Chapter Text
I've been the archer, I've been the prey
Who could ever leave me, darling
But who could stay?
Dark side, I search for your dark side
But what if I'm alright, right, right, right here?
And I cut off my nose just to spite my face
Then I hate my reflection for years and years
☆
Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Spain.
It was a sweltering day even by summer's standards in Montmeló. An unforgiving, luminous sun beat down on the grounds of the circuit, burning through the layers of sunscreen worn by the masses who camped with General Admissions tickets or crowded the uncovered grandstands.
Twenty minutes before lights out, the outer edges of the circuit were sparsely populated. It was mostly the volunteers who milled about now, seeing to last-minute checkboxes or resigned to miss the first several laps for the sake of duties assigned.
Luis had not known what to expect when he'd signed up as a First-Aid trained volunteer. It was something new, a different way to experience a race weekend. He wasn't thrilled he was destined to miss most of the action, but the race day atmosphere was a thick, restless omnipresence that spared no molecule of the too-hot air. As a lifelong fan of the sport, he loved it.
As a lifelong Alonso fan, part of him was a little glad to be out here in blissful ignorance. It was a lot less fun to sit through a race where your favourite driver fought with his own car instead of against the rest of the grid. If Alonso hadn’t already suffered a DNF by the time Luis got to check in, it would be enough to lift his spirits.
"Ey, Luis! We have a case!"
The distant trance of his thoughts was broken at the shout of his name. He looked up from under the pitiful shade offered by the First-Aid tent, squinting at the colleague who'd rushed over to find him while kicking up clouds of brown dust.
What was this guy's name again? Juan? He thought it might have been Juan.
Luis didn't risk it.
"What's up?"
Possibly-Juan pointed in the direction of the gate.
"There's someone. He's bleeding."
Luis blinked. He stood up straight, the idle laziness vanishing.
"Mierda, for real?" He didn't waste time, gathering his heavy trunk of rudimentary First-Aid supplies as he hurried out of the tent. "What happened?"
Juan shook his head as they fell into a brisk walk.
"Ni idea. I think a dog bit him."
A dog bite was unexpected. Luis picked up his pace, starting a swift jog towards the gate. He'd been doing First-Aid for a while but he couldn’t recall ever having to treat a dog bite. He knew how to, in theory, but it just wasn't a common occurrence in his experience...
There was commotion at the gate when it came into view. A man had seemigly just been allowed through the barriers and was surrounded by his fellow volunteers– gate and security staff, mainly– who all wore some degree of concern on their faces. The man's clothing was ripped in places. Blood had completely soaked through one white trouser leg. He was standing funny, but that was not strange when your leg was in such a bad state.
The crowd made room for Luis when they saw him approach with his First-Aid kit. He got a good look at the man now. A foreigner, probably, visiting for the race, blonde and wearing a McLaren t-shirt. He was shivering slightly.
"Hello," Luis said, trying to sound friendly without spooking the man. He looked like he was in shock. "I'm Luis. Can I take a look at your leg?"
The man shivered and nodded. He looked down helplessly at the bloody garment.
"Someone bring a chair!" Luis shouted at the onlookers. It was delivered in seconds, a fold-out chair set open on the ground for his patient.
Luis helped him into the chair. He was absolutely disoriented.
Could it be rabies? he thought, a flash of worry crossing his mind. Rabies was far beyond the scope of what he could deal with. The man would need to go to a hospital, and everyone here would have to be…
Luis crouched to look at the injury. Up close it was even worse. He felt stupid for not realising earlier that the bleeding was simply too severe for a quick fix. Rabies or not, he should be calling an ambulance anyway.
"Can you take this off so I can look at the wound?"
The man blinked at him sluggishly. He didn't seem to register anything happening around him.
His eyes were bloodshot, Luis realised with a start. Bloodshot and...greying? The man looked young, but his pupils were cloudy like cataracts.
"Sir?"
Nothing. The man wasn't even reacting anymore. His head lolled to the side as if his neck didn't have the strength to support it. Luis noticed angry purple veins pulsing under his skin, which had turned oddly taut and transparent.
He slowly rose to his feet. This wasn't a dog bite. He had no idea what this was, but he was not qualified to handle it.
“We need an ambulance,” he declared to the volunteer circle. They exchanged worried looks. Luis didn’t bother answering the barrage of questions that came at him from every direction, instead pulling out his phone and walking away. He dialled the emergency hotline as he went. The gazes of the volunteers followed him, burning the perspiration off the back of his neck with their intensity.
Click.
“Hello?”
Click.
“This line is currently busy. Please hold, we will get back to you shortly.”
Luis blinked. He pulled his phone from his ear, frowning at the screen as the automated voice continued.
“If you are calling to request an ambulance, please hold. If you do not require an ambulance, please follow these instructions. Press 1 for non-emergency inquiries. Press 2 for assistance with booking a doctor’s appointment. Press 3 for…”
He let the voice go on and waited at a holding tone for one long minute. He ended the call and tried again.
Click.
“This line is currently busy. Please hold, we will get back to you shortly.”
How unusual.
Luis pressed the phone to his ear and tried to be patient. It was strange for the ambulance hotline to be inundated with calls, he thought. Was it possible that more staff were on holiday than usual? Here, at the circuit instead, for what they believed was Fernando’s last home race? It was a simpler explanation than the hotline being clogged by a large number of emergencies that required an ambulance.
The call went nowhere. He was left on hold for the third time.
Luis sighed, activating the speaker and slipping the phone into his pocket. That way he wouldn’t miss it if someone did answer on the other end, if he was eventually taken off hold. He turned around to return to the rest of his group and the patient, figuring he could examine the wound some more.
Luis wasn’t expecting anything unusual. He was expecting to see the volunteers waiting for his report, and perhaps that the patient’s condition had worsened. At worst, he was worried he’d find the patient not breathing.
There were several bodies on the ground.
Luis froze. He stared at his colleagues in the dust. Seven of them, lying…not exactly motionless.
He ran over without thinking, dropping to his knees before the nearest body. What the hell had happened? He reached out, shaking the younger man’s shoulders. His body was too light. It flipped over with the slightest push, landing face-up towards the sky, eyes glazed and cloudy.
“Oye,” Luis said, panic creeping into his voice. “Oye, ¿qué te pasa? What happened?”
He hadn’t heard anything. He hadn’t seen anything happen when his back was turned, had no fucking idea how one unresponsive body had turned into seven.
Seven? He’d had more than seven colleagues gathered here.
The young man kept staring at the sky but as if he wasn’t seeing it at all. His mouth was yawned open and twitching. His breathing was faint and raspy.
Luis looked around at the others helplessly. Was he just inside a bad dream? Nothing made sense, but a dreadful feeling was crawling up the back of his neck, and his heartrate was picking up, growing louder in his ears like a warning.
A warning he should probably listen to.
Luis scrabbled to his feet, nearly tripping over them in his haste. A cloud of brown dust puffed around him, briefly obstructing his senses. He didn’t get more than a split second to recover before he felt something roughly snag his ankle.
Luis looked down.
“¿Estás bien?” The man on the ground had a desperate grip. Luis suddenly felt guilty for trying to get away. Of course he had to stay and help, his colleagues needed him, he—
“Don’t,” the stricken man gasped. “Don’t let them bite.”
Luis wanted to ask if he was okay. If he needed his help, another attempt to call an ambulance, or water for his bad throat. He thought about all of those things before he thought about what the man actually said.
The hand around his ankle fell limp. The man rolled over onto his other side with a horrible, agonised groan.
“I’ll get help,” Luis said quickly, making up his mind. “Aguanta un poco. I’m going to get you help, so just— just wait.”
His feet carried him away before he finished talking. Luis took several long strides in the dust, rapidly wiping sweat from his brow, in the general direction of the Volunteers’ office. The First-Aid tent he’d abandoned before was just coming into view when Luis heard the same scratchy sound that had accompanied his colleague’s breaths, but louder and nearer.
It happened fast. He turned, a question on his lips, and then the back of his head collided with the ground. Something was gripping him. Fingers, digging into his forearms with inhuman strength, and that rasping sound was right above his head while the plume of dust cleared. Luis barely opened his eyes through the pain and his breath caught when he saw it.
Spit. There was lots of spit, stringy saliva with the foulest smell.
A familiar pair of milky eyes. The patient from before.
Luis desperately choked out the only thought in his addled mind.
“¿Qué eres?”
And then there were teeth.
Kimi was fuming.
He didn’t care for luck. He didn’t like that luck had anything to do with racing at all, because luck could be bitter, and she didn’t care if you deserved to be on a podium after a hard-fought battle or if you deserved to bite the track out of nowhere because your engine fucking gave up.
Luck should not dictate championship points. That was what he thought when he glanced at the feed from the podium as the celebrations rolled and God Save the King played faintly behind the roar of the immediate noise around him. Kimi would have been happy with P2 today, and he would’ve been ecstatic to celebrate Lewis’s first win with Ferrari from next to him on the second step while they doused each other in champagne and Lewis congratulated him for a phenomenal drive.
“Kimi,” Toto called his name in a sharp voice. “Focus, please.”
Kimi dragged his eyes away from the screen. The engineers crowding the table wore tense expressions. Toto brimmed with rage, sounding with every next word like he was one wrong breath away from snapping. He lectured the table on reliability and what it had cost them today, made sure to highlight Kimi’s brilliant overtake on George and point out that it was wasted because the car was not good enough, that they were left with nothing when they could have had a podium. Ferrari was catching up and they couldn’t afford any more mistakes. He went on and on, and everyone listened. A few brave engineers dared to raise technical points to debate at the table. Kimi’s focus slipped again.
The podium ceremony had just finished. Lando gave George a pat on the back as they walked down, an awkward half-smile on his face. George’s own face was hidden behind a long hand. Lewis caught them up at the bottom of the stairs, and the feed broadcasted his expression for a split second– his bright smile dropped at the sight of George– before it cut to a wide shot of the crowds.
“…and we’ll think about team orders if it goes on like this,” he heard Toto finish. He straightened his spine where he stood at the head of the table, pressed his lips into a thin, flat line, and nodded once. “That’s all. You’re dismissed.”
Kimi was one of the last to get up, waiting for the front of the room to clear first. He was approaching the door when Toto caught him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding a lot gentler than he had with the engineers. “You were brilliant today, Kimi. It’s not your fault.”
For the first time since his devastating retirement, Kimi found himself relaxing. Toto was sincere in the way he spoke, making the words and their meanings really come home.
“Thank you, Toto.”
Toto pulled him into a hug. Kimi went. He felt more relaxed, even at peace, by the end of it, the day’s labours and misfortune weathering away in the face of Toto’s expressive support.
“Go get some rest,” Toto encouraged him with a pat on the back. “You will fly with me tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Kimi promised. He had hoped to fly with Max but the Redbull driver hadn’t confirmed if it was possible. Toto didn’t need to know that, though.
Kimi weaved his way past mechanics and engineers huddled in the corridors having private discussions. He headed straight for his room, itching to change into something new– newer, more comfortable than the team shirt he’d hastily slipped into without a shower after his retirement. Kimi slowed in his tracks when he spotted a familiar tall silhouette in front of the adjacent room.
“Focus on your own horrors, mate,” George laughed into the phone. “I should be the one calling you. What happened with the…twenty-two laps?”
The decent thing would have been to pay him no attention, or to go inside his room with a polite nod at his teammate. Kimi did not need to know who he was calling and what they were on about.
“That’s bloody ridiculous,” George exclaimed into the phone, his eyes widening, British accent hitching. “No, mate, you should be– I don’t get how you’re being patient about it, Alex.”
Alex, Kimi wondered, Alex Albon? He knew the two of them were childhood friends. It was one of the few paddock friendships that weren’t manufactured for the cameras. George routinely spent as much time at the Williams garage as he could get away with, they had inside jokes to shamelessly reference between themselves in group conversations, and Kimi had even seen George stressed out about Alex’s hunt for an engagement ring.
“Shut up,” his teammate grumbled, leaning sideways against the wall. “It’s not comparable. If you want to talk about fairness, then…”
His eyes flicked up mid-sentence, finally noticing Kimi’s presence. An almost imperceptible frown crossed his face.
“Sorry, Alex,” he said, without looking away from Kimi. “I’ll call you later. Something’s come up.”
