Chapter Text
Title: Resurgo
Author: coolbyrne
Rating: T
Summary: A global infection leaves our favourite duo left to deal with the aftermath. Yes, it’s a zombie story.
A/N: First, being a zombie-type fic, I hope you’ll allow me a huge dose of suspension of disbelief. I do as much research as I can in fics that require it, but of course, I needed to create medical situations that wouldn’t be possible in the real world. Second, the title is based from the Latin phrase ‘Eadem mutata resurgo’, which means, ‘I arise again changed, but the same’. Third, my thanks to people like Scullybones and kathybopeep who, as readers, motivate and encourage. And last but not least, to RomanMachine/happycamper5, the most important part of my zombie survival plan.
…..
Even in the double-walled sanctuary of the morgue, she could hear the commotion upstairs. The thumping of heavy feet vibrated through the ceiling like thunder rolling in the distance, and a dulled cacophony of shouts and screams trickled into the room. She held her breath until she heard an all-too familiar noise. Gunfire. Knowledge from a life that seemed like an eternity away filtered through her brain, identifying the weapons, as if it made a difference whether or not it was a .32 or a 9 millimeter. A familiar face, one of the few that remained since it all went to hell 21 days ago, came around the corner.
Was it only 21 days?
“Dr. Isles!” Susie said, out of breath and shaking. “The defense has been breached upstairs. We’ve been told we have to leave.”
Even after all they’d seen and done, the fact that Susie Chang still called her by her professional name was a marginal source of amusement. “We’re not going anywhere, Susie.” The younger woman opened her mouth to object, and Maura understood. “I mean we’re not going, Susie.” She didn’t have to identify who she was including in the pronoun. “You, on the other hand, should go.”
The brunette blinked. “But… but… no, Dr. Isles. You can’t stay. It’s not safe.”
“It’s not safe anywhere,” she replied, not unkindly. “But you’ll have some armed protection.”
“And what will you have?”
“Someplace I’ve always felt safe.” Maura smiled. “Someone who’s always made me feel safe.”
Susie looked over the doctor’s shoulder, into the solidified fortress of the autopsy bay. “Dr. Isles.” She took a deep breath. “Maura. She’s not… she’s not the person you remember.”
Maura pressed her lips together and drew on conviction she didn’t know she possessed. “But she can be. And I have to try.”
Footsteps pounded down the fire escape and ten heavily weaponed men entered the two women raised their arms and shouted, “Clean!” How that became the safe word, Maura couldn’t remember, but it was the signal for the men to lower their guns.
One man, a janitor one month ago, now the group’s leader, lifted his visor and barked, “Let’s go!”
Susie looked nervously between the man and her mentor. “Go,” Maura told her. “You’ll be fine. We’ll be fine.” She slowly stepped back until she stood between the two doors that separated them from the autopsy room.
“What the fuck is she doing?” the man asked.
The moment of uncertainty on his part gave Maura time to swipe her security card through the reader. As the primary door closed, she looked at Susie. The young woman stepped towards it and placed her hand on the bulletproof glass.
“Dr. Isles?”
“Go,” Maura repeated, this time with a smile. “You’ll make it.”
The man made Susie’s decision for her. Grabbing her by the arm, he pulled her out of the room, never looking back.
…..
When the second security door closed, it was as if the world went away. Cool and quiet, the room was the antithesis to the chaos that surrounded them. Not for the first time since it all began, Maura closed her eyes and could almost pretend it was another day at the office. Another day where she worked side-by-side with some of Boston’s finest police officers. With Boston’s finest detective. But it wasn’t another day, at least not like the ones she remembered. Slowly opening her eyes, she gazed at the figure in the corner. It was another day, but one without the sly smiles and lingering touches. There were no soft words or tender looks. It was another day that only marked time, time they didn’t have.
