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"So, you’re a zombie," Clive says.
He’s kind of proud of the evenness of his voice--especially considering some of the other the sounds that have come out of his mouth recently. But it’s not every day a man sees his partner rip the head off a reanimated corpse, so a certain amount of shrieking seems justified.
"Yup. That’s me. Your friendly neighborhood zombie," Liv chirps. Under the dim tunnel lights, she looks exactly like her normal pale, goth self, no sign of the red eyed, veiny monster she became a few moments ago. If she wasn’t also effortlessly pulling a large metal beam across the rocky, dirt floor, he might think he’d hallucinated the entire thing. "And you’re taking this very well, if you don’t mind me saying."
"A zombie," he repeats. He feels it’s a point that bears repeating. "As in the undead. As in brain eating, the whole nine yards." The air down here is cool and damp, but he's still sweating slightly from running for his life, resulting in an overall unpleasant clamminess that only makes the whole situation feel even more claustrophobic.
"But Liv is a good zombie," Ravi cuts in. "I really feel like I cannot emphasize that enough." He cuts off with a grunt, struggling to lift a smaller beam; after a moment, Liv casually grabs it from him and leans it next the the first one against the door to the lower level.
"A good zombie. Right." Clive rubs his forehead with one hand, the other tightening his grip on his gun. He feels a distinct headache coming on. "And those people, they’re all bad zombies?" As if on cue, the horde trapped on the other side of the very flimsy door lets out another moan.
Liv winces. "Hungry. They’re all hungry zombies. It’s not their fault! They just can’t control themselves anymore."
"But you’re not hungry," Clive says slowly. Liv studiously does not meet his gaze. "You’re not hungry because you’ve been eating... Oh my god." He stops, unable to process for a moment. "Have you been eating morgue brains?" he hisses.
Both Ravi and Liv wince in unison this time. "I know this sounds bad--" Ravi begins.
"You think?" Clive snaps, feeling his cool begin to evaporate. This is not how he imagined his day going. He’d thought paperwork, checking on on the ASoIaF board he frequents, and maybe catching a break in the case of a local contract killer they'd suspected was dumping bodies down in these old, abandoned transit tunnels. Instead, he is dirty and he is tired and all he's discovered is a bunch of exciting new smells and, oh yeah, the fact that his partner is an undead cannibal who also happens to enjoy eating his homemade sandwiches and prying into his love life. "Is there anything else you want to tell me?" he demands. "Are vampires real, too? Do we have a werewolf infestation I may need to know about?" He shakes his head. "I must be losing my damn mind."
"You are not losing your mind," Liv says, stepping toward him. When he instinctively takes a step back, a look of hurt flashes over her face. He feels a split second of remorse, and then a sudden sharp burn of anger bubbles through his gut.
"Oh no, you do not get to give me those puppy dog eyes when you have been lying to me every damn day since the moment we met. I cannot believe you." He sweeps his glare over to include Ravi. "I cannot believe either of you."
Ravi raises both hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Yes, fine. But could we please focus on the immediate problem of our impending deaths by rabid zombie horde before delving into a review of my professional conduct under some very trying and, I might add, extremely unusual extenuating circumstances?"
The door is starting to buckle under steady hits from the other side. Clive stabs a finger at both of them. "Fine. But this discussion is not over, you understand me?"
"Yes," Ravi nods. "Absolutely. We will talk all about it as soon as we’re done not dying horribly."
Liv holds a hand over her chest. "Cross my heart and hope to die."
Clive glares at her. "Not funny and not cute."
He double checks his ammo. Five rounds left. Before they managed to shut the door, there were at least twelve zombies on the other side. Twelve starving zombies who’ve been trapped on a lower level until the three of them bungled into these tunnels and let them out.
"All right, look," he says. "That door’s not going to hold forever. And we can’t leave them here to escape."
Liv nods. "I know. If they get loose, they’ll infect the entire city."
"We need to call in reinforcements."
"And tell them what?" Liv demands. "That they need to firebomb all the people on the other side of that door, no questions asked? Do you have an execution squad on speed dial?"