He ended the call presumably without waiting for a response from Alex. Kimi reluctantly made his way forward, stepping out of the cover of shadow that, in hindsight, probably made it look like he was eavesdropping on purpose.
“Kimi,” George greeted, polished and polite, in that emotionally detached way he had used in all their conversations lately. “Can I help?”
Kimi tamped down the immediate flare of annoyance he felt. The way George treated him now was almost condescending— he never said anything outwardly insulting, but he looked at Kimi like a minor inconvenience and gave him indifference over respect. The way his alien blue eyes swept up and down blankly, paired with the flat set of his mouth, was nearly irritating enough to make Kimi’s blood boil.
“What happened to his race?” he asked. “Albon’s, I mean.”
George’s expression didn’t change.
“It’s not very nice to eavesdrop.”
Kimi scowled, gesturing at the narrow corridor.
“Just happened to be here, mate. I wasn’t spying on you or anything.”
George pursed his lips, the displeasure at having to interact with Kimi rolling off him in waves. He put his phone in his pocket to free his hands, and crossed his arms at his chest.
“Alex was sent out of the pits with his wheel brackets still attached,” George explained. “They had to call him back in. He fell twenty two laps behind.”
Oh. Okay, that was…shockingly bad. The race highlights hadn’t covered that. Kimi had briefly spotted some absurd number of laps at the bottom of the live leaderboard, but he’d been too occupied with the battle at the front, the feed focused on himself and George, to really question what was going on with the backmarkers.
“Tough,” Kimi said, trying to sound sympathetic. He didn’t really care. Albon wasn’t more than a passing acquaintance to him and Williams was the furthest team from a threat in the standings. “Toto would probably kill someone if our garages made a mistake like that.”
It was meant to be a lighthearted joke. He was only trying to relate to an unfamiliar team and situation in the only way he knew how, through comparison with his own experiences, but the words seemed to be the exact trigger to totally overturn George’s careful temperament. He suddenly laughed, a short, loud bark that echoed in the corridor, and fixed Kimi with a crazed grin.
Kimi instinctively took a step back. George had never looked at him like that. He had never looked like that, ever.
“And what would you know about that, Kimi?” George demanded, dropping his arms to come closer, staring down at him from his towering height. “Toto would kill someone if our garages fucked up? You think so? If your garage made a mistake like mine, probably!”
Kimi was momentarily stunned. George didn’t shout. It wasn’t a thing he did.
Not anymore, apparently.
Kimi found his voice.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
George stepped back, running a hand through his hair, bleeding pure frustration. Kimi realised belatedly that he was still in his fireproofs and stank of champagne.
“Toto must have told you it was a brilliant overtake,” he muttered, not looking his way. “How you deserved P2 because you managed an overtake on me, how unfortunate and sad it is that your car finally experienced the reliability issues I’ve been dealing with all season—”
“What’s your problem?” Kimi snapped, boiling over. “You’re being such an asshole! I don’t know what crawled up your ass, but it’s not my fucking problem!”
“Why,” George deadpanned, staring him down again. “Did you believe him, Kimi? Are you proud to have overtaken the slow car with the misaligned front wing?”
Kimi snapped his jaw shut. Anger and disbelief knocked at his door, threatening to burst free any second, but George’s last words pushed them aside for confusion.
“Mis- Misaligned–” he repeated, the English word not coming out easily in his haste. “What?”
George straightened up. He pursed his lips, looked at Kimi one last time, and turned his eyes towards the door of his driver’s room.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” he murmured. “I’m sure we’re both tired. I’ll see you later.”
Kimi didn’t have time to come up with a response before the door clicked shut behind his teammate, leaving him alone with his muddled thoughts in the dim, empty corridor.
He didn’t understand what had just happened. George was on the podium. He’d won a whole eighteen points where Kimi had left with zero, and he had lost it and shouted at him in the corridor while smelling of the podium celebrations.
So George’s garage had messed up, and Toto hadn’t mentioned it to Kimi. So what? At the end of the day, George was the winner here and Kimi had lost everything. It was ridiculous of him to act like he was somehow worse off in this situation.
Last year, George would have…
Kimi shook his head, angrily getting those thoughts out of his head. He entered his own room and slammed the door shut. George had been a completely different fucking person last year, and even at the start of this season, someone that Kimi could appreciate. He had comforted him after his first face win, looked genuine when he’d congratulated him, been kinder than anyone when he hadn’t finished his first home race.
His father had warned him about George. Your teammate won’t be so nice to you when you start threatening him, he’d said at the start of this season. You’ll see what Max has been talking about. He’s a two-faced snake, Andrea.
Yeah. That checked out.
Kimi dropped himself onto the hard single bed without bothering to take off his shoes. He found his personal phone on the small bedside table and allowed the sharp contrast of the screen in the unlit room to burn his eyeballs. He had some texts from friends and one from his sister timed to his retirement from today’s race, consolation messages and encouragement that he’d make up for it in the next one. They made Kimi smile, but he set everything aside to reply to later, and opened Instagram.
The home page wasn’t loading. He noticed the signal bars on the top right corner of his screen were weak.
Well. It happened sometimes. Kimi opened the option to make a new post anyway, trusting it would go through when the WiFi returned. He found pictures from today that his photographer had added to the cloud drive shared with him, his father and the team, selected the best ones, and wrote a caption that he knew was sure to piss George off.
‘I felt confident in the car during the second stint and managed to increase our pace, which in the end led me to P2 before the DNF,’ he typed out. The rest of the caption oozed positivity and he promised to come back stronger in Austria. And post.
Kimi watched the WiFi signal disconnect entirely, his first attempt failing. The signal came back in a few seconds with just one bar. The post went through, and appeared on his feed, just before it disconnected again.
If they were all experiencing the WiFi issue, George would probably not see it until much later, but Kimi could live with some delayed petty revenge. He set his phone aside and kicked his feet up on the bed. His whole body ached from the exertion of the race. It was too easy to close his eyes and let the exhaustion and ache consume him.
He didn’t know how long he spent in a semi-conscious state before the relative quiet of the motorhome was broken by some distant commotion.
Kimi blinked, looking up at the ceiling. Now that he was more alert, the noises were…
He sat up in bed and swung his feet onto the floor, listening with a frown. Was he imagining it? It sounded like a fight, or…or something big, some accident or disaster, because there was running and shouting and screams.
Then the fire alarm went off.
Kimi was on his feet immediately, a little spooked. They had their fair share of false alarms and he usually never took them too seriously, because a fire alarm had never meant an actual fire, but the distant sound of hundreds of running feet and screams made this one feel extremely real.
He grabbed his phone and spilled out of his room at the same time that George emerged from his.
They looked at each other. It was unintentional, instinctive. Kimi blinked at his older teammate, forgetting his foul mood in the urgency of the moment, asking an unspoken question.
“This way,” George said, briskly taking the lead. Kimi followed after him with quick footsteps to match his long strides. Bright green signs pointing them in the direction of the nearest fire exit came into view shortly, making Kimi realise he could’ve found it without relying on George to know the way, but they were apparently the only ones taking this route so it didn’t make sense not to stick together. They hurried through a few unpopulated corridors until they reached the stairs running down the side of the building, taking three rapid steps down them before George suddenly stopped dead in his tracks.
Kimi ran into his back and nearly fell over.
“Ow! What the hell, why did you stop?”
George did not reply. He stood stock still, staring at something beyond Kimi’s line of sight. Kimi couldn’t see anything past George’s absurd height, so he tried to look around the obstacle he presented.
“What? What is it?” he demanded impatiently. “There’s a fire, mate, we can’t just stop here!”
George startled out of his daze only when Kimi abruptly punched his shoulder for attention.
“Go back,” George said, turning around. His eyes were wider than Kimi had ever seen. “Go inside. We have to– a different way.”
Kimi gaped at him. Had he lost his mind? Why the fuck would they go inside a burning building?
“That’s stupid,” he pointed out obstinately, shouldering brusquely past George. “Are you trying to die? I’m not gonna…”
He trailed off when he saw it.
They had come off the side of the track-facing main paddock. The paddock and track were both swarming with people, in hives and droves, but it didn’t look like the traditional track invasion Kimi was used to. The fans were fighting each other.
It was a massive brawl. Most people were trapped in the crush of a crowd that only worsened because some were throwing wild punches and kicks at others, struggling like their lives were on the line, and people were yelling and screaming and getting run over–
Kimi’s eyes found one part of the crowd to focus on, then, reducing the details down to the most attention-grabbing one. A fan wearing Ferrari colours was fending off a fan wearing Redbull colours, a look of absolute terror on her face, and then the Redbull fan cracked his neck in an unnatural direction, opened his jaw unnaturally wide, and took a chunk out of her shoulder.
The Ferrari fan’s scream punctured through the hot air.
Kimi stumbled back into George.
“What the fuck,” he blurted. “What the fuck? Che cazzo succede– George, did you see–”
“We have to go,” George said, desperate urgency and something like mounting panic in his voice. He pulled Kimi up from under his arms. “Come on.”
Kimi’s gaze remained transfixed on the scene in front of him. He was distantly aware that the Ferrari fan and the Redbull fan he’d locked onto were not the only instance of the same happening within the crowd, but he couldn’t look away from their unfolding fates. The girl was screaming and convulsing, and then she went quiet like her voice had died out. Her skin had turned grey and veiny. Her head lolled backwards, eyes going milky white, and she started twitching like an insect whose head had been cut off. The Redbull fan turned on another victim. He did the same again. Ripped the flesh from a McLaren fan’s shoulder, and then he was going grey and convulsing, too, and a distant revelation dawned on Kimi in the shape of one wild word he’d never thought would mean anything in real life.
Zombies.
“Kimi,” George said.
He finally listened. Turning around, he urged George up the stairs, following quickly, gripping his teammate’s shoulders like his life depended on it. The door had just slammed behind them when a loud thumping noise startled him.
They stared at him. It. The greying zombie that was suddenly pressed to the glass, its jaw wide and snapping, but its milky eyes confused and directionless. The glass was the only barrier between the zombie and them. Kimi’s heart threatened to beat right out of his chest.
When had it come up the stairs? How?
Was it that fast?
A large hand gripped the back of his shirt and then Kimi was being dragged forward, away from the creature on stumbling feet, until he snapped back to his senses and his survival instincts finally took over giving him the ability to run for his damn life.
They went back the way they’d come, only staggering to a halt when something emerged from the turn at the end of the corridor with their driver rooms.
Neither of them had the time or the mental faculty to evaluate if it was a zombie or a normal person. It took an instant to turn on their heels and keep running, in another direction, the only other direction left.
A loud screech echoed down the corridor behind them as they came upon another door. George gripped the handle and pushed. It was locked. He stared at the door like it had personally betrayed him.
“You’ve got to be kidding me…”
“Move,” Kimi snapped, getting past him without wasting time. He grabbed the handle, pushed with all his strength, rattling the door in its hinges. When that didn’t work, he took a deep breath and rammed into it with his shoulder so hard that sharp pain flared up along his arm, but the door gave way under the force and he fell right through it.
George was behind him quickly, taking over to slam it shut again. He grabbed a crate full of cleaning supplies and barricaded it. Kimi looked up at him and at the crate, breathing heavily, and wondered if it would really–
“Oh, no,” George exclaimed, running to push back against the crate. “No, no, you don’t!”
Something slammed on the door from the other side, cracking it open a fraction before George pushed it back closed. He kept pushing against the repeated onslaught. Kimi ignored the pain in his arm and joined in, shoving the door back shut as another forceful thump cracked it open. There were noises now, noises that sounded like more than one zombie on the other side of the door, and Kimi almost laughed because the only thing between the two of them and certain death was once again a simple door and now a crate of cleaning supplies.
“Where are we?” he asked, risking a look at their surroundings. It was a small dark room full of random junk with a dead-end wall except for a window. “Can we–” Thump. The door opened and the screeching grew louder. They forced it shut again. He gestured helplessly at the window. “That’s our only way out!”
George sucked in a sharp breath. Kimi could see the cogs turning in his brain as he tried to come up with something. He desperately hoped he could, and part of Kimi was aware that despite their bad blood his teammate was smart, he had experience and was bloody brilliant at making strategy calls to the point where Kimi was honestly envious of him, so if that translated to real life–
“We’re in the B wing,” George said finally, choking back a wince when he had to push back against the door even harder. “Left side facing the track, behind meeting rooms three and four. The window should lead to the service entrance, and if we can make it all the way down that path, we should get to the car park that the catering and media teams use.”
