Dead Flesh, Still Sweet
Task Force 141 × fem!Reader [ Sugar ]
❝ Act One | Chapter 1 ❞
ㄨ SYNOPSIS: Six years after the worldwide collapse, the 141 survives on discipline and trade. Then a routine deal puts you right in front of them—collared, bruised, and eerily composed. They drive away. They try not to think about it. They fail.
.ᐟ CW: 18+ | zombie apocalypse au; dystopia; slow burn; found family; eventual romance; violence; horror/gore; smut; implied noncon/rape/abuse; hurt/comfort; angst; no use of Y/N; other tags to be added
[ ⨟ MASTERLIST ]
2031. Late autumn. Six years after total collapse.
One can smell Ashworth before seeing it.
The smoke comes first—a greasy black column rising from the eastern edge of the settlement, visible from three miles out, smearing the October sky like a thumbprint on glass. Their permanent cremation operation built into the skeleton of an old scrapyard, and the smell of it—sweet, chemical, wrong in a way that the human nose recognises before the brain can name—carries on the wind across the Herefordshire hills and settles into everything.
Clothes. Hair. Skin. The mud.
Soap watches the smoke through the windscreen and says nothing, which is the first wrong thing about this morning.
The truck rattles along the A49—or what's left of it. Six years of freeze-thaw and neglect have cracked the tarmac into something closer to mosaic than road; saplings pushing through the gaps in the central reservation, the hard shoulder buried under a tide of dead leaves and grass. Abandoned cars line the route like a museum exhibit, stripped to shells, windows smashed, some burned down to bare metal. A red Royal Mail van sits nose-first in a ditch, its side panel ripped open, the contents long since looted. October light—low, amber, the last of the warmth before November kills it—catches the rust and makes it glow.
Price drives.
He always drives on Ashworth runs. Left hand on the wheel, right hand resting near the gearstick where it can reach his sidearm in under a second. His boonie hat is pulled low, the brim shadowing his eyes. The cigar—half a cigar, really, a dried-out stump he's been nursing for God knows how long—sits unlit between his teeth. He rolls it from one side of his mouth to the other without appearing to notice he's doing it.
The engine in the truck bed is a marine diesel they pulled from a beached trawler on the Severn coast. Three weeks of work with a chain hoist, a come-along, and Soap swearing in combinations that could strip paint. Twelve hundred horsepower, four-stroke, intact. It's the most valuable thing they've traded in two years, and it's going to a man Price would cheerfully put a bullet in if the mathematics allowed it.
The mathematics don't allow it. The mathematics haven't allowed it for three years of trading with Dean Holt, and Price has made his peace with that the way he makes his peace with everything—quietly, totally, with the particular discipline of a man who learned long ago that the mission is more important than how it makes you feel.
"Hate this fuckin' place," Soap announces, breaking the tension, and saying out loud what everyone is thinking.
It's the first thing anyone's said in twenty minutes. His voice breaks the quiet of the cab; that deep, unnatural quiet that six years without traffic or aircraft or the background hum of civilisation has carved into the world. The quiet that drove people insane in the early days. The quiet that still presses against the windows like water pressure, so that every sound inside the truck—the engine, the rattle of the tarp, Soap's voice—feels too loud and exposed.
"Noted," Price says, without looking over. His jaw works around the cigar. "You've mentioned it the last four times."
"Deserves mentionin’ a fifth."
"Keep it to yourself when we're inside." Price glances in the rearview mirror. Gaz and Ghost sit in the back—Gaz on the left, rifle across his knees, chewing on a dental floss stick with the focused intensity of a man performing a religious ritual; Ghost on the right, balaclava on, arms crossed, one boot up on the seat in front of him, utterly still. "All of you. We're in, we negotiate, we're out. Three hours maximum."
"What's he want this time?" Gaz asks. He pulls the floss stick from his mouth, examines it, puts it back. The London in his voice is always closer to the surface before an Ashworth run—the vowels flattening, the consonants sharpening, the code-switching that happens when Kyle Garrick is bracing for something. "Beyond the diesel."
"Don't know. That's what worries me." Price pulls on his gloves—tactical, worn thin at the fingertips, one of a dozen pairs he's maintained since Credenhill. "Holt doesn't call us back early unless he's got something to prove."
