In which Zofia may secretly ponder the creakiness of one Kyle Crane, but is mostly just worried.
Chapter 2: Rock Paper Scissors
Aeons ago, Zofia had been convinced that the day her mum had kicked dad out of the house had been a day of grand meaning. One so important, it'd change the entire damn world and that nothing was ever going to be the same.
What an ignorant, wee bean she'd been back then.
The world, unimpressed by her worrying over whether or not she'd still get to feed the fish in the pond, hadn't changed at all.
Years later, she'd tried having a boyfriend. A disaster, that. When that'd ended— in a kind of way where it took you a decade before you realized you ought to have gone to therapy 'cause of it —she'd assumed that the Earth's axis must have been moved. At the least. But the world, unimpressed still, hadn't even blinked.
Two more breakups. The first iPod. Literal wars. Landing a gig at a stunt agency. Losing a best friend. Getting poached by another (agency). Terrorist attacks. Twitter. Mum's cancer. The first MCU movie. Mum's remission. Baumgartner skydiving from the stratosphere.
It looked as if nothing could rouse the world at large beyond a simple, grumbling shrug.
Then Harran had happened.
For Zofia, Harran had been a divide; a moment that marked the transition between her Before and her After. More so than anything else had ever done in her life.
Remaining unimpressed, the world had carried on.
Sometimes, she wondered if maybe it ought to have paid a bit more attention. If things had gone differently if it'd let itself be humbled.
A little later, the world had fallen.
Unimpressed, Zofia had survived.
As soon as a shy puddle of light oozed into the attic (the window it came in through was so grubby it turned the rays a muddy green), Zofia pushed the roof hatch open. Or tried to, at any rate. Its hinges locked at a quarter of the way up, stopping her short.
Please don't leave, the house might have been saying. I haven't had people over in years, and you haven't even rifled through my kitchen yet. Who knows, you might find tea!
English Breakfast, the house teased. Moroccan Green Mint, who knows what you'll find? Granted, it'll taste awful, but it'll be tea.
Zofia put on a mild scowl but decided not to move, her arm remaining pressed to the hatch while she allowed the morning to unfold around her. Brisk air made her shiver— even fully dressed as she was —and the scent of lavender tickled her nose. The horizon, or at least the slice of it that she could see, bled a pretty pink.
And then there was Crane. One moment she had the hatch to herself, the next his arm looped around her shoulders and his cheek appeared barely an inch from scratching at hers. Zofia threw him a sideways look.
He returned it, a subtle smile hanging in his light brown eyes, and popped the hatch open with one hard shove.
On almost every other day, that motion would have been trivial. But today? With the Antizin fresh in his blood and weighing him down?
Today, Zofia thought, it made him look near his age, from how his brow knitted with the effort and his lips pulled down, and how all the creases he'd collected over the years appeared to etch themselves in deeper. The ones he'd hoarded scowling so damn much. The ones he'd picked up from smiling even more. And not to forget the scars: some mere nicks, barely worth the mention, others deeper slashes that'd bled a lot. He carried an entire map of them on his face. A map, which, if you knew how to read it, led you down a life lived so unabashedly, it was a miracle he was still alive at all.
Crane did not mind her staring. Not one bit, and so she stared a little more. He squinted at the budding morning, which crinkled his eyes. Gave him crow's feet— or whatever those things were called —and went oddly well with the grey that'd taken up residence in his hair, most of which bunched close to his temples and salted his shaggy stubble.
"I'll be your charming, handsome, silver fox," she remembered him saying when he'd found his first grey hair. "Gimme a few years."
Those years had come. Then gone. Crane had kept his word. Despite, well, everything.
Said fox climbed out the hatch, armed with his fat bladed machete and her hatchet to spare.
Wordlessly, Zofia shrunk back into the attic and— one by one —hauled their gear to the hatch for Crane to grab. Their reasonably heavy packs went first, and while she tipped them through the gap, her thoughts meandered back to the early hours, when Crane's seizures had woken her from a dreadfully thin sleep. Then they kept wandering, further and further back, until they reached an argument they'd had three nights ago.
It'd been about how he needed more than the knockoff Antizin.
She grabbed his crossbow next, that heavy, unwieldy thing. Then came his stubby shotgun.
Their argument had been a mostly one-sided spat carried by hushed voices. She'd done most of the pleading (Because that's what it'd been, no? Her, pleading.) while Crane had resorted to stubborn silence. At least until she'd tried to get ahead of it all by jabbing him with their single remaining dose of Tomorrow.
That's what she liked calling it anyway. Tomorrow. THV-H0-3 was what it said on the syringe.
Crane had stopped her.
"What if you get a bad enough episode, huh?" he'd snapped. There'd been a disapproving (and scared) scowl on his brow.
Zofia stuck her bow, plus quiver, out the hatch.
