then raked his fingers through his hair. "I didn't feel like sticking around to find out. Would you?"

She found herself smiling at the question. "No. I guess I wouldn't at that." A silence passed between them then, and it came to her that this was the first real conversation they'd had in days. Or weeks, maybe. I've been a fool, she thought, as emotions flitted across his face. If they're alive, they aren't coming back. And if not... either way there's no reason to stay here. She wiped a hand across her mouth, swallowing through a lump forming in her throat. Then silence drew out, became uncomfortable.

"So... what have you been up to?" she asked lamely. As soon as the words left her mouth she regretted saying them. They sounded false in her ears, a retreat back into the safety of her walls. A return to the status quo vague questions and even vaguer answers, of talking past, instead of to, each other.

From the way Peter's lips thinned, he heard it also. He brushed past her. "Not much," he offered without looking her way. "Just working a few things out in my head." His voice trailed after him as he headed toward the kitchen.

Olivia's gaze followed his broad frame across the room, eyes widening as he presented his back to her. The things strapped to his chest were in fact swords. Incredibly, two samurai swords, like something out of a movie, hung low across his back. Were they real? Where could he have possibly found them? She wanted to ask but then he was gone, disappearing around the corner, leaving her standing alone in the entryway.

Alone. Pain clenched her throat. The bottle of whiskey sitting on the nightstand upstairs entered her mind, and she imagined the feeling of its quenching burn sliding down her throat, the sharp pain in her heart dulled to a muted throb.

No goddamnit. I'm done with that.

Instead, she headed for the kitchen, listening as Peter moved about inside. She paused in the doorway. He was standing over the sink, head bowed and leaning forward, both hands gripping the countertop. On the wide island in the center of the kitchen lay the two swords, sheathes made of some dark, shiny material, wood possibly, with blue and red cords hanging down. While interesting, and possibly quite useful, the swords could wait for later. We have to talk.

Crossing over to him, the soles of her boots whisked faintly on the tiled floor. The stench of blood and death and decay filled the air as she drew near. She laid a hand on his lower back, and a twinge of pain went through her at his flinch. Then she latched onto a spot high up on his left shoulder. His coat was torn, bunched together in a familiar shape.

The air sucked out of her lungs. Above the collar of his coat, Peter's shaggy brown hair suddenly blurred, the backs of his ears also, doubling, as if there were several of him occupying the same space, and all out of sync somehow. She blinked, then forced her eyes shut, forced herself to take in a breath, then another. When she opened them again, the odd blurring was gone, but the source of her panic remained.

A bite mark. On his coat.

For time immeasurable, her eyes remained glued to the coat's torn fabric, the frayed ends twisted this way and that. How close had it been? How close had she come to losing him also? To finding herself utterly alone, adrift with no tether in an empty world. Would she have known? Would she have somehow sensed his fall? How long would she have waited for his return? Weeks? Months? How long before madness set in—if she wasn't mad already. Grief came with its own special brand of paralysis.

Trembling, Olivia drew in a shallow breath, and managed to speak. "Hey."

"Hey." His voice was weary. Downtrodden. Exhausted.

"Are you okay?"

Peter turned around at the question. His face was a slab of granite as he studied her, but his blue eyes burned with some hidden emotion. "Am I okay?" he asked finally. "You're asking me that?"

She met his gaze with her chin up, without blinking or looking away, but merely nodded her head in reply. She didn't trust her voice, didn't trust herself to say the right words.

He fingered the bite mark on his shoulder. "I almost died today," he offered softly, he visibly cleared his throat before continuing. "I was an idiot. And you would have never known."

Olivia gave him a hopeful smile. "Well, I'm glad you didn't. Die, I mean."

"Yeah? Me too." A lopsided grin curled his lips.

Reaching out, she took his hand. "Come here," she said, pulling him after her toward the kitchen table. "Sit down. We have to talk."

Peter's brow furrowed as she guided him to the table, but he remained silent, dropping down on a wooden chair with thin spindles and elegant curves. He stared up at her, eyebrows raised expectantly. Waiting. She understood his silence; it was her truce after all, she had been the one to call it. The plumes of dried blood decorating his face transformed it into a grisly mask. They had to go.

A kind of serene stillness permeated the kitchen as she wet a rag from a cabinet drawer with a bottle of water. When she approached his chair, Peter's eyes widened and he leaned away slightly, as if uncertain of her intentions.

"Hold still, Bishop," she growled under her breath, reaching out, and then to his obvious surprise, began gently wiping the smears of blood from his temple.

She didn't speak. Not at first. Nor did she meet his gaze, though she could feel his eyes boring holes through her flesh. The blood had dried tacky, clinging to his skin by invisible fingers that resisted removal. How could there be so much of it? Had he decided to take a shower in it? It was an exaggeration, but not by much. She worked in silence, moving on from the deep creases lining his forehead, to skin around his eyes, which were soft and gleaming, locked on her face. His breath hissed softly below her, and at some point a hand had crept up her right hip, fingers hooking into the back pocket of her jeans.

"Peter, I uh...," Olivia began quietly, dabbing at a stubborn spot in front of his right ear. She wet her lips and started again. "These last few weeks, they've... been difficult for me. And I know they have been for you, too," she added quickly. "But first I had this... idea in my head that they had made it. That if they had made it out of the lab they were gonna be okay. Even after we searched the tunnels, I'd still thought they'd made it. I kept thinking that we just had to wait one more day. Just one more day. And then I'd hear a knock on the door and they would be there, Rachel and Ella, Astrid and Sonia. Broyles. Even your father." His face was clean now, the white rag tinted crimson. She tossed it in the sink, where it would remain, perhaps forever. She turned back, meeting Peter's gaze steadily. "But that's never going to happen. Is it?"

"Olivia, I wasn't trying to-"

"No, let me finish," she cut in, touching his cheek for a brief moment with the pads of her fingertips. "Please. They aren't coming back, are they? Even if they're alive — and I'm not saying they are — they're not going to show up here. That much is clear. You've been wanting to tell me that, but I wouldn't hear it."

Peter lowered his head, nodded once in agreement. "I've looked for them, Olivia," he said to the floor. "I've looked everywhere. Even among the infected, looked in every place I could think of, anyplace at all I thought they might have gone. And I know it's not what you want to hear, but I don't know what more we can do. Maybe they made it out of the subway. Maybe they even made it out of the city, and they're out there, looking for us right now. Or... maybe they didn't. I'm sorry."

