The due South Zombie Radioplay

The due South Zombie Radioplay is a serial story posted daily. Beginning right from the pilot, it immediately throws the universe on its ear; no character is off-limits and no one is safe. This work is open to remix, adapt, play with, add to, build upon or otherwise!

[dszrp]

Hiya! I don't mean to be a bother, since I know you're probably quite busy. I was just wondering if you're planning on bring this back on during winter break.

We are definitely hoping to.  My wife, who wrote half of it, has suffered a pretty severe bout of depression and only now is starting to recover from it, that’s why we had to pause editing.  The story’s done, it’s just hammering it out in editing, but depression’s a miserable thing.  But we haven’t abandoned it. <3 You’re no bother.  As soon as the mental health and physical insanity of IRL are sorted, we’ll be pushing to the conclusion.  Sorry about the delay.

[dszrp]

A week ago, this mighta been a lab, but now--

It was a horror show.

Most of the bodies were covered in sheets, at least.  But not all of them were in one piece.  The things that got Ray was that there wasn’t no telling if these were zombies once or humans once; in death, they all looked the same.  He could maybe take some guesses, but there wasn’t any sure thing.

When he saw the short-cropped blonde hair of a woman strapped to a table, his heart did that thing where it tried to exit his chest right out through his breastbone.  Even though he knew it wasn’t her, couldn’t be her, his mind automatically answered, Stella.

She wasn’t Stella.

Her name was Audrey McKenna, and Ray hadn’t talked to her when they were still in that cage; found her some kind of hopeful and terrifying, all at once, this woman who had been bitten, but who had recovered enough to be on her feet and coherent, whose eyes shone silver-blue when the light hit them just right.  She had been other then.

Now, something in him roared inside at the sight of her abused, tortured body and when she saw who had come, her eyes went wide and the tears started flowing anew.  It didn’t matter to Ray anymore what color her eyes reflected.  He started tearing the straps off, while Vecchio and Frobisher covered the door.

Reems was on the other side, mouth a wounded bow, helping Ray undo the straps and saying quivering, reassuring things.  When Audrey sat up, she started sobbing, her whole body shaking, and Ray went and grabbed a clean blanket from the nearby haphazard pile to wrap around her.  “We got you.  Anyone tries to touch you again, we’ll blow them away.”

“The others--” she started, but when Ray looked, all he saw were other corpses.  Dead corpses, not walking ones.

“They took Ben,” Ray said, once they had her wrapped up and on her feet.  “You have any idea where they woulda taken him?  Did you see him?”

“I didn’t see him, but I can help you find him,” she said, staring at one of the bodies not too far away, left uncovered.  She clutched the blanket tighter around her body, shuddering once, then nodded for the door, leaning into the way Reems wrapped an arm around her like the person that she was.

[dszrp]

The building exploded.

Once they buried the tank in it, backed the tank up again and turned it over to Frobisher, Ray and Kowalski scrambled out of the top hatch.  Frannie had been spot-on -- and wasn't that a kicker! -- about this place, because there was an ominous looking doorway with an 'Authorized Personnel Only' sign in giant red letters, which led to a staircase down.

Ray's heart was hammering, but for the first time since the world had ended, he felt like he was actually really alive.  Not waiting for the next horror, but determined to make sure there weren't gonna be any more horrors.

They'd already figured that whatever they were doing to Benny, it was probably gonna be ugly.  That was why Reems, the vet, was with 'em.  A decent guy; his hands shook around his borrowed pistol and he seemed scared half out of his skin, but he was right there with them with determination in his eyes, to get back the two who had been taken for whatever awful purpose.

"I got the lead," Kowalski said, practically on Ray's ear, and Ray nodded.  He'd bring up the rear, they could keep the vet between 'em.

Going through that door was--

The smell of it.  Disinfectant, and a lot of it.  That chemical, hospital smell that Ray knew from some bad arrests and his own occasional landing in it.  Distantly, he heard someone scream.  A man's voice, but it wasn't Benny's.

God.  God.

The staircase lights flickered, the fluorescent hum of them feeling like the worst kind of prelude to whatever was coming next.  There were movies that started like this.  Even after all he'd seen, Ray's skin was crawling.

Kowalski edged down the steps, gun at ready; Reems followed, and Ray went down and kept swinging back to keep an eye on their rears.

