A/N: Not much to say here, except it's, once again, way longer than the original chapter. I think it's a curse or something. Regardless, a thank you goes out as per usual to my delightful beta who fixes my awkward word problems without laughing at me. Which is a definite bonus. Enjoy!
Chapter 2
You cry when you pry the staples out five days later.
They've started to itch and rust and every breath stabs you along the incisions, straining as the healing flesh tries to morph around them until they become part of you. You can no longer straighten up, your bony shoulders hunched in defeat, for every time you try they pull until little rivulets of red leak down your cracked porcelain body, pooling in the dip of your hipbone and over the curves of your breasts. It hurts so much that you've begun to feel something less than human; a beast chained in an invisible cage.
So instead you hunt through the halls, your skeleton hands feeling along the door frames and walls, scrabbling for switches - you have acquired an almost paralysing fear of the dark despite being able to see through it, for it reminds you of things you can't picture, yet, but drag up such a sense of disquiet that it takes you hours to calm yourself down. You roam through the rooms and cover your mouth at the bodies there, slumped and forgotten, their parts scattered about and left to rot. If you had enough strength, you would give them a proper funeral.
As it is, you can barely find the energy to pray.
But an hour ago you had wandered into the forsaken morgue. For the longest time you had tried to avoid the place like the plague that has taken over your mind, diverting through the ways you now know so well, doing all you can to forget about the cold steel doors leading to the land of the dead.
Medical supplies, your tired mind had said, I need that. Another infection could kill me.
And then you remembered the hole in your head and stranded yourself between laughing or crying.
Now you're here, naked again, staring at yourself through the reflection in the grimy mirror. If possible you've grown yet more emancipated since you woke up - food is scarce, hope is scarce, life is scarce. Somebody must have swept the place before you came to be, as the shelves were wiped clean and scattered, empty bottles of water littering the ground. Luckily the tap still runs. Not that it matters terribly; you've spoken maybe a handful of words in the time you've wandered.
Sometimes you wonder if it's worth it. What are you living for? Curling in the corner and staying there until the eternal sleep takes you seems a much simpler option. Something to look forward to in an attempt to escape this hell.
You shake your head to rid yourself of your thoughts. Once upon a time, you think you were more optimistic. Memories come to you in shards upon the dead of night, splicing names and faces into your thoughts. You're a patchwork quilt made up of the voices of others - they speak to you in dream and you respond, a part of you coming alive only to wither away once you open your eyes. Nothing but the blank slate of these spattered walls and the chained doors that impede your journey to the outside world.
Come on, Britt. You steel yourself, reaching for the tweezers you found in one of the drawers. They had looked clean, at least, better than the crusted ones found sporadically strewn across the counters. Some look angry enough to have been weapons in another life, the jagged saw blades tarnished in the harsh lighting. Get this over with.
As you pour the rubbing alcohol all over your front, you smear it into your wounds with your other hand, flinching back from the sharp sting that bites at your still unhealed flesh. You shimmer in the lights, casting shadow over the indent of every rib, forcing it to reflect dimly over your hair. One silver lining was the finding of a working shower - you stood under the spray for an eternity and drank it in until you choked, your lungs sputtering to expel the water that had trickled through. It hurt, but you felt real.
For a moment, you simply stare at your reflection. Can you do this? Are you willing? Your fingers trace the scars that will (hopefully) hold themselves together. To think that mere days ago your inner workings were splayed out for the world to see.
Your hand jerks harshly at reaction to that thought, and you stifle a whimper of pain as the first staple clatters to the floor. Each falls with a quiet clink, one by one by one, a small stream of blood with each wrench as you grit your teeth and bare it; the tweezers clatter to the floor when you reach mid-belly, both hands splaying over yourself and sliding over the crimson flowing freely over your skin, slipping to find purchase. Tears drip down your nose as you hunch down to pick the tools back up, digging under the next staple, yanking it from the softness of your abdomen.
