Capt. Babs Greenling (is a ray of f'ing sunshine) (bite_sized) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-11-16 21:31:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | # 2018 [11] november, calvin davidson, mary-june greenling |
WHO: Captain Babs Greenling and Sergeant Cal Davidson
WHAT: A scouting mission to get medical supplies turns into Babs punching Cal in the face.
WHEN: November 6, morning
WHERE: Seton Medical Center
Wind blew across the city. Papers shuffled along the street, and Babs knew the fact it looked empty was only an illusion
When the shelters hunkered down and locked their doors, the Capitol knew it had more than enough supplies to last—and even if worse came to worst, the Department of Resources could bypass the lockdown and be sent out into the wastes to bring back more. No rest for the wicked, and nothing would stop their duty. (As the Transportation Corps’ motto had once read, back when such things mattered: spearhead of logistics. If required, they would find a way.)
But the library didn’t have such luxuries, and their trade relationship with the Capitol had broken down in lieu of something else.
That didn’t mean, however, that two army vets necessarily needed to stop cooperating. When Captain Greenling reached out and asked for some assistance, Sergeant Davidson had gamely agreed. It was his job, after all, wasn’t it? He could fucking well get supplies to the people who needed it, even if everything else was crumbling in the city around them. Babs didn’t even notice the crumbling half the time- she assumed she was the one crumbling.
He’d reviewed their options. St. David's had already been picked-over by the library, so they had to go further afield. He’d consulted his maps and own native knowledge of the city: Austin State Hospital was too big, too dangerous to delve into, but Seton Medical Center right beside it was smaller. And honestly, Babs wanted a fight. She wanted to be a little bloody- she had the ability to shower now. The hair that Cal had first seen matted and brown with grime was blonde once more, her face was scrubbed; even her clothes were clean. Seton seemed fine to her. Still a risk to investigate, but at least a more manageable one.
(Once upon a time, he’d looked down at Lansing’s city map and seen Seton wiped off the paper, crossed out with livid black marks—and now he was going inside anyway. Funny, how these things worked out.)
But it was a long walk, too far outside the usual circumference of what constituted habitable Austin these days. It would have meant walking for the better part of an hour through dangerous, unvetted territory—or a mere eight-minute drive.
Which meant Babs standing out in the street, fidgeting and waiting for Cal’s dusty SUV to come rolling up. He’d left ample notice with Karen, along with his coordinates in case something went awry. After verifying that their surroundings were empty and she was alone (no dog today, he noted), Cal popped the lock.
She remembered being 7, and in the back of her Dad’s truck. They’d sang “Sweet Home Alabama” to one another over the radio. She remembered being 21, next to her boyfriend in his jeep and letting him touch her in intimate areas. And she remembered 29, sitting in a van next to Brian and trying not to panic about how very mom and dad it felt, and how excited the man was for it. She had hoped that him driving it meant she got to keep her two seater.
The door swung open, and Babs slid in. She’d gotten her hands on basic clothes again, her own ripped and bloody ones thrown away. Sure, she had her boots and her leather jacket, but now her jeans weren’t red with blood and her black shirt actually had sleeves and a hem. Being clean felt wrong. The man beside her cast the woman a sidelong look, taking in her greatly improved appearance—less like some crimson-painted, haggard, sleep-deprived mess scraped out of the fire. Actually a pretty good-looking blonde, now that all the grime had been scrubbed off.
“Hey,” she said, putting her seatbelt on, and then resting her gun on her lap. It was one of Brian’s, left over from military days. She also had a knife on her, but she wasn’t about to show that to someone she only knew for his ability to hide in her car, stay still for stitches, and quote beloved 80’s movies.
“Hey.” Cal’s hands were instinctively flicking the lock again. Once upon a time, perhaps that might’ve made a woman nervous, this automatic kneejerk instinct to lock her in with him—but times had changed drastically over the last couple years. Locked doors meant safety meant runners not yanking open the door and chowing down on his passenger.
The SUV engaged with a comforting grumble and started rolling down the street, its driver’s eyes trained on their surroundings, always watching for the telltale flicker of movement. “You said you were in Arizona before. So you never knew Austin back when it still stood, right?”
It was easy to ask questions like this, for him to focus on the basic logistics and variables. They were on a mission, as far as the sergeant was concerned. It was harmless, and Babs didn’t even know how to answer a harmless question anymore. It took her a moment.
