a kick in the teeth is good for some. Who: Captain Greenling & Sergeant Davidson Where: The mall, and what was once Sears & a Michael Kors What: A scavenging trip goes awry, and they end up shopping for some formal clothing for the ball. When: Way backdated to the day before the Full Frost Moon
It was awkward, but it was necessary. Babs had given Cal some time to cool off, avoided him on social media, and tried not to think about him as her knuckles healed from punching him in the jaw. She would defend that act, but she knew damn well that the fact that he’d even agreed to meet up with her to get the rest of the goods was a damn miracle. So when Cal rolled up in the agreed upon meeting spot, Babs clutched a paper bag to her chest carefully. Inside were three pancakes she’d managed to make with some vegan pancake mix and frozen berries. They weren’t great, but they were also weren’t terrible.
Okay, they were terrible. She’d tried, okay.
Cal’s truck got closer, and Babs stepped out to meet it. She reached for the door handle, and as she pulled it she heard the door lock automatically. Narrowing her eyes and gave the driver a good glare before trying again. And again, the door locked. The expression he gave her through the window was wide-mouthed fake surprise, a who? me? I have no idea what’s happening, his hands thrown up in mock despair.
When she finally opened the door she threw the bag of three pancakes into Cal’s lap with no answer, and buckled her seatbelt before crossing her arms and looked ahead on the road.
“Just go.”
“You slugged me in the jaw. I deserve some fun.” His free hand picked up the paper bag in curiosity. crinkling, peering into it before slipping the car into gear. Grease was starting to press through the paper, and—were those pancakes?
He realised, too late, that it was an olive branch. Maybe he shouldn’t have jokingly locked those doors after all.
But Cal was still incorrigible, so: “Does that make this a breakfast date?” he asked innocently. Babs’ jaw nearly dropped at that comment, her brows knitted. The pancakes were heavy. She knew they tasted only somewhat like food. She missed cooking, real cooking she didn’t do herself and Brian or someone else had done. Mostly Brian. He’d made one hell of a pot roast, just like the one his Mama had shown Babs; the one she’d never managed to do.
“It’s a gesture,” she said, almost steaming from the top of her head.
It was like goading a lion. He’d picked up on that much, at least, testing and jabbing with the chair to see how close he could get, how much he could get away with—it was Cal’s usual M.O. Still, there was an extra calculating edge whenever he looked at Babs now, taking note more attentively than he might’ve before, an unconscious little check to see if she was still stable. Wondering if he trusted her.
She looked a bit better than before. Cleaner, for one. (Where was the LBJ getting its water from? They’d shut down trades with Karen. Take note of that, too, Davidson.) She’d gotten some more clothes- reddish pants, a green-khaki jacket that looked like it could take a few gnaws. The same boots. She even looked as if she might have gained a little weight, though that could have also been the jacket’s padding.
Apologies were not her strong suit. She’d never said ‘sorry’ to Brian in their entire relationship, and she wasn’t about to learn for the guy who asked her if they were on a date. Instead she defaulted to saying how many more pill bottles she thought they had left, how much more time they needed.
And then she finally brought it up.
“You have any part with bringing those bikers in?”
His boot pressed a little harder against the gas pedal for a moment, and the ever-loyal SUV nosed forward a bit faster. Then he slowed. The question had come out of left field, after her shutdown of the subject via texts. Cal cleared his throat. “Nope. I was out of town, even, when it happened. Missed all the fun.”
He could’ve been joking again—it sure sounded like a joke—but his voice was oddly flat.
In another life, maybe Babs would have taken the time to learn how other people’s faces could be read. She had no clue in this life however, and so she dropped the topic instead of bringing up how she’d helped, how she’d been there and seen those people scared and worried for their lives and the lives of others. How smart that girl had been, how worried that man had been as she pulled out metal like a miner.
