A/N: K, I have nothing much to say other than OH MY GOD. THIS WAS A BITCH TO WRITE. Despite it's shortness.

Oh, wait, there is another thing. As much as it warms my heart that a few of you have actually put this on alert and FAVORITED this story (SERIOUSLY!), the happy feeling kinda fades whenever you do that and then fail to review. I'm all like, wat. You like it enough to favorite it but not enough to get a little more personal and review it? You sicken me... not really, but THREE OF YOU did that. I have half the mind to type your names right here and call yo out PUBLICLY, but I won't. Just know this: if anyone else favorites my story and doesn't review... I'll... I'll... I'LL DO SOMETHING, OKAY? *threatening glare*

Chapter Five
red crescent marks

My eyes followed Dylan as he paced back and forth, over and over again. The freezer was narrower than it was wide, and his movements never changed. He'd start from the cardboard boxes piled against the door, walk ten steps, then spin around at his heel before he reach the opposite wall where I sat, always turning at least a foot away from me. Occasionally he would sit down in silence, but not long after he would be standing back up and marching around again. The ritual might have been funny, but whenever he said people survived longer in colder environments if they could move around made me wonder if I should have been moving around, too. I sat with my knees tucked up to my chest, shivering. I couldn't care less that this was a bad position to be in wearing a skirt... though my legs were cold.

Everything was very cold.

"Why are we here?" I finally asked, breaking the silence that hung over the two of us. Dylan didn't say much after he locked us in here and ensured that nobody else could get in from the outside should they use the handle. He paused mid step an d his eyes flickered to me before he started pacing again.

"Would you rather be out there?"

I bit back the sarcastic comment that threatened to fly off my lips, and sighed instead. I watched as my breath formed a little white cloud in front of my face, and it reminded me of the chilly morning when I was walking to school, convinced it would be a mostly ordinary day. Obviously, that wasn't the case.

I gazed at my surroundings and scrunched up my nose at almost everything I saw. I hated the freezer. It was maybe three feet wide, and you could only walk about ten paces before being stopped by the wall I sat against. Shelves covered the upper walls to my left and right, filled with boxes of meats and large bags of frozen vegetables and even a few tubs of ice cream. Boxes also lined the walls underneath the shelves, though several had been moved by Dylan. On it's own, it was a ton of food, at least a lot more than you would expect to be in the freezer of a normal high school. The lunch ladies had literally thousands of kids to feed everyday at Stuyvesant. I couldn't blame them for stocking up.

"So, um..."

The silence was killing me. The cold was killing me. These fucking gashes on my back were killing me, though I couldn't pinpoint the exact location of any of them. It felt as if the pain was everywhere on my back, though it had numbed. Which was great, but not if I froze to death.

"You got a... family?" Oh, Jesus, I was playing twenty questions with this guy, that's what I had been reduced to. And what a stupid question, too.

I didn't want to say "You got friends?" because obviously he didn't have many, and if he did, they were dead.

I was also thinking about my mom and dad. They were something big I could lose, and for all I knew, probably already loss. I wouldn't ever admit it then, but I might have asked that stupid question because I wanted someone to sympathize, empathize with in this desperate situation, and to talk about it before I lost myself worrying quietly to myself.

Dylan sighed, and he sat down again in the middle of the "room", his back towards me and his legs crossed. He bit one of us his filthy fingernails and looked up at the ceiling, and his head was tilted at an angle that I could see his lips moving, but no words came out.

After several moments I thought he wasn't going to answer me, but right after I opened my mouth to fill the void of silence once more he said, "I have a sister."

A pause.

I tilted my head to the side slightly. "A sister? And a mom or dad?"

"I have a sister," he said again. He never turned to face me when he spoke.

"Oh..." I could feel another long silence was threatening to overpower the room once more, so I asked, "What's she like?"

There might have been a ghost of a smile when he said, "She's six. Loves animals, even the ones most consider gross or disgusting. So optimistic and happy it gets annoying." He laughed quietly to himself, but his eyes were still downcast. "She means a lot to me." He paused, then turned his head to look at me. "What about you? Siblings?"