The last one falls and you cast the disgusting things away, curling both arms over yourself and resisting the urge to sink to the floor, where the blood has pooled around your feet. It creates mesmerizing spirals as it slides down the length of your trembling thighs, hiding in the crevices of your toes. When your hand goes for the alcohol bottle it shakes so hard that it slips from your fingers and shatters, its precious substance mixing lazily with your own essence.
"Fuck!" You curse, harsh and angry, stepping away from the mess. There's no point cleaning it up - who would step in it? You? The dead man on the table, grown bulging and putrid with rot? Even now his face nauseates you, eaten away from the inside until his eyes have simply... disintegrated in his skull. In time, the rest of his flesh will hold the same fate.
If it's the last thing you do, you refuse to let yourself ever become like that.
A shuffle as the doors swing on their hinges... and you remind yourself once again that it's not just you that has to live in this filth.
The man you've shared the compound with is... strange. He doesn't say anything. You think he's maybe lost the ability to talk, evidenced by the nasty wound on his throat that gapes even now. His once pristine suit is soiled with blood, gashes on the fabric of his arms glimpsing at the pale, waxen skin that is hidden underneath. You can hear him coming from all the way across the building by the shuffling gait as he drags one limp foot behind him. What unnerves you is his stare - the eyes that look at you aren't conscious. They hold no spark of human intelligence behind them. The film is soured milk smeared over his sight, but he always seems to find you.
"Hello again," you greet in an effort to be cheerful, "what's got you excited this time?"
His response is a low, rattling moan; something that never ceases to send chills spiralling down the long length of your spine. You've noticed that he only does it when he sees something that he's never seen before.
"What do you want?" You ask him. "The mirror?"
Nnnnnnnggghhhh.
"No... the bottle?"
Raaaaaaaaggggnnnn.
You frown and clear your throat nervously as he shuffles towards you.
He's done this before. Perhaps you should feel violated, sometimes, but there's nothing malicious about his touch. Simply... curious, if you could relate it to him. His fetid breath blows across your face as he leans in close - your gorge rises as you spy the swarming mass of larvae curling just underneath the surface of his skin, crawling out the cavities of his eyes, swirling in the gape of his mouth. He huffs once, head shifting down to your torso.
It's been long enough that you know something's not right about this place. This man is clearly sick... evidenced by the way his clammy fingers drag themselves across your breast and your newly aggravated wounds, palm slicking itself with blood. You yelp and jump away, feet crunching hard on the broken glass as he raises his fingers to his face and begins to chew.
It only lasts a second. He slows, stops, and finally lets his slimy fingers fall limply from his mouth, turning to shuffle back the way he came.
You stand there for a long time before you follow him out the door.
It's best to go in the opposite direction, to the showers. The less contact you have with this... man (loosely used), the easier it will be to live out however remaining days you have trapped in this hell. Perhaps whatever he has is contagious? The phantom feeling of bugs crawling over your skin makes you grimace and turn the shower dial to scalding.
Your head tips back as the water cascades over your skin, washing away the blood that has begun to dry in wobbly trails. It feels something like renewal - you stand upright for the first time in a week and allow the stretch to extend so fully you fear you might again split apart at the seams, dropping back into normal stance only when your bones click satisfyingly into place. Ever so slowly you try a smile upon your mouth. It feels wrong and forced, all the muscles stiff and unused to such strange movement. But it's the first all the same and it counts for something you care not to name.
It is in times like these that you wonder if something is legitimately wrong. The shower is as hot as it can go, and the world has begun to fill with haze, and your skin steams as it turns pink and raw from scrubbing. The fog in your mind has not lifted yet, not in its entirety, but you no longer sweat through whatever clothes you can possibly find in this place. There are still moments where you forget yourself entirely, staring out into space for what could possibly be hours on end, but these are fewer and far between. Against all odds, you seem to be getting... better?
Or maybe simply better adapted to this strange state of being.
Somebody once told you (your sister? it sounds like her voice, harsh sarcasm riding with an underlying affection in every word she speaks) that insanity is hard to define, because everybody feels it in a different way.
Sometimes you think you remember her smile in your mind, but it floats away like the cold, angry mist of your breath in the basements of this place.