It didn’t happen here first. That honour went to Madagascar, and before the little nation could close its borders, it was out. Barbaros Simplex-C. What the media called The Virus despite it being a bacterial infection. But, the label sold papers and spread fear and that’s all that mattered. The speed in which it spread gave little chance for study, but they did know a handful of things. It was a blood-borne pathogen, contact through any mucus membrane spread the disease. It wasn’t like the movies; there were no ‘zombies’. The infected could be killed by any means necessary. But most importantly, at least to Maura, the transition from healthy to infected was complete within seven days. She looked again at the figure who jerked slightly and had darting eyes. Seven days had whittled down to three. She heard another shot fired, a muffled thud somewhere in the distance. She wondered if she’d get those three days.
Walking up to the figure, yet still a safe distance away, Maura refrained from reaching out. Instead, she simply whispered.
“Jane.”
…..
“Maura, this wouldn’t be happening if you’d just bought that damn bug-out room!”
It was still early days of The Virus in Boston – not so early that they hadn’t already lost friends, but not so far gone that Jane couldn’t find a moment to throw in some sarcasm. They had contemplated leaving the city, but a half a million people seemed to have the same idea, and now, the freeways were gridlocked with panic and infection. The streets were so bad that even leaving the station was out of the question. So they took solace in the only place available: the morgue. Jane, Maura, Susie, and two CSRU techs were the five who had the sense to find security with the dead, though not before Jane dragged Maura to the armoury and threw a duffel bag of weapons together.
“We should’ve raided the cafe,” Jane grumbled. “I’m starving.”
“And I have to take a leak,” Mark piped up.
Maura spun around. “Are you two children?” she shouted, her emotions getting the better of her. “Really? Really?” She threw the word at Jane. Turning her ire to Mark, she snapped, “There are four sinks. Pick one.” Undeterred by her rising voice, she yanked open the fridge and pulled out a sandwich. It landed at Jane’s feet. “I don’t care if it’s from the dead people fridge. We’re all dead!”
Jane carefully approached the blonde with soothing words and slow movements. “It’s okay, Maura. It’s okay.”
She held up her hands to keep the detective at bay. “Is it really, Jane? Do you promise?”
Jane cast her eyes downward, knowing it wasn’t a promise she could make. “I don’t know. Is that what you want to hear? That I don’t know?”
“Hey,” Susie said with a feigned lightness to her voice. “We’re all a bit on edge. Maybe we need to come up with a plan?”
“I’m planning on not staying here,” Liam said. Looking at Jane, he shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry, Rizzo, but you gotta admit sitting isn’t doing shit.”
“So what’s your big plan?” Mark asked. “Have you seen it out there?”
“Westover is an hour and a half away,” Liam told them. “It’s one of the largest Air Force bases in the States.”
“Eleventh,” Maura automatically said.
“Eleventh,” he corrected. “You can’t tell me the government isn’t shipping people out to a safe place.”
Mark laughed mirthlessly. “And where might that be?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but it sure as hell ain’t here!”
Susie watched the conversation intently before turning to Jane. “What about you, Detective Rizzoli? What do you think we should do?”
She felt all eyes on her, and not for the first time in her life, the weight of responsibility. “I think we gotta stay.” She ignored Liam’s heavy groan. “At least for now. Let’s wait and see how it plays out.”
Liam looked at her incredulously. “How it plays out?” he repeated. “I’ll tell you how it plays out, Rizzoli: we stay, we die. I’d rather take my chances out there than wait for the walls to close in here.”
She didn’t try to persuade him to stay, but she did insist he take one of the guns and extra ammunition. He promised to send help when he got to the air base. That was 18 days ago. No one had come for them.
The only people who showed up was a group of men who thought the police station was a good place to hole up. They arrived on the 5th day, and the two packs of survivors came to a personal agreement: the group upstairs would be the eyes and ears, and the group downstairs would hand over half their weapons. It wasn’t an agreement that pleased Jane, but with phone service down and no access to information, they had little choice. At least the guys had the decency to bring down some food.
