RPS Fic: Fading Silhouettes (3/4) J2 Remix
Part One // Part Two
Jensen wakes up on fire. He touches his face and his fingers come away sticky with pus. Katie leans over him, grabs his wrist, holds his hand still. "Hey," she says. "Careful." Her voice competing with the ringing in his ears.
"What happened?" he asks. He's lying down, he thinks. He lifts his neck, looks around, the rumble of an engine underneath him, the tarp stretched over the truck bed he's lying on.
"Grenade. You got a little kickback." She dabs at his neck with a cloth, winces. "They're taking us to a settlement." Her lips are tight.
"Who?" Jensen struggles to swallow, a rush of blood making his vision go spotty.
"I don't know. Hezekiah? Some men. Jared's up front with them."
"Oh," Jensen lets his head fall. His eyes close. "Okay."
"No," Katie says. "It's not okay. Jensen, we're almost there. You have to wake up. We have to leave. You have to tell Jared we should go."
"Okay," he says. He opens his eyes, but they keep fluttering, won't let him get anything but little glimpses, the white creases on Katie's face. "Just--give me a second. I'll take care of it in a second."
****
When he wakes up again, he doesn't open his eyes immediately. Just lays there in the dark. He listens to the noise of tires on dirt, the bump and squeak of the car's undercarriage. The sway of it moving in his body. His lips feel dry and cracked, and there's blood drying on his shoulder. His nose is plugged. The floor is hot under him, little beads of sweat seeping from his pores.
He can hear Jared and Katie, the quiet pitch of their voices, the rise and fall in sync with his breathing, sharing rhythms down to the cell.
He can hear singing. A faint chorus, all in unison.
He opens his eyes. There's a strange man looking down at him, still of face and old. "I'm Hezekiah," he says. He has a gun lain across his lap.
"Jensen," he croaks.
"Morning, Jensen," he says. He reads the question in Jensen's eyes, tilts his head to catch the sound of voices more clearly. "It's Sunday," he shrugs.
They slip past fences.
****
The three of them wash. They get separate shower stalls, two side by side, one across. He can see Katie's feet under the curtain of the shower across from his, but he can't see anything of Jared and he chews on his cheek. When he tastes blood, he knocks on the partition, listens.
Jared starts whistling, and Jensen eases, scrubs to the sound, the evidence of Jared's presence.
They get haircuts one by one. Katie goes first. The woman behind her brandishes scissors, asks, "How would you like it cut, sweetheart?"
Katie shrugs.
The woman looks at Katie in the mirror, cards her fingers through Katie's hair. "I'm going to want to trim the ends, definitely, but what do you think? Do you want to leave it about this length, or it could look cute maybe around the chin." Her smile is bright, the chatter chirpy and staged.
"Could you cut it very short, please?" Katie asks. She folds her hands in her lap, doesn't look up once. The woman falls away into silence. When she's done, Katie fingers a lock of shorn hair, stands and turns away without glancing in the mirror. "Your turn, Jay."
Jared sits down, and Jensen watches him get shaved. Jared luxuriates in the cream, long expanse of throat stripped naked, stubble cut down to the skin. He has exact specifications for his hair, and he runs his hands through it when she's done. He picks at a stray piece at his temple and asks her to trim it a little bit more, there. When she asks if he'd like some mousse, he rises to the level of her excitement, nods.
After, he borrows a pair of tweezers, goes at his brows, staring close into the mirror. When he's done, he puts his hand down heavy on top of the tweezers and doesn't lift it for a long time.
"Alright?" the lady asks.
Jared looks up, smiles at her automatically.
"Would you like to see the back?" she asks, holding up a small mirror.
Jared laughs, takes what she offers, kisses her lightly on the cheek.
Jensen sits through his like Katie, but when he's shaved and trimmed, he stares at himself in the mirror.
He thought he'd look the same. He thought it'd be strange to look at his old face. But it's brand new, what he sees, scarred and worn. Underneath all that dirt and blood and hair, he had been changing all this time.
"Handsome," the woman says. She puts two fingertips on either temple, straightens his head imperceptibly.
This is my face, he thinks, and he judges it like a stranger's.
****
They tour the compound. It's an old food processing facility, the warehouses, the vats. It takes them until dark. At the end, Hezekiah asks them if they have any questions, and Katie asks, "How many people are here?"
"84," Hezekiah says.
"And how many do you cap it out at?"
"We haven't had to decide, yet."
Jensen can see Katie reassess. It's a more honest answer than she was expecting.
"How did you find us?" Jensen asks. "We were a long way from--wherever this is."
Hezekiah puts his hands in his pockets. "We were scouting. We've been needing advance notice, these last months." He looks troubled for an instant, then says, "Anything else?"
"Can we stay?" Jared asks.
Hezekiah kisses his fist, raises it skyward. "We've made up rooms," he says.
"Room," Jensen says. "We only need one."
They navigate, and Katie brings up the rear, watchful and silent.
****
They move three cots into one room and as soon as Hezekiah leaves, Katie follows. "Where are you going?" Jared calls after her, but she ignores him, closes the door gently.
Jensen lies down on his cot, draws a blanket up over his chest, loose threads skittering across his skin. He kicks off his pants under it. "They took our clothes," he says.
Jared nods, studying the room with more attention than it requires. Like four walls is a luxury. Like three cots and a light is manna.
He looks looser, Jensen thinks. He drinks in the sight of Jared's smooth face, every mole in its place. "Hey," he says. "We can stay for a little while."
Jared raises an eyebrow. "Are you willing to risk the wrath of Katie? I hear that's pretty bad."
Jensen shrugs. He can barely keep his thoughts together, there's a fuzzy signal somewhere in his head. An antenna dipping just the slightest bit out of place. "I'm missing part of my eyebrow," he says. He touches the empty spot on his left brow. "Look at that. Burned clean off."
"Yeah," Jared says. "It's hard to tell you're human anymore."
"Lie down," Jensen says.
"Why?" Jared grins at him affectionately, and suddenly everything's significant. Everything in this room. The dull green of blankets washed too many times. The plastic netting of the cot under him. The buzz of manufactured light. The smell of soap, new and potent.
It's too silent, and Jensen worries suddenly, irrationally, that he might be deaf, and he says, too loud, "I really need you."
Jared sits.
"I really need you," Jensen says again. "I want you to know. I don't want you to wonder." Jensen watches Jared. He feels sewn up into his skin.
"Okay," Jared says. He lies down on his cot, grabs the edge of Jensen's to drag himself closer. He nudges his face into the space under Jensen's chin, kisses his Adam's apple.
Jared’s breathing is labored and Jensen feels it, the pull, the dragging current. He says, "This is only who I am now. It's not who I'll always be. It's not who I've always been." He feels every single one of his scars. They go to the bone, dark and callused.
"No." Jared shakes his head. "No, man, you're--" He lets out a hot breath, his long fingers stroking Jensen's bare hip. "When this is over," he says. He kisses Jensen's jaw and the new skin there pulls thin, bleeds.
****
They slot in quickly. The first morning, Hezekiah comes to their room, tosses them a cob of corn each, then leans against the doorjamb. "Where's Katie?" he asks.
Jared has his mouth full, but Jensen turns the cob over in his hands, lets it warm them for a little while. "Bathroom," Jensen lies.
Hezekiah nods. "We have jobs for you. You can choose if you want."
Jared wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Jensen will do monologues," he says. "And strip on Tuesday nights."
"Good," Hezekiah says. "A morale booster."
****
Jensen works along the fences, a gun in hand, walking along the perimeter. He wears a Tulane University sweatshirt one of the compost guys gave him, and a pair of shoes that are half a size too small. They pinch his toes. The boy they have working with him is all of nineteen; his head is shaved unevenly, longer behind his ears and at his nape where his reach was strained. His cheeks are always flushed.
"I used to show my dick on webcams," he says.
Jensen's gun hangs around his neck on a jump rope. He locks his fingers around the links of the fence, shakes it. Listens to it rattle.
"I could have made a ton of money off it, if I wanted. People like soldiers. It's a uniform thing."
It's probably two o'clock, Jensen thinks. He's sinking into the heat, head spinning.
"Old guys would offer me money all the time. Pretend to be college chicks and shit." The kid flicks a drop of sweat off the bridge of his nose. "My name's Brad."
"Okay, Brad," Jensen says.
Brad lapses into silence. He follows Jensen's gaze out, trying to see what Jensen sees. He grabs the links next to Jensen's right hand with his left.
Jensen runs a hand down his face and his palm comes away black with sand. "I think we're in New Mexico," he says.
