Who: Dave Cutler and Nadia Costa Where: The Roof of LBJ When: Day 2 of the siege, around sunset of January 9th What: Shooting Zombies, Missing Home
Watching a man killing the undead wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it was better than wasting away downstairs.
Nadia stood leaning against the edge of the rooftop; she flinched every time Dave pulled the trigger and the deep booming shot rang out and another mindless figure dropped like a stone, but she was inuring herself to the sight and sound. The fresh air did her good, and she felt less like she was suffocating up here, weighed down by a shelter under siege for a horde that was ostensibly her fault. Watching Dave set his face against his sights, she toyed with the edge of her own rifle, considering.
It was one way to do target practice, at least.
“Did you do this a lot back at Luckenbach?” she asked, after the previous shot died out. The woman was restless, jittery, but Dave was like a cat on the hunt, smooth and steady and still.
"Yep," he answered. "Everyone who ain't a little kid or visually impaired takes a turn on sentry at least once every coupl'a months, and when you're in construction you're building expansion walls and guard posts, so we all have -- had holsters in our toolbelts." Nadia was one of the only people he knew now who could understand what had been lost when the compound fell. It was comforting and painful, being around her and remembering that night, remembering that his home was something that belonged in the past tense.
Dave focused on the present for long enough to breathe and squeeze his trigger again -- the back of his target's head splattered out onto the zombie's compatriots, and he collapsed onto the quad in front of the library building. They were going to have to burn or haul a shitton of bodies, when this was all finished. He pulled the manual bolt-action to clear the casing and loaded another as he continued. "Not to be a dick, but you don't seem like you shoot much?"
“You would be right.” Nadia looked comfortable holding her weapon, her hands resting at all the right places, but reluctant to pull the trigger herself. “I learned from necessity—two years on the road, my traveling companion and I had to shoot a lot—but I do not like doing it. I run more.” Her smile was a small and rueful thing, a nod towards her status as a scavenger and supply scout.
“You could be a security guard here,” she pointed out after a pause. “When you’re not building.”
"Naaaaah," Dave drawled, returning her little smile before his head dipped back to the gun sight. "M'not much for authority figures," he admitted. "Don't think I could stand to be one myself." After another moment he took the shot, his calm more fitting to a quiet night on the rooftop looking up at the stars, rather than the groaning murmur of decaying bodies, pressing against the barricades below as the sun crept closer and closer to the horizon. In the years since the virus had begun, there was really only one shot that had given him any pause, any sort of regret, even though it had been the most essential of them all. "You never said where you started out from, originally," he inquired as he reloaded, avoiding his own memories in favor of hearing about hers.
This time she didn’t flinch, growing almost used to that whipcrack from the man’s weapon. “Brazil. Rio de Janeiro.” Nadia raised her rifle to her eyes, and this time she lined up a shot, took a long low exhale, and pulled her own trigger just as Dave looked up in surprise.
" 'the fuck?" he interjected, looking at her, rather than after her target. "Are you serious?"
The runner didn’t go down completely—it wasn’t a headshot, her target had moved too quickly—but it stumbled and was reduced to a crawl. (Antón’s lessons still held.)
“It was a long walk,” Nadia said, an understatement if ever there was one. “If there is one thing I have learned during the last few years, it is that we become things we never expected: you could be an authority figure.” There was a mischievous edge to her suggestion, though, an acknowledgment that she was kidding.
He pointed to his chest, eyebrows raised in matching banter. "Moi? You know what I did for a living, before this all started?" They had MMA in Rio, he had been promised a UFC fight there someday, but it didn't guarantee she would know what it was. "I was a fighter. UFC, that's where all of this comes from," Dave's gesture expanded to include all of him. "You wouldn't like me if I was trying to be somebody who wears a necktie."
“Oh!” Her rifle lowering, Nadia cast another curious look over the man beside her, some pieces now falling into place. All those tattoos that she saw encircling his forearms and curling at the neck of his shirts. “UFC. That is the American organisation, yes? I dated a guy briefly, he was into a Brazilian fighting sport called Vale Tudo. It is not the same thing,” in fact, if Eduardo’s bragging was to be believed, it was a bloodier ancestor of MMA, “but I was always curious about it.”
"There's a lot of fighters not from America, but yeah." There were a lot of fighters from Brazil, from other parts of South and Central America, guys who had been using the organization as their ticket into the country. He couldn't blame them, and the expansion of the sport to a global market meant that the pool of fighters would expand too. Dave couldn't quite bring himself to mention that he'd flamed out well before the outbreak had hit, not with the way her eyes had lit up in recognition, with the mention that she'd dated someone else who'd been a fighter already. "I'll train you to fight, we'll go find out whatever happened to Ronda Rousey, see if she made it through or if it turns out that putting zombies in arm bars is a fuckin' lousy idea," he teased instead.
She laughed then, her gloomy mood lifting slightly. It was the first time she’d done so since she, Nick, and Jeremy had come stumbling breathless through the front entrance. “Frankly, I would not mind the fighting lessons in general. These days, hand-to-hand is more useful than ever back in my old life, I think.”
The sun was close to setting, and there wouldn't be more than an hour of light left, so as much as he wanted to give up his task in favor of paying all his attention to her, Dave squinted, aiming the sniper rifle into the crowd yet again. Nadia waited patiently until he’d dropped another few zombies. There was something oddly cathartic about this: the neat rhythm of his movements, the sensation of a job well-done, chipping away and whittling down the threat, even if they weren’t clearing out the entire horde. The bullets were pebbles thrown at a window, drops taken from the ocean.
