Chapter Text
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” - Jack Kerouac
Derek knew that his choice had been made ten months ago. Communication had been spotty, but they were still getting reports at that point. They knew undead were swarming the streets of Chicago. Derek had known then that he had a choice to make. He’d chosen his duty. There had been options. Garcia offered to find him a ride. “It won’t be the jet, beloved, but the military moves troops. For a star like you, I can swing a first class flight to O’Hare.” Considering that all commercial air traffic had already been grounded for weeks, it had been an incredible offer. Reid had even offered to go with him.
“I’m not the most valuable field agent per se, but I can compute traffic patterns on the fly. If you actually let me navigate for once, I can help your family get out of the city in record time.”
Even Hotch had his back. Derek wouldn’t have had to go AWOL as so many people with a duty did during those first few crisis filled months. A leave of absence would have been granted. That had been the time to go to his family, but instead Derek had chosen his duty. He’d still had hope that they could turn the tide and save the day as they had done so many times before. No one had anticipated how bad things would get. So he stayed in DC to do his job, because he knew that if everyone who had a job to do went running home to momma, the cities would fall. And then the cities did fall, and they lost all contact with the Chicago field office.
Giving up hope had been necessary. Clinging to an unrealistic fantasy about his family fighting their way out when so many others were lost divided his focus. Distractions weren’t something they could afford when the whole human race was struggling just to survive. So he put it behind him. There had been a time to choose his family, and he’d chosen his team. DC was such a hotbed of infection that the zombies swarming out of there had wandered down to Quantico regularly in their mindless compulsion to find humans to bite. Chicago would be worse by about two million people.
Derek checked the basement of the abandoned farm house, definitively clearing the place. The windows were boarded up and the barn had been empty. Obviously the family of four in the smiling pictures on the mantelpiece had survived long enough after the initial attacks to take some action. There was no sign of them in the house, and no indication that anyone had been through in months. It was as good a place as any for the team to hole up and rest.
“We’re good,” he called as he trudged back up the stairs.
“All clear here,” Hotch shouted down from the attic.
Exhausted, Derek dropped to the dusty living room couch and propped his eyes open while the rest of the team got to work.
Garcia and Freeman stashed the SUVs in the barn where they wouldn’t be spotted if the controlling, narcissistic general from their last official posting sent out planes to do a flyover. Zombies were more than enough to deal with, and Derek hoped that they wouldn’t have to fight good marines working for a bad guy on top of everything. The man had been obsessed with JJ, obsessed enough to kill her husband Will. He likely wouldn’t take kindly to the loss of Freeman, either. She’d been his right hand and she was carrying his child, for all that she’d been forced into the situation by a stark lack of options. Power and control. General Smith had all the hallmarks of the kind of man they’d hunted before the world fell to pieces. There was no sense in taking chances.
Out in the yard, JJ was settling the boys. Jack and Henry bounced around like nothing could keep them down, sword fighting with sticks and somersaulting dramatically. Derek had the impression that they’d done a lot of sleeping in the car, but JJ was able to corral them and herd the dynamic duo into the house. Upstairs on the second floor, Reid and Park were joking about bed bugs as they changed the dusty sheets for well cleaner things out of the linen closet.
Hearing Reid laugh was good. It hadn’t been a common sound over the last year. Park was smart, a scientist with multiple degrees, just like Reid. Pretty, too. Slender, with straight black hair, dark eyes, and a porcelain complexion, she looked like an asian doctor sent straight from central casting. A little short for him, maybe, but that didn’t matter if Reid liked her. Given an one hour deadline to collect anything he needed before they ran for their lives from the general’s oppressive command, Reid chose the good doctor and her go bag. Clearly she liked him too, since she’d offered to follow him to the grave.
Derek carefully checked the safety on his gun, set it on the table, and leaned more heavily against the back of the sofa, the smell of moldy, neglected furniture filling his nostrils. He was so tired. It hadn’t even been sixteen hours since Reid had aimed a gun at his own temple. It didn’t help to know that he’d been doing it for the team. Doing it to prove a point to Freeman about how far they would go to escape. The fact that he’d convinced her didn’t seem to matter. All Derek could see when he closed his eyes for even a second was Reid with that gun in his hand. Ten months ago, Derek had chosen his team over his family, and he wasn’t going to pretend that Reid hadn’t been a factor in that choice. Reid was one of the last good things in Derek’s life, but he didn’t seem to be hanging on as tightly as Derek was.