“I visited once. My husband had friends here, we came by before the wedding. He wanted me to meet his friends, know the wedding party.” Christ, that seemed so stupidly… simple. She’d been taken to Austin to see some buddies so she wouldn’t have strangers at her wedding. “We were only here a few nights, not a lot of strategic visiting or planning,” the elaboration almost felt like an excuse, as if it were her fault that she didn’t know Austin well enough.
On the side of the road there was a corpse. Swaying softly, almost falling into the road a few times. She thought about lowering the window and shooting it, but with the way the jaw hung off of his mouth, she didn’t. It looked harmless. Which was so different for Babs, everything was different. Cal’s blue eyes followed hers, noted the corpse, and then dismissed it just as easily.
“I need bandages,” she said, not wanting to keep talking about Brian, or getting married, or anything else. “I need a few other things, but sanitary bandages are the most important. I’ll even taken fabric ripped up. Advil or ibuprofen would be a win.” She could keep listing what she needed as a nurse, but what she needed as a person? That was a hell of a lot harder. Friendship, redemption for Pickens, sex, laughter. All that was out of reach.
Husband. That was another piece of information to file away, and now he glanced over and caught the gleam of white-gold on her finger, clenched around the gun in her lap. She’d roared into town by herself, with only a dog as a partner. That raised questions, but not ones that he desperately needed answered—Cal tried not to grill people about family, being too aware that he was so lucky where others hadn’t been. Before the outbreak, So are you married? would have been bland small talk, the expected conversational filler. Nowadays, it risked stepping right into a gaping wound. For Babs it was a step that would lead right into a mess she couldn't even discuss yet.
“Alright. So I dunno if anyone told you this, but as some background—there’s a reason Brackenridge is the only standing hospital anymore. They were the only ones that refused to treat any bite victims whatsoever. As a result, all of the other medical centers fell during the outbreak.” Babs heart clenched. The idea of turning the sick away seemed outrageous to her, and yet one day she’d have to. His voice turned flat and dry, rattling off information like he was briefing her in the field. Which he sort of was.
Cal had lived through it, and when he closed his eyes, he could see these streets reconfigured into a very, very different picture. In some ways, the ghastly emptiness was preferable.
“Which means it’s probably fuckin’ chock-full of geeks. It’s not gonna be fun. We’ll have to go carefully, and dispatch of them quietly when we come across ‘em. When, not if. But the bright side is it means there’s probably a ton of medical supplies there for us to pick away at. A big place like that, it’s hard to scavenge safely unless you’re prepared.”
“I can shoot,” she said, and she said it simply. She’d grown up with gun culture, she’d served, she could do it. It didn’t cause her any fear anymore, the only thing she feared was having to shoot someone she knew again. The first time she’d pulled a trigger after Brian, she’d flashed to her husband’s face. The way it had cracked and expanded and fallen into nothing after the bullet had gone in.
The man next to her was alive, he didn’t need a bullet in his head. But unlike Brian, a man Babs had known inside and out, this man was unknown. Maybe unknowable. She was curious, she hated to admit, about this man. Glancing at him, she noted the chin and jaw. She only somewhat remembered what he looked like full on- she’d been so tired before, half dead.
“How often do you get supplies?”
“Department of Resources supply runs, you mean?”
“No, how often do you get supplies,” Babs said, arching a brow. “I know your type. You might be military and you might be on duty for the fancy Capitol building, but I’m willing to bet this is not your first time getting off the book supplies.” She smiled, for a second- the right corner of her mouth twitched.
And that drew a real laugh out of the man (his reactions three times hers, Cal Davidson wearing his heart and reactions on his sleeve as he always did. That stunned the nurse.). She’d seen right through him. There was something refreshing to that: another little echo of the military that used to be his family, the men and women like Karen Sharpe and Jadyn Hunter.
“Maaaybe,” he said, drawling out the one word even as he thought how to describe his off-books, off-limits excursions. They hadn’t always ended very well for him. “At least once per week. Don’t tell my superintendent. There’s some friends I like to get things for, when they can’t do it themselves.” And his voice tapered off at the end of that sentence, a little lilt as if it wasn’t quite certain what tone to settle on. Friends. She could read between the lines- women he flirted with, likely. She felt some pink in her cheeks, realizing she was very possibly just apart of a long line of girls he got things with. But how many of them went with him? She thought that question had just been in her own head, but it slipped out.
