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It starts slow. The reports, at first, are hazy and easily ignored. Amy and Holt, of course, take notice immediately, and the squad walk in one Monday morning to a brand new board in the briefing room, littered with newspaper clippings, printouts from the internet and handwritten reports of neighbourhood sightings. Holt brings it up in morning briefings and tells his squad to keep their ear to the ground. Most of the 99 brush him off—it’s a weird flu, or a new drug, or youth culture gone awry—but Amy doesn’t, and Jake takes her lead, and Charles is afraid of everything by nature. After a month, even the disbelievers have to admit that something strange is going on. The CDC have issued a statement to all, advising the citizens of New York to stay away from any individuals who appear to be infected with what they’re calling ‘the Contagion’. Symptoms are unclear and difficult to agree on, with citizens describing rage and lethargy, sudden strength and sudden weakness, red eyes and black eyes and yellow eyes. The only thing everyone agrees on is an uncontrollable desire for human flesh. No one utters the word zombies until it’s far, far too late.
—
Jake’s never been one to take things seriously. He’s bounced through his life, making light of his dad leaving and subsequent abandonment issues, turning grievous injuries into opportunities for comedy, joking about therapy to anyone who would listen. For Jake, his self worth is inherently tied into how funny his friends and family think he is, so, yeah, he can be immature and silly and, honestly, a bit insensitive without much thought for the consequences. This, though, he takes seriously. That, somehow, makes it all worse.
—
Jake’s at the precinct when it all falls to pieces. Amy, Rosa and Charles are out on a case—another incident with one of the Contagions, and there’s more and more every day. It’s getting harder to ignore, harder to work around, and they have no more information than they did when they started. The atmosphere in the precinct is chilly, at best. There’s a guy in holding, real sickly, pale and shivering and groaning, and it’s all Jake can do not to just toss him out on the street to get some peace. He’s the only one in the cell, thank god, when his coughs and splutters reach a fever pitch, and then stop.
“Terry, can you check him?” Jake calls over, not looking up from his computer screen. He’s been working on a report—really working on it, because Holt had been so impressed with the last one that he’d decided to try more often—and he doesn’t want to distract himself with some random perp with the flu.
“I ain’t going in there!” Terry says. “Terry’s got 2% body fat and no cushioning to protect from disease.”
“You’re closest, Sarge,” Jake says. He thinks this argument is reasonable, but Terry’s grumble drifts across the room, and Jake can feel his scowl prickling the back of his neck. He makes a face at Gina, and she raises her eyebrows.
“Hitchcock and Scully are right there, man.” Terry shoots back. “They’ve got immune systems of iron from being cops in the 70s!”
“It’s true, Jake,” Scully says. “I haven’t gotten the flu since 1976.”
“My doctor told me my body is a hostile environment for all living things, including diseases, parasites and myself.” Hitchcock adds, proudly.
“Not something to boast about, buddy,” Jake says, but he concedes all argument and pushes his chair back. The guy in the cell is suspiciously quiet now. As he walks over, Jake’s steps slow. “What is this guy in for again?” He calls over his shoulder. Terry shrugs.
“It was Charles who brought him in.” Terry replies. “Aggravated assault or something. I think he tried to bite some teenagers in the bodega across the street.”
Jake stops dead in his tracks. His blood runs cold. “He tried to bite them?” He repeats. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t know, man!” Terry says. He’s annoyed now, by the questions and the interruptions and the fact that his yoghurt break has been delayed for this, but Jake clenches his jaw.
He says again, “Are you sure he tried to bite them?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Terry nods, and just as he says, “why?” The guy springs back up with an inhuman growl and throws himself against the bars.
“That’s why, Sarge!” Jake yells, scrambling away from the cell so quickly he falls to the ground. The guy—if he can even still be called that—is utterly transformed. It’s as if the man himself has melted away, and what’s left behind is a grey, pulpy mush of skin with yellow, watering eyes. His lips are pulled back, almost to the point of disappearing, to reveal his teeth. The veins in his neck are stark against his skin. His hands, pure white, are claws.
Holt has heard the commotion and opened his office door. He stands, stock still, staring at the remains of the guy, who is now trying to push himself through the gaps in the bars. Sickly crunches are coming from the cell, and Jake is gagging.
“Captain Holt?” Jake says, over his shoulder. He can’t drag his eyes away. “Captain, what do we do?”
“The CDC said there is no cure, Peralta.” Holt says, coming up behind him. His footsteps are almost silent, and Jake jumps at the sudden hand on his shoulder. “Their official guidance is run if you can, and destroy if you must.” A world-weary sigh pushes its way up from his lungs, and ruffles the hair at the nape of Jake’s neck. He hasn’t heard defeat in the Captain’s voice like that… well, ever. It’s the most chilling thing he’s experienced today.