Despite the horror-flick style lighting and the ambient noise, though, nothing happened.  No one jumped out at them.  They got all the way to the bottom without incident.  And it was a long ass staircase, too.

Above, he could hear the battle still going on, getting further away, more echoey as they went.  Below, he didn't hear anything, but the smell got stronger and stronger.  He didn't know what the fuck to feel when they were clustered at the bottom of the stairwell, peering into the dimly lit chamber beyond, wilfully ignoring the smear of something on the wired glass.  Kowalski looked between them.  Reems nodded, then Ray did.

Kowalski turned the door handle.  They went in.

[dszrp]

Turned out these pissants in uniform were pretty unprepared for a civilian assault.

The woman, Elaine, didn’t waste any time putting herself in command of the push-back.  There were a few of her group who stayed behind, including the pregnant girl, but most of them seemed ready to follow her into any situation.  Buck wasn’t one to get antsy about letting a woman take charge; he knew plenty of people in the good ole days who would take issue, but damned if he was going to be one.

They’d bashed out a plan based on what recon they had managed to gather from their escape, and the fact they had a tank at their disposal.  They drew out an assault plan on newsprint and by the time an hour was up, it was time to move out.

Now, they were following a pissed off pair of yanks both named Ray, plowing a tank across the tarmac as fast as its governor would allow it to go, Buck having gotten a quick lesson from the blond one on how to drive the thing once they split off to go find Ben.  Different small groups kept behind it, darting between it and other cover, firing to warn first.  Turnbull had traded his pistol for a military rifle; Buck watched the boy pick a soldier off, kneecapping him, who made the mistake of trying to fire at ‘em.  Good shot, given how fast the soldier had been moving.

They took his gun, but left him alive.  Fact was, grim as all this was, no one wanted to shoot the living if they could help it.

Every heartbeat was dwindling hope that the world could survive. They kept going out, like the street lights of lost civilization.

Not all of it was death.  Pockets of boys and girls, beleaguered and overwhelmed, dropped their guns and surrendered quick.  Give Elaine this: she took their surrender, sending them in little clusters back to their impromptu holding area behind the truck depot.

“Ahead!” the yank girl, Frannie, shouted; she was pointing to a building that looked just that bit different.  There were no markings on the door, but it looked like the kind of thing someone might stick over a much more important door to a much more important bunker.

Buck scaled the tank, wincing at his bum thigh, and hollered down into the pit of it. “Two o’clock!”

The balding Ray stood up out of the hatch; sweat was glistening on his head and his hands were shaking, but he managed to get a look and yell back. “Got it!  Kowalski, you think you can make us an invitation?”

“Damn straight!” Kowalski yelled back.  Damn fool sounded like he was on a rodeo bronco and not a tank, but Buck couldn’t complain. “Get everyone clear!”

[dszrp]

He woke in a cave, coiled next to a familiar heat. The acoustics of water dripping off a stone were clear to Ben before the breathing in his ear. Perhaps it had been too long since anything had gone right, and that was why his mind refused to accept that. Diefenbaker. Ben was dreaming, or dead. He didn’t know how long he had let the sleep-within-a-dream take him. Whatever this otherworldly nightmare was, its surreal quality was clearer to him under the familiar scent of his wolf. He laughed into warm, tactile fur, feeling like a boy reaching out for his father’s furs in the snow, breathing coming shallow through it. He felt a familiar lick to the top of his head; he pulled himself out to look at his lost friend. Dief released a labored whuff by way of greeting, but Ben’s own was far less grim. It was elation. He stole what must’ve been an hour under that protection to simply pull himself apart and together again. Shared pets and whimpers, tears and prim refusals that lapsed to rare acquiescence gave way to offering his bandaged stump to their shared grief. Was it real? It felt real.  It hurt real. Was any of this real? The fire Benton found time to build, with help, came from scattered twigs left some long time ago in this place, but as Dief watched on, Benton knocked away one larger branch for a seat. Underneath was a bundle of old pages. Some blank. Some blurred, damaged, or burned.  Some perfectly clear; scrawled with sharp handwriting. Others, scribbled with crayon and signed with a great big VM. Benton looked up.  Diefenbaker looked away. The war outside raged on without them.

[dszrp]

“Sergeant Buck Frobisher.  This is Constable Renfield Turnbull and Constable Maggie Mackenzie.  RCMP.”

