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Running for your life sorta loses the novelty about the seventieth time you do it.
Not that Sasha was counting-- god knows she’d have lost it so long ago it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning-- but she could still do basic math. An encounter with a zombie-hoard at least once per day multiplied by two years was enough to give her a guestimation. She doesn’t think she could pin down the exact date that she stopped panicking every time a rumble of groans sounded behind her, but she’s almost certain it was before the first year ended.
Part of her wonders if the lack of fear is a normal thing that happens when you’ve been in peril for so long, or if it’s just a her thing. She’d ask Marcy and Anne, but… well…
“Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck! Oh mother-fuck of fucking-shit!”
“My bad! My bad! My bad!”
Their continued reactions spoke for themselves.
If you’d asked thirteen-year-old Sasha if she thought her two closest friends could survive a Zombie-Apocalypse she’d have laughed in your face. Marcy would’ve tripped over the first object she came into contact with and been chum within seconds and while Anne certainly had the athletic ability to keep herself alive, she was somewhat lacking in the common-sense department.
Skip forward two years and here she is, running for her life for the nth time with her two closest idiots hot on her heels.
She still wasn’t sure how they’d done it if she were honest. Everything just kinda fell into place. One minute they were normal middle-schoolers whose main concerns were the upcoming 8th-grade dance, the next society had collapsed around them. Anne’s parents were dead, Marcy’s had completely disappeared, and Sasha was pretty sure her old man had skipped town the moment he’d smelled something even remotely rotten.
Survival was a mission best kept together, something they’d learned after a few too many close calls those first couple months after everything went to shit. (Sasha still had the scar under her left eye from a Griever that would’ve definitely killed her if Anne hadn’t decided to go after her stubborn ass. Marcy still slept with her back against a wall.)
That didn’t mean there weren’t occasions that Sasha seriously considered ditching them, if only for a few minutes of peace and quiet. (That’s a lie. Sasha would sooner close a Cruncher’s teeth over her own arm than be separated from them again. It was a promise she’d sworn to herself very late one night when Marcy’s head had fallen from its place against the brick to rest in the crook of her neck, Anne’s arms already wound around her right leg.)
Case in point: this was supposed to be a routine supply run. Anne had outgrown yet another pair of boots and Marcy was going through pairs of glasses like they were going out of style. So they were going to just pop into the old Outlet mall, nab some stuff, and get the hell out of dodge. Simple, easy, they’d done it a million times.
Then Marcy had set off a bomb.
They’d joked at least a couple of times that if they were ever in a really dire situation they could probably just bust Marcy’s skull open and it’d keep the resident Horde occupied for at least a week. She was smart. Smarter than she thinks any of them ever fully realized until she’d walked in on her sketching out blueprints for an actual fucking aeroplane they could build out of spare parts. Pipe bombs and other forms of improvised weaponry were child’s-play.
Unfortunately, that also meant that she wasn’t as careful with said improvised weaponry as a normal person would be. That was assuming, of course, there was such a thing as a normal person in a Zombie-apocalypse.
She’s getting off track.
Point is: Marcy set off a bomb and every single damn undead creature in the nearest mile radius and their mother had come running at the promise of fresh meat.
Hence their current predicament: Run.
As Sasha clears a set of half-rotted picnic tables she finds the lack of even surprise somewhat disturbing. This is just routine now. Every day. A normal daily occurrence, just as mediocre and predictable as the rising sun.
They’ll get a goal, go to complete it, something will inevitably go wrong, run for their life.
Honestly, she’s half-convinced that if everything hadn’t gone to shit they’d still find a way to end up in mortal peril on the daily. Zombies or no Zombies.
Anne grabs onto a pole, ripping it up from the pavement in a motion that is so smooth and practised Sasha would be impressed even if she didn’t get a nice view of the muscles in her right arm flexing with the strain. It twirls around her fingers almost as if it has a mind of her own before rocketing through the skull of a Devvie that might’ve once been a banker if his half-moth-eaten tie was anything to go by.
