“Oh, crap—he’s got a syringe , Five!”
Sam’s voice almost drowns amidst the thoughts racing in the runner’s mind, feet pounding into the ground to push them as far and as fast as they could. The times recently haven’t been kind to them, runner or not in Abel Township—but Runner Five refused to add onto the remnant despair looming in the corners of their home. Even if they felt a little frustrated at Maxine for sneaking out like this, even if it’s too late to regret agreeing to do a favor for a friend—they had to do something.
The wretched piece of shit and Abel Township’s beloved doctor are only a single beat of silence away. Being thrown and catching a kitchen knife to defend against someone is one thing; spinning it as if the weapon is made for their hands is another. The needle sparkles under the sun, reflecting light and the possibilities of seeing Maxine one with the shambling dead—seeing her trapped like Paula…
“He’s going to inject the doctor with something,” Sam’s voice rings in their ears. “You have to stop him—!”
Five had seen Sam lose someone close before; they refused to see him like that again.
In between the seconds, milliseconds , that Five had run behind the pair to save Maxine, it felt like they'd jumped into a portal back in time. It stretched the moment into an eternity, forcing them to blink in and out of reality; Maxine and Van Ark, three children in the basement, Maxine and Van Ark, three…
“Please don’t leave,” Pollux begs as their eldest pushes up to their feet, starting a chorus of wailing from their uninjured twin and third sibling. Castor had behaved well all this time—even managing to stop the bleeding bite on his twin’s limb—but even Altair had cracked up and started to cry. There’s only so much blood and running a mere seven-year-old can do, and with the middle ones already stained with bright red…
“I’ll be back,” they say, effortlessly wearing a smile to soothe the children. “I’ll just get some food for us, okay? I promise I’ll find some of those sweet, sweet treats you all love.”
Van Ark’s neck is close enough that even if Five’s arm had turned into pure, heavy lead, they manage to grab him by the shoulder. The mad scientist looks back in surprise, meeting the omen of death in the form of bright brown eyes. He shouts as Five drives the knife down into the man’s nape, forcing him to let Maxine go and drop the syringe entirely. That could be it, really— mission accomplished , as Maxine is already away and no longer at risk, but they find themself pulling the knife out sidewards . It gets stuck, struggling against part-bone and human flesh, but they yank it off despite the growing taint in their hands.
Crimson paints the tanned skin on the bridge of their nose yet the scent of iron does nothing to faze them. Five blinks to witness their siblings die in their hands once again—not as crying children but as the rabid wave of gray that took them away. They weren’t even there when it spread; they weren’t here to witness who bit Castor in the hand and who tore off a part of Altair’s face. Maybe it’s merciful that they didn’t witness them suffer or cry, but it hurts to think of how helpless they probably felt. And it’s downrightcriminal to know that the man who started it all would get away with his head attached to his fucking body.
“You got him, right in the neck!” Sam’s voice pulls them out of the horrid scene within their eyes. “God, have you—“
Five can feel the hot liquid coating their hands, sticky and absolutely unpleasant to the touch, but the injury they created made sure that their hands weren’t the only parts of them that were red. They feel it on their clothes, their face, their hair… It’s as if it rained blood and only Five was marked as a scarlet letter—for knowing how to use that knife, for beheading their rabid siblings and stabbing one right between the eyes. It’s as if the world knew of their past without their permission, without them speaking or uttering a word…
Sam had paused, watching them through grainy cameras and cringing to himself at the brutal, brutal sight. But that wasn’t what got to him. What did strike him is how Five straightens up to look around, scanning for Maxine and where she’d managed to run off to. The red jacket that they wore is two shades darker than he knew it originally was… For once, they look as if they’ve slowed down and were unable to decide as fast as they usually do. Frankly, he wasn’t surprised.
“Don’t look back, Five,” he manages to gently nudge as the runner seems to have awoken from their trance when he spoke. “Just… Grab the doctor and get away. You did what you had to do, that’s it. Up, and away—don’t look!”
They fail to notice when and how they gather Maxine in their arms, helping her get up after being roughly pushed to the ground. It’s a good thing she didn’t wear the white lab coat she’s known for in Abel, because the crimson in Five’s arms blended well with the black shirt Maxine wore. Grab the doctor and get away. They had to run.
“I'll think you'll find I'm a great deal harder to kill than that.”
The atmosphere sinks as Van Ark’s concerningly-not-garbled words hit the air, and then Sam starts freaking out in their ears. Five makes the mistake to turn and look, tuning out their only friends to stare at the same motherfucker they tried to behead barely a minute ago; they made sure they only left enough attached so that it doesn’t fall off, but the grotesque wound they made is slowly shrinking into… Nothing.
“Maxine, Five,” their radio operator desperately calls. “Just—run! RUN!”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Sam is leaning too close to the monitor on his desk, keeping an eye out on every working footage to spot any movement or path. As his friends run, he aggressively presses a few buttons to use any working camera in their path to follow, having another monitor display the route where they’re headed. They’ve scurried and ran even before the supposed fatal wound finished reconnecting Van Ark into the same, terrible, breathing monster that he is.
He can tell that Five is feeling their legs burn as they eat through the ground, tearing soil into the air while keeping their pace close to the doctor. They didn’t look okay—no grainy camera can stop him from knowing how Five moves when they’re confident even if they’re tiring, or when something bothered them as they went. Maxine isn’t as fit as they were but it’s still impressive to see her keep up with Five—especially after knowing about her constant 20-hour shifts.
Or maybe Five isn’t running their fastest. Seeing the look on their face after stabbing Van Ark… Yeah, it could be a possibility.