"I know you are...," she whispered through a blur of tears and aching pain. She stifled it down, clearing her throat. "So... I guess what I'm saying is, is that I'm sorry, too. And, that I'm ready to leave whenever you are, especially if one of those... things, is prowling around here.

Peter rose slowly from his chair. He reached out, and she allowed him to pull her close, to rub his forehead to hers. "I'll promise you this," he said, "If they're out there somewhere, we'll find them, Olivia."

"Don't make promises you can't keep, Peter," she replied, smiling up at him sadly. She started to turn away, then paused, looking back and wrinkling her nose. "Oh. And Peter? It's time for some new clothes. You smell like road kill. And I mean that the sincerest way possible."

The burst of laughter that erupted from Peter startled her at first; it almost seemed alien, originating in some other universe, but then she found herself joining in, forgetting for that span of minutes that the two of them were all that was left. It was enough, for now. The paralysis was fading, the numbness with each passing moment, until finally, after her stomach began to ache from the humorous spasms, she could breathe again. Feelings she'd been holding at bay for too long came rushing back in, filling her chest to bursting.

When the laughter died away, their eyes met. Olivia pressed her lips to his cheek, and then turned away, homing in on the pair of swords lying forgotten on the island top.

A story went with them, and she wanted to hear it. She wanted to hear what exactly he'd been up to that had led to him taking a shower in infected blood. She ran her gaze over the weapons' sleek lines. They were beautiful. Dangerous icons of a different era, museum pieces. One was a bit shorter than the other, both slightly curved. At the top of each sheathe was a metal clip formed into the shape of a clover.

Glancing back, she caught a flicker of anticipation cross Peter's face. He had been looking forward to this moment. It was right there in his eyes, plain as day. She could imagine him stumbling across the pair of swords who knew where, could imagine his excitement, his need to show her. The thought made her smile.

"Now. Tell me about these swords, Peter," Olivia said, inclining her head and motioning for him to join her. Reaching out, she laid a hand across the smaller sword's hilt. The cloth wrap was soft, yet firm, and she suspected it would yield a strong grip. Sliding an inch or two of the blade free, her eyes widened at an edge so finely honed it appeared to glimmer, as if possessed by some inner luminescence. Surely it was a trick of the light. She looked up to find Peter watching her, eyes gleaming. The raw emotion he was showing took her breath away. Her insides filled with heat, a blatant reminder that she was still alive. And so was he.

A slow grin crooked her lips. "And tell me which one of these is mine."

The arrow of time slowed in increments, growing exponentially shorter, shorter before ceasing its forward progress altogether. What remained in its place were mere snapshots of moments, without order or sequence, without meaning or message. Motion happened in fits and starts, in sudden patches of flickering darkness and flashes of light. Voices echoed hollowly from nowhere, whispering through the grayness of stasis. Faces intruded, strange visages that passed in and out of view, blurred and disembodied. Woven throughout was an ever-present ache. Pain that had weight pressed down interminably. It was all intolerable.

In the midst of such chaos, Walter floated, adrift in the spaces between moments.

Yet it was not all confusion. Not all were delirious amalgamations of thought and memory and dreams. Elizabeth was with him; her voice murmured accusations inside his head. Her lips feathered softly against his ear. She whispered of Peter. He had left her, left Boston. He was gone. Her baby was gone again, she cried in his left ear, her voice distant, tinny, reverberating downward from some great height, or percolating through a narrow tube. Her panic was tangible. Infectious. Peter was gone. As before, the blame lay with himself; he wasn't smart enough, capable enough to discover the cure on his own. He wasn't there for him even when he was there.

Thundering heartbeats drowned out her voice, drowned out everything, even himself. He floated in anxiety-streaked grayness. Images coruscated, blasting through his writhing consciousness.

When something that resembled awareness returned, it was Belly's voice he heard at the end of the dark tunnel. The nature of reality was on the day's agenda, the potential consequences of parting the veil. Oh, how he loved to pontificate! Of course there was danger. Did not the great explorers of eons past experience doubt upon embarking for the edge of the map? Did they not feel fear when they neared the place where monsters resided? Fear of the unknown must always be overcome if any real progress was to be made. And Belly was hardly one to talk! His own appetites for pushing back the boundaries were well known and documented; detritus of his own littered the path of his enlightenment.

Belly's voice faded, only to be replaced by that of a woman. Her voice was shrill, full of wretched pain, of terrible agony. The foul odor of burning flesh and hair became the extent of his existence. And screaming. Coming from everywhere and nowhere. Walter yearned to scream also, anything to make it stop. To make it all stop. But it went on, blaring louder and louder, ricocheting through the gray void, now streaked with angry spiderwebs, cracks the color of rust, fiery oranges, colors pulsing, keeping time with a steady pounding.

Thump... Thump thump. Thump... Thump thump...

"Dad?" a tiny voice whispered. "What do you think happens when you die?"

The weight on Walter's chest grew heavier, like a mountain collapsing on top of him. Peter!

THUMP... THUMP THUMP. THUMP... THUMP THUMP...

The void shattered, exploding into infinite fragments. Sharp splinters cut deep, lacerating his very being. And then everything stopped. Quiet happened, and the grayness melted into light.

Walter found himself in a small bedroom, looking down on himself. On a bed, hands pressed into the soft quilt of blue-striped plaid. The room was dim, cast in a dull yellow light by lamps with conical shades sitting on nightstands on either side of the bed. Beside one of them was a silver dollar, resting face down. The face staring up from the pillow was near translucent, veins showing through skin pale with sickness. Beneath bright blue eyes were dark rings of purples and browns. Sickness. More bruises resided under the layers of quilts, mottling Peter's arms and legs, the skin of his abdomen.

"I... I don't know, son," he heard his own voice answer, simultaneous with a voice shrieking the answer in his mind. The Walter on the bed didn't say that his experiments all pointed toward oblivion, that consciousness was an illusion, a mere reflection of the brain's chemistry. He didn't say that it could be manipulated like a machine, played like a piano. He didn't say that he knew this because he had plucked those chords himself.

