Chapter Text
Rumi wakes up with aching bones and the bitter taste of grief coating her mouth. She stares up at the ceiling of the motel room she currently occupies, takes in the webbed cracking of the ceiling and a black substance that looks suspiciously like mold. There is a heaviness in her chest, and ache that makes her fingers twitch.
Last night, she dreamt about Celine.
More specifically, she dreamt about the last conversation they had, before Celine shook her head and gave up on her and took a plane to Seoul to get away from her. The memory of their argument ricochets through her, positively searing.
“Why couldn’t you love me?”
“I do!”
“All of me!”
All of a sudden, the bed covers feel too restrictive. They wrap around her body, tight and suffocating. She throws them off of her, sucking in a harsh breath. She feels too hot, too tight in her own skin. The age-old ache of her burn scars lances through her. She grits her teeth, clenching her jaw so hard that she thinks it might snap off.
Even after all this time, two years after the Great Infection took hold, two years since the last time she saw Celine, she’s haunted by the stricken expression on her face, the way she refused to look at her.
Enough.
Rumi practically leaps out of bed, stumbling as her feet slip against the carpet. She needs to get up and get ready and accomplish everything she promised herself she’d do today. If she keeps busy, if she focuses on fulfilling her goals, she won’t have enough time to think about her scars or Celine or anything else. Survival, she reminds herself, is her highest priority.
Rumi walks into the bathroom of her motel room. The floor tiles are shockingly cold against the soles of her bare feet. She shivers, rubbing at her arms. There’s no heating in the motel. If she had to guess, there hasn’t been any since two years ago when the world fell apart. As a result, she feels the cold bite of winter keenly, even with four walls around her and a roof over her head.
The bathroom is a dingy, dirty thing. That’s not a shock; there’s been no one to clean it in forever. There’s dirt caked along the walls. When she flicks on the light – she’s still pleasantly surprised that the place has functioning electricity – dust motes dance through the air. Like in the bedroom, mold growth has developed in the bathroom. She steps around it, wrinkling her nose, and steps toward the shower. She’d been so tired last night that she hadn’t bothered to test out the plumbing. She’d just crawled into the bed, exhausted and wary beyond words, and sank into the deep abyss of sleep. As she turns on the shower knob now, she feels a grim sort of resolve.
As she’d expected, the water doesn’t work. There’s a weak dribbling of it from the faucet and then it stops. Rumi bites the inside of her cheek and sighs deeply. She doesn’t want to use up her drinking water, but it’s been days since she washed and she desperately needs to clean herself. She doesn’t really have a choice.
She walks back into the main area of her motel room and grabs a plastic water bottle from the stash of her things. Then she takes the soap she found a month or so back and walks back into the bathroom, her prizes in hand.
She undresses as quickly as possible. As she does so, she keeps her eyes fixed on the wall ahead of her. She doesn’t look down at her body. She doesn’t want to, doesn’t think she could take the sight of her burns after dreaming of Celine. She folds her clothes carefully onto the counter. She brushes her teeth quickly. Then she steps into the shower.
Rumi unscrews the cap to the water bottle. It lets out a hissing sound as it cracks and she peers at it dubiously. Is it safe to use? With a sinking heart, she realizes that it doesn’t really matter whether it is or isn’t; she has no alternative regardless. She pours water from the bottle onto her felt. It’s room temperature but in the chill of the bathroom, goosebumps rise across her skin anyway. She lathers soap across her body. As she touches her own skin, she starts with her legs first, where she’s mercifully free of most of her burns. Coaxing herself into touching her skin is always the best way to start things. When she finishes with her legs, she moves to her arms. Her fingers trace against some of her burns and she swallows thickly, keeping her eyes fixed on the shower curtain. Finally, she gets to her torso, where the burns are the worst. They sting in the coldness of the morning and the pain is only made worse by her touch. She scrubs at them quickly, biting her tongue hard to hold back a hiss.
She keeps washing herself for a bit longer. Then she rinses herself off with the rest of her water bottle. She steps out of the shower, dripping onto the floor. Her teeth chatter. She doesn’t have any towels on her and this room doesn’t seem to have any either; there’s nothing warm to wrap around herself as she dries off.
Deciding to be as prudent as possible, Rumi walks back to the main part of her motel room as she dries. She doesn’t want to slip her clothes on before she’s fully dry – she hasn’t survived zombies for two years only for pneumonia to get her. As she waits for the water to evaporate from her skin, she digs through her belongings. Rumi once had mountains of wealth, had more money than she could ever hope to spend in one lifetime. Now, everything she owns has been reduced to a single black dufflebag. She rifles through it, narrowing her eyes.