"If we explain that they’re sick--"
Ravi shakes his head. "Then they’ll want to bring in doctors."
Clive throws his hands in the air. "And that’s a bad thing? You can’t just sit on this. The CDC needs to be involved."
Liv and Ravi exchange a pained look. Ravi shakes his head. "You think we haven’t thought about that? I am many things, including handsome and brilliant, but I am not actually a virologist!"
Liv gives him her Serious Justice Face. He normally finds it endearing, although he would never, ever tell her that. "There’s nothing the CDC could do for them once they’re in that state. And lot of innocent people could get hurt if this goes public and a panic sets in."
"A lot of innocent people are going to get hurt if zombies take over the city!"
The beams leaned against the door wobble and they all jump, eyeing it warily. "We don’t have time to argue about this now," Liv says. "I’m stronger than them. I can take them out. Clive, you just need to be ready to pick off anything that gets past me."
Ravi looks alarmed. "Liv, are you sure that’s not just the…" He pauses and glances at Clive before whispering. "You know, the brain talking?"
"You know I can still hear you, right? Like, I am standing right here," Clive says.
Liv ignores him. "It’s fine, I can do this. I’ve got the strength and the brain’s got the moves."
"The what?" Clive says.
Ravi sighs, looking put upon. "Liv sort of takes on the skills and memories of the brains she eats. Temporarily."
Liv nods. "I’m on Judo master brain right now."
Clive blinks at her. "You get their… memories?"
Liv casts him a really judgmental look. "Did you really think I was both a psychic and a zombie? I mean, what are the odds on that?"
"Oh, I’m sorry. Is that where we’re drawing the line on crazy today?"
The door takes another jolt, snapping them out of their stand off. "We do not have time for this," Liv says again.
He grits his teeth in frustration, but there’s no help for it; she’s right. They can’t trust the horde won’t get free in the time it takes help to arrive, even if they can convince any help of what needs to be done. He flicks the safety off on his gun.
"Right," Ravi says, his voice going high and reedy. He stoops to pick up a loose brick. "Absolutely. No problem."
Clive rolls his eyes and pulls him over to the corner by the entrance to the tunnels. "Just stay behind me."
"Yes. Stay behind you. That works too."
Clive turns to face him, putting a hand on his shoulder. "If both of us go down, then you turn and you run and you warn people. Do you understand?"
Ravi visibly swallows. "I understand."
Liv waits by the door. Clive nods are her. "You sure about this."
"Not really. But we don’t have a choice, right? Remember: head shots only."
"Got it."
She visibly steels herself before going all red eyed again. Even having seen it once already, the transformation makes his blood run cold. Scary, hulked out zombie Liv easily tosses the beams aside and doesn’t just open the door, but actually rips it off its hinges. The zombies on the other side fall forward in a clump, their efforts to get up hampered by being stepped on and tripped over by the ones coming up from behind.
"If I wasn’t dead frightened right now, I’d think this was really just sad," Ravi murmurs from behind him, and Clive is inclined to agree. The zombies are a sad mess of mud and blood and saggy, decomposing skin. The smell is revolting. They can barely walk, but they’re all fixated on him and Ravi, snapping their jaws and snarling. It’s somehow both depressing and deeply deeply terrifying.
Hulk Liv slams the door down the heads off the first two, then grabs a piece of rebar and brains the next one to stumble free. Another manages a swipe at her, and while they’re grappling, one of the ones on the floor crawls free of the group and starts limping toward them. It’s a man, wearing the remains of a business suit. Clive lines up a headshot and thinks, this may have been a person, but now it wants to eat you.
He takes the shot, watching it for a moment after it crumbles to make sure it doesn’t get back up. When he focuses back on her again, Liv’s taken out several more, but two others have managed to slip past her.
"Detective--" Ravi says, patting his arm urgently.
"I see them." He fires at the closest and it goes down. The second is lurching closer and his shot misses. "Damn it!" Clive takes a deep breath and focuses. His second shot takes it down. That leaves Liv struggling with the final three. "Only one bullet left," he tells Ravi over his shoulder. "Get ready to run."