"I wish there was a way I could tell you," Peter's voice murmured, fading away. "After I die..."

The image of his dying son compressed, turning sideways as Walter's heart shattered again into a million pieces. The certainty in his son's tone; the acceptance of his own inevitable death. He's just a boy! He howled into the nothing. A goddamn boy! Peter! My son!

Walter began to shriek as the bedroom disintegrated. He thrashed about as the void formed around him once more, sinking back into a grayness that seemed lighter than before.

The intruding voices returned. Voices calling his name. He saw bright light. Faces in a crowded room. White walls, peeling paint, sagging under its own weight. Where was he? Hands like iron gripped his arms, his legs, holding him in place. He had felt similarly manhandled before. Somewhere. Voices spoke from a vast distance, fading in and out like an out-of-tune radio.

...hold him.

...that really necessary? ...antibiotics... even working?

...time... needs... lie still. ...keep him sedated... tolerance to... is incredible...

I don't... think... like...

Walter?

The voice was vaguely familiar, almost musical in its qualities. He reached out, grasping, fumbling for a name. The light faded as something moved in front of him. A face? It moved in close, obscuring the light. Whispered words reverberated through the gray nothing. The words were pleasant, soothing, like the fall of water over rocks in a stream. He strained to hear better.

"...want to restrain you, Walter. Please."

Walter came forward, clawing his way toward consciousness. The something obscuring the light was right above him. He could just make out a heart-shaped face, cream colored skin. Dark eyes and curls of black hair. Something touched him. He became aware of feeling, and felt a hand on his arm, applying the gentlest of pressures. It was a woman. He knew her. Didn't he?

"...have to lie still... I'm here. Just relax."

Astro...? He tried to speak, but her voice was fading again, receding down a dark tunnel. He felt a distant prick, and a pleasant glow bloomed inside his mind, wiping consciousness away in a burst of pleasure, suffusing through what little remained of his awareness.

Main line sedative... an inner voice whispered. Main line... the voice became a lingering sigh that faded into nothing.

Darkness closed in, sweeping him away.

When semi-cognizance returned, Walter found himself in a bare room, eyes frozen on a plaster ceiling stained and pitted with odd-shaped indentations and faint, hairline cracks. Directly above him was a dome-shaped light fixture that flickered fitfully, buzzing, its inner surface harboring a layer of dead bugs.

He shifted his gaze, staring down at his feet. He was on a bed, covered in thick, wool blankets up to his chin. To his right, a small window showed a cerulean sky. Vertical bars of gray iron outside the glass sent a chill racing down his spine. Directly ahead was a plain, circular clock mounted high on a wall the color of healthy urine, hands overlapped on the Roman numeral twelve. Left of the clock was an aged door of dull brown metal that appeared heavy enough to withstand a battering ram. Set in the door's upper half was a single horizontal window, the sliding type, just narrow enough to shove an arm through. Possibly. If he were desperate.

Sweat began to bead on Walter's brow. Chalky dryness coated the back of his throat. Swallowing, he lowered his gaze to the door knob — or at least, to where it should have resided. In its place was the rusted backside of a deadbolt lock. Shock stole his breath away. He knew that door, that lock, and the tiny window that would slide open to reveal a pair of pale, gray eyes. Terror surged through his limbs. He went to sit up and found himself unable to move, hand and feet glued in place, his chest also, held in an implacable grip.

Straining, he lifted his head and found a thick leather strap fastened across his abdomen. Was it growing tighter? It was! Constricting, squeezing, coiling ever tighter like a python embracing its prey. He opened his mouth to scream, to call out for help, but found the air in his lungs solid as stone.

Something small and hard dropped onto his tongue, then another. He spat out the foreign object, and found two perfectly formed teeth sitting atop his blankets, roots and all. Eyes bulging, he felt the rest of his teeth drop out, filling his lips to the brim. He spit them out also, spraying the room with molars and canines and incisors, then felt along his gum line, shoving the tip of his tongue into the moist, empty divots.

Footsteps echoed outside his door. The world shook, the air vibrated in expanding ripples that shook his bones.

Walter gasped. He tried to hide, to sink back into the softness of his bedding, but instead found the mattress as hard and unyielding as concrete. The footsteps grew louder, booming, vibrating the air. Suddenly voices were shrieking outside his room, all overlapping, layering on top of one another in a rising crescendo. Gibberings of madness, whispers of insanity, reverberating through walls of concrete. A resounding thud echoed on the other side of the wall opposite his bed, followed by a wild cackle filled with glee. Another blow shook the wall, and then another. He could feel each, through the bedposts, rocking the frame, and somehow, he knew that it was a head striking the wall, over and over. A head. Leaving spots of blood behind, bits of hair and flesh. Perhaps a tooth. He had seen such before, hadn't he? The maniacal laughter continued beside his head. Or was it not laughter, but screaming? Screams of agony? Of hysterical madness? His tongue ran over the edge of his own teeth, sharp and unyielding as ever. Outside the barred window a storm raged. Lightning shattered across a black sky.

The footsteps stopped, cutting the madhouse cacophony off mid-shout.

Walter's mouth worked. His eyes darted between the sliding window and the narrow strip of light beneath the door where a pair of shadows moved. Someone was outside. His heartbeat thundered, blaring inside his head. After an interminable silence, there came a metallic jingle from outside the door. The window slid back suddenly, revealing as he'd known it would, the pair of pale gray eyes staring in.

Were they familiar? Did he know them? Their shape? Their color? Did he?

"H—hello...?" he called out, straining once more to sit up. "Who... who are you? Wh—where am I? Why are you holding me here?"

The gray eyes regarded him without blinking, cold, unfeeling, empty. A knot of cold fear formed in the pit of Walter's stomach. Suddenly he regretted calling out. Maybe he didn't want to meet their owner. Without warning the sliding window slid shut with a deafening crack. A keyring rattled, and then a metallic scrape as the lock began to turn.

The door swung open with a creak and a man stepped inside. He was hatched-faced, with reddish skin and sand-colored hair streaked with wings of gray in front of his ears.

At the sight of the man's face, Walter shrank back, jerking against the straps holding him in place. He shook his head, denying the sight, even as the man stepped closer, lips pinched together, nostrils flaring. No! It can't be him! Anyone but Sumner! His gaze flew around the room, and he suddenly saw it for what it was.