She has five pairs of clothes, excluding the ones she took off before her shower. She has a spare toothbrush, but she’s running out of toothpaste. She has some soap left, but it’s starting to get lower than she’s comfortable with. She still has several sticks of deodorant and a decent amount of tampons, which is good. She is, however, dangerously low on food. She has exactly one bag of chips left. At the sight of it, her stomach growls.
Rumi sighs, crossing her arms over her chest. On one hand, she’s relieved that the dangerous trek she decided to make will be worth it – she needs to restock on supplies. On the other hand, worry gnaws at the back of her mind. What if she gets to the mall and finds that it was already pillaged? What if she’s made this entire trip for nothing and she has to stumble to whatever place she decides on next with an empty stomach and a lack of basic hygiene products and a depleted morale?
The worst part, Rumi thinks, about these last two years has been the loss of hope. When each day is a fight for survival, when you aren’t sure if you’re about to be attacked by a horde of undead monsters and if you’ll have anything to eat before you go to sleep, life begins to feel less like living and more like surviving. And Rumi had her issues before the world ended, but this is an entirely different beast.
When she deems herself sufficiently dry, Rumi dresses. She pulls a white long-sleeved t-shirt over her head and slips on a pair of jeans. Then she throws on her purple wool coat. The fabric is soft and thick and warm, a remnant of the life she used to live. It had been a gift from Celine, she remembers, and swallows hard.
Rumi opens up the bag of chips and pops them in her mouth. Her mouth waters at the first bite. Her stomach growls again, more insistent this time. She winces, knowing that she has barely anything to offer it. She wolfs down the chips in under five minutes, then tosses the bag on the floor. There’s no use in actually throwing it in a trash bin; there will be no garbage man to take it to the landfill. Her stomach tightens at the sight of the empty bag. It longs for more food, for a sustenance she desperately needs. She turns away and shakes her head.
Rumi packs up all of her belongings quickly. Everything – her clothes, her last few water bottles, her toothbrush and toothpaste – is dumped into the duffel bag. Everything except for one item. On the nightstand, beside her bed, the cold metal of her gun gleams. She picks it up, weighing the familiar weight of it in her hand. There was a time when she would have flinched at the sight of a weapon like this, when the sight of it would have flooded her senses with discomfort. That time is long gone. Now, as she holds it, all she can feel is a sense of relief that she has it. Her palm itches, recalling the sensation of a recoil after firing off a shot.
Rumi slips the gun into her waistband after making sure the safety is on. Then she scoops her duffel bag up, setting it over her shoulder. She takes one last look to make sure that she hasn't forgotten anything. Everything is in order in the room, as it should be. With a quiet nod, she exits the room and makes her way outside of the motel.
The trek to the shopping mall isn’t long, but she’s on high alert the entire time. Her fingers keep twitching and her right hand strays often to where her gun rests against her hip. The hair on the back of her neck stands straight up and she chews on her lip nervously.
The streets around her are tight and narrow. While they provide her cover from any zombies who might be wandering around the area, that’s a double edged sword; the streets also, inconveniently, happen to provide a cover for the zombies. Rumi is highly aware of this fact as she approaches the shopping mall.
All around her, the place is a ghost town. There isn’t a single person in the area. The only sound Rumi can hear is the sound of her own footfalls against the concrete and the occasional rustling of a critter. The deathly quiet is thick and oppressive, and she finds that she hates it. That’s another awful thing about the world ending: the loneliness of it all. Rumi has always kept people at arm’s length, has always held up a wall between herself and others. But there’s a difference between having your walls up and still being able to talk to people, and not having anyone to be guarded around at all.
The last person Rumi saw was over four months ago as he clawed at her legs and begged her to help him, the infection of his bite beginning to set in.
Rumi pushes away the grisly thought, shaking her head. Today, it seems, she’s doomed to be plagued by unpleasant memories.
Eventually, she makes it to the shopping mall. It’s a wide, elegant structure, all towering buildings and curving arches. It must have been very beautiful once. Now, it’s just as lifeless as the rest of the town. Decay has begun to set in. Long lines of ivy climb the walls of the buildings. Debris has piled up all around the area, no one there to clean it. The windows that decorate the buildings are disgustingly grimy and she has to squint to see through them.
Rumi pushes open the main doors to the mall. They don’t budge. She applies more pressure. They still don’t move. She curses under her breath and touches the end of her braid. Giving up on the doors, she approaches one of the windows to the main mall building instead. She opens her duffle bag and takes out a shirt. She wraps it around her arm and then slams her arm into the window. The sound of splintering glass reaches her ears, but nothing has fully given way yet. Rumi draws her arm back again. Slams it into the window again.
