Work Text:
Listening to the Dark
by bos10blonde
~*~
Her headset had gone silent again. The only thing Runner Five could hear now was her own harsh breathing and footsteps crashing through the forest undergrowth. She struggled to run quieter, cursing her lack of stealth internally: Holy hell, do you have to be so loud? Every zom for a mile can hear you! Judging by how dark it had gotten, Five guessed she’d been running for over an hour since Sam had confirmed she had run beyond Abel Township’s camera coverage. She should’ve been back at the township by now…
She could still hear Sam’s intermittent radio calls, but Five was running blind. If Sam couldn’t see her, she was figuratively and literally in the dark, with no idea if there was a pack of zombies on her tail or if she was heading towards their necrotic embrace. If that thought was a pure bolt of electric terror, the next was a churning weight of molten anxiety: she wasn’t even sure she was going the right direction. Runner Five had only been running for the township for about a week and a half and hadn’t yet memorized all the surrounding area beyond major terrain in relation to the township. Compasses really should be standard equipment, she thought. And emergency flares. Does Abel even have those?
Five wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep running. Today’s mission was supposed to be long from the start; Janine had tasked her to go to New Canton, over a half hour’s run each way. She’d assumed if the neighboring camps had become friendly enough for an electronics exchange, she’d be able to take a break before heading back, but that had been proven wrong when New Canton started firing warning shots as she approached. She’d had to turn and full-out sprint away from both New Canton and Abel Township to escape.
“It’s fine,” Five had panted over the comms as she hauled tail out of there. “I’ll circle ‘round this farm then head back.” Sam and Janine had warned her that she’d remain out of camera range while she did, but it should only add fifteen minutes to her return route, so Janine had cleared her to go ahead as long as she checked in frequently.
But things almost immediately got much worse. Five rounded the last corner that was supposed to put her on the path back into camera range and—stepped into open air, tumbling into an old runoff ditch along the boundary of the farm. She cried out once, the impact jarring as her knees struck cold earth and her pack slammed against her back. After she stopped rolling and frantically checked for breaks, Five scrambled to her feet. Mildly disoriented, she decided to follow the trench until she reached a stand of trees she was pretty sure extended toward her original route. She knew this would put her at the edge of radio range as well, but she didn’t have much choice without a way to check the fields above. Five could feel blood trickling from a nasty cut below her right knee, so she sped up again, trying to outrun any zoms that may have caught the scent. She gritted her teeth and cursed profusely in her head at the jolts of pain sparked by each step.
Trying not to trip again in the uneven gulch, Five groped at the right side of her headset for the switch that opened her comms frequency. She felt a cold rush of adrenaline when her fingers met with jagged edges and curving wires instead of smooth plastic.
“Runner Five to Abel Township! Come in, Abel Township.” Five swallowed a mouthful of grit and pulled the microphone closer to her mouth. “Sam? Can you hear me, Sam? …Janine? Abel Township, do you copy? Over.” No response. The right side of her headset had been crushed.
Five fought a wave of panic as she ran to the shelter of the trees, slowing her pace slightly to check on her various cuts and scrapes. Barely five minutes passed before Sam was in her left ear asking her to check in. It sounded faint and staticky, although from distance or damage, she couldn’t tell. Five tried to answer, but Sam didn’t acknowledge. She was surprised to hear concern in his voice as he and Janine tried to raise a response again and again.
It had still been dusk then. Even once she was out of the ditch, there was no indication they could see or hear her. Dread clawed up her throat from her stomach. Had she gone that far off course? It was fully dark now, and the stand had lasted longer than she’d expected, stretching into a forest, but she didn’t dare alter her bearing too much in case it put her further off course. Eventually Janine left, and Sam went from addressing Five directly, to worried that she was a zom with a headset now, to mourning the loss of his family almost to himself. A second hour began since he’d lost visual, and still came on the comms every so often. Why is he putting in so much effort for someone he barely knows?
Runner Five’s eyes were hot with suppressed tears despite the frigid air, and Five fought to keep breathing normally. The sadness and loss behind his words felt like needles driving into Five’s heart. She felt like her hope was waning along with Sam’s. Would they really lock her out, even if she managed to find her way back to the gates? Absolutely, her Mullins training told her. And they will soon, if you don’t start moving faster.
Her lungs ached from constant exertion and her legs burned with each shortening step by the time she broke out of the woods. Five scanned the horizon desperately for any indication of life or the undead, listened until her ears buzzed and strained her eyes until she saw double. Five craned her head right to left—wait. Is that light? She jerked her head right, tried to catch it again—there! There was a steady red point of light beyond the field, farther west than expected, but definitely there. The beacon on the tower!