"Yeah," Brad says. He chews on his red lower lip. "I bet girls really like you. Underneath all that scarring."
Jensen sighs. He puts his hand over his eyes, cracks his fingers apart to stare up at the sun. "We should move. I don't see anything here."
"Okay."
They trudge along. Brad hangs his head.
"Did you know Hezekiah's almost sixty?" Brad asks.
"Yes," Jensen says. "He looks it."
"Really?" Brad's head whips up. He eyes Jensen's profile. "Not to me. My staff sergeant used to say 'black don't crack'."
Jensen raises an eyebrow.
"But he was black, too," Brad says. He's red all over. He's going to peel.
****
Jensen gets a little overwhelmed at mealtimes. The first time they went down to the kitchen for dinner, they'd milled around in line and a girl had tapped Jensen on the shoulder and said, "I really liked your show. It's stupid to say it now, I know, but--I thought of it, a couple times, when the zombies first..." She'd drifted off.
Jensen had gaped. It was hard to wrap his head around it. To really remember what she was talking about.
Jared had to interject. He'd shaken her hand. "Thanks. I'm a little sorry that we didn't do more episodes about zombies. Some sort of how-to." He'd grinned.
She'd shaken her head. "No, that's not what I mean. It's just--" She'd shrugged. "It was nice to think that maybe the world wasn't over, now that things like that existed. That maybe they'd existed all along."
Jensen tried to get Jared and Katie to eat in their room after that, but Katie was too hard to pin down long enough to reach any sort of consensus and Jared just laughed at him and patted his ass.
It's dinner now, and Jensen's sitting at a table with Katie wedged in next to him, and he's staring down at his rice, poking at the fried egg draped over the top of it. Jared asked him to wait, so Jensen stabs at the yolk with his knife, watches it ooze. Jared's across the room, talking to the canning lady, gesticulating wildly. He's practically glowing at her. It's been more than five minutes.
Jensen clenches his fist around the fork, shoves half the egg into his mouth.
Katie swats at his shoulder. "You're, like, the babiest baby."
Jensen shrugs, stuffs his mouth.
"Why are you so obsessed with him?" Katie showily readjusts her untouched plate. "He never flosses anymore."
Jensen puts down his fork, wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve.
Katie's lip curls. "You know you're going to have to wash that, right? By hand?"
"Where have you been?" Jensen demands. He turns in his seat, shadowing her with his torso. "What've you been doing? I don't know anything about you anymore."
She lets out a startled laugh. "What the hell are you talking about?"
Jensen's face is drawn up tight and tense. "You look different," he says. "Your hair or something." He reaches out, but thinks better of it, just barely brushes the tips of his fingers against her face.
She puts a hand to her head, traces the length of her hair. "It's growing," she says.
"I don't like it." Jensen turns back to his food, closes his eyes tight until he sees pinpricks in that red haze of skin-filtered light. He pounds at a knot in his thigh.
"Don't be an asshole," Katie says. "Look at me."
He opens his eyes, and his gaze goes to Jared, then to Katie.
"I don't know if we should stay." She puts her feet up onto the bench, arms atop her knees, glances up at his eyes before repelling away. "Okay, don't look at me."
Jensen goes back to eating. He's almost polished off his plate.
"In San Francisco, I let people die. 'So that they can achieve a peaceful and final rest'. We didn't have enough of anything and I was really scared." Her voice is almost drowned out by the hubbub, the murmur of people talking and laughing. Jared's voice carrying. "So when they asked me to bring the new arrivals to the exit room, I did. I can't make any excuses. I think--I knew I could say no."
"Does Jared know?"
"He's known for a while."
Jensen presses his finger to stray grains of rice, sucks it clean. "Okay, so we leave. We don't have to wait for that to start to happen. We can go."
Katie puts a hand in the crook of Jensen's elbow, fingers over the vein. "But I don't know. Things might be different here," she says. She's chewing on the collar of her sweater. "I don't feel scared here."
Jensen's eyes touch at the place where Jared was last, but he's not there, and Jensen sits tall in his seat. "Look," he says to Katie, "I don't know if this is the place for us either. We just have to figure out our next step. I don't want--" He finds Jared closer than he'd thought, at the table next to theirs, head ducked down, tip of his tongue sticking out as he folds a paper crane for the little girl with her mother at his side.
The thing is, Jensen forgets how good-looking Jared is and it's easy to do, seeing him every day. It takes something big to make Jensen think of it, a new angle he's never seen before, a tux, or:
This. Jared is smiling at the girl, holding out a crane made from a scrap of paper, tiny and white in his big palm. Then when her little fingers close around it, Jared's smile fades and he just nods gravely as she thanks him and Jensen can't finish his sentence. It just fell out of his head.
The light flickers off. When it comes back on, the sound goes, everybody mute. Hezekiah's standing at the door, his hand on the switch. "We have a situation. Retrieve your weapons. Make sure they're yours. Don't grab someone else's firearm. Report to your stations. Thank you for remaining calm," he says, and then he's moving on.
Katie's already got her rifle out from under the table, checking to make sure it's loaded. Jensen's shotgun is stacked up against the wall on the other side of the door with most everyone else's. He's itching to get it back--he can already feel it in his hands, what it would be like when it bucks and spits--and he thinks, somewhere in the back of his head, Finally.
And then he sees Jared, unfolding from the table, rising to his full height and it's not painful to look at him anymore; he's just collected and stone-solid. He pulls his gun out of his sweater, getting ready to tug the bulky garment off, and he puts it down on the table, right there in front of the little girl. And when she opens her mouth to wail, her face collapsing into a kind of trembling, Jensen steps toward her and almost says, "Careful." She has a little bird in her hand.
****
He gets a good look at the corpses. He has Jared at his back and Katie at his side, and six men and women flanking out, and he's not running. It's dark but the strip around the fences is flooded with light, generators whirring in the distance.
It's the biggest number he's ever seen. He lost count at sixty. And they sprint, all of them, the stench leading the way, forcing its way into Jensen's nose, digging crevices into his brain. It draws him forward, advancing to study them.
Some died fresh. A corpse gets close, and he can see the lipstick still smeared across her mouth, the stud in her nose. He's reloading his gun but there's not enough time and he goes for his knife but she's on him, pinning him against the fence, one hand knocking into his solar plexus, the other pushing up at his chin. She bites into his shoulder, and he can feel her teeth tear into him, a burst of radiating pain that comes out his mouth.
His eyes are screwed up, and he can see how much it hurts; blood pumping hard in his temples, pants going hot and damp. He's pushing at her, all his strength put into shoving her away; fuck it if she rips out a piece of him as she goes, just as long as she goes, and somebody help him, please. Please. He hears a shot and opens his eyes, but the bullet drives through her torso and into his. He pictures his kidney popping like a balloon.
He's fading, and it's more peaceful than he thought it would be. It's not the worst thing that's ever happened to him.
Jared rears up into sight. He's big enough to blot out the sky. He doesn't look like one person. He's a flock, a school of tiny little bits working in concert. His arms rise and there's an ax in his hands.
It comes down singing a high, clear note, snaps the corpse's head off its neck like fruit from a branch, bites a line into Jensen's shoulder.
He's slipping, without the corpse holding him up. Then Jared's under him and over him, cradling him to his chest. He's running. They're running, and Katie's screaming, this faraway noise he can feel under his fingernails.
****
He spends days in the makeshift clinic, going in and out of consciousness. When he first wakes up, there's an Asian woman in glasses standing over him, the cross around her neck framed by the vee of her blue oxford. She's praying for him. Jensen interrupts, asking, "Where's Jared?"
The stranger moves aside, reveals Jared behind her, sitting forward in a metal folding chair. He raises his hand, says, "Present."
Jensen's arm throbs and the memory of how he got that pain comes with a burst of adrenaline; he shoves halfway up, questions panicking to escape his throat. "Am I--How do they--I'm okay? Am I gonna be okay?" He touches his shoulder and it feels colder, rubbery. Foreign to him. "Oh fuck, am I--"
Jared rises. He cups Jensen's face with his hands. He kisses Jensen's forehead, then cheek, then mouth. "You're fine," he says. His breath is hot and dry. "You won't become one of them. The zombie inside will have to wait." He kisses Jensen again, a fine sip at Jensen's lip. "Go to sleep."
Jensen's eyes drift closed.
"You taste like a penny," Jared says.
****
The pastor's back. "Athena," she says, introducing herself. "How're you feeling today, Jensen?"
"Wow," Jensen says. "That's a name."
