Work Text:
- Things Preserved
The air over Abel was thick with soot and tension. Five had come stomping through the gates with several agitated guards in tow and gone directly to confront Janine. Sam—who had gone to the farmhouse expecting another relieved Sam-Five reunion—had never seen two people argue so fiercely and yet professionally. Sam scarcely had time to appreciate that Janine was not yelling at him for letting Nadia try to murder one of their runners before a new guard ran in shouting about unscheduled arrivals.
Apparently, word had spread fast after Five hadn’t returned to New Canton. There were a few Abel runners outside the walls when they got word; they’d immediately dropped their headsets and headed straight for Abel. While this was deeply, eye-wateringly inspiring, it also meant the camp suddenly had to find even more beds and rations in its scant shelters.
Janine wound up shouting at Sam for a while, after all.
Sam rolled his shoulders, trying to loosen up the tightness there. He’d climbed out of his sleeping bag feeling sore and irritable before he’d even begun work for the day.
It’s not like he had anything else to do except worry about what Nadia might be up to, anyway.
The Almighty Janine had made it clear his primary job was to assess the state of all the electrical equipment and cables in camp, not “further antagonize New Canton’s communications officers.” So, after a tacky energy bar breakfast, Sam dutifully pulled on his rubber-palmed gloves and began following cables from the former site of the comms shack to their inevitably frayed ends, retracing and recoiling the wires back to the start. The mid-spring sun taunted him, making him sweat just enough that the soot he kicked up with each step clung to him like growing aggravation. Most of Abel had been made of abandoned fenceposts and lumber scavenged from hardware stores, so while there had been very few physical impacts during Van Ark’s attack, fire had swept through much of the township and left it a blackened shadow of itself.
After another tedious hour tracing wires to more completely destroyed speakers, Sam had had enough. He tore off the gloves and shoved them into the back pocket of his jeans.
This was a mess. A complete and total disaster. There was just no way Abel could recover from all this damage. And not just from the fires, but from the fear and the loss.
Hell, he thought with a pang like a knife to the ribs, We even lost Runner Eight.
Sara Smith had seemed so invincible. He’d always felt like she didn’t need his help in the field—that she could run entire missions by herself on the fly and still rack up more zombie kills than anyone since the legendary Chris McShell. She was intimidating, and blunt, and the last person he would have thought would get bitten. But he hadn’t seen what he should have, hadn’t caught on to the organized zombies advancing on the township. Five and Eight had been distracted telling him to run, and it had gotten Sara killed.
Bloody lot of good all your cameras did.
His cameras hadn’t even picked up which way Sara had gone, drawing the zombies away before she turned herself. Sam’s eyes burned as he remembered telling Janine they wouldn’t be able to bring Sara back for a proper burial.
After all the damage that had been done to her home, the look on Janine’s face at that moment haunted him the most.
Desperate for a distraction, Sam cast around for something more fruitful to do. He spotted a cluster of people working on a building next to the running track—which had been unscathed except for a few scorch marks—and went to help. He joined the grimly silent group, throwing himself into trying to make a dent in the rubble and pulling out anything that seemed salvageable. It was meditative, almost. Any personal effects were easy to spot against the dull brown-grey of charred wood or aluminum supports so that there was always another splash of color to work towards.
Sam pulled at a ragged slab of drywall, grinding his teeth together with the effort. After a held breath of exertion, the chunk jolted towards him, causing the whole pile of debris he was working on to scrape and shift. He paused, putting upward pressure on the plaster so it wouldn’t crush whatever the lavender scrap of fabric beneath it was, hoping he hadn’t already made things worse. Seeing an opening, he grabbed the thick, satiny lavender material and freed it from the pile.
The delicate color contrasted sharply with ash that had crept into every line of his hands and crept under each fingernail.
The item Sam had just freed turned out to be a ragged throw pillow, which confirmed he was standing in the ruins of the rec room of what used to be the runner’s dorms. The dorms had collapsed early on and the fires hadn’t been quite so bad in this section. As a result salvage of useful items from this building had become both very slow and encouragingly fruitful. They’d even found a bucket of protein powder that would significantly boost their rations.
Sam had never realized before how many people had taken such great pains to hold onto things. He’d gone to his own tiny room the first day—a tool shed near the comms shack, really—and stood looking at the collapsed corrugated metal for a long time before pulling out a couple of hoodies and deciding anything else wasn’t worth the effort. He hadn’t had anything of his old life on him when he’d fled. But he’d noticed over the following days that most of the other living spaces around town held troves of pictures, stuffed animals, plastic figurines, worn-out books with notes in the margins. Artifacts of a past life brought into the present.