“Destroy?” Jake whispers, his voice just managing to carry over the grunting from the cell. Terry looks away for the first time, and his wide eyes search Jake’s face.
“The brain, Jake.” Gina says, from her desk. “The CDC tweeted it last night. Don’t you follow them?”
“Really, really not the time, Gina.” Jake says, and he swallows, his throat dry. “Okay,” he says, to no one in particular. “I’ll do it.”
“Jake…” Holt says, but Jake shrugs off the hand on his shoulder. Something in him knows that he has to do this, and he has to do it now, or he’ll never survive in the new world that they’ve just tumbled into. He moves slowly, as if through treacle, towards the kitchen, never taking his eyes off the creature in the cell, whose face is slowly collapsing under the pressure of the bars. With one hand, Jake puts his hand on his gun. With the other, he gropes behind him for the handle of the drawer he knows contains all the knives. He pulls one out and almost slices his hand open trying to adjust his grip. He’s trembling all over, and he can feel the panic sweat dripping down his back. Again, Holt says his name, but Jake can barely hear him—it’s like he’s wading underwater, and everything is filtered through that hazy lens, except the guy and the cell and the knife in his hand, all of which are in razor sharp focus. He moves quicker now that he’s adjusted to his position at the bottom of the ocean, and the drag on his limbs isn’t as bad. When he’s standing in front of the guy, the snarls filter through the ocean water clogging his ears clear as day. Jake breathes in, lifts the knife, and plunges it deep in the guy’s eye socket. He slumps, his face against the bars, and Jake turns his own face to the side and throws up all over the floor. He’s trembling when Holt’s arms wrap around him from behind, prising the knife from his hand and discarding it on the floor. Jake turns into the embrace as the tears overflow and presses his face into Holt’s shoulder. Terry cleans up around them, and Jake’s shoulders shake.
—
Jake can divide his world into two halves: before, and after. Before, the zombie threat had been distant and foreign, like the rain in another city that threatens yours but doesn’t quite touch down. After, it’s as if his entire world has been struck by lightning. There’s a constant crackle in the air, in the precinct, in his own damn head, and he just knows that it’ll never return to normal.
—
They hole up in the precinct. Jake’s mom has gone upstate with the lesbians across the street, and she tells him to keep in touch on the two-way radio he gave her a month ago. She’ll be safe with them—one of them is an ex-marine, and the other grew up on a farm, and they’ve been ready for this a lot longer than most. He misses her, but she’s safer with them than she ever would be with him. He has a tendency towards the reckless, and if there’s one thing he won’t do in this new world, it’s force his mother to watch her son die due to his own headstrong stupidity.
Amy’s parents are half a country away, with her brother Carlos and his wife and their three young children. Amy’s brothers are with their own families, and there’s no way she can make her way to any of them without dying horribly along the way, so she stays. Holt goes to Kevin and brings him and Cheddar back, and neither of them will tell anyone what happened on their journey. Jake stops asking, eventually.
As soon as he can, Terry leaves. They don’t hear if he made it back to his family, but they have to assume he did. There’s no part of them that can bring themselves to think otherwise. Charles goes to Genevieve and Nikolaj, and his crackling voice over the receiver cuts out as the phone lines go down. Rosa escorts Hitchcock and Scully back to Hitchcock’s place, and then rides off on her motorcycle, alone. That’s the first night, but it could also be called the second or third or seventh night, because time melds into one big long string of tension, pulled tight, ready to snap.
—
Amy has never been said to be calm—she’s strung too highly for that, like a violin string. Jake, for all his banter, is wound that way too, and he’s always thrumming, like he’s just been plucked. It makes him a good detective, but it makes him exhausting to be around. He knows this, knows the toll he’s taking on his friends, but he can’t stop, won’t stop, because he’s hanging on by a thread.
Right now, Jake feels like dust motes held in the vague shape of a man. A strong gust of wind could blow him to pieces.
—
After the rest of the squad leave them, they hole up in the briefing room. When Holt leaves to get Kevin, Jake, Amy and Gina push all of the tables and chairs out. Some of them go up against the door as a barricade, and some of them get stacked wherever there’s room in the bullpen. Jake finds some crash mats leaning against a wall in a cupboard and he takes them, one by one, and drops them onto the now empty floor with a resounding thwack. Amy and Gina pull the couch from the break room into the corner. The three of them then invade all of the store cupboards and lost and found, and somehow scrounge together pillows, a few scratchy blankets, and enough faux fur coats to keep them warm until winter. They step back when they’re done. It isn’t attractive, by any means. It isn’t even particularly homey, but when they go out to the balcony to shift some of the chairs, they hear the moans and groans of the zombies in the alley. Their little makeshift camp looks a lot more welcoming after that.