Athena laughs. "Yes. I thought about changing it. One of my seminary professors strongly suggested it, actually. But it's my name." She puts a hand on Jensen's wrist, watches the clock. "Or it's just a name. I'm torn between the two rationalizations."
"What're you doing, Athena?"
"Taking your pulse." She's wearing a Bank of America polo today. She lifts her hand off of Jensen, scrawls something onto her clipboard. "I got my M.Div. first, and then my M.D. Impressive, I know. Hold your applause." She puts the clipboard down, fusses with the IVs hanging off wire hangers. When she's done, she puts the clipboard down onto Jensen's thigh, pulls up a chair. "Alrighty. Questions?"
"Where's Jared?"
"I insisted that he return to the fields and resume hard labor. He kept saying that you needed him, but he needed something to occupy his hands and mind."
"Katie?"
"I insisted that she return to skulking about the hallways after Hezekiah. I also reassured her that everything here has been aboveboard so far, but--" She shrugs. "There's only so much I can say or do."
Jensen pushes himself up into a sitting position. "When can I leave?"
"You could leave now, if you wanted. But you'd be back within the day. I recommend you stay for three days, at the very least, but--" She shrugs again.
"What the hell am I going to do here for three days?"
She smiles, holds her hands out. "We can talk. I'm all yours. And if you don't want to talk, I'll probably practice my sermon on you."
Jensen shakes his head. "No," he says. "I'm not your target audience." He closes his eyes, rides out a sudden wave of dizziness. When he opens them, she's holding out a cup of water. He takes it, downs it in one gulp, then turns the cup over in his hands. "This is the tiniest clinic ever," he says.
"We make do." She brings one foot up, slides it under her thigh.
"So, I'm okay, right? I'm not going to snap. Go all--" He chomps his teeth together.
"You won't snap, but you're infected. Like we're all infected." Athena takes off her glasses, wipes the lenses with her shirt. "I wish I had more of a nose bridge."
Jensen waits for her to continue. It would be nice to have some answers, he thinks. To know something for certain.
She puts her glasses back on, leans back in her chair. "How much do you know about the rise?"
Jensen crosses his arms over his chest. "I know that it all started with that virus thing they created. And I've had enough rotting flesh stain my clothes to know that these aren't infected people, they're dead bodies." He purses his lips. "I know that my mom called me a week after the first news broadcasts to strongly suggest that I wear a gas mask and I rolled my eyes at her."
Athena laughs. "You weren't wrong to roll your eyes. I'd say everyone you know was infected within the first few days. We are all carriers. We will all rise after death." Her eyes go to the clock. "Shit, I have to go. I'm on my third strike as it pertains to tardiness with Hez."
"Wait!" Jensen says. "You can't leave me with that. There's no way to stop it?"
Athena looks up at the ceiling, brows knit together. "Cures take time. There's not a way now. It doesn't mean there never will be."
"I don't want to rise," he says. He feels conquered. The heart in his chest beating some alien rhythm.
She laughs. "This is going to sound incredibly unhelpful. And depending on your personal stance, equally naïve. But you'll be gone. Far away. It's just your body that will rise." She grabs the jacket she'd draped on the doorknob. "But someone will be there, at the end. I'm sure. To put that body to rest." She turns back to him, smiles kindly. "Feel better, Jensen."
****
Katie comes to visit him in the mornings. He wakes up to find her sitting in bed next to him, eating Jell-O. "They give you the best food here," she says. "And you don't even eat it."
Jensen yawns, sees Jared's underwear and towel draped across the empty chair at his bedside. "Did he sleep here?" he asks.
"Good morning, Katie," she says. "Obligatory snarky comment about my love of food. Snide comment about my lack of sensitivity to your condition. Eye roll."
"I hate Mad Libs," Jensen says.
Katie flicks his forehead.
"Ow!" Jensen rubs at the reddening spot. "You're chipper for someone whose hero figure was almost mauled to death."
"I'm an enigma." She lifts the blanket covering Jensen's torso, looks down at the bandages over his bullet wound. "I did that," she says, pointing. Her hair shadows her face. It touches her shoulders now.
"Yeah? You trying to stake your claim? Mark me right up."
She laughs, but her hand's hovering right over the wound and Jensen can see it trembling. "I got insanely scared. Such a bad shot. I'm never going to live it down."
Jensen grins. "Nope."
She snickers, pulls her hand back. She eats the last of the Jell-O, a bit of lime green at the corner of her mouth. "Okay, I have to go." She hops onto her feet, sticks the spoon in her back pocket as she makes her way to the door.
"Reconnaissance calls."
She turns around, hand on the doorknob, door ajar. "You know, they tried really hard to save you. Athena, she worked her ass off. Hezekiah asks about you." He can see her reshuffling her deck, expressions flickering across her face.
Jensen nods. "Was I the only guy lucky enough to get fucked up?"
Katie cocks her head, stares at him. "You were the only one who stepped past the fences."
****
Jensen hasn't been complaining, but Jared shows up one afternoon, sweaty and streaked with dirt, a smile on his face. "Hey," he says. "You feel up to moving around some?"
"I don't know," Jensen says, sitting up. "You could blow me, maybe."
"So far from what I was thinking," Jared says. He shakes his head, then comes in close, kisses Jensen on the cheek. "You made a funny," he says, sliding Jensen's arm around his neck, tugging him gently out of bed.
"Where are we going?" Jensen asks.
"I don't know. I'm gonna show off your brand new chicken thighs."
"Yeah," Jensen says. "Mock my muscle atrophy."
"Dramatic." Jared wraps an arm around Jensen's waist, leads him out the door, down the hallway, and outside.
The sun takes a sledgehammer to Jensen's eyes. He blinks it back, and when he can see again he sees damages in repair: fences being raised, gardens replanted, windows boarded over.
"They ran amok," Jared says. He's tall at Jensen's side.
"Hey!" Jensen hears from behind him. He looks over his shoulder to see Brad barreling toward them, a lump of chew in his cheek.
"Hi, Brad," Jared says. "What's in your mouth?"
Brad opens wide, displays a cud of beef jerky.
"Wow," Jared says. "Thank you kindly."
Brad nods. He gives Jensen the eye. "Damn," he breathes.
Jensen looks down at the shirt he'd poked his way into this morning. It's already crusted across his shoulder and over his abdomen. The bandages are soaked through, oxidized and powdery red. His skin's taken on a yellow tone in the white light of day. It looks like awe in Brad's eyes and Jensen sighs, musters up some energy. "Bad-ass, right?" He grins.
"No," Brad says. "I mean, sure. But--" He looks over at Jared. "He should lie down. Bullet wounds hurt like a bitch, and they open real easy."
Jensen reads the concern in Brad's tone, the earnestness. It's not expected. He looks at the skin flaking off in strips off the back of Brad's neck. He touches it with the tips of his fingers. "You should get aloe for that. I think Athena's got a plant."
Brad's eyes go wide, and he blushes. "Yeah, I know. I keep forgetting. I never used to burn. Just freckle." He swallows his wad of beef jerky, dances a little on his feet. He screws up his mouth. "Jared, come on, man. Take him back inside. My big brother's bullet wound opened up four times because he was a total fucking idiot."
Jared nods. "Yeah, Brad. Okay." He squeezes Jensen's hip.
****
Jensen wakes up in the middle of the night. His shoulder's prickling. He can feel infection moving under the skin. It's dark as fuck, but when his vision readjusts, he can see Jared against the wall, leaning in close over Athena. For a second, he thinks they might be about to kiss, and he waits, stops breathing.
Instead, he hears them whisper: "He's just--he's really scared about it," Jared says. "I think he has nightmares. He's not getting enough rest."
"I know." Athena sighs. "What about you? Are you scared?"
"I don't know." Jared hums. "I mean. It's kind of crazy, right? That my body could be walking around but it's just--not me."
"Yes," she says.
Jared looks up, leans heavily against the wall. "But. It's kind of...if you wanted it to be, it could be cool. You know?" He grins. "Like, maybe I'm not just my devastatingly handsome face. Or my superior brain."
"Is that what all that forehead's for?" Athena asks, voice rich with amusement.
Jared laughs quietly. He tugs at his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger. "The corpses, they're all need, you know? Hunger, and what's that word you used? Propagation?"
"Yes." She smiles at him.
"Maybe we leave that behind here. You know? In our bodies. I might like that. If where we go, we didn't need anything, the things like that. If we were free to choose what to do with every second." His voice is wavering.
She touches her hand to his chin. "Yes. I read a verse this morning that might be--You might like it."
Jared laughs. "I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm babbling. It's late."