You're just so lonely.
When you have stood under the spray for so long you think you'll suffocate in the wet air of the bathrooms, you step out onto the frigid tiles. The small cuts in your feet from the glass sting as you pad across the grout, one hand wiping down a small mirror, shaking water from your hair as you search in the cabinets opposite. This has been your only lucky find - filled to the brim with medical supplies, everything that you could need for however long fate deems you to stay here. It was obvious that somebody had previously attempted to break in and take your precious goods from the bloody fingerprints raking along the outside of the wood, but their efforts were in vain. You were the one that had to drag the limp body out into the main hallway.
After it was done you threw up from over-exertion and the blood you felt congealed under your nails.
It should be strange that I'm getting used to it. You think as you worm your way into a pair of old sweats, tying the strings as tight as they'll go around your bony waist. They're ratty and there's a hole in the knee, but they keep you warm at night and stop you from feeling like the captured animal you sometimes think you are. It freezes you right down to your exposed marrow - you must be somewhere up north. You doubt Texas would try and turn you into a glacier.
Sometimes you think of taking the boards off the windows. You crouch and trace the knots in the ragged wood with the tips of your fingers, leaning against the sterile-white walls, yearning for the sunlight and the embrace of the moon. It has been so long that the touch of the sun has warmed you that you remember it only in passing, in a distant memory of grass and fields and blue, blue skies. But something inside you knows it wouldn't be your best option - in the dead of night you hear things outside, wheezing moans and rattles and lonely cries into the open air. The sound of gravel being scraped across the earth wounds your ears and you always recoil, dragging yourself back into the corner of deeper darkness where you have made your temporary home.
The man always looks at the doors on those nights, staring emptily at the chains that impede his freedom. Once you asked him if he wanted to leave, but he simply ignored you before shuffling away.
A burn in your arm takes you back to the present. You hiss as you run your wounded forearm under the tap, brushing away the sharp stacks of dry blood that dig into your tender, puffy skin, exposing the broken meat underneath. Though your elbow is still difficult to move and your hand would rather not clench, it has ceased being an ache that resonates into every fiber of you, instead becoming an almost forgettable pain if not aggravated. With every day that passes the infection around it becomes a little less red, a little less hot. Your head clears as your flesh knits - if you find enough food to sustain you, there might be hope on the horizon yet.
Water scorches your throat when you gulp down your daily penicillin pills found in the depths of the cabinet, used with palpable relief in the first few days when you could scarcely hear the world over the sound of your heartbeat. After that, white paste is smeared carefully into the wound (you don't know what it is, but it sounds helpful) and a freshly washed bandage is rewound over it until no inflamed skin is seen. After that comes a bra you found in one of the lockers (it feels really strange to be wearing somebody else's underclothes, but you visibly cringed at the thought of taking it from the dead) and a men's checkered shirt, buttoned up loosely and rolled to your elbows. It hangs like a tent from your scrawny frame but you feel normal within its comfort. Safe.
The feeling doesn't stay. Vapour curls over your bare feet and disappears into the hallways with but a whisper of warmth when you open the door, and the first thing that hits you is the overwhelming stench of all the rotting corpses littering the compound. Your nose wrinkles but it doesn't trigger your gag reflex as it usually does - instead, you go to find your meager stash of food and resign yourself to finally doing something about the dead.
You perch upon the desk in the main lobby as you munch thoughtfully from a can of watery tuna. Though recovering, you certainly aren't strong enough to drag each and every body into one single room, especially those from all the way across the building. They should be cleared from the hallways, maybe the more important rooms... should you carry some to the morgue? A shiver rolls down your spine at the thought of those silver tables and you mentally cross it from your list. Various rooms it is, then. Not like you need them all.
When you finish you leave the can on the counter, draining it down to the last salty drop. To this day you don't know how the man doesn't lose weight even though you've never seen him eat... maybe he's the one stealing the goldfish crackers from your little stash. With a sigh, you crack your fingers and get to work.