Kimi stared at him.
“What?” George asked, looking offended by Kimi’s incredulity. “We’re supposed to know the layout of the whole circuit, not just the track.”
Kimi made a strangled noise.
“No the fuck we aren’t?”
George rolled his eyes.
“Looks like someone didn’t pay attention to the floor plan. You know, the one that is plastered everywhere because it marks the fire exits and assembly points?”
Kimi was about to unironically call him a bored nerd for knowing something like that in such scary detail, but the hoard of zombies behind the door didn’t give him the chance. It rattled violently and jumped open much wider than before, giving Kimi a clear view of five mangled grey hands that emerged from the gap at his left. His soul left his body and came back just in time to slam the door shut with every ounce of strength he had left, crushing the grasping claws at their wrists in a disgusting snap of flesh and bone.
Three were withdrawn amidst piercing animalistic screams. Two were severed and thumped to the floor on their side. Kimi threw up in his mouth.
“Hold the door,” George said, his voice suddenly clear and decisive. “You’re stronger than me, so hold the door while I get the window. Okay? Can you do that?”
Kimi felt ill. There were two severed human hands on the floor just a foot away from him. He couldn’t pay attention to much else.
“Kimi,” George said urgently.
His mouth tasted of bile. He looked to his right at George, who was way calmer than this situation warranted, who looked like hadn’t even noticed the severed hands on the floor.
Kimi nodded anyway. They couldn’t hold the door forever. It wasn’t like he had better ideas.
“I’m leaving,” George warned, slowly taking his weight off the door. It flashed open for a split second before Kimi aggressively slammed his own body back against it.
His mind was empty of any thoughts that didn’t concern their immediate survival, most importantly the heavy door at his back with at least five zombies behind it. He watched in only a distant sort of way as George ran to the window and looked outside. He spent a few heartbeats there, looking outside and down while he gripped the ledge, and looked over his shoulder at Kimi.
Kimi had a horrible thought.
He could just leave.
His blood ran cold. Why hadn’t he thought of that before agreeing to be the one to hold down the door? George could just leave, right now, escape on his own while Kimi held back the hoard, because it would be a hell of a lot riskier to save them both. The door would open as soon as Kimi tried to join him. Wouldn’t it be safer, even saner, for George to just leave on his own, and leave him to his fate?
He’s a two-faced snake, Andrea.
Kimi looked at George with a new mounting fear choking his ribs. He should’ve thought about it sooner. He was stupid, so fucking stupid, for simply agreeing to George’s plan that put him in the safest position at Kimi’s expense. He should have listened to his father. His father’s advice had never let him down.
“You need to go first,” George said crisply, cutting through the spiral of his thoughts.
Kimi snapped out of his head.
“What?”
George wasn’t even looking at him. He was looking out of the window and down.
“There’s a- There’s this construction platform. It’s far but it’s our safest route.”
Kimi barely understood what he was saying.
“You want me to go first?”
That wasn’t what he was expecting.
“We need to be quick.” George started shrugging out of his jacket, rolling up his shirt sleeves. “I’ll bring more things to barricade the door. You jump first. Wait for me on the platform. I trust that you’re–” He looked at Kimi flat against the door, holding it back as best he could. “Strong enough to catch me.”
“Catch you?” Kimi echoed.
George pushed a crate from the other wall of the room all the way to the door. He returned quickly for another. An old cabinet appeared at Kimi’s right. The force behind the door suddenly felt a lot lighter.
“It'll hold for a bit,” George said, wiping liquid sweat off his brow. He stepped back with a heavy breath. “Don’t miss the platform. Go.”
Kimi felt like he was rapidly falling behind on whatever the hell this plan was. He had so many questions and nothing made sense. George glared at him like he was stalling on purpose.
“What are you waiting for? Go!”
Right. Act first, ask questions later. Kimi didn’t need to be told again before he was sprinting for the window and looking outside himself. George’s plan made sense as soon as he saw it.
There was a wooden platform, one of those temporary aids built for painting higher walls of buildings or fixing windows, upheld by steel bars wrapped in colourful foam tubes. They were on the third floor. It only extended to the top of the first, but George was right– reaching it and then scaling it down was the only safe way to reach the ground without breaking something.
Kimi pushed the window up as far as it would go, realising the gap was just enough for him to squeeze through. Enough for him, comfortably, to get through and land a perfectly-aimed jump at the platform. George would struggle to squeeze through the gap without manoeuvring his long body in odd ways, so he had a higher chance of missing the platform.
“Any day now, Kimi!”
Kimi ignored the sarcasm in favour of carefully climbing out the window. Hot air rushed into his face as he crouched with his shoes on the windowsill and his back bent just beneath the edge of the part that opened, gripping it with one hand from the inside for balance. He zeroed in on the platform, hearing the sound of his own heart thundering in his chest and the way his breaths were shaky, and jumped before he could overthink it.
Kimi landed on the platform in a perfect posture that didn’t break his ankles, a squat that shielded him from the impact. He scrabbled unsteadily to his feet and looked up.
His father’s words echoed in his ears again. George couldn’t be trusted, he wasn’t someone Kimi should ever get comfortable with, he didn’t need to be friends with his teammate to have a successful career, and…
And George had just allowed Kimi to be in that position. He could leave on his own now. Save time. Save himself the risk of waiting for George, who’d bring the hoard on his heels. Kimi had the perfect chance to be the two-faced snake his teammate was supposed to be.
A shadow crossed his face and he realised it was George at the window, looking down and then worriedly behind him.
“Jump,” Kimi said, his voice carrying over a lot clearer than he expected. He wasn’t really thinking about it. He wasn’t thinking about anything when he added, “Just jump. I’ll catch you.”
George couldn’t get out the same way he had. He was too tall to get his entire body out, hang with one hand and aim for the platform with his feet. Kimi saw him calculate his trajectory and turn around, exiting with his back turned, carefully lowering his long legs and torso out from the gap while he exerted his upper body strength to hang with both arms. Kimi paid close attention. He couldn’t afford to miss and he couldn’t afford to let go too early if it was the edge of the platform. Every muscle in his body screamed in exertion but the adrenaline keeping him alive numbed the pain.
He heard a loud bang and a chorus of screeches before George let go of the ledge.
Kimi caught him half an inch out of the platform edge, the sudden force knocking the air out of his lungs in an instant before they tumbled back. He wheezed when George’s weight rolled off of him, gulping in air as he heard his teammate heave in the background. When he recovered in the next moment, George grabbed his hand to pull him to his feet.
They looked up at the window simultaneously. It rattled as it was aimlessly pushed and shoved against, the tortured noises of the hoard ringing in the air. Arms extended out of the gap and back, reaching for prey that wasn’t there, but none of the creatures seemed to have the capacity to figure out how they’d disappeared.
George was the first to rip his gaze away from the grisly sight.
“We have to climb down now.”
The road that led to the service entrance was situated behind the stretch of garages and motor homes, and for the most part, completely disconnected from them excepting locked doors and windows like the one they had jumped out of.
In other words, their survival was awfully, disproportionately hinged on there being no unlocked doors.
George took that into account. He instructed Kimi to stick close to the tree line and fence that made the other boundary, sticking to the shade and shadows they provided with a careful eye on the back of the buildings at all times. It was almost eerily quiet out here. That gave Kimi’s heart the opportunity to somewhat return to its normal amount of beats per minute and for his thoughts to begin clearing.
Without the imminent danger, the reality of the situation they found themselves in came crashing down.
“Is everyone else-” Kimi raised into the quiet air. “How do we know if everyone else is okay?”
George stopped. He turned around with slumped shoulders, looking as pale as Kimi felt.
“I didn’t see them,” he said after a short eternity. “I didn’t see the…the zombies who were behind us, but they might have been–”
He didn’t have to finish saying it. Kimi was conscious enough now to have made the connection himself.
They might have been people from their building. People from their team.
Any of the mechanics, engineers and strategists that Kimi had passed in the corridor on the way to his room. Anyone who’d been visiting them in the paddock. The social media admins, the photographers, the team’s investors, anyone.
He leaned against the fence for support. The gravity of it all was only hitting him now. Every mangled, screeching half-corpse they’d run away from and the creatures whose hands Kimi had severed were people that Kimi and George had probably personally known.
“Toto,” Kimi choked out. “Do you think– maybe Toto escaped? Do you think Bono managed to– maybe Sergei, I mean, I didn’t see him around, maybe he made it.”
He was deluding himself. He knew, in a faraway sense, that he was only telling himself those things because he desperately wanted them to be true, not because they were likely. He thought about Toto in the meeting room after the race. Wasn’t Toto exactly the kind of person who could outsmart these circumstances? He would have found a way out just like George had found a way out, hell, he probably had backup plans upon backup plans in case something went horribly wrong in the Mercedes motorhome.
George didn’t answer him. George had his phone out, and it was ringing, but no one was picking up.
Toto, the contact name read.
“His phone probably broke,” Kimi said hastily. “Or he lost it in the middle of everything.”
The line went flat. George instinctively re-dialled the number, but this time, there was no ringing either.
“There’s no signal,” he said, looking up at Kimi. “I don’t know if Toto has his phone, but the signal is really weak for some reason.”
Kimi fumbled for his own phone out of his pocket. That wasn’t possible, not out here. The WiFi was sometimes shit, and the phone signal inside the motorhome was sometimes weak, but it couldn’t possibly be the case out here.
The top of his screen displayed two crossed out circles. He had neither.
“So we can’t call anyone?” Kimi turned his phone to show George. “Cazzo, how is that possible? I have 5G, it should work like, all the time!”
George pressed his lips into a thin line.
“We have to go,” he decided, pocketing his own phone. “Let’s get somewhere safe and try again.”
Right. That made sense. Kimi swallowed thickly, following him with mixed feelings. George was almost too good at compartmentalising. It seemed kind of…he didn’t know the word, but it didn’t seem very human. His face was set in stone as if everyone he knew and cared about from their team wasn’t in danger or already dead right now.
They passed behind more team buildings with no incident. Kimi kept one eye on the doors and one on George, wondering if he was actually that good at keeping his composure tight or if he truly did not care about anyone. He was thinking it, trying to scale it against the almost inexplicable fact that George had trusted him with the opportunity to stab him in the back at the window. Had he only allowed it because it was the logical thing for him?
Kimi was so caught up in his thoughts that he almost missed it when George’s phone made another appearance, ringing close to his ear. His teammate’s expression was suddenly more tense. Kimi realised belatedly that they had come to a complete halt.
“George?”
George bit his fingernail on his free hand. His eyes flicked restlessly towards the building he was now squarely facing. Kimi saw his throat dip and constrict as the phone rang away in his ear.
“Fuck,” George muttered softly to himself. “Pick up, pick up.”
Kimi traced his worried gaze. The white building was marked at the back with a giant Williams banner, the smiling faces of Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz printed on opposite ends, arms crossed and facing each other.
The line went cold. George quickly called again. He kept the phone fixed to his ear and never looked away from the building.
“Please,” he begged a person who wasn’t listening in. “Please just pick up the phone.”
He got nothing in return. A raw, pained noise scratched its way past his throat before he tried, with violently trembling hands, to call Alex Albon again.
When there was no one on the other end for the third time, George put his phone away and made an impulsive decision that caught Kimi completely off guard.
“I’m going into Williams,” he said, turning around to address him. “I need to find Alex and Lily. I don’t know how long it’s going to take or if we’ll have anything chasing us, so you can go ahead without me.”
What?
George pointed in the far direction.
“Take the service entrance like we discussed,” he instructed plainly, as if he was informing Kimi of directions to a sponsor’s filming venue. “Your first option is the parking lot. If you can access it, the catering and media vans should still have a few drivers on standby, probably people with no idea what’s going on in here. Inform them and leave the circuit with them. You don’t have to ask anyone to stay behind for our sake, but I would really appreciate it if you could get them to leave a key behind for us. Can you mark that vehicle in some way?”
Kimi blinked rapidly. George was talking fast, articulating cleanly like he always did, but the words weren’t registering so clearly in his mind. It was crazy. It was crazy, right, to go into a zombie-infested motorhome and expect to come back alive? Was he serious? Was he asking Kimi to go on alone?
