Doesn't Say

The uptown scout waves the heat detector in a circle around herself, making sure that the actual detector part is well away from the vital warmth of her body. Her other hand is, as always, on the 9mm she's been carrying from the beginning of this nightmare. Not for the first time, she wishes she could wear heat-vision goggles and carry two weapons, but then she'd be blind to her enemies. Too dangerous a situation. She knows better than that. It's in her blood.

Heat means life, either human or power. Zombies are mindless and destructive, but they don't consciously destroy things that don't have brains. If she finds a place with working electricity, she'll report it as a way station, a place where they can refuel and establish a beachhead. If she finds survivors, she'll assess their situation and either try to persuade them to come to the island or give them communications equipment. At least those are the theories. She hasn't had much of a chance to try them out yet.

Maybe it's a waste of time. Maybe they're the only humans left in New York. At least she's not scouting Queens again. She made that mistake twice. They've been scouting Queens since the beginning, and by now they're getting as far as central Queens, and they haven't found anyone left alive yet. She shivers, though the day is warm, then puts her memories of Queens back into the locked box from which they've escaped.

She gets Lexington today, and it's eerie to see the street so empty, to know that the 6 train isn't running underneath her feet with the entire population of the East Side on board. There's a skywalk in the near distance. One of the panes of glass is broken. She can see the pieces lying flat on the sidewalk, reflecting nothing.

The sidewalk is stained with blood. New to Lexington, less so to the scout. There was blood on York, and First, and Second, and Third, blood on every cross street she's passed through. It's a good day when there's only blood. It's a bad day when she sees where the blood came from. It's a really bad day when whoever the blood came from starts chasing her.

The detector beeps softly. She stares at it, confused. Then she looks at the building. Park Avenue Armory. Well, if nothing else, there might be some ammo in there, and maybe even grenades. She likes the idea of grenades. But the reading's faint enough that it might just be a stray cat, or a flock of pigeons (which, given the huge amount of birdshit on everything, is a damn good possibility). The detector's trying to adjust for the thickness of brick walls and gives her an estimate of 99.9 degrees. Possibilities rise.

The nine's in her hand and up now. The metal's warm, warm as her hand. She shoves the heat detector through her belt- let it get all excited about her warmth, she really doesn't care anymore- and raps on the door, making sure she's got a clear shot at the door when it doesn’t open and she'll have to shoot the lock off the door to see what or who is in there.

Except that the door opens, and there's someone behind it with a bigger gun. "Shay!" Ashley exclaims, and then someone else hits her upside the head with a baseball bat. It stuns her for a few minutes, just long enough for someone and someone else to toss her in a small dark room and click a lock closed.

Seems like as good a time as any to start swearing, so she does.

They listen at the door for half an hour while Shay curses them out fluently, rapidly, and creatively. After that, the sounds change, become harsher, unfamiliar, more hesitant. Ashley has her hand on the lock, ready to put Shay out of her misery, until Chava lets them know that she's cursing in awkward and slightly ungrammatical Hebrew. "She would have learned it overhearing a man," Chava says.

So instead, they let Erin open the door and explain things to an irate and armed Shay. "The onset's delaying more and more. Like they're fucking evolving. So we have to isolate anyone who shows up until they can prove they're still human." She's still not used to swearing. The word drops from her mouth like lead.

Shay nods once, sharp and quick, doesn't say anything, but then, she doesn't have to say anything. Of course Shay understands about security. Clearly something has been metaphorically eating Erin's brain. Before Erin can ask hi, where the hell did you get off to, and what happened to Tiffany? Shay asks, "Loree?"

"Food poisoning," Erin says. She doesn't say she was the one to hold Loree's hair back while Loree threw up again and again until what came out was either watery or bloody. Doesn't say that she and Barb kept Loree between them when she shivered like a seizure. Doesn’t say that she had to hold Loree over the bucket, because no matter how strong Loree had been, that strength was only a memory from a better time. Doesn't say that she rubbed Loree's broad shoulders to calm Loree out of raving delirium. Doesn't say that when Loree lost the fight, she was the one who had to grab a cleaver and make sure Loree didn't come back for round two. Doesn't say that she helped dig the two holes for the grave, and set the wooden plaque in place over the smaller one.

"Barb?"

"Cathrine," Erin says. She doesn't want to say any more.

"Cathrine?" There's something coquettish about Shay's curiosity, like eyes flickering out behind a snapping fan.

