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In These Bodies

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"What the hell happened to you?!"

"Why were you going to stab me?!"

"I thought you were a looter!" Santana insisted, dropping the knife onto the kitchen table.

"Looters don't knock!" Kurt argued.

"You didn't knock!"

Dani finally cut in sharply, raising her voice. "Hey! How about you stop squabbling and actually deal with the problem?" She pointed to Kurt's head injury.

There was a badly bruised laceration on his temple, and the hair surrounding it was caked with blood in a wide streak down the side of his neck. Kurt lightly prodded it with a slight wince. "It's not as bad as it looks," he said.

"Kurt, you look like you lost a gallon of blood," Rachel deadpanned.

"Head wounds bleed a lot," he waved her off, still out of breath. "I'm fine." He made a beeline for the kitchen table, grabbing a bottle of water and chugging the entire thing in a few seconds. "Please tell me we have food; I haven't eaten since yesterday lunchtime."

Rachel handed him a Power Bar. "That's all we have that doesn't require the stove or microwave." He didn't seem to care, gratefully tearing it open. "What happened?"

"Got caught in a minor riot back near the Gershwin Theater, which is where I lost my keys," he replied, taking one of the chairs at the table with Rachel. Dani dumped the contents of a few water bottles into a large mixing bowl and retrieved a washcloth from the bathroom as he spoke. "People were looting like crazy. I was just trying to get past them, but someone kind of hit me with a baseball bat."

Dani frowned, sitting in the chair next to him and soaking the washcloth in the bowl. "A baseball bat gave you this cut?"

"The bat was broken when it hit me."

Dani made a face, wringing out the cloth. "Okay, lean back." She began to gently scrub the dried blood from Kurt's skin and hair.

"Where were you all night?" Rachel asked. "We were worried sick."

Kurt flinched and hissed through his teeth when Dani brushed over the cut. "Isabel convinced me to stay the night in the office," he explained. "I wanted to leave right away, but she said it wasn't safe, I'd get hurt, et cetera. Long story short, I left first thing this morning and I still got hurt— Ow!"

"Sorry," Dani said, pressing a little too hard on Kurt's wound.

Kurt huffed and forced himself to stay still as Dani scraped the dried blood away from his skin. "Do you guys have any idea what happened to the power?"

"If we could watch the news we might," Santana said flatly. "But no. Any theories?"

Kurt shrugged. "Terrorist attack?" he suggested. "I keep thinking I should Google it, but that's obviously a bad plan." He coughed, his throat sounding hoarse and dry, and reached for another water bottle.

"Careful, we have to ration that," Dani said.

"I'm sure the power will be back before we have to worry about rationing anything," Rachel countered.

Kurt took a long swig. "Did you guys run into any trouble on your way back?"

"We didn't get caught in any lootings," Santana said, "but Little Miss Genius over here took off her shoes and stepped on glass." She nodded pointedly at Rachel, who indignantly slapped Santana's arm with the back of her hand.

"Those boots were killing me!" she protested.

"And how'd the glass treat you?"

Kurt glanced down at Rachel's feet, noticing the bloodstained improvised bandage wrapped around her left heel for the first time. "Jesus, Rachel!"

"It's fine, Santana got the glass out. And we'll go to the hospital once the power's back."

"I'm a full-on Army field medic," Santana declared.

"By the way, Santana, I still need to pee."

Santana rolled her eyes and stood to help Rachel to the bathroom.

Los Angeles, California

Mercedes wiped sweat from her face, peeking through the Venetian blinds covering the window to her tiny apartment, feeling more grateful than ever that her door had two locks on the inside. Since the power had gone out, she'd managed to stay safe inside the apartment, but her roommate had never come home and without the electricity to run the air conditioner, the building was quickly heating up, baking under the sun. The faucets wouldn't work (the pumps were long dead) and Mercedes had already run out of water.

This kind of crap would happen during an April heat wave, Mercedes thought bitterly.

She swallowed nervously, chewing on her lip as she scanned the area outside through the gap in her blinds. She hadn't seen anyone in the street below for a while — at least, no one alive. A man's corpse lay on the pavement sprawled across the yellow line, just beginning to bloat under the sun's glare. Mercedes hadn't actually seen him die, but from the condition of his limbs, he had probably been trampled.

For what had to be the thousandth time, Mercedes pulled her phone from her pocket and pressed the power button, her lips pressing together when it did nothing in response. She tried not to think about what Ohio might look like now, or where her parents and brothers might be. She wasn't an idiot. She knew the blackout wasn't exclusive to Los Angeles. Planes had crashed in the streets, dropping from the sky in almost perfect unison. Cars and buses had stopped, the lights across the city went out. Since then, she'd not seen anything electronic work.

There were no Army Humvees plowing down the streets, carrying the National Guard to rescue people from their own homes.

There were no police officers, no ambulances, no Red Cross helicopters.

There was a dead man already rotting in the street right in front of her apartment building, and she swallowed and turned away from the window as a black crow swooped down and perched hungrily on the corpse's chest.