"We're not risking it," he'd gone on, "I'll be fine."
Fine.
Fine.
He always said that.
Always.
Though he'd been right about one thing: Where Crane's awful curse— because what else was it than a curse? —followed a neat and gradual curve from wee twitches to a need for unspeakable violence, hers was a fickle and unpredictable thing that, if given the chance, would burn her up like a flash fire.
Today, Zofia felt perfectly normal. Perfectly human.
Tomorrow she might not.
With all their gear out, she slid from the hatch, out into the early autumn morning, and followed Crane down to the edge of the lichen-covered roof. There, they repeated their exercise again, with him leaping down to land on gravel long overgrown by moss and weeds, and her throwing him their gear piece by piece.
The roof made it easy to keep an eye out, watch for movement and whatnot. It overlooked what'd once been a wide driveway of sorts, which cosied up to the front of a farmhouse. The farmhouse, to this day, had an air of residual luxury, as Zofia had noted when they'd come up to it in the evening and it'd looked real pretty in the gloom. She could vividly imagine how the gravel must have been a brilliant white at some point, certain that the gravel had probably been a brilliant white at some point, not such an overgrown mess full of moss, weeds, bushes, and even young trees. Her eyes roamed from the left to the right. A forest ringed the property. Unattended, that same forest— with its leaves turning a lovely shade of It'll be real cold soon —had folded over the access road feeding into the once-gravel lot.
Nothing moved.
Well, except the stuff that ought to, like those leaves bursting with red and orange, the branches they clung to, the clouds, the birds— and Crane.
He gestured for her to jump.
Since nothing came to have them for breakfast, they allowed themselves a few moments to stretch. A droll kind of picture that probably was, Zofia thought, them following an old routine of waking their limbs up while dressed in road-worn trousers and often-mended jackets, with a once-picturesque farmhouse surrounding them and nothing but birdsong for company.
While she pulled her elbow up and her arm over her head, Zofia gave the farmhouse another good look. ts walls were grey stone— with no piece quite like the other —and its corners were marked by thick, dark wooden beams. The same type of wood framed its windows, along with a very wide glass door at the front. Not that there was any glass in that anymore, safe for teeth ringing it that'd gotten worn down from sharp to blunt by wind and rain. Next to the front door hung a decorative coach wheel and one of those thick collars belonging to a draft horse's harness; both of which invited a brief nibble of nostalgia at the back of her head. She smelled horse and leather swaddled in beeswax. Heard the thud-thud-thud of hooves on hollow earth, a sharp whistle, the rush of padding paws—
Zofia turned away from the memories, squashing the nibble before it turned into a gnawing that'd gobble her up, and refocused on the farmhouse. On the broken, old thing.
It had flower beds. Plenty of them. Some were fixed to the walls (or had been fixed would have been more accurate, they'd mostly fallen off), and others ran the length of the building, where their wooden bodies had rotten into the ground.
With no one to scold them, the flowers had fled their flowerbeds.
Now they grew wherever they pleased, adding dashes of colour among the thick greenery. There were pale pink roses dotting untamed bushes, large daisy looking things with red blooms vying for her attention, and a whole army of lavender bushels.
No. Really. There was enough lavender to make her feel a tad sick.
Zofia arched to the side, scooted her leg out in a low lunge, and bent until she could pluck a stem heavy with blue buds from the nearest bushel. When she came back up, a loud pop got her attention and her eyes snapped over to Crane.
He'd frozen mid-stretch, his shoulders pulled back and his hands clasped past his tailbone. His eyes were comically wide.
"Okay," he wheezed, the word coming up in a tight kinda way. "I'm done. I'm good. Let's go."
Zofia snorted. She slipped the lavender stem behind her ear.
They walked straight through the busted glass door, crossed a devastated hall full of broken furniture, and stepped back out into the morning on the other side.
Crane turned them left, and as they crossed an asphalt-covered courtyard boxed in by three buildings, it occurred to her that this hadn't been a farm at all. She'd misjudged it. There'd been no pigs here or cows or crops. Just… horses. They'd taken shelter at what might have been a riding school once. A fancy one.
On the right stood the riding hall, though its roof had long ago decided it preferred being a floor. Vaguely connected to the hall were the actual stables, which bent like a sideways L. Crane took her all the way to the far edge of that, where a gate had fallen flat over some while back. It'd rotten into mulch. They walked right over it.
The stables themselves had long ago stopped smelling like they ought to; of horse and hay and treated leather. Rather, they reeked of brackish water, rotten wood — and of not-quite-dead Shambler.
Zofia's eyes flicked up. Light came in through holes in the roof and plenty of dirty windows, but further back, where the roof had kind of held, was a lot of shade. Crane, for his part, didn't as much as look up. He slunk forward until he'd reached the first open stall and promptly vanished in there. She followed him until she stood at the stall's mouth, her eyes still fixed on the shadows up ahead.