"No, Jared. Don't apologize." She touches a hand to his cheek, then glances towards the bed. "I'll be back to check on him in the morning. Good night."
Jensen waits until she goes, until Jared sits back in his chair, long legs stretched out in front of him, a ratty blanket pulled up to his chin. He quotes, "Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but do not kill the soul."
"Wow," Jared says. "Usually takes a few drinks before you start spouting gospel."
"I blame it on mi padre."
"So Texan tonight," Jared says.
****
Athena clears him to resume some of his duties. "You're going to get bored without my running commentary," she says. "I bring flashes of insight to your life."
"What we should do," Jensen says, "is get you on a walkie, and get me on a walkie, et voila."
"Hilarious," she says. "That show of yours, that was a sitcom, right?"
"Ba-dum-bum," Jensen drums.
He heads outside, picks up his gun from the rack next to the door. It feels strange, and he wonders for a second if he'd picked up the wrong one. But there's Katie's hair tie looped around the handle and the ding from the time Jared threw it at the floor of that mall. He wraps his hands around it, resettles them, feeling for the grooves his fingers had worn in.
He backs out the doorway, and goes looking for Brad. When he finds him, the kid's shirtless, a couple sand bags in each hand. "Where'd you get those?" Jensen asks.
Brad turns, raises an eyebrow. He spans his arms out wide. "Sand's everywhere, bro. Use your eyes."
"My eyes tell me you're going to get the mother of all sunburns. You're gonna go lobster."
"You know who's crazy hot?" Brad says. "Katie. It hurts me."
Jensen eyes the fence Brad's shoring up, the slashes through the chain links. "What's taking the repairs so long?"
Brad squints up at the patched holes, leans over to position the sand bags, vertebrae rising in his back. "We keep getting waves of the rotters. No down time to do a primo job." He straightens, cracking his back. "Tell Katie I love her. Will you? Jared won't. I don't know why."
"It's because you don't love her," Jensen says.
"It's the whitest lie, dude."
"Appropriate. Coming from the whitest guy."
"That," Brad says. "That's why you're tops."
****
"Hey," Jensen calls out to Jared. "You seen Katie?"
Jared looks up from the other side of the waist-high wall, digs his shovel down into the ground, rests one arm on it. "I think she went on the supply mission to that base with Hezekiah. She should be back soon, though. Sun's going down."
"Okay," Jensen says. He slaps the concrete wall. "I'll go check the gate."
"Hey, wait."
Jensen turns back and Jared walks toward him, taking off his ballcap and wiping at his forehead with his arm. Jensen waits patiently, the slipping sun at Jared's back. He can see the hair lit up on Jared's arms.
Jared leans over the wall, hands braced on top of it, presses his mouth to Jensen's. He parts his lips lazily, draws out the kiss, enjoying the slow slide of it. No hurry behind it, just for the sake of Jensen's mouth. When he pulls away, Jensen can feel the wet on his lips dry cold in the air.
"Whoa," Jensen says. "What was that for?"
Jared looks away, touches the tip of his tongue to his upper lip. "I don't know. Missed you." He slants a gaze at Jensen.
Jensen grins. He rolls his eyes. "Laying that sexy farmer schtick on pretty thick, don't you think?"
Jared smoothes his hair back, puts his ballcap down over it. He tugs at the brim. "Athena says she'll marry us, no fuss, no muss. As long as you don't mind it being real goddess circle-y. I'm thinking June."
Jensen scratches at the itch where the bullet wound's scabbing. "Pretty weird, Jay."
"Yeah," Jared says. He ambles back to where his shovel sticks up from the earth. It's cold, and the sun is blowing out in the wind, going to rest.
****
There's a slash of blood across Hezekiah's face. He has a hand pressed to his cheek, keeping the wound from pulling open. Katie's in a thrown-together sling, driving the jeep with one hand. Jensen races up to the braking car, demands, "What the fuck happened? You're late."
"Yeah, we got swarmed, okay?" Katie jumps out of the car, hurries around to open the door for Hezekiah. "Ass."
"Are you alright?" Jensen asks. He's at Katie's heels, grips Hezekiah's elbow, helping him out of the car.
"I'm fine. I just gave my elbow a good knock. Hezekiah got cut up." Katie closes the garage door behind her.
"Daddy!" A little girl bursts through the door on the far wall and runs toward Hezekiah, slows at the sight of the blood on his face.
"Hi, baby," Hezekiah gets out. He tries to smile, holds up a hand in an abortive wave. Jensen steadies him.
Katie runs to scoop the girl up into her arms. "Hey Shoshannah, your daddy's a tiny bit busy right now, so maybe we could go see Jared, huh? You love Jared."
The girl leans over in Katie's arms, looking over Katie's shoulder. "Is he okay?" she asks.
"I'm fine, little girl," Hezekiah says. "Go have fun, okay? I'll see you at dinner."
"Come on," Katie says. "I'll tell you more stories about the time I met Zac Efron."
"Ooh," Jensen says. "Zac Efron!"
Katie's lips quirk up at that, but Shoshannah nods, and Katie takes her out, bouncing her gently.
"Here," Jensen says to Hezekiah. "Lean on me. I'll walk with you to Athena's."
Hezekiah grunts. He's heavy; the smell of his blood turns Jensen's stomach. They make their way slowly, down dim hallways, past dark, unused corridors.
"How far out? And how many? Is it gonna be days?" Jensen asks, breaking the silence. "Or tomorrow?"
"We got hit within sight of the walls. Twenty, at least. They're probably here." Hezekiah lets out a harsh breath. "You should go, after you drop me off."
Jensen nods. "This is crazy," he says. He doesn't say he's scared. That it's the most he's ever seen, a constant, eroding barrage. "Why are there so many here? Is it the desert?"
"It's us," Hezekiah says with finality. Throwing a glove on the floor. "We're too many, too concentrated. They smell us. They come for miles, smelling us."
"I think they're drawn to the heat," Jensen says.
"What?" Hezekiah puts one foot in front of the other.
"Nothing," Jensen says. It's winter, and Hezekiah's body is a furnace at Jensen's side.
****
When the fighting's over for the night, Jensen trudges down the halls, looks for a light.
He finds Jared tucked up inside a spare closet, Shoshannah curled into his side. He's got a sock puppet on his hand. They're both dozing.
"Hey," Jensen says. He knocks his shoe against Jared's foot.
Jared stirs, opens his eyes. "Hey."
"You don't have friends your own age?" Jensen asks.
Jared smiles, gets to his feet. He picks Shoshannah up and she sighs, settles into the hollow under Jared's neck. "I do, but she doesn't." He presses a kiss to her hair. "There aren't a whole lot of kids around." He says it simply.
Jensen nods. His head aches. "I'll be in the room," he says. "Katie's probably already there."
"Okay," Jared says. "I'm gonna put Shoshannah down, but I'm on cleanup tonight. I'll try not to wake you up when I come back in." He starts down the hall.
"Hey," Jensen says. Jared turns around. "Are you okay?" He really wants to hear Jared says yes. It'd be nice. Just for tonight.
"Yes," Jared says. "I'm just really tired."
"You're lying," Jensen says. "I think. Are you?"
Jared laughs. "Way to go, gumshoe." Shoshannah's little hand on his chin, and Jared bites her thumb, gentle.
****
Things get worse very quickly. They abandon repairs; there are three holes where the fences have been torn down and the corpses flood to those, like running water finding a drain. It's easier to maintain shifts, keep a 24 hour watch.
It's one a.m. and Jensen has a rabbit's foot keychain around his thumb. It's something Brad gave him; he wouldn't hold on to something like that, usually--it’s pure superstition--but he kind of likes the feel of the fur in his palm. He's wearing Jared's sweater over his own and his arms rest on top of the layers, puffing him out.
Hezekiah raises his rifle, aims, squinting, picks off a corpse in the distance. "Would it be so crazy?" he asks. He points his gun down, reaches for the Thermos at his feet, takes a sip of steaming hot water.
"It's within the realm of sanity," Jensen says. He's not sure how much he's supposed to say. It feels strange that Hezekiah would address him as a peer; a residual deference to Hezekiah's age making Jensen awkward.
"I could focus," Hezekiah says. "On the people that are most important. My wife and daughter. I could protect them without splitting my attentions. You and your friends could come. That would still be a small enough group."
The automatic Jensen's borrowing lets loose with a spray of fire, taking down three straight ahead. His heart is pumping hard enough in his chest to make his body stutter in time.
"You lasted for a long time on your own, the three of you. Was it better?" Hezekiah gulps at his Thermos. He's going to burn his tongue.
The wind stings at Jensen's cheeks. "It was easier to hide," he says.