Ravi says, "Oh, god," but obligingly backs toward the exit.
Liv is too busy dodging hits from each of the remaining zombies to get a shot at any of them. Clive looks for a clean shot, but she’s moving too much to be sure he wouldn’t hit her. The one on the left manages a hit to her shoulder and she snarls back at it, diving forward to bludgeon it with renewed ferocity, taking of its head before turning to struggle with the second zombie. Clive hesitates for a moment before darting forward and pistol whipping the third one, dancing back as it stumbles and recovers. And then Liv is on it, coming from behind and ramming its head into the wall with a sick crack.
For a moment, there’s no sound except his panting breath. And then Liv looks up, eyes still burning, and snarls directly at him. Clive raises the gun instinctively. Liv’s intent gaze is nothing like that of the shambling, desperate horde. She’s an apex predator sighting its next meal.
"Liv!" Ravi shouts, suddenly close behind him. Too close.
"Get back," Clive hisses at him without taking his eyes off of her.
"She won’t hurt us. Will you, Liv?" Ravi says, ignoring him completely. He stretches out a hand to her and Liv focuses on it like a piranha seeing a foot in the water. Clive’s finger tightens on the trigger. But then suddenly, she slumps and shakes her head. The red fades, leaving only plain old Liv behind. "Sorry," she mutters, and makes a face and wiping at the gore on her hands and arms.
The adrenaline rush is starting to wear off. "Judo master brain, huh?" Clive takes a shaky breath and holsters his gun, trying not to look to closely at the bodies on the ground. He’s no stranger to bloody crime scenes, but this feels different. For a long moment, they all stand there, shell shocked among the carnage. "All right, now what?" he says finally.
"Now," Ravi says firmly, "we burn everything."
"What?" Clive shakes his head. "No, this is evidence."
"Clive, we can’t tell anyone," Liv says. "Think about what the government will do. They’ll round up all the zombies, good or bad, and experiment on them. And if it leaks to the public, people will go nuts. There will be paranoid anti-zombie militias gunning down anyone who looks at them funny!" She gestures at Ravi. "Plus, we have a cure."
"There’s a cure?" Clive feels the bottom drop out of his stomach. "We just murdered all these people and there’s a cure?"
Ravi shakes his head. "It doesn’t work on them when they’re this far gone. But yes, theoretically, there is a cure. I was only able to synthesize one dose, but all we need is more time and the right ingredients to recreate it."
"I know it’s a lot to ask--" Liv begins.
Clive glares. "You’re right. It is."
She looks at him imploringly. "And we’ll tell you everything, I swear. But there’s more going on here than you know. There are already zombies in positions of power, and they’ll do anything to keep this quiet if you try to expose it. It’s not safe for any of us."
The last of his frayed temper cracks. "Oh, so you’re worried about me now? And here I thought all this time you were both letting me wander around blind to save your own asses."
"Clive--"
"No, I’m done. I’ll keep your secret--for now. But this is your mess. You clean it up." He steps carefully steps over a body, heading for the door. "I don’t want to look at either of you right now."
"I had a vision."
Clive looks up to find Liv standing in front of his desk. They haven’t spoken in four days, all his communications with the morgue filtering through phone calls with Ravi. But now she’s standing before him, wearing the Serious Justice Face.
"Oh, no," he says. "Absolutely not."
"But--"
"When I agreed to sit on the--" he lowers his voice to a whisper, "zombie freaking apocalypse, that did not mean this--" he gestures between them, "would keep on keepin’ on like nothing has changed."
Liv rolls her eyes at him, unimpressed. "The victim is still dead, isn’t she? Does she deserve justice any less because now you know--"
"Now I know that you’ve been eating the victims of all our cases?" His voice is still low and there’s no one close by, but Liv glares and makes frantic hushing gestures.
He grabs her by the arm and hustles her toward the back stairs. Once they’re outside, she steps into his face and hisses, "You had no problem with psychic visions that had absolutely no explanation!"
"That was when I trusted you!"