“If the parking lot has…zombies,” George winced around the word, “Your next best option is still to find a vehicle of some kind. The circuit buses should be parked outside of Gate E. The same compound will have the campers that people drove to the circuit. I don’t know if that path will be clear either, but you should try to get away in whatever you can. Drive to a place of higher elevation and try to make a call.”
Kimi realised two things very quickly.
Firstly– George was far sharper than he had ever given him credit for. He’d thought of a plan and backup plan somewhere in the middle of fighting for their lives, remembered minuscule details like where the circuit buses would be parked and the floor plan of the motorhome, and had the capacity to put his survival strategy over his emotional distress when it mattered. Kimi had not come up with any survival strategy.
Secondly, it wouldn’t be cataclysmic for him to go off on his own if there really were unaffected drivers waiting in the parking lot, but if it wasn’t an option, Kimi would probably not make it very far on his own.
He couldn’t think so fast when it wasn’t about racing. He was proud of his ability to make split-second decisions behind the wheel and proud of how it allowed him to win races and compete with much more experienced drivers, but without a car, a track, a helmet and a race to win, Kimi could not do that.
If he split ways with George now, there was no chance in hell he was going to survive.
“It’s a waste of time,” Kimi said before he could really evaluate the card he was about to play.
A confused frown crossed his older teammate’s face.
“What are you talking about?”
Kimi barrelled past the guilt and said, with a straight face while pointing at the Williams motorhome, “Going in there for Alex and Lily. They left a while ago.”
George’s eyes went wide. He glanced between Kimi and the motorhome, probably trying to weigh what he was saying against the timeline he was aware of. He’d been on a call with Alex a short while ago. Kimi didn’t know if Alex had said anything that explicitly contradicted his lie so he could only hope it wasn’t the case, or that he could convince George of the lie anyway.
“Are you sure?” he asked hesitantly. He didn’t sound like he didn’t trust his words, just that he was confused by them. Kimi was going to take advantage of the difference.
“I saw them leave,” he lied, voice so steady and convincing it frightened the part of him that felt wracked with guilt for what he was doing. “He had a bad race, right? I asked you about it because I saw them leaving early, like, just after the podium celebrations. It looked like they only stayed for you and got out of here, probably to beat the traffic, and probably because Alex didn’t feel like hanging with his team after what happened today.”
He didn’t expect it to work without more pushing, but George’s tense shoulders slumped with relief and the stress-creases on his temples smoothed out. He exhaled with a shaky laugh.
“I didn’t realise,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Alex didn’t say he left. Good grief.”
Kimi’s stomach dropped. He immediately wanted to take it back, apologise and admit it was all a lie and that he didn’t really know what happened to George’s friends, but he was still in survival mode and it told him to keep his mouth shut.
“I’m glad,” George said, smiling sincerely. “That’s a relief. If they left before this started they might be in a safer situation. Thank you for telling me, Kimi. I’m really glad you did.”
Kimi smiled tightly.
“Yeah, ’course,” he said. “Wasn’t going to let you go in for no reason.”
George stood up straighter, looking about five times more confident. He nodded curtly.
”Let’s keep moving.”
Kimi ignored the way his conscience screamed as he trekked down the service road behind George.
It’s for his own good too, he thought, fighting it. I mean, he would’ve been ripped to pieces if he went in there. He was going to die for nothing. Even if his friends are inside, there’s no way they aren’t already dead or zombies, and even if they weren’t, what are the chances he was going to reach them and get out safely? He’s better off thinking that I told him the truth.
They slowed to a stop when the service gate came into view. It was simple, a locked iron gate about twice as tall as George was, controlled by an access panel and an intercom. Peering through the grills, they could see the parking lot off to one side, sparsely populated and quiet. It was hard to tell if any of the vehicles had occupants, but from here it looked ordinary and safe.
“I think the coast is clear,” George said, stepping back from the grills to squint up in the sun. “You have your paddock pass by any chance?”
Kimi fished into his pockets and found it. George passed the card by the scanner only for it to beep aggressively and flash red.
“Fantastic,” Kimi grumbled. “For some reason they need to have different access.”
George pursed his lips and looked up again, handing him back his pass.
“We can climb it.”
Naturally. Kimi slung the lanyard of his pass around his neck and reached out to wrap his hands around the bars. The metal was uncomfortably hot from baking in the sun all day but that was a minor inconvenience. Hoping his shoes had enough grip, he placed one vertically against a grill and pulled himself up, then used the other foot, and back again until he had closed the distance enough to leverage himself right over the top of the gate, sitting on it with a leg on either side before looking down at George.
“Need a hand?”
George shook his head, grabbing the bars to follow suit. Kimi jumped down the other side with care, kicking up a plume of dust at his feet. George was on the ground next to him in seconds.
He straightened his crumpled collar, ran his hands through his hair to fix it, and squared his shoulders as he faced the parking lot and its assortment of five vans and two cars, all parked sideways relative to their view.
“Right,” he said, as if to himself. “Right. Let’s hope for the best.”
The best was finding a driver in one of those vehicles, Kimi assumed. The worst was no driver and no keys, locked vehicles, and a dead end that left them with no choice but to resort to the much riskier backup plan unless George had one more surprising alternative up his sleeve.
They approached the opening in the low wall that marked the boundaries of the parking lot. It was a less secured area than Kimi expected with no access control except for a chair by the opening that was supposed to come with a security guard. The area looked like it was far from everything, though, even the more adventurous wayward fans who turned up at the most unexpected places for autographs and photos. And, Kimi supposed, since no drivers would ordinarily come here, it didn’t need to be sealed off.
As they got close, he got the impression that something was off. The plot was eerily quiet and still. Still in the way that amplified even the smallest trace of movement.
Kimi instinctively clamped a hand over his mouth when he saw it. George noticed, blinking at him in question. He swallowed thickly, keeping his gaze locked on the sight lest something change unfavourably for them, and wordlessly directed his teammate to look at the bloodied shoe sticking out of the back of one of the SkySports vans.
George choked down an alarmed noise. A white trainer splotchy with bright red patches, sticking out limp and horizontal, motionless except for an occasional slight twitch. The back of the van had double doors, one of which was still closed, the other, behind the standout object, casting the rest of the van’s insides that they could see in a dark shadow that totally obscured the body the shoe was attached to.
It moved again. This time, it was dragged an inch further inside.
Kimi wanted to turn and run back the way they’d come. It was extremely obvious that there was something inside that van with the body, something that had killed the owner of the shoe and was currently feasting on them.
“George–”
“We need that van.”
Kimi stared at him like he was fucking insane. No, he was. He had never heard such an absurd thing in his life.
“What?”
George bit his lip, keeping his eyes on the van and the shoe.
“The keys should be inside.” The line of his throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Or on the body.”
Kimi snapped.
“Are you out of your mind?” he hissed, almost raising his voice, grabbing his teammate to forcefully turn him his way. “I– mamma mia, I can’t believe such a stupid– there’s a zombie in that fucking van! Mate! You want that one?”
“Be quiet,” George warned him, like he was the one being crazy and unreasonable. “The other vehicles wouldn’t still be here if they had drivers. They’re going to be locked.”
“Then we go onto Plan B!” Kimi exclaimed. “Are you trying to die early?”
“We have better odds right now than with Plan B,” George said firmly, like none of Kimi’s reason was getting through his skull. He removed Kimi’s fists from the front of his shirt. “It’s one zombie now or a possible hoard later. We don’t know what the situation is between here and Gate E, or what the compound with the buses currently looks like. It’s not a risk I can justify.”
But you can justify running into Williams when it’s crawling with zombies? Kimi wanted to shake him. I don’t understand your decision-making at all!
“I’ll need your help for this, Kimi,” George said seriously, keeping his voice low. “We need to get it out of the van. You saw how it works, right?”
“Saw how what works?” Kimi asked wryly, afraid he already knew the answer.
“How you can become a zombie,” George clarified. “They bite. Earlier, in the crowd, people weren’t turning while they were trying to fight them off, only after they got bitten. That suggests simple contact isn’t enough to transmit it. As long as we can avoid getting bitten, or getting any open wounds infected, maybe–”
“Che palle! You’re saying that like it’s easy!”
George ignored him.
“Do you have any open wounds?”
Kimi gritted his teeth. It really, really looked like this was not going to go his way.
“No,” he muttered. “None.”
“Okay.” George nodded, looking way too satisfied with that answer. “Then don’t get bitten. We’ll distract it so it leaves and get inside as fast as possible. The driver’s seat is accessible from the back of the van, so we’ll essentially be completely safe and sorted once the doors are closed.”
Kimi rubbed his face. He couldn’t believe he was entertaining this insanity. Unfortunately, he didn’t have better ideas, so George was kind of in charge here.
Despite how quiet they made themselves, it was utter madness to approach the van with the zombie in it. Kimi's heart was in his throat, louder than anything else. George silently walked right alongside him with his determined gaze fixed, though Kimi could notice the edge of unease present in every movement if he squinted, until they were close enough to smell blood and feel the heat radiating from the van's sun-heated chassis.
George took his elbow and guided him to the side of the van by the closed door.
“On my mark,” he whispered.
Kimi nodded. He wanted to know more, demand exactly what George planned to do in the meantime, but the air was thick with tension and imminent danger that really discouraged anything but absolute silence at this moment.
George made his way around the front of the van. Kimi risked a glance from behind his cover to see George emerge on the other side, partly hidden by the open door.
At this proximity to it, he could hear the sounds of slobbering, no different than that of a greedy dog, and the much less familiar squelches of raw human flesh being chewed on.
The sudden sharp sound of a whistle pierced the air before a large rock sailed out of George’s side, skidding far away in the earth, bellowing brown dust around it.
Kimi expected the zombie's reaction to be instant. He thought it would get distracted, run after the rock like a dog on a stick, and give them an instant to get in the van.
That was not how it happened.
The corpse fell out first. Kimi's breath hitched as he saw it drop, landing face-down with a heavy thump.
The zombie did not immediately follow.
Kimi saw its head first. It peered out from the shadow, sniffing the air. He quickly got behind the cover of the van’s body to avoid being seen.
He could only hear it and feel how the van creaked and groaned under the creature’s shifting weight as it continued to peer outside but didn’t leave. Kimi realised with horror that they really had no idea how it worked. The zombies were fast, they could be and he’d seen it himself, but what else did they have? Could they smell humans? Did they have exceptionally good hearing? Were they intelligent?
The last one in particular was chilling. If it was not a dumb creature, it might not fall for their distraction, and in that case–
The van dipped and Kimi heard a pair of feet land on the ground too close to the doors.
He didn’t dare look now. George wasn’t going to signal them to get inside when that thing was literally blocking the way, in a perfect place to attack. What could they do besides hope it left on its own?
Sucking in a deep breath, Kimi dared to inch closer to the edge. Sinking into a crouch, he looked from under the van at its feet and dead body. Blue shoes caked in mud, indistinguishable from a regular human's, stood stock-still before the torso of the dead driver. Blood had spread into the ground underneath. He felt the urge to be sick again but something caught his eye.
Is that the key?
By the driver's hip, hanging from his belt loop was a black rectangle with the Mercedes logo on it. Kimi almost giggled, feeling insane. Of course the fucking van they were risking their lives for was a Mercedes.
So they could not get on board without robbing the corpse first. Fantastic. He wondered if George had spotted it and come up with another plan. Kimi was focused on the key, unable to look away from the single object that dictated his survival, when the zombie's blue shoes shifted imperceptibly in the other direction.
It happened fast. The shoes were gone in an instant and then George was shouting curses. Kimi broke his cover without thinking about it. His heart dropped to his stomach.
Behind the swinging second door, George was holding off the snapping creature with both arms in front of him, eyes blown wide with panic. He staggered under the zombie's weight and the force with which it tried to hurt itself at his neck, sharp teeth chattering and clenching with the impact of every missed bite. He was being backed further and further away with the creature upon him, increasingly unsteady on his feet with every step.
George did not call for him. He did not call for help, but Kimi had never seen someone so paralysed with fear before.
It was also Kimi's first time really seeing one of the creatures up close in the light.
It had the shape of a man, someone who was tall and built like a tank in a previous life, who twisted unnaturally and hunched like an ape now. The back of its neck was dark grey and full of pulsing red veins under the translucent skin. It wore a Redbull t-shirt. Its body was rotting, visually falling apart, but it was strong and fit like the man it had once been, tall like George but at least twice as heavy.