Part Four
Jensen wakes up on fire. He touches his face and his fingers come away sticky with pus. Katie leans over him, grabs his wrist, holds his hand still. "Hey," she says. "Careful." Her voice competing with the ringing in his ears.
"What happened?" he asks. He's lying down, he thinks. He lifts his neck, looks around, the rumble of an engine underneath him, the tarp stretched over the truck bed he's lying on.
"Grenade. You got a little kickback." She dabs at his neck with a cloth, winces. "They're taking us to a settlement." Her lips are tight.
"Who?" Jensen struggles to swallow, a rush of blood making his vision go spotty.
"I don't know. Hezekiah? Some men. Jared's up front with them."
"Oh," Jensen lets his head fall. His eyes close. "Okay."
"No," Katie says. "It's not okay. Jensen, we're almost there. You have to wake up. We have to leave. You have to tell Jared we should go."
"Okay," he says. He opens his eyes, but they keep fluttering, won't let him get anything but little glimpses, the white creases on Katie's face. "Just--give me a second. I'll take care of it in a second."
****
When he wakes up again, he doesn't open his eyes immediately. Just lays there in the dark. He listens to the noise of tires on dirt, the bump and squeak of the car's undercarriage. The sway of it moving in his body. His lips feel dry and cracked, and there's blood drying on his shoulder. His nose is plugged. The floor is hot under him, little beads of sweat seeping from his pores.
He can hear Jared and Katie, the quiet pitch of their voices, the rise and fall in sync with his breathing, sharing rhythms down to the cell.
He can hear singing. A faint chorus, all in unison.
He opens his eyes. There's a strange man looking down at him, still of face and old. "I'm Hezekiah," he says. He has a gun lain across his lap.
"Jensen," he croaks.
"Morning, Jensen," he says. He reads the question in Jensen's eyes, tilts his head to catch the sound of voices more clearly. "It's Sunday," he shrugs.
They slip past fences.
****
The three of them wash. They get separate shower stalls, two side by side, one across. He can see Katie's feet under the curtain of the shower across from his, but he can't see anything of Jared and he chews on his cheek. When he tastes blood, he knocks on the partition, listens.
Jared starts whistling, and Jensen eases, scrubs to the sound, the evidence of Jared's presence.
They get haircuts one by one. Katie goes first. The woman behind her brandishes scissors, asks, "How would you like it cut, sweetheart?"
Katie shrugs.
The woman looks at Katie in the mirror, cards her fingers through Katie's hair. "I'm going to want to trim the ends, definitely, but what do you think? Do you want to leave it about this length, or it could look cute maybe around the chin." Her smile is bright, the chatter chirpy and staged.
"Could you cut it very short, please?" Katie asks. She folds her hands in her lap, doesn't look up once. The woman falls away into silence. When she's done, Katie fingers a lock of shorn hair, stands and turns away without glancing in the mirror. "Your turn, Jay."
Jared sits down, and Jensen watches him get shaved. Jared luxuriates in the cream, long expanse of throat stripped naked, stubble cut down to the skin. He has exact specifications for his hair, and he runs his hands through it when she's done. He picks at a stray piece at his temple and asks her to trim it a little bit more, there. When she asks if he'd like some mousse, he rises to the level of her excitement, nods.
After, he borrows a pair of tweezers, goes at his brows, staring close into the mirror. When he's done, he puts his hand down heavy on top of the tweezers and doesn't lift it for a long time.
"Alright?" the lady asks.
Jared looks up, smiles at her automatically.
"Would you like to see the back?" she asks, holding up a small mirror.
Jared laughs, takes what she offers, kisses her lightly on the cheek.
Jensen sits through his like Katie, but when he's shaved and trimmed, he stares at himself in the mirror.
He thought he'd look the same. He thought it'd be strange to look at his old face. But it's brand new, what he sees, scarred and worn. Underneath all that dirt and blood and hair, he had been changing all this time.
"Handsome," the woman says. She puts two fingertips on either temple, straightens his head imperceptibly.
This is my face, he thinks, and he judges it like a stranger's.
****
They tour the compound. It's an old food processing facility, the warehouses, the vats. It takes them until dark. At the end, Hezekiah asks them if they have any questions, and Katie asks, "How many people are here?"
"84," Hezekiah says.
"And how many do you cap it out at?"
"We haven't had to decide, yet."
Jensen can see Katie reassess. It's a more honest answer than she was expecting.
"How did you find us?" Jensen asks. "We were a long way from--wherever this is."
Hezekiah puts his hands in his pockets. "We were scouting. We've been needing advance notice, these last months." He looks troubled for an instant, then says, "Anything else?"
"Can we stay?" Jared asks.
Hezekiah kisses his fist, raises it skyward. "We've made up rooms," he says.
"Room," Jensen says. "We only need one."
They navigate, and Katie brings up the rear, watchful and silent.
****
They move three cots into one room and as soon as Hezekiah leaves, Katie follows. "Where are you going?" Jared calls after her, but she ignores him, closes the door gently.
Jensen lies down on his cot, draws a blanket up over his chest, loose threads skittering across his skin. He kicks off his pants under it. "They took our clothes," he says.
Jared nods, studying the room with more attention than it requires. Like four walls is a luxury. Like three cots and a light is manna.
He looks looser, Jensen thinks. He drinks in the sight of Jared's smooth face, every mole in its place. "Hey," he says. "We can stay for a little while."
Jared raises an eyebrow. "Are you willing to risk the wrath of Katie? I hear that's pretty bad."
Jensen shrugs. He can barely keep his thoughts together, there's a fuzzy signal somewhere in his head. An antenna dipping just the slightest bit out of place. "I'm missing part of my eyebrow," he says. He touches the empty spot on his left brow. "Look at that. Burned clean off."
"Yeah," Jared says. "It's hard to tell you're human anymore."
"Lie down," Jensen says.
"Why?" Jared grins at him affectionately, and suddenly everything's significant. Everything in this room. The dull green of blankets washed too many times. The plastic netting of the cot under him. The buzz of manufactured light. The smell of soap, new and potent.
It's too silent, and Jensen worries suddenly, irrationally, that he might be deaf, and he says, too loud, "I really need you."
Jared sits.
"I really need you," Jensen says again. "I want you to know. I don't want you to wonder." Jensen watches Jared. He feels sewn up into his skin.
"Okay," Jared says. He lies down on his cot, grabs the edge of Jensen's to drag himself closer. He nudges his face into the space under Jensen's chin, kisses his Adam's apple.
Jared’s breathing is labored and Jensen feels it, the pull, the dragging current. He says, "This is only who I am now. It's not who I'll always be. It's not who I've always been." He feels every single one of his scars. They go to the bone, dark and callused.
"No." Jared shakes his head. "No, man, you're--" He lets out a hot breath, his long fingers stroking Jensen's bare hip. "When this is over," he says. He kisses Jensen's jaw and the new skin there pulls thin, bleeds.
****
They slot in quickly. The first morning, Hezekiah comes to their room, tosses them a cob of corn each, then leans against the doorjamb. "Where's Katie?" he asks.
Jared has his mouth full, but Jensen turns the cob over in his hands, lets it warm them for a little while. "Bathroom," Jensen lies.
Hezekiah nods. "We have jobs for you. You can choose if you want."
Jared wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Jensen will do monologues," he says. "And strip on Tuesday nights."
"Good," Hezekiah says. "A morale booster."
****
Jensen works along the fences, a gun in hand, walking along the perimeter. He wears a Tulane University sweatshirt one of the compost guys gave him, and a pair of shoes that are half a size too small. They pinch his toes. The boy they have working with him is all of nineteen; his head is shaved unevenly, longer behind his ears and at his nape where his reach was strained. His cheeks are always flushed.
"I used to show my dick on webcams," he says.
Jensen's gun hangs around his neck on a jump rope. He locks his fingers around the links of the fence, shakes it. Listens to it rattle.
"I could have made a ton of money off it, if I wanted. People like soldiers. It's a uniform thing."
It's probably two o'clock, Jensen thinks. He's sinking into the heat, head spinning.
"Old guys would offer me money all the time. Pretend to be college chicks and shit." The kid flicks a drop of sweat off the bridge of his nose. "My name's Brad."
"Okay, Brad," Jensen says.
Brad lapses into silence. He follows Jensen's gaze out, trying to see what Jensen sees. He grabs the links next to Jensen's right hand with his left.
Jensen runs a hand down his face and his palm comes away black with sand. "I think we're in New Mexico," he says.
"Yeah," Brad says. He chews on his red lower lip. "I bet girls really like you. Underneath all that scarring."