There was no one coming to help.

The sky began to grow dark again over New York as Kurt and the girls sorted through the contents of the refrigerator, food spread out over the kitchen table in a half-organized chaos.

Rachel paused to stare out the window at the bright gold and pink streaks across the clouds, the corners of her mouth turning down in disappointment. "I was hoping the power would be back on by now," she sighed.

"Midtown's probably in shambles," Kurt added, dropping a no-longer-frozen package of ground beef into the quickly filling trashcan at the end of the table. The blood had been scrubbed from his skin, his bloodstained shirt thrown out and exchanged for a hoodie, and his cut had been taped over with three large Band-Aids.

Santana abruptly dropped the cans she was scrutinizing for expiration dates back onto the tabletop with a solid thunk. "Does anybody else think we're being a little too casual about this, or am I the only sane one here?"

Dani and Kurt exchanged a wary look. "About… what, exactly?" Kurt prompted.

"Uh, this entire city's gone up in flames in less than twenty-four hours," Santana said slowly, her eyebrows sharply pulled down. "And none of us can call home. And we're just sitting here sorting the food that'll keep from the food that'll go bad like we've done this before."

Rachel swallowed, her hands pressed flat against the table. "Santana, it's just a power outage," she said, though she sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as Santana.

"No," Santana shook her head, her voice growing harsher. "No, a power outage is when the power grid goes dead. Are we just going to ignore the fact that all of our phones died simultaneously? Are we not going to talk about the helicopter that crashed right in front of the diner?" She pressed her lips together for a moment, and for half a second Kurt saw her chin tremble. "This is not a power outage."

"Well, what do you expect us to do about it?" Rachel asked, throwing her hands up.

"I don't know, maybe panic just a little ?"

Kurt paused, leaning forward with his arms braced against the back of a chair. "Santana, we're all terrified," he said gently. "What good is panicking going to do?"

Santana let out a heavy huff of breath, backing away from the table and raking her fingers through her hair. "You're right," she acquiesced. "Sorry. I'm just tired."

Dani stepped around Rachel and took Santana's arm. "Come on, let's go to bed," she urged quietly. "You haven't slept since yesterday morning."

"Kurt and I can finish up here," Rachel offered, gesturing to the pile of cans and various food products strewn across the table.

Santana rubbed her eyes in exhaustion. "I need to change Rachel's bandage."

"I'll do it," Kurt cut in. "Go get some rest."

Dani nodded gratefully to Kurt and Rachel as she guided Santana out of the room, one arm looped around Santana's middle back.

Kurt grabbed the rest of the cloth strips Santana had torn and set on the kitchen counter, then swung a chair over closer to Rachel and sat, patting his knee. "Okay, Rachel, let me see your foot."

Rachel leaned back in her seat, wincing as she raised her leg to rest her foot on Kurt's thigh. Kurt delicately unwound the cloth strips from around her heel, his lip curling at the smell of old blood as he dropped the soiled makeshift bandages onto the table and muttered something about it being highly unsanitary. He lifted her ankle up to get a better view of the wound in the diminishing evening light filtering in through the window.

"Rachel, this looks… really nasty," he said grimly.

Rachel leaned her head against her fist, propping her elbow on the table. "Yeah, I know."

"You'll need stitches."

"I swear to God, Kurt, if you sew me up post-apocalypse movie style, I will kill you," she said in what was probably supposed to be a joking tone. Kurt could hear her voice shake.

"Relax, I don't have the stomach for that," he replied, wrapping a strip snugly around her heel (Rachel flinched, letting out a small whimper at the renewed pressure). "But we really should get you to a hospital."

"I'm sure they have a lot more people to worry about who are worse off than me," Rachel said as Kurt finished bandaging her foot, carefully tying it around her ankle so that it wouldn't slip. As he finished, she spoke so softly that for a few seconds Kurt wasn't entirely sure he'd heard her. "I miss my dads."

Kurt swallowed, leaning forward to wrap his fingers around her hand. He knew how she felt; the question of whether or not his parents (and Blaine) were all right had been hanging heavily in his chest for a long time.

"They'll be okay, Rachel," he said, mostly to reassure himself. "Promise."

Blaine watched the pavement pass under his feet in a daze, his mother gripping his hand as they walked toward downtown Lima. Any other day, he'd probably tug his fingers out of her grasp in embarrassment, but at this point he didn't really care. His dad strode silently beside them, pushing along a collapsible gurney that they'd stolen from a capsized ambulance a mile back. The air still carried the putrid stench of burning fuel and leaking engine lines, even several blocks away from the crashed plane, and it made Blaine's stomach churn.

Under the sky alit with bright orange streaks in the sunset, Lima had been turned into a ghost town. Storefronts had been smashed and gutted, cars left crooked in the street, and the few people that they saw carried themselves furtively, like mice darting for cover. The blackout seemed to have caused an almost literal shift in the earth.