It would've been so easy for Kimi to leave. The keys were on the ground at his feet, the van was just beside him and far from the action, and he wouldn't be risking his life for the sake of a teammate who barely tolerated his presence. Kimi knew, logically, that whatever he did now was just a matter of survival. Nobody could hold it against him if he acted in self-preservation, and the only sane thing to do right now would be to take the van and go. George was about to be as good as dead anyway.
“Kimi!” George’s voice suddenly cut through the air. He sounded urgent and afraid. “Get out of here!”
Kimi watched him struggle to hold his ground. His eyes were squeezed shut and his head was turned away, putting as much distance between his neck and the creature's snapping teeth as possible.
“Go, Kimi!”
Okay. Well. George did not get to do that.
He didn't know what came over him. One moment, he was terrified for his life and thinking of running away, and all of that fear was gone the next. A sense of alarming clarity woke him up.
Kimi bolted towards George and the zombie. He pounced on the creature’s back, wrapping his arms around its throat and yanking, pulling it clean off of George who landed on his ass with a thump, and tightened his elbow around its neck, squeezing, until–
Kimi heard the snap of bone. The thrashing creature went limp in his grasp, dropping like dead weight as soon as he let go.
Kimi stood over its body breathing heavily. He stared at the once-human neck he had snapped, like a psychopath, loosely holding the gnarly-looking head of something that was once a person. A foul-smelling foam bubbled out of its open maw. Its eyes had gone deep black like voids in space.
George scrabbled onto his hands, sitting up in the dirt with a look between intense relief and abject disbelief on his face. His hair was all over the place.
“You killed it,” he exhaled.
Kimi dropped his arms to his sides. They retained the phantom tingle of something struggling and breaking against them.
“Yeah,” he gulped. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
Feeling a little numb all over, he absently offered George a hand, which his teammate took with surprising renewed strength. Kimi expected to let go when George was on his feet, but instead he was pulled into a tight hug.
The numbness slowly ebbed away. He relaxed unconsciously, sinking into his teammate’s embrace in a way that would have been inconceivable just an hour ago. He was shaking, he realised, only a little less than George was. He was pretty sure it was an impulsive moment on his teammate's part to thank him, because they did not hug, had not hugged once since Kimi's first race win, and George was not a tactile person.
Nearly dying will do that to you, Kimi figured.
“That was brave,” George said finally, holding him at arm's length. “A bit too brave.”
Kimi barked out a laugh.
“Mate, you have no room to talk.”
George smiled at him, a brief, sincere thing, before letting go and looking soberly down at the dead zombie.
“Now we know at least one way to kill them, too. Let's get out of here already.”
“I know where the key is,” Kimi said.
George inclined his head, encouraging him to lead the way.
The back of the SkySports van was full of crap; big electronics with lots of buttons and small screens, cameras, lights, mics, headsets, and other media equipment that Kimi couldn’t even name. Two duffel bags provided the change of clothes George insisted on. Their shirts were dirtied with blood and muck, which, according to him, posed a potential threat since it really was just a theory that the zombie infection needed a bite or open wound to transmit. It was better to be on the safe side, he argued when Kimi was impatient to drive out of there without wasting any more time.
Changed into a fresh shirt that was slightly too loose and short, George took over the driver's seat of his own volition.
Kimi got into a Redbull polo that was conveniently his size. George eyeballed him judgmentally as he strapped himself into the passenger seat.
“That just looks wrong.”
Kimi smirked.
“Gonna snitch on me to Toto?”
George huffed, almost a laugh. He started to drive the van out of its parking slot the wrong way, studiously avoiding the two corpses behind them. Like Kimi, he was probably doing his best to avoid thinking about it.
“You look like a mini Max,” George commented, looking in the rearview mirror as he maneuvered the van with some difficulty. “It's disturbing.”
Max. He had wondered about Max in his fleeting moments of clear thought. He wondered about all of them, but especially Max, Lewis and Ollie, a sick churning in his guts at the idea that they might not have escaped. It was worrying that no one else had found the clear, safe service road at the same time as them when it was probably the only exit out of the paddock not swarming with crowds of the infected.
He glanced out of the corner of his eye at George.
If his teammate hadn't been around at the right place and time, if Kimi hadn't met him outside their driver's rooms and got into a shouting match with him just minutes before disaster struck, he wouldn't have known about the route either.
“Hey,” George said, a clear voice cutting through his thoughts. “Max will be fine, Kimi.”
Kimi blinked. He realised he was wearing his worries transparently on his face only when he saw the way George was looking at him, blurred by a haze of unshed tears.
Kimi rubbed his palms over his eyes stubbornly.
“How do you know that?” he demanded. “You don't have to lie to me like I'm some kid. I understand the reality of this situation. Everyone we know is probably– most of them, they're probably already dead, I know.”
George pursed his lips. The van crawled out of the parking lot and onto a bumpy road. With the air conditioning off, it was unbearably hot inside.
“I'm not lying to you,” George said after a while. His eyes remained on the road. “I'm saying what I think. I know what Max is like, and he's– well, he's the type of person to know about three different routes out of the paddock. How do you think he's so good at hiding from Netflix?”
Kimi sat back and stared at the road. “He is…” He tried to collect himself and shake off the emotional response, feeling slightly stupid about it. This was not the time and place to entertain a breakdown. “Yeah, he's a bored nerd too.”
George looked surprised.
“Excuse me?”
“I meant that as a compliment.” Kimi shrugged. “You had the floorplan of the motorhome memorised, mate.”
“That is not unusual.”
“For a nerd,” Kimi pointed out. “Like you and maybe Max. He's less obvious about it, though.”
George scowled.
“How the hell am I more of a nerd than Max? He placed second in Grill the Grid this year!”
“The fact that you remember who placed where in Grill the Grid…” Kimi remarked mildly, biting back a laugh.
George huffed, indignant.
“It wasn't that long ago.”
The road was narrow and uneven, trailing downhill onto the main highway that cut through Montmeló. This was the time he'd expect to see massive crowds of people outside the circuit, stuck in traffic on the way home or stuck in long queues for the shuttles and trains. It was eerily deserted today. Kimi scanned their surroundings and looked in the rearview mirror for any signs of life, finding none, like there hadn't just been a Grand Prix right here attended by thousands of people.
His stomach did a nauseous flip at the reminder. Thousands. There were thousands of fans, workers, volunteers and colleagues trapped inside the circuit right now, and by some fucking miracle, they were the only ones escaping down this road.
He thought about the fans whose caps he'd signed today. There had been a little kid dressed like him whom he took a photo with. There had also been a pair of twins in the paddock, two young girls who'd wished him luck and said they wanted him to be World Champion.
Kimi wondered if any of his hardcore fans had left the circuit after his DNF. It might have been a life-saving decision to give up and go home at exactly the moment Kimi's car had given up on him, because the fans who'd attended the podium and track invasion had almost no chance.
“It's quiet,” George murmured.
They couldn't possibly be the only survivors. It was just not feasible, right? Out of thousands of people? And like they'd established, Max was capable of finding his way out of the circuit. Toto was the sort of Team Principal to know their section of the paddock inside out and have backup plans for everything. Bono, Marcus, the engineers and strategists, they were smart as hell, they could have figured it out too. There must have been fans and workers who got lucky. It couldn't just be Kimi and George.
The exhaustion only hit him when he noticed the sun starting to dip below the horizon. Kimi leaned his head against the window, gazing into the empty distance as his eyes fluttered.
“Where are we going?”
The van was way slower than it needed to be on such an empty road. George took a turn at a road sign that marked the answer to that question.
“Into town, but we're not getting out of the van.” His voice was faint in Kimi's sliding consciousness. “Just to assess what's going on. If it's overrun like the circuit, we'll turn around and head for higher elevation.”
Right. The phone calls they needed to make. Kimi had to call his family and tell them he was okay because they'd probably heard there was some kind of disaster at the circuit.
One last unsettling thought nudged at him just before he fell asleep.
What if it's the same in Italy?
When Kimi woke up, he briefly forgot where he was. He wondered if his hard bed at the motorhome had ever been this uncomfortable. Then he noticed that the world was dark and it wasn't hot anymore. A collection of muffled voices surrounded him.
Kimi sat up with a start.
Zombies–
The voices died out. He felt a pair of hands on his shoulders.
“Welcome back,” George said in a low voice. “Sorry about this. I didn't want to leave you in the van.”
His vision cleared, finally relaying some useful information into his brain. Kimi saw that he was no longer in his room or in the passenger seat of the SkySports van, but on solid land, in an uncomfortable chair, between four walls. There was an ancient-looking camping lamp on another chair. A small table was situated in front of him, covered in a green cloth with a plastic sheet on it, and copies of the same table were scattered about the small room with copies of the same chair, many of which occupied human strangers. It was the inside of a restaurant, he realised, most of its furniture cast to one side to clear more floor space. Everyone was looking at him with a mix of trepidation, concern and interest.
George was sitting in a too-small chair a few feet from the small table with his long legs stretched in front of him. He addressed the crowd of unfamiliar people who were considering Kimi like a museum exhibit.
“I'm sure my teammate needs no introduction.”
Someone at the back of the room whooped a hearty cheer.
“Our championship leader!”
The rest of the room followed suit, laughing and applauding. It was only at this point that he realised most of the restaurant’s occupants were fans, dressed in merch from different teams, all looking a little worse for wear behind the cheerful airs they were putting on for him.
Championship leader. Kimi wasn't sure the title meant anything anymore.
He gulped and smiled awkwardly at the crowd, worried it would come off as rude not to appreciate their enthusiasm.
“Hi, everyone.” He stole a glance in George’s direction. “I don't really know what's going on, but I'm glad to see you guys are safe.”
More cheering erupted from the audience. Kimi ducked his head and felt strange about it. This was not exactly a fan forum where people had showed up to listen to him talk and pay attention to him. In this setting, the dynamic between himself and this crowd felt misplaced and inappropriate.
“Glad you made it, Kimi!” exclaimed a young guy in a Ferrari t-shirt.
“We knew you would!” added a girl in a Mercedes cap.
Kimi turned to George for help. The look on his face must've been obvious, because George intervened without question.
“Kimi missed the explanation of what's going on,” he said smoothly over the commotion, talking to someone in particular for the whole room to hear. “Would you be so kind as to fill him in as well?”
A few tired murmurs sounded from corners of the crowd, disappointed at their moment being curtailed for an exposé on whatever grim reality the lot of them were caught up in. The person that George had singled out was an older British gent in a luminous LN-1 shirt, though it was caked in dust and blood almost to the point of suppressing the obnoxious colour. He occupied a chair diagonally across from them, surrounded at its legs by people sitting cross-legged on the floor.
I didn't know he had old fans, Kimi thought distantly. He'd kind of assumed that Lando's fanbase was particular, the young and hip types who drank Monster and exchanged friendship bracelets. Maybe he was a bad person for never considering old folk could like Lando.
“Of course, George,” the old guy said warmly. Elderly people easily warming up to George was nothing new. “I'm glad to see you're in good shape, Antonelli. My name is Keith. As I told your teammate while you were asleep, we're a group of survivors who managed to get to the shuttle buses just in time. I mean, it was packed, everyone who managed to flee from that gate was there. Someone in the crowd had turned so the infection was spreading, but we were close enough to the only bus with a driver that we managed to get on and escape. Miguel here was our driver, by the way. We owe him our lives.”
Kimi blinked slowly, processing those words. Some people had escaped using one of the buses, just as George had devised for their backup plan, it just hadn't been easy. The visual of a desperate crowd packed into that compound and vying for the same bus while people started to turn into zombies was absolutely terrifying.
“We came to Montmeló looking for other vehicles,” Keith continued. “You can imagine the bus was full to bursting.”
“The people here?” Kimi asked.
“Most were gone. We don’t know where, but a local told us that almost everyone had turned.”
A by-now familiar spike of fear shot down his spine.
“If everyone in this town turned into a zombie, why the hell are we here?”
He wasn't proud of the way his voice cracked on the last word. The way some of the people in the room looked at him, too, like they were surprised he wasn't being calm and cool in this situation, it was so…
“It's empty now,” George said, answering for him. He shook his head. “No one knows why, but when they got here, the infected had already left. The survivors in town said they'd gone in the same direction.”