“And how often do they come with you, these friends?” she asked, raising a brow. “I hope you’re not endangering civilian lives, Sargent,” Babs said, her tone flat and that smile only in her blue eyes. “It would be a shame if this was a revolving door of heroic antics.”
Cal made a playful scoff, still watching the road, but this time sensing that shoulder-prickling feeling of being watched. “No civilians endangered, ma’am. All my dumb-as-shit heroic antics are done alone, thanks—which is sort of the problem with dumbass heroic antics to begin with. I swore to myself I’d bring my partner going forward, but,” and this time he finally looked over to her, “you served, so I figured you could be a well-qualified substitute today.” Partner, Babs mulled. Gay? Detective? She didn’t know.
It was a neat, clean mental delineation for him: the women who’d worn dog tags, and those who hadn’t. He trusted the former to have his back. The latter, not so much. Babs felt the same way, only about men.
“Good. Who’s your partner?” she asked, knowing she wouldn’t know the name, but not caring. Most of her days were filled with medical talk, official discussions, or just silence. This was as close to alive as she had. She didn’t want it to end, even as they started passing signs for the hospital and she could see the walkers getting thicker in little packs every hundred yards or so.
Their eight minutes were up, swallowed by the road and this conversation. “Karen Sharpe. She’s with the DoR too, we work together,” he said aimlessly; the invocation of that name was a lodestone, his own little mental reminder to be sensible. To tread carefully. To cover his ass, because there was someone waiting for him—it wasn’t a girlfriend, it wasn’t a swooning damsel waving white handkerchiefs in the window for his return, but it was what kept him anchored nonetheless. If Babs had been able to see that, to know, she would have respected him more for it. Dizzy dames had never impressed her, and she was even less impressed by the men who went for them.
Arrows were pointing the way to the Austin State Hospital; he veered his way left, away from them, and towards Seton. The hospital soon pulled into view, its straight lines and angles reminding him suddenly of a prison cell. As the trusty old car rolled its way up the drive, Cal tried to bite back the wave of apprehension that roiled out from that building, near-flattening him under its weight. It would be dark inside: there was no power, and not all hallways would have direct access to windows and sunlight.
He was not looking forward to this. Babs, twistedly, was.
Cal gave himself the mental equivalent of a pinch to his arm by looking over at Babs. She was a nurse, she needed medical supplies, and the library wasn’t trading with the Capitol, so that meant scavenging. When Cal arranged the facts in front of him in a row like that, he could swallow them more easily. It was something he could focus on. A simple problem with a simple answer, as opposed to the moral and ethical quicksand that was life around the Capitol these days. Something that didn’t mean stewing over his phone and feeling helpless, lost.
“You got a melee weapon too? Sometimes gunshots summon the rest of ‘em. We’ll want to avoid them to begin with.”
“I carry a knife,” Babs said, thinking about not telling him at all for a moment. She was always logical, she could order her thoughts properly and accept reality. Hell, she was so logical that whenever logic wasn’t applicable (love, sex, adrenaline- though she sometimes thought those three things were the same with different names) she tended to shut down and let someone else take over. She could almost sense death on the hospital, and it wasn’t the kind she was used to. It wasn’t formaldehyde and the crispness of the cold morgue. It was heated, burning, heavy. Her nostrils flared, and she twitched her feet.
Pulling her hair back, she tied it into a messy bun at the back of her head- she didn’t need anything reaching out and grabbing it, or it falling into her eyes. She knew the polite thing was to ask the man if he had one, but she knew he would. He was army, he’d been the one to ask.
The building looked like the one Joker had blown up in Nolan’s Batman movies. She didn’t say at much, she knew that her slightly nerdy interest didn’t fit in with the images she had. Besides, it wasn’t that Babs read (or had read) comics or something. She just loved movies, she loved being lost in another person’s story. Old movies, the black and white kind with Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn or even Twilight Zone were the best.
Wind blew across the city. Papers shuffled along the street, and Babs knew the fact it looked empty was only an illusion. Babs waited for the car to stop before taking her seatbelt off and opening the door. She stood up, put her gun into a holster she’d had to sew and minimize from Brian’s size to her own, and took the knife out of her pocket. It would have been illegal to carry once- big, heavy, her dad’s old hunting knife. Another form of protection borrowed from man.