The runners seemed the worst and best for this—the rubble was more colorful here, thin siding mixed with torn posters or dirty colored yarn or the ragged wrappers of protein bars. Best of all for his current mental state, none of the runners had been in their rooms at the time of the attack, so Sam could be sure there would be no survivors or…non-survivors amongst the ruined walls.
Guilt and relief—and guilt at his relief—at this thought flooded his brain. He hadn’t had to uncover any of the immediate casualties of Van Ark’s attack.
The first day back at Abel, he’d rolled his eyes at Janine’s insistence that she clear each building first before letting the reconstruction team enter. He was certain it was another symptom of her chronic Control Freak Syndrome. Until the day she’d trudged out of one of the collapsed farmers’ quarters clutching a bundle of reddened cloth and looking more severe than usual.
Sam had turned away as Maxine and the med techs grimly filed in with a sheet.
No, it was much better for him to spend days stripping wire after wire, following their trails to burned or ragged or miraculously intact ends. Even though the comms shack and tower had been thoroughly destroyed in the attack, the roots of his communications and surveillance system ran deep through the township. He’d been able to set up a rough two-way broadcast in the clear on one of the backup laptops from the hospital within three days of arriving back at Abel.
A damn good thing he had, too. Sam felt fire at the back of his throat as he was reminded once again of how Nadia had shamelessly tried to kill Runner Five. His newest runner, the smallest runner, the one still the most eager to help, the one—
And if he had taken any longer…
Sam couldn’t face that right now.
He flung the throw pillow aside and dropped the drywall with a thunk, clenching his hands into fists. The gesture did nothing but pull at the scrapes and cuts all over his hands and arms, but the stinging didn’t seem very out of place amidst the burned-out piles of runners’ prized possessions.
Suddenly, Sam had an idea. Pushing everything else aside, he traced what he remembered to be the hallways of the dorms. Runner Five was one of the few runners that had come back to Abel so far. If he could figure out which room was hers…
Two hours later, Sam hurried towards Janine’s farmhouse, clutching a battered baseball cap and trying to hide his excitement. He burst through the side door leading into the kitchen, listening for signs of activity. He wandered through the living room and the adjoining office – because of course Janine de Luca had an office complete with overstuffed filing cabinets in a zombie apocalypse—before he picked up the sound of women’s voices coming from the sunroom.
“—with all due respect, ma’am,” Five was saying as Sam moved quietly into the room. “Diplomacy with New Canton was never part of my mission, even before their comms operator tried to kill me. From a stability standpoint, we need all the hands we can get to rebuild—”
“There are more than enough people already in Abel to reinforce the most critical structures,” Janine argued. “Positive relations with our neighbors could prove useful in the long term, and you will not get those by pulling back all our people now.”
Janine and Five were perched on patio chairs, staring intently at a HAM radio as if it was a person. Sam could see why when he recognized the Major’s voice coming from the box above the tinny static of the poor connection.
“That is certainly true, but Captain Fletcher makes a good point about external indicators. If we focus only on those buildings, we’re pointing out where our interests lie. Given our solid justification for pulling back our runners, we could bring them back here without revealing—”
“Hold on, ma’am,” Five said suddenly, eyes flicking to where Sam was awkwardly hovering in the doorway. “Sam! Did you need something?”
Janine turned to fix her intense gaze on him as well, and Sam suddenly felt as if this hadn’t been such a good idea, after all.
“I, er, um. I thought I would—I think this belongs to you,” he said, proffering Five’s trademark hat with a motion that acknowledged how lame of an offering it was.
Much to his astonishment, Five’s eyes positively lit up as she abandoned whatever secret briefing she was in to rush over to Sam.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “You found it.” She reached slowly for the cap as if it would disappear if she moved too quickly. Sam was too paralyzed to hand it over, only managing to release his grip when Five gingerly tugged at the brim. For the first time since she’d come fuming back into Abel, Sam saw Five’s face lighten into an actual grin instead of the courteous, tight-lipped smile she’d been giving when the situation required it. She ran the tips of her fingers over the stitched-on star in the front, thoughts drifting to somewhere Sam had never seen.
He suddenly realized he should rejoin the conversation instead of standing gaping in the doorway. “Yeah, sorry. I didn’t realize you were in the middle of some…secret meeting,” Sam said, glancing at Janine.
“Is that Mister Yao?” the Major asked over the radio. “I do so wish we had more time to talk, but we need to discuss the rebuilding of Abel before I have to dash off to another PAC meeting—”
“And since Mister Yao would rather we abandon Abel for New Canton,” Janine interjected with a scowl, “I do not think he has much to contribute to this conversation.”