Instead she focused on the road, and how they seemed to be moving slower as they got further away from LBJ and any other spots she knew well. But for once her instincts weren’t to be worried about Cal hurting her. He’d had her back, and honestly she was pretty sure that if he’d been angry enough to hurt her, he would have done it the last time she sat in his car with vomit on the floor and his blood on her fist. Her knuckles were still a little bruised.
They passed a mall, a few department stores. Sears, JC Penny, a food court. It was empty, sad.
“Are we stopping?” Babs asked as the car got even slower. His forehead was furrowed into a frown. Cal might have dug deeper into that conversation as well (he could be like a dog worrying a bone sometimes), but his mechanic’s senses had been picking up on a distracting, discouraging noise from the engine. He knew this truck inside and out, and like an injured animal, it was complaining. He’d serviced it after crumpling the front in the collision with Los Nahuales, and after poking through its innards, he thought it was fine.
Evidently, that was a fucking mistake.
“The engine’s…” In another life, he could have easily popped out with his tools and gone to work—but they lived in Austin, 2018, and that meant zombies, and that meant no roadside repair. “Are you fucking kidding me,” Cal said, lashing out and thumping the steering wheel with the flat of one hand. Feeling futile, helpless. “From the looks of it, don’t think we can make the supply run today.”
As the SUV coasted to a stop, so did that little mechanical whine. (She couldn’t hear it, but it stood out to his ears like nails on chalkboard. A little stutter in the works, a tremble that shouldn’t be there.)
Silence. Babs hated silence, it allowed time to think. White noise was so much better.
Resigned, Cal ripped open the paper bag and took a closer look at one of the pancakes. “Berries? Shit, you went all-out.” He took a few bites of one, ready to dig in and eagerly inhale the food—then he choked slightly (it was dry and a little too crispy), and handed one of them to her to share.
Would he realize that she knew her own cooking was bad if she passed one up? Babs looked at the food and chewed the inside of her cheek, leaving her hand on her legs and not reaching for one. He shrugged, set it back into the bag.
“We can still get supplies- the mall, clothes. Maybe electronics if we want to go deeper,” she avoided the food, and instead tried to gauge how dangerous it would be to get between the car and mall. It was likely picked clean, but one man’s trash was another’s treasure.
“Yeah, I guess. And you bought yourself some time with the medicine we got out yesterday, anyway.” Unconsciously, his hand grazed his cheek, as if testing the sore skin. He still hadn’t quite forgiven Babs for it, but the fact that she was trying did count for something. “What do y’all need most, if we were to hit up the mall?”
Like a shopping trip. He bit back a sardonic chuckle. The overrun hospitals were a nightmare, but he fucking hated the mall, too—it was way too Dawn of the Dead.
Babs had never watched zombie movies before, and so the reference was lost on her. But the memories of being 17 and going to the mall with friends for sports clothes and maybe a dress were not lost on her. She snorted, and thought about the people back at LBJ. Olivia, Day. Day- the damn ball. She wasn’t about to say she needed a dress still.
“Shoes. Light, warm clothes. We could use some comfort toys for kids,” she admitted. And then she looked at Cal, raised a brow and with her most southern of drawls asked “and I expect you need tails for that damn victory party your court is holding.”
“What, you don’t think I already own a perfectly-tailored tuxedo and bowtie?” He didn’t. He really, really didn’t—Cal had been expecting to have to borrow a suit from a friend, but Isaac was too tall. Theo was the closest to his build (and didn’t he know it), but he’d be damned if that would be their first proper conversation after last weekend.
So. Shopping might not be such a bad idea.
He didn’t answer the question or address the ball yet, but finishing his overly-dry, disgusting-but-well-intentioned pancake, Cal set the paper bag on his dashboard and then cracked the door open, ready to slide out of the SUV. “Got your weapons? Ready to go?”
“Yup,” Greenling said, checking her knife, gun, and roll of trash bags one last time before they got out of the car. There was a bit of snap to the air, and Babs was just happy that when she got drunk with Day, she hadn’t gotten so drunk that she was hungover that day. But then again, now they had lots of water and she didn’t need to worry about being hungover like a sorority girl trying to make it class that morning.