So many dead in this place. This happens with very little order to the design - you wander aimlessly and cover their expressionless faces with sheets; reuniting those who you believe husband and wife, tucking children into the sides of their parents. Those who died alone join the one room at the end of the hallways, heaved laboriously on ruined blankets across the floor. Their disturbed flesh creates the worst smell ever known to you (that you can remember, anyway, which isn't much) and you scrounge desperately for a medical mask until you secure it over your face and return to your grim task. It doesn't help much with the stench, but the psychological comfort never hurts.
Once, laying a lone body to rest in the dark room rapidly filled with decay, your heart stops in your chest as its hand reaches out and clamps around your wrist with a groan of discontent. You shriek, falling over in your scramble to get away, accidentally kicking it square in the nose. There is a snap and its head lolls back, black blood dribbling onto the floor.
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry... I didn't know you were alive." You get up on your knees and hover over it... him? No, her. The clothes give the otherwise unrecognizable face away. "But you scared me so badly... couldn't you have given me a different sign? I think I broke your nose. Or what's left of your nose, anyway..."
Your hesitant fingers touch the massacred flesh and dart hastily away at the cold, slick quality presented to you. She (it?) flails helplessly on the floor, moaning in an attempt to get closer to you, her hands scrabbling at your knees and gripping at the hems of your pants. "Okay, um, I'm going to, uh, get a blanket or something because you're obviously not well. Just stay here, okay? Don't move."
A dumb statement, considering she has no legs left to speak of save dirty bones poking out from the shattered remnants of her knees. You stumble to your feet and run into your supply area, a room fortified with boards and metal pipes across the windows, and pick up a ratty blanket from the pile that you don't use. When you return to that macabre little room, she's barely moved an inch.
"You must be cold, right? I get cold and I still have all my pieces." She turns her head to you, and you cringe. "I'm really sorry, that was mean of me. Here... do you want this? It might help." You flutter the blanket over her body and she stills for a moment, her head turning to suck the blanket into her mouth. She seems to consider it for a moment, slack jaw now working with determination, before she falters and spits it back out. Your face falls as she lays her head down with a muttered wheeze of despair.
"I'm sorry," you say miserably, "I wish there was more I could do. You're just... in really bad shape. I'm not a doctor." At this, you grin. "I can't even fix my own head. I think whoever did this messed something up inside, you know? Like I have broken brains."
Her eyes watch you sightlessly and you start to giggle thoughtlessly. "Yeah, broken brains! I have broken brains and you can have broken bones. We'll be like... like sisters! Except I'm the prettier one, I think." You don't even have it in you to apologize.
Over the next few days you finally complete your work until it looks like it could host some semblance of life. Various doors are shut tight to keep away the lingering smell of rot, drapes placed over the decaying bodies, whispered apologies to the little children who are much too still against their parents' sides. You visit your sister every day, sitting next to her and rambling on about anything you can think of. She doesn't talk much, like the strange man, but the incoherent grunts and grumbles are still comforting in a world with no noise except the tap of your footsteps. You like her better, anyway. The other day he dropped part of his arm in the main hallway and it was so disgusting it took you two hours to work up the courage to move it. (Now you're sure there's something wrong with this place.)
Sometimes you're glad she doesn't seem to eat, because your already feeble stash of food is running dangerously low. Soon enough you're going to have to brave the outside world and scrounge for whatever you can find... maybe somebody can give you insight into this nightmare building. There has to be houses somewhere nearby, right?
Your frame doesn't get any larger, still a moving skeleton showing all the sharp angles of its stature, but it doesn't get any smaller either. Getting yourself to do chores has improved your focus, allowed you to work off the aches and pains of your injuries. Ever so slowly you start to gain mobility in your left arm - it is stiff and awkward but it no longer makes you cry if you drop something on it - and the gashes upon your torso begin to heal, ever so slowly sealing until they will knit themselves together into glossy pink lines as a souvenir of what-has-been.
You hate them, but you realize there's nothing you can do. It's not like anybody here really cares what you look like.
