28 Weeks Later - Voice, Cessation
Why hallo there! Lookit what I found from months and months ago, tucked away in the little corners of my computer. :) It's 28 Weeks Later fic!
Voice, Cessation
Rating: R-NC17
Character: Andy Harris (Pairing: Nothing romantic, that's for sure.)
Genre: Horror, Angst, Mindfuck. Post-Movie
Word Count: 4000+ (I MISS THOSE DAYS)
Warnings: Rape. Underage. Fucked up. You've been warned. Also - OLD, and possibly very, very bad.
Summary: Even though the infected scratch at the walls outside, Andy can't escape this new, cruel world.
Voice, Cessation
He doesn't have a body anymore.
It's easier to feel that way, when they're snarling in the dark behind him. He doesn't feel his sister's hand slacking her grip on his, colder, trembling as her breath two paces to the side. He doesn't feel the stitch in his side, the rough gloves that Flynn wears pulling him by his forearm. Flynn's hands tremble, too. He doesn't feel the strange hurt in his right eye, or the way his sneakers slip in blood and loosen with painful pebbles clattering about in there with his feet.
'Sgt. Mal Yates to Unit, do you copy? Over.'
They hear the static voice over Flynn's radio, small as it is. Not them - the infected. They howl. The sound of poor beasts.
'I repeat, Sgt. Mal Yates to Unit, do you copy? Over.'
“Copy. Oh - fuck, COPY.” Flynn gasps into the mouthpiece. “I have two survivors with me. A kid. We've caught a dozen, maybe more. Location. Over”
Nothing.
“I repeat, Location. Over.”
'We've picked up your signal, Unit. We're sending backup.'
He has his body back again, collapsing in the sparse, dry grass and dirt face first. The uniformed soldiers run in silent synchronization and the sound of automatic fire fills his ears as dirt fills his nose, his mouth.
It's the Spain refugee camp all over again, twenty pathetic, sallow people per tent, sitting dumbly on their cots, doing nothing but inhaling the smell of the chemical toilets and letting red eyes replay in the backs of their brains.
There is a high, brick wall, ending suddenly in the jagged loops of barbed wire. There are armored vehicles and snipers behind sandbags. There are men with big, mean dogs patrolling the cramped grounds behind those barbed-wire walls. There were the cold showers, the smell of bleach, of fire and ash as their clothes went up in smoke with other odds-and-ends in a giant, neverending bonfire. They stood there, naked and cold, as women once fat and now skin and bones and hollowly sweet hunted for something for them to wear.
Maybe if he could be like Flynn, who put up a mask face and ignored the openness of bare skin. Tammy shivered and wrapped her skinny, soft arms around her soft chest and crossed her thighs and set her jaw. He should've covered her. He crossed his hands in front of himself and hid his bareness instead, and stared resolutely at the dirt between his toes.
There is the rough texture of handwashed, half-dried clothing. Flynn has gone to the Major's private tent in military uniform a size too small. There is food that tastes of the thin, tin plates they eat from. The words spoken between people might as well be silence. They are there - to the refugees, they are not, or they are, or most likely, it doesn't matter.
He and Tam eat in silence.
Then, even the sound of breathing stops.
A dog barks in the distance. Someone shrieks - someone who was once human. There is the staccato sound of gunfire. If they listened close enough, and they did, the distinctive, wet sound of a body - not human, not human - hitting the dirt. Draped, in reality, over the bones of its kin who were foolish enough to attack the wall crowned with barbed wire.
The men laugh and it is a sound as ugly as the sky gray with ash. As harsh as the bark of a dog who was trained to kill. Tammy wraps her skinny arms around his head, pushing his cheek in, and holds him to her chest. He lets her, but he stopped reaching for her hand somewhere between District 1 and their dad.
They are not stupid enough to sigh in relief when the sounds cease.
Without comment, the other refugees begin to eat again, their conversations and the clank of tin dinnerwear the same damn thing. A soldier marches past and shoulders his gun proudly, arrogantly, and it is horribly awkward on him. Andy's too tired to feel his heart sink at the reminder of Sgt. Doyle and his cheeky, foolish wink before everything went up in flames.
He doesn't like the way that solider, awkward, boisterous, looks at his sister. He far from understands it, but he does not like it. He stares back with his blue eye and his strange eye.
He smells Flynn before he hears him, lingering diesel fuel and gunpowder residue marking his name before Andy's closed eyes.
“Be quiet and listen to me.” Flynn says in a hushed voice, that matter-of-face voice, they train them to sound secure like that but Andy knows the truth. He sees it in the way Flynn's dry lips are pushed together as if he wants to throw up but cannot.
Still, they both nod dumbly. Wide awake, because they never really sleep.
“Tammy has to sleep in my cot from now on.” He seems to hessetate and his fingers twitch on the hip pocket where his babygirl's picture is stored. But that is a picture, and Andy's mismatched eyes are different from his babygirl's in ways coming-of-age stories can only dream of. “I told them Tammy is my wife. Otherwise the men here will do very bad things to her. Do you understand?”
Tammy clutches the dull aluminum edge of the cot until her pale hands turn knuckle-white. Her jaw is set but her throat trembles as she nods and says nothing - there is nothing to say, except “It'll be okay. Be brave.” Whispered in Andy's hair with a kiss to his forehead and she follows Flynn out the tent. Andy sees her timidly wrap her hands around his large, strong arm, before the tent flap takes them away and he sees nothing but moonlight through polyester fiber.
