karen sharpe (boltcutter) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-09-11 02:14:00 |
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There was nothing quite like a close call to make one think of others’ failed close calls, an awareness of one’s mortality come crashing back into focus. Cal had cleaned out his injuries and slapped on a bandage, but it was a slapdash job, having expected to stop by the hospital for Lita’s professional attention. Without that, he knew who he should turn to in the interim: Karen, his tether, the person who should have been with him in the first place. He waited in their usual spot: the elevated curved balcony above the open-air rotunda in the Capitol annex. A few lights lit the surrounding area, which was far better than most of Austin got. Patting through his small bag, Cal eventually found a battered pack of somewhat stale and dry cigarettes. He rarely smoked—had officially quit after the outbreak, hands shaking through the nausea and headaches until he finally kicked the habit, shedding it like an unwanted skin in a world that didn’t have room for such dependencies anymore—but it crept back sometimes. On the shitty nights, when he could feel the stress winding him tighter and tighter. Tonight he chased the last of the adrenaline out of his system by inhaling the nicotine instead, drawing on the too-hard filter and leaning against the closed door of the building. It was a good location, which was how the two sergeants kept gravitating here: an underground extension to the Capitol building, carved out of solid rock but connected by tunnels. The rotunda gave them a balcony with fresh air and a clear sky, yet was technically enclosed (and thus secure). And even the shufflers had learned to not come too close to these buildings; between the patrolmen and APD and Department of Resources, the Capitol complex was about as safe as one could make it. Besides, Cal had a strangling need for fresh air and a smoke while he waited. Dried blood was matting his bandages; Cal’s partner was in seemingly no hurry to run to his rescue. Panic was unnecessary and fear a hindrance of course, and Karen had not a good use for either. Calm and practical then did she wander those bare, shadowy tunnels (the veins of a ruined city carved under the scorched flesh of the earth above), the echo of her solitary gait stretching lonely down those familiar, empty halls. She didn’t like the quiet, didn’t like what it did to the mind. The lights down the tunnel stretched out and guided her vision to the rotunda ahead, a golden pool of light marking her destination. They buzzed in her ears as she passed, a nagging chorus of doubt. Kay kept her grip on her gear bag tight and thought of the texts from earlier. A sputtered out apology begging too many questions. Through the tunnel and beyond the hall that snaked around the top of the rotunda and its sentinel row of stone columns, Karen nudged the door open with her palm and ventured out. She stood still for a moment and allowed her eyes to adjust, peering around in her dark, familiar clothing like a ruffled raven who had discovered its nest disturbed. “Well now,” she drawled, spotting Cal leaning against another door and looking bleak. “Don’t you look a right mess.” Kay walked up close to get a better look at his wounds, her sharp expression never cutting as deep as she might’ve liked; she pursed her lips and gave a shrug after a moment, her bag falling down into her hands. He watched her reaction warily with something of the air of an abashed schoolboy, waiting for the verdict, the gavel to fall. “Go ahead and sit down or something,” she said in a casual way (her shoulders tensed), “I ain’t about to deck the Christmas tree here, fixin’ you up.” He laughed then, a gravelly puncturing of their careful, weary tension. “Not that tall,” Cal pointed out, glancing down at his partner with his five inches of height to spare, but he sat down obediently nonetheless. The man slid down the balcony railing until his ass hit the ground, along with a slow exhale of breath. He was careful with his right forearm, she noticed, holding it clear and avoiding letting it get jostled. Then Cal launched into the rundown, as curt and professional as if they were in the field (and weren’t they always, these days, even when they were at home?). “Bite mark—ghoul, not walker—on my wrist. Knife laceration to the forearm. Some nail gouges.” He tilted his head in the dim light then, showing where red lines tracked down the skin of his neck and collarbone. “Gonna need a cleaning and re-bandaging, ‘specially for the arm, and Singh will take a better look at it whenever she can get over here. I won’t be allowed over at the medical center until I’m in the clear.” No explanation yet of how he’d ended up on the wrong side of a ghoul. And not directly addressing the new elephant in the room, the strangling terror that had lodged deep in his spine after Lita mentioned quarantine—what if the ghoul, Emilie, had been in the incubation phase? What if she was contagious, though the symptoms weren’t