"Do you know what's going on?" You ask Velma one day - her name now, because she refuses to give her own and just pronouncing it makes you laugh - with your face stuffed full of mushy corn. Days and nights go by absent of you. It is like somebody has taken the minutes out of the hour and all seconds are frozen, churning by so slow as you crave the touch of natural light so fiercely it scares you at times. You have grown to loathe these crimson painted walls as much as the people who undoubtedly made them this way.
She grumbles and rolls herself towards you the best she can, her freezing hands clamping onto the fabric by your knee. "I guess you're as clueless as me, right? You must be for somebody to have been that mean to you."
You don't know how she lives with her legs shattered like they are. If you were her, you would have dragged yourself into the bathrooms and drowned the best you could in the single, tiny bath. You think you tried it once anyway, in your sleep, for you woke up in the freezing water under the surface, the world distorted through a shimmery haze. It took three hours to warm back up again.
Velma mumbles her agreement and mouths toothlessly at the hole in your sweats, her cold spit swathing your knee. "Ew, that's gross! You know I hate it when you do that!" You jerk away and she simply lets out a huff of air, rolling back on her stomach to glare blindly at the floor. With a grimace, you wipe the grey, gooey substance from your skin with a stained blanket lain over one of the slain.
"Sometimes I think you have broken brains too. Who tries to lick another person?"
You've tried to tend to the wound in your head, but how does one go about cleaning a hole that leads straight into your skull. Once you watched in morbid fascination as your finger travelled all the way down the channel, recoiling only when you touched a soft, spongy substance and your world exploded into such bright fire you slumped on the floor for the rest of the night. Ever since then you've kept all objects away from the vicinity of your head, instead doing the best you can to hide it with your remaining hair.
It's not all that successful, but it isn't that disgusting anymore, so you count it a victory.
As you spoon the last mouthful of your pathetic meal into your mouth, you almost spit it back out when a loud crashing noise reverberates through the hallways. You still and stiffen silently, listening intently for any source of dispute. It's probably just the man tripping over another table, you think uneasily, but startle at the distinctly human voice that meets your ears.
Male. It's deep and dark and desperate, highlighted with the yelling of a few other tones mixed it. Multiple, then. It's been so long since you've heard another human voice (your memory is but a void of darkness, so really this is the first you have heard, and it sears itself as the beginning of a new life) that you stumble on yourself as you make your way to where it comes from, the slamming on the doors growing in intensity the longer it takes.
"Please, if there's anybody there, let us in! They're coming for us!"
They? Closer now, you pick up the wheezing moans of the things outside, whatever they are, presented with a new fervour never known to you. They've morphed into shrieking groans that stack up on themselves until it's a wall of noise that makes you want to crouch down and block them out, but the persistent voice has taken on a tone of madness.
"I know there's somebody in here! Whoever you are, you have to open the door! They're going to kill all of us!"
A crunch, and he simply grows in ferocity. "Open the fucking door!"
You swallow once, laying your hand against the cool metal. "U-um... hello?"
The pounding stops for a second, and when the mysterious person speaks up again, the relief seeping through his voice almost floors you. "Oh thank god, there's somebody in there. You gotta open this door, there's dozens of zoms out here! We can't take 'em all."
Zoms?
There's a scuffling noise, and a shrill female voice. "Noah, you can't simply demand to enter somebody's safehouse! For all they know we could be infected too! Maybe this needs a more feminine touch."
"Rachel, you can shove your feminine touch up your-"
A thwack and a groan of pain, coupled with an irritated shout to shut the fuck up and help. Your eyebrows raise high over your forehead and you wonder vaguely what kind of a group this has to be.
"Hello, kind stranger!" The new voice greets. "What my comrade was trying to say was that we would be so grateful if you let us inside, as we are running on limited sleep and are severely overwhelmed. I know it must be risky to take a mass of strangers into your place of refuge, but I assure you that we are all healthy and disease free."
"Maybe you, but I don't know about Puck."
"Shut the fuck up, Lopez! I don't see you keeping it in your pants either!"