He looked at Hotch on the other end of the couch. The man was obviously as exhausted as Derek felt. Both of them had spent the last fifteen hours behind the wheel, most of that driving done in the dark on hazardous roads. First shift in the beds upstairs belonged to the two of them, and Derek wasn’t going to say anything to rock the boat before then.
“Hey Hotch, man, we aren’t stopping here for long, right?”
“A day will let us know if we’re being tracked by air. With all the backtracking and re routing we had to do to avoid major population centers last night, we barely managed three hundred miles. If the general has his planes fly a standard grid pattern today, we should hear evidence of it. Then we can act accordingly.”
“Makes sense.” Derek knew he should stop there. Derek was going to stop there. “So we’ll be heading out tomorrow morning around sunrise.”
“As long as we don’t see or hear evidence of pursuit.”
“Right. So I was thinking, man. Maybe we could head west for a while.”
Hotch blinked. “I understand your feelings, Morgan, but East Allegheny’s only thirty miles north of here.”
JJ’s head snapped up from diligently cleaning the kitchen counter so she could make the boys something to eat there. Clearly that meant something to her, but it took a long time to click for Derek.
“Small town Pennsylvania. That where you’re from?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But Hotch, if you’d told me that was where we were heading I would have cautioned against it. I know it isn’t a major population center, but it’s still going to be dangerous. We can’t risk taking the boys into a town.”
Hotch laughed, a quick, dry gasp. “We never talked about it.” He sounded surprised. “We were compartmentalizing, working together so seamlessly, that I forgot we never mentioned it out loud. Our plans, for what we would do if we didn’t have a duty. My plans, I guess.”
“So tell us the plan, Hotch,” Derek said, so focused on his boss that he barely noticed Reid and Park come up behind him. Garcia and Freeman hovered at the front the door. Even Jack and Henry had stopped to listen, though that was more about Jack than about the little blonde boy bouncing on his heels.
“Most of us still have family to wonder about. JJ’s parents in East Allegheny just happen to be closest. I was lucky, I guess.” His eyes flicked to Jack, who immediately looked down at his sneakers. “I know that Sarah, my inlaws, and my mother didn’t make it out of DC. I know that for a fact.” Derek had been with him when they saw the bodies, so he knew how hard it must have been for Hotch to say as much in his deadpan, matter of fact way.
Hotch, however, didn’t pause. He just kept laying it out for the team. “But Sean’s latest girlfriend was a NYU professor with a cabin in the Catskills. We won’t go anywhere near New York, but I’d like to check there before I give up on him entirely. If he survived the first wave without coming to me or checking on Mom, that’s where he’ll be. After that, Chicago. We can’t all go in. The boys will slow us down too much. I was thinking a team of three. Obviously you’ll take point given your knowledge of the terrain. JJ and I can back you up. Reid and Penelope will stand guard on the boys at a secure location. We’ll do the same thing in Las Vegas, though obviously Reid will take point there. One of us will stay back with the boys, and hopefully a few of our other family members, ensuring that even if the point team is lost there, at least one field certified agent remains to protect the civilians.”
“There’s no point,” Reid said softly and Derek’s heart broke a little. “We don’t need to go to Las Vegas.”
“No point?” Hotch raised an eyebrow at Reid.
“My mother is a paranoid schizophrenic being held in an institution that definitely succumbed to the infection. There is next to no chance that she made it out alive. Even if she did, she would have been on her own for the last year. She forgets to feed herself. She doesn’t notice injuries and isn’t capable of treating them properly, which means she’s far more likely to get a more ordinary, if still fatal, infection. There’s no way she survived for the last year and if she did we have absolutely no hope of tracking her down.”
“And you’re speaking in the present tense,” Hotch said, shutting Reid up. “So we’ll go to Vegas. That’s as far as my plan goes. Hopefully we’ll find other survivors and a safer place to settle. If not, we’ll make one. Garcia, I wasn’t certain about you. I know you don’t have any living family, but if there was a friend or an ex boyfriend you wanted to look up?” The open ended question was unusual for Hotch, but it was probably just exhaustion making him sound like he hoped the answer would be no. Derek was grateful that tracking down their families had apparently been the plan all along, but it sounded like a long ass road trip through incredibly difficult terrain. He wasn’t in a hurry to add stops. Getting to Vegas through the desert was going to be enough of a nightmare. If Garcia wanted to go all the way to California, they might be in trouble.
