Chapter Text
The bite looks bad. Really, really bad.
With a sob, Scary rips off the hem of her shirt, yanking with tears in her eyes and fury in her heart. How dare they? How dare they take the one thing she loves more than anything else in the world from her, though she never used to admit it. But now, seeing him trying to smile, veins already blackening, the whites of his eyes darkening, she just wants to curl into a ball and sob until they find her and then it can be all over.
‘You are not going to die!’ she hisses to him as he coughs, a trickle of blood seeping out of the corner of his mouth. Scary can barely see through the tears that are painting her face. He tries to speak but she shushes him.
‘Shut up! Save your stupid breath.’ She finishes her tourniquet, applies antiseptic as fast as she can, but to her horror she wasn’t fast enough. The inky threads of infection have already crept past his bicep, and she knows its her fault that he’s going to die now.
Her fault.
She tucks her knees up to her chest, Swiss army knife clinking in the pocket of her combat trousers as she heaves heavy, dry sobs. She knows what she has to do; everyone does, when it comes to this, but more often than not they can’t do it.
Scary doesn’t know if she can.
But behind her, he struggles to sit up, props himself against the wall and touches his broken ribs. He was caught because he fell down the stairs when they ran. And because Scary didn’t catch him. Scary didn’t catch him. Scary didn’t didn’t didn’t catch him and now he’s going to DIE. And its her fault and now she has to shoot him twice in the brain and once in the chest.
He holds out his gun towards her. A truly ancient thing, a CAR-98 from the 50s with some scratches in the butt. They peeled off the old name label- some dork called Frankie? Frannie? Francis? She thinks it was Francis. But his old tally marks (Scary jokes that it was his kills) are a whole new level of awful now she’s adding one more.
She takes the gun, struggling to take steady breaths, and he removes his bag and all the useful stuff out of his pockets. A little sewing kit for repairs, a pathetic medical bag, his spare clip go skittering off sideways to join the bag with his bedroll and rations, plus his coat and all his prized possessions within it.
Scary levels the rifle and cries as she shoots him once, twice, three times in quick succession, and he jerks with every shot and God, its horrendous awful disgusting hopeless pathetic depressing. Lonely. Every shot makes her lonelier.
Without looking at him she grabs his stuff, sorts through what she wants and what she can live without. She takes his long-life food, takes his sewing kit, medkit and clip, pockets as much ammo as she can carry and attaches his hunting knife to her belt. She swaps their coats and sleeping bags- his was bigger and she’ll stop fitting into her own one day.
A dull ringing has worked its way into her ears- probably from shooting a rifle three times in an enclosed space without ear protection, she reasons, but it kind of distracts her from the encroaching dread. She can think about it later. Later later later. Just not right now, when the coppery smell of blood is still fresh in the air.
‘Later.’ She says aloud both to herself and to the corpse as she leaves, shutting the door behind her.
She pretends not to hear Terry Jr, broken, bruised, bitten and bleeding, slump to the floor as his muscles finally relax. She tries desperately not to think about rigor mortis setting in, contorting him into false life as he lies there. Dead.
Unsurprisingly, Scary cries herself to sleep that night.