With Great Power

Catch doesn't want to fight anymore. She's sick of the feel of the guns in her nearly numb hands and the report she feels more than hears whenever she has to fire, no longer able to cope with one more rotting teammate, either ambulatory or already down. She's got deep, festering scratches down one arm from Anna, a couple of broken bones in her hand from Miko, bruises around her throat from Tammy: the list of incidental injuries (which, these days, is anything that doesn't result in death and resurrection) is almost as long as the Indiana roster was. This life thing hurts like a bitch.

It's been almost a week since she slept. A lone traveler like her can't sleep, not when she exudes the reek of hot living blood from underneath the protective cover of rotting gore. Sleeping means not waking up. She's exhausted, body dragging heavy, eyes bloodshot, mouth raw, fingers trembling when not wrapped around the gun handles. But she can't close her eyes, or else what opens them won't be her.

The fever doesn't help; the world around her seems washed in fire, fire that burns away the death that would touch her, fire that blinds her, fire that keeps her warm in a cold dead world. Licking her sweat doesn't help her thirst. It's enough to make a woman consider drinking blood, if there were any left flowing.

She'd have stopped fighting days ago if she thought dying would actually mean an end. But if there's anyone left to kill her, it won't last. She'll rise again, questing for flesh and blood, driven more relentlessly than she is now, and if there are ten people left alive around here, that's a generous guess. Even without factoring in the walking undead thing, that sounds less restful than her current condition.

Indianapolis? More like Necropolis. City of the dead, and a few stray damned. What did she do to deserve this?

The body under her foot twitches, and there are fingers around her ankle. Jesus, Tully still doesn't know when to quit. Another fireax job. The last had been Tan, who had become Red all over Catch's sweats. Practicing on twice-dead bodies has perfected her stroke; she knows the precise angle to sever the spinal cord, slice through the jaw, and remove most of the frontal lobe. Anything that gets up from that deserves to eat her.

But this is it. She's a team captain who's failed her team. She's done all she can to rectify that mistake. She keeps thinking she forgot someone, maybe a few someones, but the names slip from her memory. There is no past, and there will be no future. There is no thought, no reason to think.

From numb shaking fingers, the fireax falls on top of what used to be Tully. The next shambling undead thing that comes in here can goddamn well tear out her throat and devour her brains. She hopes it enjoys her bitter memories. She certainly won't.

And like someone has finally gotten around to answering her prayers, there's a a figure at the end of the hallway, pale white and moving slow. But it's moving gracefully, like a dancer, and it gets faster when it sees her, and when it throws its arms around her, they're warm. Breath is hot against her neck, and she thinks she can feel a heartbeat.

"How are you still- I mean, you are alive, right?" Ann asks, brushing gore-matted hair out of her blood-smeared face with a filthy hand. She smells funny, like death and life and bug spray all at once.

Catch pauses, blinks, swallows, forces a couple of words past her lips that actually sound like words and not zombie groans. At least she thinks they sound like words, because Ann hasn't taken her head off yet. Not that she's sure, because her batteries are dead and she hasn't been stupid enough to go out for more.

"C'mon. Ali's at the hospital with Kasha… well, most of Kasha. A bite on an extremity is stoppable if you catch it in time. Handy to know for future reference. God, I thought they'd gotten you when you didn't get out."

She still has teammates. She has young teammates who need her. She's still a team captain. "Still here," she says as clearly as she can, blurry from exhaustion and sickness. "Wouldn't give up on you guys."

And she doesn't. She even manages to get to the hospital that's home base for the remaining human population of the city. It's only at that point, when Ali's there to catch her, that the exhaustion and the delirium overcome her.