He remembers her strong, warm hands and sees them around Flynn's arm. He remembers the ugly way the solider looked at her. He wraps himself in the wool blanket and the remaining warmth of her. 'Whatever happens' was promised in an abandoned carnival with caricatures of fanciful horses long stood still. He wakes himself just before sleep for the rest of the night, right when his mother is about to peel her face off, because he is alone and the blanket does not keep Tammy's warmth for long.
It is the morning before the sun, when the sky is light and you can see - but no true sun. Andy still hasn't spoken. He hasn't moved. His footing is unsure before his feet even meet the ground, but breakfast is a good a goal as any.
Breakfast is canned fare in tin bowls and it all tastes of metal, but it is at least, something. They are all faceless and uniform as the food, except for the soldiers who eat before their shift, who Flynn is now one of. Andy sees him smile and joke and his smile is a little too wide, his eyes a little too bright. As Flynn makes himself one of them - respected, tough, dependable, -survivor-, they sneak glances at Tammy who eats mechanically by Flynn's side.
There is one that likes to stare at her. He is young - twenty, maybe - with a jaw too square and hair too blond. He is made of angles and roughness, and his blue eyes are mean as a dog's bite. He catches Andy watching and watches right back.
Andy will not look away.
Neither will he. He takes a bite of the canned stew and his sharp, stained teeth bite very, very hard. As if he wants to bite into Andy's face and take away his eyes - but only infected do that. He chews with an open mouth and lets Andy see the gravy-covered tongue behind his teeth.
Andy does not like the way he looks at him. He stares back, with his blue eye, and his strange eye.
Perhaps in stories Tammy would sneak into his tent in the dead of night, like when he was five and she was ten, and he was still terrified to sleep alone in his over-decorated bedroom so very fucking long ago.
But she does not. Flynn maybe keeps her from doing so - Andy is convinced of it, his mouth tasting the bitterness of the ash in the sky. She sneaks little smiles to him across the campgrounds, and stays with the other women who are mourning loss and angry at the apparent youth she, in truth, no longer has. Her pretty blue eyes are as sunken as everyone else's.
No one speaks to him. They are always a body's length away, even though reason tells them he is safe. They have seen the scabbing, scarring mark on his shoulder when he stood naked in the cold. Flynn told them it was an accident, a tumble, a fall, he had enough scratches and bruises to make it believable.
They believed him. After all, he wasn't raging, red-eyed. But they still kept away.
Maybe he hates them for that, as he lies in his cot, alone, in the tent, staring at the light through polyester fibers. Maybe he cannot find it within himself to hate the black scabs scattering themselves over his shoulder like freckles on a painting's child, because it is his last memory of dad.
“Damn him.” He hisses bitterly into the thin pillow beneath his cheek.
He curses in his thoughts now, and mutters them beneath his breath, without the childish thrill of rebellion. Words like 'damn' and 'shit' and 'fuck' are a part of his vocabulary now, no longer adventurous in their spoken state, drab as the cameo tents all lined up on their pickets. There is no one to rebel against. No one who'd really care if he said those things, anyway.
Tammy still smiles at him across the campgrounds.
Then she stops, because the soldiers have noticed. Flynn has told her in a quick hissed whisper in her ear that made her look away quickly and turn that soft smile into an impasse line of her lips that kissed his forehead when he first saw their mother peal her face off in his dreams, high up in that loft and the lie that was District 1.
But it is too late, and the men tease him relentlessly about it. Seated, comfortably, an arm's length away.
They say mean things, things that make his insides grow cold and his stomach coil in knots, like “Have you peeked on her?” and “Give her a kiss and a pat, but make sure Flynn doesn't see you.”
They also say things that make his fingers twitch and his brow furrow and his teeth grind, like “No woman goes for pale little boys. Not when she's got our boy Flynn.” 'Our boy Flynn', because Flynn has become one of them, with his sharp shots and his mechanic's brain and his rowdy, too-bright smile. They said something rather gross about his penis and Flynn's penis that he didn't quite get and didn't want to think too much about. “No woman goes for little boys, 'specially not if they look like girls!”
The refugee women look upon the soldiers with concealed disapproval, too scared in their own skins to say much or let anyone see much. As those men who've become un-human to kill the Infected and face those red eyes every day laugh and laugh in a sound that isn't like any laughter Andy has heard before, he finally snaps and yells “She's my sister, you disgusting wankers!”
Flynn isn't there to hear him. Neither is Tammy. They make more jokes that Andy doesn't understand - why the hell can't he understand? - and they push each other and he does not like the way they look at him. There's too many of them, too loud, and that stupid man with those stupid, mean eyes keeps staring at him, blue eyes skimming up and down.
Andy leaves, into the tent, letting the flap fall behind him. For some reason, the soldiers only laugh more.
It's as if his confusion turned them rabid. They walk by him, closer. Stand, closer. It happens in a matter of days, until he can feel the heat of their skin through their uniforms and his old knitted sweater into the chill of his bones.
It only serves to make him colder.
It's as if they're testing something, as they stare down at him and he stares squarely ahead, jaw set so hard his teeth ache. There is a moment of tension, of silence, where he can feel their eyes as bright and demonic as any Infected person's. Then they might catch the eye of another man, or he might finally turn away and walk, and that laughter-that-isn't would bloom like a thorny patch in dry sand and the women would purse their lips when the men cannot see.