The man beside her was careful to lock the doors after them, that little jolt of paranoia dogging his heels at all times: imagining another Emilie picking away at that lock and leaving them stranded, trapped out in the middle of nowhere while the sun sank towards the horizon. What would once have been a careless little jaunt, a simple twelve stops and home on the bus, was now a near-impassable wasteland.
Cal took a deep breath, readjusting his own weaponry. He unlatched the holster (his is perfectly-sized for him) for his service pistol and drew out a crowbar, which he hefted in his hands after donning gloves. Long pants, long sleeves, a high neck despite the heat of the morning—he was careful to minimise his exposure. Anything to drop the chances of something hungry finding bare skin and latching on. He’d placed the angle-head flashlight in one of his many chest pockets, batteries re-checked and ready to illuminate their path.
The mouth of the hospital stood waiting ahead of them, a dark maw leading into what he’s pretty sure might be some form of hell.
“Ready?”
“Ready,” Babs said. She walked with a sort of soft stomp to her feet, knife handle gripped in one hand and the other shading her eyes for a moment until the first zombie approached to her left. The gas that had settled over Austin smelled, but the shuffler was even worse- it was death, only closer and encapsulated in one being. Babs didn’t even hesitate as she walked right up to the damn thing, pushing hard against the middle of the chest. She had expected to hit a hard sternum and knock the thing down, but instead her hand squished and went inside of the cavity.
She’d deal with the ick factor later. Right then she dealt with getting her knife up into the thing’s throat by aiming for the chin and pushing upwards. She heard neck bones breaking, and after twisting the handle and pulling hard to the left, the head turned at an unnatural angle and the zombie stopped moving. Babs pulled her hands and knife back to herself.
Messy, ugly. Necessary.
She’d do it more clean next time. Because she couldn’t help but note that in that moment of killing, her mind had gone so totally blank that she’d almost cried with joy. Not a single thought that been in her other than surviving. She’d been back on the road with Kaleo and Gabe for a moment. She looked over to Cal, the sun blaring behind her like a faulty flood light. She wiped her hand on her jeans and began back towards the door, stepping over the dead thing she’d put down.
He followed, and the two of them instinctively settled into some form of cooperation as they shoved open the door and entered the building. It was nowhere near as symbiotic and unthinking as his hard-won chemistry with Karen, nor even Archer; but there was some of that same muscle memory, the crisp curt movements drilled into them by the army, the way they signaled to one another with fluttering hand movements. Babs was in the lead for a moment, but then Cal shook his head and took point, his flashlight casting a hollow glow down the hallway. Babs had to remind herself it was okay for someone else to lead. She pulled back.
It was just about as bad as he’d feared: overturned gurneys, dessicated corpses, papers scattered on the floor, smears of blood against the countertops. A scene out of a badly done fucking horror film.
The pair of soldiers made their careful way down the hall. As he turned into the waiting room, the light fell on two aimless shufflers, woken by the sound and smell of fresh meat—all grasping teeth and hands and rotting flesh, and the smell was even worse indoors, the air tight and musty from disuse. They’d walked from gassed fields that would have made Vietnam feel lucky straight into Hades.
Cal’s crowbar swung without hesitation, colliding sharply with the shuffler’s head. The weakened bone mass shattered, sending a horrible spray of flesh and brain into the room, but Cal was already turning his head aside to avoid the splatter.
Behind him, Babs dealt with her own. Or rather, she didn’t. She’d been so focused on covering Cal’s back, that she had almost missed the crawler. It walked like some dumb kid trying to reenact The Exorcism or whatever movie Linda Blair had crab-walked in. Babs turned when the thing grabbed her leg, and she acted without strategic thought. Her knife went for the shoulder, slashing for a second and getting stuck. It took a moment before Babs’ panic allowed logic to seep in. She kicked its head, hard, and hurt it enough to grab the knife and pull it out.
The zombie had a floral set of scrubs on. Babs could name the online store the living person had once ordered them from. She’d gotten a lavender set from the same place. The cloth was scratchy.
The knife went into the jaw, eye, and finally severed the spine. She took a look in its pockets before pulling out some paperclips. Useless. But she pocketed them anyways, because once this woman had thought putting them into the flower scrubs was better than putting them in the trash. Babs grabbed the ID card off of the woman, in case it could be a security pass of some sort- sure, the electricity was down, but sometimes backup generators kept locked doors functional. For how long, she didn’t know.
“You know where the pharm is?”