Marcy comes tumbling after, using the crumbling body of the zombie for leverage and spring-boarding off its back. One of her gloved hands wraps around a window sill and she tugs herself up by the tips of her fingers, bending back down with an outstretched hand almost immediately. Sasha jumps to catch it and gravity loses all semblance of meaning as she’s tugged up and into the air, nearly scraping the skin off of her arm as she goes rolling over the lip of the roof.
“Watch your aim, Mar-Gyver!”
A grunt answers her before another body comes careening over the roof. The last two years have been great for Anne’s height if not her coordination and so Sasha watches with more than a little amusement as four long limbs flail wildly before the Thai girl rolls past her like the world’s largest loudest tumble-weed.
“Son of a-!”
There was a time where Anne thought that swearing would result in her quick and untimely death, if not by the devil himself then by her mother with a bar of Soap that had almost gotten shoved down Sasha’s throat enough times for her to not push the issue. Now Sasha’s pretty sure that she’s made a point to make up for lost time.
Marcy scrambles up herself, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead, glasses fogged up enough that Sasha can’t help but wonder how she manages to see out of them.
The Horde lets out an unholy screech below and they all know they’ve only bought themselves a couple seconds before enough of them pile up to make the measly single-story a cakewalk.
“Got any toys?” Sasha grunts and grabs Anne by the collar, tugging her back to her feet.
Marcy wipes the lenses of her glasses on her sleeve before reaching into a pocket sewn into her elbow and tugging out what looks like a ballpoint pen rigged up to a fishing reel. Sasha decides not to ask how the hell she got that in there to begin with.
“Zip-line?” she prompts, short of breath.
Anne groans.
“I didn’t bring my gloves.”
Sasha shoots her a look.
“It’s fucking 20 degrees, Boonchuy, why the hell do you not have gloves?”
“I forgot, okay?! Jesus.”
Marcy tugs another something from her hip and clips it to the pen before tossing it into the air like a baton. It twirls once, twice, three times before giving a painful sounding shriek and shooting out in two different directions. One end impales the clock tower that was once the centre-piece of this outlet mall while the other shoots off into the distance, farther than Sasha can make out with just her eyes.
Marcy told her she probably needed to pick up a pair of glasses herself, but she wasn’t willing to admit defeat on that one yet.
“No need, I grabbed my rings this morning.” Marcy says, unbothered by Sasha and Anne’s bickering. She pulls off the aforementioned rings, spinning each so that they uncoil from themselves, expanding until they resemble carabiners more than simple pieces of jewellery. Anne unclips the cords from around her arms and hands them over without prompting, which Marcy ties into a makeshift harness in less than a second. Below, the Horde is getting louder and Sasha feels her teeth pressing together.
“You two keep working on that, I’ll keep the buggers busy.”
She gets noises of acknowledgement, but none of them quite reach a language that Sasha can recognize, and she’s learned her fair share of Mandarin and Thai. Grime unclips from her bag, the familiar weight of the bat like an old friend at this point. The name had been a joke once, a reference to the impossibility of cleaning the damn thing because how the hell do you clean a baseball bat with nails in it? Now Sasha likes to imagine it as more of a threat.
When I’m through with you, there won’t be anything left but Grime.
It’s a threat she makes good on when the first of the Devvies makes it up over the lip of the roof.
Thunk.
One down, god knows however many left to go.
They fall into a rhythm. Sasha hits, a zombie dies, Marcy and Anne bicker. It seems to be all they do these days, bicker. It’s affectionate and they’re not actually in any danger of getting mad at each other-- they’ve done enough of that to last a lifetime-- but Sasha wishes sometimes they had more to talk about. There is nothing to talk about, though. It’s not like they’re any new forms of media to get caught up on, power has been out for months now, and talking about the current state of affairs is just downright depressing. In a similar vein, serious discussions just lead to scabbed-over wounds, and there’s no sense picking at those.
So jokes. Bickering. Funny nicknames. Anything to keep them talking. Anything to stave off the silence. Anything to pretend that they have even the slightest clue what they’re doing.
They haven’t seen another human in almost six months.
The thing about Apocalypse fiction, Sasha has found, is that most of it has an ‘after’. An eventual goal the protagonists strive towards. Some sort of safe haven they’ve heard about, a cure they find, a family member they’re trying desperately to reunite with.