Ray stared at the unlikely trio, gaping.  “You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”

Even Vecchio snorted at that; rough as things had been lately, Vecchio hadn’t smiled in forever, but that introduction got one that was kind of disbelieving.  “More Mounties. What, your compass get turned around?”

“We’re not kidding,” Turnbull said; he and the other one, Mackenzie, they were so young that Ray woulda pegged ‘em as rookies in another life.

“We’re here for Ben,” Frobisher added, calm as anything, not realizing how fucking weird what he just said was.  Ray was staring.  Hell, all of them were staring.

That was about all Vecchio needed to hear; his hands flew up, the chopped gestures of an agitated Italian-American gathering a full head of steam, voice going squeaky as he said, “What is this?!  How the hell could you know about that?  What, they issue you some kinda weird mental powers with those pumpkin pants?  You got some kinda transmitter in your big hats?”  Didn’t seem to matter to Vecchio that none of the Mounties were even wearing hats. “I swear, if you tell me it’s all just trackin’, I will pull off what’s left of my fine Italian leather shoe and beat you with it.”

Frobisher didn’t seem taken aback by the tirade.  Turnbull, on the other hand, was watching with the corner of his mouth twitching up, maybe bemused, maybe amused.  Mackenzie -- Christ, were her eyes blue -- just blinked in surprise.

Ray, though… maybe it was the days, maybe what had happened, who even knew, but out of everything that happened, hearing Vecchio rant and bluster made him feel better like nothing had done in a long time.

Like listening to a squeaky balding skinny cop lose his shit over the improbability of all of this righted something in the universe.

“Yes, well,” Frobisher said, after a moment, unperturbed. “We have a man to rescue.”

“And a woman,” Elaine added, the first time she had bothered speaking up.

[dszrp]

Dawn brought no comfort.

The base wasn't as strongly held as it had looked at first.  Despite them not knowing how to fire it -- yet -- the tank had kept the military at bay, the confusion of the formerly captive civilians being armed and willing to fight back enough to trip whatever limited self-preservation instincts that the soldiers had.  At least, that was what Elaine thought it was.

She didn't actually care enough to think too much on it.

They didn't fire the tank, but they did move it; backed the entire group up to the fence at the perimeter.  Kowalski and Vecchio had already declared they weren't leaving without the half-zombie Mountie and hopefully Audrey McKenna, but they had done as Elaine ordered and got the civilians to the fenceline.

As quiet as it was right now, Elaine thought maybe the soldiers were ready to cut their losses.  There were only so many bodies either side could afford, and she damn sure hoped it was clear to them that if they tried to take her group, her group would take as many of them with them as she could.

It felt otherwise like they'd hit a catch-22.  Most of the guns they'd gathered were gone, and she sure as shit didn't want to depart this place on foot with just a tank that would only get so far before it needed refueled anyway.

She was conferring with Frannie -- of all the people she might have expected to step up as second command, Vecchio's sister would have been dead last until a few days ago -- about how they could get to the jeeps when her perimeter detail came up. "Uh-- we have some people coming towards us from outside."

"Zombies or soldiers?" Elaine asked, turning to pin the kid with a look.

"I don't think either."

She hiked an eyebrow, but then she and Frannie left the cover of the tank and headed to the fence.

Turned out the kid was right.  The three figures moving across the grass towards the base were armed, but they weren't soldiers.  Two men, a woman.  One of the men was white-haired.

"Need a hand?" he asked, once they were in earshot, his deep voice booming in the morning air.

[dszrp]

Ben followed Victoria like a lost puppy, no more idea what to do with the afterlife than he had with how to cope with an eternity of limbless space where his hand had once been. He tied off the tourniquet with his teeth, coping with the most base, rational skills he knew. He grit his teeth every time his unsanitary hand brushed the ragged space where his arm became wounded void.

Victoria’s cold back was the alternative view. Lit up in otherworldly blue light.

“Where are you taking me?” His voice was shaky with pain and weakness. He didn’t feel dead. Like death, maybe, but not dead. The pain felt visceral; so did the abandonment. He wasn’t following her to join her so much as to figure out where the hell his father was.

To find out where his mother was. To find any answers at all.

Victoria was in his face so quickly that for an instant, Ben wasn’t sure he saw flesh on her bones. Her eyes seemed endlessly, cloyingly black.