The distance between the car and mall was eerily empty. No cars in the lot, save one all the way near a bank at the outer edge. She checked in the windows, but they had been shattered and whatever had been inside the car had been picked clean. She wondered if it had gas and could be hotwired.
The front doors of the mall were busted open, but Babs had expected that. A Starbucks to the left, a nail salon to the right. She thought about going in for various chemicals, but decided to skip. Instead, she headed towards the first toy store she saw, nodding her head towards the Build a Bear. She had no intention of building a bear, but the display bears were still there.
“Jesus. I remember these places being packed,” Babs said. The store looked nearly untouched.
“I wouldn’t know. Never really had any younger siblings or cousins.” He’d been the baby of the family, running rampant in Willa’s shadow. Babs said nothing, she only nodded.
He looked thoughtfully at the Build-a-Bear, and considered. It was hard to think of these places as actual pre-outbreak shops anymore, havens of capitalism and commercialism—when Cal looked at them, he saw only potential threats. Gaping dark empty hollows that could hold an entire horde of runners, if they were unlucky.
He kept his voice pitched low, even as they kept walking slowly, flashlights on. The skylights far above had gotten too grimy to let in much good light.
As always, he was struck by how changed polite conversation had become. You got any kids or siblings? was a minefield these days. So instead, he settled for: “Considering I’m looking for a penguin suit… you going to that ball too? You and that Ryan guy you were posting about, your… husband?”
Cal might have been trying to stay quiet, but at the mention of the Ryan guy being her husband, she laughed loudly and suddenly. Her hands stilled in their packing of a few teddies into garbage bags, and she actually doubled over a little. It was painfully funny, the idea of the man she’d met after killing her husband being her husband. She finally wiped her eyes.
“My husband-” she began, about to try and put words to it. But she stopped, so looked at Cal. “Gabriel isn’t my husband, or my boyfriend. He’s just a traveling companion,” she said. She put a Disney themed bear into her bag and stood up. “But yeah- I’m going to the party.” It seemed so alien to talk about going to a party, about actually trying to celebrate something… anything. “I assume you are with your… whoever.”
He’d located some Beanie babies and added them to his own bag, then a stuffed Olaf the Snowman. Frozen could still be hot shit with kids, right?
“My whoever?” Cal echoed, also amused. It was a good question. Who was his whoever? Did he even have one? He had an ex-girlfriend who summoned him for sex sometimes. A friend he’d crossed a line with. A lady in a tower who might not even be allowed to step foot in the Capitol again, as far as he knew. And a partner.
—actually, there it was. “I don’t really have one. I might force my department partner to go, though. Formal dances ain’t really her thing, but that’ll just make it more fun to see her lookin’ unimpressed. Same with you, I imagine.” Partner. The same one he’d mentioned in their very first meeting, but still hadn’t named.
Babs wanted to say he was wrong, that she loved formal events just to see him look sheepish. But he was right, she hated formal things.
“Only time I ever wore heels for a party was for my wedding and prom,” she said, waiting for him to be done. “Actually, I think I wore the same heels.” She’d worn heels one other time- to a bar with Brian, in Charleston, and she’d twisted her damn ankle. She was better in boots and flats, always had been. Mind you, Brian had been sweet about the ankle- he’d helped her ice it, and hadn’t allowed her to lift a finger until she was back on her feet. Happier memories- better than the ones in Pickens.
Unlike Cal, Bab’s romance life was dead. She hadn’t had sex in years at that point, and it wasn’t like anyone was knocking down her door to change that. And even if they were, she hadn’t felt really connected in too long. Only with the dog and Day, and that wasn’t the sort of connection she meant. She wanted someone to tell her she was still someone worth wanting, But asking for that seemed pathetic, sad, and lonely.
She looked up and down the mall’s halls and thought she saw a movement. She pulled back.