They don’t have any of that.
When LA fell, everything fell. There is no outside contact. No ‘safe haven’ to go to. No cure to be made. No family members they care to go looking for.
All they have is each other. All they have is today.
Sasha whacks another Devvie into the ground and spins around to clip another when she feels the shift in the air. A sudden blast of cold that can only mean one thing. A curse drops from her throat, much too gravelly to be a whisper.
“Grievers!” she shouts, and the rustling behind her doubles in intensity.
Grievers are a sort of ‘evolved’ form of zombie. Marcy said it was caused by a mutation of the initial virus, but Sasha had no idea how a simple ‘mutation’ could cause a person’s body to turn into that. Imagine a person doing a backbend, then imagine their ribs snapping outwards into straight lines, joints cracking their way into existence so you have a sort of rotting, fleshy spider of human flesh crawling towards you at max speed. Now give it the world’s largest pair of what Sasha could only think to describe as lobster claws.
You get the picture.
One Griever is usually a two-person job. Sasha can make out five scampering over the rooftops towards them. Grime suddenly feels a whole lot less like her trusted weapon and a whole lot more like a children’s toy.
“How’s the line coming?!”
“Almost done!”
One of the Grievers gives a great leap, landing no less than thirty yards away and Sasha lowers herself into a battle stance.
“Cool, just curious.”
Something curls around Sasha’s ankle and she only has a chance to shout before she’s being pulled down. The sensation of soft, squishy, rotted meat being pressed against her skin is not one she thinks she’ll ever get used to and so it is instinct alone that allows her to tear her eyes away from the Grievers in time to swing Grime into the skull of a Devvie before it gets its teeth on her. Grey matter explodes across the rooftop and Sasha scrambles backwards in her best imitation of a crab-walk. Her breath is tight in her lungs.
“Any time now would be- gah!”
Something grabs her by the hair.
Sasha kept her hair long on principle and nothing more. Marcy had always preferred hers short and Anne had lopped hers off to a more manageable length several times, the curls still more often than not acquiring new and strange accessories when they weren’t looking. Sasha kept hers long because it distinguished her. Made her pop against the increasingly grey and tan landscape that was slowly overtaking the city. (Los Angeles had been a desert long before humans settled there, after all.)
The ponytail was practicality. Keep it out of her face, all that fun stuff.
(It had nothing to do with the fond expressions she’d get from Anne and Marcy when she made a point to move her head a bit more than necessary in an argument, just to let them know she wasn’t serious.)
Now, though, she knows she’s not going to live to regret that decision. Something has got her by the ponytail and is dragging her backwards. Yanking her over like a top-heavy water bottle. She barely has time to shout before her skull makes a painful connection with the ground. Faintly she can hear the clattering, chittering noise of a Griever closing in on its prey, the great moaning shifts of the Devvies below, but the new ache between her eyes is damn near blinding. She swings, blindly, with Grime and is rewarded with nothing more than wasted breath.
A voice shouts her name and Sasha makes a point to dig in her heels, even as her body is dragged across the roof like a rag-doll. Arms grab her by the legs, a shape lands nearly atop her. A scream- or perhaps a growl?- tears from her throat and she tries again to get in a swing. Her arms are caught and pushed aside.
“Sash, it’s me!”
Anne.
She closes her eyes, pressing the lids tightly shut as the shape-- Anne-- moves over her, grabbing at the base of her ponytail and giving a few good tugs to try and get it loose from whatever Devvie got a hold of it. It’s more painful than it should be. The Devvie must be one of the ones with most of its flesh still attached: a Freshie.
Anne yelps in frustration just as Marcy shouts that the line is ready and Sasha can’t help but wonder if this is it. This is where they finally die. Two years was a pretty good run, yeah? Better than most she’d guess.
Sasha’s hair comes loose with a painful snap and she all but headbutts Anne’s shoulder, nose smashed flat against her collar bone. Arms wrap around her shoulders before she can celebrate the victory and she’s scooped up without protest.
“You got her?!”