Credenhill.
The name sits in the cab like an old bruise. None of them say it often—the SAS base in Hereford where they regrouped after the global deployments failed, where they held the line for eighteen months while the chain of command rotted from the inside, where Price watched the institution he'd served for twenty-five years turn into something he couldn't stomach and made the call to walk.
Four men out the wire in the dark with what they could carry, leaving behind the uniforms and the ranks and the last pretence that someone else was making the decisions.
That was four years ago. They've been independent contractors since—a polite term for survivors who trade skills for supplies and try not to think too hard about who they're trading with.
Ghost says nothing.
Ghost hasn't said anything since they left the safehouse at dawn. He sits with the stillness of a man who has compressed himself into pure function—no wasted movement, no wasted breath, no wasted thought. His eyes, the only part of him visible above the balaclava, move in the steady sweep of a scan pattern. West wall weak point. Generator housing. Fuel storage. The two guards on the gate with AKs held like they learned from films rather than training.
Amateurs. The whole compound is run by amateurs with just enough cruelty to compensate.
At forty-two, Simon "Ghost" Riley is the second oldest thing in the truck that isn't the engine. They don't call him Simon much anymore. Price does, occasionally, in moments of gravity—pulling the name out like a key to a room that's usually locked. The others say Ghost because Ghost is what he prefers, and what Ghost prefers is what Ghost gets, because nobody argues with a six-foot-four wall of silence that can clear a room of infected in under thirty seconds with a knife.
The truck crests a rise and Ashworth opens below them.
It's bigger than it was.
Every time they come back, it's bigger. The core settlement—the original industrial estate that Holt commandeered in year one—sits at the centre like a fist; corrugated steel walls twenty feet high, reinforced with concrete barriers, razor wire coiled along the top in thick, gleaming loops. Watchtowers at the corners, manned. A Union Jack hanging from the tallest, bleached almost white by weather and neglect. Inside the core, maybe three hundred people live in relative safety—Holt's inner circle, his enforcers, the skilled workers he values, the women he keeps.
But the core isn't Ashworth anymore. Ashworth is the sprawl.
It presses outward from the walls in every direction like a net of black veins—a shanty city of lean-tos, repurposed caravans, shipping containers stacked two high with ladders between them, tarpaulin roofs stretched over frameworks of salvaged timber. Cooking fires trail smoke into the October air. Washing lines sag between structures, strung with clothes that will never fully dry in this climate. The sound of it—two thousand people crammed into a space designed for industrial machinery—carries across the valley; hammering, shouting, a baby crying, dogs barking, the generator's diesel thrum underneath everything like a mechanical heartbeat.
Two thousand.
The number matters because numbers are power, and Dean Holt counts every mouth the way a miser counts coins. It doesn't matter that most of them are sick, malnourished, living in the outskirts where the guards respond slower and the rations stretch thinner. It doesn't matter that the feral children—orphans, parentless packs running semi-wild through the shanties—are too young to be useful and too numerous to manage. What matters is the headcount, and Holt doesn't need them healthy. He needs them dependent.
The outskirts are darker than the core. Not literally—the same weak October light falls on both—but in the way a room gets darker when you realise nobody's watching. The core has rules enforced by Holt's men. The outskirts have suggestions enforced by proximity. The further you get from the walls, the thinner the protection. The quieter the violence.
And on the eastern edge, downwind, The Pit. The scrapyard repurposed into a cremation site—metal frames and concrete foundations holding the permanent fire that disposes of the dead, infected and otherwise. The lowest-status outskirts residents tend it in shifts. The smoke rises day and night, greasy and black and saccharine, and serves double duty: disposal and landmark. Everyone in the region knows where Ashworth is. Holt wants it that way.
The patrol zone extends roughly two miles out—armed sweeps on rotation, clearance runs for rotten shamblers, watch posts on the major approach roads. Inside the zone, you're relatively safe from undead. The 141's truck passes the first watch post a mile out: two men with rifles and a fire barrel, who nod at Price without stopping them. They're expected.