Andy doesn't notice they only do this when Tammy or Flynn isn't looking. He's stopped looking for them days ago. He is alone in that world of vicious uniformed packs and fragmented humans who used to belong to family, friends, co-workers, other survivors. They are, essentially, surrounded and alone.
It comes as a surprise, then, one day after another day the same day of the giant bonfire and grey ash sky, that the man with mean blue eyes speaks to him. Sitting beside him on the rickety wooden bench, casual as a long-forgotten normal.
“You know how to shoot?”
It's so very sporadic that Andy blinks and something of the old him left that wondered at Scarlett's dog tags and laughed shyly with the long-gone adults of District 1 practically perks up, sits up and begs. He's still too young to kill it beneath the mask that everyone else wears. He hasn't the heart to.
“What do you mean?” He is painfully aware of his stupidity. It turns his open eyes and open words into introversion as quick as a coin flipped with a bullet.
“A gun?” The man doesn't mince words. But at least he's talking. It isn't Tammy, or even Flynn. It isn't Doyle or Scarlett or even Jules and Amanda and Chrissy from school way back in Britian or Mrs. Krestler or great-aunt Missy on dad's side he only saw once or twice or Dad or MOM -
He shakes his head mutely. His throat hurts, like it did when Dad bit him and he fell to the cold, dusty concrete with blood raining on his face.
The man gives a low whistle. “That's bullshit.” He says in such a way that Andy can believe, yes, it is bullshit. “We need you kids to know how to defend yourselves.”
Andy nods like a well-trained parrot.
“Let's go.”
And he follows. Like an idiot, against Tammy's advise and Flynn's warning and the caution his Mum and Dad hammered into him since he could walk. He followed.
The man's name is Marc. With a 'c', not a fucking 'k'.
The shooting range is little more than a sheet of plywood with the crude shape of a man drawn with coal from the fire.
He's a United States Marine. Seven years in the military. Twenty-Five Years Old.
The .9 mm feels heavier in Andy's hands than he thought it would. TV made it seem so easy. Andy can see how it can fast become a reassuring weight.
He's got a wife and a newborn baby he's never seen at home. Andy tries not to think about dad, and mum, and their little suburban house with pictures he drew when he was seven still on the fridge. Maybe.
“Here is the safety. You push it down - like this - when you want to fire it.” Marc's hands are rough and harsh over his, cold like the rest of the world that has narrowed and choked down to the inside of the walls crowned with barbed wire.
“Wait.”
He waits. Marc is pressed against his back, overly-large, a mass of warm and cold and harshness and nothing like Tammy or Mom or anything he's familiar with. His hands shake.
“Focus on the target. Keep the very tippy-top of the barrel in your sight.”
Andy snickers when Marc says 'tippy-top', and receives a harsh look for it. He quiets immediately.
“And when you're ready, pull the trigger. It's gonna kick back a little. I'll keep my hands on it at first.”
He takes a deep breath. It barely smells of cologne and sweat and days without sleep. Tin from their meals and smoke from the bonfire roaring yellow and red light across their shadows.
He pulls the trigger. The kickback is startling, as if the gun had become a vicious, live thing in his hands all of a sudden. He'd have dropped it if Marc hadn't kept his hands over his. He'd have fallen, humiliatingly, on his butt if Marc's chest isn't against his back.
Andy stills and grits his teeth. What dumb remark now? He'd fucked it up. He'd fucked it all up. “Fuck.” He whispers, his heart hammering in his chest, the gun so loud and live and unexpected in that dead-gray place. Beyond the quick and biting echo of the gunshot still sounding in his ears, he braced himself and let himself become cold even if Marc was warm and mean as the dogs and the bonfire.
“It's okay. Shit, man. Let's get this out of your hands.” Marc flipped the safety on and took the gun from him by the barrel. It was only then that Andy realized he was shaking.
A few seconds later, Andy realized Marc hadn't let go of the sharp cut of his hipbone.
He realized things by seconds, as the man's hand went down the front of his jeans that were way too big on him. One hand became two, clumsy between his legs. It didn't feel good. Didn't feel bad. Just impasse warm, just like impasse cold. Andy stared at the light of the bonfire and dug his nails into the fabric of Marc's cameo jacket sleeve. He thought he was sick, and became frightened, when his body seized up and a strangeness overcame him. Not good. Not bad. Terrifying, the way he lost himself for a minute.
He didn't know he sobbed something like a pathetic wretch of a child until Marc smoothed his sweaty hair and whispered a gruff reassurance in his ear. Marc wiped his hand on the seat of Andy's pants, a humiliating gesture.
Marc told him to 'catch some Z's' and Andy said nothing. There was nothing to say. He curled up beneath the wool blanket and felt as if he didn't have a body anymore.
There is no one to tell, so Andy says nothing. He knows, in a distant sort of way, that his Mum and Dad told him in one of their 'serious, this can save your life' talks to tell an adult if anyone touches him like that.
But the adults are all fucked. Flynn keeps Tammy away from him. The soldiers are all crude, mean sonsofbitches. The refugees don't care about anything until the rescue chopper finally comes for them.
Marc always waits for Tammy or Flynn to leave for the tent, or the cooking area, or somewhere not there. That's all that mattered. Soon enough, so do the others. Andy doesn't particularly care for the others - he tried to struggle the first time, their nails sharp and jagged and their grip on his arms, too tight, leaving the shapes of their fingertips on his skin.