“Do you know this place’s status?” she asked. The man’s gaze followed hers, and he went still—a prey animal with its ears cocked, senses keened for the sounds of danger.
“Not cleared out,” he said softly, with a dry almost-laugh. “How could it be? It’s a big ole mall. Zombies love this shit. Lots of dark corners for them to doze in, or stand and meditate in, or do yoga in, or whatever else they do when there ain’t food around.” She snorted.
But then there was the slightest shifting in the darkness, and in the same instant, they both knew there was something there.
Now falling silent, Cal’s hand rose instead; with the sort of instinct that came to him after years of habit, he used a military gesture to signal that they move away, quietly, in the opposite direction. If it was a shuffler, they could probably just outpace it without drawing any extra attention.
They started moving.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a shuffler.
With what felt like an explosion of movement, a runner came tearing out of the hall towards them. Babs didn’t even think- she lugged the bag of toys in the runner’s path, hoping it would be dumb enough to run right into the slipper plastic and soft bears. The runner tripped a little, and Babs took out her knife, waiting for the damn thing to get a little closer before she swung around it, and stabbed it through the back of the spine, using it as leverage to swing the thing around to face the other living being. Cal’s tire-iron swung, and she let Cal deal with the front before dislodging her knife. The thing fell down, dead.
“Well that’s that,” she began, about to put her knife away when she heard more steps- more running footfalls. “Crap.” She didn’t give it much thought- she didn’t have to wonder what those sounds belonged to. Runners turned the corner, a pack.
Babs began to sprint, and it took her a few moments to realize that she’d grabbed a hold of the corner of Cal’s sweater as she was running- as if she was half concerned he might stay behind. She let go of it, and turned her head slightly to look at the runners- which was a huge mistake, because they’d just run into one of the larger department stores, and Babs ran right through what had once been a large display of perfumes, but now was a stinking mess of liquid and glass after being previously knocked over. She slid, slipped, and fell right to the ground with a heavy sound. Glass bit into her skin, the sting of perfume followed- but it wasn’t nearly as worrisome as the pack getting not only closer- but on her. The floating, dipping feeling of falling had made her lose her breath, and it took Babs a split second longer to get her grip on defending herself- three of them hit her at once, grabbing and trying to gnaw at her. She ran- her jacket pulled off by one, her knife dropped, she couldn’t reach back for it, she knew that.
Where was Cal? She’d lost sight of him. Had he run somewhere else? Was she just too panicked to notice him?
She ran until she hit a dead end in the jewelry section. She jumped a counter, standing behind it and taking her gun out, holding it out and cocking it.
Her heart rammed in her throat as she watched them get closer, as she realized that a gunshot could give her location away so easily. Were more coming? Finally, against all her stubborn need to take care of herself, she shouted out in a voice that was only a little better than a shot.
“Cal!”
The name summoned the man like a shot. He turned the corner running towards the sound of Babs’ voice, emerging from a forest of abandoned clothing racks with his face set into grim lines. He assessed the situation in a few glances: her jacket was off, her bare arms exposed, and the runners were on the verge of scrambling over the counter towards her.
Cal collided with the pack, and started swinging.
Once again, he’d placed himself squarely in harm’s way. He’s an idiot, Babs realized. But he was a brave idiot, and she had a soft spot for those.
But there was something so painfully, liberatingly cathartic about fighting these monsters: he swung and swung and swung, and each dull impact of metal against rotting flesh was another piece of freedom. Was another problem he didn’t have to think about, or bellyache over, or consider and weigh the moralities of the situation. There was just blind hunger and blind anger, and his temper vibrating through his clenched fists and impacting a shoulder there, splintering a jaw, unhinging it so they couldn’t bite as easily.
The glass of the display case shattered as the man and one of the zombies went crashing into it. He felt the sharp jabs of pain from the glass. Wondered, with a vague and distant disconnect, if there were teeth involved. Hopefully not. With their location definitely given away with the noise she and Cal had created, Babs aimed and fired- she got the last standing zombie with a professional shot, and then put the safety back into place on Brian’s gun.