"Delayed onset," Erin says. She doesn't say anything about the all-consuming fear in her stomach when Cathrine and Janel stumbled out from their alcove, when she saw the blood that smeared Cathrine's face from Janel's throat. Doesn't say that she thought she was going to die when the two of them took Barb down, because two bites from a delayed-onset had the same effect as one old bite, and Barb was back on her feet in a hurry. Doesn't say that the fight was the best rush she ever had when she swung hard and cracked bone. Doesn't say that she knew her friends and former teammates would have wanted her to end it for them if she possibly could. Doesn't say anything about the blood that splashed her when she took Cathrine down (there's still a droplet, browning and a little itchy, in one of the hollows above her collarbone). Doesn't say anything about the ebb and flow of adrenaline when Angelina put the shotgun down for a moment, then blew her head off before the bitemarks on her long arms could take effect.

Erin's said enough. "You're breathing. Come on. Your turn to answer questions."

"Like you've said much," Shay replies.

She squints at the light, even if it's dim. Maybe a dozen people in the room, including herself and Erin in the count. Ashley she recognizes, and the tall woman with the hard face looks like a player too. Former player. A world without games doesn't have players. The rest are strangers: a pretty blond boy, a hard-eyed woman with steel-gray hair, a dark-haired man with strangely familiar dark circles under his eyes, a couple black as night and maybe more dangerous. All of them look like fighters, except maybe the one woman with the coppery curls and the shy smile. Shay waves at her.

"Queens?" Ashley asks idly.

How did someone that quick on the uptake end up at UConn? Shay's face tightens. "When they could not find the living, and they did find many, they sought the dead. Whatever animates them works on the old dead too." None of her teammates are- were- New Yorkers. They don't know that no matter how much of your life you live in Manhattan, you go to Queens or Brooklyn to die. She's not about to tell them. She can't say the things she's seen, not if she wants to maintain whatever sanity she still has. Maybe if she doesn't mention it, they won't guess. But the others who have joined them look at her with sad eyes, and she remembers that they are New Yorkers, and they know what she's not saying.

"So where have you been?" the big woman asks.

Shay bristles at the accent, but it's all on the inside. She can't help it. She almost forgets her answer, but when she comes up with it, she addresses it to everyone but the big. "Roosevelt Island. They guard the approach from the bridge, and there is no other way by foot onto the island. There are two hospitals, each with a generator, each researching a different aspect of this. There are weapons. There's a decent amount of food, although we're always looking for more and I don't think there'll be too many pigeons left by the end of this. It's the safest place left in New York."

"Not saying much," the steely woman mutters.

Erin turns and glares at the woman, and the woman subsides. If Shay'd been wondering about the power structure in this group, she just got a pretty good demonstration of who's in charge. Order being restored, Erin looks back at her. "Tiffany?" she asks.

"Dead," Shay says, and it's even true, for a given value of dead. She doesn't say that Tiffany never got across the bridge with her. Doesn't say that when she heard the first groan, she froze up solid, couldn't move a finger, couldn't even scream. Doesn't say that she still regrets leaving the way she did, walking out at dawn with her nine and a bag of supplies, because maybe if she'd done it some other way Tiffany would still be here instead of chasing her across half of Manhattan. Doesn't say that she couldn't turn around when she heard Tiffany die for the first time. Doesn't say that she ran and ran and ran until her feet bled through her socks and she could taste blood in her mouth, blood that the dead could smell, and then she ran and ran and ran again.

"We guessed," the big German says, and Shay bristles again. She can't help it, no matter how much she wants to. "She would have come back."

"It's good to see you again," Ashley says. She's trying to care, it's clear, but it's just as clear that she can't quite get it to work. Her face doesn't move quite right. Her smile's a little too flat. It doesn't reach her eyes.

"Stay the night," Erin says, and it's not a request. "At dawn, take Chava and whoever else wants to go."

"Why me?" the woman with the coppery hair asks.

"Manhattan's no place for non-combatants, and the last time you tried to kill something, you almost shot Ty," Erin replies calmly. Chava grumbles under her breath, and the angry young black man, presumably Ty, smirks.

There's a sharp rap at the door, followed by two more in rapid succession. The pattern repeats. Ashley opens the door to admit a slender Korean guy and a stocky black woman, both of them armed to the teeth. The woman holds up two loaves of bread. "Food Emporium's not too bad off. Hasn't been picked clean yet."

"That's it. I'm staying for dinner," Shay declares.

Chava's a really good cook, like, a fucking miracle worker, and Shay says that if Erin hadn't already said they were clearing out, she would have kidnapped her in the middle of the night and run off, walking dead or no walking dead. There are eyerolls.