The sergeant was watching her. He hadn’t stepped forward to intercede during Babs’ tussle; she looked like she could handle herself, and if it seemed like she was in dire straits, if those champing teeth had started to come too close, then he’d have lunged into the fray. But in such close quarters, jumping the gun would have been dangerous to all involved.
“Yep. I know the lay of the land a little—I came in here once, for a concussion.” His smile was rueful, the rush of fond memory coming to him unbidden, a story behind the ridiculous injury. Concussions happened to everyone- Babs had gotten one, a long time ago. During a game of football against a future husband.
A simpler time.
But in this one, the here and now, Cal turned so the beam of his flashlight swung back to the route they’d have to take to the pharmacy.
Once they reached the supplies room, having to pull a toppled dusty wheelchair out of the way of the door (that was promising), the area opened up a little—god bless, but it had a window. Dirty and grimed and it hadn’t been opened in years, but just seeing sunlight cast through the room lifted Cal’s spirits. It gave them a clear view, too, too, revealing that there were two corpses in the corner but they weren’t moving.
He stepped over to them anyway, the crowbar held in readiness just in case. Cal nudged one of them with a boot, then kicked it (once upon a time it had been a doctor; now it was simply a threat that had to be double-checked), then the other.
Nothing.
He exhaled a breath, even Babs did too, relaxing by approximately an inch for the first time since entering the hospital.
“You find bandages, I’ll get drugs,” Babs said, pulling out two folded trash bags from her pocket. She tossed one to Cal and pocketed her knife, going for the rows of pill bottles and reading names. It was a big supply, and the issue was that half the stuff was old. Too old to take safely, and so Babs began to weed through dates, tossing anything that was still good into her bag without care if it was a pill to get a hard on, help with coughing, or pain meds. A few feet away, Cal was doing the same with another cabinet. By the time Babs stopped, her bag was heavy and bulged. And she still had more rows to go.
Damn.
“So you said you were from South Carolina?” Cal’s voice broke through the monotony: soft and low, but not strained. The lit room and the repetition of their work in this safe space had lowered his hackles until he felt almost normal.
Why did he want to know? Why didn’t she want to answer quicker?
“Yeah, I’m from a town called Pickens. Went to school in Charleston before college,” she said simply. There was the slightest hint of pride there. Oh, sure, school had been hell; but she’d gotten her high school diploma from an old establishment private school, and she was a little proud of that.
“I did basic training at Fort Jackson. Not sure how close it is to Pickens, but—I liked the area, it felt good stayin’ in the south for training.” And there it was, his frame of reference, some of the source of his curiosity.
“Pickens is near the North Carolina border,” she said, not wanting to go too deep into it- but of course the implication was there. Everyone in South Carolina knew that the further North you went, well… there was a stereotype. Poorer, more likely to be white trash, less educated. Babs didn’t like to give the satisfaction of talking about how her town had had one movie theater screen, or that she’d grown up in an RV. It wasn’t anyone’s business but her own, and the body she’d left behind.
So she wasn’t being particularly forthcoming, but Cal rarely gave up. He could count the friendships that had been born from just his sheer bloodyminded stubbornness. Babs shared that, but usually was more silent, and didn’t apply it to things like friendship when death was imminent and painful.
So: “Is it really?” the man asked wryly, an attempt at humour. “Sure that ain’t another lie? We’ll have to stop by a gas station, get an almanac and check.” Babs rolled her eyes, but bit her tongue. She had earned that, she supposed.
She had to step over a few smashed blog bags that something had gnawed hopefully at weeks before. Her footprints turned bloody.
“When I moved away for college I was told to keep pepper spray on me and never hand out information to strangers. I’ve upgraded to guns since then. I adjusted the other part too. You wanna fault me for that?”
He didn’t get a chance to answer. The door moved. Something moved outside of it, shoulder banging into the door. Babs dropped the bag out of surprise, and turned right away. Whatever was outside paused, its shuffling noise paused. Cal stood frozen into stillness, alert and watchful like a dog that had scented prey.
It was then that Babs did the math- she was in a room with a window that might not open, with the undead outside, and with a man she’d lied to and didn’t know well. Oh, someone might come looking for her if she didn’t make it back to LBJ. But she could be dead by then. Babs carefully watched, before going back to the pill cabinets, starting to pile up good meds onto the floor next to her bag. Cal kept staring at the door for a while after she looked away, his hands still gripping the crowbar. They’d stayed too long. Their bags were too full. They needed to haul ass back before they loaded up too much and couldn’t move easily.
