"Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone."
- Anthony Burgess
He sat and watched, though there were no security monitors within the room he was in, as the last of the trouble makers finally fell. Admittedly it had taken longer than he would have originally liked for him to be rid of them, but he couldn't help but feel impressed that they had managed the feat. Had he not had a hand in some of the occurrences in which had taken place, he was positive that more of them would have survived and caused problems for him in the near future.
Fortunately though, none of them managed to evade what he had in store for them. They hadn't necessarily died in any particular order of his choosing, save for the blonde haired boy standing in front of the elevator. He had seemed to know more about the zombies than anyone he had ever seen or met, which was of course why he had been the first to go. It would have been troublesome not to get rid of him.
The biggest surprise of them all had been the infected girl. She had become infected at sundown, right when he had planned to execute his plan to its full force, and yet, she had managed to survive just a few minutes before sunrise. He had expected her to be dead shortly after her blonde friend or the dark skinned man, and yet she was one of the last survivors. It was very impressive that someone would have that good an immune system and he would have to look into that later.
The final stage of the plan was at hand, and all he would have to do was wait it out. If the target was as resourceful as he thought he was, then he wouldn't have to wait long for another encounter.
And so he sat and watched and waited.
He had been so shocked that he hadn't even realized it was Laguna who had pushed him through the door initially. But as soon as he had slipped past the landing and began to fall painfully down the stairs, he was jogged out of his momentary lapse and managed to cast a spell, the familiar white wings attaching themselves onto his back and keeping him from landing awkwardly onto his back. A moment later, he suddenly remembered what had happened the last time he had tried to cast a float spell, and considered himself lucky that, this time, it had worked.
He sat on the next landing, floating in mid air for an instant, trying to figure out exactly what it was that had just happened when the wings suddenly dispersed, and he landed with a dull thud onto his backside, wincing slightly as he inclined his head back up towards the landing he had fallen from.
His left hand immediately shot up to the base of his neck where Rinoa – where one of those things – had bitten him, and it was then that he realized what the elder man had done. Rising to his feet awkwardly, as the bite still hurt, he climbed the stairs, two steps at a time, slowly at first but gaining speed as the seconds passed. When he reached the landing, he approached the door leading back into the hallway, finding the door locked. There was no window, so he couldn't see what had happened, though he did hear gunfire sounding before it suddenly cut off.
Dread filling him, he tried harder to pry the door open, but remained unsuccessful. "Laguna?" he shouted, hoping the elder man could hear him, but no one responded. All he heard was moaning from the creatures wandering past the door.
He brought his left fist against the door, hard enough for it to hurt his hand, as he called out again, the panic slowly beginning to rise once more. "Laguna?"
He received no answer, and started to pound desperately at the door, hoping that he was just imagining things, that he hadn't just left another person behind, even if it hadn't been his fault. "Laguna!"
He brought a fist down against the door once more before he slumped back, allowing his face to drop into his hand and swivelled around, his back facing the wall next to the door and falling back into a sitting position against it, his face buried into his right hand. He tried to deny what had happened, telling himself that Laguna got out of it okay, and that he was looking for another flight of stairs heading down. That he would run into him when he reached the lobby on the first floor…
But he knew he was only deluding himself. He had heard the gunshots, and they had suddenly stopped. They hadn't faded away, which would have happened had Laguna moved away from the area. He had to face the truth of the situation. He had gotten out alive, but Laguna's seemingly infinite string of luck had finally run out.
But he locked me out, Squall's mind argued, defended. He pushed me in here, locked the door and made sure I couldn't get back out to help him.
The thought didn't make him feel any better, and it wasn't supposed to.
Pulling his legs into his chest, Squall allowed his chin to rest atop his knees. It wasn't fair, it just wasn't fair. He knew that life was cruel and sometimes bad things happened to people who didn't deserve them, but it didn't stop it from hurting. The fact that he was still alive now, even as the other's bodies cooled by the death that had taken them, made him feel worse about it. He had made far worse slip ups that night, far more mistakes than any of the others had. While Quistis and Laguna had been rightfully suspicious of him, Squall had trusted Nicholas and had been blinded by anything that screamed he couldn't be trusted at all, all under the false pretence that he might have actually been a surviving relative of his. It made him feel useless, sick and naive that anyone could have played him for the fool that he most certainly had been. If anything, he didn't deserve to be where he was at that moment, mourning the loss of his comrades while he could still draw a breath.
"I'm sorry," he rasped through a throat that made it hurt to talk. His face was beginning to feel wet, but he no longer cared. No one was there to find him, and no one who mattered to him would ever come and catch him at this vulnerability. "I'm so, so sorry. If I had opened my eyes maybe more of us could have been here, could have gotten away. It isn't fair that I'm still here. I'm not as strong as everyone thinks I am, so why the hell am I still here?"