“Shut up, fucking brat.” One man, gray and mean as the rest, cuffs him on the back of his head. In the daze that followed, he felt his hand shoved into the man's open trousers and bile rose when he began to rock against Andy's limp hand. His old and creaking voice whispers Tammy's name into his ear like the man's been possessed. It's over soon enough.
They laugh when Andy recoils and wipes the vicious, thick liquid on his pants leg and only succeeds in smearing it. One grabs his wrist and the back of his head and suddenly Andy's palm is in his face and he knows the smell of the gray man all too well. He gags and vomits on it and his eye stings where his wet finger accidentally touched it. It sparks tears out of instinct, rolling down his face with the water Marc unapologetically provides. Even with the smell gone and the sting gone, the stupid childish tears will not stop. He wants to sleep curled up next to Tammy again. He wants the skyrise view of damaged and abandoned Britain. When Marc checks on him with that stupid stolid look on his face and his fractured, sharp blue eyes, Andy stupidly asks him to please not leave, please, please don't leave.
The other nineteen refugees in his tent pretend to be asleep.
Marc tells him to follow. As usual, Andy does. He's too young to understand why the consequences of this place happen the way they do. He remembers the way the gray man whispered his sister's name in his ear, and he understands just a little bit more.
The tent is pitch-dark and dusty. There are crates half-empty and it smells like metal and rust. A dog barks and gunfire peppers rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat almost a song if you think about it. Then silence. He can see the whites of Marc's eyes in the darkness, before he's pulled down to lay beside him on the tarp and told to be quiet with a rough, calloused hand over his mouth and his other hand pawing without preemptive at his jeans.
In this world, you cannot scream. It will attracted the Infected.
The air was cold on his bare legs.
He could scream. He could. But then what? He remembered the way the gray man whispered Tammy's name into his ear and he saw her strong hands around Flynn's arm. He bit his lip, then his tongue, when he heard the rustle of clothes behind him and was pressed, chest-first, into the ground.
He shut his eyes and clutched the tarp between his fingers. White-knuckled like Tammy's were when they first got here. When? Days didn't seem to matter anymore.
Marc leaned over him.
“Tammy.” Andy whimpered. Just once. He was kissed almost lovingly along his back. He coughed up what he knew was saliva but felt to be pain as he was held down and his body went rigid with the sheer hurt of Marc above him.
He remembered following Flynn through the forest, remembering not to scream. Even if the Infected screamed. When they ran they screamed. Sometimes. Other times, if they ran long enough, they breathed like volcanos in your ear.
He'd always imagined it to be sulfurous, scalding hot.
Like now. Uneven, the sound of it, as Marc trembled above him and there were fingernails in his thighs. They dug in deep and his movements inside slowed. Stopped. Stilled at that awkward, humiliating moment.
He heard Marc's teeth creak and crack behind him. Heard the soft little coughs. Felt him seize and retch like a snake, and the slickness of bile and blood all along his back.
He tried to look over his shoulder. He saw red eyes and red teeth and fingernails red with his blood. They reached for him. Andy scrambled out of the way, half on his back, half on his side, half turned-around and mindless of the sudden emptiness and smell that he now knows to be sex hanging amidst the tin scent of canned food. Marc screamed and was no longer human. Andy thought he was, and never was, but this is is the truth of it all. Marc was human. And now he wasn't. All over again.
“I'm sorry.”
What-used-to-be-Marc lunged, teeth bared, fingers outstretched. Andy saw his father's face. It was an amalgam of his mind that made him sick.
Andy ran, disappearing behind the tent flap. “I'm sorry.” He had whispered, a strange thing that fear does to people. He heard the sharp crack of the tent flap open. The molten hiss of breath between broken teeth and a mouth full of blood.
He runs. They don't know, not yet, he experiences things by precious seconds he has above everyone faceless else. The familiar bonfire, the uniform tents, the soft, dry dirt on his bare feet. Screaming humans and screaming non-humans follow in his wake. He isn't as he used to be - maybe he's a demon, a bad omen, bad luck, it all unfurls behind him again and despair grips his young shoulders like his Infected father, like his deranged, poor mother, like the soldiers.
Andy gets far enough to Flynn and Tammy's tent. Tammy's eyes just begin to fill with tears, they are sunken enough to hold many tears, as she sees him, bloody and naked if his sweater had fit him right instead of reaching to his knees.
There were dogs at people's throats and refugees grabbing cheap pots and pans that will bend and nothing else against an Infected's skull. They grab the guns off unaware soldiers. Andy holds his sister's hand but does not feel it. It is calloused, yes, but they are familiar callouses. Maybe he can relearn this particular roughness in time.
The gray man is mangled and dead, slumped against the wall. Andy sees it, and nothing more.
They could see the heaving wrath of attacker and victim as silhouettes through the tents where the bonfire cracked and sputtered and flared. Red eyes will turn to them soon enough.
They used Flynn's shoulders to jump over the wall, first Tammy, then Andy, leaving red on the walls and the razors on the wall's curled silver barbed-wire crown. They see Flynn's hand, dark with a gentle, open palm reaching for purchase on the spikes of the wire.
They see it snatched away.
Tammy gives him her shoes and cannot stop crying. He doesn't ask why. She doesn't explain. She sobs when she sees the dried blood between his thighs. He refuses to let her wipe it off with the corner of her sleeve.
Flynn is not there to guide them, and it is then they finally see the world they have stepped into. It is a world of empty houses and human bones sinking into the earth. It is a silent world. A world that has learned not to scream.