The Shambler— Biter, zombie, Infected, what-have-you —was a gnarly thing weaving on the spot, probably come in for shelter when morning had broken, washed in like a rotting fish pulled ashore by the ocean.
It greeted them with a quiet moan.
"Aw, a Squonk," Crane commented. He'd poked his head over the top.
Encouraged by his voice, the thing shuffled on its feet, pointed itself at them, and began a slow, shamble towards them. Well, hers, to be more precise.
"You think they get lonely?" Zofia had asked Crane an approximate eleven years ago, on a particularly drab day lorded over by low hanging clouds. It'd drizzled, she remembered. Constantly. Been never-ending damp and that'd driven her near mad. Anyways— they'd found a house. A virgin-house. Untouched. Unlooted. Right up until Crane had kicked in its front door at any rate and they'd carried in mud and empty packs. In the living room, they'd met a Biter. A single, lonesome, Biter. "When they roam about without a group, I mean? Do they miss company? Get all depressed?"
Crane had tossed her a Dear God, Fi, kind of look back then.
Today— on a day much less drab —he tossed her a gardening hoe. She caught it with a quick grab.
Ever since then in the living room, Crane called the lone things Squonks. A Squonk, according to him, was a mythical creature hailing from his US of A, where squonks roamed about alone at dusk and dawn, were always unhappy, ugly as sin, and ready to dissolve into tears when cornered.
Literally. Not figuratively.
"You box them in they cry themselves into a puddle," he'd said, waving a dust-covered book at her which he'd plucked from a shelf in that same living room on that same drab day. The Squonk had lain crumpled on a mildewy carpet, dead.
"You're making that up. All of it," Zofia had insisted, though without the Internet to help— that'd abandoned them —she'd had no way of uncovering the truth.
Today's Squonk came dressed in tattered clothes way too large for what was left of it. Its face was haggard, with hollow cheeks and skin broken over a sharp edge of bleached chin bone. Its eyes were sunken deep into their sockets. They were murky and hungry and fixed on her.
Crane had ducked back into the stall. He pulled on a wide sheet of tarp— dusty and mouldy tarp —and revealed what he'd half-heartedly concealed in here before they'd gone to sleep. The tarp flapped loudly.
Encouraged by the movement and the noise, the Squonk picked up speed. Not much, mind you, but enough to tell her it'd reach her at some point in the distant future. Zofia watched, the hoe grasped tight in her good hand.
She thought of lonely things again. The idea of anything— anyone —wandering and wandering and wandering and then wandering some more and doing it all alone?
That was tragic.
Real tragic.
The Squonk reached her. Zofia swung the hoe. The Squonk got its arms up (and likely its hope, though whether or not hope was still a thing for Biters she couldn't rightfully tell) and the sharpish tip of the gardening tool cracked into its skull.
Its arms fell. So did the whole Squonk. Zofia let go of the hoe and left it stuck in its skull.
While she'd ended the lonely thing's endless wandering, Crane had finished uncovering their bike. A bike which had— very long ago —forgotten what motorcycle drawer it used to fit into and now landed squarely in the Apocalypse Touring corner. Most of its original pieces had been replaced, modified, or added onto. The only constant that remained was the name.
U.S.S Slow'n'Serious was stencilled on its dirt-green gas tank in chipped, orange letters. Crane's idea.
They had a Millennium Emu, too (also Crane's idea), but that one they'd left at a settlement six weeks behind. Barring about a thousand things that could go wrong, they'd go back for it. Eventually.
Crane pushed the Slow'n'Serious from the stable to park it on the asphalt and went about a quick inspection. His crossbow and shotgun were already fixed to it; one holstered at the front, one at the back.
Zofia kept watch.
Once satisfied that the bike was in working order, he moved on to plugging in their UV lamp's rechargeable battery, what with how they'd drained a few hours out of it last night. That particular contraption— the light and charger —had been a parting gift.
Stay lit, was scribbled at its base. Love, the Aldemirs, it read on the top.
Zofia's innards knotted painfully.
Stop thinking, she told herself and focused on the edges of the courtyard instead — and on how Crane had started belting his pack to the bike's already overloaded tail. The Slow'n'Serious accepted the extra luggage with grace, though Zofia wouldn't have blamed it if it'd ejected all its bolts and fallen to pieces instead. Not with how it carried their entire lives on its back. Relentlessly.
"What's our ETA?" Crane asked after he'd tightened the last strap.
Zofia twisted the lavender stem behind her ear and gave the route she'd plotted earlier another quick think. "Three-abouts," she said eventually. "Unless we get a flat."
"Mhm," he intoned and slunk his long-legged self into her direction.
"Or there's a fire."