He was saddened, grief-stricken at the lost of his friends, and angry. Angry at Nicholas, angry at those things that had killed the others, and angry at himself for having been blinded to the truth, that Nicholas had been behind this whole mess the entire time. He wouldn't have been surprised if the strange man had been the one to release the infection upon the citizens of Esthar, costing everyone who lived in the technologically advanced city their lives, leaving him as the only one left, the sole survivor of an epidemic that could turn even the most squeamish person into a monster who only lived to feed.
"But not for long," he muttered as he gingerly touched the bite wound that had been inflicted upon him. It swelled with whatever it was that had caused this epidemic, and he had become infected by it, having hesitated when he had seen the face of the woman he had cared about, the one solely responsible of dragging him out of his self-protecting shell. He hadn't been able to shoot her down and she had bitten him for his weakness. Sometime soon – Squall had no idea when or how long it would take – he was going to die the same way most of these people died, the same way he had watched Quistis suffer. It was exactly what he deserved to have happen.
He idly wondered what Laguna had meant by those last words, the ones he had shouted at him that had shocked him into silence. He had picked a strange proverb, and his mind – having gone numb from the self-loathing thoughts that festered there – couldn't grasp its meaning. He didn't know if he really wanted to search through the meaning behind those words, or if he even deserved to have that answer, but it was something to do before the inevitable happened.
Laguna had said 'a father shouldn't have to burry their son'.
While the meaning behind those exact words couldn't register in his mind, a voice in the back of his head was telling him not to waste his time wallowing in self-loathing. It was telling him that he still needed to do something, and that he couldn't do it by sitting here feeling sorry for himself. He wanted to tell the voice to shut up, but it was then that he realized that there was still something he could do. What was to stop what happened in Esthar from happening somewhere else? He couldn't just stand by and let what had happened to him happen to everyone else. There were still people to warn, people to tell what had happened, to explain why an entire city's population had just been wiped out.
From what little he knew about viruses, he recalled that it depended on the person's immune system how long it would take for them to die. Quistis' immune system was pretty strong, probably because she was a Blue Mage, but there was no telling how long the infection would take to turn him into one of those things. He dropped his gaze to the side bag he still carried and started digging into it, hoping that the containers he carried hadn't broken on him when he had fallen down the stairs.
Luck seemed to be with him, because not a single one of them had broken during his fall and he dug deeper into the bag, finding the needle he had sterilized earlier. He slapped one of the containers inside, stashing the rest back into the bag before ripping off the remaining sleeve he had. He wrapped it around his right arm haphazardly, tightening it and flexed his muscle before he injected himself with the anti-virus, the chemicals entering through his skin and flowing through his blood cells. Squall was hoping that, if it didn't work, it would at least buy him some time until after he managed to warn the outside.
Unfortunately, he didn't know where he would be able to contact the outside. The COM system inside of the President's Office (he held back the guilt as he thought about Laguna) was supposed to have been operational, even during a blackout. It had been how the Presidential Residence had been able to contact Garden during the Lunar Cry – when all of Esthar had lost their power, and even it was fried. That had to mean Nicholas was using something in order to jam Estharian frequencies from getting out. The only reason Squall could figure Nicholas would do something like that would be to prevent word from leaking out, from anyone else discovering what had happened until it was too late, just like in the movie.
Squall would have killed Irvine himself for suggesting that particular movie.
It seemed like an eternity ago that they had all sat together that one evening, that he had been bored while most of the others had been captivated over the stupid looking video Irvine had suggested. That the following night Rinoa hadn't been able to sleep and he had stayed up with her, checking under the bed and in the closets with her and all the other little idiosyncrasies that came with a young child being afraid of a monster attack. How a few days later, they all were gathered in his office on the second floor, begging him for help right after he had disconnected a call he had taken from Cid—
His head snapped up upon thinking about it. Of course. The uplink he had made using a Balambi frequency. It had been a precaution he had set up just in case another power outage took out the main power supply, so that he would still be able to work regardless of what condition the city was in. If Nicholas was jamming Estharian frequencies, then the Balambi frequency was probably still intact! Not to mention it was on the way to the ground floor. He would be able to assess whether he would be able to escape from the ground floor exit, or if Nicholas had lied about that as well.
The anger was back, frothing at the surface, and Squall used that fuel in order to pull himself together, but pushed it down long enough for him to focus. He saw this as a mission, get to his office by any means necessary, contact Balamb Garden, warn them of the spreading epidemic and then get the hell out of the Residence. If Hyne-bidding, he'd make it out of Esthar to tell the tale.
He didn't even think about the possibility that the anti-virus was a fake.
Checking his ammunition supply, he frowned at what little remained, three clips from the MP5K, less than that for the LDA's, no combat knives, no grenades and the antivirus. He'd have to make due.
Rising to his feet, the SeeD put his own misgivings, doubts and regrets behind him as he descended the stairs, the moaning sounds having grown faint to his ears.