The gates grind open on a hand-cranked chain. Metal on metal, shrieking. Soap winces. Price doesn't.
"Captain Price." The gate guard grins. Missing teeth—four, by Gaz's automatic count, which means no dental care, which means the man's gums are probably already infected, which means he'll lose more before winter. Gaz's jaw tightens around his floss stick. "The Dean's been expecting you."
"I'm sure he has."
They drive in through the outskirts first.
The truck moves at walking pace through a narrow track between structures, close enough to touch the walls on either side. Dirt-streaked faces watch them pass—gaunt, wary, the expressions of people who've learned to assess every newcomer as a potential threat or opportunity. A woman with a black eye carries a bucket of rainwater. A boy, maybe ten, sits on an overturned drum cleaning a rifle that's bigger than his torso. Two men argue over something in a doorway and go quiet as the truck passes, waiting for it to clear before resuming.
The smell is immediate and total. Rot and unwashed bodies and latrine trenches and cook smoke and the ever-present undercurrent of The Pit, and underneath all of it the specific, sour tang of too many people in too small a space with too little sanitation. Soap breathes through his mouth. Gaz's floss stick works double-time.
Ghost catalogues. Not the smell but the infrastructure. The gaps between structures. The sight lines. The choke points where an armed response would bottleneck. The places where two thousand people become a liability instead of an asset, because a crowd is only useful until it panics, and a panicked crowd in a shanty warren with one road in and one road out is a death trap.
They pass through the outskirts checkpoint—a manned barrier between the shanties and the core walls—and into Holt's domain. The difference is immediate. Cleaner. Quieter. The structures inside the core are sturdier, better maintained. Electric light glows behind windows, powered by the generators that the outskirts can hear but never benefit from. The air still smells, but it smells like diesel and concrete instead of sewage and despair.
The truck rolls to a stop outside the main building—Holt's palace, a former industrial unit reinforced with concrete barriers and steel plating. Two guards flank the entrance. They're bigger than the gate men. Better fed. The kind of fed that means someone else isn't.
"Leave the weapons visible but slung," Price says, killing the engine. He takes the cigar from his mouth, examines it, puts it in his breast pocket. A ritual completed. "We're not here to start anything."
"And if he starts something?" Gaz asks casually, kissing his teeth as he takes in the scenery.
"Then we finish it. But he won't. He wants the engine more than he wants trouble."
They climb out. Four men moving with the unconscious synchronisation of a unit that's breathed in rhythm for over a decade.
Price leads. Ghost falls to his right flank—six-four, balaclava, moving with a silence that shouldn't be possible for a man his size. Gaz left, rifle slung, dark eyes sweeping. Soap rear, where he can watch their backs and keep his mouth furthest from Holt's ears. The zippo appears in his hand—open, shut, click-snap, click-snap—the fidget as automatic as breathing.
The interior is warm. That's the first wrong thing—warmth is a luxury, and Holt's burning generator fuel on space heaters. The second wrong thing is the smell. Cooked meat, actual cooked meat, and something underneath it. Perfume. Floral. Expensive. In a world that smells like diesel and rot and the burn pit's greasy residue, the scent of perfume is so alien it stops Gaz mid-step.
Price clocks it too. His eyes move, just once, across the room.
Holt's holding court.
He's at the far end of the space, set up on a raised platform built from shipping pallets and plywood—a throne room constructed from rubbish. Mismatched furniture, a leather sofa with the stuffing coming out, a coffee table covered in bottles and ammunition and a leather-bound ledger that's closed but prominent. His men—eight, nine of them—spread around the room, drinking, eating, talking too loudly. They look up when the 141 enters. The conversation doesn't stop, but it shifts.
Two men flank the sofa.
The first is Danny—big bloke, shaved head, enforcer, the physical threat that keeps Ashworth's population in line through the simple mathematics of violence.
The second is thinner, smaller, almost forgettable: mousey hair receding at the temples, clean-shaven in a world where nobody bothers, wearing clothes that are deliberately neat in the way of a man who has made professionalism his camouflage. He holds the ledger's twin in his arms—another leather-bound book, open, a pencil behind his ear. His eyes are quick and small, and they move over the 141 with the particular attention of a man who counts everything.