Liv’s face crumples a little and he almost wants to take it back. Then she straightens her back. "Fine. If that’s how you feel, then fine." She slams the door on her way back inside.
Clive sighs deeply and gives it a thirty count before following. The worst part is he is a little stuck on this one. And the realization of how much he’s come to rely on Liv’s contributions to their investigations is more than a little disheartening.
He grabs his mug off his desk and takes it over to the break room for a refill.
"Detective Babineaux." Peyton Charles steps up next to him, holding a mug of her own. He nods, warily. "I was angry too, you know. When I found out."
He looks up sharply. "Did literally everyone know about this but me?"
"Well, if it makes you feel any better, I only found out because she killed a hitman right in front of me."
He pauses, feeling all the pieces come together. "Sebastian Meyer was a batting for team Z. Of course he was." In retrospect, a whole lot of things are starting to make a lot more sense. "That would have been helpful information to have before he nearly killed you both."
Peyton hesitates, then gestures at the unappetizing sludge in the coffee pot. "Listen, I realize we don’t know each other that well, but do you want to grab something at the coffee shop across the street with me? You seem like you could maybe use someone to talk to."
He sighs. "Yeah, sure. Why not?"
Peyton’s quiet as they wait for their orders, and then leads him to a table in the corner. The morning rush as died down; no one is near enough to hear their conversation.
"All right. So tell me how you stopped being angry," he says.
"I ran away." She takes a sip of her latte. "All I could see was the look in her eyes as she bashed his face on the counter, over and over again. It was so… brutal. Monstrous. Like there was nothing of my friend there at all."
"Yeah, I’ve seen that look."
She nods. "She told me. But she was protecting you, just like she protected me." She sighs. "After I ran, I started thinking about that. I remembered the look on her face when she realized I was afraid of her. Like it was her worst nightmare come true."
"Which she could have avoided if she’d trusted you enough to tell you the truth before turning into a monster right in front of you," he points out.
Peyton shrugs. "Maybe. I’d like to think I’d have taken it better, but who knows? But Liv didn’t ask for this to happen to her. She’s a victim. Can you imagine how scared and alone she must have been? How hard it must have been, lying to everyone she cares about? I can’t blame her for not handling it perfectly."
Clive holds her gaze for a moment and then shakes his head. "It’s not that simple -- this secret she’s been keeping is bigger than you and me or our hurt feelings. People are dying."
"Okay, then why are you still protecting her?"
He gets up. "I honestly don’t know."
His phone buzzes as he gets back to his desk. Tox results back on Mrs. Peterson, the text from Ravi reads. Also some interesting ligature marks you should see.
A second later, it buzzes again. Liv not here.
Fine, he thinks, and heads down. It’s not like he can avoid the morgue forever. Ravi’s waiting by the examination table. When Clive joins him, he smiles widely and slaps him on the back. "Thank you for gracing us with your presence, Detective."
Clive eyes him and takes a step away. "What have you got for me?"
"Ah, yes. The, uh, results." Ravi fumbles in the pockets of his lab coat. "They were just here--no, wait! I must have set them down by the copier. Just a moment!"
Clive watches bemusedly as he dashes up the steps. "Don’t you have a copier down here--" The sound of a door slamming shut coincides with Liv’s appearance from the morgue kitchen.
"Oh," she says, stopping as she sees Clive.
"Oh no," Clive says, bounding up the steps. Ravi’s standing on the other side of the closed door, holding keys and a very familiar cell phone in his hand. "Is that my phone?" he demands. "Did you just steal my freaking phone?"
"It’s for your own good," Ravi tells him through the door. "Peyton and I both agree. You two need to talk to each other. So you’re staying down there until you work things out."
Clive rattles the handle. "This is insane. Don’t you have work to do?"
"Nothing that won’t keep while I take a long and well deserved lunch break. I suggest you use the time wisely and figure out a way to restore a harmonious workplace environment for us all. Oh, and help yourself to the a roast beef sandwich in the fridge."
And then he turns and leaves.