By Day 11, the food dried up, and on Day 13, Jane made a decision.
“I’m going to go out and see what I can get,” she told the group.
Maura’s response was immediate and firm. “Absolutely not.”
But of course, she absolutely did, because they had no other options. Mark agreed to go with her, not just for back-up, but because everyone suspected he was going a little stir crazy in the morgue. Susie declined with a drop of her head, and Jane told her there was nothing to be ashamed about. Maura stood silent in the corner, with arms crossed and lips firmly pressed into a line.
Jane quietly approached her until their toes touched. “You know I have to do this, Maura.”
With a steely gaze, she looked up into deep brown eyes. “It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
The detective snorted. “You think I like it?”
“Yes,” Maura admitted, surprising them both. “I think there’s a part of you that likes being the cowboy. I think you’re drawn to danger and often enjoy-”
Her words were stopped by a kiss.
Pulling back slightly, she breathed into Maura’s lips. “That’s wasn’t a ‘just in case I never get to do it’ kiss.”
“No?” Maura asked, gripping Jane’s shoulders. “What kind of kiss was it?”
Even now, signs of a Rizzoli smirk could be spotted in the corner of her mouth. “A promise of more to come.”
The words took Maura’s breath away, but she shook her head. “If you go, you can’t make that promise.”
They were quiet for a moment. Years of wasted time disappeared between them. Maura cradled the brunette’s face in her hands and kissed her deeply and soundly. “That wasn’t a good-bye kiss,” she said, and found a glimmer of lightness to inject into her words. “It was a ‘look what you’ll be missing if you don’t come back’ kiss.”
“I’ll come back.”
She fought the tears that threatened to breach the defenses of her heart. “Please come back to me, Jane.”
…..
She kept her word as she always did. She came back. Armed with packaged food that Maura would have rebuffed only two weeks ago, Jane and Mark returned as heroes and shared all they discovered about what was going on. What they didn’t know was, along with the food and information, they also brought back the infection.
Jane glossed over an encounter they had with the Infected, brushing it off as if they hadn’t fought for their very lives in the convenience store two blocks over. The streets had seemed quiet, and the course of action was stealth. ‘Don’t shoot unless you absolutely have to,’ Jane had told Mark. So, the pair moved wordlessly through the abandoned cars and overturned debris. Some ‘experts’ had claimed the Infected were only attracted to movement, not smell, and that seemed to be the case when Jane spotted one gazing out a window directly at them. It only stood and stared, and the pair stayed statue-still until something drew its attention, and it turned back into the building.
They weren’t so lucky in the store. Mark had knocked over a display of cans in his zeal to fill his bag with sugar treats and two Infected came out from the back. They weren’t alarmingly quick, but they weren’t the shambling bodies of pop culture lore, either. Jane had a knife at the ready the minute she left the morgue, but Mark had sheathed his to collect the supplies. While Jane was busy dealing with her attacker, Mark took out with his own, but not before a bloody mouth had latched onto his defending forearm.
“Holy shit!” she said, breathlessly. “You okay?”
He laughed nervously, something Jane had attributed to the adrenaline at the time. They knew now, on Day 17, that it was something else entirely. He had hidden the wound from them, both literally and figuratively, for three days, until the effects of the virus couldn’t be ignored. Though he had shown signs of anemia that researchers associated with the disease, the group had dismissed it as simple fatigue. No one could say the events of the last three weeks weren’t exhausting for everyone. But when the twitching, the darting eyes, the laboured breathing, the self-mutilation all came to the fore, they knew the horrible truth. As he lay in a restless slumber on one of the autopsy tables, the three women contemplated what needed to be done.
“It’s obvious,” Jane spoke first. “It was obvious before he started gnawing at his own arm. He’s infected. We can’t let him stay here.”
“So we just…leave him somewhere to die?” Susie asked.
The detective pointed to the twitching body. “He’s more than halfway there already.”