An irritated sigh, and you can almost hear the eyes rolling throughout the group. "Ignore those two. I promise that if you reach past their hoodlum exterior they have a certain charm that grows on you... much like a fungus."
Your eyes float down to the chains linking the handles together. They look sturdy, and there's nothing here to break them that you can see. (And if there was, could you? You are nothing more than skin and bones these days.) "I would love to let you in, but, um, I-I don't know how to take off these locks."
"Oh, I see. Are there any alternate exits that we should know of?"
They're all locked in the same fashion, sturdy and near impossible to budge.
"They're all locked too."
The voice falters here. "I-is there any way you could possibly unlock it? I'm afraid we don't have much time." To demonstrate, there is a loud bang with a sharp yelp of surprise and you duck instinctively, hands curling over your ears. Gunshots? What the hell are they doing? The ringing in your head disorients you, and it takes a few precious seconds to realize they're calling out to you from across the barrier.
"Y-yeah, uh," you remember a gleam of metal in the depths of your recent memories and curse your deteriorating luck, "I think I know where the keys are. Hold on a minute."
Of course, your hurried path leads you straight to the morgue. The smell here is near unbearable, and you've long gotten used to the constant odour of decay hovering otherwise in the rest of the compound. You grimace, nose crinkling, and gingerly side-step the still shattered glass as you make your way to the occupant still splayed out on the autopsy table.
His staples have burst and from that his insides are laid out in gruesome detail inside his body, some of his bloated innards drooping over the flimsy barrier of his abdomen. All that truly remains pure is the white of his teeth, and even those have begun to bear the badge of deterioration. Clenched in his putrid right hand is the gleam of a large metal keychain, his shattered fingers looped through the ring and held so tight some of the keys puncture into the flesh of his palm. You shudder as you reach him, fingers carefully reaching to peel away his grip.
From across the room, the strange man looks in the direction of the banging with all his apparent senses on high alert. It sends a foreboding feeling through your body.
One by one, you slowly tug at his hand, revealing your prize. The feeling of his skin is disgusting in a way you can't describe, the texture rising bumps that prickle all along your arms just to under your ears. He finally falls away with a wet thump and you breathe out in victory, shaking the excess gore from the teeth of the keys and turning to walk away.
On second hesitation, you mutter a quiet sorry under your breath as you prop a broom handle across the morgue doors, impeding the slow, methodical boom of the man who tries to escape. You didn't like the hunger you saw in his eyes.
Your feet slap against the tile as you shuffle through the keyring, flipping them over to read the scrawl as you go. Back door, kitchen, safe, laundry- you have a laundry room? - room 1, room 2...
When you reach the door again you run straight into it, groaning as you hold your head in one hand. The noise outside has reached a fever pitch, full of people screaming and things hitting flesh and bodies thumping to the ground. Though it might be from the overwhelming stench inside your compound, you think you smell fresh blood that spills to the floor with each meaty whump of a weapon against a person. Your hands shake as you flip through the rest of the keys.
"Side door, side door, side door..." It's distracting with the girl begging at you to hurry up, but you finally cry out in triumph as you find the small, silver key. It fits into the lock perfectly and the chains slither as they fall away.
You wrench open the doors and take in a moment to view the world outside; your eyes instantly burn as the sunlight you haven't seen in a week assaults your nervous system, flinching away and retreating back into the relative gloom. From here you can see multiple shapes rushing past you, all in various states of disarray, backpacks stuffed to the brim and clothes stained with blood. In the brief moment where they clear out from the steps, you think you see what Hell has always looked like.
The people here... they're all like the strange man and your sister. They moan and shriek and wheeze in their own language, hands grasping at thin air, fighting all over themselves to reach you first. Horrible diseases eat at their skin and render them mockeries of the human countenance, mouths open in hungry snarls. It is their eyes that haunt you - they aren't even the eyes of an animal. No, they are eyes of monsters. Before you can stare for too long, two strong hands grab your shoulders and wrench you away, shutting the doors firmly with a solid bang.
The chains are re-attached, and it sounds a lot like safety.