showing yet? What if he’d just fucking sealed his own death sentence because he hadn’t put a bullet in the girl’s head the first moment he saw her next to his SUV? Cal’s fingers were drumming against his knees, a nervous tic he’d never quite been able to shake. It was fine, he told himself. Probably fine. His luck wasn’t that bad. Not yet. Probably. Karen sat down and anchored herself beside him, legs crossed, as he rattled off his list of injuries. Always it was with Cal, she had long learned, as if she were a determined prospector of old and he the wild river. Keep sifting through and eventually she’d find what she needed. Meanwhile, his anxious chatter helped her focus on what had to be done. A list pegged itself to the forefront of her thoughts, wounds that needed patching. “I know the procedure well enough,” she said reassuringly, reaching into her bag now. Practiced, orderly, solid; raised up to be as such in hard times, and so she was. “Ain’t no nevermind about all that just yet, we’ll get to it when the time comes.” (We, never put into question.) “But you go on now, tell me about this handsy date of yours,” she continued, “I don’t mind hearing all the details.” Karen took out a sturdy-looking first aid kit (a name once affixed to the top now blacked out with ink) and gave Cal a pointed look. Now that more could be seen in her bag, it was obvious in the light above them that she had packed up well for the occasion; a familiar enough bottle of booze poked up from the open cover, inviting. His eyes drifted down to where the glass gleamed, and gave an almost imperceptible nod of assent. He sighed, and unlike the beleaguered grumbles over their usual strain, there was the sound of self-effacement in it now. This was Calvin outright kicking himself. “I went for a night drive,” he said. He’d always liked long, lonely drives, with the road unfurling beneath his wheels and nothing but him and that dizzying sky and the empty horizon ahead of him. “I left the truck—shufflers don’t give a shit about vehicles that don’t have meat in ‘em, and I was far from Hound territory and driving my personal vehicle anyway—but came back from a piss to to find her trying to break into it.” Cal was staring off into the middle distance while Karen fussed with the box, his own mind’s eye revisiting the scene (the altercation, as his superiors might have phrased it) with dull-eyed thoughtfulness, wondering if he could have done it better. If there was another way he should have handled himself. “Tried to throw her off without using my firearm, but the bitch had a knife. And teeth.” After so much time with Clover and Torrie, his impression of the ghouls had slid, and he’d started to forget the true depths some of them possessed, the violent manias that could drive them. Not a mistake the man would repeat anytime soon. Won’t happen again, he’d written, and the phrase stuck itself with some measure of painfulness in the back of Karen’s thoughts. “And here you are, all chewed up like a blond Wrigley’s.” She made a low sound in her throat that wasn’t much a laugh, and went carefully about undoing Cal’s mess of bloodied bandages. Gloved hands (well, she had picked habits up from somewhere, sometime ago) went prodding at the fresh wounds, dabbing with antiseptic and making a more careful effort at cleaning things up. Not a real and proper doctor, but she knew a thing or two—and this scene wasn’t unfamiliar. Packed like a pair of sardines in a government truck for so long, she had some experience with pulling a reckless partner out of a scrap. Cal twitched slightly when the antiseptic burned into the knife wound, but didn’t make a sound, and then went still. Too gentle, she nearly said after he had quieted, but she stubbornly held it back. Karen had listened and understood more now; realized with some strange twist of guilt that, perhaps if she had been present, this whole mess before her might not have happened. (Would her brother have disagreed, she wondered? No chance in changing what God would will?) The evening wind, howling down into the rotunda and echoing along the stone walls and across the lower level columns, whistled out her unspoken concern. Underneath the cool neon lights they sat beneath, the starry glow of evening sky above was dulled and dimmed to an uncertain pool of black. “Not the grand memorial you were fixing on tonight, I’ll bet,” she said thoughtfully, “but I figure we can still make do. Unless you got a bugle around here somewhere I ain’t seen yet, of course.” “You mean you don’t carry around a portable bugle at all times in that pack of yours?” he said dryly, watching Kay work with a surprisingly dispassionate eye. (Meanwhile, discomfort and worry twisted and seethed in his gut.) “Besides, I didn’t plan for anything big and grand anyway, just something that was Department-only rather than the suits writing eulogies. All I need is you and some booze, maybe a fire, and that’s about it.” He’d never quite seen the point of the three-volley salute, and even less so nowadays—they needed to conserve as much ammo as