"This is an emergency! We need Runners Three, Five and Eight at the main gate immediately!"
Five perked up, hearing Runner Seven call her from the loudspeakers. Looking out the window next to her bunk and peering toward the main gate, she saw it was wide open. She frowned, flicking on her radio.
"Five!" Sam called instantly. "We need you ready to go right now! The gate is stuck open! The zombies could stroll right in if they wanted to!"
"How did that happen?" she asked worriedly, tying her shoes tightly and heading toward the main gate.
"I just lifted it for Runner Two!" the radio operator replied, mortified. "I swear it wasn't my fault. It just got stuck!"
Five reached the open gate in no time, and a young woman with a mousy brown bob approached her. "Runner Five, right?"
"Yeah."
"I'm Sara Smith," she replied back, shaking Five's hand firmly. "Runner Eight."
Sam must have seen the two women together from the comms tower. "Five, we're pairing you up with Eight on this mission. You two go out and help us distract the zombies, all right? Take a noisemaker and get them as far away as possible!"
"Got it, Sam," Five replied, waving at the comms tower.
Almost as soon as they had set off at a steady jog, Runner Eight began wheezing.
"Are—are you all right?" Five gasped, automatically jumping away from the runner.
"Y—yeah. I'm fine." Eight hacked again, spitting violently on the ground. Five couldn't help but stare, suddenly anxious. They had about ten zombies following from four kilometers away and couldn't afford to slow down.
"That cough…" Sam said nervously through the radio.
"Just a chest cold," Eight insisted. "Nothing to worry about."
"But that's what they all say," he tittered. "First a cough, then a rattle, then a moan…"
"It's just a cough, Sam!" she huffed, then lowering her voice. "He's always fussing about something." She let out another powerful hack but cut the radio controller off before he could voice his worry once more. "You know, Sam, if it bothers you so much, I'm just going to turn the radio off."
"Oh, no you don't!" Sam yelped. "Don't tu—"
With a small click, Eight cut the connection.
"There we go," she said. The radios emitted nothing but silence. "Now, it's just you and me. Those zombs are following us at a steady pace. Shouldn't be a problem at all, and we won't have to bother Sam."
Five didn't like this. At all. "Are you sure this is a good idea?" she asked worriedly as Eight coughed again. She felt much safer when Sam was covering her back and cracking bad jokes. "He can track the horde for us and—"
"Oh, don't tell me you're worried now, too," Eight replied, rolling her eyes. "You sound almost as bad as Sam."
"Sorry. I'm just… a little jumpy."
"Not surprising, considering you went through that chopper crash a couple days ago," the runner beside Five said, her voice suddenly sounding a little too cheery. "The only survivor and all that. Sev told me you were headed back to Mullins for further instructions; we were due for some supplies, so we think you were going to come to us. But then you got hit by that launcher… strange, isn't it? You were just bringing in supplies."
"Yeah," Five replied honestly. "We had no idea someone would attack us like that."
"Is that so?" the brown-haired runner's eyebrows were high, and Five suddenly had a bad feeling about where this conversation was headed. "You turned up out of the blue, perfectly unhurt. Sure, you have the right uniform, but that could have been stolen from a body. How do we know you didn't fire that rocket launcher?"
Five's eyes widened in shock. "I—I didn't!" she stammered. "Ask Sam, I talked to him right after the crash, he'll tell you—"
"Sam sees the good in everyone," Eight interrupted coldly. "I like to stay realistic."