“I would not!” he protested, crossing indignantly towards the radio as if to address the distant Major directly. “Only—look, sorry, I know this is your home and all, Janine, but in case you haven’t noticed, pretty much everything else is wrecked. It’d take months to rebuild until it’s safe—”
“Wait, no!” Five cried from Sam’s shoulder height. “You’re not saying we shouldn’t rebuild Abel, are you?”
The open astonishment in her gaze surprised Sam enough to derail his train of thought.
“No, I—I just—”
“That is clearly out of the question,” the voice of the Major on the radio said. “Not only has Abel become home for so many people, but it also possesses valuable access to fields, fresh water, and valuable trading partners—”
“Not to mention the established surveillance and security systems,” Five volunteered, determinedly not looking at Sam.
“Yes, those too,” the Major continued in a slightly amused tone. “I am sorry, Mister Yao, but Abel is too valuable to give up, even accounting for the severity of the damage. However, I do concede your implied point about safety. We ought to consider carefully how many people to pull back from New Canton.”
Janine scowled at Sam as if he was to blame for this development. “If we pull any more people out of New Canton after the runners’ abdications, we’ll look like we’re trying to go back on the agreements—”
“As if they’ve held up their end of the bargain?” Five interrupted. “Given we clearly can’t trust them to keep us safe outside the walls, I’d say we’ve got a pretty good reason to pull back the runners and guards.”
“They are the best equipped to handle themselves until the defenses are repaired,” the Major agreed. The electronic buzzing wavered a few times in the background, and Sam wondered if his runners always had to strain so hard to hear him.
Five nodded as if that was the end of the discussion while Janine shot her an irritated look.
“I think we ought to return to the main threat at hand, then,” Janine said after a moment. “Professor Van Ark. What does he stand to gain from destroying Abel?”
Five glanced uneasily at Sam. With timing so accurate it was like she had seen the movement, the Major chimed said, “Captain, why don’t you go retrieve the rest of your things, now that Mister Yao can show you where they are? Janine and I can finish up before I run to the next meeting.”
Sam wanted to protest the dismissal. What are they planning that could possibly be so secret? But Five had obeyed the Major without pause. With an almost-cheerful, “Yes, ma’am,” she turned away from the radio to look at Sam expectantly. “There’s a couple of things I’ve been hoping we could find.”
“Ah—er, yeah,” he fumbled, resolving to fight with Janine about the cloak-and-daggerness later. “C’mon, Five, I’ll show you which debris pile to start with.” If I can find it again myself.
Sam looked sidelong at Five as they walked out of Janine’s farmhouse in silence. He could swear the runner relaxed once they were out of earshot of the radio, although maybe he was overthinking it. Still, he couldn’t be imagining the way she lifted her chin slightly when they made it into the sun, turning her face towards the warmth. The gash on her forehead from the explosion had healed enough that she’d stopped “wasting” bandages on it. Now there was only a line of shell-shiny deep pink above her right eye, looking like it would be a permanent reminder of Van Ark’s attack. Five winced as she put her cap on a little too quickly, putting friction on the raw skin.
Sam realized with a start he was practically staring, and dropped his gaze to the torn-up earth.
“So, what are you looking for?” Sam asked after a while. The silence felt companionable, but he always started second-guessing that if it went on too long.
“Uh…” for once, it was Five’s turn to waver. “I kept…a few things from my life before in my dresser. Not too much, you know—a picture of my family in my wallet. A little box of…mementos. So. That would be nice to have. Oh! And the chapstick!”
Sam raised a bemused eyebrow at this very cryptic statement said as if it was obvious.
“My first Runner’s Right,” she said with a half-grin. “I know it’ll probably be, like, impossible to find, but it’d be cool to have it back.”
Sam smiled to himself with wry amusement while Five chatted about what she should try to find of Rowan’s and Cora’s. Five had always struck him as a practical, no-fuss kind of person, but after seeing her reaction to getting her hat back, Sam was beginning to understand why people came back to a scene of utter destruction. Just because he didn’t have anything more valuable than a hoodie, didn’t mean other people weren’t searching for scraps of their past lives. Surely that was worth digging through some rubble. To be able to give that back to people. Which reminded him—
“Here,” Sam said, pulling out his discarded gloves and handing them to Five. “They might be a bit big, but they’ll keep your hands from getting cut up while we’re looking.”
Five made a short, pleased, hum of pleased surprise before accepting the gloves and pulling one on experimentally. They were massive on her tiny hands, the fingers flopping lose almost a third of their length and the wrist elastic coming fully halfway up her forearm. Five giggled and waved her gloved hand at Sam, making the thing flap around comically.
The pair laughed and joked their way to the ruined dorms.
Maybe Abel didn’t have to be a total loss.