Holt comes back with Kevin later—though how much later, they couldn’t say. He and Kevin give a cursory glance at their work and give nods of approval. Jake has still barely spoken since the incident with the perp. Holt takes him to the interrogation room as Amy and Gina show Kevin what they’ve done. Amy catches Jake’s eye as he leaves, and gives him a reassuring smile.
“Are you okay, Jake?” Holt asks, when the door of the interrogation room swings shut behind them. Jake ducks his head and rubs the back of his neck.
“Yeah, I’m good.” He replies, avoiding Holt’s eyes.
“I know you’re lying,” Holt says. “You don’t make eye contact when you lie.”
Jake stands up straight then, and looks him directly in the eye. “No, Captain, I’m not okay. But there’s nothing we can do to fix it right now.”
Holt, though not satisfied with the answer, is able to at least accept it. He settles for pulling Jake into another tight hug, patting him on the back, and sending him on his way.
That night, they fall asleep on their makeshift beds. Holt and Kevin are in one corner, Gina in the other, and Amy and Jake lie close but not touching in the middle of the room. It had felt natural to Amy to shuffle the mat so it was parallel to Jake’s. Jake had tripped over it half an hour after she’d moved it, which shifted it a foot closer and Amy deliberately hadn’t moved it back. There’s eight inches of space between them now, which is just the right distance for Amy to reach across and grab his hand.
“We’re gonna be okay, right?” Amy whispers. It pierces the silence and Jake, so close that she can feel the heat of his body, lets out a whoosh of air like a burst balloon.
“Yeah,” he replies. He sounds sure, but he’s sounded surer for less. “Of course we are.”
It doesn’t reassure her but the hand, still gripped tightly in hers, squeezes her fingers once, and that makes all the difference. She falls asleep with his hand in hers, and doesn’t let go until morning.
—
Jake can’t remember a time when it’s been easy to turn his brain off. Amy is the same, but it’s her anxiety that keeps her up past the greying hours of dawn. For Jake, he just can’t stop thinking. He thinks about the past and the future and alternate universes and what-ifs and he-saids and she-saids and things he wishes he could change but can’t. The new world they’ve found themselves in is infinitely different from their old one, but it is simple. Sometimes Jake goes out to the balcony to hear the zombies, just to remind himself of that fact. That’s what does it, what sends him straight to sleep—the knowledge that he’s in this for the long haul, and the only things to worry about are just beyond the front door.
—
They’re on the fourth floor, so they don’t hear or see much of anything. On day four, Jake and Holt, clad in Kevlar and armed to the teeth, start a sweep of the precinct. Amy tries to come with them when they leave, but Holt takes her aside. Jake, standing off to the side, tries not to listen. Amy’s looking at him though, over Holt’s shoulder, and he hears all the same.
“Amy,” Holt says, and there’s something pleading in the deep baritone of his voice. He says Amy where he would have said Santiago, before. “We don’t know what we are going to find on these floors. If something should escape, you are far more capable of protecting my husband than I am.”
“Let me go instead.” Amy says. “Jake can stay.” She locks eyes with Jake as she speaks to Holt. “He’s too reckless, and he’s been locked in here for days. He won’t think.” And that stings, but he knows what she’s doing. He holds her gaze for a beat, and then makes the mistake of looking away. Her chin raises; she’s won, and she knows he’ll be careful, for Holt’s sake if not his own. Holt is rubbing his eyes with his hand and he misses the exchange.
“Amy...” Holt says. “Jake has my back. I have his. I need your focus to be here.”
He doesn’t hear what Amy says in response, but it makes Holt sigh. He replies in a voice that is tinged with gut wrenching sadness.
“I know you do.”
They leave. They start on the top floor, two floors above theirs. The stairways are clear, and it’s silent as they ascend. Outside the door, they give each other a grim faced nod and enter. The entire floor looks like it was abandoned in a hurry—there are desk chairs upended, drawers hanging half open and half empty, bits of food left to rot. The only living things are the flies, which swarm around a muffin on the desk closest to the door. There’s no sound on this floor, save for their breathing, and it takes them only ten minutes to canvas the entire area.
“What did Amy say to you?” Jake says, because even though it’s not important, it’s the only thing that matters to him at that moment. Holt’s hesitation is clear.
“I don’t think it is my business to say.” He says. Jake lets out a defeated huff, but doesn’t ask again.
