Work Text:
I can kill you. One foot in front of the other. Left. Right. Left. Right. Keep running. I can kill you. I will kill you.
The blood had poured over my hand. The warm red flush as I plunged that kitchen knife into his neck...the blood had been just as warm as what was dripping onto my arms right now from my mangled wrists. I could feel the blood dripping especially over the left hand on the side of the wrist. There were scars there already and now there would be more. This wasn’t going to be the end. I’m not dying here.
Van Ark was sneering and practically laughing. Five knew why. She didn’t look like a runner and probably even with whatever it was running through his system nearly dying produced some kind of high for him. So here she was, still looking like an overweight rugby player, covered in scars being dragged along behind a Jeep like a scene out of a bad movie. He was sneering that he couldn’t be killed. I’m starting to drift out of myself, see from outside. The anger is taking over. I’m her, she is me. I can kill you, we can kill you, she can kill you. He keeps saying he’s immortal.
Keep thinking that, you idiot. Acid, fire, plain old bleach - a knife didn’t do it but I’m going to kill you then stop the cell regeneration. There’s some way. One foot in front of the other. The anger her mother had said she had to learn to control or it would control her was coming to the front now and she let it. She felt her ankle start to go. The familiar twinge on the right. It had been taped since that stress fracture- well, sort of tied up tight with a sewn bit of knit cloth. It was the apocalypse after all. But now you’re Five. Keep going. Ignore it. Keep thinking of other things.
She glanced down feeling something underfoot as Van Ark gleefully teased that she surely hadn’t gotten this much exercise before the apocalypse. Her Guinness shirt. That’s right. This was supposed to have been a quick easy run, check the church for Sam’s conspiracy theory. She’d put on her favorite shirt, a random find that reminded her of university and her father teasing her about her choice of drink, asking her why she didn’t drink things like mimosas or those little things with umbrellas like proper young ladies. Anything else. Think of anything else. Before. Sixteen years old singing at the pub with my father smiling in the corner, he was having a pint, everyone belonged with nobody realizing he wasn’t the same. Your uncle with the other soldiers teaching you and your siblings to play darts then laughing when you missed when you changed to the ones with the flights marked with the Australian flag. Van Ark was on about how she could be used as an experiment.
I can kill you. The anger was the right kind. Her mother standing in the garden when she was young, red hair long with the summer breeze blowing it out behind her, looking like a strange warrior woman in an apron shouting at all those men with guns to get out of the garden, how dare they trample through those irises... There were children playing in the garden, get out and get out right this instant. Was that real? Was this real? What was reality? Memories were strange. Her parents arguing about staying or going when the troubles were getting worse and there was the unspoken worry, the rosary beads on her mother’s dresser but the dog tags on her father’s neck. The breeze flitted across Five’s face for a moment, sweat and blood mixing and cooling for a moment.
Van Ark was trying to break her. She’d had this before. People had tried to break her so many times. Some had come close. University that one professor had tried to tell her she was an idiot. She didn’t know how to play that game but making a poor grade hadn’t done much. Think. Don’t think. Run. Sam’s voice in the dark. Failing his engineering classes. No, don’t think of that. Van Ark had broken the headset. Sam couldn’t talk to you. One foot in front of the other. The branches hurt. Step on the logs not over, remember being a girl and your troop leader taught you that, snakes live under logs. Step on the log when you’re hiking so they aren’t startled into biting you. One foot in front of the other. Left. Right. Left. Right. University - that had been a mistake. That party and the aftermath - not knowing what had happened - then later... that had nearly broken her. The baby...no, don’t think. One foot in front of the other. Left. Right. Left. Right. At Mullins lying in the bunk restless then getting up trying to go for a walk, the sentry feeling like she was easy prey, her not knowing how to fight yet and not thinking that a soldier would grab a recruit - but knowing that she’d lived through it before, she’d lived. It didn’t break her. Just bruises, the hand marks on her body, he’d tried to use her but it was just her body. The body is just here. Expendable. And later that sentry had slipped on a bar of soap. Turned out she wasn’t the only recruit he’d tried that with. Now Van Ark was still almost puzzlingly shouting about how it would be fun to drive through zoms. How there were casualties in every war.
She could hear, she could see but it was all through a filter. Her ankle was definitely hurt and now the pain was starting to radiate up into the knee. I can kill you, Van Ark. Concentrate on that. One foot in front of the other. Not right now but later. I will. War? My family was always there. My mother laid over me in a bathtub when I was a baby while idiots tried to light bombs in the streets. Every man in my family was a soldier and I and some of my cousins joined as well. I wouldn’t have been surprised though if in the unwritten history the women of my family were standing there holding swords from fallen men or pouring pitch over ramparts too. You don’t know who you’ve got here. I have red hair. That means I’m Neanderthal. You say you can’t die but my blood is older than you. I can kill you. The summer breeze carried the scent of flowers briefly and incongruously to Five. Then suddenly Paula.
No. Paula...the point was that you are supposed to get back...I don’t have anyone...I’m expendable...don’t think about Sam...he’s not yours, not really, he belongs to all the runners, Paula, get back to Maxine...I can kill him...my ankle suddenly shoots pain up into the knee, as Van Ark says “Just a little farther.”
A haze over everything- uncomprehending as Paula says get out, take the vials - a headset...