Fletcher. Price has dealt with him before. Neil Fletcher, Holt's bookkeeper—the man who knows every number in Ashworth. Every ration card, every birth, every death, every resource allocation. Danny keeps people in line through fear. Fletcher keeps them in line through need. He decides who eats and how much. He decides which outskirts families get medicine when the children are sick. And every decision is a transaction, even when the price isn't spoken aloud.
Dean Holt stands.
He's shorter than every man in the 141, but he takes up space like something pressurised. Shaved head, thick neck corded with veins, the barrel chest of a man who's never stopped eating well while everyone else got thin. Leather jacket over a bare chest, which would be absurd if the grin weren't worse. The stumped left hand—three fingers and two shiny keloid nubs where the others used to be, bitten off in year one and cauterised gruesomely with a lighter—comes up in a wave.
"Captain!" He calls out like they're mates. Like this is a pub. "Right on time. Bloody love that about you, John. Military precision. Even now, eh? World's gone to shite and you're still running on a clock."
"Dean." Price's voice is level. A transaction. "Engine's outside. Marine diesel, four-stroke, twelve hundred horsepower. Intact."
"Straight to business." Holt clicks his tongue. "No drink first? No catch-up?" He gestures at the table, the unlabeled bottles. "Got vodka. Actual vodka, not the bathtub piss. Came off a shipment from somewhere that used to be Poland."
"We'll pass."
"'Course you will." Holt's grin doesn't move. It never moves. It's not a smile—it's a display. "You lot always pass. Monks, I swear." He looks at his men, playing the room. "Four fit lads and they won't touch a drop. Won't touch anything I offer. Makes a man wonder, doesn't it?"
A ripple of laughter from the room. Dutiful and rehearsed. Fletcher doesn't laugh but he smiles, thin and precise, and writes something in his ledger.
Soap's zippo clicks. His jaw tightens. Gaz stares at a point six inches above Holt's head. Ghost does nothing. Ghost is a wall with eyes.
"Wonder all you like," Price says. "We're here for the trade."
"And we'll get to it; we'll get to it." Holt drops back onto his sofa, spreads his arms along the back. King of rubbish mountain. "But first—first, I've got to show you something. Because you come here every few months, Price, and you never stay long enough to see what I've built. What Ashworth is now. And I think—" He holds up the stumped hand, wagging a remaining finger. "—I think you don't appreciate it."
"I don't think about you at all, Dean."
The grin flickers. Just a fraction. Then it's back, wider.
"Funny man." Holt snaps his fingers. The sound is sharp in the warm, perfumed air. "Bring her out."
A door opens at the back of the room.
One of Holt's men comes through first—big, scarred, the universal look of hired muscle. He's holding something.
A leash.
Leather. Proper leather, the kind you'd see in a high-end pet shop in the world before, attached to a collar—also leather, also deliberate, fitted snug around a throat that is very obviously, very deliberately human.
And then you step through the door.
The room shifts.
It's subtle—a recalibration, the way a room changes when something enters it that doesn't belong. Holt's men look up from their drinks with the glazed, proprietary interest of men who've seen this show before. Fletcher's pencil stops moving. His eyes fix on you with a quality that's different from the others—not the lazy entitlement of Holt's enforcers but something hungrier, more patient. A man watching something through a shop window, calculating whether there's a way to get it without paying full price.
But the 141—
Gaz sees you first.
He clocks the collar. The leash. The hand on the other end of it. And something crosses his face that he can't hide fast enough—a flinch, quick and total, like someone has pressed a thumb into a bruise. His eyes cut to Price, then back to you, and his grip shifts on his rifle strap.
You’re in a skimpy black dress and matching black heels. It's ridiculous and it's the whole point; satin or velvet, something that catches the light from the bare bulbs, spaghetti straps and a slit up one thigh. The kind of dress that belonged to Saturday nights and champagne and choosing to be looked at. Here it's a costume. A display case.
Your skin is clean beneath it—conspicuously clean, in a world where clean means someone is spending resources on you. Water, soap, time—luxuries that two thousand people in the outskirts would riot over, poured into maintaining one woman's surface. Soft where the world has made everyone else rough. Your legs are shaved. Your hair is down, long curls falling past your shoulders, catching the light in a way that says someone's been brushing it. Maintaining it. Like grooming a show animal.