I shook my head. "Only child," I said plainly. "You'd think my dad was my older brother, though, the way he acts."

"I can sympathize," Dylan said, but his words were cold. "Some people never grow up."

I shivered, though I was unsure if it was because of the horribly cold temperature or because of Dylan's cryptic tone. My eyes lingered on Dylan's back. His dark long sleeve was all but shredded at the back, red criss-crossed patterns covering the revealed skin, and some were still bleeding. Where it wasn't cut, the skin was bruised. The one wound stood out, though, was the deep gouge mark stretching from the edge of his neck to his lower ribcage, oozing slightly as his body began to work to harden into a scab. It looked dirty... and painful.

I cringed.

Dylan noticed.

"Are they bad?" he asked, and I didn't need to ask what he was referring to. Truth be told, I didn't want to look at the injuries any longer. That's how disgusting and terrible they looked. For a moment, I considered lying to him, so he could feel some form of relief, but I considered if it really was a different question altogether: Are they as bad as they feel?

"Yeah," I admitted, looking down. "they're bad."

He let out a low humming noise and turned his head away, never commenting on my injuries. That pissed me off to some degree that he couldn't even care to know how I felt. And I felt like hell. My legs were generally well off—my ankle only had a slight bruise from the fall I took and my knees were mildly scraped—but my top was an entirely different story. There were no scars on my front... they never got close enough if I could see them. But my wrists had several nasty gashes and I didn't want to think about what covered my back, if it would be just like Dylan's or perhaps worse. I didn't ask him to take a look because I was afraid of what he would say.

A few more minutes passed, and my ass was cold. I was sitting on cold concrete with nothing to cover my legs except for a plaited skirt and stained stockings.

"We need to turn off the freezer," I said irritably, but a question lingered in the air—how are we going to turn off the freezer? We'd have to go out into the kitchen, and neither of us were willing to search for a thermostat that we didn't even know the location of. Neither of us could think of an answer that we wanted to hear.

Dylan opened his mouth, but was cut off by a noise at the door: the sound of some of the cardboard boxes sliding an inch out of place. Both of our heads snapped up and we heard someone curse foully, and then a loud banging on the reinforced steel.

"Hey! Is anybody in there?"

I knew from the look on his face that Dylan and I found the same answer.

"Can you let us in? Please?" It was a feminine voice this time, her voice high with a mixture of desperation and relief.

Dunno what she's so relieved about yet, I thought, and admittedly I felt a little evil. I stood next to him with my arms folded across my chest, but ready to help push the door shut should we need to.

"I don't know," Dylan said, narrowing his eyes. He leaned over the boxes and pressed his hands against the door in case the boxes failed to do their job. "How many of you are there?"

There was a small pause, and I guessed someone was doing a quick head count.

"Six," the male voice that had spoken first said.

"Can six more people even fit in here?" I wondered aloud.

Dylan shrugged. "Maybe. Probably not comfortably."

"Come on!"

"Okay, okay," Dylan said to the young man, or maybe it was a full grown man. It was hard to tell, his voice was really deep. "We'll let you in, but first you have to turn it off."

"Turn it off?"

"The freezer," I said impatiently. "You need to turn it off or we're all going to freeze."

"Can't you let the rest of us in while one of us does that?" the female said this time.

Dylan and I looked at each other.

"No," we said in unison.

The crowd behind the door grumbled to themselves and cursed loudly, and I was worried for a moment that they wouldn't go through with this until a different girl's voice spoke up above the commotion and said, "Guys, I know where the controls are for the freezer, and I wouldn't want to go alone anyway. Let's go."

The grumblings faded as the over five people followed her, but they didn't leave before the man's voice nearly hollered at us. "You better keep your end of the deal!"

I don't care if that door is made of steel, I thought. If he attracts zombies to the door being noisy like that, I'm going to be pissed.

