and i will rise up, though i be a dead man.
Unlike many less fortunate Boston residents, Matt Reeves had had the option of simply locking his doors against the undead hordes and staying safe and sound indoors. He'd been in his apartment when the earthquake had begun, not yet ready to head in to Labelle for an evening's work; his building had withstood the quake with relatively minor damage, a few cracked windowpanes and a now-nonfunctional elevator the only real evidence that anything had gone wrong. When the screaming outside had started, the doors had held. Nothing out there was getting in unless Matt opened the door to it, and he could have simply twisted the deadbolt and waited this whole thing out. He had food and water, after all, by sheer luck he even had power. As far as he could tell, not a one of his neighbors had so much as poked their heads outside, and he quietly congratulated them for being smart enough to stay out of danger and keep themselves safe. He could have done the same.
But Nell was out there. Holed up at Labelle, barricaded inside with the rest of the early evening staff, with who knew how much time before something forced its way through; she'd made a good show of sounding confident on the network, but he knew her, he could tell when she was putting on a show. She wasn't nearly as sure of her safety, or that of the people she was hiding out with, as she pretended to be. And so here he was, a block from the entrance now, a duffel bag filled with first aid supplies and what weapons he'd been able to scrounge up slung over one shoulder, a metal bat held loosely in one hand as he made his way down the largely deserted street. Well, deserted by the living. The dead were another matter.
They were fast, and they were strong, and they didn't care about damage unless it was enough to put them down; he only had to make one mistake in order to be completely screwed, but so far he hadn't made it. There was blood on his clothes, on his hands and on his face, but most of it wasn't his, and what was had come from shallow cuts and scrapes. He hadn't been bitten, that was all that mattered. Twisting, he caught an approaching zombie that looked newly-dead with the bat, right across the temple - it wasn't quite enjoyable to see it go down as the side of its skull caved in, but at this point he couldn't pretend it wasn't satisfying. Even better, it gave him a moment's quiet to let Nell know he'd made it there, before they closed in again and he couldn't split his attention between fighting and communicating.
Outside, was all the message said before his phone was back in his pocket and his hands were busy again. She'd said the side door was unblocked, and he could see it from here, once it opened he was just a few seconds' sprint away.