Five kept running. She knew she was close to her limit, but she forced her legs forward. Her only goal now was to reach that voice in the dark, hoping that would keep one flame of hope from being extinguished.
I’m still out here. The zoms haven’t gotten to me yet. Please, Sam…I’m coming. Please don’t stop talking. Help me get back.”
~*~
“You should go to sleep, Mister Yao.” Janine said sharply, although she had been trying to be gentle. It had been aggravating enough that Sam had woken her up for some nonsensical question about the composition of Pre-Z desserts, but even worse to hear that Runner Five was still missing. It was Janine’s responsibility to keep everyone safe, including ensuring adequate training for new runners. She kept trying to analyze what had gone wrong. I know she’s only been in the area a fortnight, but didn’t Mullins provide her any training before sending her into the wilderness? Was it too soon to send her out alone?
“I know, I should sleep.” Sam’s voice was raw as it cut into Janine’s thoughts. “I just…well, I couldn’t possibly…” Sam trailed off, passed a hand in front of his eyes, and sighed shakily. “I don’t want to just, ah…leave her out there. Like the last time.” There was a heavy pause in which Sam refused to meet Janine’s eyes. They both knew he was reliving what had happened to Alice. It hadn’t even been a month since they’d lost her, and this situation eerily echoed that day. For the first few hours, Sam had been trying to tell himself that this Runner Five wasn’t Alice, that this wasn’t the same, that it was going to end differently this time…You don’t even know her name yet anyway, he rationalized. But as exhaustion set in and the night ground on, he was less and less able to convince himself.
“Just a bit longer,” Sam finished finally.
Janine flicked her wrist at Sam in what she hoped was a dismissive gesture before turning on her heel and leaving the comms room.
Sam turned his chair to lean forward over the desk again, propping his forehead on one fist and letting out a long exhale before he spoke. “Oh, I dunno, Five…They said to me just now I should probably hit the sack sometime soon.” He yawned quickly, hardly bothering anymore to move away from the microphone perched on the comms desk in front of him. “They’ll send on someone else to keep sending out pings through the night, but…I’ve gotta be honest. We’re losing hope here. A couple of zoms have arrived at the gates, and that…usually means the bigger horde is on its way. It may be only a few minutes till we bar the gate.”
Why did I say that? a part of Sam wondered. If he thought Five was listening, why tell her they might bar the gates and trap her out there? Was he trying to scare her? At the same time…if he didn’t think she was out there listening, why was he still sending desperate calls into the night? Why did he still need to be on the comms, when there were plenty of others that could take over? Sam felt his chest tighten as his thoughts swirled. Was there something else I should have done?
Sam muttered, more to himself than the mic, as he glanced at the monitors again. “Another good runner gone. Another piece of equipment lost. And we’re…” Still no movement. It was so dark that the monitors mostly just reflected the glare from the window, even when Sam turned off the comm shack lights.
“The next time I see your face, maybe I’ll have to shoot you in the head.” As a broadcasting professional, Sam should have been proud of how matter-of-fact he sounded, but it didn’t feel like the statement had come from him at all. His vision felt wavery and distant, like either he or the room around him was slightly underwater, but his eyes were burning and dry. He couldn’t stop the words spilling out of his mouth.
“No one stays sane through this, Five. Whatever the future is, it’s not going to be like the past. No ice cream rolls will make it better, no… No one saying they’re proud of me would make it okay.”
Sam trailed off as Janine re-entered the comms room with two mugs of bitter instant coffee from what passed for the shack’s break room. She set one down on the side of his desk with a clink. Sam wondered idly how much she’d heard, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Janine had enough time to cross to the other side of the comms room before he began speaking again.
“Maybe you’re better off, see, is what I’m saying. I know we’re not supposed to say that, but… but sometimes I think…”
Janine slammed her mug onto the card table supporting the monitors as she reached to grab the edges of the monitor showing the northernmost camera feed. “Mister Yao?” she called, but he hadn’t heard her as he shrugged at the microphone.
“Maybe, if you don’t have to try to build the future, you’re one of the lucky ones. Maybe…
“Mister YAO!” Janine nearly yelled this time, certain now that she had seen color moving on one of the cameras facing east. Sam looked slowly over his shoulder, and Janine gestured urgently at the faint spot of color bobbing gently on the screen.
“What? What is it? I told you, the scanner’s down, we can’t-” Sam’s eyes widened as he saw what Janine was pointing at. Suddenly, his blood was roaring in his ears. Hadn’t Runner Five worn a baseball cap on all her missions so far? “Oh my god, is that…” He’d teased her for looking like the stereotypical American, but was he sure it had been that color?
The pair held their breath a moment before Sam whipped around to the mic and shouted, “Runner Five! I can see you!”
~*~
“Runner Five! I can see you!”