“Just go!”
Sasha wants to throw out that she is perfectly capable of getting on the line herself, but once she manages to pull her face out of Anne’s shoulder the sunlight nearly stabs her through the eyes and right into the brain.
“Fuck!”
Anne’s grip on her shoulders is true but when one arm leaves her to wrap in the cord of the makeshift harness Sasha can’t help the doubt that swims in the pit of her stomach. Fear is an emotion that she isn’t sure if she can feel anymore, but dread it not and the several ways that this can go wrong swing through her aching head with a vengeance.
“Anne, don’t-”
“Just hold on.” She squeezes with her right arm, the left wrapped so tightly in the cord that Sasha can see the way it cuts into her flesh. Blood drips down her arm. “I got you.”
It’s all the warning that she gets before gravity takes over.
~
Consciousness comes back with an abrupt impact. The sensation of hitting something solid and flat and likely made of concrete. She doesn’t hit it hard, all things considered. Not hard enough to actually hurt herself. Just enough to jolt her. Knock the air out of her lungs. The sense back into her head.
She wakes up as her legs hit the ground and she’s treated to the world cartwheeling by as her eyes flutter open. The pile of long-since abandoned trashbags she rolls into cushions her enough that when she hits the opposing brick wall she doesn’t give herself another concussion. (or at least avoids making her current one worse). Still, it takes a couple seconds of wheezing with her legs higher than her head for things to start making sense again.
To her left, someone is laughing and she can just make out a hand sticking out of the pile of trash bags. Fingerless gloves twitch with the laughter, the small rounded fingertips just managing to poke out from the cloth.
Farther off she can hear a second set of laughter, this one raspier and choked with a breathlessness that only comes from the relief of being alive. The still lingering effects of adrenaline.
Bomb. Horde. Grievers. Zipline.
Right.
A laugh of her own wells up in her throat and, even as upside down as she is, she can’t quite find it within herself to repress it. Once it starts, though, she knows it won't stop. Not until her nerves have thoroughly and completely managed to piece themselves back together.
Another close call for the books, they really need to start counting them. Or at least make a point not to do anything too crazy for the next few days. Marcy’s heart will probably give out on them if they do.
The laughter shakes her. Forces all of her limbs into a rocking motion that is as familiar as anything else these days and she takes the opportunity to take stock of her limbs.
Some bruises on her legs and back, a couple scrapes on her arms, a new cut next to her temple, and what feels like a roadburn on the back of her neck. Not too bad, though certainly could be better. She thinks that she restocked their med-kits less than a week ago, so it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. Assuming Anne and Marce are in similar states of disrepair, of course.
The laughter runs its course, Anne and Marcy’s own petering off in tandem. Sitting up doesn’t hurt too much, the bruises along her spine only sting a little. Marcy’s right beside her, pulling flecks of what Sasha thinks is ash (when did that happen?) out of her hair. Her glasses are slightly catawampus and Sasha sticks out a finger to push the right side back down. Marcy blinks at her before offering a sheepish smile.
“Oops?” she whispers and Sasha just shakes her head.
“Fucking dumbass.”
That gets another bark of laughter out of her and something much less physical in Sasha’s chest aches.
She has a new scratch along her cheek, just underneath the place where her glasses rest, and a bruise forming underneath her jaw. It’s a good look on her, slightly roughened, and Sasha’s hand moves without her input to gently press her thumb to the scrape. The blood comes away easily, little more than a breaking of the skin.
Marcy sticks her tongue out.
“Mature.”
“Uh, guys…” Anne’s voice breaks in and Sasha whips her head around. That tone is never a good sign. It’s the ‘I don’t want to freak you out but there might be a problem’ tone. The same one that Anne used when she snapped her wrist in a tennis match back in seventh grade.
Briefly, the sight of blood dripping down Anne’s arm comes as a relief. She remembers the cord pulling taut around the appendage just before she passed out and a little tangle is something they can handle. Even if she did manage to pop it out of its socket, Marcy knows how to set bones. Sure, things would be a bit difficult for a few weeks, but they could manage.