“You tell me, Ben,” she whispered. For the whip-crack instant that she’d appeared, it was achingly gentle. She seemed to search his eyes as he looked into hers. “Heaven? Hell? What’s it like being with me? What do you believe in? What have you earned?”

Ben found her tone didn’t matter. His blood trail trickled to a close against his haphazard dressing as he took a large, wary step back and laughed another incredulous sound. “What?”

“She hardly seems like Saint Peter, does she, son?” Ben could’ve cried to hear his father’s voice. Bob Fraser looked as if he’d fought his way up all 30 floors of a sky scraper after a mischievous child had decided to press each floor on the elevator. Hat askew, clothes torn, and a bitten sort of anger on his face that said he’d fight to the bitter end and save one last spit for the spite of it.

“What’s happening, Dad?”

There was sudden blackness, oil-slick and angry, and it drowned out whatever his father might’ve said.

There was light, too, even without words Ben knew the light was somehow surprised with itself.

He was lost in it, fighting to find horizon in the maelstrom. Somewhere in between, Ben felt a beckoning. Familiar and grey.

Ben reached for it and held tightly.

[dszrp]

The fact that it was dark outside didn't make anything less ominous.  Seemed like any second, something would start groaning in the shadows, if the guys with guns didn't get 'em first.  When she was little, this was the kinda thing she mighta watched on television too young, hiding under the coffee table in the family room, fists stuffed in her mouth to muffle her squeaks.  But she wouldn't have been really scared 'cause Pop was way worse than any fake monsters on television, with bandages hanging off their arms and shuffling steps.

Fear to Frannie, growing up, was the smell of whiskey and cigar smoke and stale beer.

Fear to Frannie, the past few days, was the reflective glow of eyes too tall to belong to cats or dogs or deer.

Now, Frannie had long since passed the point of fear.

They managed to knock down a couple guards who had been running for backup, passed the guns along.  Elaine shot one more, sprayed him down with gunfire like he'd been a zombie, and got them another.  They were still pinned down, but this time--

Well, none of 'em knew how to work a tank, but right now, her brother and Kowalski were in one trying to figure that out, while the rest of 'em used it and the trucks beside it as cover, and Reems, the vet guy, he was searching through those trucks for more guns and ammo.

"Two o'clock," Elaine said, and yeah, okay, it took Frannie a second but when she looked closer in the dark and shadows, she saw the group of guys trying to break towards the trucks to their side and aimed her stolen pistol at them while Elaine kept the rest backed off.  She didn't think she hit any, but somewhere in the back of her head, she--

She didn't care if she did.

She'd had enough of people telling her that she was safe.

And when she heard the motor on that tank come to life?  Frannie smiled.

[dszrp]

The baby-faced guard had been easy to disarm; he hadn’t put up any fight and Ray thought maybe that was ‘cause he wasn’t ready to shoot healthy, living, uninfected people yet.  Elaine had stalked past him, snatching the rifle out of his hands, and that was it.

Shame the rest of ‘em weren’t so easy.

They dodged and wove between forklifts and supplies, mowing down individual guards when they came across them.  They didn’t have enough guns, but there was still a hesitation for both sides to fire on the actual living.  Kowalski was like a madman, all twitchy intensity and wild blue eyes, and Ray woulda found that terrifying in any other situation, but in this one, he was grateful that neurotic basketcase was who he was.  Because if it was Elaine who was doing the leading -- and God, God, how she had changed, Ray almost didn’t recognize her-- then it was Kowalski who was the driving force propelling these people, most of whom looked like they wanted to just lay down and rest.

And Ray got that.  He got that real well.

He just wasn’t willing to do it without Benny and that poor blonde girl, who managed to not only survive the end of the world but the virus killing it.  He wasn’t willing to consider it when the implications of the ‘help’ the military offered came at such a high cost.

“We need to get out of here and regroup,” Elaine said, assault rifle in hand, mouth verging on a snarl.

“How do you propose we do that?” Kowalski asked back, working his hand against the length of pipe he’d grabbed God-knows-where.

Elaine peeked around the corner of the section of crates they were all huddled behind, to the door down some hundred and fifty yards away.  Then she turned back to them, eyes narrowed. “I cover you.  You get everyone the hell down there.”