A cell.

His cell.

The high ceiling with sagging tiles, the hateful lime-colored walls, narrow and coffin-like. The mesh-covered window, dented with abuse, caked in years of dirt and grime. It was his old room, his old cell at the asylum. Dear god... I'm back.

"Good afternoon, Doctor Bishop," his old doctor said, looking up from his clipboard and smiling professionally. His gray eyes were sharp and disapproving, the smile false, the smile of a shark eyeing its prey, the smile of a charlatan. "And how are you feeling today? Better, I hope? That was quite an outburst yesterday."

"Oh?" Walter swallowed. His breath came in shallow pants, vision dizzy with fear. "I uh... I'm afraid I don't... I don't recall... yesterday..."

"Is that so," Sumner said flatly. "Well, your little tantrum upset the other patients, particularly Mister Kim. Dashiell nearly beat Jeremiah to death. The poor man's skull was fractured." The hospital administrator shook his head sadly, and pulled a syringe from the front pocket of his white smock. He placed it on a metal tray beside Walter's bed. "I'm afraid this kind of behavior is unacceptable in my institution, Walter."

An outburst? Dashiell? Jeremiah? Mind racing, Walter's gaze swiveled to the clear solution inside the syringe. What was it? Thiopental? Lorazepam? Perhaps it was a cocktail of both, with a side chlorpromazine — the man was obsessed with the drug, no matter that it had been superseded decades ago. He wanted no part of it. It would put him back to sleep, drown out the world, drown out himself — like he had been before Peter came.

A terrible thought struck him then. Peter had come, hadn't he? His son had come, finally, and freed him from his prison. Hadn't he? Peter, grown up and so handsome. And angry, so angry. He had come with Olive, had he not? Olive had come back to him. It had happened, hadn't it? But then why was he in his cell? No, it couldn't be right. After the fire, they had never seen each other again. They had made sure of it. Steps had been taken, the children's memories carefully edited — a risky enough process in itself. But other risks were simply too great, so Belly had said, and he had agreed. God help him, he had agreed.

Had he never left then? Had he never left Saint Claire's at all, then? His son had never come? Could it have been a dream, an intense hallucination, more detailed than he could ever recall? Yet there were clear dream-signs. The dead rising? Ridiculous.

"Now I had thought you were making progress, Walter," Doctor Sumner went on in his southern lilt. "I had thought that you had rounded a corner. I see now that I was incorrect." His lips pinched together, turning white from the pressure. "You have made no progress, and in fact are regressing, the breaks in your psyche becoming more pronounced, more schismed. I'm afraid harsher... more direct methods are in order."

Doctor Sumner reached for the syringe. Unable to protest, Walter shook his head, eyes locked on the needle's point. It seemed incredibly large, large enough for a horse. Or a rhinoceros.

Suspended from the needle's angled tip was a drop of clear liquid. The drop stretched out, sagging in the air, perfectly shaped raindrop. Quintessential. He waited for the drop to fall, but instead it just hung there, glistening with an iridescent glow. The light drew him in. Something shimmered inside its depths; particles that spun and twirled, spirals that waxed and waned. It was as if an entire world resided inside. And did they not? Who was to say? All was possible in the endless expanse of time and space. Multi-layered it was. Didn't he know? Had he not experienced it firsthand?

The drop fell, splashing silently into rainbows of color.

Walter flinched as a shadow moved into his line of sight, hovering above him, a black, person-shaped spot. Fingers gripped his chin, squeezing his jaw with terrifying strength. Gasping, he tried to jerk his head free, but the grip only tightened, fingertips gouging into the fleshy part of his cheek. Pain and blinding light blurred his vision.

"Hold still, please," Sumner ordered. Walter tried to scream but his teeth were clamped together. "Any movement on your part could have catastrophic consequences on your mental faculties going forward." His voice held not a hint of pity, and raised the syringe to plunge out the air bubbles. "Frank? Hold him."

The metal door opened with a bang and another person stepped into the room.

"No!" Walter thrashed about, head banging off the cool metal of a surgical gurney. "I don't—! NO...! NO!" Intense light shot down from above, blinding circles of white that scalded his retinas. A pair of meaty hands fell across his shoulders, pressing down with the weight of a mountain.

"The problem is your brain, Walter," Belly said, standing over him. A teal surgical mask covered his face, muffled the rasp of his voice. "Your brain — it's always thinking. It has to come out."

He heard the whirl of a bonesaw roaring to life somewhere out of his view. He felt something loose inside his gut, and the acrid odor of urine filled his nose. The room darkened, yet he could still see every detail happening around him. The plain, circular clock high up on the wall spun backward, numbers and all. A ring of people surrounded the gurney—nurses and other doctors, presumably — watching the procedure from above masks splattered with red spots. Belly moved in closer, and the spinning bone saw was passed to him by a pair of hands—one of which was metal, fingers moving robotically.

Harsh spasms shook Walter from head to toe. Bile rose up in the back of his throat.

Belly stood over him. His normally dark eyes were burnished gold, with striated capillaries that writhed ever so slightly. "I'm sorry, old friend," he said with real regret, "but it is for the best. There's just too many of you. There's always been too many of you."

The bone saw descended, volume increasing to painful whine. Walter screamed but there was no sound. There was only the whirring saw, growing louder and louder. The blade descended slowly, a blur of tiny but sharp teeth, eager to rend flesh, to grind bone. Louder. Louder. Belly's eyes were gone above the mask. Blackened pits remained in their place, empty spots with all the gravity of a collapsing star. The spinning saw blade pulled at his hair. Exquisite pain lanced through the back of his skull, and then he was falling into endless darkness.

Falling. Air rushed past, whistling, screaming in his ear. Yet all was silent. Something rushed toward him, a kind of mirrored blackness. Was he rising or falling? Perhaps moving sideways. It was impossible to tell.

A speck glimmered, growing larger every moment until he was staring at himself, a mirror image whose eyes were bulging, mouth gaping open. Or was he the reflection? A voice was screaming. His own. Theirs. They both were. The distance between them halved, then halved again and again, and again, and on unto infinity, and then beyond infinity, where time had no meaning, where the self had no shape or form or identity.

The world blinked out.

