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Feet pounding on concrete. Wind whipping past. Burning legs. Gasping for air.
Oppressive darkness. Prey caught in a corner.
The night air is sharp against Shawn's throat, grating and cold as he pants, pushing his back into the bricks behind him. They catch on his shirt and dig into his skin. His heart is nearly bursting out of his chest. He’s hyperaware of the way the shapes of the city, barely recognizable in the absence of electricity and moonlight, seem to seethe around them in a kind of nauseating, terrifying dirge.
"Where's the map?" He whispers hoarsely.
Lassiter wheezes as silently as he can, hands on his knees. "I dropped it while we were running. Damn it. Damn it all to Hell." His head is hung low. There's penitence written plainly in every line on his face.
Shawn turns away, baring his teeth in frustration, and whisper-shouts his fury into the wall. He doesn't kick it, because it would make too much noise.
Somehow they’ve wandered into one of the most populated parts of the city. It’s not either of their faults—maybe the map was wrong, or outdated, or maybe the street signs had simply been stolen and never replaced. He digresses. This is perhaps the stupidest mistake they’ve ever made, and certainly the most dangerous, despite their respective careers. Losing one’s way in the zombie apocalypse was just something that you could not do. Yet they’d done it. And it seems there’s a zombie round every curve, lurking in every crevasse; the ones behind them only stir up the others ahead, alerting them of their presence in advance. Growing the horde.
Shawn speaks again, forcing his mind to ignore the encroaching terror and work. "Okay, we need to. We need," he presses two fingers to his temples, desperately wracking his brain for the glimpses he needs to put a mental image together. Fright runs circles around his recollection.
Seeing him do this, Lassiter undulates his hands out in front of him in a sort of desperate exasperation and bares his teeth in a grimace, eyes widening. The vein on his right temple stands out proudly. "Not this bullshit, not now," he seethes, cursing himself for allowing himself to end up in this situation.
A zombie croaks in the distance, barely audible. They flinch, whipping their heads towards the sound.
"We need to run again!" He hisses, grabbing Shawn's shoulder. "They're going to catch up, come on!"
"We don't know where we're going! We could be heading straight into a horde—"
"There's a horde behind us! Would you rather stay here?" The snarls are louder now. Closer.
Shawn runs a hand through his matted hair. Makes a decision.
They sprint.
Shawn thinks.
Right, left, left, right. Through, across. Right, left. They snake in between the buildings, ruinous and grim and menacing. Through the maze-like apparatus of the city, wooden beams across doors and windows. He recognizes this road, he knows its shape… remembers this curve, that street sign. The red and green lines of two intersecting roads. They flash before his eyes, fractions making a whole.
And suddenly he knows. Understands. He tilts his head up in desperation. Oh, they fucked up. He knows where they're going. What they're going towards.
"Lassie!" Careful not to shout, but he needs his attention yesterday.
Lassiter turns, slowing to a jog. “What—”
Shawn cuts him off, the words retching up ugly from his throat. “Stadium. Ahead. Center of—” He heaves a guttural cough, doubling over. “Center of the city.”
The sable of night and the head-spinning queasiness of marathon doesn’t do a damn thing to mask the instantaneous pallor of Lassiter’s face.
“Oh, shitting hell—”
“Yep.”
“Son of a bitch. ”
They can hear more noises now, both behind and ahead of them, and to their right as well. The chittering of teeth, the tenuous sound of glass shifting under feet, the curious calls of the undead to their fellows. Shawn doesn’t think he’s ever been more scared. Not when the zombies crashed through the front doors of the station, not since Yang kidnapped his mother two years ago. Those times, he had options: places to run, people to fall back on, anything. Everyone. But now he stands in a street with the only other person still alive in the world and he has no idea where to go or how to keep him safe and he can see them clearly now, the horde from behind and the horde forming ahead, he can see their staring faces and they’re hungry and they’re hungry and they’re hungry and
“I’m sorry. Fuck, I don’t know what to do. I don’t—I’m sorry. Lassie?” He says, voice weak. “Lassie?”