Then, Sasha sees that the blood is coming from above the tangle of cords wrapped around Anne’s forearm. From the single hand being held aloft, just barely catching what little is left of daylight snaking through the end of the alleyway like a raven seeks out death.
The bite-mark is undeniable.
Something very cold has taken hold of Sasha’s chest.
When everything went to shit-- a day that she’d heard a lot of different names for but had yet to find one she felt truly described the absolute chaos that was society collapsing while people turned into walking corpses-- they’d all been separated at first. Just because it’d been a weekend and they’d all been in their respective homes when the news reports started coming in. It took a couple weeks to find each other again, wandering the streets and surviving on a combination of the kindness of others and their own wits. Once they had met up again, it had been quite clear that they’d each gotten a taste of just how bad things could get.
Marcy kept shooting them suspicious glares for days and Anne…
Anne wouldn’t talk. Not for a whole damn month. Even after Marcy had gotten over her whole thing, Anne kept her mouth shut. She’d never been as much of a chatterbox as Marcy-- not even close-- but she’d never been that quiet either. It’d been… eerie, to say the least.
Then they’d come across a zombie that looked a bit too much like a former classmate for their liking.
It hadn’t been a hard fight, if you could even call it that, but whatever had been keeping Anne’s mouth shut had broken in that moment. She’d spent the next half hour beating the damn thing to a bloody pulp, screaming the whole while.
It turned out that Anne had been out when everything went wrong. Picking up groceries for her parent’s Thai Food place. By the time she’d gotten back it was too late.
She never went into details, but Sasha could guess what happened.
They avoided that part of town at all costs.
Sasha’s only seen a person turn once. They found the poor guy chained to his own fence and when he saw them he only managed a hoarse, panicked shout for them to run before his eyes had rolled back into his head. Other survivors said it usually took a couple hours for the virus to fully set in. Some even claimed that if you were particularly strong you could last days.
Marcy hypothesized this was because of the virus itself taking time to get acclimated to the body and not because it hadn’t spread. The saliva is the same, she’d said, it's the blood that gets infected, that’s why they all still have it. They just gotta get their blood in you, biting is just the most efficient way to do it.
Anne’s eyes are wide. Her breath is coming in stuttering, pained gasps. Her hand is completely still, her arm hanging above her head. Tangled in that damn cord like a hanged man remains in his noose.
“I, uhm, I think my arm is broken…” she whispers. Swallows, thickly and shakily. “I can’t, uh, I can’t fe-feel it?”
Sasha can’t feel her body. She can’t feel anything. It’s like she’s sitting outside of it, outside of everything. Watching like a kid watching his favourite character die on a tv show. Helpless and upset, but ultimately worthless. There’s nothing she can do, no way to change the outcome of this.
Marcy’s voice shakes when she speaks.
“Can you move it?”
Anne blinks. Slow and uneven. Her right eye reacts before her left.
“What? I, uhm, I just,” she licks her lips, “I just said I could- er- couldn’t feel-”
“Can you move it?” Marcy repeats, steadier this time.
Again, Anne takes a second to respond.
“Uhm… I don’t… I can’t feel-”
“Anne, listen to me.” Slowly, Marcy pushes herself into a crouch. Her voice is steady, posture calm, hands raised forwards and upwards like she’s approaching a frightened animal. “You’re going into shock. This is important. I need you to tell me: can you move your arm? ”
Anne stares. And stares. And slowly shakes her head no.
The hand in the air, wrapped in the cord of the harness, remains motionless.
Marcy sighs. Some of the tension leaves her shoulders.
“Ok… good, good. This is good…” she whirls around to face Sasha and the first coherent thought to push through her brain is that she looks a hell of a lot older than fifteen. “Sasha, I need you to hold her down.”
Getting back into her body feels about the same as waking up from her impromptu nap did: colliding with a flat, hard surface.
“You need me to what?!”
“It’s cutting off the circulation,” Marcy hisses and starts pulling off her coat then, with only a hint of hesitation, tugs off her gloves as well. “The-the cord.”
“But-”
“Normally we wouldn’t have enough time,” Marcy starts rooting around the contents of her backpack for something. “But the- fuck- the blood flow is completely gone. We don’t even have to tourniquet. It’s already done.”