"Blaine, do you remember where he is?" his mom asked, her fingers squeezing slightly as her voice cracked.

"Pamela, for God's sake," said his dad, maneuvering the gurney around two cars that had collided in the middle of an intersection.

Blaine swallowed his nausea and turned down the adjacent street. Up ahead loomed the mangled and half-blackened shell of the airplane, casting a skeletal shadow over the block. The fuselage was on its side, one wing stretching up into the air like a steeple. The other wing, ripped from the hull mid-air, protruded from a building two blocks in the other direction, half-buried in the brick wall.

Pamela's shoulders dropped, the air rushing from her lungs. "Oh, C-Cooper, baby," she cried, letting go of Blaine's hand so that her fingers could cover her mouth.

Cooper was just where Blaine had left him, and Blaine wanted to scream at the top of his lungs until they withered away inside his ribs.

Timothy set the gurney aside and placed a hand on Pamela's back, wrapping an arm around Blaine's shoulders. "Come on," he said gently, his voice thin and hoarse. "Let's get him out of there."

Without a word, the three of them pushed against the underside of the overturned car, their muscles straining to roll it just a foot or two away. Blaine gritted his teeth, throwing his body into it as much as he could and ignoring the sting of the scabbed-over patch of skin on his hand.

The silence was broken by a sob from Pamela as she clenched her jaw and pushed on the car with all her strength.

Slowly, the car gave a small groan and tipped back until it rolled onto its roof, its windows shattering as the weight suddenly shifted, and it lay there upended and slightly rocking back and forth. Cooper's blood had been smeared across the side.

Timothy squeezed Blaine's shoulder. "Help me get him onto the stretcher," he said, retrieving the gurney and collapsing it so that it lay flat against the ground beside Cooper.

Blaine felt the air tighten around his mouth and nose like he was in a vacuum, and his chest constricted until he could barely breathe, but he clenched his fists and stepped forward to do as his father asked. They carefully turned Cooper onto his back, then Blaine gripped Cooper's mangled legs and helped Timothy lift him onto the gurney.

"Where are we…" Blaine trailed off for a moment. "Where are we taking him?"

Timothy pulled the gurney up so that it stood back on its wheels, then shrugged off his jacket and draped it over Cooper's upper body, covering his face. "We'll find a nice place for him to be buried. Away from all this."

"The cemetery?"

Timothy shook his head and swiped a palm over his eyes, his voice thick. "Somewhere nicer."

Mercedes wasn't willing to venture out into the city until nearly sundown, an empty backpack on her shoulders and a pack of matches in her pocket. Hugging her chest, she worked her way through the streets as the light gradually bled out of the sky, leaving burning red streaks of clouds behind it. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and her heartbeat was practically all she could hear as she walked. Her mouth had been dry for hours, her tongue feeling like sandpaper, and she decided that for the rest of her life she would always keep a well-stocked supply of water in her kitchen.

At last she came to the large supermarket where she normally bought her groceries and half-jogged across the parking lot, disliking the feeling of being so out in the open. The automatic doors were no longer functioning, but she stuck her hand between them and wrenched them open with a grunt of effort.

Inside was dark, and it was nearly impossible to see anything beyond a few feet away from the door where she'd come in. Luckily, she was familiar enough with the store to remember where most of the sections were, and she headed straight for the aisle where they kept the bottled drinks. She struck a match, cupping her hand around it to protect the flame as she fumbled through the shelves in search of bottled water, feeling like she'd struck gold when she found it. She twisted the cap off a full two-liter bottle and drank greedily, swallowing as if she'd not had water in a year.

Mercedes splashed a little on her face and the back of her neck to cool herself down, kneeling to shove a couple bottles into her backpack. She yanked two one-gallon jugs off the shelf as well.

It had been barely a day since the blackout, and Mercedes would never again take water for granted.

Her backpack was nearly full — canned goods, granola bars, anything long lasting and calorie-heavy — when she ran out of matches. She mentally berated herself for not stocking up on matches before food, but she managed to fumble her bag closed in the dark, already looking forward to heading home.

There was a resounding click behind her, and something cold and metal pressed into the small of her back.

"Whatever money you have on you, give it to me," snarled a man's voice close to her ear.

Mercedes froze, the air in her lungs turning to ice. "I-I don't have—"

"Now!"

The shout reverberated into the void of the empty and massive room, and Mercedes quickly lifted her hands. "I don't!" she swore. "I don't— I don't have anything. Please, I just want to go home. Please."

Mercedes yelped, flinching as the man's hand was suddenly touching her, roaming quickly over her body as his other fist kept the gun kept pressed firmly to her back.

"Please—" she repeated.

The man's hand finally lifted away from her, and there was another click from the gun. "Go on, get out of here," he said gruffly, sounding almost apologetic.

Mercedes didn't pause to think on it. She quickly slung her backpack onto her shoulder, grabbed her jugs of water, and blindly ran for the door.

Miraculously, she made it all the way back to her apartment before she broke down into heaving, wracking sobs. She couldn't stay here.