Then, silence once more.

Dylan pulled away from the door, letting his arms drop to his side. He took a seat on one of the cardboard boxes that weren't stack so high as the others and I watched as he began biting his dirty fingernails again.

"Stop doing that," I chided without completely realizing. "It's gross."

Immediately his eyes flicked to my hands, covered with chipped black nail polish but obviously gnawed on at the edges. "You do it," he accused.

"Yeah, but not when my hands are covered in blood and all sorts of other nasty shit," I said and he frowned. "You should really try to wash it off."

"It's just going to come back anyway whenever we have to leave this place," he argued.

"It's nasty. If you're not going to try to clean it off, then at least don't bite your nails. It's unsanitary."

He looked straight into my eyes and took a big bite out of his pinky's fingernail before ripping it off completely with his teeth, deliberately slow.

Oh you son of a bitch—

"Whatever," I said with a scowl, then turned around and walked back to my wall. "Whatever."

I sat down. Dylan stayed seated, too, not bothering to resume his marching around this icebox. My eye started twitching when I realized he was twirling the broken fingernail around between his teeth as he stared thoughtfully at the ground.

"The thing," he said suddenly, but he didn't meet my eyes. "with the tongue."

I felt a lump rising in my throat.

"Yeah?" I choked out.

He paused and turned his head to the side. Looking anywhere but at me.

"He was... your friend, wasn't he?"

My fingernails dug into my palms, my teeth bit down on the insides of my cheek, and my eyes were at battle fighting back tears. Get a hold of yourself. Get a hold of yourself, Jacky. It's just a question. It's just a fucking question.

"Yeah," I said, so quietly I could hardly believe I heard myself.

He said nothing for a while, and I wondered if he had heard me. It didn't matter.

I was wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand when I heard him say, "I'm sorry."

Red crescent marks lined my palms as my fingers relaxed, before they curled up again.

Sorry won't bring anyone back! a voice inside me screamed.

"It doesn't matter," I said calmly. "He changed, and you did what you had to do."

"Are we doing the right thing?"

The question caught me off guard, and after I processed it a few times, I almost laughed. If anything, I expected that I would be asking myself that question, but I definitely did not expect the guy who planned on shooting me anyone else close by to ask me. For that moment, the roles were reversed. I was the cool head if not slightly unsympathetic and he was the one asking the desperate questions with his head hung low and a million emotions shining in his eyes.

I looked straight at him. "It doesn't matter if it's the right thing. Like you said, we have to look after ourselves. We're going to have to think about what's best for us before we think about the other people if we want to survive."

He nodded to himself. I breathed out through my lips. I wasn't worried about him not heeding his own words, but I had issues trusting myself not to do something that could jeopardize my life. It's not like I fed the homeless people on the streets everyday, but I felt needles shoot through my heart whenever I saw the other students die and felt like a monster when I didn't help them.

It was suddenly quieter than usual. I looked up.

The cold air stopped blowing from the vent above my head.

"Looks like they did it," Dylan said, then he looked at the boxes. "Are you sure we should let them in?"

"Uh, yeah," I said. "They helped us. Now we can help them."

"Just saying..."

He began moving the boxes back their original spots before the group of six even returned, and I was reminded again of who Dylan McKeizel was. My hands curled to fists at my sides and I let him move the barricade on his own, never stopping to offer help.

"Turns out we had the same idea," a girl even shorter than me with mousy brown hair and black rimmed glasses said with a smile. I recognized her as the female voice who had spoken up, saying she knew where the thermostat was.

I tried to smile back. "Yeah," I said. "It was really Dylan's idea, though."

"Good thing there's at least a few nooks to hide in around here," she said thoughtfully as she stepped inside the slowly warming freezer, and five others followed. Three girls, three boys. I thought it was really weird that there was such an even gender ratio, but I didn't comment. It was stupid anyway.

The five other survivors were all students and were mute as they filed inside, some lugging around backpacks and a few even holding metal bars that looked as if it once held up a shelf in a classroom, but now served as something to keep zombies at bay. One guy who might have been a prep even had a cricket paddle.