"Son of a--" Clive resists the urge to kick the door. Barely. He contemplates just staying there until Ravi gets back, but Clive’s mother didn’t raise a coward. After a moment, he turns and heads back downstairs to face the music. "You boss just locked us in," he tells Liv.
"I heard," she says, not looking any happier than he feels. "I guess this is his version of an intervention."
"I don’t suppose you have your phone on you?"
She sighs. "No, it seems to have mysteriously disappeared from my purse, along with the cord to the landline."
Clive scrubs his hands over his eyes. "Great. This is just great."
Liv glares at him. "Hey, it’s not exactly my idea of a fun time either. I prefer to be trapped in small spaces with people who don’t actually hate me."
"Funny. I prefer to be trapped in small spaces with people who don’t want to eat me."
"Wow," Liv says, backing away from him. "You are like a--a zombie bigot, and I’m going to go be somewhere you’re not right now."
He watches her stiff back disappear back into the kitchen, guilt twisting in his gut. "Damn it."
She looks up warily from her sandwich as he comes in. "Liv," he says, then stops. "That’s not Mrs. Peterson, is it?"
She smiles a little meanly. "No, I already had her for breakfast. This is just turkey on rye with half a bottle of hot sauce. The zombie special."
"Right." He’s not sure what to do next, except that sitting here in silence seems like the worst possible way to spend the next hour. After a moment, he opens the fridge and claims Ravi’s roast beef sandwich. "Look. I don’t hate you, all right?" he says as he sits down across from her.
Liv bites her lip. "Really? Because the avoiding and the glaring and the jokes about me eating you kind of make it seem like you do."
"Maybe I’m just having a hard time accepting that you’ve been lying to me every single day since we met."
She hangs her head for a moment. "I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t help, but I am." She looks up, meeting his gaze imploringly. "But what was I supposed to do -- announce the truth when you came down here for the first time? Just keep silent about the things I see? I took this job so that I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone. I hate being this--this monster that has to desecrate people’s corpses to survive. Don’t I owe it to them to do whatever I can to bring them justice?"
"I don’t know. I’m not sure it works like that."
Liv leans forward. "After the party, when it… happened--Clive, I had to give up everything. Major, my career. My family thinks I had a nervous breakdown." She sighs, then looks away. "Being here, working with you, it gave my life back some meaning. Maybe there’s a part of me that just didn’t want to risk losing that."
He’s quiet for a moment. "I guess I can understand that." She meets his gaze, surprised. "So, what’s it like?" he asks.
"What’s what like?"
"Getting to see someone else’s life, feel what they feel?"
Liv pauses, looking surprised, then thoughtful. "Sometimes it’s nice. When someone feels a passion for something, it’s amazing. Like a whole new world opening up. But then some brains take me to dark places."
Clive raises an eyebrow. "You mean like old man Cranky McRacist?"
Liv’s hands fly to her mouth. "And I am so, so sorry about that, you have no idea."
"Uh-huh."
"When I get a bad brain, it’s like I lose myself in this other person, and it doesn’t matter if I know what I’m doing is crazy and the brain’s influence. It feels real to me." She shrugs. "I guess that’s the worst part. That, and having to see the moment of their deaths." She shudders. "Being murdered isn’t fun, you know."
"No, I guess not." He eyes her. "And I guess going through all of that alone at first must have been rough."
Liv looks surprised again, and then, to his horror, her eyes well up with tears.
He stiffens. "Liv? Why are you crying? Don’t cry. I’m trying to say I understand."
She sniffles and rubs at her eyes. "I know and that’s just… it’s really nice to hear."
He hesitates, then reaches across the table to gives her shoulder a little pat. Liv blows her nose on a napkin.
"How does a zombie cry, anyway?"
She lets out a watery laugh. "I don’t know. I barely bleed, but I can still cry. Strange, huh?"
"Maybe it just means you’ve still got a big old heart." She gives him a shaky smile. After a moment, he extends his hand. "Partners?"
She takes his hand and shakes it. "Partners."
He takes a bite of the sandwich. It’s not as good as one of his po’ boys, but it’s not bad. "Now, tell me about this vision you had."