1/2
Archer got his facial expression completely under lock-down. Anything less was unacceptable.
There was no way on earth, or what the fuck was left of it, that Thomas Lansing or Reeves Olinger were allowed to see his surprise or his distaste and they sure as fuck weren't allowed to see his regret or his uncertainty.
Deep down he'd known that Roccolini couldn't be saved; she couldn't just be injured. If she was infected, she'd be in quarantine and he'd know about it. Therefore she had to be dead. He'd just needed to hear it said. She was dead and Grady was dead and sentimentality had no place in his office. Not here and not now. Later, maybe, Archer would find a way to honor the fallen. Likely as not, though, there wouldn't be time.
Granted, it wasn't like before: the bloodbath of the first days, the infected shambling forth to get a foothold, blister gas streaking the sky, he and Brannon back to back and picking off the ones headed for the Capitol, not sure if they'd see sundown. But just because they now lived in as safe a shelter as you could get and with good food didn't mean Archer was fucking comfortable. The loss of their Chief and Deputy Chief was a hard one to take but there'd be other losses and these were just two more burdens Archer would have to shoulder.
So he listened with an impassive face as Thomas talked about how some fucker on the wash killed their zombie CoP after seeing him shuffle on past their dead DCoP. And how the Washer was given a dozen cans of baked beans for the exhalted task of ending the mindless hunk that once was Grady.
The baked beans were gonna bother him. Bad enough that a decorated officer had to go and get his ass infected -- and fuck you so very fucking much for that, Grady; what were you doing that a zombie got to you? -- but that the price for his euthanasia was a dozen cans of beans. Archer would've preferred the task of killing him fell to another cop, even himself, but he'd also prefer they weren't in the middle of a damn apocalypse, so he rarely bothered whining much about the shit he would've preferred happened.
Still. He was gonna remember about the beans. And he was gonna do his utmost to remember that Thomas was doing his job when he told them. Given the kindness in the mayor's smile -- no guile there, honestly oblivious -- Archer could deduce that Thomas was responsible for the Bad News portion of this fucked up little meeting. He appreciated the lack of sugar coating or beating around the bush. Succinct facts were usually best with Archer. At the same time, this could have been handled better and Archer couldn't be the only one in the room that knew that. He and O'Brien were cops. They came to Austin as detectives and, ranks aside, still operated very much like detectives when they weren't busy doing the thousand other things required of them to keep Austin as safe as humanly possible. Information, and loads of it, would have been the way to tell them. Olinger might not have had a clue that that would've been helpful -- what had he and Grady discussed in their last meeting? was he out and about on a mission or assessing security? -- but Thomas Lansing was a smart man. A smart man with a wife and a son that Archer was friends with, so after looking at Thomas for a few seconds after he'd finished speaking, he gave the slightest of nods and focused on the mayor. Trying to remember what Thomas was like the day Charlie was born. Trying to remember that people like Charlie were exactly why Archer kept scraping away at this job. Charlie and Adelaide and Graham and Brannon and the whole lot of them.
That they were the very reason he was going to reach out and take that gory badge.