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‘This is your idea of a safe haven,’ the woman says.
James shrugs. He likes her. She’s a no-nonsense type. In anyone else the tone of her observation would have been questioning, maybe derisive, even. But in her it’s just a statement of a fact.
‘It’s served me well in the last few days,’ he says. He glances at his wrist communicator out of habit. The screen is a black mirror, dead like every other electronic device in a world without power. ‘I’d say you’re welcome to stay, but I don’t think sticking around would be a good idea.’
‘How many more of them do you think are out there?’ she says in response, gesturing with the gun she’d trained on him the moment she’d walked in, not lowering it until she was satisfied he wasn't infected. (James hadn't minded; it was good, for once, to run into someone who could obviously protect themselves.) She checks to see if it needs reloading in a casual, practised gesture, her hands rock-steady.
‘Enough,’ James says. He holds out his hand. ‘James.’
She shakes it with her free hand. ‘Scully.’ She shrugs off her huge backpack, letting it slide to the floor. She’s in army fatigues about two sizes too large for her, but he doesn’t think she’s military. Law enforcement, perhaps.
--
They make a meal out of the cold foods in the restaurant’s freezer that haven’t spoiled yet, and there’s too-ripe fruit in the vast abandoned kitchen. A tiny cat, no more than a few months old, jumps on to the stainless steel island in the centre of the kitchen and mews, arching her back in greeting, as though today is just another day in which she’ll deign to accept food from humans. They give her more than she can eat.
None of the stoves work and there’s no way to brew tea, but James spoons instant coffee into mugs and they stir until the coffee mostly dissolves into the water. They drink the sludge sitting side by side on the floor of the freezer room, the only place where the sweltering heat is bearable, remnants of the cold still lingering in the air.
‘Do you have someone to look for?’ James asks, more to combat the emptiness around them than for any other reason.
She glances at him over the rim of her mug while taking a sip. ‘You sound like you don’t.’
‘I do. It’s just that he was difficult to find even when we had phones.’
She smiles. ‘A free spirit, huh?’
He smiles back. ‘Jack’s listed in the textbook under the definition of that term.’
‘Maybe he’ll find you.’ She leans back against the cool silver of a freezer unit, stretching out her legs and crossing them at the ankles. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. ‘Stranger things have happened,’ she murmurs with her eyes closed, already in the liminal space between sleep and waking. The cat curls up next to her knee.
‘Sleep,’ he says, sensing that she’s reluctant to let her guard down. ‘I’ll wake you if something happens.’ He listens to the silence for a moment, a soundless eternity filled with memories of devastation. Of moments of happiness that were never meant to be his, stolen and cherished. ‘Although I doubt anything will.’
In a few hours, maybe a few more, they’ll abandon the illusion of safety and leave, making their way -- perhaps together, perhaps alone -- through the apocalypse-torn wilderness that their world has become. Their world. A world in which strangers are now allies, in which rules are no longer rules but life still persists, despite the dangers waiting around every corner.
Scully doesn’t move except to lay an absent hand on the cat’s small head, her eyes still shut. ‘Something will happen. Something always does.’
James can’t find it in him to disagree.