Gasping, sucking in a huge mouthful of air, Walter came awake.

His eyes fell on peeling paint, on a wall a pale beige in color. He was in a small room, little more than a closet from its size. To his left, a rusted folding chair sat beneath a window of clouded glass. The closed door on his right, gray and featureless.

He tried to sit up, but found himself unable to do so. Fear choked the air from his chest, but then he lifted his hands, waggling his fingers weakly. He touched a spot on his head where phantom pain lingered for but a moment before dissipating. With a sigh, he relaxed, sinking back into a lumpy pillow.

Not strapped down, then. Not restrained. The bed he rested on was little more than a simple cot, the sort one might find anywhere, at any hotel the world over. His blankets were plain, homespun wool gray in color, and quite warm.

He was not at the lab, or even in the Kresge Building, judging by the unfamiliar room. The air seemed stale, aged, an odor only an antediluvian structure with a lifespan that measured in centuries could exude. He thought he could hear distant music, playing somewhere outside his door.

Memories began to collate, images and fragments coming together in a clouded deluge. The lab. The undead's attack, and their subsequent escape into the steam tunnels. He'd been sick. The respiratory infection he'd been developing over the last few weeks had finally come to head — walking pneumonia a distinct possibility.

Yet he felt better. Not great, but to some degree better. The weight on his chest was only moderately heavy. He noticed his clothes were gone, replaced by a light blue patient's gown. On the back of his left hand was a strip of white medical tape, holding a thick wad of gauze in place.

"What is this?" he murmured, touching the bandage carefully, feeling a strange lump.

A dull ache emanated from underneath when he applied pressure. IV cannula? Feathers of unease stroked the length of his spine. Where was he? How had he come to be there? Where were the others? Where was Peter? How much time had passed?

Before he could contemplate his present circumstance any further, he became aware of a figure standing beside the door, watching him.

Walter jerked back, crashing against the wall beside the bed. Eyes bulging, blood thundering in his ears, he shook his head, denying the apparition before him.

It couldn't be. Not here. He had left him behind, at Saint Claire's.

The man standing before him wore his face, his hair, his clothes. Only the face wasn't his as he was now, but the man he had been, before. Before Peter, before the sickness and the pain and the suffering. Before Elizabeth's beautiful brown eyes had turned sad, and his world with them, before everything unimaginable that had happened so long ago, back when he'd been certain of his own place in the universe; far, far above it. The harsh lines of his former face were cast in stone.

Was it possible he had always looked so cruel? As if the only emotion he was capable of was of clinical detachment? How had he never noticed before?

"Hello, Walter," the apparition said, taking a step forward. "You're back. Back where you belong."

"No... no, no...," Walter whispered, swinging his head from side to side. As if it might serve as a shield, he pulled the rough blanket up to his chin. "I'm not here! I'm not back. This isn't happening. You're a figment of my imagination! A construct of my mind. You always have been!"

The corners of the other Walter's mouth turned upward, giving him an even crueler aspect, if that were possible. "We've missed you here, Walter." The voice seemed to echo around the room, coming at him from all sides. "But now you're back. Now you're home."

Walter screwed his eyes shut, rejecting the apparition's existence. He focused on the insides of his eyelids, on the swirls of muted colors, kaleidoscopes and writhing fractals. It had worked before. The man wasn't real. He'd never been real, merely a product of his own guilt, his own paranoia.

Inside the darkness of his head, he heard music again, louder than before. The beat was familiar, guitar chords, and most especially, the piano accompaniment.

A smile broke across his face. His throat tightened, tears unbidden seeped out from beneath his eyelids. How was it possible? He nodded, hummed along, whispering the lyrics to Violet Sedan Chair's, Last Man In Space, beneath his breath.

"...the last man in space
It's a shame you got left behind
Follow the sound
It's a shame there's no gravity
Pulling me down
It's a shame you had to leave me here
I don't want to die
It's a shame at the end of time
To leave my only world behind
It's a shame you got left behind
Follow the sound..."

A sudden squeal interrupted him, the opening of a door. His door. He let his eyes crack open, and saw a shaded person outside his door through his lashes. His former self was gone, gone as if he'd never been there. Had he? Last Man In Space blared loud through the open doorway. A female-shaped silhouette spoke to someone out of view, and then stepped into his room, closing the door behind them.

The shape was a woman. A slender woman with dark, curly hair. Walter felt a weight lift of his shoulders, replaced by a kind of indescribable joy that left him breathless.

"Astro!" he wheezed, trying to sit up. He made it only as far as his elbows before falling back on his pillow, gasping for a breath.

"Walter!" she said, stopping for an instant, before breaking into a smile that lit up the entire room, and rushing to his side. "You're finally awake! Thank god! No, don' try to sit up. You're still weak. You've been sick, Walter. Very sick. The Doctor said it was some kind of pneumonia."

"Doctor? What... what happened?" he asked. "Where are we? Where's Peter?"

Astrid shook her head. "I don't know where Peter is, Walter," she said, pulling the folding chair closer and sitting down beside his bed. "Or Olivia. I'm sorry. Truly. But we made it to safety. Everyone else is here. Rachel and Ella. Sonia. Agent Broyles. We all made it. Because of you."

Because of him? Walter wiped his mouth with his hand. "Made it where? What is this place?" And why does it summon him?

"Everyone calls it the Home of Light. Or just the Home, for short. It's kind of a sanctuary, I guess. It's safe here. So far, at least."

Safe? A sanctuary? How could it be safe anywhere? And who were they? He glanced around his room, taking it in anew. The stark walls and their peeling paint, the clouded window, which upon closer inspection appeared barred. Why did it bear such a strong resemblance to other rooms he had known — other cells he had known? He scratched at itches traveling up both forearms, digging his nails in deep. And what about Peter? And Olivia? Were they safe? Were they even alive? My son... I'm so terribly sorry.

Astrid reached out, taking his hand. "They have power here, Walter. Somehow." There was a hint of pleading in her voice, and in her expressive eyes. "Electricity. Some kind of generator in one of the out buildings. It's spotty sometimes, but it works." She smiled, touching her curls with her free hand. "You know what? I took a shower this morning. Running water, Walter. You can't drink it, and it's not very hot, but it's running water. They have people at the local water utility somewhere around here. I think somebody used to work there." She paused, studying his face for a moment. "I know you want to find Peter, and we will, but you have to get better first. You've been in and out of it for almost two weeks."