Dazed, it took him a while to realise that nothing was moving anymore, and that Babs stood over them.
Cal had come in like a freaking wrecking ball. She had stood her ground, sure, but Cal had freaking swept it. More broken glass, more blood, more noise - but when it was done, it was done. Her legs still shook a little bit when she crouched down, and checked the status of the zombie and then of Cal. She couldn’t tell what was his blood or old blood from the monsters yet. All she knew was that it could not possibly be safe to stay where they were.
“We gotta move,” Babs said, and she was almost kind in that moment. She helped Cal stand up, she even put one of his arms over her own shoulders to help him gain support. He had half a foot on her, but it didn’t matter as they began out of the large department store aisles. The man staggered for a moment, before regaining his balance and stumbling along beside her. She tried to think of a good plan; they couldn’t stay here, they couldn’t go outside. They’d need a smaller store, something they could slip into and lock up easily.
Each step was hard, and she felt naked with her body so exposed. She hated knowing that every sound she heard was no longer imagined: a swarm could very easily be coming their way. She might have gotten them killed for teddybears.
As they walked out of the department store, Babs still letting them share each other’s support, she finally looked up at his face again. She even made eye contact.
“Thank you, Cal.” She didn’t look away. He met her eye, managed something approximating a smile.
“Hey, I ought to be thanking you,” he said. “Sometimes you just want to let loose on some fucking zombies.” Days like this, excursions like this, it kept his mind off everything else.
Leaving the too-big and too-open department store, the first thing they saw was a smaller boutique, a Michael Kors. Its tactical advantages were obvious: the entire shop would be visible in a single glance from inside, and the door could be closed behind them.
Unfortunately, there was no second exit, either.
Letting go of Babs’ shoulder (a little reluctantly) as they entered, Cal checked the corners and aisles between ludicrously expensive clothes while she slammed the rolling door shut behind them. With that claustrophobic sound, he remembered the ambulance. She couldn’t disagree with him. She locked the doors into place and began to move tables up against the windows, half tempted to see if there was a way to crawl through air vents. But that was a little too ‘tv special’ for her liking.
“We have a tendency to end up in tight spots like this,” Cal remarked, wryly.
Babs turned to talk to him, and that was when she noticed the mirrors. They reflected the two of them, and she went silent. Lips drawn thin again.
He’d withdrawn a floodlight from his backpack, set it on a counter, and flipped it on to illuminate the store. Taking refuge and waiting for the horde to pass also meant leaving the dim skylights of the mall behind.
“You need a new jacket,” he said. His shirt was torn too, raked and gouged from the glass. He winced a little, touching one of the scratches.
“Cal, we need to do a bite check,” she said, her voice almost soft. “We need to make sure we didn’t get bitten.” She crossed her arms, she felt confident that she hadn’t, but… well. She’d gotten so scratched up by glass, who knew? The man went a little still, as if she’d reminded him of something that he hadn’t actually considered.
After two years, it was so easy to get lost in it and convinced of one’s own invulnerability. It had been this long, and he’d made it this far—
But as soon as the idea was planted, Cal didn’t waste any time. “Yeah,” he said, and without looking at the woman, he shrugged out of his jacket and started peeling off his shirt, teeth gritting when the blood made the fabric stick to his chest a little and had to be tugged free.
“Woah- wait a second. This is what changing rooms were invented for,” Babs said, not actually looking up at the man. For a split second, her accent as as thick as the day she’d left Charleston for the first time. As professional as Babs was, it was one thing to ask a patient to strip down in a spot like the hospital or even her clinic at LBJ. And she was so rarely the one that had to undress. Meanwhile his actions were quick and pragmatic; he’d turned un-self-conscious after so much time living and breathing with other agents in too-cramped quarters. Fixed on his task, Cal didn’t take much notice of her as she turned aside and stalked off to find some privacy.