“You’re ‘everyone’ too, lady,” and Kowalski was snapping it off, too pissed, maybe too much over a whisper.

"No."  Elaine hoisted her rifle and got into Kowalski's face, making Ray's eyebrows shoot up his forehead. "I'm not arguing this.  You're the one who wanted a fight, so let's get fighting."

Without bothering with another word, she went around the corner and started firing; without hesitation, the group of people she'd kept alive so far followed her hand signal to make for that door.

Kowalski swore violently, then took the lead.

[dszrp]

Blood stained the snow red, like spilt wine drifting across a table, inevitably drifting toward the edge.

Benton let it fall, trudging through snow under an alien sky. He followed the strange motion in the distance, his only ragged and beaten thought remaining was that of his broken compass. He had nothing else to follow. No emergency kit. No friends. No family. Just blood and a dying will to keep moving.

No tourniquet. Just a drip. Speckling crimson in a field of white.

He could feel his life leaving him with his blood. There was no way out of this place, and no fighting what happened outside of it.

Collapsing was peaceful. Somehow warm, despite the stabbing kiss of the snow against his exposed skin. Benton watched the sky, the dancing moons, and nightfall as it began to take over. The breeze stirred powder snow from the trees above him, and it was with that sting that she arrived.

Victoria’s fingers felt achingly good at his forehead.

“Hey,” she said, as if this were normal. She actually looked worried. Pained. Her eyes reflected the foreign moonlight just so to make her look like an angel of death.

“...hello,” he answered with a manic note, suddenly shivering. His heart was broken; he was in pieces. Benton searched her beautiful eyes

She smiled kindly. He waited for the razor teeth he was certain must be behind it to appear.

“Ben, it’s time. You have to come with me,” she said, as if it were the simplest thing in the universe.

[dszrp]

--white, hot light--

--faceless things, pale blue and white over his body, nodding and speaking as though he weren't there--

--black ink floating in the waters of the room, fluid ribbons, a weight on his chest--

--his father's voice, frightened and ranting at the blue-white figures who heard nothing--

--needles in his skin, his back, his eyes--

 Benton Fraser knew the half-mad pounding of his own heart, and the winds of nowhere shifting through the corridors of his own mind.

There was no motion.  The straps bit into every limb, into his own forehead, and his muscles long since burned to the point of fragility from running, from fleeing, from convulsions and from fighting.

The figures spoke to one another.  Muffled, too damnably quiet and far away to understand.  Gesturing at his arm - infection - as though it were a piece of machinery to be dismantled and studied, like a flawed part in a snowmobile engine.  Bob Fraser screamed to the point that Fraser could make nothing out, only terror, only righteous anger, the shape of which was lost to the sound of his own weak, heartbroken laugh.  His own voice raw in his throat, hindered from the screaming and the protests and the horror.

His father's voice reached frantic crescendo.

And then, in desperation, it was gone.

The drips of black in the room flooded to its center and took shape.  Victoria's eyes were blood-shot and dead.

"Ben."

He tried to recoil; tried to answer the nausea and the goosebumps her sick presence left, but he couldn't.  Two beautiful hands pressed to his cheeks, and she examined his face from the vantage of under his chin..

A blue figure took out a syringe.  Fraser heard himself sob; just once.  A sound escaping around the shock of something invaded his infected arm.  Piercing; a pinch of sharp, and then liquid, coursing heat.  A small thing.  It should not have felt so violating.

Victoria began to hum.  Off-key.  Slow.  Broken.

The figures - the doctors - settled instruments in a tray beside him.

His attacker with the needle seemed to check her watch.

"It isn't working," fell somewhere into Victoria's song, as long fingernails raked lightly down his neck.  

Someone nodded.

Someone else strapped his forearm more tightly-- until it hurt-- until--

--Victoria sang, each note more melodious and clear as the doctors-- as they--

"No," he forced out through dry lips and aching throat, taking back some desperate measure of control of his own voice.  "Stop--”

Another note in the song bent sharp.  His own sweat drenched him, his own tears rolled tracks down his cheeks.  And he understood.  

--dissection--

  "Stop!"

 --something cut into his arm--

 --something in his heart broke-- 

--something laughed, and something screamed--

 --Victoria sang.  Benton bled.

[dszrp]

Sleeping under whatever they'd given her was impossible.