You’re beautiful. That's the weapon. That's the point. The kind of beautiful that's become currency in a world that trades in people—soft and shapely, kept. The kind men would trade their last pill for, their last round for, their last shred of something decent for. Holt knows it. He's counted on it. He's invested in it the way Fletcher invests in ledger entries.
The tattoos run up one arm in a full sleeve—colour and black, the story of a life lived when tattoo parlours existed. More scattered across the other forearm, bleeding into your collarbone. A large piece on your thigh flashes through the slit of the dress. Pre-collapse art. Evidence of a person who used to make choices about her own body.
And the bruises.
They're on your upper arms. Fingerprints. Four dark ovals and a thumb, pressed into your skin like someone grabbed and didn't care about the marks—or cared specifically about the marks. There are more at your collarbone and neck, disappearing under the flimsy neckline.
You move the way a person moves when they've learned the choreography of compliance—chin up, because he likes it up. Eyes forward, because he doesn't like the floor. Spine straight, because posture means he doesn't have to correct it in front of company. Every piece of you is arranged.
But your eyes.
Your eyes are somewhere else entirely.
Soap catches it. He's looking at your face while everyone else is looking at everything else, and what he sees there is a woman who has left the building. Who has pulled some essential part of herself so far inward that what's walking across this room is a shell running on muscle memory. He's seen it before. In Urzikstan. In the places they don't talk about from the Credenhill years. The lights are on. Nobody's home. Nobody's home on purpose.
His zippo stops.
"Gentlemen," Holt says, and his voice has the particular warmth of a man showing off a car. "Meet Sugar."
He tugs the leash. Not hard—a demonstration. You stop where you’re told to stop. Beside the sofa, within arm's reach, standing like an ornament. Fletcher shifts his weight, angling himself closer by a degree. His pencil taps his ledger.
"Found her about three months ago. Or—the lads found her, technically. Out past Ross-on-Wye, living in a farmhouse with a beast of a dog and a shotgun and not much else." Holt's hand comes up, casual, possessive, and settles on your hip. His thick fingers press into the fabric. "Killed the bloody dog while she almost killed two of my men with that shotgun before they got it off her. Spirited, isn't she?"
He looks up at you, grinning triumphantly.
"Say hello to our guests, Sugar."
Your eyes sweep the room. They pass over Holt's men, and they clearly mean nothing to you. They pass over Fletcher, and something tightens in your jaw so briefly it's almost invisible. Then they find the 141, the four men standing in a loose formation near the entrance, and for a half-second, something flickers behind the blankness. Recognition maybe. Not of them specifically, but of what they are. The way they stand. The discipline. The difference between these four and every other man in this room.
Then the flicker dies, and you do what you were told.
"Hello." Flat. Slightly accented.
Holt lights up.
"Hear that?" He squeezes your hips with both hands now, leash wrapped around one fist, obviously delighted. "Not from here. Won't tell me where, though. Three months and she won't tell me where she's from. Stubborn little thing." He says it with admiration, the way you'd admire a quality in an animal.
"European, I think. Somewhere on the continent. Won't give me a bloody word of it." He laughs. "But smart. Fuck me, she's smart. Can field-dress a wound, can read a map, knows plants—which ones'll kill you, which ones'll cure you. Got herself a whole little survival operation going before we found her. Books and everything."
His hands slide from your hips to the small of your back, then lower.
"And she's still feisty, aren't you, Sugar? Behind closed doors." He looks at Price over your shoulder while nuzzling your hair, conspiratorial. Man to man. "Still bites. I like that. Means she's not broken yet. Where's the fun if they're broken, aye?"
Price's expression doesn't change. Not one muscle. He could be carved from the Herefordshire bedrock.
"We're here for the trade, Dean."
"Yeah, you keep saying that." Holt stands. He's still holding the leash. He walks around you in a slow half-circle, and his free hand, the good one, catches the strap of your dress. He pulls it down off one shoulder. Then the other one. The fabric slides—not all the way, but enough. Enough to show the elegant curve of your shoulders, the bruises at your collarbone in full, the swell of your breasts above the neckline. He's undressing you by degrees, in a room full of men, with the same casualness of someone unwrapping a birthday package.