Babs found the three stalls easily. They were in the middle of the shop, and awfully exposed- they went all the way to the floor, sure, but she knew that from the clavicles up, Cal would be able to see her, and… well. He had several inches on her. She stepped into a booth and took off her shirt, boots, and pants with her back to Cal. She felt so exposed.
It wasn’t that Babs was a prude. It was that she was uncomfortable with her own body; that hadn’t always been the case, but she felt as if her body was an old friend that she hadn’t written to in too long. She looked into the mirror and saw that her skin was a bruised, unbitten peach. She checked every inch.
And then she looked at her clothes: the boots were pretty much all that were left.
“I do need a jacket. And a shirt… and jeans.”
From the other side of the partition came a relieved laugh as the soldier finished combing himself over in one of the store mirrors, picking through shallow scratches (they weren’t that bad, thankfully) to look for teeth. Nothing. The Capitol medical checks would verify it later, he was sure of it.
“I can grab you something. And all clear over here, by the way,” he said, crumpling the torn fabric in one hand. Cal accidentally looked over, giving a quick fleeting glance as he asked: “How about you? Bites?”
It was instinctive to look at someone you were talking to. He hadn’t really meant to, but in that look he caught a glimpse of pale bare skin, scars, the straight lines of her thighs, the swell of her side in a faded bra. He then studiously turned his head aside again.
There had been nothing intimate about the way he’d stripped down, just giving way to the cold, impersonal nudity of servicepeople, their bodies their weapons. But now, for just a moment, another thought had kicked in the back of his head and Cal pressed it back down.
The times Babs had been naked with others around her included her birth and infancy, before and after sports with team mates, and during intimate situations with men. Her first boyfriend, Brian. She could count on one hand the number of people who had touched her while she was naked through all the years of her life. She folded her arms, covering her bra and feeling relief at how cool the floor was against her hot feet. With him walking away, she turned around and looked at the shop. The clothes were shiny and expensive, and she vaguely remembered seeing the logo on a wallet that Brian had gotten her for a birthday. She’d been confused because ‘MK’ were not her initials.
“I wasn’t bitten. Besides, I’m immune,” she said. She didn’t tell that fact to most people, but most people weren’t someone who had just Hulk-smashed the shit out of some zombies while she stood there like a freaking girlfriend prop. She looked down at her thigh, and saw the ugly scars that would never go away, the half moon shape betraying anything but serenity or nightfall relaxation.
As Cal looked at clothes, Babs looked at Cal. Yes, the initial strip had been for very clinical reasons. But she could still watch. It had been two years for her, probably a little more. Her last partner had been Brian, when they’d been frustrated in their tent and needy enough for touch to pretend that they didn’t fight every second of every day. She glanced down for a moment, the silver chain around her neck still there- Brian’s wedding ring, her own small enough to slide into it. She’d left his dog tags on his corpse.
“Immune?” his voice filtered back through the store.
“Yeah,” Babs said it softly, the memory of the ambulance and waiting to die a distant, horrible flash she wanted to keep locked up tight for the time being.
Cal paused in the middle of rummaging through the untouched clothing racks (gold-sequined rompers weren’t exactly popular these days). His hand went still on one of the hangers, remembering kissing the edge of Sammy’s bite scar, tracing the outlines of Theo’s. Catching a glimpse of Karen’s, coming back from a mission and shucking off their ruined uniforms. Seeing the ugly puckered ridges at Bunny’s collar, Nate’s, the nasty chunk missing from Clover’s arm.
Then he forced himself to start moving through the racks again. “Shit, somedays it feels like almost everyone I care about is immune. That’s great news. I don’t have any idea about mine.” There was a rueful edge to his voice. “How long ago did you find out?”
That was a sanitised way of putting it. ‘Find out’. Like getting a piece of paper in the mail; not like agonising pain and fever and chills and the fear of impending death, or worse than death. Babs’s heart beat in her throat. She could hear every sound her body was making, and for a moment it consumed her; she could have fallen asleep to the woosh of her own blood. Her eyes closed for a moment. Then she breathed in and out.
