Shifting gears ...
Sara stared down at her name, utterly speechless. Her mind groped for a possible explanation – perhaps it was not her, but someone who shared her name – but the thought did not last. Below her neatly written name were the letters 'LVPD' in tiny writing, and they left no room for debate. At the base of the cross a bouquet of long dead and shrivelled flowers lay propped up against the stem. Someone had missed her.
"Well," Nick said quietly, after a long pause, "I guess that answers all our questions, then."
Sara shook her head, stunned out of her reverie.
"How does that answer anything?" she demanded. "I am not dead."
"Not in our reality," Warrick replied, trying to be gentle. "But it looks like you are in this one."
Sara's head spun; they were back to the parallel universes theory, but as hard as it was to digest, she knew there was no escaping it this time. The grave at her feet, the cemetery and devastation rotting around them had not happened in the space of a few days. And the body at her feet was not her, but a parallel universe twin. Wherever their Las Vegas was, their own home, they were a long way from it now.
She felt sick. The sight of her grave clutched at her heart, tugging her down with it.
"It means this plague's no joke," Warrick said sadly. "And neither's our situation. It all actually happened."
"It's hard to believe it's all real," Nick said. "You know, we must've run into something sinister when we were out in that desert with Brass. Stumbled into something no physicist would have expected in their wildest dreams. Remember how we all felt dizzy, saw that light shimmering? Maybe it was some kind of rift in space-time, like a tear that we got caught up in."
"And if it was, now we're stuck on the wrong side," Warrick finished. "With no way of getting back."
Catherine held up a hand, looking flustered.
"Just stop," she said. "Let's just slow it down a second –"
Sara felt Sofia's eyes on her, silently probing.
"Let's go sit down," Sofia ruled.
Sara felt her take her arm, and immediately tried to shake her off, her attention still focused on her grave. She could not walk away; she had to make sense of this.
"You go ahead, I'll catch up."
But Sofia's grip tightened. She looped an arm instead around Sara's waist, urging her away.
"Bring him," she said, throwing a pointed look to someone.
She led Sara away, turning and walking her between the crosses back to the hazard tape. The strength in Sara's legs seemed to have vanished; she felt wobbly, trembling as if the temperature had suddenly dropped.
"It's okay," Sofia said, holding her. "We'll go sit down."
She lifted the tape, and then walked her out past where their bikes lay strewn to a patch of dry grass beyond. Sara sat down, sinking her head into one hand, not wanting to meet their eyes.
"It's okay," Sofia repeated, arm around her.
"You want some water or something?" Nick asked, crouching beside them.
Sara shook her head; water was useless.
"I think she just needs a minute," Sofia said gently.
Nick nodded. His hand, too, settled on her back, rubbing gently.
"I know it's a lot to take in," he said kindly. "We'll just rest for a bit, hmm?"
Sara ignored them, and was glad when they didn't force her to talk, but accepted her silence. They simply sat with her, their comforting hands roving her back, and gave her time. After a while, thanks to their support, the pain lessened, and she sighed deeply, trying to expire the thoughts from her system.
"I'm sorry," she said, wiping at an eye.
"Don't be," Nick replied. "You'd hardly be human if it didn't bother you. We probably shouldn't have walked in there in the first place. No good was ever gonna come of it."
Sara nodded, fully agreeing.
She lifted her eyes, wondering where Grissom was.
"They'll be along in a minute," Sofia said, reading her thoughts.
Sara glanced over shoulder, and saw him still at her gravesite, Catherine and Warrick's arms around his shoulders, Catherine talking earnestly in his ear.
"Give them a moment," Sofia advised.
Sara almost got up, no matter what Sofia said, but realised after a second that she was right. It looked like a private conversation, and as she weighed it up Catherine caught sight of her, and held up a few fingers, warning her to stay put. Sara nodded, and respectfully looked away.