Whatever they'd bothered to throw at her for anesthetic, it wasn't enough.  Not to sleep, not to escape the pain, not for anything.  Audrey's wrist ticked back and forth in futility against the restraint.  Leather and brutality.

The perfectly spaced cuts along her arm didn't bleed anymore; the coagulation speed of each had been photographed and recorded in another little space on that damn clipboard.  The counter pattern of three identical burns still felt like fire, that recorded too, blistering and turning angry red at the edges.  Her eyes had been tested over and over with bright, blinking lights once they'd carried away fluid of the vitreous for study.  The dull fire still lingered from the spinal fluid extraction.

They'd shelved her.  She didn't know why, only that they were preparing for something, and the room they'd left her in was cold.  Other gurneys lined it.  The strap across her forehead made it difficult to wrench her head to the side to look, but she managed.  

Mostly empty.  Blood stained some of the gurneys, though.  Some brown enough to be old, some still red, all of it repulsive.  This is what they'd done after she'd left.  It should not have shocked.

She spat.  Not in disgust, though she would have; to clear more of the gauze from her mouth, to breathe, she had to breathe in.

It was then she realized she wasn't alone.

Audrey wrenched her head to the side to the sound of something whimpering, yanking a muscle in her neck only to see...

A man.  Dark haired, grubby, young.  Jerking in his restraints now that she seemed to have startled him, though not even to get away.  Just, it seemed, to curl in on himself.  He was bloodied.  Split at the lip, the wound now healing, but still marking him.  Others like hers.  Surgical slices, burn patterns, bruises.  His bite still stood out on his forearm, healing over like Audrey's.

They were the same.

"Wha-- Who are you?"  Her voice was raked to a whisper.

The man whimpered again at the sound, moving against his restraint in the opposite direction.  As though he could reach out instead.  Hand flexing open and closed; somewhere along the line he had raked his fingernails back to the quick.  He sounded like he was sniffing as he tried to breathe.

Audrey blinked away tears, enough to see him clearly for an instant.  He had grey eyes.  Full of terror.  Heartbreak.

He was crying, too.

"I'm sorry."  It came out rushed, almost manic, when she said it.  "I'm sorry, I--"

Somewhere, a door slammed.

[dszrp]

"C'mon!!  You saw it, you saw it you motherfuckers, you fucking saw it and you're just gonna stand there and take it for some-- some--"

Ray Kowalski was so mad that he could feel the blood pound through his body.  Screaming.  Shrill.  Because somewhere, they had Ben and--

"FUCKING FIGHT!" he yelled at the top of his lungs.  And he would, fucking hell he would, even though he could feel his arm half-numb where the butt of the assault rifle slammed into it, and he knew Vecchio would, even though he was sitting against the wall with Frannie's underwear pressed to the side of his still-bleeding head, and he even knew Frannie would now that she'd decided, but the rest of these fuckers?  The rest of these assholes just sitting there looking helpless and scared?!

"You survived the end of the world, you managed to make it this far, you had a fucking PLAN and you're going to give it all up for some illusion that you're safe here?!  You are NOT fucking safe here!  You will never be safe here!  How long before they come for the women next, huh?!  How long before they decide which of us is healthy enough to live and which ones aren't?  How fucking LONG?!"

"Shut up."  The woman looked exhausted.  Elaine.  She stood up, hollow eyes looking at Kowalski. "Just... shut the fuck up."

"No.  No, you fucking shut up, you fucking let them take her, you could have fought, you could have--!"

"Shut. Up."  She pushed him in the shoulder, making him wince, and then eyed the fence. "Let's do this."

The majority of the members of her group stared at her, eyes wide.  Then, shaking like a leaf, the pregnant girl Trish stepped up.  Her face was wet with tears.

Ray looked at her and shuddered, his own eyes stinging.  God.  God.  Fuck.  He had nothing.  She was pregnant, and he hadn't meant her when he called for them to fucking fight, but there she was, scared and carrying a baby that was gonna be born soon and ready.

Frannie made a soft noise.

Then, one by one, the group got up.  Ray panted, and he was so goddamn grateful when Vecchio stepped over, grateful for the couple moments he steadied the guy and gave himself a few seconds to breathe, and then he whirled around and grabbed hold of the chain link fence with such ferocity that the baby-faced guard with the assault rifle took a step back.