“Emily,” Garcia said. “I know there’s no way to do it. We can’t just fly to Europe and I haven’t heard from her in months. Even when she was reporting in on our back channel, she was bouncing around so much I couldn’t predict her movements from one day to the next. So I guess I don’t have anyone to look for, but maybe we can put a thought for her on the back burner? That way, if any of us think of a way to look for her that has even a tiny chance of success we still have her on the agenda.”
“Absolutely.” Hotch’s voice was a lot warmer than it usually was when he addressed the team. Then again, they weren’t really a team anymore. Now that they were officially AWOL, they couldn’t be called anything but family. “I think we’d all like to meet up with Prentiss if we can. I’ll do my best to think of something.”
Park cleared her throat. All eyes went to her. “My grandparents have a farm in Ohio. My mother was in Atlanta with me, so I know she didn’t make it, but my grandparents wanted to retire to the middle of nowhere. They’re pretty far from any major cities, and I wonder.”
“Of course we’ll check,” Hotch said. “If they’re alive, we’ll offer them every assistance whether or not they want to join us on the road. And that goes more generally, too. I know we’ve had a bad experience with the Smith command, but we are still trained public servants. If we find other survivors in need of aid, we will provide it.”
“Thank you.” Park was demur. Gentle in a way Reid probably appreciated. Unlikely to push him around or get on his nerves by starting a prank war. Derek forced himself to look through the gaps in the boarded up window, watching the sunshine on the autumn leaves.
“I don’t have anyone left,” Freeman said. There was nothing hesitant about her. She joined the conversation as though she expected to be included. Derek liked that about her, but he didn’t look away from the window. “My father and I were the only ones around for the outbreak. After he got infected, I put him down myself.”
“I’m so sorry,” Spencer said, his voice full of sympathy and sincerity. “That must have been awful.”
Derek could imagine it. Freeman standing tall while the body of her father came after the only prey available, his own daughter. The dead didn’t walk like anything natural. They shuffled and lurched, a mix of slow shambling and sudden lunges. Morgan didn’t have to see much to recognize it through the small gap in the boarded up window. Snatching his gun from the table he pushed Garcia all the way into the house as he ran past her. Flipping off the safety, he put one slug into the leg of the little girl on the porch. Two in the mother as she lurched up the steps. Two in the father as he dragged himself across the grass. By that time JJ was there, managing perfect headshots on the little boy and a fifth zombie that Morgan didn’t recall from the family photographs in the living room. He’d probably been the vector for the family’s initial infection.
“We didn’t check the grainery,” Hotch said, gesturing to the broken open door in the side of the silo, finishing the one legged girl with an almost casual head shot.
“It was locked from the outside,” Reid said. “Someone must have trapped them in there. They wouldn’t have gone to extreme measures to break out until they sensed human prey nearby.”
“Sloppy,” Hotch said, looking down at the now fully dead family. Whether he was referring to Morgan’s aim or their failure to check, he was right to criticize. “We need sleep. JJ, do you mind?”
“Of course not, Hotch. You and Morgan get some rest. Garcia, if you can make sure the boys stay inside, I’d appreciate it. Reid, ladies, let’s glove up and take care of these bodies.”
Morgan was grateful to be dismissed so thoroughly. The guiding hand Hotch placed on his shoulder, turning him back toward the house, was firm and steady. Morgan tried to emulate him, but the shot of adrenaline after a long night on the run with a car full of people depending on his vigilance and precision driving was way too much. Holstering his gun, he balled his hand into a fist to stop the shaking. Hotch noticed. It would take more than one night of sleep deprivation to keep Hotch from noticing something that blatant.
“Just tired,” he mumbled as they went upstairs together.
“I know,” Hotch said easily. “I’m tired, too.”
It wasn’t enough. Derek felt desperate and defensive. He was supposed to be the one who could keep it together. Maybe he was a year late, but he was finally headed to Chicago to check on his mother and sisters. The bed he fell into had blue Star Wars sheets and a unicorn wearing a tutu on the pillow. Derek didn’t need to know that the little girl he’d failed to put down easily had interests in common with Reid. Derek didn’t need to think about Reid with a gun to his head, or Reid downstairs with Park, or Reid burning an infected body and what would happen if he cut his hand on something while he was doing it.
Curling up on a dead child’s bed in rural Pennsylvania, Derek didn’t need to lie awake wishing Reid was at his side, but he did.