Jensen sighs. He puts his hand over his eyes, cracks his fingers apart to stare up at the sun. "We should move. I don't see anything here."
"Okay."
They trudge along. Brad hangs his head.
"Did you know Hezekiah's almost sixty?" Brad asks.
"Yes," Jensen says. "He looks it."
"Really?" Brad's head whips up. He eyes Jensen's profile. "Not to me. My staff sergeant used to say 'black don't crack'."
Jensen raises an eyebrow.
"But he was black, too," Brad says. He's red all over. He's going to peel.
****
Jensen gets a little overwhelmed at mealtimes. The first time they went down to the kitchen for dinner, they'd milled around in line and a girl had tapped Jensen on the shoulder and said, "I really liked your show. It's stupid to say it now, I know, but--I thought of it, a couple times, when the zombies first..." She'd drifted off.
Jensen had gaped. It was hard to wrap his head around it. To really remember what she was talking about.
Jared had to interject. He'd shaken her hand. "Thanks. I'm a little sorry that we didn't do more episodes about zombies. Some sort of how-to." He'd grinned.
She'd shaken her head. "No, that's not what I mean. It's just--" She'd shrugged. "It was nice to think that maybe the world wasn't over, now that things like that existed. That maybe they'd existed all along."
Jensen tried to get Jared and Katie to eat in their room after that, but Katie was too hard to pin down long enough to reach any sort of consensus and Jared just laughed at him and patted his ass.
It's dinner now, and Jensen's sitting at a table with Katie wedged in next to him, and he's staring down at his rice, poking at the fried egg draped over the top of it. Jared asked him to wait, so Jensen stabs at the yolk with his knife, watches it ooze. Jared's across the room, talking to the canning lady, gesticulating wildly. He's practically glowing at her. It's been more than five minutes.
Jensen clenches his fist around the fork, shoves half the egg into his mouth.
Katie swats at his shoulder. "You're, like, the babiest baby."
Jensen shrugs, stuffs his mouth.
"Why are you so obsessed with him?" Katie showily readjusts her untouched plate. "He never flosses anymore."
Jensen puts down his fork, wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve.
Katie's lip curls. "You know you're going to have to wash that, right? By hand?"
"Where have you been?" Jensen demands. He turns in his seat, shadowing her with his torso. "What've you been doing? I don't know anything about you anymore."
She lets out a startled laugh. "What the hell are you talking about?"
Jensen's face is drawn up tight and tense. "You look different," he says. "Your hair or something." He reaches out, but thinks better of it, just barely brushes the tips of his fingers against her face.
She puts a hand to her head, traces the length of her hair. "It's growing," she says.
"I don't like it." Jensen turns back to his food, closes his eyes tight until he sees pinpricks in that red haze of skin-filtered light. He pounds at a knot in his thigh.
"Don't be an asshole," Katie says. "Look at me."
He opens his eyes, and his gaze goes to Jared, then to Katie.
"I don't know if we should stay." She puts her feet up onto the bench, arms atop her knees, glances up at his eyes before repelling away. "Okay, don't look at me."
Jensen goes back to eating. He's almost polished off his plate.
"In San Francisco, I let people die. 'So that they can achieve a peaceful and final rest'. We didn't have enough of anything and I was really scared." Her voice is almost drowned out by the hubbub, the murmur of people talking and laughing. Jared's voice carrying. "So when they asked me to bring the new arrivals to the exit room, I did. I can't make any excuses. I think--I knew I could say no."
"Does Jared know?"
"He's known for a while."
Jensen presses his finger to stray grains of rice, sucks it clean. "Okay, so we leave. We don't have to wait for that to start to happen. We can go."
Katie puts a hand in the crook of Jensen's elbow, fingers over the vein. "But I don't know. Things might be different here," she says. She's chewing on the collar of her sweater. "I don't feel scared here."
Jensen's eyes touch at the place where Jared was last, but he's not there, and Jensen sits tall in his seat. "Look," he says to Katie, "I don't know if this is the place for us either. We just have to figure out our next step. I don't want--" He finds Jared closer than he'd thought, at the table next to theirs, head ducked down, tip of his tongue sticking out as he folds a paper crane for the little girl with her mother at his side.
The thing is, Jensen forgets how good-looking Jared is and it's easy to do, seeing him every day. It takes something big to make Jensen think of it, a new angle he's never seen before, a tux, or:
This. Jared is smiling at the girl, holding out a crane made from a scrap of paper, tiny and white in his big palm. Then when her little fingers close around it, Jared's smile fades and he just nods gravely as she thanks him and Jensen can't finish his sentence. It just fell out of his head.
The light flickers off. When it comes back on, the sound goes, everybody mute. Hezekiah's standing at the door, his hand on the switch. "We have a situation. Retrieve your weapons. Make sure they're yours. Don't grab someone else's firearm. Report to your stations. Thank you for remaining calm," he says, and then he's moving on.
Katie's already got her rifle out from under the table, checking to make sure it's loaded. Jensen's shotgun is stacked up against the wall on the other side of the door with most everyone else's. He's itching to get it back--he can already feel it in his hands, what it would be like when it bucks and spits--and he thinks, somewhere in the back of his head, Finally.
And then he sees Jared, unfolding from the table, rising to his full height and it's not painful to look at him anymore; he's just collected and stone-solid. He pulls his gun out of his sweater, getting ready to tug the bulky garment off, and he puts it down on the table, right there in front of the little girl. And when she opens her mouth to wail, her face collapsing into a kind of trembling, Jensen steps toward her and almost says, "Careful." She has a little bird in her hand.
****
He gets a good look at the corpses. He has Jared at his back and Katie at his side, and six men and women flanking out, and he's not running. It's dark but the strip around the fences is flooded with light, generators whirring in the distance.
It's the biggest number he's ever seen. He lost count at sixty. And they sprint, all of them, the stench leading the way, forcing its way into Jensen's nose, digging crevices into his brain. It draws him forward, advancing to study them.
Some died fresh. A corpse gets close, and he can see the lipstick still smeared across her mouth, the stud in her nose. He's reloading his gun but there's not enough time and he goes for his knife but she's on him, pinning him against the fence, one hand knocking into his solar plexus, the other pushing up at his chin. She bites into his shoulder, and he can feel her teeth tear into him, a burst of radiating pain that comes out his mouth.
His eyes are screwed up, and he can see how much it hurts; blood pumping hard in his temples, pants going hot and damp. He's pushing at her, all his strength put into shoving her away; fuck it if she rips out a piece of him as she goes, just as long as she goes, and somebody help him, please. Please. He hears a shot and opens his eyes, but the bullet drives through her torso and into his. He pictures his kidney popping like a balloon.
He's fading, and it's more peaceful than he thought it would be. It's not the worst thing that's ever happened to him.
Jared rears up into sight. He's big enough to blot out the sky. He doesn't look like one person. He's a flock, a school of tiny little bits working in concert. His arms rise and there's an ax in his hands.
It comes down singing a high, clear note, snaps the corpse's head off its neck like fruit from a branch, bites a line into Jensen's shoulder.
He's slipping, without the corpse holding him up. Then Jared's under him and over him, cradling him to his chest. He's running. They're running, and Katie's screaming, this faraway noise he can feel under his fingernails.
****
He spends days in the makeshift clinic, going in and out of consciousness. When he first wakes up, there's an Asian woman in glasses standing over him, the cross around her neck framed by the vee of her blue oxford. She's praying for him. Jensen interrupts, asking, "Where's Jared?"
The stranger moves aside, reveals Jared behind her, sitting forward in a metal folding chair. He raises his hand, says, "Present."
Jensen's arm throbs and the memory of how he got that pain comes with a burst of adrenaline; he shoves halfway up, questions panicking to escape his throat. "Am I--How do they--I'm okay? Am I gonna be okay?" He touches his shoulder and it feels colder, rubbery. Foreign to him. "Oh fuck, am I--"
Jared rises. He cups Jensen's face with his hands. He kisses Jensen's forehead, then cheek, then mouth. "You're fine," he says. His breath is hot and dry. "You won't become one of them. The zombie inside will have to wait." He kisses Jensen again, a fine sip at Jensen's lip. "Go to sleep."
Jensen's eyes drift closed.
"You taste like a penny," Jared says.
****
The pastor's back. "Athena," she says, introducing herself. "How're you feeling today, Jensen?"
"Wow," Jensen says. "That's a name."
Athena laughs. "Yes. I thought about changing it. One of my seminary professors strongly suggested it, actually. But it's my name." She puts a hand on Jensen's wrist, watches the clock. "Or it's just a name. I'm torn between the two rationalizations."