—
Jake fell in love with Amy one week after he met her. It happened when she brought him coffee one morning in a chipped NYPD mug. He wrapped his hands around it, looked up at her, bleary eyed and joked, “I love you,” and she had shot back, “I know.” He had mouthed Star Wars? at her, and the smug smirk she gave him had his heart falling through his stomach to the floor. He was utterly gone after that. He loved her first; trust came later. By the end of their first year as partners, he trusted her with his life.
He knows Amy loves him too. She isn’t an open book like he is, but he cracked her binary code long ago. Her zeroes and ones form a perfect picture of her, and he can see her love in everything she does, from the way she laughs just a little too hard at his jokes, or the way she always lets him have the last of her soda, or the way she places her hand on his shoulder and her fingers linger, just this side of too long. He thinks about doing something about it—has been thinking for years, really, with increasingly flimsy excuses holding him back—but Amy is Jake’s One Sure Thing, and he can’t do anything to jeopardise that.
—
They sweep the remaining floors, picking up supplies on their way. The only zombie they find is one of the beat cop chair jockeys from the first floor, who drags himself, still in his chair, towards them. Holt swallows, but otherwise shows no visible signs of distress as he despatches the creature. Jake can hear the gurgle it made as the knife entered its temple echoing in his ears all the way back to their floor. When they get back and put their duffle bags into the briefing room, Kevin crosses the room in three strides to throw his arms around Holt. Amy scrambles to her feet. She’s wearing a pair of navy sweats and a grey NYPD T-shirt. Her hair is falling loose from her braid. Her eyes are glassy as she stumbles towards him.
“You said you’d be an hour.” She whispers when she reaches him. “An hour. It’s been four.” Jake looks at his watch and grimaces. He glances back out of the windows and notices the shadow creeping across the desks closest to the balcony. Time is meaningless without the sun. He opens his mouth, but his mind goes blank.
“My bad,” he says, and regrets it immediately. Rage comes over her face, untamed and unrelenting. She turns her back on him, grabs the crash mat and fake fur coats she’s been using as a bed, and drags them to the other side of the room, next to Gina’s little nest. Even Gina, queen of personal space, doesn’t begrudge her. Jake stares forlornly at his own bed, looking lonely and sad somewhere near the middle of the room. As they get ready for bed that night, Amy doesn’t talk to him. He can hear her muffled tears long after he’s pretended to fall asleep.
—
Jake’s never been one to hold his tongue. In school, his teachers would write him up: Jake is a bright boy but needs to learn to think before he speaks. He would be given extra drills in the academy for talking back, and more often than not, his classmates would be at the side stretching as he finished an extra lap or twenty. Rosa used to elbow him when she sensed him about to blurt, but all that did was give him a near permanent bruise on his side. Holt, then, was a breath of fresh air, because while his lips pursed at a Jake outburst, he never punished him for it. He just said, one day in his office, when Jake was mid-apology for doing the robot voice again, “have you ever been tested for ADHD?” and Jake’s brain had gone quiet, for the first time. The world fell to pieces before the results of all the tests came in, but it had been enough.
So Jake has said a lot of things to a lot of people, some of which he regrets. And even if she’s forgiven him, there’s never been words he wished he could take back more than the two he said to Amy, because they’re the ones that hurt her.
—
The lights go off on day six. The heat follows not long after. They burn candles until the candles burn to nothing, and then they use road flares until the road flares run out, and then they start burning what’s been left in the lost and found. The windows let in the daylight, but they don’t get the sun on that side—its north facing, and so sunrise and sunset happen beyond the limits of their vision. It’s like there’s a permanent cast over the sky, a dusky grey cloud cover with no respect for such trivial things as circadian rhythms.
“We’re running out of food.” Jake whispers to Amy, on either the twentieth or twenty-first day. He’s lost track of time already, which terrifies him, but his phone ran out of charge on day three, and he hadn’t been that sure of what day it was before it all happened, anyway. They’re standing in the bullpen; the others are in the briefing room. He can see them through the small window.
“I know,” she nods, grimly. “I’ve been keeping track. We’ve already gone through Scully’s secret stash.” Her eyes flicker to the ceiling, as if she’s calculating. “We have enough to last us two days, maybe three if we ration.” She glances at Holt and Kevin, who are sitting next to each other on the couch, reading a book together. Holt taps the page to let Kevin know he’s finished reading it, and Kevin turns the page. Gina is playing a game of solitaire on the floor with a deck of cards from Jake’s desk, in the absence of her iPhone games. Jake knows what Amy’s thinking, and he says it before she does, just to spare her the pain of being the one to bring it all crashing down.