possible. They could mourn their dead differently. And hopefully he wouldn’t get added to that list. “How are you feeling?” Cal asked, watching his partner’s profile, the angles of her cheek below that sun-bleached hair. “Mm?” The gloves came off with a snap. Were it most others, she might not have paused for a moment to consider the question—rolled it away with a shrug of her shoulders perhaps (so accustomed were they to carrying their burdens). Instead, Kay gave him a look. An honest one, painted uncertain in the warm glow of the outside lamplight. A pile of bloodied bandages laid between them, and so too the unspoken concession. That chill bolt of dread that sinks down in the belly when what’s important to you just might slip away. “Just glad you’re alright,” she breathed out in a careful sigh. Reaching up as she always had done on their many missions together, the gesture so familiar and natural now (the two of them side by side, the steady roar of the engine around them and miles of ruined city behind), Karen ruffled Cal’s blond hair. Her hand lingered gently atop his head for a moment—a silent confirmation before pulling away. He exhaled with the touch, his fingers twitching as if he was about to reach up and catch her hand. It’s an easy, companionable sort of brusque intimacy. The kind that came from having seen each others’ skin torn open and bared to the bone, from piecing each other back together under fire. Different from what he had with any of the other women in his life; Kay and Cal were two sides of the same coin, his partner acting as his right-hand, picking up the slack whenever he faltered and vice versa. And christ, but he felt slack tonight. “Do me a favour and don’t run afoul of raiders or ghouls,” he said. “Dunno what I’d do without you. I mean, how would I tie my shoelaces?” He gave a mordant grin. Death was always waiting too close for both of them, nipping at their heels with each supply run. The two most recent graves in the Department reinforced that awareness more than ever. “I suspect I have enough that still needs doing around here,” Karen said, a vague smile tucked back as she turned her attention to her supplies. “Keeping you in a single piece among the list.” Digging around through her bag once again, she took up the bottle, and a familiar pair of small drink cups. “Go ahead and fix us up a toast to that, if you’re thinking you can manage,” she continued. Leaving him to it, she concentrated back onto the medical kit. (Now a fire, she suspected, wasn’t a half-bad idea -- a pile of bloody bandages burnt over a solemn soldier’s oath.) “Are you doubting my oratory skills?” The ribbing was half-hearted, though, as Cal instead twisted open the bottle and poured out a generous helping of liquor into each cup. He wasn’t like Nate, didn’t need the burn as a daily afterthought, a punctuation to his entire existence—but moments like this? They needed it. Needed the fire in their bellies, needed to salt and burn their memories of the fallen in order to face a brand-new day. He held out the second cup to her. “To Sergeant Karen Sharpe,” he said first, straight to the point. He owed this woman his life. Maybe not tonight specifically, but in general. “And Kay, my friend. And our other friends, the band of buggered, the men and women too damned gallant to just go live their lives in a shelter and stick their head in the sand. Here’s to them. Here’s to us all being idiots. Here’s to helping keep civilisation alive, one damn day at a time.” It wasn’t flowery, it wasn’t poetic or even well-thought-out—he was still talking from exhaustion and adrenaline, and he even still had a meeting with Laberenz later tonight—but it was the best Cal could do. The words tumbled out in a familiar messy torrent and it was enough, more than enough to make Kay grin. She took the cup and drank. “Cheers to that,” she said in a throaty laugh, and by now had eased her gear aside. Shifting around so that her back was to the railing, she was now side by side with Cal, their limbs nudged messily as if sitting on a cramped driver’s bench. Out here with nothing but black night and the wind howling down the stone walls, one might certainly feel as if they were sitting at the end of world. Dangling on that narrow razor’s edge of existence but, Kay reminded herself, not alone. The alcohol made her throat burn, took away the spare few words fixing to claw their way up—no tired but eager declarations as Cal could muster, but something similar offered up in exchange. Men had died, and more would die, and that was a soldier’s life. It was the reality of the battlefield this city had become. No room was there any longer to take things so easily for granted. “And to Cal,” she said after a moment, the words breathed out heavily in something similar to a laugh, “you damn fool.” She shook her head; and there it was, finally, a curse bubbling out with affection. It wasn’t much, certainly—but then again it was everything. “Ain’t that the truth,” he added with a sigh, glancing down at his bandaged arm. But it was everything, and it was enough. |