Two weeks? Dear god. Walter's head swam. So much could have happened in two weeks. Anything. Anything at all. But Peter was intelligent, despite his proclivity for acting the fool on occasion. Olivia would keep him safe. She would. Why did it sound like a prayer in his head? He had to trust her. He had to trust Olive. Wasn't it why they'd made her?

He met Astrid's gaze. "You said there's running water, yes?" he asked hopefully. "And a bath? A tub?"

Her slow nod brought tears to his eyes.

The fence curled slowly inward from one upper corner, rolling over onto itself as a tall man wearing a tan cowboy hat made several cuts, using what looked like giant scissors, only made for slicing metal instead of paper. With a rattle, the cut-away section tipped over, dropping flat on the ground. Several men rushed in, dragging the old piece of fence away, while at the same time other men unwound a new stretch of fence from a huge roll lying on its side nearby. Overlooking the entire operation was yet another man, armed with a machine gun, standing in the back of a pickup truck outside the fence. Head swiveling, he searched for approaching infected. None had appeared, yet. When the new section of fence was finally wrestled back in place, the man in the cowboy hat pulled what looked like a pistol on a hose from the back of the truck, and dragged it over the new fence. He bent over, doing something near the pistol's tip, and suddenly a bright light bloomed in his fist.

The thing was a welder, so Ella's mother had called it. And it glued metal together. Somehow.

She was not to stare at it, not ever. Just looking at it could burn her eyes out, as impossible as that seemed. She turned her face away as the man put a pair of thick sunglasses over his eyes and bent close to the fence.

Strange hisses and pops and crackles carried over the yard. Sneaking a glance back toward the fence, a shower of sparks out of the welder's tip, which blazed like a second sun. With a gasp, she quickly covered her eyes, seeing a purple blob floating on the backs of her eyelids. It had only been a second. Surely that was okay.

After a moment, Ella lowered her hands and turned to the girl on the stone bench beside her. "Do they have to fix the fence a lot?" she asked, blinking her eyes open and closed to make the purple go away.

"Sometimes. Every once in a while." Gina said, lifting her shoulders. "Only after really big ones."

"Have they ever broken it down all the way, and gotten inside?"

Gina shrugged again. "I don't know. I don't think so, else the dead ones would be in here with us, wouldn't they?"

Ella considered that, eyeing the other girl sideways, and then nodded. Her new friend made sense, she supposed. Gina was actually a little older than herself, but sometimes she seemed younger. Sometimes. She hardly ever said anything for one, and sometimes she wouldn't leave her grandma's side, for another. Skittish, was the word she had heard her mother whisper to Sonia. Her friend's black hair was bound in tight, thin braids, some with a pretty pink and purple beads woven throughout. Her dark eyes were focused on her uncle, who was with the men working on the fence. She didn't talk much, her new friend, but they were friends. It was nice to have a friend again, a friend her age to talk to. More than nice.

Twisting around, she snuck a careful look back toward the fence.

The welder thing was off, and the giant roll was being loaded back into the truck by four men, each straining hard to pick it up. When the roll was finally loaded, the cowboy — whose name she could never remember — hopped back up into the back of the truck and smacked the roof. The pickup truck lumbered forward, the men walking beside it. Those not working on fence repair, men mostly, but a few women, walked along the inside, each carrying long poles of wood or metal that were sharpened to fine points, like tall spears.

Most everyone was still a stranger to her, other than Gina's uncle, Chris, who was among the workers. As the truck passed in front of them, he winked and flashed a smile their way. Gina waved, grinning a huge grin. As he walked past, Ella waved also. She had come to like him in the short time they'd been there. He was kind and funny and strong, kind of like she'd imagined how a big brother might be. Not that she would ever have one, or a little sister, of whom she had dreamed of even more.

Suddenly bored with the fence repairs, Ella leaned back, eyeing the blue sky overhead. Strings of curling white clouds stretched across the horizon. A slight breeze blew wisps of hair across her face. The wind was cool, but not too cold. Warmer weather had melted all the snow away, and the ground was only a little squishy still, mostly in the form of a ring of dirt that wound all the way around the inside of the fence. It felt like spring outside to her, but it wasn't yet. At least that was what she'd been told by everyone she'd asked. Weather was strange like that. Occasionally the breeze would carry with it the bitter stink of death and dead bodies, twisting the inside of her nose.

The dead pit — as some of the others called it — was outside the fence and beyond a wide parking lot, but still too close. Especially when they burned up all the dead bodies of infected in it. The single time she had seen the licks of fire rising from inside the pit, a dense cloud of gritty black smoke had spread out, hanging low over the yard. Accompanying the smoke was a smell beyond horrible, worse than anything she could think of. Mom had taken one look at the smoke cloud, and then hustled her back inside.

Ella turned in her seat, eyeing the buildings spreading out behind them, gaze shifting to the pointed clock tower towering overhead. She was still uncertain how she felt about their new home. The buildings were all ancient, even older than Walter's lab. At night, when all the lights went out, she often found herself unable to sleep in their tiny room. The thick metal door was encrusted with rust, and so heavy she could barely swing it shut, or pull it open. And they creaked something awful, too. Late at night she could hear them; doors opening, with eerie squeaks and creaks that would echo through the corridors, seemingly without end, as if the buildings moaned in their old age. Or screamed.

But there was electricity. Running water. So what if the rooms all smelled kind of bad inside? Or that the lights didn't work all the time, or that when they did, they glowed eerily, pulsing brighter and darker like a beating heart? Or that the water wasn't very hot, or that they had to cook it first before they could drink it? She'd been doing that already at the lab.

She heard her mother's voice speaking inside her head: What right do we have to complain?

The only things missing were Aunt Liv and Peter. Where were they? No one seemed to know. She missed them both, terribly. Her mom did too, though she rarely mentioned either one of them. It was in her face, though, in the way she would stare out at the gate. Ella found herself staring out it also. Waiting for them to appear. They would, one day. She just knew it. They had to.

"What was it like where you came from, Ella?" Gina said after a while. "There a lot people there, like there are here?"