They walk until they cannot feel their bodies, under the sky gray with ash.
end
Voice, Cessation
Rating: R-NC17
Character: Andy Harris (Pairing: Nothing romantic, that's for sure.)
Genre: Horror, Angst, Mindfuck. Post-Movie
Word Count: 4000+ (I MISS THOSE DAYS)
Warnings: Rape. Underage. Fucked up. You've been warned. Also - OLD, and possibly very, very bad.
Summary: Even though the infected scratch at the walls outside, Andy can't escape this new, cruel world.
Voice, Cessation
He doesn't have a body anymore.
It's easier to feel that way, when they're snarling in the dark behind him. He doesn't feel his sister's hand slacking her grip on his, colder, trembling as her breath two paces to the side. He doesn't feel the stitch in his side, the rough gloves that Flynn wears pulling him by his forearm. Flynn's hands tremble, too. He doesn't feel the strange hurt in his right eye, or the way his sneakers slip in blood and loosen with painful pebbles clattering about in there with his feet.
'Sgt. Mal Yates to Unit, do you copy? Over.'
They hear the static voice over Flynn's radio, small as it is. Not them - the infected. They howl. The sound of poor beasts.
'I repeat, Sgt. Mal Yates to Unit, do you copy? Over.'
“Copy. Oh - fuck, COPY.” Flynn gasps into the mouthpiece. “I have two survivors with me. A kid. We've caught a dozen, maybe more. Location. Over”
Nothing.
“I repeat, Location. Over.”
'We've picked up your signal, Unit. We're sending backup.'
He has his body back again, collapsing in the sparse, dry grass and dirt face first. The uniformed soldiers run in silent synchronization and the sound of automatic fire fills his ears as dirt fills his nose, his mouth.
It's the Spain refugee camp all over again, twenty pathetic, sallow people per tent, sitting dumbly on their cots, doing nothing but inhaling the smell of the chemical toilets and letting red eyes replay in the backs of their brains.
There is a high, brick wall, ending suddenly in the jagged loops of barbed wire. There are armored vehicles and snipers behind sandbags. There are men with big, mean dogs patrolling the cramped grounds behind those barbed-wire walls. There were the cold showers, the smell of bleach, of fire and ash as their clothes went up in smoke with other odds-and-ends in a giant, neverending bonfire. They stood there, naked and cold, as women once fat and now skin and bones and hollowly sweet hunted for something for them to wear.
Maybe if he could be like Flynn, who put up a mask face and ignored the openness of bare skin. Tammy shivered and wrapped her skinny, soft arms around her soft chest and crossed her thighs and set her jaw. He should've covered her. He crossed his hands in front of himself and hid his bareness instead, and stared resolutely at the dirt between his toes.
There is the rough texture of handwashed, half-dried clothing. Flynn has gone to the Major's private tent in military uniform a size too small. There is food that tastes of the thin, tin plates they eat from. The words spoken between people might as well be silence. They are there - to the refugees, they are not, or they are, or most likely, it doesn't matter.
He and Tam eat in silence.
Then, even the sound of breathing stops.
A dog barks in the distance. Someone shrieks - someone who was once human. There is the staccato sound of gunfire. If they listened close enough, and they did, the distinctive, wet sound of a body - not human, not human - hitting the dirt. Draped, in reality, over the bones of its kin who were foolish enough to attack the wall crowned with barbed wire.
The men laugh and it is a sound as ugly as the sky gray with ash. As harsh as the bark of a dog who was trained to kill. Tammy wraps her skinny arms around his head, pushing his cheek in, and holds him to her chest. He lets her, but he stopped reaching for her hand somewhere between District 1 and their dad.
They are not stupid enough to sigh in relief when the sounds cease.
Without comment, the other refugees begin to eat again, their conversations and the clank of tin dinnerwear the same damn thing. A soldier marches past and shoulders his gun proudly, arrogantly, and it is horribly awkward on him. Andy's too tired to feel his heart sink at the reminder of Sgt. Doyle and his cheeky, foolish wink before everything went up in flames.
He doesn't like the way that solider, awkward, boisterous, looks at his sister. He far from understands it, but he does not like it. He stares back with his blue eye and his strange eye.
He smells Flynn before he hears him, lingering diesel fuel and gunpowder residue marking his name before Andy's closed eyes.
“Be quiet and listen to me.” Flynn says in a hushed voice, that matter-of-face voice, they train them to sound secure like that but Andy knows the truth. He sees it in the way Flynn's dry lips are pushed together as if he wants to throw up but cannot.
Still, they both nod dumbly. Wide awake, because they never really sleep.
“Tammy has to sleep in my cot from now on.” He seems to hessetate and his fingers twitch on the hip pocket where his babygirl's picture is stored. But that is a picture, and Andy's mismatched eyes are different from his babygirl's in ways coming-of-age stories can only dream of. “I told them Tammy is my wife. Otherwise the men here will do very bad things to her. Do you understand?”
Tammy clutches the dull aluminum edge of the cot until her pale hands turn knuckle-white. Her jaw is set but her throat trembles as she nods and says nothing - there is nothing to say, except “It'll be okay. Be brave.” Whispered in Andy's hair with a kiss to his forehead and she follows Flynn out the tent. Andy sees her timidly wrap her hands around his large, strong arm, before the tent flap takes them away and he sees nothing but moonlight through polyester fiber.