Shay looks for a corner to curl up in for the night, but that would mark her as too different. The group sleeps in a tangled mass like puppies, hands and feet overlapping, arms and legs loosely tangled (or not so loosely, in a couple of cases, and Shay blushes as she looks away). She's the outsider, so she doesn't feel that she should be doing this, but Erin says, "It's a check on each other, you know? Make sure everyone's still warm and breathing. It saved most of our lives once."

So Shay edges towards the rest of the group, just barely touching against Erin. She's tense and wary, but she's so tired, and it's nice to be around people who trust her again. And it's not too warm behind the thick brick walls, just warm enough that it's soothing and just cool enough that it's nice to have someone against her skin. And there's a whole section of the vast empty hall that's covered in nice soft comfortable bedding. She starts out as aloof as she's allowed to be, self-contained, needing no one.

But when she wakes up the next morning, fully wakes up and becomes aware of what she's doing, Erin's leg parallels hers and her fingers are tracing the dips and rises of Erin's collarbone, stopping for a moment on a brown spot that might be a beauty mark. She pulls away like Erin's on fire, or maybe like Erin's not warm at all. Erin's eyes are already on her, as amused as she can manage under the conditions. "Missed you too," she doesn't say.

"I should not have left," Shay doesn't tell her.

"You're here now, aren't you? You can be forgiven," Erin doesn't reply.

"I could have made a difference. Saved a life." There's heavy regret in the words Shay doesn't voice.

Erin doesn't shake her head, doesn't say, "Or you'd be dead. I wouldn't make that trade."

After they don't have that conversation, they rise and separate further, picking up their guns and helping Chava pack what supplies they have. It's no surprise that Ashley and the former post are heading to Roosevelt Island with her and Erin, but as she gathers herself and prepares to go, she realizes that the entire group is abandoning this base. All their eyes are on Erin, and Shay can almost see the power she holds. It's really quite disconcerting, but Shay's been a team captain- granted, in more normal situations where her team had more than three other players and all hell had not in fact broken loose- and she knows that it lends a woman a little extra presence, whether it's from her own confidence in being good enough to be team captain or from her teammates' confidence in her.

Erin would have made a pretty good team captain in normal circumstances, but they'll never find out about that now, will they?

Even in broad daylight, the undead sometimes attack, and a large group traveling together is a big, warm target. The survivors curse in several different languages and draw weapons with fluid ease. Even as she raises the rifle and sights, Erin's also watching how her group responds to the threat, and their reaction time is most excellent. Then again, they've crossed half of Manhattan in the last two months. Anyone who couldn't or wouldn't shoot quickly and efficiently hadn't made it to the next hideout.

She's worked on her shooting since those first awkward days when she needed multiple shots to hit her target squarely. She recognizes the gait of the undead now, knows when they're going to zig and when they're going to zag, knows how decaying muscle can foul a properly aimed shot, knows which parts of the skull tend to be the softest and most easily penetrated. She fires again and again, and between shots she checks everyone else's back to make sure they don't have any new problems to worry about.

Shay uses the nine like she was born to it. Cool, calm, and collected, she ends up with as many takedowns as Ty and Tarrie, who are both bad-ass, ruthless, and damn near suicidal. Erin's not about to forget the day Tarrie went mano a mano with a pair of former bouncers, just her and the knife that would make Aussies quail. Hard to believe she's only fourteen.

Shay's watching Erin now, just when Erin thought she'd gotten all that reversed. "Why do you go for the eyes?" she asks. "There's enough power in that gun for you to take an easier shot."

"You'd be surprised. You have to get the right part of the brain for them to really stop moving. I mean, if you just blow out their higher functions, big deal, they're not using them anymore. Frontal lobe's a pretty good guarantee." Erin talks and walks, like a teacher on a class trip. "You should practice aiming for the eyes. It's easier than you think. That Glock you've got is a snap to reload, so even if you mess up a shot, you've got time for more. And once you master it, you never have to worry about missing the important parts of the brain."

"A general headshot has always worked for me," Shay responds.

Ashley grunts and mutters, "Shooters. Always talking shop."

There are sentries on the bridge and more posted on the ramp to the island. Shay waves at them, and they let her bring her companions over to sanctuary. When she holsters the nine, it's like an exhalation.

There are soft beds, actual doctors for the injuries that are pretty much expected when one is constantly fighting for one's life, places to stash things, ammo caches, lots of civilized things. Chava nearly swoons at the kitchen she's allowed to work in, since it has all the things that a kitchen would normally have. There are basic introductions: quartermaster Emilia, head researcher James, armsmaster Ray, chief of operations and general arbiter Mark. People find their niches pretty quickly. Erin watches her group settle in, and there's half a smile on her face. Shay watches Erin watching her group, and there's half a smile on her face.

But neither of them says anything to the other.