Ella shook her head. "No, not so many," she replied, then hesitated before going on. Gina had never asked about where they'd come from, or about much of anything — she hardly spoke at all most days.

They weren't supposed to talk about it much, Mister Broyles had made that clear to the others when they'd arrived in the middle of the night, with the giant searchlight shooting up into the stars. She was supposed to be asleep, but she wasn't, and had heard them talking about how they would approach the new people. Nothing was to be said about Walter, or the secret research he'd done in his lab before the infected came, or that Mister Broyles and Astrid were secret special agents, like her aunt. Why it all had to stay secret she didn't understand, but Mister Broyles had seemed awfully sure. The others had all agreed, except for Walter, and he'd been burning up with fever.

But surely there were some things she could tell her friend? Surely not everything was a secret.

"I was visiting my aunt at her house when the infected came," she started, thinking back to that day. "We were watching a movie."

She told Gina how the news reports had cut in, and how mad she'd been when they couldn't finish the movie. And she couldn't even remember that they'd been watching. It all seemed so long ago, so far away from her. She told her how her aunt had called and warned them to stay inside, to not let anyone in. She told her of the looters out on the streets below her aunt's window, and how they'd been replaced by hordes of dead people, the freshes and the monsters. Of the soldiers, and the bombs dropping outside the window, the fires raging across the city, how she'd watched a woman leap to her death out of a window across the street, and then how that same woman's broken body had stood up and joined the ranks of undead feeding on the soldiers. Of the long silence after the soldiers were gone and fires had gone out, and how she would stare down at all the dead people walking past on the street below, how she would sometimes give them names in her head, give them stories. Her eyes stung when she told Gina about her Daddy, and how he had come back one night, holding his arm, blood dripping through his fingertips, and after locking himself in the back bedroom, how she had never seen him again.

"What happened then?" Gina whispered. "How'd you and your mom make it out?"

"One night, my aunt came for us," Ella said, "just like she promised she would. She and Peter."

She described the wild ride in the truck, how her mom had puked on the floor, how Peter had run over all the infected, and then how they'd had to walk the rest of the way when they'd run out of gas. Gina's eyes bulged when Ella told her about the run for the bridge, the strangers in the other truck shooting at them, the horde of infected on their heels.

"What happened to your aunt?" Gina asked when the story was done. She tilted her head, braids dangling, beads swinging back and forth in the wind. "She still alive?"

Ella nodded at once. "I haven't seen her in weeks, but I know she is" she said without a shred of doubt, no matter that it had been days and days with no sign of her or Peter. "Aunt Liv said we would see each other again, she never lies, ever. She was a soldier once. My mom told me. And then she was a—" She cut herself short, on the brink of giving away her aunt's secret job.

"A what?" Gina's eyes narrowed.

"A... policeman," she said quickly. "She was a detective. And the best."

Gina face turned glum. "Oh. There was a cop with us, too," she said, rubbing her fingertips together. "A sheriff. His name was Rick, but he's a dead one now. One of the demons got him on the arm. Then he almost got my uncle, but Chris shot him in the head with his own gun. We left them all behind at the farm. "Gram says they're all demons, now. That the Devil's inside them. That the Devil's inside all the dead ones." Her voice fell quiet, little more than a whisper. "You think she's right?"

"Demons?" Ella frowned. "I don't know..." Aunt Liv had never said anything like that about the infected before. Or Walter, and he knew more than anyone. He thought something was wrong with the world, that it was broken somehow, and the broken parts were what made the infected come back. "I don't think demons are real," she said. "Or the devil. I think the dead people have just forgotten they're dead, and not supposed to move anymore."

Gina seemed shocked by her response, mouth hanging open, but before she could reply, clomping footsteps turned both their heads.

A tall man wearing a black t-shirt and blue jeans was striding toward them over the wilted grass. Muscles bulged down the length of his arms, like he was some kind of movie superhero. Ella knew his angular face well. Mister Overbeek.

He was the man who had questioned them all before they'd been allowed inside. Questions about who they were and where they'd come from. He was kind of like Mister Broyles, tall and hard-faced, except his gray eyes were almost always flat and empty. And he never smiled. Mister Broyles at least smiled, sometimes. He looked like a dead fish, or so she'd heard her mother once whisper to Astrid.

"You young ladies staying out of trouble?" Mister Overbeek said as he approached. They both nodded at once, and he crossed his arms over his chest, staring down at them with his dead fish eyes for several moments before glancing over at the work on the fence. "Well... you shouldn't be out here alone, not while the fence is down. Head back on inside, now. It's about time for lunch anyway," he added before turning and stalking away toward the other men.

From the firmness of his tone it was clear he wasn't asking. Ella slid off the bench, preparing to head back. She glanced at her friend and found Gina still sitting, watching the departing Mister Overbeek, giving him an odd look. Was it fear? Why would she be afraid? Or is it something else?

"Ella. Ella!"

She turned at the sound of her name, and found a grinning Astrid standing between the pillars of the main entrance. And to her surprise, standing beside her in his usual plaid shirt and tan slacks was Walter. He raised his hand and smiled, giving her a silly grin.

"Hey, it's Walter!" she cried, forgetting all about Gina as she raced across the yard. Pounding up the steps to the porch, she crashed into him, wrapping her arms about his waist. "You're awake!"

Walter's hand patted her back. "Hello, my dear, Ella," he said, squeezing her gently. "Indeed I am awake, finally, as you can see by my standing before you."

Ella drew back, and noticed how thin he looked, how old he looked. She had never seen him that way before. "Are you sure you're all better now?" she asked. "You still don't look very good, Walter."

Walter chuckled above her. "Hmm. Yes. Well, I am certainly on the road to recovery, though pneumonia can be a tough nut to crack in the best of circumstances." His voice lowered, and he muttered something about a doctor, about him knowing what he was doing.

"You can let go of him now, Ell," her mother said firmly, stepping out from behind Astrid. "Before you knock him down. He was very sick, give him some time to get his strength back before you tackle him."

"Oh, it's quite all right, Miss Dunham," Walter said, grinning as Ella released him and stepped away. Shielding his eyes, he squinted skyward, lips curling into a broad smile. "I'm feeling better already. It's good to see her again. It's good to see sunlight again. My... room, if it can be called that, was certainly lacking in such a delightful view... Oh! And whom have we here?" Turning, Ella found Gina standing behind them, peering up from the foot of the stairs with guarded curiosity. "Who might you be, miss?" he asked.