“They left,” Kimi echoed in disbelief.
“There's a lot we don't know about...” George gestured vaguely. “How it started, how far it's spread, if those creatures are…smart, you get the gist. We don't know anything at the moment.”
Kimi was grateful for George's direct, matter-of-fact explanations. It helped to focus on one place when everything was overwhelming, and distracted him from the curious eyes all around that were studying him in an almost invasive manner. Being in the spotlight had introduced him to the feeling, of course, especially this year when everyone seemed to have too much to say about his successes in the title fight, but it had never felt so disconcerting as it did right now when all he saw in front of him were other survivors who could probably help him while they still saw a driver, a celebrity with a public persona, and acted surprised when he didn't follow the script.
“We might have an idea of how far it's spread,” Keith said. Kimi saw George swallow and wince. It was the first time all night his teammate had looked visibly uncomfortable. “Our phones aren't working to contact anyone.”
Kimi sat with that revelation. He didn't need to try for long to draw the connection between how far it's spread and the fact that no one's phone was working.
“You're saying it's everywhere.”
Keith shrugged.
“Only a global catastrophe would cause a technology blackout.”
“We don't know that yet,” George said curtly, objecting in that polite, PR-trained way only he could. “The scale of it could just be local. If it started here in Barcelona or nearby, they must have acted to quarantine the region at some point. Airports would have shut down as soon as they knew what was going on. It couldn't have gotten so out of hand that every country across the ocean met and failed to quarantine an infected person.”
“That's one option,” a guy in a Redbull t-shirt said, butting in. “The other option is that the circuit was one of the latest places to get infected because it was relatively isolated with ticketed access. The infection could have spread far and wide before it reached us.”
George pursed his lips, backing down without a reply. He looked especially disturbed at the implication that it was a worldwide situation.
His family, Kimi realised, Is exactly one bit of ocean away.
But Kimi's family did not have the supposed protection of an ocean and an airport. There were no such borders between here and Bologna, Italy.
Unless they saw it coming and acted fast, he thought stubbornly, though his heart was suddenly in his throat. Maybe they did. Maybe there was time. Isn’t it still too far away to spread that fast?
“What are the odds it originated here?” another person asked. “This is some freaky disease that was probably cooked up in a lab. It could’ve come all the way from a lab in France. They have biotechnology over there.”
George raised his hands.
“I’ll be honest with you, that sounds extremely conspiratorial—”
“The last pandemic came from the other side of the world and it still got us, didn’t it?” a different guy interrupted. “Isn’t it optimistic to think it starts and ends in Europe?”
“Okay, but this isn’t a normal—” George started, then stopped himself and cleared his throat when he remembered to sound diplomatic and polite, before continuing, “This isn’t an illness with an asymptomatic period or even symptoms like a runny those that people can easily overlook when they board a flight.”
“And how do you explain the fact that our phones don’t work?” the first guy challenged. “If there wasn’t some global crisis big enough to shut everything down, I don’t see why we would have no functioning cell towers or switching centres to make a simple phone call.”
George pursed his lips, a displeased frown creasing his brow. He looked like he understood everything that was being argued in principle.
“I don't know.”
“Stop fighting,” a girl in a Ferrari cap piped up from somewhere in the back. Kimi’s attention was drawn to her. She looked about his age, with blonde hair and blue eyes. “No one knows anything. We just have to wait for the authorities to get to us, right? They have to launch some search and rescue operations eventually.”
“I think you're all stressing over nothing,” agreed the girl sitting on the ground next to her, decked from head to toe in Mercedes merch. The assortment of friendship bracelets on the pair of them suggested they might have attended the race together. “Jess is right. We should just wait here where it's safe until someone locates us or the phones start working again. Give it some time.”
The two guys who were arguing with George looked like they didn't agree but didn't object either. It was probably because they didn't have the energy left to argue more.
“That's a plan for the short term, at least,” Keith said. He spoke like the group had already named him their de-facto leader, but murmurs of agreement sounded off across the room just because he'd said it, so maybe he really was. “This is a good location that wouldn't be missed so it's worth staying a few days.”
It didn't sound horrible. Kimi was itching to know more, to find out about his family in Bologna, but he wasn't even sure right now if he should be expecting the worst or if they were in a position to be more worried about him than their own situation. He could only hope for the best right now
Most of the small crowd unanimously decided to call it a night when the single light source illuminating the room started to spark out. Kimi only stayed rooted in his chair as he watched people gather their belongings and search for more comfortable corners to set up camp for the night. He turned to George, meaning to suggest they sleep in the van instead, when movement at his periphery drew his attention.
Kimi blinked up at the Mercedes-merch girl from before. She was smiling nervously but excitedly, sticking out a hand.
“Hi, Kimi. Can I hang out with you for a bit?”
Beside him, George raised a perfect eyebrow.
“Uh– sure,” Kimi said hastily. He didn't have the mental capacity to come up with a half-decent explanation that wasn't, no, I'm exhausted, and this is a weird setting. He shook her hand reluctantly.
“I'm Sasha, from California. I'm a huge fan of yours!”
In normal circumstances Kimi would have appreciated the sentiment. He noticed just now that her cap was in his colour, with a 12 on the side, and its brim was already signed. He had at least met her in passing before.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, hoping he sounded like he meant it with his usual enthusiasm. “Thanks, uh, Sasha.”
She winked at him.
“Signing with Redbull next season?”
That one managed to get a small laugh out of him. He tugged at the rival team's t-shirt
“No comment. It wasn't by choice, though.”
Kimi expected it to wrap up there. He didn't expect for her to drag a free chair from the table next-door and camp in front of him.
George got up to leave.
“Where are you going?” Kimi blurted, sounding a little alarmed. He immediately felt mortified when George raised both eyebrows this time.
“I'm not required here,” he said, smoothly, holding back a shit-eating grin that made Kimi want to kick him. “Giving you guys some privacy. I'll be in the van.”
This asshole. He knew what he was doing and he was enjoying it. Kimi had several choice words he wanted to say out loud, but the enthusiastic fan's presence prevented him. He heard her giggle in the background.
“He's not so bad in real life,” Sasha said, leaning across the table conspiratorially when George was out of sight. “I always thought you guys didn't get along, not even last year. Is it really all just acting?”
Kimi was completely thrown by the question.
“What?”
She shrugged.
“You don't like each other, right? I mean, I get it, he's kind of a dick. Not right now, but you know. In general.”
“He isn't–” Kimi gulped. “He's not a dick.”
He didn't understand why he felt the need to defend George to an overzealous fan of his. It was unnecessary to feel so confused, too– he knew where she was coming from, what she was talking about, and that it wasn't exactly unfounded.
Still. It was off-putting to hear a stranger talk about Kimi's teammate like she personally knew him. Knew them, what they were like away from the cameras. It wasn't a long shot that they didn't exactly like each other, but he didn't want to hear that from someone who didn't know them. It felt like a diagnosis, invasive and intimate.
“We're just competing.” Kimi's weak response sounded foreign to his own ears. “That's all.”
Sasha snorted like he'd said something funny.
“You don't need to be so PR-trained when there's an apocalypse going on, Kimi.”
He snapped his jaw shut. Another diagnosis. He didn't even know how to reply.
“Yeah,” he agreed instead, collecting his composure to sound cool and put-together. What would he say if circumstances were different? It was easier to respond like nothing had changed. “Okay, that's fair.”
Sasha grinned from ear to ear.
“Anyway, we can officially consider you the driver’s champion now, right?” She leaned further forward, elbows on the table, into his personal space. “It’s like the season is basically over. Congratulations, Kimi!”
Kimi smiled tightly, feeling vaguely nauseous.
Everyone, he wanted to scream, is probably dead.
There was no one left. There was no guarantee that any of the drivers besides himself and George had made it out of the circuit alive. His friends and his competition were gone. Lewis, after working so hard for his first win with Ferrari, and Lando, the reigning champion who might have pulled more stellar performances out of his car had the season progressed like it was supposed to, and Max, who might’ve eventually wrangled Redbull’s new shitbox under control– they had no idea how the season could have gone and they never would now. How could she say he had already won?
Kimi wasn’t keeping track of his long stretch of silence, barely noticing when Sasha started to realise that she’d said something wrong. It was only the unexpected arrival of her friend in the Ferrari merch that saved him from instinctively blurting some half-assed explanation.
“Sasha,” the other girl hissed at her friend, pulling hard on her sleeve. “Stop harassing him. He’s probably tired, right?”
The question was directed at him with a knowing glance. To Kimi, it felt like a lifeline, one he immediately seized.
“Ah, yes, sorry.” He rubbed the back of his neck, damp with sweat. “Sorry, I’m kind of zoning out. It’s been a long day.”
“I’m not harassing him, jeez, Jess.” Sasha rolled her eyes. “Just taking the opportunity to talk to my favourite driver. Like you wouldn’t do the same if Charles Leclerc was here.”
Jess treated her friend to a poisonous glare.
“No, I really wouldn’t, because we’re all in a shitty situation.”
“You like, lost your mind when Charles signed your cap.”
“Different context?”
Kimi snorted, finding the squabble funny despite himself. When the girls turned to him simultaneously, he hid behind a fake cough.
“Oh my god, are you okay?”
“Just fine,” Kimi said, making a move to stand up. “I think I’m gonna get some rest.”
Jess nodded in understanding but Sasha’s eyes brightened. She had something more to say.
“Where are you thinking to camp out?” She gestured at the room behind them and its clusters of people huddled together in small groups. No one had quite clocked out for the night yet, but Kimi saw people sitting against walls and nodding off, couples with someone’s head in another’s lap, and younger people curled up on the floor with their belongings clutched to them. There wasn’t a lot of free space left. “Jess and I found a good spot in the café next door. You can join us if you’d like.”
Kimi did not consider it for a second. He pretended to think about it.
“Thank you, but I already have a place.”
“Really? Where?”
Kimi pressed his lips in a tight line. Dio mio! Sei seria?
“The van we came in,” he said, though he regretted giving that away as soon as he’d said it. He really did not need to share that with a stranger, especially not one who didn’t seem to have a sense of situational awareness and kept bulldozing over his boundaries. Maybe he wasn’t doing a terribly good job of enforcing those boundaries. Was he unconsciously encouraging more of this? He’d never had a problem with fans who treated him familiarly or got touchy, but none of the usual reasons— they came all this way to see me, it’s good to have this kind of support, I would be excited to meet an athlete I like too, it’s normal— held much weight when he was tired and dreading the future and worried about his family and maybe all of the other drivers were dead.
He really must not have been clear enough. The girl looked shocked by his answer, for whatever reason, and he had just enough time to wonder if maybe she was just being kind, not wanting him to spend the night in an uncomfortable setting, before a question came tumbling out of her that instantly ruined the benefit of the doubt.
“You’re staying with George?”
Kimi gritted his teeth, finally finding the limit of his patience, and opened his mouth to say something scathing. Again, the other girl read the room and intervened before he made matters worse.
“He can stay with whoever he wants,” she told her friend curtly, in a sharp voice with a forceful tug of her elbow. “It’s none of our business, so. Stop asking.”
His throat felt dry. Yes. It was a relief that he hadn’t had to say anything. Sasha really looked chastised, like the message had finally gotten through to her, glancing at him quickly then looking away. Kimi’s anger was gone as easily as it had come.
Fucking hell, had he really been about to lose it at a fan?
“Right. Yeah, of course. Sorry. Goodnight, Kimi.”
Sasha looked mortified. He noticed that several pairs of eyes in the room had drifted towards their corner, sensing the spark of conflict.
Her friend led her away by the elbow. Kimi stood dissecting his strange feelings about the interaction for a second, wondering if it was a bad sign that he felt bad about an instance that he was probably in the right for. Right as the girls reached the door on the opposite end of the restaurant, carefully weaving through the bodies on the floor, Jess looked over her shoulder at him.
“There are a few more people in the café besides us,” she informed him. “You two can come in at any point if you want.”
Kimi nodded numbly. He didn’t feel inclined to take the offer. He was not going to tell George about it, either, just in case.
George was hanging around in the back of the van when Kimi knocked on the driver’s door, standing on his toes to look in through the window.