And you don't flinch; don’t react at all. Your hands stay at your sides. Not a hitch in your breath.
Gaz looks away. His throat works. Fletcher doesn't look away. He watches openly with the focused stillness of a man memorising something for later.
"Look at that," Holt taunts, to no one and everyone simultaneously. "Clean. Soft. When's the last time any of you saw skin like that? Eh?" He looks at his men, who murmur and grin on cue. Then back at the 141.
"Oh, right. Never. Because you lot don't look. That's your thing, innit? Too good for it. Too fucking principled." He drops the strap, pats your shoulder like you're furniture, and pulls the dress back up with a rough tug. "Makes me wonder, honestly. Four men. No women. Not ever." He tilts his head at Price. "You all sharing a sleeping bag, Captain? No judgement. Well," he pauses, grins, "some judgement."
Laughter from the room. You stand perfectly still through it, adjusting the straps methodically.
And then Soap speaks.
He shouldn't. He knows he shouldn't. Price told him not to. But something about the leash, or the bruises, or the flat nothing in your voice when you said hello, or the way Holt's hand keeps finding your body like it belongs to him—something trips a wire in Johnny MacTavish that no amount of operational discipline has ever been able to fully deactivate.
"The engine." His voice is steady but his accent's thickened, the Glasgow in it hardening every consonant. "Twelve hundred horsepower. Ye want it or nah?"
Holt looks at him. Really looks, for the first time. The grin sharpens.
"The Scotsman speaks." Holt steps closer. He's still holding your leash, wrapped around his stumped fist. "You like her, son? Caught ya looking." He snickers, glances back at you, then at Soap, and something cruel and delighted moves behind his eyes. "Tell you what—throw in something extra on top of the engine and I'll let you have an hour with her. She's good. Trained her myself."
The silence that follows is a physical thing.
Soap doesn't blink. His bright blue eyes stay fixed on Holt's face and something in them goes very, very flat. The zippo is still in his hand. He's stopped flipping it. His thumb rests on the lid like a man resting his finger alongside a trigger guard.
Fletcher watches this exchange with interest. His pencil moves.
Price steps forward. One step. Enough.
"The engine for the agreed supplies," Price interjects with finality. His voice hasn't changed. Hasn't risen. He could be reading coordinates. "Ammunition, antibiotics, water purification tablets. As discussed. Nothing else."
Holt holds the moment. Then he laughs again, big and theatrical this time, and waves his stumped hand.
"Always business with you, Price. Always business." He drops onto the sofa and tugs the leash, pulling you down onto the armrest beside him. His good hand settles on your bare thigh, thumb stroking over the edge of your tattoo through the slit of the dress. "Fine. Let's talk numbers. Sugar, pour us drinks."
He lets go of the leash. You stand on heels, smooth the dress with hands that don't shake, and move to the table.
Fletcher intercepts your path. It's subtle—a half-step to the side, placing himself between you and the bottles so you must adjust, must pass closer to him than necessary. His hand doesn't touch. It doesn't need to. The proximity is the message. You navigate around him without acknowledgement, the way someone would navigate around a piece of furniture, and something in Fletcher's thin smile curdles.
Soap sees it. Files it. Adds it to the list of things wrong with this room.
And Ghost, who hasn't moved, hasn't spoken yet, who has stood like a shadow in a skull-print balaclava and watched the entire display with eyes the colour of cold tea—
Ghost is looking at your wrists.
At the thin scars on the insides of them. Not old. Not from the before. From rope or zip ties. From being tied. And underneath the compliance and the rehearsed posture and the empty eyes, he sees what Soap saw but reads it differently. Soap saw a woman who'd shut down. Ghost sees a woman who's waiting.
Not broken. Holding.
His eyes move from your wrists to your face, and for one fraction of a second, you look back, meeting his gaze.
Then you go on and pour the vodka and carry it to Holt without spilling a drop.
I just know this is gonna be so damn good!!!! It's only chapter 1 and I'm hooked!!!!