He turns, but Lassiter is already grabbing his forearm and dragging him into the alleyway to their left. His heart skips a beat as he’s led blindly into the opening between buildings, more adrenaline than he thinks is probably healthy coursing through his system. They dodge a single zombie, hunched on the ground in a heap, startled into awareness. It raises its disgusting maw up after them, and its tendons strain to give chase, but its torso ends midway down and the best it can manage is a wet hiss. They’re already too far down the alley to even begin to bother giving it a second thought.
Shawn gasps when he sees it. Literally, audibly gasps—dropped jaw and all. Of course, leave it to Lassie—beautiful, beautiful genius Lassie, to find the one fucking dumpster in Santa Barbara he didn’t already know about. Why he knew the location of every dumpster in his city, well—he—they—he shoves the thought away almost as violently as Lassiter shoves him up and through the lid of the stinking thing. His back lands softly on a decomposed trash bag, elbow squishing into something that smells sort of like squid, and a moment later Lassiter lands heavily on top of him. What little air he had left swiftly exits his lungs, and he chokes for a moment, before the other man lifts himself shakily off and to the side.
“Holy mother of—” He’s about to say holy mother of bacon, egg and cheese McMuffins because this experience will most likely haunt him for the rest of his days and he needs a joke right now, but Lassie’s hand rockets up so quickly he’s barely got the first syllable of bacon out before his sentence is cut prematurely short.
He can’t see him, but psychic or not, he can just feel that the other man’s eyes are boring into his. The hand is followed with a sharp shushing sound, and Shawn decides that, of all the perilous moments in his life, this is probably the singular one in which he really should not run his mouth. He nods, and Lassie’s hand retreats warily.
It turns out to be a great decision on his part, because at that moment, the sound of groaning zombies reaches their ears, steadily growing louder as both hordes combine and begin lumbering down the alleyway. They seem almost confused, lost—wandering madly through the dark after prey that they could no longer see. It’s not long before they’re all standing aimlessly outside of the dumpster. Like dumb mosquitoes they swarm for blood; every minute or so, one will wander into the side or the front of the bin, startling them with a soft thump and the clicking of teeth as its jaws work around nothing. They never know which side it will come from, or when, or how loud. It’s a concerted effort, Shawn believes, on both of their parts, to keep still and not rustle any of the trash bags when the noises interrupt the thick air. He remembers, numbly, something he’d seen on the internet as a kid, back when his dad still let him have unrestricted access to the family computer. Chinese water torture.
They settle in for the night. There will be no rest.
Lassiter shudders out another breath, feeling a bit lightheaded. Every exhale must be perfectly silent—a massive difficulty in the incredibly claustrophobic space. The walls seem to bear down on him eternally, moving in on him quickly like a vulture on the recently deceased.
He finds himself at a loss, unable to adjudicate what will come first—an end to this glacial terror or the heat death of the universe. Him and Spencer sit together like stone, like stationary monoliths, barely daring to fill their lungs halfway with the rot-stunk air permeating their metal coffin. Their savior and their prison.
The walls muffle the outside world somewhat, but not enough to where they cannot hear the incorrigible moans, the gullet-deep howls, the shuffling and scraping of bare feet on rough asphalt. The tolling of their death knell, lest they not make a single noise.
It wouldn’t take a lot for them to open the hatch, for them to pile on and break the flimsy plastic covering, for them to come spilling down into their temporary ark. There really would be nowhere to run, then.
Lassiter feels a light tap on his hand. Startled, he blinks owlishly into the inky pit of darkness to his right where Spencer sits. The tap comes again, this time rhythmic. It takes a moment for him to realize that he's trying to communicate using Morse code, a skill he'd personally picked up during his early years in the police force.
/ … .-.- .- .-. . -.. / SCARED
He lets out a single, unsteady breath. Taps back.
/ .. . / -- --- --- / ME TOO
/ .-- .. .-.. .-.. / -... / --- -.- / ..--.. / WILL B OK ?
Spencer's got his hand in a death grip now. He still manages to tap out his answer, with short, firm presses. They leave no room for argument.