The glass shatters. Bits of it cut into her arm, even through the protective layer of her shirt, and she hisses. She can feel droplets of blood sink into the fabric of her shirt. She climbs through the window, careful to avoid cutting herself on any more glass.
With that, she’s in the interior of the mall.
The first thing Rumi does is make a beeline for the food court. She’s not stupid – she knows there isn’t a real meal waiting for her. Still, there might be some non-perishables stored in the ghostly empty skeletons of what used to be restaurants.
The mall is large and confusing, a dizzying concoction of winding hallways and unclear directional signs. Still, eventually she manages to make her way to the food court. She hops over the counter of a restaurant, wincing as pain flares in her right arm. She walks into the kitchen, her stomach twisting tightly. The restaurant smells faintly of dust and dirt and nothing of food, but just being here in this space where food was once prepared, where there might still be something to eat, makes her mouth water.
She pushes the doors open to the kitchen. There’s nothing on the counters, which is to be expected. She checks the walk-in freezer. Nothing there either. Despite the fact that she was expecting that too, her heart sinks a little. There are other restaurants in the mall and she hasn’t even fully finished searching through this one yet, but–
But what if there’s nothing of value to be found here at all? What if she travelled all this way for nothing, injured herself for nothing? What if, the next time she comes across a zombie, she’s too weakened to defend herself.
Rumi touches at the braid again, fingers brushing against the end of it. She bites the inside of her cheek so hard that she draws blood. The taste of iron hits her tongue. She could spit the blood out, but she doesn’t. Instead, she swallows it, the bitterness of it burning at the back of her throat. She rubs at her forehead and tries to collect herself.
She opens the cabinets next. The first she opens is empty. So is the second. So is the third. She’s about to give up, but something tells her to open the fourth. She feels a tug from somewhere deep in her chest, some kind of intuition that draws her to it. She opens it, holding her breath.
When she peers inside, she practically sags in relief.
There, sitting on the shelves, are rows and rows of canned fruit.
Rumi grabs one before she knows what she’s doing. She cradles it in her hands reverently, holds it as if it’s something delicate. She rifles through the kitchen until she finds a knife. Then she cuts into the can. Scooping up the canned fruit with her bare fingers, she brings it to her mouth. It’s mushy and unpleasant, and it’s the best damn thing she’s ever tasted in her entire life. All the five-star meals she had before the end of the world are nothing compared to this. She wolfs down the food, eating so fast that she knows she’ll regret it later. She can’t bring herself to care.
When she finishes, she wipes at her mouth with the back of her hand. She grabs all the canned fruit she thinks she can carry and stuffs them into her dufflebag. She’ll have to ration them – she can’t afford to wolf them all down the way she just did – but if she’s careful, they’ll last her enough to keep the hunger from gnawing at her from the inside out for a while at least.
Her pursuit of a meal done, Rumi makes her way back outside of the restaurant. Her spirits considerably heightened, she thinks about her next move. She’d like some new clothes, but that can wait. First, she should see if there are any hygiene products left. She needs more toothpaste and she should stock up on tampons while she can; free bleeding in the middle of an apocalypse has to be one of her worst experiences. An absolute zero out of ten, she never wants to do it again.
She makes her way to the store section of the mall. There’s a Daiso nestled in the far left wing of the mall. She searches through it, adding whatever she thinks is useful to her dufflebag.
And then, all of a sudden, she hears it: the sound of footsteps. Rumi’s head snaps to the direction where it came from, her eyes widening. Terror, sharp and hot, spikes in her bloodstream. This mall was completely empty minutes ago. Did a zombie get through the hole she made in the window? She swears in the confines of her mind, furious at herself.
She ducks beneath the counter of the Daiso. She draws her gun and deactivates the safety. She takes a deep breath in and a deep breath out. She’ll be okay. She’s handled zombies dozens of times before, and she can handle them again. She has her gun and her wits and her reflexes, and that’s been enough to carry her through the last two years. It will be enough to carry her through this moment as well.
The footsteps draw closer to Rumi. The zombies are just in front of her now – she can sense them. Gripping her gun tightly, she rises from behind the counter, her finger hovering on the trigger.
She freezes when she’s met with the sight before her. When she meets the wide, panicked eyes of two young women her own age, one with hot-pink hair and cutting cheekbones, the other with black hair and a heart-shaped face.
At once, all the fight drains out of her.
Rumi lowers her gun.