Chapter Text
Death
“It’s time to go now, honey.” It’s not the first time she has said it today, but it’s always more difficult when she’s saying it to a child.
A lot of children have died today, and plenty more will die before the day is over. Extinction event, she had heard the Others suggest, but confirmation of that has not yet reached her ears. Whatever it is, it’s the heaviest death toll since the influenza pandemic in the early twentieth century, and when it’s over the numbers will eclipse both that tragedy and the Black Death before it.
“I’m not ready.” Her name is Sarah. She’s twelve years old and bleeding out in her father’s arms from a gunshot wound that has torn through some major abdominal blood vessels. Her last breaths come in rapid shallow gasps. She looks scared.
Kneeling so she is closer to eye level, and taking care to avoid touching the father, she gently cards a hand through the girl’s hair. She makes a point of collecting children herself rather than leaving it to one of the shades. A final friendly face to greet them in death.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the shadowy outline of a shade collecting the soldier and disappearing again. There is little time to delay today, there is much work to be done.
“I imagine it’s scary,” she says gently, “letting go. But it won’t hurt anymore, I promise.”
“Where am I going? Is it…?” Sarah trails off uncertainly.
“Somewhere nice. Peaceful.”
“My dad.” Sarah turns away from her to look at her father’s face, crumpled in devastation. “What will happen to him?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
“I don’t want him to be alone. He isn’t any good when he’s alone.”
She lifts her head, glances over at the other man standing near holding a gun. His face is damp from tears, and she recognises some of Sarah’s features in him. “That’s your uncle, right?” She asks. “He’ll take care of your dad. He won’t be alone.”
“Uncle Tommy’s always leaving.” Sarah protests. “He didn’t stay when Mom left. What if he leaves again when I’m gone?”
Seeing the future isn’t in her skillset. “This time might be different,” she suggests, “maybe this time he’ll stay. But you can’t stay, honey, and lingering like this isn’t making it any easier on yourself or your dad.”
She hates it when it’s like this. When they argue. With the adults, she sometimes loses her patience and drags them kicking and screaming into the After. She can never bring herself to do the same with any of the children. It feels so much crueller.
“Could you…?” Sarah begins then falters.
“Can I what?” She asks, encouraging her to finish her sentence. “Go on.” No guarantee she can give the girl the answer she wants, but there’s never any harm in hearing them out.
“Can you, maybe, check in on him? Make sure he’s not alone?” Sarah looks at her pleadingly and she hesitates.
It’s not an unusual last request. Sometimes she can fob them off with vague platitudes, but she senses this won’t be enough for a soul as stubborn as Sarah’s. She looks over at the father, at his desperate grip on his child, listens to his pleas to her to just hold on just a little longer.
He isn’t long for this world. He won’t survive this.
“I can.” She replies and something in Sarah sags in relief. “Will you come with me now?”
“Can you promise me?”
She barely withholds a grimace. “I promise.”
A couple of days maximum, she estimates. He won’t do it in front of the brother and the brother likely won’t leave him alone in the immediate aftermath. She offers a hand to Sarah. Hesitantly, the young girl reaches out to take it and beneath them the now empty body sags with a final gasp.
She pulls Sarah’s soul away as the father breaks down. The brother approaches, likely to offer either comfort or a reminder of the danger around them. It’s never good for a soul to see the reaction to their own death, so she turns Sarah away from the scene and guides her into the After.
One day. That’s all it takes. Even with her limitless amounts of energy, she feels drained and tired. So many souls to ferry in so little time. One of her sisters had dared to suggest that at least her workload would decrease once everything settles down. As though this unprecedented tragedy was somehow a favour.
She sits cross-legged opposite Sarah’s father as he stares at the gun in his hands. His name is Joel, he has just turned thirty-six. He can’t see her yet, but she’s ready for him. One last soul to collect before she rests. She would normally leave this kind of work to a shade, but re-uniting family units is one of the better parts of her job, bittersweet as it is.
It won’t be long now.