“…I think we’ve—“ Maxine pauses to catch a breath as she runs. “I think we've thrown them off…”
Five doesn’t risk looking back to check. Don’t look back , Sam told them earlier, and it was odd how he knew something was wrong by then. They have the tendency to rigidly follow instructions when they think it’s the best—no, the only course of action to take…
He checks the cameras behind them. There’s nothing, and that’s somehow worse than finding Van Ark trailing behind them with a healed neck wound.
“Yeah, they’re— oh , no, I don't know, I can't see them!” Sam admits in frustration accompanied with a grumble to himself. “Van Ark seems to have slowed down … And the two of you—“
He hated this. He hated this. But indecisiveness can kill them both and—
“…Look, you have to split up again.” Sam states lowly, tapping his fingers on his desk to relieve some anxiety. “Five, stay on the path. Doc—… Head west. I'II keep you in radio contact with each other.”
“He should have slowed all the way down!” Maxine exclaims into his ears as he sets up the radio broadcasts. Five quietly slips away, doing as he told them to without question or defiance—and somehow, that worries Sam too. “Runner Five got him across the jugular, slashed the trachea! He should have been—“
“—Dead,” Sam continues for her, trying to bury his overloading feelings while he watches the both of them at once. “He should have been dead . I-I saw it! His blood, like— ugh! And I don't want to be graphic, but like, fountained off him onto that huge soldier with the eye patch just behind him—I mean, really! Just like—you know? You know, like that fountain at the end of Ocean’s Eleven, the one with all the—“
“It must have something to do with the treatments he's been getting…”
Sam dropped the fast stream of thoughts as soon as Maxine took the words right out of his mouth. Only then, in the dark walls of the comms shack, did it dawn on him what this… Meant. Van Ark healing from a deadly wound—hell, Five almost forced his head right off but it healed right in front of their eyes… Their enemy is basically—
“This… This isn't great news, is it?” Sam mutters absently into the mic. “Our enemy, who commands an army of zombies, is now also invincible ?”
“Where's Paula?”
Paula. Right. Paula Cohen, Maxine’s girlfriend—right. Sam aggressively shakes his head to get rid of his looming thoughts, looking all over his screens to find—
“Paula's, uh… Yeah—looks like she's away safely,” Sam confirms as he watches the woman from one of his active feeds. “Heading over the bridge now.”
His eyes abandon that feed then, focusing back onto Maxine and Runner Five. Sam recognizes the path Maxine is taking and he risks a slight move of his chair, peeking out the window and squinting. Relief floods into his chest when he finds a head of black hair moving just a bit outside Abel’s walls.
“Doc, I can practically see you from the comms tower with my eyes!” Sam exclaims with a creeping grin in his lips, his gaze lingering as he moves his chair back to the monitors. He’s so ready for this to be over; it was a shit run and Janine will most likely give them an earful—well, mostly Maxine since she ran away to get there—but he’s just happy to have them back again. He’d finally be able to ask Five if something is wrong, maybe help Maxine clean the drying blood off of their gear—he can finally make sure they’re not carrying so much in their silence!
“And Five,” he states enthusiastically, leaning close to the monitor. Red glasses reflect the light of the screen right back yet it didn’t bother Sam at all. “You're coming through the tree towards—“
Bang.
“ Crap—“ His enthusiasm is shot down by the loud gunshots coming from Five’s headset. Sam flinches at the sound, witnessing Five almost curl up after doing the same—but they keep running, and running, despite it all.
There are soldiers closing in behind them yet he still held onto hope because Runner Five outpaced them effortlessly. But the footage of the route they’re headed to…
“ Five, I was looking at—“ Sam desperately stops himself from throwing up due to the bubbling dread in his throat. He winces into the mic, feeling his entire body slowly come to a freeze as the soldiers from another camera disappear from the footage. They’re right there. They’re coming—
“Five, can you see them?” Is his other attempt at remaining calm. But a moment of silence passes by in a beat and Sam only feels his gut sink deeper and deeper. “You… You have to try and get away… You have to—“
Sam could hear their ragged breathing as Van Ark caught up to them, threatening them to a stop with a barrel aiming right between their eyes. In the camera, the soldiers have them surrounded as Five takes a careful look around; there’s nowhere else to run or go.
He finds himself internally begging them to say something, anything —like those rare, quiet moments where Five found comfort being alone in the same room as him. Moments where Sam would hold back a tear or two for finally being welcomed into Five’s internal, safe space—a sacred moment in time where they’d smile, giggle softly, or sing along to songs in a low whisper. He hoped they’d tell him they had a plan, loudly grumble into the mic to reject his defeat—like that time he was giving a death speech after the Zombie Sprays didn’t seem to work. He’d even take tapping morse code into his headset regardless of his sentiments about it beforehand…
But all Five does is raise their hands to surrender. And all of a sudden, he’s back to that night a few months ago—except this time, he can see and hear Five clearly. He watches them surrender, frozen in his seat as one of the men hit them with the back of their rifle. Runner Five easily crumpled to the floor like a heap of clothes and Sam could feel his anger—his guilt, his worry, his dread bubble in his veins.
The last time they let a runner be captured by Van Ark, she turned up dead. Even as the men dump them into the back of the jeep, careless and disrespectful of Five’s strength, Sam doesn’t find it in him to move an inch or breathe . If Archie, soft as she is, refused to give up intel despite being tortured…
Runner Five would kill themself before Van Ark manages to even think of using them for Abel’s downfall. Frankly, Sam doesn’t know which outcome he feared more.