“We should probably get—” he began, one hand touching her shoulder. Babs moved so quick that she almost pulled a muscle. She might be sloppy fighting a decaying bag of flesh, but a human was different. Her knife was out, and she had one hand twisting around Cal’s arm and the other pointing the knife at his lower throat in two seconds. He froze.
And there it was - the look in her eyes. She wasn’t just a woman who acted like a soldier and knew how to run shit. She had that fear, that special reminder in her that she could die at any moment, and the only thing between her and someone carrying a homemade bomb into her tent, or her and a zombie wandering through her clinic, was herself. Captain Greenling was her own weapon, her own checkpoint, and Cal was an unknown operative. The man didn’t move, didn’t speak, barely even breathed—just his eyes drifting downwards to follow the tense line of her arm to the curve of her shoulder to the stricken, feral look on her face. Cal’s hands stayed motionless by his side. Any wrong move and that metal could part skin, could find his carotid artery.
She didn’t release the knife for a few moments, breathing hard. She blinked, and then seemed surprised, as if she’d walked in on someone else putting pressure against the wrong side of Cal’s elbow, or pressing the knife against his skin. She didn’t move though.
“Easy,” he finally managed, his Adam’s apple bobbing against the knife. Inanely, his mind flew to old-fashioned shaving, his father trying to teach him the ways of a straight-edge razor, the scrape of metal against skin. This wasn’t the same.
“Easy.”
As if he were calming a rabid dog. Babs slowly let go of his elbow, and dropped the knife to her side. She stood up a little straighter, putting her knife back into its place and smoothing her jacket down as if it was a tube of toothpaste. If she manipulated it enough, it would go smooth and the paste inside would go back into the right places before it was emptied out, and tossed into the waste bin.
“Don’t sneak up on me, Sergeant,” Babs said, trying to sound curt, but faltering a little. She looked back at their bags, and realized just how badly they needed their hands. “If we leave these here, we can come back with backpacks and better bags. Stuff your pockets and we’ll take one bag for one,” she ordered. Stronger this time. But no eye contact. He was still watching her, standing still like a deer in a glade, waiting to see how she moved.
She smelled sweat. Was there her own? It was, she knew it.
Just as Babs had flown through her own mental calculations, the same thought now crossed Cal’s mind: she was an unknown. A possibly unstable quantity, who’d come roaring in from the wasteland covered in blood and a strangled laugh. Who’d pulled a gun and then a knife on him. He’d gravitated to her because she was army and that generally meant calm, composed, efficient, but maybe she wasn’t anymore; he’d seen when happened when a soldier splintered in half. Everyone had their breaking point, after all. And some of them never came back the same.
Maybe she’d already reached that point.
Still quiet, Cal busied himself by picking up one of the bottles. He exhaled, his chest finally loosening from the breath he’d been holding. Were they just going to pretend that hadn’t happened? Babs was fine with that.
Well. Cal was never one for tiptoeing around the bush. Which was probably better, because the nurse had a habit of trampling through them without meaning to.
“Didn’t mean to startle you, Greenling,” he said, after he’d finished filling his pockets.
Babs was busy mixing bottles of the same pills together, picking out the ones she was hoping would be needed, and looking at all the ones they were going to have to leave behind. Damn. She purposefully focused on that, not on Cal. Let him mutter and prod, she wouldn’t give into the desire to give a quick, easy answer.
“I imagine it won’t happen again,” was all she could muster.
“Good. Make sure it doesn’t.” His own voice had turned strangely curt and hard in return, the tension having almost visibly ratcheted in the room. Cal could have elaborated—digging that metaphorical knife in deeper, scraping away at whatever ugliness they’d temporarily unearthed—but he refrained, instead swinging the bag up onto his shoulder. His temper was there, throbbing beneath the surface, lit by the adrenaline of having his life imperiled. And not even from a fucking walker, either. Walkers were animals, you could almost forgive them for being hungry for death.
He paused by the door, looking back at his companion. Still measuring, and considering. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah,” Babs said, her own pack ready. She wasn’t make eye contact, like a dog who had gotten into the trash and knew better. When she and Brian had walked into tension like this, her M.O. had been to go on a jog and not ask where Brian went when she got home and he was gone. Part of her had almost hoped he’d gone to another woman, but Brian had always been too damn good of a man for that. Not until he thought she was dead.