The next few moments passed while they waited. Sara drank some of their water to stem her shaking – the liquid warm and glistening from their ride in the sun – and with it, her faintness eased. She passed the bottle to Sofia, who swallowed a pill drawn from the pocket of her jeans, and strangely, it was this sight more than anything else that brought Sara back to her senses. She knew she had to get it together. They still had problems much bigger than the death of her parallel universe twin.
At last footsteps heralded the return of the others, and Sara looked up as they joined them. Grissom looked like he just taken an emotional beating, but it was Catherine who reached her first. She pushed back her red hair and knelt in front of her, looking concerned.
"You okay?" she asked.
Her hand grasped Sara's shoulder.
"I'm fine," Sara said, nodding, and hoping she looked it.
"Don't worry about it, okay?" Catherine told her. "We'll be fine. Like we all said on the first day here, if we stick together, we'll come through."
Sara wondered vaguely where her strength came from – that peculiar ability Catherine had to deflect anything that life threw at her – but she tried to give a weak smile.
"I'm fine, Cat, really."
"You sure?"
She looked as if she doubted it, not quite convinced.
"I'm good," Sara replied.
She let go of her shoulder. "All right. We'll give you two a minute."
They retreated a short distance away, leaving her alone with Grissom. His expression was hard to read. He sat down in front of her, and though his eyes betrayed volumes – fear, terror and love in equal amounts – he seemed momentarily devoid of words. He took in her body language, as if assessing whether she really was okay, and when his mouth finally opened to check, she cut him off.
"I'm fine," she assured, nodding. "It was just a shock – but I'm okay."
She tried to give another smile, but he did not look relieved. He looked weary, as if he had just been dealt a lifetime of pain in five minutes.
"You all right?" she asked.
He nodded. "I'll be fine."
She raised an eyebrow, questioning.
"It's just …" He looked strangely remorseful. "A part of me wishes I hadn't called you onto this case. At least that way you would have been safe in Vegas. And I would've had the comfort of knowing that."
"Safe?" she queried. "You know as well as anyone that on this job, there's no such thing as safe. And there was no way you could have known, no way any of us could have known what was waiting for us at that crime scene. There's no reason to feel guilty. And I would rather be here with you and know what's going on, than back at home scared to death that you're missing. And for the record, I'm not dead. Whoever's lying under that cross isn't me. I'm okay. We're all okay. And at least now we have some answers – that's progress."
She said it positively, trying to stay upbeat, and when she smiled, his own mouth turned up at the edge, looking at her with love.
"We'll be fine," she reiterated. "There's nothing here that can harm us if we stick together."
He took her hand, fingers curling around hers, and with a mutual glance to the others to check they weren't watching, he leaned in. He took her lips softly with his, holding them for one blissful moment before drawing her into a hug.
It was an intimate embrace, close and comforting, and as she held him she felt a slight residual tension in his body that told her some of what he had suffered at her gravesite. She stroked his back, telling him it was okay, and he seemed to relax. When they parted, he kept her hand in his, and in the silence she began to hear snippets of conversation drifting down to them from where the others were huddled as a foursome.
"I don't think we can go back," Sofia said quietly. "They're in no shape to ride back right now –"
"And in any case it's pointless," Warrick said. "We came here for answers, and we still need a few more."
"We need to know if there's any survivors here, man," Nick said lowly. "We at least need to know that much, if anyone's gathered somewhere, or if it's total, you know?"
"Then we'll probably have to take a look around town," Catherine said. "See what's here."
"Well … I'm up for that if you are …"
Sara sensed that she was being relieved of the burden of decision-making, but it was a pleasant feeling. The suspicion that was proven correct a few minutes later when the others wandered back, and Catherine knelt down with a look of tactful diplomacy.
"You want to go into town," Grissom said, relieving her of the necessity of explaining.
"Only if you're up for it," she replied. "If you need some more time, it can wait. There's no rush."
"No, we're fine," Grissom said.
"Let's go," Sara added.
"Are you sure?" she asked. "If it's too much, say so now. Pride goes before a fall."
"We need answers," Sara reasoned. "The only place we might get those is in Vegas. There's no point turning back now without them, otherwise it's all been a waste."