“I was on a run. I fell behind, I got bitten. The other guy ran ahead. So I locked myself into my ambulance and waited to see if I’d die or survive. I survived, I went back to the camp I was in. Things went to shit- that’s another story.”
It didn’t make sense to go on, to tell Cal about how the bite hadn’t hurt nearly as much as hearing Brian apologize had. Her terse, clipped words told Cal everything he needed to know about this particular wound: to not touch it. Steer clear.
So he did. Instead, he tossed a bundle of fabric over the edge of the partition. She caught it, and stared at it and then him in confusion.
“There. Got something for you, for the formal.” There was something familiar in his voice: a suppressed laugh.
Babs held the dress by the shoulders, looking at it unfurl before her and feeling her nose wrinkle. She knew it was hideous, she knew that Cal was trying to goad her, but maybe she felt a little guilty for just how action hero he’d had to get. So she pulled it up and over her head, walked out and did a twirl for him.
“I think this frock cost more than my wedding dress did,” Babs announced trying hard not be… well. Hard. To soften up her smile, to move her head just so, to look like she wasn’t slowly crumbling apart on the inside because the tacky glue she’d used to mend herself after leaving Brian wasn’t doing it anymore. “I look like the mom from Psycho.”
“That’s over two thousand dollars for the pleasure of looking like Mrs. Bates,” he confirmed, having glanced at the price slip before throwing it to her. She pulled a face- it was somewhere between Scarlett’s signature brow-lift and a ten year old’s ‘ew’ face.
Hearing Babs crack a joke was surprising as always. Like watching ice start to thaw slightly, careful and chipped in morning sun. The setting was incongruous, not exactly conducive to laughter or relaxing—he still felt like a violin strung taut, his injuries scraping against each other—but Cal could never resist. Even in the most dire situations, even covered in blood, he’d try to make a compatriot laugh.
Even holding his insides in, he’d probably still try to laugh.
“Here. Something better. Still fucking expensive, but better.” Grabbing items off the long-dusty racks, Cal passed over jeans, a new shirt, a leather jacket. And some nicer formalwear, far less hideous than the paisley monstrosity (and plain white like a wedding dress—).
She took the clothes, half thinking the white dress was some sort of tunic. Changing out of the frock, she was happy the door didn’t cover her up fully now. She could watch Cal, read his movements. The white dress went up and over her head, and came down. Red smeared one of the pleats, but she didn’t really notice it. What she noticed was the white, the cut, the cool feel of the fabric on her skin. It was impossible not to think about her wedding dress- she’d brought it up only a moment before.
When she’d been engaged to Brian, she’d dreaded picking out a dress. So he’d picked it out for her. She had almost cried when she’d gotten home from the hospital and it had just hung in the bathroom, ready for her to take it to a seamstress for a fitting.
A million years ago. When Brian had still been able to read her.
She took the dress off, hung it, and put on the plain clothes. When she got out she pulled the boots on, found a bag, and put the dress in. Tied the top. Tied up her throat and feelings. In the meantime, he’d found his own replacements for his ripped and torn outfit, and carefully tucked away a new suit into his bag.
“We can’t stay here forever,” she said, a hardness back in the clench of her jaw. “It’s a nice dress.”
“It’ll look nice on you for this bullshit ball,” Cal said, still light where she was hard. But then, back to business: “D’you think the runners have moved on by now? I don’t want to stay in here overnight, charming as the company is—there’s no plumbing, for one—but I don’t want to open the front door and find ourselves neck-deep in a horde either.”
Babs didn’t want to peek out the window just to find out a horde was right there. She knew damn well that to a zombie, she looked like a damn good appetizer. A bite might not turn her, but it could still kill her if she got infected with something else. An open wound was an open wound.
“We could always try a distraction,” Babs said, looking around. She spotted the manikins and smiled a little. “You still got your bloody clothes?”
Cal’s gaze followed hers, the mental wheels turning—and his grin grew.