“Someone needs to leave,” he says. “To get supplies.” Amy’s eyes flicker again to the ceiling, and he can see her lips moving silently. She’s counting to ten. She’s trying not to cry. She looks back at him and nods.
“I think it should be us,” she says. Jake nods. He’d been thinking the same thing.
“Holt will never agree to it.” He says. She presses her lips together in a thin white line.
“We’ll draw the names,” she says. “But we’ll cheat. I can’t let any of them go out in my place.”
Jake lets out a huff of breath and runs a hand over his jaw.
“How do we do it?” He says, and relief floods her face, as though she’d imagined the hardest part of all of this would be getting Jake to agree. He’s flooded with affection for her, for the naivety he thought they’d both long since lost to zombies and near starvation and freezing, shivering nights. With the determined look in her eyes, she looks like the Amy he met nearly ten years ago, when things were different. When they were easier. When hope was a given, and not a privilege.
“Okay,” she says, and leans in close. “Here’s what I thought we could do.” She explains her plan with a grim determination. He can’t do anything but agree.
Just as they’d suspected, Holt is outraged at the prospect of staying behind. His anger is only tempered by Kevin’s hand on his arm, and Jake and Amy’s suggestion of drawing the names. They notice Holt’s fearful glance at Kevin as they put the names in the hat, and Jake’s glad, for once, that they’re cheating. Watching Holt leave in his place would have been awful, but watching Holt watch Kevin leave would have been unbearable.
Jake sticks his hand in the bag and feels for the paper with the tiny rip in the corner. He panics for a second when he can’t find it, but then his fingers close on the right paper, and his heart unclenches. When Jake reads out his own name and then Amy’s, Holt’s eyebrows raises. Jake suspects he’s aware of the rigging of the draw, but his pride prevents him from saying anything. Still, he disappears for a good twenty minutes, and they can hear things smashing in the interrogation room. When he comes back, his knuckles are split, but he looks calmer.
“You will take weapons from the arsenal.” He says, his jaw clenched. “You will both wear the bomb suits as we have discussed. There will be no unnecessary risks taken. Come back alive, or so help me, I will come out there and find you myself.”
They nod, solemnly, and their relief at the plan working outweighs the fear they feel at heading out.
After it’s been decided, there’s really no time to lose. They empty out two duffel bags and raid the arsenal. Gina straps them both into the bomb suits. She’s subdued. She’s been like that a lot lately, and it’s only got worse as the supplies have dwindled, as the weather has taken a change for the worse, as the communications over the radio have become few and far between. She gives them a sad smile as she steps back.
“I want you to know I don’t agree with this,” she says. “I don’t want to stay behind. Let me out there. I’ll make a hairspray flamethrower.” There’s a little of her old fire in her as she says that, but she averts her gaze, and a lump lodges itself in Jake’s throat.
“I love you, Gina,” He says, and for what feels like the first time, he’s serious. He pulls her into a bone-crushing hug, and she allows it for a solid fifteen seconds before she starts complaining of being suffocated by the bomb-suit. She steps back and surreptitiously wipes her eyes. He sniffs and swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “You gotta hold the fort here for me, okay? Keep Holt and Kevin occupied, make sure Cheddar’s entertained. If we don’t come back—“
“Don’t even, Jake.” She interrupts, but he presses on.
“If we don’t come back, you’ve have to take the lead.” He glances over to Kevin and Holt, who are talking quietly to Amy. “You have to look after them. They’ll need it.”
She snorts a wet, dejected laugh. “Deal.” She holds out a hand, and he grasps it firmly. When they let go, the others have made their way over.
“Now or never,” Amy says, looking between the pair. Holt looks like he wants to protest, but Kevin squeezes his hand, and he quiets. As they turn away, Amy falls into step beside Jake. “I’m glad you’re on my team.” She whispers, only for his ears to hear.
The group make their way slowly down the stairs. As they walk through the wreckage of the first floor, Amy, Kevin and Gina catch a glimpse of the zombie Jake and Holt had taken out nearly three weeks ago. It’s slumped sideways in its chair, hand dragging across the floor. Even the flies are avoiding it. Kevin brings a handkerchief to his mouth, and Holt puts a hand on his back.
Eventually, they reach the front doors. They pull away the barricades Kevin and Holt had placed there when they arrived back. Holt and Kevin give them final hugs and check over their equipment. Holt looks stony, but resigned.
Jake turns to Amy and gives her what he hopes is a reassuring smile.
“Ready?” He says, tapping her bomb suit affectionately.
“Ready,” she replies, determined. They nod at each other and Holt and Kevin pull open the double doors in front of them. The sun streams in, and they walk out, into the brave new world ahead.