“Oh, hang on a minute,” came his crisp British accent. The body of the van swayed slightly on its wheels while George walked over to open one of the back doors for him. Kimi climbed in and realised upon first glance that his teammate had been fiddling with the various equipment, odd bits and pieces scattered on the floor next to a pair of chunky yellow headsets.
Kimi pointed at the mess behind him.
“What are you doing?”
George looked at it and ignored the question.
“How was your little date?”
Kimi rolled his eyes, pulling the door shut with more force than necessary. The van rocked on its wheels again.
“Shut up. First you tell me why there’s a huge mess on the floor.”
His teammate leaned against the sturdy back of the passenger seat. The van was tall with a high ceiling, letting Kimi stand upright, but George had to sink himself or duck if he wanted to do the same. He crossed his arms, gesturing with his head at the assorted nonsense.
“The big black box is a radio. It's some super advanced equipment, probably for doing complicated things that only big broadcasters have a need for, but it's a radio at the end of the day. I'm trying to see if it can pick up any signals. Maybe we'll be able to listen to the news tomorrow.”
Kimi eyed the box with healthy skepticism. Now that he took a closer look at it, there did appear to be speakers on either side, though he'd never seen a radio which had a need for so many knobs and dials. It had cables coming out of the back of it, connected to something he assumed was an external battery, and slots for more cables and ports. It probably served more than one purpose.
“Did you break something?”
George rolled his eyes.
“The battery was damaged. I just took apart the battery from that thing over there–” He pointed at a smaller gadget, now scrapped beyond recognition. “–and forced it to fit with the radio's. It's not as complicated as it looks.”
Kimi eyed him one more time before he crouched in front of the so-called radio and gave it another close examination. The battery pack did look like an ill-fitted, belated addition, now that he knew to look out for it.
“Since when are you an engineer?”
George didn't rise to the bait.
Kimi got to his feet, stretching his limbs just because he could. Being a head and a half shorter than George had its perks.
“So the radio works now.”
“It wasn't giving me anything before,” George said. “Now, at least there's static. I figure if we mess with it a little more, it should be in perfect working order to pick up any channels on air tomorrow.”
Very scientific, Kimi wanted to rib him. Marcus would be proud.
Still, he would be eating his words if George’s idea actually proved useful, so he elected not to comment on it. He simply shrugged it off and tried to get past George into the passenger seat, but he stopped him.
“I was thinking we don't actually need to sleep in the van,” George said. “The lack of security measures around the restaurant were a little worrying, but maybe if there were any zombies left over, they would've found the large loud group of people ages ago.”
Kimi faltered, taking an unintentional three steps back. The words were out of his mouth before he could vet them.
“We can't.”
George looked mildly surprised.
“Not convinced the place is secure?”
“No. It's not that.” Kimi's ears were pink. The very real concern that they were simply hedging all their bets on the idea that every zombie had left, without so much as a locked door or a pair standing guard, had not even occurred to him. His was the relatively inane concern that some of the fans didn't see him as a real person going through the same world-ending event, instead treating him as something to dissect and gawk at.
George pushed away from the seat, turning to face him fully. This time he ducked instead of sank.
“You don't have to entertain those people, you know.”
Kimi's eyes were glued onto his teammate's bright blue ones. How the hell had he figured it out? It was aggravating and strange. Before he could demand an answer, George explained anyway.
“I thought I saw it earlier as well. I get it, really. It's strange to be in this kind of situation and to be treated like nothing's different, like you're still a driver and they're still fans. It's like not getting to clock out from the spotlight after a race weekend, isn't it? Like the cameras have followed you home.”
George wasn't wrong.
The restaurant when he'd woken up had been full of people who regarded him like they were inside the set of Drive to Survive and he had walked in to give an interview, every careful word and turn of his body fair game for interpretation.
But even more than that, it was the sheer magnitude of vulnerability on display. In there he couldn't be Youngest Championship Leader, Kimi Antonelli, as the fans expected to see and as Kimi himself wanted to appear to them. They shouldn't get to see him as he really was now: a tired, miserable and frightened nineteen-year-old mourning the loss of his perfect old life and nearly everyone he'd known. Who didn't know the current fate of his closest friends and family outside of the grid. Who did not want to see another zombie ever again.
“Didn't you feel weird in there?” Kimi snapped. It felt unfair that he was the only one who was so rattled by all of it. “They must have asked you weird questions too. I know, you were probably PR-friendly in front of them, but we don't even have careers anymore to ruin so you can drop the act too!”
George was quiet. A stifling silence filled the small space, punctuated by the thrumming in Kimi's ears and the steady beat of his own heart, slightly elevated against his ribs.
At the end of the long stretch, he wasn't expecting George to laugh.
“Yeah.” He rubbed his face. “Yeah, I got a healthy dose of invasive questions before you woke up.”
Kimi wanted to know. It was kind of hypocritical when the whole point of his anger was that they deserved a break from public scrutiny at a time like this, but he wanted to know if George had also gotten asked if he didn't like his teammate or if Kimi was a dick.
“What did they ask?”
George raised an eyebrow.
“Look who's being invasive now.”
Kimi glared at him.
“We're in the same boat, mate, in case you haven't noticed. What, you think I'm going to go to those people and spill your secrets?”
“Someone asked me where Carmen is.”
Kimi's anger choked and died in his throat. Suddenly, he felt very immature and very stupid.
“I– I'm sorry, that is not–” he stuttered.
George shook his head, his shoulders dropping with a sigh.
“I wasn't quite prepared to answer them. But like you said, we're in the same boat, so I don't mind telling you.” He looked defeated and far-away when he met Kimi's gaze again. “She wanted to be here this weekend. She also had this conference in the US, a big networking event for entrepreneurs in her field. I didn't want her to sacrifice a useful thing for my sake, so I pushed and insisted that she skip the race and attend her conference.”
Kimi's throat worked dryly, scratchy. The implications of the revelation were bleak. He understood immediately why George wasn't prepared to tell just anyone that if it wasn't for his own ill-timed expression of support, his girlfriend would probably be right here next to him, where he'd know she was safe, rather than be uncontactable halfway across the world with an unknown fate.
“I'm sorry,” he said, meaning it. He didn't know what else he could say. “I hope you can get in touch with her soon.”
George nodded. He smiled tiredly at him.
“You must be worried about your family too, Kimi.”
George had just shared something significant with him. He partially felt obliged to return the same, but if he was being really honest with himself, he also needed to talk about it for his own sake. Keeping his worst fears completely to himself all this time had done nothing for his sanity, and who could he trust with this besides George right now? They were on the same boat.
“Everyone is in Bologna.” Kimi sat on a crate. He stared at the floor. “My parents and my sister were at our home the last time I spoke to them, before the race. I didn't even reply to my sister's last message because I thought I could just…do it later.”
He was sure he didn't need to explain that his fears stemmed from the very fact of their last known location. They didn't know for sure that this situation was a global catastrophe but they knew it was here, originating from or already having reached Spain, so it was much less of a long shot that Italy had been hit.
George quietly considered his answer, letting the words settle between them in a way that wasn't quite comfortable, but didn't feel like he'd handed a piece of his soul to someone who would enjoy having it, either.
“There should be new information over the radio tomorrow,” he said, breaking the silence with a smooth, pragmatic air Kimi was convinced only senior drivers could pull off. “To give us an indication of how big this has gotten. If there's a safe route, we can see if there is a possibility of going to Bologna.”
Kimi looked up sharply, eyes shooting open.
“Really?”
George didn't match his excitement, keeping his careful, diplomatic expression.
“Only if there is a safe way, Kimi. We have to wait here to be rescued first. I don't know what will happen after that, so I can't promise anything.”
Kimi tried to fit the puzzle pieces in his head. He had nearly forgotten the plan to wait here with the other survivors, responsibly and sensibly. George wasn't talking about leaving right now and making their way to Bologna, and as much as Kimi impulsively ached for it, he knew it would be reckless and stupid. What would happen after they were rescued? They would probably be locked somewhere safe and quarantined, he supposed, because there was no way everyone would just be allowed to go home to their families.
So, breaking the rules, then, Kimi realised, not without a little modicum of newfound respect. He imagined George putting his famed diplomatic charm to good use, convincing the people in charge to make an exception for him.
“Okay,” he said, reminding himself not to feel too hopeful. George hadn’t actually made any promises. “Thank you.”
George turned away, his attention becoming occupied by something else now that that line of discussion was over. He knocked on the headrest of the seat next to him.
“I found that these don’t recline,” he informed him. “Are you sure you want to sleep in the van for the foreseeable future?”
Kimi wrinkled his nose. Admittedly, his neck was already sore from doing exactly that and sleeping upright again in another chair after. The back of the van was full of junk and it was cold inside from having the widows cracked open so they could breathe.
“We can sleep in the restaurant,” he said. Paused, debating if he should disclose it or not. “But can we avoid the café next door?”
George didn’t question it beyond a simple raised eyebrow. He had been doing that a lot lately.
They didn’t have much to take with them out of the van. There was a single sorry cushion George dug up from under the seat and passed to him without comment. His teammate picked up one of the duffle bags with clothes to serve as his own pillow and pocketed the van keys. Kimi opened one of the back doors and jumped down, expecting George to follow immediately, but had to turn around a few seconds later when he didn’t. He found George holding up one of the headsets, a thoughtful look on his face.
“What are you doing?”
George pursed his lips, seemed to think about it some more, and made up his mind. He tossed one of the headsets Kimi’s way. He barely managed to catch it with his free hand, caught off-guard by the action.
“So we can sleep if it’s noisy?” he asked, confused. To be honest, it wasn’t like there was any other purpose a pair of headphones could serve when they had no working technology—
“Heavens, no.” George grabbed the remaining set and hopped out of the van. He closed the door behind him. “You need to hear it if there’s any danger around. It would be a terrible idea to block out your hearing completely.”
Kimi treated him to a dry look as if to say, then why the hell are we taking these?
“Put it around your neck.” George slung his headset around his own neck as if he intended to pull them up over his ears later. “We’ve seen that the zombies tend to go for the neck, so having this bit of metal around might block some teeth. Give us a bit of added protection.”
Kimi looked down at the headset in his hands and wondered if he really had what it took to survive this new hell.
Because, for the hundredth time today, George had pulled some useful survival strategy out of his ass and it just made sense. The headset was a heavy, uncomfortable thing, designed to block out sound with maximum effectiveness, but it was also two hard plastic shells and a sturdy metal bridge that wrapped nearly all the way around his neck. A normal person would probably chip their teeth if they tried to bite through it. A zombie, occupying a normal person’s body, would probably struggle even with the strength of its bite behind it.
A sick, selfish part of his mind thought: it had absolutely been the right call not to lose George to the overrun Williams garage. He was not so sure anymore that George himself wouldn’t have survived it somehow, but it was almost certainly true that he wouldn’t have made it this far if he didn’t have his teammate constantly thinking on his feet for both of them.
No, he fought that idea. It’s not just for me. He would have died.
Yes. He would have died in the process of looking for his friend. It wouldn’t have worked out. Kimi’s lie was egregious, unforgivable for the false hope he had given him, but it had saved his life or at least prevented his untimely death.
“Okay,” was all Kimi said in the end, slipping the headset around his neck.
The restaurant was crowded but not fully asleep when they headed inside. Small groups of people gathered in circles over hushed conversations. A couple of teenagers were lying down browsing their phones, probably fulfilling their screentime quotas with pre-downloaded stuff. Kimi spotted a girl making something out of crochet. They looked more like a big group of people stuck at an airport or waiting for a delayed train home than survivors of an apocalyptic event.
Fortunately, not many people seemed to notice their arrival, and the few who did only flashed them quick smiles or waves. Kimi was happy to return the gesture. He followed George to an unoccupied corner near the stacked tables at the back of the restaurant. He settled his duffle bag down.
“We’re going to build a barricade first,” he declared. “Just in case.”
Nobody else had built a damn barricade. Maybe he was being too paranoid about this. Kimi pointed out as much, but George ignored him and started moving tables without making a sound. The questioning looks it attracted from casual onlookers made Kimi want to disappear or find somebody else to camp with. After a painful minute of it, he gave in with a frustrated sigh.
“E va bene! Okay, I’ll help.”
He didn’t miss the amused uptick of George’s mouth when he practically snatched a small table out of his arms.