"What the hell are you doing?!" Yells a large boy with a mohawk, glaring at you from where his hands are still clamped around your upper arms. "Are you trying to get us killed? Huh? Is that what you want?"
Another boy, taller with black hair and a kind slant to his mouth, places his hand over your attacker's neck. "Lay off, Puck! She just saved our asses from being ripped to shreds."
It's so hard to think with so many people swirling about you, curious eyes glancing over every inch presented to them, tapping at the walls of your home and peering down the hallway. The frenzy outside booms so loud in your head that you have to squeeze your eyes shut in pain, your temple crying agony as the madness continues on.
"Hey, is she okay?"
"God, it stinks in here."
"Do you think there's any running water?"
Your eyes clench further.
"Stop it!"
It's only when all the noise ceases and you acquire the distinct feeling of being watched do you realize it was you that shouted. You crack open one lid, painting a sheepish smile over your face that feels as if it is hanging on by little threads.
"I'm sorry, it's just been a long time since there's been other people talking."
One girl pushes through to give you a sympathetic smile. With the pipe clenched in her fist and the determined set to her stance, you like her immediately. The blond boy seems to like her, too.
"We get you, girl. We've been stuck together for so long we don't notice when somebody else is tryin' to talk. You live alone here?"
Your muscles start to unwind, and your smile becomes a little more genuine.
"No, there's two other people. My sister and the strange man."
Her brows knit together. "The strange man?"
"Yeah, he doesn't talk much. He has a nasty cut right over his throat so I think he can't anyway. It's all nnnnngh and rrrrrghhhh and he kind of stumbles around like a paralysed hamster."
She opens her mouth to speak, but before she can somebody shouts from further down the hallway. You see a tall boy, with a head full of messy black hair, staring at the metal doors of the morgue with a permanently stunned expression on his face. In one hand he clutches the broom handle, and in the other a black mass that you can't properly identify from this distance. A rotting hand reaches for him, and he shouts a startled zom! before raising the object eye level. A bang roars through the hallway and stuns you with its power, startling all the other occupants in the room.
The strange man tumbles to the floor, and a pool of black spreads where his body has fallen. One of your hands cups over your mouth, and the choked sound you make is instinctual. A gunshot.
"What did you do to him?" It's such a breathy whisper that the girl has to lean in to hear, but the next second you're pushing through the milling throng, running instead to where the boy still stands with an inscrutable look on his face. You bare your teeth at him like the animal you had almost become, and he backs away with both hands raised by his head.
"What did you do to him?" You repeat with more force, crouching by his face and ghosting your fingertips along the battered outlines of his features. One knuckle grazes the bullet in the middle of his forehead. "We match now." You say to him, snickering past the utmost confusion. "See? I told you we would find something in common eventually!" Not for the first time, he doesn't respond.
But it's permanent now.
A hand falls to your shoulder and you flinch away from the touch, looking upwards at the same girl who had talked to you earlier. "What's your name?" She asks you cautiously, eyeing the corpse on the floor with something bordering on fear.
"Brittany," you say, though it comes out more as a song, "at least, I think so. I don't remember."
"You don't remember?"
"Nope! It's all just gone. Poof, like the wind! Or whatever the wind is. I haven't been outside in a long time. What's your name?"
"Mercedes." She says slowly, and you like the way it wraps around your tongue. "Brittany, I need you to tell me... your sister, does she look like the man?"
"No, of course not." You scoff, and she relaxes for a second until you continue on. "She's a girl, right? She's not really my sister. I just call her that because we have things that are kinda similar. For the most part she just lays in her room because she doesn't have any legs."
You lean forward, as if imparting a secret. "I think whoever destroyed this place broke her too, just like they broke me."
Mercedes looks at you with the kindest sympathy in her eyes and beckons forward another girl. Dark hair and darker eyes, so black you could fall into them like you tumble into the abyss of your corner where you dream of restless ghosts. In her left hand she holds a nasty looking knife, and her right knuckles are covered by a sturdy layer of brass. She eyes you like she doesn't know whether to place you in a museum or a mad house.