"What're you doing, Athena?"
"Taking your pulse." She's wearing a Bank of America polo today. She lifts her hand off of Jensen, scrawls something onto her clipboard. "I got my M.Div. first, and then my M.D. Impressive, I know. Hold your applause." She puts the clipboard down, fusses with the IVs hanging off wire hangers. When she's done, she puts the clipboard down onto Jensen's thigh, pulls up a chair. "Alrighty. Questions?"
"Where's Jared?"
"I insisted that he return to the fields and resume hard labor. He kept saying that you needed him, but he needed something to occupy his hands and mind."
"Katie?"
"I insisted that she return to skulking about the hallways after Hezekiah. I also reassured her that everything here has been aboveboard so far, but--" She shrugs. "There's only so much I can say or do."
Jensen pushes himself up into a sitting position. "When can I leave?"
"You could leave now, if you wanted. But you'd be back within the day. I recommend you stay for three days, at the very least, but--" She shrugs again.
"What the hell am I going to do here for three days?"
She smiles, holds her hands out. "We can talk. I'm all yours. And if you don't want to talk, I'll probably practice my sermon on you."
Jensen shakes his head. "No," he says. "I'm not your target audience." He closes his eyes, rides out a sudden wave of dizziness. When he opens them, she's holding out a cup of water. He takes it, downs it in one gulp, then turns the cup over in his hands. "This is the tiniest clinic ever," he says.
"We make do." She brings one foot up, slides it under her thigh.
"So, I'm okay, right? I'm not going to snap. Go all--" He chomps his teeth together.
"You won't snap, but you're infected. Like we're all infected." Athena takes off her glasses, wipes the lenses with her shirt. "I wish I had more of a nose bridge."
Jensen waits for her to continue. It would be nice to have some answers, he thinks. To know something for certain.
She puts her glasses back on, leans back in her chair. "How much do you know about the rise?"
Jensen crosses his arms over his chest. "I know that it all started with that virus thing they created. And I've had enough rotting flesh stain my clothes to know that these aren't infected people, they're dead bodies." He purses his lips. "I know that my mom called me a week after the first news broadcasts to strongly suggest that I wear a gas mask and I rolled my eyes at her."
Athena laughs. "You weren't wrong to roll your eyes. I'd say everyone you know was infected within the first few days. We are all carriers. We will all rise after death." Her eyes go to the clock. "Shit, I have to go. I'm on my third strike as it pertains to tardiness with Hez."
"Wait!" Jensen says. "You can't leave me with that. There's no way to stop it?"
Athena looks up at the ceiling, brows knit together. "Cures take time. There's not a way now. It doesn't mean there never will be."
"I don't want to rise," he says. He feels conquered. The heart in his chest beating some alien rhythm.
She laughs. "This is going to sound incredibly unhelpful. And depending on your personal stance, equally naïve. But you'll be gone. Far away. It's just your body that will rise." She grabs the jacket she'd draped on the doorknob. "But someone will be there, at the end. I'm sure. To put that body to rest." She turns back to him, smiles kindly. "Feel better, Jensen."
****
Katie comes to visit him in the mornings. He wakes up to find her sitting in bed next to him, eating Jell-O. "They give you the best food here," she says. "And you don't even eat it."
Jensen yawns, sees Jared's underwear and towel draped across the empty chair at his bedside. "Did he sleep here?" he asks.
"Good morning, Katie," she says. "Obligatory snarky comment about my love of food. Snide comment about my lack of sensitivity to your condition. Eye roll."
"I hate Mad Libs," Jensen says.
Katie flicks his forehead.
"Ow!" Jensen rubs at the reddening spot. "You're chipper for someone whose hero figure was almost mauled to death."
"I'm an enigma." She lifts the blanket covering Jensen's torso, looks down at the bandages over his bullet wound. "I did that," she says, pointing. Her hair shadows her face. It touches her shoulders now.
"Yeah? You trying to stake your claim? Mark me right up."
She laughs, but her hand's hovering right over the wound and Jensen can see it trembling. "I got insanely scared. Such a bad shot. I'm never going to live it down."
Jensen grins. "Nope."
She snickers, pulls her hand back. She eats the last of the Jell-O, a bit of lime green at the corner of her mouth. "Okay, I have to go." She hops onto her feet, sticks the spoon in her back pocket as she makes her way to the door.
"Reconnaissance calls."
She turns around, hand on the doorknob, door ajar. "You know, they tried really hard to save you. Athena, she worked her ass off. Hezekiah asks about you." He can see her reshuffling her deck, expressions flickering across her face.
Jensen nods. "Was I the only guy lucky enough to get fucked up?"
Katie cocks her head, stares at him. "You were the only one who stepped past the fences."
****
Jensen hasn't been complaining, but Jared shows up one afternoon, sweaty and streaked with dirt, a smile on his face. "Hey," he says. "You feel up to moving around some?"
"I don't know," Jensen says, sitting up. "You could blow me, maybe."
"So far from what I was thinking," Jared says. He shakes his head, then comes in close, kisses Jensen on the cheek. "You made a funny," he says, sliding Jensen's arm around his neck, tugging him gently out of bed.
"Where are we going?" Jensen asks.
"I don't know. I'm gonna show off your brand new chicken thighs."
"Yeah," Jensen says. "Mock my muscle atrophy."
"Dramatic." Jared wraps an arm around Jensen's waist, leads him out the door, down the hallway, and outside.
The sun takes a sledgehammer to Jensen's eyes. He blinks it back, and when he can see again he sees damages in repair: fences being raised, gardens replanted, windows boarded over.
"They ran amok," Jared says. He's tall at Jensen's side.
"Hey!" Jensen hears from behind him. He looks over his shoulder to see Brad barreling toward them, a lump of chew in his cheek.
"Hi, Brad," Jared says. "What's in your mouth?"
Brad opens wide, displays a cud of beef jerky.
"Wow," Jared says. "Thank you kindly."
Brad nods. He gives Jensen the eye. "Damn," he breathes.
Jensen looks down at the shirt he'd poked his way into this morning. It's already crusted across his shoulder and over his abdomen. The bandages are soaked through, oxidized and powdery red. His skin's taken on a yellow tone in the white light of day. It looks like awe in Brad's eyes and Jensen sighs, musters up some energy. "Bad-ass, right?" He grins.
"No," Brad says. "I mean, sure. But--" He looks over at Jared. "He should lie down. Bullet wounds hurt like a bitch, and they open real easy."
Jensen reads the concern in Brad's tone, the earnestness. It's not expected. He looks at the skin flaking off in strips off the back of Brad's neck. He touches it with the tips of his fingers. "You should get aloe for that. I think Athena's got a plant."
Brad's eyes go wide, and he blushes. "Yeah, I know. I keep forgetting. I never used to burn. Just freckle." He swallows his wad of beef jerky, dances a little on his feet. He screws up his mouth. "Jared, come on, man. Take him back inside. My big brother's bullet wound opened up four times because he was a total fucking idiot."
Jared nods. "Yeah, Brad. Okay." He squeezes Jensen's hip.
****
Jensen wakes up in the middle of the night. His shoulder's prickling. He can feel infection moving under the skin. It's dark as fuck, but when his vision readjusts, he can see Jared against the wall, leaning in close over Athena. For a second, he thinks they might be about to kiss, and he waits, stops breathing.
Instead, he hears them whisper: "He's just--he's really scared about it," Jared says. "I think he has nightmares. He's not getting enough rest."
"I know." Athena sighs. "What about you? Are you scared?"
"I don't know." Jared hums. "I mean. It's kind of crazy, right? That my body could be walking around but it's just--not me."
"Yes," she says.
Jared looks up, leans heavily against the wall. "But. It's kind of...if you wanted it to be, it could be cool. You know?" He grins. "Like, maybe I'm not just my devastatingly handsome face. Or my superior brain."
"Is that what all that forehead's for?" Athena asks, voice rich with amusement.
Jared laughs quietly. He tugs at his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger. "The corpses, they're all need, you know? Hunger, and what's that word you used? Propagation?"
"Yes." She smiles at him.
"Maybe we leave that behind here. You know? In our bodies. I might like that. If where we go, we didn't need anything, the things like that. If we were free to choose what to do with every second." His voice is wavering.
She touches her hand to his chin. "Yes. I read a verse this morning that might be--You might like it."
Jared laughs. "I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm babbling. It's late."
"No, Jared. Don't apologize." She touches a hand to his cheek, then glances towards the bed. "I'll be back to check on him in the morning. Good night."
