Chapter Text
The ground is cold and hard under Rey’s injured foot. Clay, damp, forms to the shapes of her toes as she presses her weight onto the ailing appendage; it throbs at the pressure and she hisses, pressing the heel of her hand to her mouth. She can still hear the hordes behind her, shambling and growling as they pick through the thick mud and cattails of the marsh. She’s safe from the immediate danger for now; she’d had to swim across a river to get to the tree she currently leans against, and she knows for a fact that they can’t swim. Even if one did manage to bob its way across the current the rest of the horde is unlikely to follow, and taking out a straggler is easy.
But she has more immediate concerns now; she lost a boot to the swamp while she was running and then her left foot had caught on some sort of rusted industrial equipment on her way across the river. The skin on the top looks road rashed, scraped to hell and bleeding. It’s covered in mud, an infection risk for sure, and she doesn’t even want to think about the possibility of tetanus. Her ankle is already starting to swell, she can see the blue black bruises of a sprain beginning to paint their way across the surface of her dirty skin. She bites down hard on her lip to keep from crying out in frustration; this is probably the thing that will kill her--if the infection doesn’t do her in then the lockjaw will--but she isn’t going to give in so easily. If she’s going to die it’s going to be with more dignity than this; soaked to the bone and shivering like a wet cat, pupils still blown wide with adrenaline from a near miss with the horde. No, she’ll die in relative comfort if she has any say in the matter. Preferably tucked safely away in the CDC, in Atlanta. She’s so close.
She manages to finagle her bag from over her shoulders and it lands on the ground beside her with a heavy thump. She picks through it, tossing away the items that have taken on water damage; including a half eaten sleeve of saltine crackers. If she were of weaker constitution she might cry over that, the loss of her best food. But she lets them go gracefully and continues to dig around until she finds her ziplock bag of medical supplies. She sighs with relief to find that the seal is still in tact and the items inside are mercifully dry. Most of her elements are crude, basic things scavenged from cob webbed toiletry cabinets in long abandoned and picked over homes; no neosporin or peroxide, just iodine, no antibacterial dressings, just a basic gauze and a small roll of electrical tape. She reaches for her canteen, unclipping it from her belt and reluctantly unscrewing the lid. She hates wasting fresh water, but she doesn’t have much of a choice. She is about to tip the container over her wound when she thinks to press the collar of her jacket into her mouth. She can’t afford for any undesirables to hear her crying out in agony and hunting her down; and the hordes follow sound.
Once the river drenched rag is pressed firmly into her gullet she tips the canister ever so slightly over her foot and bites back a sob at the sensation. It’s cold against her ragged, hot skin but it still burns like hell. After she’s cleared away most of the dirt she pats it dry with a bit of gauze and then moves on to what she knows will be the most unbearable part, the iodine.
Heaviest of the stable halogens, symbol ‘I’, atomic number 53, atomic weight 126.904. Basic things she learned in her intro to chemistry class, all she knows about the staining liquid besides it’s tendency to kill the fuck out of pathogens. Should she pour it directly over the wound? Spread it onto the gauze? She doesn’t know, so she takes her best guess and grabs the bottle. She repeats the mantra to herself over and over again as she pops the cap. Heaviest of the stable halogens, symbol ‘I’, atomic number 53, atomic weight 126.904. Tips the bottle over her foot. Heaviest of the stable halogens, symbol ‘I’, atomic number 53, atomic weight 126.904. And squeezes. Heaviest of the stable halogens, symbol ‘I’, atomic number 53, atomic weight 126.904!
This time she doesn’t just cry out against the rough dirty fabric of her coat, she shrieks. She drops the bottle and gropes at the hard clay of the earth around her as her foot burns. She squeezes her eyes shut and writhes, tears roll down her face and she wonders briefly if she should have just let the damned thing fester.
Once the white hot pain has begun to fade she manages to tighten the cap back onto the iodine and find her gauze and electrical tape. She wraps it tightly, grimacing as the fabric presses on her wound; but it's nowhere near the level of pain disinfecting had caused, so she grinds her teeth and bears it. Once it’s tightly wrapped in several layers of clean white cotton, she takes the black electrical tape and wraps it around her foot haphazardly several times, following no distinguishable pattern. Rey observes her handy work and scowls, it’s certainly no medic’s job; but it’ll do until she can find shelter and better supplies. She supposes the loss of the left boot isn’t so terrible, she wouldn’t be able to wear it anyway with the way her ankle is swelling, and it would’ve been one more thing she had to carry on a bum leg.