/ -.-- . … / YES
The response seems to settle him somewhat, his hand relaxing in his grip, but there’s still tension radiating off of Spencer in painful waves, and he knows the same is true of himself.
They stay like that for the rest of the night and the better part of the next day, unmoving and huddled and fearing and silent. Each of them still holding the other’s hand, afraid to let go.
Sunlight now seeps in through the cracks of the lid, and they can see a bit better, but they still don’t dare talk. Even though the footsteps have moved on, losing interest in the chase, there’s still the occasional movement from outside. It’s impossible to tell what would happen if they opened the top, whether there would be nothing but birds in the alley or a few stragglers left, poised and ready to alert their friends to the rediscovery of a tasty meal. But there was no way either of them were going to stay another night, and at some point, the bullet needed to be bit. Perhaps literally, thinks Lassiter, a bit hysterically.
Carefully, he dares to speak.
“We—” Immediately he stops to clear his throat, because in his unused voice the word comes out strange and cracking.
“We need to find a way out of here,” he says again. Stronger this time, more confident after having already broken the silence, but still barely a whisper. I have to get out of here.
Spencer, who he can now see faintly in the gray light, nods vigorously, but hesitates when he looks up.
“What if…” he trails off, gesturing vaguely. Lassiter gets his point, having thought basically the same thing moments earlier.
“We’ll just have to chance it and see. There’s no other way. You want to stay here longer?” he asks, knowing with certainty that there won’t be a positive answer. Sure enough, with the same intensity he used to nod before, Spencer shakes his head, visibly disturbed even by the suggestion.
“Good. Me neither.”
Lassiter steels himself, inhaling through his nose to quell his beating heart, desensitized to the smell hours ago. He double-checks that his pack is on right and carefully reaches up, placing his fingers, then his palm, to the plastic hatch of the dumpster. Wincing at the light squeak of hinges that echo softly off of the alley walls, his numb legs push him up, up, and up, slowly emerging from the dumpster like some postmodern gopher. The change in the air is immediately noticeable; it’s less stuffy and hot, and far more clean. A light breeze blows past him and he’s suddenly aware of the damp patches on his shirt and jacket from whatever mystery juice had been festering at the bottom of the bin. Further off down the alley, that half creature they’d run past earlier lies unmoving on the pavement, head spread out garishly across an area of two meters, having been trodden on by hundreds of feet.
Carefully he jumps out and onto the ground, landing with a thump and a huff. The alley is totally deserted, a stark contrast from how it was for most of the night. It’s perfectly silent. He knows that if anything within two hundred yards were to take even a step, he’d be able to hear it. Every move he makes is audible, from the swishing of his jeans to the creak creak creak of his knotted neck muscles. Despite that, it’s a breathtaking relief to be out of that hot, dank box.
Spencer pokes his head out warily and takes a look around.
“Is it safe?”
“Yes, as far as I can tell. It’s quiet, at least.”
Spencer joins him on the pavement below.
“We need a new map,” he continues.
Lassiter hears Spencer shuffle up behind him, shoes scraping on the loose gravel. When he still doesn't hear a response, he turns and looks at him, words on the tip of his tongue, but then he really looks.
Spencer’s shoulders are slumped, legs bowed outwards, and not in his overexaggerated “I’m bored” way, it’s more like an “I’m bone-deep tired” kind of way. He sees Spencer’s relief, weary and absolute, written plainly across his face and in the creases of his eyebrows. But there’s also the last traces of a desperate fear, the vestiges of a man who’d been lost and scared and helpless for too long; that part lies in the dark creases underneath his eyes. He’s staring off into the direction that Lassiter was a moment ago.
It catches him off guard because it's possibly the most un-Spencer-like expression he's ever seen on the man, in spite of their new lives.
“Spencer.”
It gets his attention, at least, the man's eyes drifting over to his face. Lassiter clasps a hand onto his shoulder, squeezing.
“Let's get the hell out of here.”
Spencer nods, sighing.
“That, my good Lassie, sounds like a plan.”