Sasha’s head still isn’t quite caught up with the rest of her. That cold sensation in her chest has spread all the way down to her toes.
“What are you-”
“Damn it Sasha!” Marcy throws her head back and settles her with a look that is the most manic thing she’s ever seen. “We have to cut it off!”
The words hit her like a freight train.
Anne’s eyes have gone glassy, her breath shallow and quick. Her arm still hangs in its corded cage, blood dripping down it, but just underneath what had already caked the hand Sasha can see that the fingers have turned an impressive shade of purple.
The bite is still there. Clear as day in its half-moon smile. Mocking almost.
We have to cut it off!
She feels so very cold.
“Marcy-”
“Shut the fuck up, okay?!” Marcy snaps and finally finds what she’d been looking for. The hunting knife unfolds with a click and, briefly, Sasha remembers when she’d gifted it to her for her birthday after their first year. “Just, just shut up and hold- hold her down, okay?” Her voice cracks a little.
Her hands are trembling. The blade is toothed, a saw blade. Made for cutting through the bones of particularly large game.
“Sasha.”
It takes a second for her to register that she’s shaking too.
Her head is bowed, her cheeks are wet.
Her heart has taken off at a runner’s pace and she can barely even tell if she’s breathing or not.
A hand lands atop hers.
Marcy’s eyes are still and steady. Dark and cold and sure, even as the sweat from her hand paints across her skin.
“I need you. If we don’t act quickly Anne’s going to die. I need your help, can you do that for me?”
Sasha thinks if she moves she’ll crack apart. Little more than ice, than glass. Shattering the moment any sort of pressure is applied.
She nods.
Marcy sucks in a breath.
“Okay.” Her grip tightens and Sasha’s not sure if it’s to reassure her or herself.
She directs her attention back to Anne.
“Anne, you still with me?”
There’s a beat. Then a slow, almost dreamlike nod. Like Anne isn’t quite sure if her body will react to her or not. Like all of her movements aren’t her own.
Sasha feels much the same.
“Ok, I need you to stay awake. Can you do that for me?”
Another nod, this one a bit more sure than the last.
“Good.”
Marcy’s hand releases Sasha’s and the absence of its warmth is colder than anything she’s ever felt.
“Sasha, I’m gonna cut the cord from the line, be ready to catch her.”
It’s a bit like playing a videogame. One of those weird ones where the controls are all wonky for added difficulty. She moves her left leg, then her right, then her left again. Over and over until she’s at Anne’s side, gently placing her arms beneath Anne’s armpits. Anne doesn’t so much as twitch at the contact. Her skin is slick with sweat.
The cord snaps beneath Marcy’s knife like nothing and Anne’s weight is in her hands almost instantaneously. There is no resistance in her body as she lays her down, clutches her right wrist in her own and settles herself atop her abdomen. Anne’s eyes stare sightlessly past her, settling on the sky. It would be worse if she couldn’t feel her stuttering breath beneath her. Marcy breathes.
“Ok, good. Good, now we just have to…” she trails off and Sasha knows what comes next.
“Keep her still.”
It’s all the warning she gets.
Later, after the screaming has stopped. After the wound has been wrapped. After the scent of iron has sunken so deep into everything Sasha doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to smell anything else again, Marcy will collapse. Her eyes will roll back into her head and she’ll slump to the ground, exhaustion and stress having pushed her to the breaking point.
Later, Sasha will sit in that alleyway surrounded by the limp bodies of her two closest friends and silently cry as the reality of what they’ve just done tries its hardest to crystalize into something she can wrap her head around. She will tremble and shake and clutch onto both of her friends with hands that feel much too small, much too fragile, much too childish to actually keep a grip on anything even remotely important. She’ll stare at the waning sunlight as the world continues to grow dark, winter chill turning every wet, sticky, iron stain into something to fear not just because of where it comes from.