A little under a mile away, Runner Five heard Sam’s shout. Her shoulders slumped in momentary relief. She dropped her chin to her chest for a second, but forced her head back up with an internal groan. She had to stay visible, and that meant running as tall as her five-foot frame allowed. It meant trying to catch any light and color she could to distinguish herself from the long grasses around her. She had to keep moving, she had to be seen. I should get a headlamp for night missions, Five thought mistily, her thoughts few and slow-moving now as she battled exhaustion.
Five kept moving, although her pace was slow. It felt like she’d been running for an eternity. The small of her back felt like it was being tenderized by the cans from her pack bouncing against it. She shook her arms down from shoulder level, trying to coax her fists to relax, and willing some hidden reserve of energy to her legs as they churned onwards in the dark. Every one of Sam’s increasingly despondent words echoed in her head.
Over the sound of her breathing, Five thought she heard noises behind her as she kept her eyes on the steadily growing red beacon. She didn’t dare to slow herself down by looking over her shoulder—she’d been hearing things, or thinking she was hearing things, all night long. It was too dark to know for sure if there were actually zoms out there or if it was just the wind in the leaves, unless they were too close for it to actually matter. Keeping her eyes forward, Five tried to speed up, but her feet had gone numb so long ago and her legs felt so heavy she honestly couldn’t tell if it worked. It wasn’t long until she heard a half moment of static, and she held her breath to listen.
“Runner Five? Runner Five, if you can hear me…I can see you!”
Five weakly swept a hand in front her face in an approximation of a wave, hoping the cameras would pick up the gesture. She didn’t even time to finish before Sam’s voice crackled urgently through again.
“Oh my god, Runner Five…” Slapping at a switch on his console, Sam opened the frequency to the speakers above the guard shack. He didn’t have time to explain but he needed the perimeter guards now, so Five and anyone in earshot of the gate all heard what Five had feared. “You can’t see them, but there’s a tail behind you. Zombies, about thirty of them.”
Luckily, Janine had sent word to the guards hours ago that there was a missing runner. Everyone on duty was alert, scanning the darkness more closely than usual. When they heard the speakers crackle to life, every guard leveled their weapon outside the wall, a dozen sets of eyes trained outwards. Sam had barely begun his next call before a particularly sharp-eyed guard caught sight of movement and called the position to his neighbors.
“They’re getting closer. I—I dunno, they make that sound at night.”
Shouts went up as a guard confirmed the tiny figure in the bright baseball cap was Runner Five. Another aimed his weapon at a blur of grey-brown movement about a hundred yards behind her. She ran towards the gate at a diagonal, trying to give them a clear angle to shoot. One guard, then a second, then all of them opened fire as the figures all began to move into the spotlight. The speakers sounded again, fighting to rise above the chaos.
“Run, Runner Five!” In the spotlights and cameras now clearly trained on her, Sam saw Five open her stride and put on a burst of speed. Caught between fear and joy, Sam urged her on one final time. “Run, run, RUN!”
Three well-placed shots from the west side of the gate cut down the last of the zoms that had made it into the range of the perimeter’s lights. Five reached the beginning of the chain-link serpentine that was the last obstacle before the gate and crashed into it, using the momentum of the rebound to turn quickly if inelegantly. The stragglers had begun to slow and spread out, and Sam knew they had the opening they needed. Triumphant, he cranked the speakers at the gates to their full volume. “Raise the gates!”
In the comms shack Sam was on his feet, clutching the microphone as he tugged the cord to its full length so he could stand as close to the gate camera’s monitor as possible. The dark glass superimposed his reflected grin over the clear image of Runner Five. Above the almost-constant sound of gunfire from all along the wall, a wavering siren added its voice to the din. The gate klaxon had kicked on as the gates began to lift, and Five had never heard a sweeter sound in her life. Momentarily blinded by a spotlight turned in her direction, she practically fell over her feet as she worked through the serpentine fencing before the township’s entrance.
“We’ve got you, Runner Five! You’re home!”
Sam dropped his mic and pumped a fist into the air, turning away from the monitors and towards the window of his shack facing the gates. Even from the other side of the quad, he could see the bustle of movement as members of Abel Township surged to see what was going on. Sam sank back onto his chair, still staring at the window. His hands were trembling, but all he felt was giddy laughter bubbling up from his chest.
~*~
For Five, all was suddenly chaos. She’d been alone in the dark so long the lights inside the gate were disorienting. She hadn’t even had enough time to bleed off the momentum from her last mad dash when a figure appeared at each of her elbows. Five started so badly that she skidded to a halt and nearly fell over. It was just two guards excitedly trying to conduct a bite check and get a debrief, but Five couldn’t follow their rapid-fire questions. The guards quickly dismissed the line of blood on her cheek from the whip of a low branch and the deep scrape along one forearm where she’d caught herself on a tree trunk before pausing.