Ray bared his teeth, didn't say a word, and started pulling and pushing and pulling and pushing, keeping his eyes on the son of a bitch while more and more hands joined him on the fence.

[dszrp]

Benton's laughter was thready, maniacal and not entirely his own.

He fought, in between bouts of vomiting - he'd never in his life thought to be so rude as to direct it at anyone, but wouldn't you know it, he found the ill-manners - lapsing into hallucinations of black clouds and warm fur.

Occasionally, his vision cleared to industrial lights, fluorescent whites harsh above before fading back into blue and more blue.  Sometimes, even now, he called for Diefenbaker.

His father's voice warbled in and out, long-distance shortwave, skipping across atmosphere.  "Benton, listen--" he would say and Ben wanted to laugh even harder at that.  His desperation was only matched by his bitterness, and both of those were overlaid with terror.

His back hit something hard and his head rolled; there was pressure on his arms, on his legs; a skip, then they were heavy and immobile.  The lights moved overhead.  Have I been shot? he wondered.

Something seemed to explode; the light changed and he felt hot glass scatter across his skin and a familiar keening in one ear that he wasn’t sure was real. Green corrupted across his vision. His father appeared and disappeared in his view. He lashed out only to feel something cold, hard and cruel across the back of his head, sending him laughing against something equally unkind. The tile grain of the floor was antiseptic white, except where it stained with the copper of his blood.  Was that from his head, or a gunshot wound? Those tiles were rough, up close.  They tasted like pine cleaner and the salt tang of calculated misery. Like an uncharacteristic but satisfying spite. “Hang on, son. I’ll have that bastard’s head especially--” Benton cut off even his father as he turned and spat his own blood back at his assailants.

[dszrp]

They weren't even treating Audrey like an animal anymore.

The restraints were vicious in their dull bite, but not so much as the brutal hands that held her mouth open as they took three of her teeth, one by one, without so much as a tylenol.  Pain, tears, screaming and nudity meant nothing to those hands.  She could barely breathe around the gauze they'd stuffed in her mouth to stem the bleeding, which dried out her screams to something ragged and tearing.

It hurt.  It hurt so far beyond the physical pain.

Bright, hard lights tore at her vision when those gloved hands pried her eyes open.  A man in white - always got a cream cheese danish at the cafe, never came into the bar, had a face like a pug, she knew this man - ticked off another notation on a clipboard.  She had a clipboard like that of her own, somewhere on this compound.  Maybe it had been hers.

The syringe made a distinctive sound, being uncapped.

Her handler was hidden behind a dust mask, blurred anyway, for all the wet that her mouth couldn't give to scream poured out from her eyes instead.  The needle glinted in the unforgiving light.  She bit down hard on the gauze as her skull was crushed hard back to the gurney, biting hard enough to taste more blood, to turn her cries wet and thick.

She rolled her eyes up, the most escape she could find, in the split moment before cold metal slid into the white of her eye.

[dszrp]

The landscape only felt right when Ben’s breath started to fog across the blue cast in the air.

Now and then he could hear his heart pound in his ear, and he was distantly aware that his heartbeat didn’t sound right. He’d begun tracking indeterminate indents in the sand, rapidly mixing with snow, both being blown over and faded so quickly he couldn’t identify them. Due… no-direction. He didn’t know how long he’d been out here. Time had lost all meaning. The metronome of his heart had broken and occasionally transformed into a cuckoo clock.

Occasionally, the wind seemed to carry whispers. Or arguments.

He shook it off, swallowing the pain and sweat for the snow and sky, tipping his hat a little further back on his head and squinting after the stirring motion beyond the far away trees.

The world got comfortingly colder.

Time passed, the strange sky moving overhead, unearthly moons watching him like two piercing eyes. They were beautiful, even while they set his teeth on edge. He wondered how they maintained their orbit. What they did to the tides. What the hell they were looking at.

Someone screamed.

He stepped in a clear footprint as he heard it, ruining the track, his first solid indication of what he was tracking. Ben spun around to the sound, its reverberation cracking the landscape further, causing it to rumble violently as if the mountains he wandered were geologically active.

It wasn’t Victoria’s scream, but an inky black entity formed in front of him just the same. Vicious and familiar, fear written in her eyes.

It slapped him.

“Wake up!”

Handprint burning his cheek, Ben fell out of the vision to all hell breaking loose.