He remembers her strong, warm hands and sees them around Flynn's arm. He remembers the ugly way the solider looked at her. He wraps himself in the wool blanket and the remaining warmth of her. 'Whatever happens' was promised in an abandoned carnival with caricatures of fanciful horses long stood still. He wakes himself just before sleep for the rest of the night, right when his mother is about to peel her face off, because he is alone and the blanket does not keep Tammy's warmth for long.
It is the morning before the sun, when the sky is light and you can see - but no true sun. Andy still hasn't spoken. He hasn't moved. His footing is unsure before his feet even meet the ground, but breakfast is a good a goal as any.
Breakfast is canned fare in tin bowls and it all tastes of metal, but it is at least, something. They are all faceless and uniform as the food, except for the soldiers who eat before their shift, who Flynn is now one of. Andy sees him smile and joke and his smile is a little too wide, his eyes a little too bright. As Flynn makes himself one of them - respected, tough, dependable, -survivor-, they sneak glances at Tammy who eats mechanically by Flynn's side.
There is one that likes to stare at her. He is young - twenty, maybe - with a jaw too square and hair too blond. He is made of angles and roughness, and his blue eyes are mean as a dog's bite. He catches Andy watching and watches right back.
Andy will not look away.
Neither will he. He takes a bite of the canned stew and his sharp, stained teeth bite very, very hard. As if he wants to bite into Andy's face and take away his eyes - but only infected do that. He chews with an open mouth and lets Andy see the gravy-covered tongue behind his teeth.
Andy does not like the way he looks at him. He stares back, with his blue eye, and his strange eye.
Perhaps in stories Tammy would sneak into his tent in the dead of night, like when he was five and she was ten, and he was still terrified to sleep alone in his over-decorated bedroom so very fucking long ago.
But she does not. Flynn maybe keeps her from doing so - Andy is convinced of it, his mouth tasting the bitterness of the ash in the sky. She sneaks little smiles to him across the campgrounds, and stays with the other women who are mourning loss and angry at the apparent youth she, in truth, no longer has. Her pretty blue eyes are as sunken as everyone else's.
No one speaks to him. They are always a body's length away, even though reason tells them he is safe. They have seen the scabbing, scarring mark on his shoulder when he stood naked in the cold. Flynn told them it was an accident, a tumble, a fall, he had enough scratches and bruises to make it believable.
They believed him. After all, he wasn't raging, red-eyed. But they still kept away.
Maybe he hates them for that, as he lies in his cot, alone, in the tent, staring at the light through polyester fibers. Maybe he cannot find it within himself to hate the black scabs scattering themselves over his shoulder like freckles on a painting's child, because it is his last memory of dad.
“Damn him.” He hisses bitterly into the thin pillow beneath his cheek.
He curses in his thoughts now, and mutters them beneath his breath, without the childish thrill of rebellion. Words like 'damn' and 'shit' and 'fuck' are a part of his vocabulary now, no longer adventurous in their spoken state, drab as the cameo tents all lined up on their pickets. There is no one to rebel against. No one who'd really care if he said those things, anyway.
Tammy still smiles at him across the campgrounds.
Then she stops, because the soldiers have noticed. Flynn has told her in a quick hissed whisper in her ear that made her look away quickly and turn that soft smile into an impasse line of her lips that kissed his forehead when he first saw their mother peal her face off in his dreams, high up in that loft and the lie that was District 1.
But it is too late, and the men tease him relentlessly about it. Seated, comfortably, an arm's length away.
They say mean things, things that make his insides grow cold and his stomach coil in knots, like “Have you peeked on her?” and “Give her a kiss and a pat, but make sure Flynn doesn't see you.”
They also say things that make his fingers twitch and his brow furrow and his teeth grind, like “No woman goes for pale little boys. Not when she's got our boy Flynn.” 'Our boy Flynn', because Flynn has become one of them, with his sharp shots and his mechanic's brain and his rowdy, too-bright smile. They said something rather gross about his penis and Flynn's penis that he didn't quite get and didn't want to think too much about. “No woman goes for little boys, 'specially not if they look like girls!”
The refugee women look upon the soldiers with concealed disapproval, too scared in their own skins to say much or let anyone see much. As those men who've become un-human to kill the Infected and face those red eyes every day laugh and laugh in a sound that isn't like any laughter Andy has heard before, he finally snaps and yells “She's my sister, you disgusting wankers!”
Flynn isn't there to hear him. Neither is Tammy. They make more jokes that Andy doesn't understand - why the hell can't he understand? - and they push each other and he does not like the way they look at him. There's too many of them, too loud, and that stupid man with those stupid, mean eyes keeps staring at him, blue eyes skimming up and down.
Andy leaves, into the tent, letting the flap fall behind him. For some reason, the soldiers only laugh more.
It's as if his confusion turned them rabid. They walk by him, closer. Stand, closer. It happens in a matter of days, until he can feel the heat of their skin through their uniforms and his old knitted sweater into the chill of his bones.
It only serves to make him colder.
It's as if they're testing something, as they stare down at him and he stares squarely ahead, jaw set so hard his teeth ache. There is a moment of tension, of silence, where he can feel their eyes as bright and demonic as any Infected person's. Then they might catch the eye of another man, or he might finally turn away and walk, and that laughter-that-isn't would bloom like a thorny patch in dry sand and the women would purse their lips when the men cannot see.