Seconds later the decision was made, and half an hour later Sara was wondering what on Earth they had been thinking. The devastation was even worse than it had looked from the hillside, and the pain of riding through it, crushing. It was like a crime scene without end, the story laid out perfectly preserved for her to read, as if time had hit the pause button. Cars lay abandoned everywhere, some haphazardly mid-street, and most with their windows inexplicably smashed. Front doors on houses and shops were kicked in, the occasional mailbox knocked over, and everywhere were signs that the city was already being reclaimed by nature. Gardens were overgrown, grass long like a wild savannah, and everywhere weeds were growing without any restraint from the human populace. Worst of all were the bodies – the last citizens standing who hadn't been buried, their skeletal remains lying in the hot sun.
Sara tried to hold down her nausea.
"Looks like chaos broke out," Nick voiced, riding slowly along. "Riots, from the way everything's smashed – doesn't look like law and order held out for long."
"Mass panic," Catherine said, looking devastated. "Society breaks down, everyone would have been out to save themselves."
"Well they definitely had something to panic about," Warrick said fairly. "This bug didn't discriminate. Old, young, the fit and healthy … no one stood a chance."
"Civil unrest would have led to martial law," Sofia said. "Normal government gets suspended, a state of emergency declared, the military takes control of everything …"
"And I don't think even they lasted long," Grissom said, pausing to stare at another body on the kerb. Pieces of fatigues were still visible even through the decay.
Sara took a deep breath, not sure how much more she could take. Their decision to enter the disaster zone now seemed stupid beyond belief if the bug had been this lethal, and she came to wonder if Warrick had been right in the first instance – they should have turned around and headed for the hills as soon as they saw the cemetery.
They paused at an intersection, stopping in the middle to survey their options.
"Which way do you wanna head?" Warrick asked. "Further into town?"
"Is there much point, do you think?" Nick said. "It's probably just more of this. And I've gotta be honest, I'm not sure we're gonna find any survivors here. Whatever happened, we're a year too late."
"Maybe we should change our tactics," Catherine suggested. "Try to find some evidence instead."
"Some more newspapers?" Sofia asked. "They won't be recent, but if we can find some they might at least fill in the blanks. And there might be some signs around from the state of emergency, pamphlets or survival guides …"
"It's worth a shot," she agreed.
"Maybe we should split up," Nick suggested. "We can cover more ground that way, hopefully find what we need and get out of here sooner."
"Pairs?" Sara suggested, already glancing down the street for a likely destination.
"Perfect," Grissom agreed. "I'll go with Sara."
"We'll meet back here in an hour," Catherine said. "Don't be late."
They split up, each pair taking a different direction. Sara went back down a residential street with Grissom, while Nick and Sofia headed for the shops, and Warrick and Catherine down an industrial back street. Soon they disappeared from sight, and Sara tried to focus her mind on the task at hand. They headed up the driveway of a large house that looked comparatively intact.
"Remember, try not to touch anything," Grissom said. "Especially doorknobs and surfaces."
"I know," Sara reminded him. "They'll be crawling with germs."
They settled for kicking in the door instead, and began their long search for the elusive evidence. It was a strange thing to help herself to people's houses and possessions without any need for warrants or process, and it was a freedom that was both liberating and utterly depressing. She saw firsthand how people's lives had been turned upside down. One house had suitcases open and ready in the lounge, half-packed for an evacuation the residents had never made it to. Their bodies were not present and Sara could only suppose they were dead in the mass graves of the cemetery. Other houses they visited had items still on the stove, and one other, windows boarded up and guns left on the coffee table in a disturbing insight into the lawlessness which had taken the city.
"It looks like they were holed up here," Sara said, shaking her head at the boarded windows. "Trying to stay alive."
"To shut out the world," Grissom said. "Defend themselves against intruders."
"It's like everything fell apart, like civilization unravelled and regressed thousands of years back to the jungle. There's no cohesion or order, no society, it's every man for himself."