“No, no—I fell, it’s not a bite,” Five protested, trying to move forward again and waving off the guards trying to get a better look at the gash below her knee. “I swear, they didn’t get near me, I need to get—Cora!”
“Five!” Cora, one of Five’s two roommates, arrived at a flat sprint from the direction of the dorms. She’d been frantic with worry when Five hadn’t returned as scheduled and bolted out of bed at the commotion. “My God, what happened? We were so worried—” Cora pushed through the guards to give Five a relived hug, but threw an arm under Five’s shoulders instead as her knees buckled and her legs almost gave out. Five smiled weakly at Cora in thanks before another arm appeared to brace Five’s waist and keep her upright. She looked over to see a group of medical technicians had arrived, along with Janine who was clearly directing the response effort from a short distance away.
Five tried to suppress a cough as she began to catch her breath. A few members of the growing crowd drew back at the noise, eyeing the patch of bloodied legging at her knee fearfully. Five tried to tell them she was fine, but it felt like her lungs were bruised, and her head was too light above her shoulders. She yelped as someone lifted her backpack from her shoulders and blood rushed painfully back to the area.
Five turned to Cora with an intense expression on her face. “I am so glad to see you. But right now, I need water. And I need to find Sam Yao. It doesn’t matter what order.”
Slightly confused but not inclined to argue, Cora grabbed a canteen from a med tech and handed it to Five, who managed to down half of it before sputtering at the salty taste of the “electrolyte recovery fluid” inside. Once she was satisfied Five had drunk enough for the moment, Cora helped Five begin crossing the quad towards the corrugated iron shack, med techs in tow. Curious whispers followed the group until Five stopped at last at the bottom of the stairs that elevated the comms shack like a lifeguard tower.
“Sam!” Five yelled up at the window. “Sam Yao! Get down here!”
There was a pause, then the sound of sneakers clanging down aluminum steps as Sam appeared, looking excited but confused. “Hey there, Five. Welcome back! I’m – ah, we’re all glad you’ve got back safely! I, uh, well, it’s great to see you in person again…You’re not looking bad for someone on their last legs, yeah?” Sam tried to grin at the weak joke, but Five was looking at him so intensely, and she looked absolutely spent. He couldn’t read her expression, and she was just standing there—well, swaying there, more like—so he kept talking. “I’m – I’m sorry if things got a bit dark there—could you hear any of that? I hope you didn’t—well, at the time I did, but, ah…it wasn’t anything important, just me rambling on…”
Sam trailed off as Five started nodding. “I could hear,” she said. “I heard every word.”
Cora tugged a med tech out of the way as Five stepped closer to Sam, examining the voice that had been her last lifeline in the darkness. She shook her head and said simply, “Sam Yao, you brought me home.”
Five met Sam’s gaze for a beat before suddenly launching forward to give him a hug. Sam froze and spluttered in surprise but, after a long moment, returned the gesture. In that moment, Sam and Five finally allowed a wave of relief to crash over them.
Before long, Sam felt Five rise to her tiptoes before she whispered near his ear, “Everyone here should be proud of you. Thank you, Sam. Thank you.”
“Well,” Sam replied, unsure what to do in the face of such gratitude, “maybe that does make me feel a little bit better, for now. That at least you got back alright.” Sam patted one of Five’s shoulders awkwardly before she let go and stepped backwards.
Five raised her voice and half-turned to address the remaining onlookers. “Everyone…You should know Sam Yao saved my life tonight. I was lost out there, and…well, hearing him on the comms kept me going. If I didn’t know he was—that you all were here to come back to, that there was at least someone looking for me…I don’t think I’d have made it.” Five cleared her throat, which was painfully dry. “…Sam Yao saved my life tonight.”
As she’d hoped, Five’s speech drew some applause and congratulatory shouts from the remaining crowd. One or two of the men even stepped forward to clap Sam on the back. Sam stammered incoherently in embarrassment, becoming even more flustered when he caught sight of Janine smirking at him from the edge of the group.
Cora moved through the commotion and gently turned Five by the shoulder. Five was trembling now as the last dregs of adrenaline drained away, and Cora was afraid Five might pass out right there.
“C’mon, Five. You probably need a whole lot more water and a good lie-down. It’s a shame,” Cora continued loudly as the pair reached the knot of anxiously hovering med techs, “that nobody thought to bring a damn stretcher, now you’ve got to walk all the way back, after being out in the cold for hours…”
Later, Five wouldn’t clearly remember allowing Cora half-leading, half-carrying her to the clinic while keeping up a steady stream of encouraging chatter. The only thing clear to Five through the haze of pain and exhaustion was that she was finally back. She’d finished the mission, and now she was home.