The barricade they assembled around their corner of the wall was almost an engineered fortress. The packing order of the tables left no gaps between them, a mix of pushed-together upright ones and horizontal ones between their four legs to fill the open spaces, supplemented by chair legs to interlink the structure. Kimi didn’t register exactly when it happened, but a number of people wound up joining them, expanding the wall of tables and chairs until it securely covered a whole wall of the restaurant. George directed people on where to put things down and revealed a whole escape route it had apparently been designed around, with the door to the kitchen behind them and further, the back door of the restaurant, near which he planned to go out and move the van. A few eager survivors hung onto his every word, resolving to copy whatever he did.
Fine. Kimi couldn’t blame them. Nobody here seemed to have organisational skills. They would all probably be far better off with someone like George dictating their survival strategy.
Get your own, though.
Kimi caught himself at the thought and was instantly mortified. He wasn’t really that petty. Or possessive. Fuck, was he really feeling possessive over his useful teammate, just because he was helping other people?
He was definitely too tired and cranky because of it. Kimi looked around for a distraction, spotted an empty plastic bottle at the top of a recycling pile belonging to the kitchen, and realised he hadn’t had a sip of water in hours.
“I’m going to fill this,” he informed George on his way out the back kitchen door. “I saw a tap outside.”
George barely looked away from the animated discussion he was having with a guy who was, of all things, wearing a number 12 cap.
A cold breeze threatened him wider awake as soon as he stepped outside. Kimi paused for a moment, taking in his surroundings. Montmeló was a pretty neighbourhood in an understated way. There were expansive white umbrellas set up in the square ahead of him over an assortment of colourful benches. Tall palm trees dotted the square with lights, now dysfunctional without an electricity supply, strung loosely between them. The roads were narrow and made for walking, with cobblestone pavements and houses in mild reds, greys and yellows framing them, and then the town lead on nicely to the train station through several small by-lanes, which Kimi thought had to be desolately empty by now.
When he tuned out the chatter coming from the conjoined buildings behind him, the town was too quiet.
Kimi cut across the side of the square to the water fountain tap he’d spotted earlier. By the mercy of there being a bright moon in the sky, it was not too dark to find it. He was relieved when the water flowed, fresh and cold against his skin when it missed the opening of the bottle.
That was something of note. They had no working electricity, and probably no water supply inside buildings, but the taps on the side of the road seemed to work just fine.
Kimi filled his bottle to the brim, drank greedily, and started to fill it again. The cold splash down his throat was almost soothing. He was about to bring the bottle to his mouth a second time when he noticed something move in his periphery.
His first instinct was to tense up. He turned towards the source of movement with every inclination in his body to sprint in the opposite direction, until he realised that the figure coming into view was too slow for the zombies he’d seen so far, and walked like a human with a limp. Kimi confirmed it from his face when the man came into view.
There were other survivors left in this town, he remembered. The residents who had informed the big group that the zombies had already left.
“Hey, kid,” the man said in greeting, breathless. Kimi took in his appearance. He had messy shoulder-length hair and weeks-old scruff. A cap, an all-weather jacket around a Supreme t-shirt—did people seriously still wear those?— and shorts and running shoes. He looked like a tourist. There was something wrong with his left foot, the ankle looking swollen and bruised.
Kimi dragged his eyes up to the guy’s face. Going by the way he didn’t seem to recognise him, not a tourist who was here for the race weekend.
“Are you okay?” Kimi pointed at his foot.
“Yeah, man, don’t worry about me,” the tourist said. “A lamp post fell on my leg. Listen, do you know where I can get some medical attention?”
Kimi couldn’t help wondering where the man had come from if he wasn’t local and if he hadn’t arrived in that overcrowded shuttle from the circuit. A stranded backpacker, maybe? But where were his things?
“Hello? Earth to kid.”
“I’m not a kid.” Kimi glared at him. “How did you get here?”
The man looked taken aback.
“Does that matter? I’m just looking for some help, man, the locals have boarded themselves up in their homes so I can’t go to them.”
The locals have boarded themselves up, Kimi thought, a little alarmed. And we’re okay with no protection, except for George’s stupid barricade?
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
The tourist sighed, groaned, rubbing the back of his neck in frustration.
“I was just in the area when shit happened,” he said. “You know, everyone was talking about some Grand Prix and there was going to be food and beer outside in the town, I thought it would be a good time. You went to the Grand Prix?”
Kimi stifled a laugh despite himself.
“Yeah, I was there.”
“Cool, cool.” The man scratched his neck. “Was it a good time?”
“It was shit,” Kimi shrugged. “My favourite driver had a bad race.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that, man.”
Kimi shook his head and pointed towards the restaurant. “There are a lot of people in there. Someone might be able to help you.”
The man looked relieved, bowing quickly before he turned in that direction.
“Thank you, thanks. Man, it hurts like a bitch.”
Kimi watched him go. He was relieved to see that the front door was locked, at least, because he needed to knock and speak to someone to be allowed inside. Maybe they weren’t completely fucked if zombies showed up on the streets.
He filled up more water for himself and made his way over to a nearby bench, sitting with his back to the restaurant. A cool breeze tussled his hair and kissed his face, inviting him to drop his head back and look at the sky.
Without any artificial light, the stars were more visible than he was used to.
Kimi remained like that for a while, head full of everything and nothing. He thought about his family and the hearty dining table that greeted him at home whenever he got to return between race weekends. He thought about the only espresso he could drink without milk or sugar, the one they served at a café three streets down from there. He thought about today’s race and Toto. He thought about the championship, about how competitive he’d felt when George gained points to narrow the gap, and Max’s horror stories about the RB22. He wondered if Ollie and Gabi, whom he’d spotted catching up after the race, had made it out of the circuit together. Maybe more drivers and colleagues had made it and just…driven off in the opposite direction, missing them.
The stars were exceptionally bright.
Kimi sat up suddenly.
Did he say a lamp post fell on him?
He hadn’t given it much thought. Of course he hadn’t. Crazy things were happening everywhere right now. But, when he gave it a second thought and wondered how it could have happened, lamp posts didn’t just fall on people.
Kimi stood, looking around as if the environment would offer any clues. It had to have been a lamp post nearby, and recently. There was no way he would have made it this far and outrun zombies with a limp. If he had a vehicle, why park it so far away that Kimi couldn’t see it, and trouble himself with a long walk when he didn’t even know there was a group of survivors at the end of it? If he was just asking everyone left in town, why not do it driving?
He got a foreboding sense that something was not quite right.
Kimi rushed back to the restaurant, being let inside easily when the guy at the door recognised his voice. He brushed past him and scrambled inside. Maybe nothing was wrong, maybe he was overthinking it, but…
Kimi stopped short. Of course, of all the people who could have volunteered their First-Aid skills to use on the suspicious bloke, of course it had to be George fucking Russell wrapping the bandage around his bruised ankle while two of his newly-ordained groupies held the scissors and medical kit for him. The tourist was sat on one chair with his foot on another, scratching underneath his loose hair while he answered George’s chattering away with mumbles and grunts.
Kimi crossed the distance to them quickly, stopping before the group with a burning urgency.
“Look at his neck,” he said, startling George and the others.
George glanced up at him with confusion. The tourist suddenly went still, his eyes blinking slowly in Kimi’s direction.
“Hey, Kimi,” he greeted uncertainly. “What do you mean?”
Kimi unconsciously reached for the headset around his own neck, tightening his fingers on the hard plastic shells.
“Look at it.” He let go to point directly at the man, who now wore the same expression as a deer caught in headlights. “He’s been scratching it nonstop. I don’t know if it’s something else or— or he’s been bitten, and he’s not telling us.”
The entire room heard him. A few shocked gasps were followed by an outbreak of hushed whispering from some and complete silence from others. George was looking at him like he’d grown a second head. But then when he looked back at the tourist, the words that spilled uncontrolled from the man’s mouth confirmed Kimi’s suspicions.
“I didn’t get bit,” he protested. “I didn’t get bit, man! I just– Just came across one of those fuckers, and I killed it, alright? I killed it, and I didn’t get bit!”
The groupies took several frightened steps back as he wildly looked around, growing more frantic with every sentence. George got to his feet, looking unnaturally calm for this turn of events.
“Where?” he asked directly.
“Huh?” The man looked out of it. “I dunno, like– outside, near the station. There was one near the station just roaming around and shit.”
A lone zombie near the station. Kimi felt a chill down his spine. All this time, he’d been outside, taking in the views around town while being under the impression there were no such creatures in the vicinity.
George walked up to the man, getting dangerously close. Kimi nearly lunged for him, stopping his grabby hand only a foot away from George’s shirt sleeve.
“Show me your neck.”
Kimi grabbed the sleeve.
“Idiota, are you crazy?”
George ignored him, staring the man down. He was shivering, Kimi realised. More than a normal person in this cold. There were veins turning visible under his skin, the symptom slow but suddenly obvious, like Kimi’s noticing had activated the dormant curse.
“I didn’t get bit!” the man yelled, recoiling from them. “How can I be fine if I got bitten by that– that thing? It just grazed me, but obviously I’m perfectly fine!”
Several things happened at once. A group of survivors who’d only been onlookers until that moment advanced on the scene. Someone yelled for the man to be restrained immediately, making all of them act at once, leaping at the infected tourist with the intent to hold him down and incapacitate him. George was unwittingly elbowed out of the way, Kimi catching him because he was the closest, and George desperately shouted at the group, “Don’t get close!”
It did nothing. They didn’t listen. The two assistants that Kimi had pettily been calling groupies inside the confines of his own mind bolted for the barricade, ducking through the opening to make a run for it through the kitchen. Other parts of the crowd screamed and started to disperse, hurriedly gathering their belongings, but most didn’t run, thinking the threat was subdued.
Kimi briefly thought it would be. He watched the tussle of limbs, of several men on one, the tourist kicking and fighting back in the flashes where he was visible. He started to think it was possible to get him under control before he turned. The illusion that they had anything under control was shattered the moment an agonised scream split the air.
Most of the men fell away immediately. They stared with horror in their eyes as they saw the infected man’s teeth come off their friend’s jugular with a spurt of bright red blood.
His skin was grey. His eyes were gone. The man who had just been bitten was starting to convulse and look just like him.
Kimi realised it as soon as the first zombie blindly attacked again.
We’re too close. We’re next.
Amid the thunder of fleeing footsteps and ear-splitting screams, Kimi acted purely on instinct. With a reaction time like he’d need to avoid crashing into a spinning car on track, he grabbed George by the wrist and made a beeline for the door.
They collided with half a dozen shoulders on their way out, too many bodies squeezing through a single door at once. He accidentally let go of George at some point. When Kimi got out the other side, he was breathing heavily, hands on his knees, and staring at the crush of bodies looking for his teammate.
He didn’t see him.
A familiar sense of faraway panic started to build in his throat. There were a lot of people the crowd spat out, stumbling forward or rolling onto the ground, but none of them were stupid tall and British. He couldn’t imagine how he’d lost him. He’d been right there, just behind Kimi when he’d reached the pile for the door, so how could he–
Another scream sounded off from inside the restaurant, a lot closer. Another bite.
It occurred to Kimi that he could just keep running. If he ran now, he could catch up to someone with a vehicle, ride away to relative safety with anyone. A lot of the survivors had sorted something out for themselves since getting here– two shuttle buses, vehicles whose owners had turned lent by the locals, abandoned motorbikes. He could do that and he was guaranteed to get out of here alive.
Kimi didn’t. For reasons beyond his own understanding, he watched the crowd for George, and hoped for the best.
It was a short eternity later that George stumbled out of the mass of bodies, hair entangled in every direction and face flushed like he’d just come out of the car in Singapore. His eyes went impossibly wider when they spotted Kimi.
No words were needed then. They both knew where the van was, knew to run to it and get inside when George unlocked the car, and it couldn’t have happened a moment too soon because Kimi had only just shut his door when he saw that the zombies were no longer just inside the restaurant.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the grisly sight of more and more people being turned, all the same way, with teeth in their necks or shoulders. Behind one such scene, he saw Sasha and Jess run out of the café holding hands. They froze when they saw it, but before Kimi could yell at them to get moving, someone else emerged from the café and pulled them away. He saw the trio get into one of the buses just as it was starting to move.
The relief that settled in his bones was unexpected, after everything.
George put his foot down and took off like he had a car he wanted to overtake at the start.
Lights out, Kimi thought, a little delirious from the fading adrenaline. And away we go.