Joel raises the gun, closes his eyes and fires. There’s a sudden jerky movement when the gunshot goes off that surprises her, making her rise to her feet and draw closer. It takes her a moment to realise what has happened. There’s blood- plenty of it, which is to be expected, pouring from a shallow wound across Joel’s forehead. Head wounds always bleed more than you might expect, making them look worse than they are. Instead of seeing her, Joel groans in pain, drops the gun and clutches at his head. Not dead, just wounded. He’d flinched.
It's so unexpected that she doesn’t quite know what to do. She has been to aborted suicides before- they’re not uncommon- but she had been so sure of this one. Against all odds, he had surprised her. The brother tears into the room and immediately goes to Joel, shouting and cussing up a storm. No longer needed, she steps back and fades away.
Later, after she’s had some time to rest and recuperate, she returns to the living world to collect the souls of some survivors shot to death by the military and left in a mass grave. There’s a little baby that reaches for her when she approaches, babbling away happily. She lifts him into her arms easily, settling him on her hip and bouncing him so that he giggles. When she reunites him with his mother in the After, the woman near rips the child from her arms, glaring at her as though she had been the one to pull the trigger.
On the way back to collect another, she thinks back to Joel Miller and what his failed suicide means for the promise she made. Her words were binding, as all vows given by her kind were. She would need to go back periodically to check in on him, make sure he wasn’t alone. It occurs to her that she’s not quite sure what she would need to do if he was in fact alone. She hadn’t made any promises in that area, only that she would check in on him. She hopes that it will become apparent what she needs to do should it come to it.
The years pass and as had been suggested the work slows. The death count had been highest in the first year, the cordyceps infections claiming more victims than the bombs that hit the cities in a last desperate attempt to control the disease’s spread. Eventually, the count slowed as population density fell and the survivors took measures to protect themselves.
Disconcertingly, she finds that infection itself is not enough to let a soul loosen its grip on a body. No matter how many fruiting bodies sprout from a shape that used to be human, it’s only when it finally stops moving that she or the shades can take away the soul of the person it used to be. She hates to think of it. Are they conscious in there as their limbs move without their input, as their teeth bite into the flesh of their loved ones? She can’t find it in herself to ask when the soul finally emerges, shaken and compliant. They never fight her when she takes their hand. Nor when she takes them to the riverbanks of the After and bids them to drink, discard those memories like the last vestiges of a bad dream.
She checks in on Joel Miller frequently enough. Death surrounds him plenty, so it’s little trouble. She doesn’t even have to break off her work, just ferry the souls he leaves behind in his wake. The man who had clutched his little girl while she died is gone. This man reminds her of one of her shades. Emotionless, distant, efficient in his tasks.
The brother is still with him, Tommy, but he has little taste for the carnage and death. He’ll kill infected without issue, but infected aren’t the only threat anymore. The world has become a cruel place. There is little space for kindness, trust and the benefit of the doubt. Those who hesitate most often end up being the ones who take her hand, while those that shoot first and ask questions later remain out of her reach for the longest. Tommy endures it by clinging to the hope of a cure, of the splintered remnants of whatever passes for a government finally getting their wits together for long enough to build safe communities with fair laws and equal treatment, of everything somehow getting back to the way it used to be.
Joel knows there is no going back.
For a while she thinks that their relationship may endure it. Joel may take more easily to the violence of this new existence than his brother, but Tommy is still more than capable of matching him. In rare flashes, she sometimes thinks she can see that same rage in him, that same ruthlessness. He’s just much better at suppressing it. At times she wonders what might have happened if their situations were switched- if Tommy had been the one to lose a child. Would they dynamic have been identical, only in reverse? Would he too have been driven to enough despair to hold a gun to his head? Would he have flinched?
Everything changes in the winter they decide to head to Massachusetts. It’s been several years since the initial outbreak. Enough time for the cities and towns that aren’t overwhelmed by infected to have been picked over by survivors. Non-perishables become rarer and more precious than diamonds. Tommy and Joel are part of a group at this point, all following rumours of a safe haven in the Boston Quarantine Zone. She watches as the group’s supplies dwindle, their tins deplete despite the careful rationing, and they begin to turn on one another.