Andy doesn't notice they only do this when Tammy or Flynn isn't looking. He's stopped looking for them days ago. He is alone in that world of vicious uniformed packs and fragmented humans who used to belong to family, friends, co-workers, other survivors. They are, essentially, surrounded and alone.
It comes as a surprise, then, one day after another day the same day of the giant bonfire and grey ash sky, that the man with mean blue eyes speaks to him. Sitting beside him on the rickety wooden bench, casual as a long-forgotten normal.
“You know how to shoot?”
It's so very sporadic that Andy blinks and something of the old him left that wondered at Scarlett's dog tags and laughed shyly with the long-gone adults of District 1 practically perks up, sits up and begs. He's still too young to kill it beneath the mask that everyone else wears. He hasn't the heart to.
“What do you mean?” He is painfully aware of his stupidity. It turns his open eyes and open words into introversion as quick as a coin flipped with a bullet.
“A gun?” The man doesn't mince words. But at least he's talking. It isn't Tammy, or even Flynn. It isn't Doyle or Scarlett or even Jules and Amanda and Chrissy from school way back in Britian or Mrs. Krestler or great-aunt Missy on dad's side he only saw once or twice or Dad or MOM -
He shakes his head mutely. His throat hurts, like it did when Dad bit him and he fell to the cold, dusty concrete with blood raining on his face.
The man gives a low whistle. “That's bullshit.” He says in such a way that Andy can believe, yes, it is bullshit. “We need you kids to know how to defend yourselves.”
Andy nods like a well-trained parrot.
“Let's go.”
And he follows. Like an idiot, against Tammy's advise and Flynn's warning and the caution his Mum and Dad hammered into him since he could walk. He followed.
The man's name is Marc. With a 'c', not a fucking 'k'.
The shooting range is little more than a sheet of plywood with the crude shape of a man drawn with coal from the fire.
He's a United States Marine. Seven years in the military. Twenty-Five Years Old.
The .9 mm feels heavier in Andy's hands than he thought it would. TV made it seem so easy. Andy can see how it can fast become a reassuring weight.
He's got a wife and a newborn baby he's never seen at home. Andy tries not to think about dad, and mum, and their little suburban house with pictures he drew when he was seven still on the fridge. Maybe.
“Here is the safety. You push it down - like this - when you want to fire it.” Marc's hands are rough and harsh over his, cold like the rest of the world that has narrowed and choked down to the inside of the walls crowned with barbed wire.
“Wait.”
He waits. Marc is pressed against his back, overly-large, a mass of warm and cold and harshness and nothing like Tammy or Mom or anything he's familiar with. His hands shake.
“Focus on the target. Keep the very tippy-top of the barrel in your sight.”
Andy snickers when Marc says 'tippy-top', and receives a harsh look for it. He quiets immediately.
“And when you're ready, pull the trigger. It's gonna kick back a little. I'll keep my hands on it at first.”
He takes a deep breath. It barely smells of cologne and sweat and days without sleep. Tin from their meals and smoke from the bonfire roaring yellow and red light across their shadows.
He pulls the trigger. The kickback is startling, as if the gun had become a vicious, live thing in his hands all of a sudden. He'd have dropped it if Marc hadn't kept his hands over his. He'd have fallen, humiliatingly, on his butt if Marc's chest isn't against his back.
Andy stills and grits his teeth. What dumb remark now? He'd fucked it up. He'd fucked it all up. “Fuck.” He whispers, his heart hammering in his chest, the gun so loud and live and unexpected in that dead-gray place. Beyond the quick and biting echo of the gunshot still sounding in his ears, he braced himself and let himself become cold even if Marc was warm and mean as the dogs and the bonfire.
“It's okay. Shit, man. Let's get this out of your hands.” Marc flipped the safety on and took the gun from him by the barrel. It was only then that Andy realized he was shaking.
A few seconds later, Andy realized Marc hadn't let go of the sharp cut of his hipbone.
He realized things by seconds, as the man's hand went down the front of his jeans that were way too big on him. One hand became two, clumsy between his legs. It didn't feel good. Didn't feel bad. Just impasse warm, just like impasse cold. Andy stared at the light of the bonfire and dug his nails into the fabric of Marc's cameo jacket sleeve. He thought he was sick, and became frightened, when his body seized up and a strangeness overcame him. Not good. Not bad. Terrifying, the way he lost himself for a minute.
He didn't know he sobbed something like a pathetic wretch of a child until Marc smoothed his sweaty hair and whispered a gruff reassurance in his ear. Marc wiped his hand on the seat of Andy's pants, a humiliating gesture.
Marc told him to 'catch some Z's' and Andy said nothing. There was nothing to say. He curled up beneath the wool blanket and felt as if he didn't have a body anymore.
There is no one to tell, so Andy says nothing. He knows, in a distant sort of way, that his Mum and Dad told him in one of their 'serious, this can save your life' talks to tell an adult if anyone touches him like that.
But the adults are all fucked. Flynn keeps Tammy away from him. The soldiers are all crude, mean sonsofbitches. The refugees don't care about anything until the rescue chopper finally comes for them.
Marc always waits for Tammy or Flynn to leave for the tent, or the cooking area, or somewhere not there. That's all that mattered. Soon enough, so do the others. Andy doesn't particularly care for the others - he tried to struggle the first time, their nails sharp and jagged and their grip on his arms, too tight, leaving the shapes of their fingertips on his skin.