Shuffling outside the door. Babs took her knife, adrenaline in her veins so thick and strong you’d think she was two hours into a tattoo. She wanted to close her eyes and appear at home, in Arizona- no, that was wrong. She wanted to close her eyes and wish that she wished that. It would be so much easier to want simple things, to want what everyone else wanted. The return to normalcy.
She was nearest the door. She looked at Cal, nodded, and then opened it up. And there it was- dead and rotting, and her knife was between its eyes before it could have moved towards her, and it dropped like a sack of potatoes. She kicked its body away, having to actually push with her foot to keep it out of the way of the door.
The room was still full of things she needed, wanted. Babs wondered if she’d be able to get back: she wouldn’t bring Olivia there, and she wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to depend on someone like Cal. He already hated her now, she was sure of it. And he was Capitol. Enough to sour any taste in her mouth.
“Nicely done,” the man said, following in her wake. They’d left the bags neatly tucked away in the corner, ready for picking up when she—they?—returned.
They made their slow way back out through those lightless hallways. The next time another walker lurched out at them, it was Calvin’s gloved hands that swung the crowbar; with his balance thrown off by the supplies, however, the metal bar lodged. Got trapped in the eye socket, wedged behind bone. He cursed, swore up a storm, then managed to kick the zombie loose and free his weapon, his heart hammering in his chest. He was more on edge than when they’d entered.
Babs was almost relieved to see him swear- to react and fuck up. It made him so much more human. Movie star good looks with a potty mouth. Just like Brian.
They kept moving. There was the creeping doubt for a moment (this bitch is going to leave me for dead, I just know it, I should never have come here, not with everything going on, should’ve just stayed camping with Arch forever—) but it subsided once he realised that Babs was still paced at the perfect distance from him, her wary gaze tracking his blind spot. Despite whatever happened in that room, looks like she still had his back out here, at least: neither of them wanted to be eaten by zombies.
Eventually, the military pair emerged blinking into the sunlight. Afternoon was on the way. The shufflers were more active at night. It was definitely time to go.
It was strange for a moment, and Cal found himself almost surprised to find that the outside world still existed. He unlocked the truck, tugged at the door, threw their single bag into the back, then climbed in; his movements had turned more hurried, now that they were outdoors and he could see freedom on the literal horizon.
A few shufflers were around them, but they were slow- hell, Babs would have had to actually stop and take a breath for them to catch up. But her calm and feeling that things were back to something like normal was gone the second her hand hit the door and she tried to pull it open- it hadn’t been unlocked, and her paranoia hit her full force.
She pulled at the door, and it didn’t budge. She tapped the window with an open palm and looked over her shoulder and that was when she saw it- female at one point, and running. She hit the door harder, and hit it so hard the window shook (the runner stumbled, but kept going) until she pulled her knife (the runner smelt like skunk and antiseptic) and was about ready to think that this man was going to leave her (she put a hand out, knowing it was about to collide) when she heard the door unlock.
She got in so fast she hit her knees on the door. She locked it, the runner hit glass. And that was when she twisted her body and punched Cal in the jaw in a gorgeous straight line- his right side forced to the left, punched so so hard her knuckles hit the window next to him. She pulled back, sat, and breathed hard as the runner kept pushing.
“Fucking drive.”
“Are you fucking—” he exploded, that whiplash anger of his suddenly stoked up to burning—but Davidson was also a practical man, so his boot hit the pedal and the truck instantly roared to attention, peeling out of the hospital driveway while the runner scrabbled at the fender, then fell back as they sped up and sped up. Babs’ heart rammed in her chest, and she bent over double with just enough forewarning to throw her own jacket onto the floor of the car and vomit into it instead of the bottom of his truck. Cal sent her a sidelong look.
His jaw was stiff and stinging. He’d bitten his tongue when she snapped his mouth shut, and for no reason other than he’d been too slow in opening the door. Cal could taste blood.
“This excursion was a real goddamn treat, Greenling,” he said, exasperated. Even so, it was a relief to feel the road rolling out beneath the wheels. He felt safe behind the wheel of his beloved truck. Even dented as it was, even dented as he was.
“We got what we needed, Sergeant. We’re alive. That’s a good day,” Babs said, looking at the bag of loot they’d scored. A very good day.