But the skinny girl with glasses had something different entirely— a small, cordless radio.

They walked in, flung their bags down, and sat down in the middle of the floor, murmuring to each other and sneaking cautious looks at the unfamiliar faces. The huddled against the walls underneath the shelf and Dylan migrated from his spot by the door to the middle of the wall to my right. I still claimed the back wall, and a feeling of petty possessiveness rose up in me whenever someone got too close. This was my wall.

"What are you doing?" the boy with spiked blonde hair and baby face said when the brunette began fiddling with the radio as she lay on her stomach, twisting the knob and trying to distinguish clear words from the static.

"Looking for a channel," she said, and continued twisting the knob as if the attention of the entire room wasn't on her by now. I knew that mine was.

"Yeah, Ida. Music is going to do us a lot of good right now," the blonde sneered as he kicked his stained white-on-white Nikes off and threw his cricket paddle to the side, but took a seat beside her despite his harsh words.

I of all people knew that tempers were running high. Dylan and I had been snapping at each other and trading sarcastic remarks whenever the other made a mistake. Maybe Ida and this prep—or maybe everyone—were the same way.

"I'm not looking for music, Chris," Ida said calmly, politely even. "I'm trying to find the emergency channel."

… or maybe it had nothing to do with the situation, and I was just acting like the bipolar bitch I am and Dylan's just a caustic bastard.

"Oh," said Chris. "Sorry."

Hell, he even apologized. My eyebrows slowly raised as I watched the exchange and the musings continued for a little while longer until the persistent crackling of the radio stopped, and a clear voice filled the air of the walk-in freezer.

"Found it," Ida said triumphantly. Chris shushed her and turned the volume to the radio up as everyone leaned in to listen to the man's voice coming from the speakers.

"-stay indoors. Citizens should not travel outdoors unarmed. Keep contact with infected individuals limited until you reach the evacuation center at Central Park. Repeat, the evacuation center is at Central Park. The military is in the process of quarantining New York City and CEDA can only remove citizens from the area for a short time. Emergency supplies will be dropped at specific places in different districts but they won't be prepared until tomorrow morning. Until fully armed do not leave the safety of your home—"

Ida turned the radio off, seemingly speechless.

"Emergency equipment?" a girl who's voice I didn't recognize from before spoke. Her red hair was thick and hung above her slim shoulders, framing a thin face with narrowed eyes and thin lips. "They mean like, guns?"

"Yeah, I guess so." someone else, a boy, said. "Looks like we should stay here until tomorrow.

My lips twitched. "We're going to have to sleep here?"

"There's plenty of food," Dylan chimed in, ignoring me. "though most of it is likely to go bad. There might be enough stuff in here that should be able to eat without cooking before it spoils. Maybe."

Everyone shifted uncomfortably at that. The redhead stared and Dylan and I accusingly for some reason, and I looked away. So far I've decided that Ida was fine, Chris was okay, but the three others had been mostly mute, and now the redhead's eyes wouldn't leave me.

"Hey, there should be enough," Dylan assured. "Even if there isn't, it's not like we're going to die if we miss dinner."

"What about after we leave here?" a girl with droopy blonde pigtails asked. She was the one who had asked "Can you let us in? Please?" all sweet and pitifully.

"Figure it out," Dylan said, folding his arms behind his head and closing his eyes. "That's none of my concern."

Everyone looked around, immediately breaking any awkward eye contact. The situation was only growing worse. I was in an icebox full of people who hardly knew each other and perishable food items. There were god knows how many zombies just outside that steel door waiting to rip my innards out. I was going to have to endure several long hours of awkward interactions with schoolmates I haven't seen before in my life only to sleep on the cold concrete floor without a blanket or pillow. The food was going to be soggy and cold.

I sighed, but something pink on the shelf caught my eye and I almost smiled. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that that carton of strawberry ice cream was mine.