The First Wave had started suddenly, or at least it had felt that way to Santana. It had probably been building for a while, a very long while, but she had ignored so many of the early signs, the news reports and the studies and the government warnings. It didn't really matter, she decided, how it had come to be, only that it had eventually worked its way through the population like a drop of colored dye in water, touching the surface and then spreading throughout until the clear water was a shining red, the color of the blood that ran down the streets. The unidentified illness had taken a few hundred thousand first, dead from the symptoms of the disease that infected everyone. No one could say what it was for sure, only that it was in them all, dormant until suddenly it wasn't anymore.

The Second Wave was even deadlier than the first. Santana remembered the way that neighbors turned on one another in a panic and riots broke out in the streets. People were dying and no one knew why and in their fear, they killed more than they saved. Men and women flocked to their houses of worship, stepping over the bodies of the fallen on their way in, but there were no more answers to be found there than anywhere else. There was only death and the loss of everything that Santana knew.

Santana figured that they had passed on to the Third Wave now, the one made up of whoever was left — people like her and people like the wild men who came in the night to murder and rape and steal. They were all sick, every single one of them infected with the unknown disease that had led them to this life, but they were very different. The wild ones were brutal, rapists and cannibals — Santana had seen it all herself — who turned on even each other when there was nothing left to eat, and there usually wasn't. And Santana — well, she did what she had to do. But even she had limits. She hoped.

They were all going to die soon enough anyway. Why make it worse?

It could have been days or it could have been weeks later when they ran into the first person they'd seen since the group in the woods. He was walking, just as they were, with a bag slung across his back, his shoes a tattered mess of leather barely held together by a few pieces of rope. He was skinny and covered in dirt, thin black hair falling across his forehead and ears. Santana and Rachel came upon him in the woods near the road and he met them with as much reluctance as they met him.

He held a bent metal pipe in his hand, one end of it rusted. "I don't want any trouble," he said.

Rachel took a step towards him, moving slowly through the grass and brush that separated them. She held her hands up. "We don't want any trouble either."

Santana rolled her eyes, surveying him intently. He would be another mouth to feed, and they didn't need one of those, and Santana and Rachel had a gun and a knife. They didn't need a pipe. "Whatever. Turn around and keep walking and you won't have any trouble, okay?" she told him, pulling her knife out. There was a bit of dried blood still on the blade.

"Santana," Rachel admonished her. She looked at the boy again. "We won't hurt you."

Rachel stuck her arm out but he didn't move. He looked at Santana. "She looks like she might," he said.

"Would you put that away?" Rachel asked Santana, exasperatedly pointing to the knife. "I'm Rachel. This is Santana and she's not nearly as mean as she looks." Her arm was still held out towards him, palm open and welcoming.

He looked at her for a long moment, unsure. Santana stuck her knife back in her belt and crossed her arms, meeting his eyes. She glared at his pipe and eventually he lowered it. "Mike," he said, shaking Rachel's hand. He nodded to Santana.

"What are you doing out here?" Santana asked bluntly.

He shrugged. "The same as you guys." He gave them a small easy smile. "Walking."

"Are you going anywhere in particular?" Rachel elbowed Santana before she could snap at him.

"Not really," he answered. "I'm going south before winter comes. What about you guys?"

"We're just," she paused, "going."

Mike nodded sympathetically. "That's all you can do."

The three of them stood there silently for a moment, Rachel and Santana on one side of a small clearing and Mike on the other, the distance between them incredibly small and incredibly large all at once. "Would you like to come with us?" Rachel asked.

Mike opened his mouth but Santana cut him off. "No fucking way," she scoffed. "Like fucking hell I'm going to let you bring some guy we don't know with us."

"Santana, look at him," Rachel said, turning to face Santana. She waved an arm at Mike. "He looks like he hasn't eaten in a long time. He looks like us." She sighed. "He doesn't look like a horrible monster."

Mike raised his arms and took a step back. "Hey, listen, I'm not trying to —"

"No," said Santana. "Who knows how many times he's done this whole pretending to be a nice guy out in the woods act."

"God, Santana. Why do you think that everyone is out to get you?" Rachel crossed her arms, mirroring Santana's stance.

"Because they are. How many times do you think he's used that pipe on naive little girls like you?"

"You can't just assume —"

"Give me your gun." Santana thrust her hand out, wiggling her fingers at Rachel. "Give it here."

"Santana, I'm not —"

Mike took another step back. A few jars and cans, the only things in his deflated backpack, jiggled and collided. "Shit," he muttered. "I'm totally not trying to mess with you guys." He cleared his throat. "Please don't shoot me."

He looked pitiful. "We're not going to shoot you," Rachel assured him.

"Speak for yourself." Santana glared at her, not even bothering to look at the boy across from them. All she could see were Rachel's eyes, defiant and angry, and her sunken cheeks, pale under the shadow of the trees. "Give me the gun," she repeated. "You want to trust him, fine. But give me the gun so that when he tries to bash our heads in while we sleep I can fucking stop him."

Rachel glared at her for a long moment. Finally, she stuffed her hand in her pocket and pulled out the semi-automatic pistol that she had been carrying since before she met Santana. She held it out and let Santana take it from her before moving to stand next to Mike, who sent her another smile, this one nervous and uneasy.

"Sometimes, you have to trust people," Rachel said to her.

The pistol was heavy in Santana's hand and she swung it around, gaping at Rachel. "Fuck," she cursed, unimpressed. "Seriously? You actually gave me your gun?"

Rachel nodded. "I trust you."

"You're such a fucking idiot sometimes, Rachel," Santana scowled, starting to feel a bit faint. It was warm outside and the air was humid, hot and sticky as it clung to her skin. They were low on food and hadn't eaten in a couple of days. She snapped. "No wonder your dad left you."