She sits for a few peaceful moments, watching the way the sunset has begun to paint the sky in dusky pinks and oranges, catching on clouds and casting their white slopes with splashes of color. Even after the world has ended the sunset is still beautiful, she decides. She hasn’t had the time to stop and appreciate it since before the hordes came.
Eventually Rey finds the strength within herself to rise, grasping at the rough bark of the tree trunk for support. Her ankle throbs in protest, and the gauze is awkward in the arch of her foot, but she doesn’t have much choice. She’s alone in the forest, the sun is setting, and she can no longer climb a tree to shelter in for the night. She needs to keep moving, put as much distance between her and the last horde she encountered as is humanly possible. She looks around her for a solid branch to use as a walking stick, and spots one almost immediately. Propped up against the base of a large pine tree is a tall stick, several inches thick and about a foot shorter than she is. She limps over to it and takes it into her hands, putting all of the weight from the left side of her body onto it. She grins when it holds without complaint.
She’s just fished her compass from her pocket and she’s about to walk away, when she notices the suspicious lightness at her side. Her bat is missing. She panics and nearly trips over her lame foot and walking stick as she scrambles back towards the tree she had rested at.
Please let it be there. Please let it be there.
She needs that bat, it’s her only weapon. It has been her constant companion on this hell journey to nowhere in particular. And it’s there, thank God, half buried under dead leaves and pine needles, her Louisville slugger; a rusted nail hammered through the fat end of it. She leans over, groaning as her foot shifts uncomfortably in her bandages, and picks it up by the handle. She pushes it back into its place on her belt and sighs at the feel of the familiar weight on her hip.
Then she goes, moving one limb at a time. Right, branch, left. Right, branch, left. It’s painful and arduous but she manages to keep a steady pace; slow and even as the sunset casts her in its eerie light and she is left with no company but the sounds of her heavy feet on dead leaves, the agony coursing up her left leg, and her own paranoia. Every bird chirp is a bandit aiming a bead on her, every twig snap is a zombie approaching with uncharacteristic silence from behind. The evening light casts eerie shadows across the forest floor, even the smallest of trees is made a beast in its shadow, towering over her and looming like a great pillars of death, watching, waiting for her to make one more mistake. The leaves seem to whisper her name, rustling gently against one another in the most menacing way. She’s truly paranoid, she knows she is. She’s been alone for too long. Days? Weeks? Too long. But her understanding of her condition doesn’t stop her from clutching her bat in her free hand and jumping at every shifting shadow.
Once the sun has set completely and she is beset by total darkness--moonlight only breaking the dense canopy in rare spatterings of silver across the forest floor--she walks more slowly, with more caution. She can’t see much, even once her eyes have adjusted the world around her is black as pitch and she can’t afford to slip and fall; if she twists her other ankle she’s done for.
She carries on until sunrise, and then goes further. She can’t stop now, not when she’s so sure that she’s nearly there. In all the chaos of the previous day she had prioritized her destination to the back of her mind, tucked it away while she struggled against the horde and then against her own body. Now her resolve has been strengthened; she will get to Atlanta, to the Centers for Disease Control. It’s the only option she has left. It’s a far fetched idea that she has, she knows it, but she still prays that she’s right. That the hordes have thinned and the virus burned out at the epicenter of the epidemic and that she’ll find other survivors there, scientists maybe. People who understand the infection and how to combat it. But as she draws closer and closer the road has grown no less volatile, the hordes still come at regular intervals, and she is entirely alone.
She doesn’t know how long she carries on. Another day at least, she breaks the treeline halfway through the first day, and comes out on a road. She stops for brief naps during the day, snacking on some of the dried fruit that survived her impromptu swim, and then she leaves whatever burnt out car or bungalow she has taken shelter in and begins the trek anew. She does this for yet another day, but then time begins to blur. Night and day feed endlessly into one another. When exactly her foot becomes hot and the exposed skin around the bandage inflamed, she isn’t quite sure; but it happens. Infection. Despite the agony she went through to prevent it. But she’s too far gone, her brain fried in the Georgia heat, her mind muddled with fever and pain; she presses onward thoughtlessly, somewhere along the way she drops her walking stick and doesn’t bother to pick it back up, or maybe she doesn’t notice that it even fell. And then it’s raining, hard beads of water pelting her hot skin. She thinks she can hear a horde somewhere in the distance. She can’t get up to run.
Gunshots, three of them. Maybe they were aimed at her. Maybe she’s been infected, and this strange ethereal blackness that has passed over her vision is what it’s like to be one of the walking dead. Maybe she’s been dead for a long time, dead since she fled the apartment. Dead on her feet, running away from the inevitable. She decides that it’s time to sleep. The darkness overtakes her.