“We need to keep him,” Maura said. “If we can study him, we might be able to find a way to reverse the effects.”
Jane’s eyebrows shot into her hairline. “What?”
Nodding, Susie continued enthusiastically, “Yes! Doctors in Japan were running tests on infected subjects and came to the conclusion it might be curable.”
Jane contemplated the thought before saying, “But if you want to study him, that means they didn’t make the cure known. Or they didn’t actually come up with one.”
“Well, no,” Maura admitted. “But the fact that they were certain of the possibility leads me to believe there is one.”
“And you want to do that here in the morgue? With him?”
“We’ve got enough to at least give it a shot,” Maura said.
Susie nodded. “Yes! The lab will have almost anything we need. The equipment, the supplies. We can do this, Dr. Isles!”
Jane couldn’t help but smile at the younger woman’s enthusiasm. “Fine,” she surrendered. “But we tie him down somewhere or chain him to something or I’m not sleeping with him four days away from going all ‘Aarrggggh!’”
How much of life would be different if things could be seen through a filter other than hindsight? Maura, who had gone through some trying moments, knew it might surprise people to know she wouldn’t change much if she had the chance. Being adopted, seeing the horrors of Africa through Doctors without Borders, having a mobster for a father, waiting until now to reveal her feelings to Jane. She was certain she wouldn’t change those things, even if given the opportunity. But she also knew without question she would change this moment – the moment when Jane reached behind Mark to snap on the handcuffs. She would make sure they had given him a sedative first. Or she would make sure she and Susie had distracted him. Or that Jane wore safety goggles. But she couldn’t change any of those things, and she couldn’t change the fact that a drop of blood from the corner of Mark’s mouth touched Jane’s eye when he turned on her in a rage.
Jane snapped the cuffs on and threw him down, quickly looping a rope around the links and through a spare set of cuffs on their makeshift restraint table. While Susie quickly injected a sedative into the snarling man, Jane looked up at Maura.
“No, no, no, no, no,” the blonde repeated over and over as she rushed to Jane’s side. Pulling her roughly to the eye wash station, she bent the brunette over and pulled the emergency lever. Soft yet direct sprays of saline shot into Jane’s eyes and the two women were silent except for Maura’s whispered chant of, “Oh god, oh god, oh god.” Gravity quietly went about its business, the emergency station based on the simple premise of released weight that slowly squeezed the solution out of its container. Maura hated it for its simplicity.
At last, the stream trickled to nothing, and Jane slowly stood up. Maura cupped her face and looked directly into her eyes. Examining. Searching. Hoping.
“Maura,” Jane softly spoke. “Maura, I’m…”
“What, Jane?” she replied, more sharply than she had intended. “You’re fine? You’re going to be okay? What, Jane?” Without waiting for an answer, she spun around and looked at the man sleeping on the autopsy table. “What have you done?” she asked, her voice rising with anger and blame. Bringing a trembling hand to her lips, she repeated the question, this time with a whispered fear. “What have you done?”
…..
The two doctors worked side-by-side for the better part of 24 hours. Tests were taken and results were analyzed, but by the fourth day of Mark’s infection, there seemed to be little hope of finding a solution. And if Maura was honest with herself, she didn’t care. As a doctor, she knew the idea of giving one life value over another was reprehensible. But she also knew, when she loved that one life more than anything, medical oaths didn’t matter. Mark took a turn for the worse faster than they’d expected, and Maura injected the euthanasia cocktail with little emotion.
“You’re going to have to shackle me soon,” Jane said quietly, as Maura put away her supplies.
“Not right now, Jane.”
The brunette looked over at Susie who had the grace to find something to do on the other side of the room. “We don’t have to do it right now, but-”
“No, Jane, I mean not right now. None of this. I don’t want to deal with any of this right now.” Jane stood by her side for several minutes, uncertain what to do. Just as she began to pull away, Maura reached out for her hand and held her close. “Don’t leave me.”
The plea was loaded with meaning.
…..