She might as well have slapped Rachel across the face. Rachel was obviously stricken, her face contorting as a deep frown settled on her face, her lips trembling. She turned away from them both and made towards the trees that circled around them, gasping for breath as she became to cry. Santana could hear it from where she stood.

Mike didn't understand what Santana meant but he grimaced all the same, setting his backpack and pipe on the ground. He made a move to follow Rachel but Santana beat him, dashing across the thick overgrown grass and raising a hand at him until he stopped and nodded towards where Rachel had gone.

Rachel made an uncomfortable amount of noise traipsing through the bushes, Santana following her. "Rachel, wait," she called out. "I'm sorry." Rachel kept walking, fists tightly balled up at her sides. "I didn't mean it, okay?"

Rachel stopped but didn't turn around.

"I'm sorry," Santana repeated, a but quieter this time. She could still see Mike, standing quietly in the clearing near them, watching.

"It's not stupid of me to trust some people," Rachel said softly, her voice half a whisper that floated lightly on the breeze "It's not stupid to want to believe that there's still some good in this place."

Santana bit back the immediate impulse to shout at her "there isn't" and sighed, moving closer until she was standing next to Rachel. "I kind of trust you, you know," she said. Rachel reached out to take her hand, her grip soft, the way it had been that day in the field when Santana had grabbed her, half covered in the blood of a stranger.

The gun weighed heavily in her other hand and Santana stared at it before holding it out to Rachel. "Here," she said, because she trusted Rachel.

Rachel took the pistol and slid it into her pocket. She wiped at her face, cleaning off dirt and tears with her fingers, and leaned into Santana, who stood by her silently.

It was in that quiet moment, when things had settled, dust and tears and anger, that Santana heard it.

Mike was beside her in an instant, moving so fast that she didn't realize he was next to her until he spoke. "Do you hear that?" he hissed. He held his bent pipe firmly in his hand, his arm stretched out in front of his chest.

Santana nodded. The sound of tires slowly rolling over broken asphalt was so loud, and yet somehow it had snuck up on them. She pulled out her knife. "You're gonna want to take that back out," she told Rachel, glancing down towards the girl's pocket. The road was on the other side of the trees, grass and weeds and bushes rising up high from the ground. Santana couldn't see the road but she knew it was there. She only hoped that whoever was driving didn't spot them through the overgrowth or hadn't heard their fighting.

The tires stopped.

Rachel nodded, grabbing her gun and tightening one of the straps on her backpack. "Do you think we can outrun him?" she whispered, so quiet that Santana only just managed to hear her.

She licked her lips and said nothing.

There were footsteps then, heavy steps moving across the small section of grass that stood between the road and the trees they were in.

Santana turned her head to the left towards the road slowly so that the movement didn't catch the attention of anyone who might be looking. She turned her head, just a little bit, just enough that she could see out of the corner of her eye.

"It's one guy," she muttered. "Tire iron."

"Think we can all take him?" Mike whispered back.

She nodded.

"Him, maybe. But not all four of us." This voice came from the right, breaking through the woods as a man stepped through them, flanked by two others.

Shit. They'd snuck up on Santana, Rachel, and Mike, putting one guy on the road and three in the woods, madmen on either side of them. They were so stupid to let this happen.

The three of them stood shoulder-to-shoulder, Santana in between Mike and Rachel, each of them with a weapon ready.

Santana moved first because that's what she always did. She dropped her backpack and sprinted towards the man standing alone, hoping to catch him off-guard. The metal of her knife flashed dangerously in the half-light of the woods.

She flung her knife at his head and he jumped back and hollered, raising his arm. She caught him in the bicep, only managing to nick him. A bit of blood ran down his arm.

He swung his tire iron at her but she managed to dodge it, moving only on adrenaline. He was large but slow and that worked to her advantage. She lunged at him again, her blade managing to cut into his neck this time. It was a shallow wound, not enough to kill him, but it was bloody and just deep enough to make him stumble. He fell back against a tree, pressing his hand against the side of neck.

Santana darted away from him and twisted around to look at the others. She turned around just in time to hear a gunshot, loud in the stillness of the woods, and to see a man fall back to ground, his hand on his leg. Dark red blood stained his pants.

Several feet away, Mike was trading blows with a man twice his size. She recognized him as the one who had spoken. The man was taller and thicker than he was but Mike was fast on his feet, she gave him that. He could definitely hold his own.

Rachel meanwhile was backing away from the last man standing, her gun trained on him. She was strong, her features stern. She had looked at Santana that way once, when she first met her, and Santana did not envy the man on the other end of that glare.

Rachel cocked the hammer on the pistol as he advanced towards her, a large and rusting axe in his hands.

Santana picked up her backpack and began to move towards Rachel. The man she'd cut was still against the tree behind her, cursing, and she paused to turn around and stomp on his groin. He cursed again.

That's when she heard, louder than the groans of pain and the curses of the men in the woods with them - the pull of a trigger and the click of an empty gun. Rachel was out of bullets.

"Shit."

Everything happened quickly then and Santana wasn't sure how she ended up on front of Rachel, but she did. She wasn't even sure she wanted to end up between Rachel and an axe, but she ended up there anyway.

The axe was up in the air and then it wasn't anymore, it was cutting through the air in a downwards arc towards them. Then there was Mike, right in front of them, pushing them back just before the dull blade of the axe hit them.

And then there was the feel of blood everywhere all at once, splattering across Santana's front, and the sound of metal splitting the bone of a skull, and then the sight of Mike's body falling to the ground, a mass of limp limbs and blood. The axe was still buried in his head.

Then there was running, Santana's hand in Rachel's, pulling her away. There was blood and there was running.