Jensen waits until she goes, until Jared sits back in his chair, long legs stretched out in front of him, a ratty blanket pulled up to his chin. He quotes, "Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops. And do not fear those who kill the body but do not kill the soul."
"Wow," Jared says. "Usually takes a few drinks before you start spouting gospel."
"I blame it on mi padre."
"So Texan tonight," Jared says.
****
Athena clears him to resume some of his duties. "You're going to get bored without my running commentary," she says. "I bring flashes of insight to your life."
"What we should do," Jensen says, "is get you on a walkie, and get me on a walkie, et voila."
"Hilarious," she says. "That show of yours, that was a sitcom, right?"
"Ba-dum-bum," Jensen drums.
He heads outside, picks up his gun from the rack next to the door. It feels strange, and he wonders for a second if he'd picked up the wrong one. But there's Katie's hair tie looped around the handle and the ding from the time Jared threw it at the floor of that mall. He wraps his hands around it, resettles them, feeling for the grooves his fingers had worn in.
He backs out the doorway, and goes looking for Brad. When he finds him, the kid's shirtless, a couple sand bags in each hand. "Where'd you get those?" Jensen asks.
Brad turns, raises an eyebrow. He spans his arms out wide. "Sand's everywhere, bro. Use your eyes."
"My eyes tell me you're going to get the mother of all sunburns. You're gonna go lobster."
"You know who's crazy hot?" Brad says. "Katie. It hurts me."
Jensen eyes the fence Brad's shoring up, the slashes through the chain links. "What's taking the repairs so long?"
Brad squints up at the patched holes, leans over to position the sand bags, vertebrae rising in his back. "We keep getting waves of the rotters. No down time to do a primo job." He straightens, cracking his back. "Tell Katie I love her. Will you? Jared won't. I don't know why."
"It's because you don't love her," Jensen says.
"It's the whitest lie, dude."
"Appropriate. Coming from the whitest guy."
"That," Brad says. "That's why you're tops."
****
"Hey," Jensen calls out to Jared. "You seen Katie?"
Jared looks up from the other side of the waist-high wall, digs his shovel down into the ground, rests one arm on it. "I think she went on the supply mission to that base with Hezekiah. She should be back soon, though. Sun's going down."
"Okay," Jensen says. He slaps the concrete wall. "I'll go check the gate."
"Hey, wait."
Jensen turns back and Jared walks toward him, taking off his ballcap and wiping at his forehead with his arm. Jensen waits patiently, the slipping sun at Jared's back. He can see the hair lit up on Jared's arms.
Jared leans over the wall, hands braced on top of it, presses his mouth to Jensen's. He parts his lips lazily, draws out the kiss, enjoying the slow slide of it. No hurry behind it, just for the sake of Jensen's mouth. When he pulls away, Jensen can feel the wet on his lips dry cold in the air.
"Whoa," Jensen says. "What was that for?"
Jared looks away, touches the tip of his tongue to his upper lip. "I don't know. Missed you." He slants a gaze at Jensen.
Jensen grins. He rolls his eyes. "Laying that sexy farmer schtick on pretty thick, don't you think?"
Jared smoothes his hair back, puts his ballcap down over it. He tugs at the brim. "Athena says she'll marry us, no fuss, no muss. As long as you don't mind it being real goddess circle-y. I'm thinking June."
Jensen scratches at the itch where the bullet wound's scabbing. "Pretty weird, Jay."
"Yeah," Jared says. He ambles back to where his shovel sticks up from the earth. It's cold, and the sun is blowing out in the wind, going to rest.
****
There's a slash of blood across Hezekiah's face. He has a hand pressed to his cheek, keeping the wound from pulling open. Katie's in a thrown-together sling, driving the jeep with one hand. Jensen races up to the braking car, demands, "What the fuck happened? You're late."
"Yeah, we got swarmed, okay?" Katie jumps out of the car, hurries around to open the door for Hezekiah. "Ass."
"Are you alright?" Jensen asks. He's at Katie's heels, grips Hezekiah's elbow, helping him out of the car.
"I'm fine. I just gave my elbow a good knock. Hezekiah got cut up." Katie closes the garage door behind her.
"Daddy!" A little girl bursts through the door on the far wall and runs toward Hezekiah, slows at the sight of the blood on his face.
"Hi, baby," Hezekiah gets out. He tries to smile, holds up a hand in an abortive wave. Jensen steadies him.
Katie runs to scoop the girl up into her arms. "Hey Shoshannah, your daddy's a tiny bit busy right now, so maybe we could go see Jared, huh? You love Jared."
The girl leans over in Katie's arms, looking over Katie's shoulder. "Is he okay?" she asks.
"I'm fine, little girl," Hezekiah says. "Go have fun, okay? I'll see you at dinner."
"Come on," Katie says. "I'll tell you more stories about the time I met Zac Efron."
"Ooh," Jensen says. "Zac Efron!"
Katie's lips quirk up at that, but Shoshannah nods, and Katie takes her out, bouncing her gently.
"Here," Jensen says to Hezekiah. "Lean on me. I'll walk with you to Athena's."
Hezekiah grunts. He's heavy; the smell of his blood turns Jensen's stomach. They make their way slowly, down dim hallways, past dark, unused corridors.
"How far out? And how many? Is it gonna be days?" Jensen asks, breaking the silence. "Or tomorrow?"
"We got hit within sight of the walls. Twenty, at least. They're probably here." Hezekiah lets out a harsh breath. "You should go, after you drop me off."
Jensen nods. "This is crazy," he says. He doesn't say he's scared. That it's the most he's ever seen, a constant, eroding barrage. "Why are there so many here? Is it the desert?"
"It's us," Hezekiah says with finality. Throwing a glove on the floor. "We're too many, too concentrated. They smell us. They come for miles, smelling us."
"I think they're drawn to the heat," Jensen says.
"What?" Hezekiah puts one foot in front of the other.
"Nothing," Jensen says. It's winter, and Hezekiah's body is a furnace at Jensen's side.
****
When the fighting's over for the night, Jensen trudges down the halls, looks for a light.
He finds Jared tucked up inside a spare closet, Shoshannah curled into his side. He's got a sock puppet on his hand. They're both dozing.
"Hey," Jensen says. He knocks his shoe against Jared's foot.
Jared stirs, opens his eyes. "Hey."
"You don't have friends your own age?" Jensen asks.
Jared smiles, gets to his feet. He picks Shoshannah up and she sighs, settles into the hollow under Jared's neck. "I do, but she doesn't." He presses a kiss to her hair. "There aren't a whole lot of kids around." He says it simply.
Jensen nods. His head aches. "I'll be in the room," he says. "Katie's probably already there."
"Okay," Jared says. "I'm gonna put Shoshannah down, but I'm on cleanup tonight. I'll try not to wake you up when I come back in." He starts down the hall.
"Hey," Jensen says. Jared turns around. "Are you okay?" He really wants to hear Jared says yes. It'd be nice. Just for tonight.
"Yes," Jared says. "I'm just really tired."
"You're lying," Jensen says. "I think. Are you?"
Jared laughs. "Way to go, gumshoe." Shoshannah's little hand on his chin, and Jared bites her thumb, gentle.
****
Things get worse very quickly. They abandon repairs; there are three holes where the fences have been torn down and the corpses flood to those, like running water finding a drain. It's easier to maintain shifts, keep a 24 hour watch.
It's one a.m. and Jensen has a rabbit's foot keychain around his thumb. It's something Brad gave him; he wouldn't hold on to something like that, usually--it’s pure superstition--but he kind of likes the feel of the fur in his palm. He's wearing Jared's sweater over his own and his arms rest on top of the layers, puffing him out.
Hezekiah raises his rifle, aims, squinting, picks off a corpse in the distance. "Would it be so crazy?" he asks. He points his gun down, reaches for the Thermos at his feet, takes a sip of steaming hot water.
"It's within the realm of sanity," Jensen says. He's not sure how much he's supposed to say. It feels strange that Hezekiah would address him as a peer; a residual deference to Hezekiah's age making Jensen awkward.
"I could focus," Hezekiah says. "On the people that are most important. My wife and daughter. I could protect them without splitting my attentions. You and your friends could come. That would still be a small enough group."
The automatic Jensen's borrowing lets loose with a spray of fire, taking down three straight ahead. His heart is pumping hard enough in his chest to make his body stutter in time.
"You lasted for a long time on your own, the three of you. Was it better?" Hezekiah gulps at his Thermos. He's going to burn his tongue.
The wind stings at Jensen's cheeks. "It was easier to hide," he says.
Part Four