"Fear can make people do crazy things," Grissom said rationally. "Things they never would have dreamt of doing in any ordinary situation. But you know the human brain is conditioned to defend itself at all costs, even at the expense of those who were formerly friends or colleagues. I imagine that once the plague took hold, all civilised life fell away, leaving only a basic instinct for survival of the self."
"A battleground," Sara said, shaking her head. "It's terrifying to think about. What it must've been like to live through this, what they must have endured …"
"I know," Grissom replied sadly.
There was a melancholy look on his face, and she did not pursue the subject. Instead, she checked her watch.
"Our hour's nearly up," she said. "I'm going to duck next door, check one more house before we go back, okay?"
"All right," he said, engrossed in a pile of papers. "Be careful."
"I'll be right back," she said, passing him a smile.
She went back out front and jumped the low fence to the neighbour. It looked like one of the poorer houses in the street, with no discernible trace of anything much in the way of a garden, the paint on the weatherboards uneven and peeling in the sun. The front door was partially open, and she nudged it further with the barrel of her gun. It was dark inside, the windows boarded up like its neighbour, and she paused in the doorway, her eyes trying to adjust to the dim.
She took one step inside, and then heard a sharp click, and the cold barrel of a gun was pressed hard into her temple. A putrid masculine smell hit her nostrils.
"Don't move," a male voice said aggressively. "Stay still, and tell me who the fuck you are."
XXX
Several streets away, Catherine wheeled her bike alongside her as she headed down the quiet side street with Warrick. It looked like it had once been an industrial area, a street composed of various sized warehouses with fences covered in graffiti, but which had now been lost to the same lawlessness that had swept the rest of the metropolis. Rubbish lay still and faded in the gutters, and everywhere weeds had sprouted up in the cracks between the concrete. Most of the windows were smashed.
"Someone had a lot of anger to vent," Warrick said, as they passed one in which no glass remained. "I don't think there's a single pane of glass left intact in the whole of Vegas."
"Well I guess being crushed by a plague could do that to you," Catherine reasoned.
She stopped outside the shattered window, the glass glittering in the sun all over the pavement, and propped her bike up against the wall. This warehouse was as good a place as any other to start.
"Be careful," Warrick guided, taking her elbow as she carefully ducked between the shards of glass.
"I got it," she replied calmly.
She twisted through with relative ease, grateful for her flexibility that she had retained despite all the years that had passed since she had been dancing. She waited as Warrick joined her, and then, still not trusting that the city was entirely deserted, drew her gun from its holster.
A grubby desk stood in front of them, and they seemed to be in some of kind of mechanic's warehouse. The floor was dirty, the counter covered in oil stains, and a door behind seemed to lead to the workshop floor. She paused to look at a calendar, where a bikini-clad model straddled a motorbike.
"I don't know who she thinks she's kidding," she observed, waving to her out-of-proportion breasts. "Those sure aren't real."
"Well I won't hold that against her," Warrick said, looking as if he had no complaints.
They shared a smile, Catherine raising a flirtatious eyebrow – men, even Warrick, were all the same.
She wandered to the desk, spotting an old newspaper buried amongst some papers. She nudged them aside with the barrel of her gun.
"Bingo," she reported, spotting the headline which read 'State of Emergency Declared'.
Warrick didn't respond.
She looked up; he was dead still in the doorway to the back.
"Warrick? You okay?"
"Catherine," he said quietly. "Get down on the floor."
"What?" she asked.
Without warning, an explosion of gunshots hit the air.
XXX
Catherine had no time to think – suddenly everything happened at once. Warrick fired a shot off into the back room before he lunged sideways and grabbed her, knocking her to the safety of the floor.
Catherine breathed hard, inhaling a cloud of dust from a floor that hadn't been cleaned in months, and feeling a fine grain of glass in the back of her neck. She winced, grip tightening on her weapon as Warrick rolled off her, and ruthlessly raised his gun to fire again at a large man who emerged in the doorway.