Much, much later, when Sasha’s standing in the bathroom of one of their many safehouses, she’ll laugh. Humans laugh for many reasons, reasons far beyond that of amusement or joy. It’s just like crying, afterall. A release of emotions. That’s why the two go hand in hand so often. When people get overwhelmed they laugh. They cry. They throw up and curl into a ball. They shout, scream, pound on the walls. They tear at their surroundings, their belongings, their companions, themselves. They become hurricanes of destruction. Unmitigated and uncontrolled.
She will laugh, she’ll cry, she’ll scream, she’ll beat her fists against the walls until they are raw and bloody. Until she can’t physically force any more sound from her throat. Until her clothes are ripped within an inch of their lives and her reflection is staring back at her with bloodshot eyes, bared teeth, and hair that is much too short to ever be used as leverage again.
Eventually, she will come out of that bathroom, wrapped in a towel and still dripping from a shower where the water ran so hot her skin is still raw from scrubbing. She’ll settle at the end of the bed, staring at her two idiots as they slumber on. Marcy’s head tucked into the juncture between Anne’s jaw and collarbone, Anne’s arm wound around her waist, the other hanging off the bed in its heavily gauze-wrapped glory.
For now: Sasha doesn’t move.
She doesn’t move a single muscle, doesn’t allow herself the satisfaction, the relief that it would give. She keeps every single fibre of her being still, taut, controlled.
Even as Anne tries her hardest to thrash beneath her.
Even as she can feel the cool sting of metal tearing through skin. Even as she can feel that raw, wet, stickiness coating the skin between her thumb and forefinger.
She does not move. She cannot move.
She has to keep her still.
Steel scraping against bone is a jarring sensation, even when it isn’t happening beneath your own skin. It’s almost as if it is, though. She can feel the sensation rattling up her bones from where they’re laid over Anne’s. Feel each time the serrated blade catches and pulls, flecks of bone being forced out of the way to make room for more steel. Anne screams again, though she never stopped after that first downward stroke. It’s like a powerwasher against her ears, pulsating through into her brain and then out the other side. There’s no escape, no relief, no way to hide.
Each scream is almost worse than the blood, than the bone, than everything else. Anne’s eyes are pressed shut and Sasha can’t help but be grateful because she doesn’t think she could handle the look in them if they opened. Doesn’t think she could stand being looked at as they do this.
As Marcy ploughs through Anne’s wrist bones like a woman on a mission. As each stroke is completed with deadly accuracy and without a hint of hesitation. Her face is covered with blood, her hands slick with the stuff, but she keeps going. Keeps sawing. Keeps moving even as Anne begs for them to stop. Pleads nonsensical and wordless. Screams endlessly into the waning sunlight.
Sasha doesn’t move. Not even when the tears finally make it past her chin to land on Anne’s sweat-soaked face.
~
“Sash…” the voice is small. Gravelly and hoarse. Little more than a whisper, but it tugs Sasha from her uneasy doze like a fishing wire.
The world feels fuzzy. Wavy and distant. Like tv static coming through a phone receiver. Not quite real, not quite solid.
“Hmmn?” she hums, struggling to blink the sleep from her eyes.
“...what happened to your hair?” The voice rasps and vaguely Sasha realizes her head does feel lighter than usual.
“Scissors…” she grumbles back and rolls over a bit in bed. A warm body is beside her, likely the owner of the soft voice.
“...not… what I meant…”
Sasha huffs, still too tired to try and piece together a more coherent response and settles for grabbing the warm body and bringing it in close. A second one makes a little grunt at being displaced and Sasha takes a moment to tug it closer as well.
For a moment they remain there, silent and still in the warmth of each other’s bodies. Then the closer of the two lets out a sigh and presses in closer. It tickles a little when a nose presses against the underside of her jaw.
“We’re talking ‘bout this…” a yawn wracks their body and Sasha can’t help but smile a little at the feeling. “Later…”
“MmHm,” she hums back and receives another sigh in reply. The third body reaches over the second, curling a hand in the fabric of Sasha’s shirt.
The world still feels wrong. Distant. Dismal. Just the slightest bit off-kilter. But this, here, now, the two bodies pressed in close? This feels right. The scents are familiar, the sensations are nice, everything is ok. Everything will be alright.
Probably.
She hopes.