"Ella, why don't you introduce your friend to Walter?" Astrid suggested.

Ella motioned to Gina, who came forward reluctantly, stopping just below them on the steps. "Walter, this is my friend, Gina," she said. "She lives here with us. Or we live here with her, I guess. She was here first."

"Oh? Is that so?" Walter's eyebrows climbed up his wrinkled forehead. "It's very nice to meet you, Gina. And how old are you? Five? Six?" His blue eyes narrowed, and he shook his head. "No. That's not right, is it?"

Much to Ella's surprise, Gina nodded, meeting Walter's gaze without hesitation. "I'm six-and-a-half, sir," she said. "I'll be seven come August."

"Six-and-a-half," Walter nodded, beaming. "What a perfect age to be. Brain development is just starting to accelerate, soaking up new information and experiences like a dry sponge. You practice your reading and writing daily, yes? And your arithmetic? You are aware it is best to get a head start on all three, are you not? Just like my Peter did."

"Does he always talk like that?" Gina said, looking Ella's way.

"Like what?" Walter frowned.

"Like a stick in the mud," Astrid muttered. "She's just a kid, Walter. Let her be one."

"What? A good foundation is crucial for a proper education!" he said, sounding rather upset. "I'm quite certain Sonia would agree with me if she were here. Hmmph. Simpletons, all of you..." Lifting his chin, he made his way carefully down the steps to the cracked sidewalk below and peered about, taking in the surrounding buildings. "Not the most pleasant of landscapes, is it? Nor is the air quality much better than indoors."

Ella was suddenly struck by an idea. "Mom? Can Gina and me show Walter around?"

"It's Gina and I, Ella," her mother corrected with a murmur, eyes focused on the fence where repairs were still underway. "Is it safe to be out here while they're repairing the fence, I wonder?"

"We'll be perfectly fine, I assure you, Miss Dunham," Walter said. "These two fine and upstanding young women are more than capable of keeping me out of trouble, I'm quite sure."

"Please, Mom? It'll only be for a little while," Ella pleaded, then held her breath as her mother decided, who, after a few moments, nodded her assent.

"Fine. Have it your way. Just don't take too long. They're serving lunch in the cafeteria soon. It's spaghetti day, apparently."

Spaghetti? Once upon a time, she had loved spaghetti, and couldn't wait to try it again. As they strolled away from the covered entryway, her stomach grumbled eagerly in anticipation.

Walter moved more slowly than Ella remembered, and she supposed he was still not feeling as well as he had claimed. As he limped along between her and Gina, flickers of pain ran across his face, but he never complained.

They walked around the center main building in its entirety, with Walter gazing up at the imposing clock tower, the tall, pointed roofs with interest. He asked questions occasionally as they pointed out the different buildings; which were open and closed, and who lived in them, as well as what purpose they served. Ella told him what little she had gleaned, but it was Gina who did most of the talking, filling in the blanks.

The laundry building seemed to interest him not at all, but he asked more questions about the kitchens than any other; what kind of ovens and how many, and if there were working refrigerators. Ella had never been inside the kitchens, but Gina's grandmother worked in them every day, along with Mister Broyles, of all people. Walter was aghast.

"You say Agent Broyles works in the kitchen?" he said, eyes wide. "What an utterly bizarre and inefficient use of the man's talents. And what of yourself, child? Do they have you both manning the battlements, defending the walls with the others?" he finished with a snort.

She darted a glance Gina's way. Had she caught Walter's slip? Her friend's eyes were narrowed as if in thought, but if she had noticed, she gave no other sign of it. "No, we can't fight at the fence, silly," she said. "We're not old enough. And Mister Broyles told me the Doctor didn't want him at the fence because of his bad foot. He sure didn't seem very happy about it, though."

"Well I should think not," Walter said, shaking his head as they walked along. "Mister Broyles is very proud man, and quite capable. Tell me, child. This Doctor I've been hearing about. Where does he stay? With the rest of you, in the... dormitories?" His face twisted as he spoke, as if he were tasting something bad.

"He stays in a different building, I think," Ella replied, shaking her head. "He isn't around much." The man everyone called the Doctor was around hardly at all; she had only seen him twice, including the night they had arrived.

Gina nodded. "Yeah. Most of the time, he's in there," she said, throwing her hand toward a distant building, set far back and away from all the others, yet still inside the fence.

The tall building was old and falling apart like all the others, with rows and rows of tiny windows and faded red bricks. Sitting up against was another, smaller building, shorter, with only a few darkened slits for windows. Gray smoke drifted upward lazily from several black pipes poking out its flat roof. A man stood in front of the entrances to each building, a man armed with a machine gun.

Walter stiffened, eyeing the two men as they came to a stop. "And what are those buildings?"

"We aren't allowed to go in those," Ella told him. That had been made clear from the beginning, on the day after their arrival. The man everyone called Mister Overbeek had said it was off limits, to everyone. For their safety, he had explained. Except for himself, of course, and a few other men.

"My Gram said the shorter one is where the boilers are," Gina supplied. "I don't know what's inside the other one, but that's where the Doctor goes. They say it's where he's trying to cure the dead ones."

"Is he now?" Walter said after a moment, in a tone oddly quiet. "I'll be curious to see what kind of results he may have. If any." He stared at the pair of distant buildings for several moments, then looked down at them both, grinning. "Come, you two. Your mother will be looking for you, Ella, and I believe I've seen enough for one afternoon." He suddenly smacked his palms together, causing Gina to jump, dark eyes startled. "I'm ready to eat!" he exclaimed. "Onward!"

Ella agreed, and her stomach rumbled loud enough for the others to hear at mention of food. As they turned away from the unknown buildings, she thought for an instant than Gina was on the verge of saying more, but then her friend merely ran ahead, long braids bouncing out to either side with each of her long strides.

"I like your friend," Walter commented, watching her go. "She seems very nice, very polite."

"She is nice," she agreed. They walked a little, and she reached out, taking his hand. "Walter?"

Walter glanced down at her, bushy eyebrows lifting. "Yes, dear?"

Ella smiled up at her other friend. "I'm glad you're okay."