He was half naked, his chest bare except for tattoos, wearing nothing but an old pair of dirty torn jeans, but there was no mistaking the deranged look in his dark eyes. His eyes seized Catherine just as Warrick downed with him with three more shots to his chest. The tattoos exploded with blood, the spatter swimming on the wall and calendar behind him, before he hit the floor with a dull thud.
Catherine threw herself up on her elbows, gripping her gun tight as more footsteps hit the air. She caught a glimpse of Nick and Sofia running up the path outside, guns drawn and faces ruthlessly hard just as a third figure ran through from the back, naked, a semi-automatic in his hand.
Sofia didn't hesitate – she sank three shots into his torso and killed him. He fell dead on top of his friend.
Silence fell as Sofia scrambled through the blown window, Nick behind her.
"Nick!" Warrick exclaimed, relieved.
"You both okay?" Sofia asked.
She did not holster her gun, but reached with her spare hand to pull Catherine to her feet.
"We're fine," Warrick said. "I think we're okay. The pricks ambushed us, we didn't even see them there –"
He was breathing hard, voice filled with panic.
"I know, they did the same to us," Nick said urgently, pulling them up. "Place is crawling with them, we've gotta get the hell out of here, fast –"
Catherine spotted blood on Nick's cheek, a fine trail running down the side of his face, but there was no time to discuss it.
"Lose the vests," Sofia ordered quickly. "If they see you're PD, we're dead."
Catherine threw down the zip on her vest, dropping it to the floor.
"We're gonna have to run to get Grissom and Sara," Nick said, slamming a new magazine into his gun. "We need to get to them before they do. If you see them, Cath, just shoot. Don't even hesitate. Rules don't apply here, anymore, okay? They're gonna catch us and kill us if they can, and they'll rape you and Sofia. Gangs are running this town now. We need to get Sara and Griss and get the hell out of here."
"Hurry," Sofia said, looking impatient at the chat. "We have no time."
She ushered them through the broken window to the bright daylight outside. Catherine saw that Nick and Sofia had both lost their bikes, and didn't stop to collect hers, but ran with them. She kept her gun cocked, heart hammering with terror like she had never felt before, her fears kicking in gut survival instinct. Sofia avoided the main road, leading them instead at a run through the side streets, trying to run by stealth and without noise.
"Which way did they go?" Nick asked, as they paused at an intersection. "Did anyone see?"
"Down there," Warrick said, pointing to a residential street down which Sara and Grissom had rode earlier.
They renewed their run, Catherine's eyes flying in all directions as they hurried, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder to watch their rear, ready to fire at the slightest movement.
It was a pure miracle that Grissom and Sara had not gone far, and as she spotted their bikes propped up against the wall of a run-down house she felt a rush of relief.
"GRISSOM!" Nick bellowed, pelting up the path.
"SARA?" Warrick echoed.
But there was no response. Catherine saw the front door to the house was open, the inside dark, and her hope disintegrated into fear.
Nick burst inside, yelling Sara's name.
"SARA?!"
And then Catherine saw her, and her heart shattered.
Sara was on the floor in Grissom's arms, eyes closed, her body covered in blood as Grissom cradled her semi-conscious form. Her shirt was torn open and her jeans unzipped, and Grissom was staring down at her with tears of shock running down his cheeks.
Catherine saw the feet of a dead man poking out of the doorway of a far room, a pool of blood on the floor.
Catherine rushed forward. She could hardly bear to ask, but knew she had to.
"Was she raped?"
Grissom didn't reply; he barely seemed to notice them there, his eyes desperately running over the limp body in his arms.
"Grissom," Catherine said, seizing his shoulder.
At last he looked up, and his trembling eyes met hers.
"Catherine …" he said, shaking, "I killed him."
Really surprised I actually finished this today, considering everything else I got stuck doing, but feeling good. Possibly cracking open some new fanfic territory here, but there you are, LOL. Poor Sara. Fingers crossed she's okay...
(BTW, would love to hear from anyone who can help me out with their intricate knowledge of CSI history. I know Sofia and Catherine have both used their guns to kill people on the show, but unsure if the others have. Does anyone remember? Thanks - Anna.)