"Mhm." He stopped in front of her and got his fingers all up into the business that was her bandana plus cap arrangement. He adjusted the lot. Which was unnecessary, since it was an already very well adjusted arrangement, thank you. She shifted her feet on the spot. He rolled a thumb down her temple. "Or the bridge got washed away."
"Mhmm." Crane stopped fussing with her headdress, leaned around her all chest-in-her-face and all, and pulled the territory's map from her pack.
"Or there's a horde," she added.
Crane clicked his tongue, chiding, and wagged the map at her nose. She swatted it aside, earned herself a small grin which piled up against one side of his mouth, and got met by a challenging tilt of his brow.
Then he stuck his free hand out — and their daily game of Rock Paper Scissors got off to an awful start.
Rock, Crane. Scissors, her.
Zofia grimaced.
Another rock.
Another pair of scissors.
"Bollocks," Zofia blurted.
Crane huffed up a quiet laugh— which, to be fair, came with Zofia realising that he'd started looking less ragged after the puffs of Antizin —and wiggled his fingers at her. Reluctantly, she fished the Slow'n'Serious's keys from her front chest pocket, trading them for the map.
"I revise my estimate," she said while Crane carried his prize off to the bike. "We'll get there around midnight, which means we'll have been eaten by then."
"Rude," was all he had to say to that as he swung his leg over the bike and got the engine to turn over.
Vrr-vrr-hack-cough-splutter-purr went the Slow'n'Serious. Zofia, climbing up behind him, tucked the map into Crane's belt and then hooked her busted up hand in along with it.
"So. What'll we do if Spike isn't there?" she asked as he steered them out from the courtyard and back onto the leftovers of a beaten road.
Crane shrugged. "He'll be there."
"This is a what-if thing, Crane." She tugged on his belt. "Go left up there. Then pass two driveways and take a right, down towards the valley. We'll have to go low until we reach the bridge, but I found us a bicycle track that'll get us past the riverside road."
"Take the first exit at the roundabout," he mocked in a monotone Google Maps kinda tone. "Got it. Anyway. If Spike says he'll be there, he'll be there. Have a little faith in the man. He isn't the type to leave us hanging." Crane stopped the bike at the driveway's mouth to look left and then right, almost like he expected traffic. There wasn't any. Moving or otherwise. Safe for large cracks in the tarmac and the occasional greenery bursting through, the road was empty.
"Humour me. Please. Imagine for a second we show up and he is nowhere to be seen. Not because he's ghosting you, but because he broke a leg or fell in a hole or choked on a chicken bone. Or maybe he's found Jane and she's given him a stroke. He's seventy for crying out loud, he ought to retire."
Crane got the bike moving again and turned left. "Christ, Fi. Who pissed into your porridge today?"
"I'm worried. And so are you, don't go pretending otherwise. First of, we've got barely enough fuel to get us to the rendezvous. Which, you know, means you should have let me drive—"
Grunt.
"—second, what if the rumours about the walls being locked down tight are true? What'll we do then?" Frustrated— and with fear ballooning at the base of her throat —Zofia curled her good hand into his jacket. Though what she really wanted to do was swat him over his big, stupid head. Over and over again. Gently. "We should have gone south, Crane. Not north. Now we're too far from Morrow's to make it back before winter and what if there's nothing here for us? What if Spike was wrong or someone lied to him? What if we came here for nothing? Geneve was as safe a bet as any and you know that."
Crane's shoulders rose and fell with a sigh so deep, Zofia felt compelled to press her head against his back and hold on even tighter.
"We're done with safe," he said eventually. His voice was a steady rumble in her ear since she'd squished herself in close. "I'm done with safe. If Spike doesn't show, then we improvise, alright? We'll walk right in there and we figure it out ourselves."
"But the—"
"—no wall'll keep us out, babe."
Zofia rolled her eyes. Or in, she mused, while her thoughts drifted off to catch on endless walls; like they were clouds getting snagged on tall mountain peaks.
"You're with me, right?" This time, Crane's voice was almost too quiet to carry beyond the bike purring under them, but she heard it clear as day.
A loaded question, that. You're not giving up, was what he really meant. Because I won't let you.
Zofia gave a silent nod, right as a vine-choked road sign rolled by.
Weather-beaten letters peeked through the leaves.
Villedor, they read.
Not Safe, someone had sprayed on underneath.
It almost made her laugh.
Taffer Notes: Update schedule? What update schedule?
Anyway, I've decided to post Zofia's introduction early. Mostly since I can, but also since I figured it'd be fair to get her's and Crane's status quo out of the way without too long of a pause between.
Having said that, anyone who is familiar with Dying Light 2 will begin to notice mentions of things that were not in the game. That's intentional :] While the bones of Dying Light 2's storyline remain, I am putting on different meat bits, all facilitated by the introduction of an additional (new) villain who has shaped the ongoings within Villedor's walls.