“Shut up, fucking brat.” One man, gray and mean as the rest, cuffs him on the back of his head. In the daze that followed, he felt his hand shoved into the man's open trousers and bile rose when he began to rock against Andy's limp hand. His old and creaking voice whispers Tammy's name into his ear like the man's been possessed. It's over soon enough.
They laugh when Andy recoils and wipes the vicious, thick liquid on his pants leg and only succeeds in smearing it. One grabs his wrist and the back of his head and suddenly Andy's palm is in his face and he knows the smell of the gray man all too well. He gags and vomits on it and his eye stings where his wet finger accidentally touched it. It sparks tears out of instinct, rolling down his face with the water Marc unapologetically provides. Even with the smell gone and the sting gone, the stupid childish tears will not stop. He wants to sleep curled up next to Tammy again. He wants the skyrise view of damaged and abandoned Britain. When Marc checks on him with that stupid stolid look on his face and his fractured, sharp blue eyes, Andy stupidly asks him to please not leave, please, please don't leave.
The other nineteen refugees in his tent pretend to be asleep.
Marc tells him to follow. As usual, Andy does. He's too young to understand why the consequences of this place happen the way they do. He remembers the way the gray man whispered his sister's name in his ear, and he understands just a little bit more.
The tent is pitch-dark and dusty. There are crates half-empty and it smells like metal and rust. A dog barks and gunfire peppers rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat almost a song if you think about it. Then silence. He can see the whites of Marc's eyes in the darkness, before he's pulled down to lay beside him on the tarp and told to be quiet with a rough, calloused hand over his mouth and his other hand pawing without preemptive at his jeans.
In this world, you cannot scream. It will attracted the Infected.
The air was cold on his bare legs.
He could scream. He could. But then what? He remembered the way the gray man whispered Tammy's name into his ear and he saw her strong hands around Flynn's arm. He bit his lip, then his tongue, when he heard the rustle of clothes behind him and was pressed, chest-first, into the ground.
He shut his eyes and clutched the tarp between his fingers. White-knuckled like Tammy's were when they first got here. When? Days didn't seem to matter anymore.
Marc leaned over him.
“Tammy.” Andy whimpered. Just once. He was kissed almost lovingly along his back. He coughed up what he knew was saliva but felt to be pain as he was held down and his body went rigid with the sheer hurt of Marc above him.
He remembered following Flynn through the forest, remembering not to scream. Even if the Infected screamed. When they ran they screamed. Sometimes. Other times, if they ran long enough, they breathed like volcanos in your ear.
He'd always imagined it to be sulfurous, scalding hot.
Like now. Uneven, the sound of it, as Marc trembled above him and there were fingernails in his thighs. They dug in deep and his movements inside slowed. Stopped. Stilled at that awkward, humiliating moment.
He heard Marc's teeth creak and crack behind him. Heard the soft little coughs. Felt him seize and retch like a snake, and the slickness of bile and blood all along his back.
He tried to look over his shoulder. He saw red eyes and red teeth and fingernails red with his blood. They reached for him. Andy scrambled out of the way, half on his back, half on his side, half turned-around and mindless of the sudden emptiness and smell that he now knows to be sex hanging amidst the tin scent of canned food. Marc screamed and was no longer human. Andy thought he was, and never was, but this is is the truth of it all. Marc was human. And now he wasn't. All over again.
“I'm sorry.”
What-used-to-be-Marc lunged, teeth bared, fingers outstretched. Andy saw his father's face. It was an amalgam of his mind that made him sick.
Andy ran, disappearing behind the tent flap. “I'm sorry.” He had whispered, a strange thing that fear does to people. He heard the sharp crack of the tent flap open. The molten hiss of breath between broken teeth and a mouth full of blood.
He runs. They don't know, not yet, he experiences things by precious seconds he has above everyone faceless else. The familiar bonfire, the uniform tents, the soft, dry dirt on his bare feet. Screaming humans and screaming non-humans follow in his wake. He isn't as he used to be - maybe he's a demon, a bad omen, bad luck, it all unfurls behind him again and despair grips his young shoulders like his Infected father, like his deranged, poor mother, like the soldiers.
Andy gets far enough to Flynn and Tammy's tent. Tammy's eyes just begin to fill with tears, they are sunken enough to hold many tears, as she sees him, bloody and naked if his sweater had fit him right instead of reaching to his knees.
There were dogs at people's throats and refugees grabbing cheap pots and pans that will bend and nothing else against an Infected's skull. They grab the guns off unaware soldiers. Andy holds his sister's hand but does not feel it. It is calloused, yes, but they are familiar callouses. Maybe he can relearn this particular roughness in time.
The gray man is mangled and dead, slumped against the wall. Andy sees it, and nothing more.
They could see the heaving wrath of attacker and victim as silhouettes through the tents where the bonfire cracked and sputtered and flared. Red eyes will turn to them soon enough.
They used Flynn's shoulders to jump over the wall, first Tammy, then Andy, leaving red on the walls and the razors on the wall's curled silver barbed-wire crown. They see Flynn's hand, dark with a gentle, open palm reaching for purchase on the spikes of the wire.
They see it snatched away.
Tammy gives him her shoes and cannot stop crying. He doesn't ask why. She doesn't explain. She sobs when she sees the dried blood between his thighs. He refuses to let her wipe it off with the corner of her sleeve.
Flynn is not there to guide them, and it is then they finally see the world they have stepped into. It is a world of empty houses and human bones sinking into the earth. It is a silent world. A world that has learned not to scream.
They walk until they cannot feel their bodies, under the sky gray with ash.
end