Salvation arrives in the form of another group. Better organised, better supplied and wily enough to realise how desperate Joel and Tommy’s group are. The trade is unfair. They get precious little food in return for the truck they are driving and a few of their weapons. She sees the moment Joel makes the decision. When his teeth clench and his white-knuckled fist loosens just enough to wrap around the grip of his pistol. Without a second’s hesitation, he withdraws the gun and shoots the leader of the other group in the back.
Chaos erupts. Bullets are flying everywhere, and she summons shades to help her ferry the dead to their final destination. The man Joel shot isn’t as calm and confident in death as he was in life, withdrawing in on himself and taking her hand without argument. His name is Paul. He’s 43 years old. Paul stays silent and it’s only when they reach the After that he asks about his husband, John. There’s no joyful reunion to be had. She’s forced to tell him that the infected don’t pass on automatically and she watches him crumble. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to put John out of his misery after the bite and now that decision has come back to haunt him.
When the dust finally clears, there are far fewer still standing than there were initially – her charge and his brother included. Tommy is furious. “Why the fuck did you do that? They gave us the food!” He demands.
“Yeah, well we’ve got more food now.” Joel says coldly. He retrieves the keys for the truck from the man he shot, then roots around in his pockets for anything else he might be carrying. That act seems to be enough to break through the horror of what has happened, and the remains of the group descend upon their newly acquired supplies with desperate enthusiasm.
They eat well that night for the first time in a long while. None of the group speak on it, but in the hungry faces around the fire there is a new understanding between them. The rules of the old world don’t apply anymore. Morality and ethics are as obsolete as telephones and traffic laws.
The next time they come across survivors, there is no attempt at trade or communication, only gunfire. Joel dispatches people with the same cold efficiency he uses on the infected. It continues to escalate after that. Everyone gets a little more paranoid. They end up on the receiving end of a few attacks and each time she thinks that maybe this will be the end for them, only for both of them to pull through. Tommy frequently vocalises his displeasure, but despite his words he always participates in the slaughter and the rewards it brings, his hands no cleaner than his brother’s.
Their group evolves over time. Some die, some leave. Occasionally people join, but only if they bring something worthwhile to the table. They even have a doctor for a while, though she ends up getting shot in a squabble over a tin of fruit cocktail, which infuriates the rest of the group who promptly execute the trigger-happy murderer despite his pleas for mercy.
One time they come across what appears to be a lone survivor, limping along the road calling for help. A member of their group shoots and misses and the man gives up on the pretence, sprinting back into the treeline and screaming for his companions to attack. The shootout is short, but when they loot the bodies they find to their surprise that they were surprisingly well-equipped.
“You think that trick actually works on anyone?” Maggie, a former police officer and the woman currently sharing a sleeping bag with Tommy, asks.
“Must do. You can’t find half of this shit anymore.”
“It shouldn’t be a man.” Robert says thoughtfully. No one really knows much about him, other than the fact he’s quick with a knife and isn’t selective about who he uses it on. “Should be one of the girls. Maybe Chrissie? She’s pretty young, and as long as she doesn’t talk, she looks innocent enough.”
“What the fuck, asshole?” Chrissie objects. “You want to get me killed?”
“Hey Joel,” the man in question looks up from his looting, “if you saw sweet little Chrissie in the middle of the road, begging for help, would you shoot first or try to help her?”
Chrissie happens to be the same age as Sarah would have been, had fate been a little kinder. She knows that Joel is aware of this fact, has seen the way he avoids looking at or interacting with Chrissie unless absolutely needed. She’s no mind reader, but she expects from the uncomfortable look on his face that he’s thinking of the question in a very different context, with a different girl in mind.
“See!” Robert says triumphantly when Joel doesn’t immediately answer. “If even Joel would hesitate, what do you think anyone else would do?”
“No.” Tommy refuses. “We’re not doing that. We’re not using a kid as fucking bait. Joel, back me up here.”
Joel says nothing. Maggie speaks up instead. “I don’t know,” she says carefully, “sounds a bit extreme.”
“How is it any worse than what we’re already doing?” Robert demands. “At least this way, we might get the drop on the assholes we come across. We lost some good people in the last attack, maybe this way more of us might survive.”
The strategy works pretty well for them for a while. Then a group with a van manages to shove Chrissie in the back before the shooting begins, and speeds out of there before they can stop them.