Once Dave finally set his rifle down again, Nadia spoke up. She was always careful to not distract their guards and shooters when they were at work; there were more important things going on than assuaging her restlessness, after all. “Do you think being a fighter has helped you today? I mean. If you really were to give lessons.”
"No." The initial response was quick, but Dave didn't leave it at that, when he knew what she meant. "Shooting isn't the same thing. We're up here, they're down there, there's a distance to this. Rifles can keep you removed enough that it's like playing a video game, aim and shoot and reload, repeat. If we were down there, at the doors with chainsaws, then it would give me an advantage over another guy, maybe. I can sense a hit coming more often, how to evade, how to counterstrike. But with a horde like this, nah." Dave fished the last box of ammunition he'd been given out of the pocket of his cargo pants. "I'd take out at least a few dozen of them with me, maybe more than fifty, but they'd kill me before I got through them all. Hence -" he rattled the box.
He watched her pull the trigger again. "You don't want to be a fighter," Dave decided. "I'll teach you things if you want that advantage, if you're out on a scout and get in a jam. But if you wanted to fight people, you'd know it already." His palm patted the muscle and bone that sheltered his heart. "Probably a good thing. I don't want to be worried you're gonna put me in a chokehold if I say all the walking gave you a really nice ass."
“It’s not always…” She struggled to find the words—even after so much daily practice, her English still faltered sometimes, and especially ran into a block when trying to describe her experiences last fall. She thought of Olivia’s ruined ankle, her best friend still benched from what she loved most in this world.
“It’s not always zombies,” Nadia finally added. “Unfortunately, there are very many raiders in Austin. More now, after that explosion a couple days ago. Piece of fucking shit Nahuales jaguars, they’re not biters but they are still a problem.”
The vehemence with which she cursed was unusual, a heat that burned more from anger than Nadia’s usual good humour. His compliment had slid on by and Nadia almost didn’t catch it, but then her smile retroactively broadened. She chose not to recognise it, however; it was easier.
Dave listened, and then fired another shot. "So that's why you came out looking." He ratcheted the handle to clear the barrel again, chancing a look up in her direction. "Maybe there was somewhere better, somewhere outside the city, without raiders making you wish you knew how to break some noses." There had been. The few times raiders had come to Luckenbach they'd found themselves facing two choices -- stay where they were, live and work alongside the rest of the town, eventually become a part of them, or move along to another target, which was most often the route taken. Inside the gates were more than a thousand souls, each of them hell bent on preserving their way of life; a raiding party - even a large raiding party - didn't stand a chance against Luckenbach.
And now he was possibly one of the only ones left. Every day he thought about it, ate lukewarm Chef Boyardee and wondered if any of the people he lived with now knew what had really been lost.
She seemed to catch onto that thread of Dave’s melancholy—possibly because it strummed in her too, this deep awareness of what they’d accidentally broken. It was hard for strangers to mesh with one another, especially as groups; a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
“Somewhere better,” Nadia repeated ruefully, as the sun slowly crept to the horizon above them. “Although there was. And I am sorry it’s gone.”
Another shot rang out, another zombie dropped, and Dave nodded. "Me too," he agreed. "I'm glad that you got to see what we built, though. That you got to eat ice cream with my son and know it was real, that better place." He didn't empty the barrel straight away, watching her instead. Nadia was absurdly beautiful in the warm rosy light, a breeze that carried with it the faint stench from below ruffling through the waves of her dark hair. It was a non sequitur, a moment that Dave couldn't quite reconcile. When she looked back at him, he struggled for what else he could say. "Thanks. For not leaving us there to die."
Those words hit her squarely in the chest, almost like a blow, her heart aching. Her hands curled around the muzzle of her rifle, more reassuring than any comfort blanket. “No, don’t you dare thank me, Dave,” she said, voice slightly strained. “It was probably our fault that it happened. That your security was so distracted keeping an eye on us that the runners slipped through. We brought them on you, and I truly cannot say how sorry I am about it.”
Just like yesterday, too. Warm bodies in the wilderness, trying to make their way through undead-owned streets—they were like hot bait for the zombies, juicy steaks on two legs leading them right on home.
She likely wasn't wrong, but he didn't want to say it. Whatever had happened to let the gnashers inside the town, it seemed almost impossible that they hadn't been attempting to follow the caravan once they managed to get away from Johnson City.
Dave's rifle rested on telescoping legs, keeping it balanced and supported enough that he could leave it be, and chance moving another step closer to where Nadia stood. "Here," he offered instead of dwelling in their shared memories, holding out his hand. "I'll do that stupid movie cliche thing, stand behind you and teach you how to shoot. And then someday, I'll pretend I know how to golf, or whatever else gets taught like this."
Her expression caught for a moment, then brightened with amusement, breaking through that little shudder in the conversation between them. “We could play from the roof too,” Nadia pointed out wryly. “Hit them in the head with golf balls.”
She’d grown used to Dave’s constant tongue-in-cheek flirtation over the last two months or so—but it was welcome, an aimless distraction to make her laugh. So she obligingly set her own rifle aside and took up position in front of his.
And when the man stood behind her, his hands steadying her elbows and wrists, Nadia took a deep breath and tried not to remember someone else teaching her to shoot, almost a year and a lifetime away.