"You have to put her down, Santana," says Mercedes quietly, laying a touch over the shadow's - Santana's - wrist, "who knows how many there are in here."
"Are you sure she'll let us?" Her voice is smoke that you breathe into your battered lungs and it drives you far from this place, high up above the cloudless sky. The cadence of the rough exhale that blows out with her questioned words sails you into the trees, caught in the branches of your thoughts. You fracture, deflate, rebuild; all to the sound of their mesmerizing conversation.
"I don't know... she's sick. Who else would make friends with zombies?"
"There are a lot of closed doors, Mercedes," she says doubtfully, and through your closed eyes you see the downturn of her brows, "and whoever the hell this chick is, she's wearing her own brand of crazy. I think we should move on."
This time the boy from before chips in - the one with the kind smile. "We don't have anywhere else to go. These doors will hold for as long as we need them to with those chains, and we're all tired. We should sleep here at least for a day."
A sigh - you're not sure who it is, but finally Santana relents. "Fine. But we need to do a whole sweep of the building." She crouches down and you open your eyes once again, immediately startled by how close her face is to yours. Her gaze travels across the story of your features, reading your birth in your pupils and your childhood in the line of your nose, coming across the pinpricks of your growing madness in the worried set of your mouth. Her hands pry you open and she takes though you have nothing to give, stuck in her spell until she looks away to break the incantation.
"How many are there?"
"How many what?"
Frustrated, she starts to bare her teeth. "Zoms. How many walkers are still here?"
Your head tilts ever so slightly, and you inhale the musk of her scent. It drowns you. "Nothing walks here except for me. Sister has no legs, remember?"
She slaps her palms loudly against the meat of her thighs and you jump. Distractedly, you notice they are all larger than you, muscle where you are simply bone. Survivors.
"How many fucking zombies are there in this fucking building, Brittany?!"
Your stare holds hers for so many fragile seconds that you see her start to become uncomfortable, backing up from your unwavering gaze. Ever so slightly your mouth twitches; one second you are silent, and the next you're slumped in the ground with hoarse, broken laughter escaping in rough staccato from your chest.
"Z-zombies?" You stutter, snorting until the healing wounds on your torso pang uncomfortably at the movement of your ribs. "Who ever said something about zombies?"
She flails wordlessly at his corpse on the ground, so the one that shot him helpfully pipes up. "Oh, I don't know, maybe just the rest of the world?"
"Shut your mouth, boy." Mercedes grumbles. "She ain't been out into the world recently, if you can't tell."
You nod seriously, looking around at the bloody walls. "No world for me. This is my world, with the dark and the dead. There are a lot of dead people here." They aren't very good company, you reflect, but neither are these people. Santana throws her hands in the air and backs up, letting Mercedes take her place.
"Britt, look..." she trails off for a moment, grimacing as somebody opens one of the doors and a rather strong gust of decay reaches them across the hallway. "You need to tell us where your sister is. She can't be all that happy, right?"
"I don't think she feels much of anything." I feel it all for her.
"You said she has no legs, right? That must hurt a lot. I think she would thank you if you let her go."
You frown, your bony hands tracing over the protrusions of your knees. In your mind, your brain tries to come up with the thought of slicing them off and the agony it must produce, but the only pain you can remotely compare it to is when you first woke up and your whole world was nothing but a tunnel of heat and shadow that reversed on itself, over and over, until you'd pass out on the cool tiles from exhaustion. It makes you shudder. "But... I like her."
"I know you do, sweetheart. I bet she likes you too. But do you want to keep her here, or do you want to set her free?"
One of your hands clench into a fist and she covers it carefully - from here you note just how thin you really are, and she must, too, for she cups it in its entirety until her smooth, chocolate complexion swallows it whole. Your lips tremble and your voice is quiet as you look away.
"She's in the last room to the left."
You see Santana nod, nothing but the dull tap tap of her boots intruding upon the silence as she briskly makes her way down the corridor. The door swings open and she steps inside.
A moment later there is a shuffle and a loud crack, and you close your eyes as you lose the only piece of family you've known.