She collects Chrissie a few days later. After millennia of this, she shouldn’t be surprised at the extent of human depravity and yet her stomach turns all the same when she frees Chrissie’s soul from what remains of her body. She pulls the young woman into her arms, reassures her in soft tones that it’s all over now and slowly guides her away, trying to ignore the way she shakes like a leaf under her grip.
At the riverbanks, Chrissie needs no convincing. She drinks from the waters until her hands steady and the haunted look in her eyes fades. More memories are discarded than she would have expected, and the woman she takes to reunite with her family is almost unrecognisable from the survivor she’s been watching for the last few months. Chrissie’s cry for her mother is almost childlike, as is the way she hurtles towards the similar looking older woman. There’s a father there as well and a younger brother – a full set, she thinks. They embrace tearily, pulling back only to take in the differences in appearance that have come with the years separating them. Forgotten about, she steps away and returns to her work.
Shaken by Chrissie’s uncertain fate and scared that she might be the next one called up to be bait, a woman called Natalie quietly recruits a few friends, who all wait until night to steal half’s the group’s supplies. By the time the rest of the group wakes up and realises what has happened, Natalie and her friends are long gone.
With limited ammo and even more limited food, the group are forced to scavenge in a nearby city filled with infected. This isn’t something they would do ordinarily. Cities that don’t have QZs attached are the most dangerous places to be, but consequently tend to be the places which still have plenty of supplies to find for those willing to brave the infected.
It goes badly. Maggie ends up bit on the hand, trying to hold an infected off herself. Robert has the bright idea of attempting to save her by amputating the affected arm at the shoulder, reasoning that the fungus needs time to spread and it might be enough to stop her from turning. They aren’t able to find out if the drastic surgery would have made a difference. In their haste, none of them remembered to apply a tourniquet and Maggie’s screams draw a swarm of infected towards their hiding place. Joel has to drag Tommy away, and Maggie is left behind to be devoured by the infected.
There are such things as small mercies - Maggie bleeds out before she can turn. Stubborn to her core, she’s resistant to being taken away. “I have to find my daughter,” she babbles, “she was in Boston with my husband, she might still be alive.” Surprisingly, she is. Little Emma and her father too. The information soothes a panic in Maggie, and the knowledge that her little girl isn’t alone is enough to persuade her to follow along without further protest.
A few desperate weeks later, what’s left of the group finally arrive at the Boston QZ. To the survivors, she imagines that the high walls, manned by well-armed guards, look like salvation. Tommy’s fantasy of a government-run community brought to life.
Processing is a nerve-wracking procedure. They’re tested for infection and other communicable diseases and their guns are confiscated and removed. “Civilians aren’t permitted to carry weapons.” A guard tells them stiffly. Individually they are taken into rooms and interviewed. The questions cover a breadth of topics, from requests for information on the state of the cities they have passed through, to questions on their pre-outbreak professions, whether they have any military experience, if they know anything about the fireflies. When it’s over, they’re escorted to their newly assigned homes by a FEDRA guard, who drones on the entire way about the QZ’s rules. No weapons or other contraband, no leaving the zone without authorisation, no breaking curfew, no associating with any members of a terrorist organisation.
Joel and Tommy don’t pay it much heed. After weeks of apathy, Tommy is finally showing some sign of life again. See Joel, he insists, I was right. The world is getting back to normal. Joel doesn’t seem quite so convinced, about his brother’s words or the QZ, but the worry in his eyes whenever he looks to his brother seems lessened. Maggie may not have been as important as Sarah, but she hadn’t been nothing.
Those first weeks, the fracture lines in their relationship that have built up in those years on the road, seem to no longer be visible. Healed over, she thinks, like a broken bone. The brimming animosity and sniping comments have been replaced with a more natural brotherly camaraderie. For a little while, she thinks that they might be able to continue like this. That she had been mistaken in her fears that one day Joel would push just that bit too far and Tommy’s ability to tolerate and rationalise away their violent actions would snap like an elastic band stretched to breaking point.
When the illusion of the QZ abruptly falls, she can’t say she’s surprised by what happens next.