Fran thought she was the first in the cafeteria to awaken, not realizing that CJ had finally given up on his abortive attempts at sleep hours ago and lay quietly on his cot with his eyes closed. He appeared to be sound asleep, but in reality he was trying to work out in his mind what exactly his strange relationship with Briggs really was. The sound of Fran's movements caused him to open his eyes a fraction, just long enough to see her making her way towards the reading corner and the crossword puzzle book.
As Fran neared the reading corner she had every intention of sitting down with the same magazines she'd been reading for the past week, probably at least a dozen times over already, when she caught sight of the pen on the outside of the crossword puzzle book. Ever since CJ had started using it as a means to communicate without alerting those watching them over the surveillance cameras they had come to the agreement that the pen being clipped to the outer cover would signal new information had been added. Keeping her knowledge of the camera's in the back of her mind, she tried to cover her eagerness to read the newest message by forcing herself to flip through the magazines before finally settling back in a chair with the crossword book in hand. She was so absorbed in what she was doing that she failed to hear Peter's approach until he spoke.
"You okay Fran?" he asked, causing her to jump a little.
"Oh, Peter, I didn't hear you," she smiled warmly at him then. "I guess I was a little lost in thought here, trying to figure out these clues," she gestured towards the puzzle book. Peter nodded, silently acknowledging his understanding.
"Maybe I can help you out then," he said, pulling the other chair closer to hers before sitting down in it. Fran eagerly held the book open so that they could both see the latest entry, written in CJ's now recognizable handwriting. The first one nearly caused her heart to skip a beat, 'Leaving soon, be ready.' Fran closed her eyes for a second, breathing a sigh of relief, causing Peter to glance her way again. She opened her eyes and focused on the page once more, continuing to read. 'Beware Davis, not what he seems,' and 'Stay together, safer," finished out the short entries. It wasn't much to go on, and both wished that they could speak freely, none of them was really cut out for the cloak and dagger routine afterall.
While the two continued to sit and write their own messages in the book the rest of the group showed signs of waking up. Steve sat up, yawning loudly and stretching, not really caring if he woke anyone. "Someone really needs to complain to the concierge about the crap ass accommodations around here," he complained.
Monica looked blearily in his direction, unused to the late night exercise she'd gotten in the wee hours of the morning. "Shut up Steve,"
"Ooh, someone woke up on the wrong side of the cot today," he said, sounding much more cheerful now that he knew someone else was awake.
Choosing to ignore him, she instead rolled over and found Glen watching them. Wanting to take her anger at Steve out on someone she said, "Something on your mind Glen?" Then, narrowing her eyes at him, she purred, "Or were you hoping you might get some kind of show this morning? Maybe it would be enough to help you join Steve's team and leave mine alone."
Glen hastily retreated to the far side of the room, where Fran and Peter sat, without saying a word. Monica watched his retreat, trying her best to shrug off the twinge of guilt she felt for speaking to him that way. He'd been nothing but nice to her, and truth be told he gave them all probably the least amount of trouble of anyone in their group.
Yawning, she sat up and glanced around the room, noticing how everyone seemed destined to pair up in some way. There was Terry and Nicole sitting on his cot playing with that dumb dog Nicole had insisted on keeping. Ana and Michael sat on her cot. He was gently massaging her shoulders, the contact between them having become more pronounced since getting caught together the previous morning. Ana had explained to Monica and Nicole why it had appeared that she and Michael had been making out like a couple of teenagers when they had all made the trip to the showers together. But she hadn't even tried to deny anything when Monica pointed out how much they both had seemed to be enjoying it at the time.
Glancing towards the card table, she watched Kenneth and Roger sit down to play a game of gin together. They did that a lot lately, play cards and talk about the good old days in the military, why they'd decided to become cops, stuff like that. Despite how different they were in appearance, the tall, muscular black man with his shaved head and tattoos, and the short, wiry blonde man with a receding hairline, the two seemed to have really bonded. Peter and Fran seemed to be a pair now too, Monica mused. She supposed it was a good thing for Fran, what with being knocked up and her boyfriend having been eaten and all. But it worked out for Peter too, he seemed to thrive on the fact that she needed and depended on him. He was definitely a caretaker type personality.
Steve was a different matter entirely. Oh, she was still fucking him whenever they could get the chance to sneak out of the sight of the others, but that was really all there was to it. He had his moments where he could be charming, but she was the only person who ever saw that, the rest of them would probably feed him to one of those walking corpses in a second if they had the chance to. Lately he'd been getting on her nerves and she'd been feeling some serious attraction to CJ. If only he wasn't so blue collar, that was his only major draw back as far as she was concerned. Well, that and he really did seem to have something going on with that Briggs chick, which actually made her kind of jealous in a way. Men always wanted her, the idea that there was one out there that didn't, who wasn't gay to boot, just didn't sit right. She shrugged it off though, letting out a yawn, she lay back down, deciding that it was just the sleep deprivation getting to her. Everything would be fine if she got a little more sleep.
0900 Hours
Henry and Masters worked their way down the escape tunnel leading to the secondary helipads. They carried a duffels loaded with supplies, intending to stow them with the other gear they had managed to bring down so far.
"It's kind of funny that they aren't monitoring these tunnels," Masters said suddenly.
"Not really," Henry replied, "Because they do have surveillance camera's here." He pointed to the faint red glow of light from one of the cameras. "Cowboy and Briggs made sure they were sort of disabled right after we got here. All the main hallways, this tunnel, the camera's are up and running, they're just on a loop. Apparently no one's watching them close enough to notice so far that the halls are always clear."
"So they've had this all planned out almost from the start then," commented Masters.
"More like a work in progress I'd say. Cowboy had his suspicions from the beginning, He was on the first team in here. But, he couldn't communicate anything to her without alerting others here that he was on to them. As soon as we arrived though and they got everything pieced together, those two started making some serious plans."
"So when are we going to start loading up the arms?" Masters asked.
"Briggs worked out a deal with Randall this morning, she's going to get us full access to the arms room when she gets back on duty this afternoon. We oughta be able to get the arms loaded and start setting the explosives."
"So until then?"
"We plan. She wants a remote detonation on the generators and the remaining helos on helipad two, that's gonna take some work," Henry said.
"Taking out the generators will cause the fences to lose power," Masters mused thoughtfully.
"Exactly. And I figure a good strafing run on the shatterproof glass should weaken it enough to let those zombies breakthrough, take care of whatever of those fuckers we don't." Henry almost smiled at the thought.
"But what about the helos we flew in on? There might be time for some of them to make it out of here on those," Masters pointed out. "And there's also the docks, they've got the harbor barricaded off too, they could get out on boats.
"Briggs wants this place completely sanitized when we fly out, so that's not even an option. She's got a plan for them both. And she's down in the labs right now trying to locate the weaknesses, bring that down first."
"How can she be so sure she'll make it back out of the lab?"
Henry paused, looking at Masters before answering, "Because they still suspect her, but they're not sure how many others she's recruited. Sure, they can kill her off, turn her into one of those things, but that just means someone else might step up to the plate. If they let her live, they can try to watch and see who the rest of us are. She treats this whole thing like a big chess board, or that game I used to play when I was a kid, Risk, I think it was called. Anyways, we're all a bunch of players in a game to her, we all have our positions on the board, but like poker, she'll never reveal her hand until someone calls."
"You make it sound like it's all just a big game to her, like she's actually enjoying this somehow."
"Maybe she is brother, maybe she is."