Chapter Text
Stardate 2261.66. 0930 hours. KL interviewing JTK.
Captain James Tiberius Kirk sits before me, arms folded tight against his chest. Although young, he wears a battle-weary expression, and his boyish good looks are marred only slightly by a scar spanning his right cheek. Like most survivors, he is quite hostile – some might say deservedly so – and insists that various members of his crew be allowed to remain outside during this interview, in case of ‘trouble’. Before the virus outbreak, he was on the Command track at Starfleet Academy, located in San Francisco, USA, Earth, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his late father George as a Starship Captain. When I ask him how he thinks the virus started, he huffs out a sharp breath through his nose and shrugs, frowning.
JK: Look, nobody knows how it started. There were rumours, of course, going from person to person, and new ones came with the nomads. But no one actually knows. Do you?
[I am not authorised to answer this question. There is a moment of silence.]
We just want to know your experience, Mr. Kirk, in whatever way you wish to tell of it.
JK: [muttering] Nice evasion there. [louder] It’s just Kirk, or Jim, okay? Can’t hold on to that formality while I’m telling you about shit that happened in the past three years.
I’m just Kaitlyn, then. If you would please tell us your story, Jim.
[There is a long pause as Jim seems to gather his thoughts.]
JK: Okay. When it started - or at least when I heard anything about it – I’d just reached Starfleet.
You were a third-year cadet, were you not?
JK: Yeah, Command track. See, Chris Pike picked me up in a bar in Iowa and dared me to do better than my dad. [A dark chuckle.] Fat lot of good that dare is now… but we were talking about the Plague, not Chris. Met Bones on the way in the shuttle. He puked on me.
To clarify, Bones is Doctor Leonard McCoy.
JK: Yeah. He had nothing better to do either. We’d just moved into a new dorm when the weird shit started coming through on the news channels. ‘Fleet were panicking, I know ’cause I hacked one of my receivers to listen to encrypted broadcasts.
That is an offence that could lead to court martial.
JK: Yeah, but who’s still alive to martial me, huh? I thought this was my story, why do you keep interrupting?
I apologise.
JK: Anyway, at the same time we started hearing reports of this rabies-like disease, ‘Fleet officers were telling one another about this- this pandemic, where people were just going feral – that’s what we called them in the end. Ferals. Zombies was too cheesy, y’know? So all the cadets were whispering, and the news guys were picking up on all these weird stories. Bones was going wacko; he was paranoid about the ‘flu, STDs, colds – surprisingly, not alcohol poisoning – but this took the biscuit. I mean, a disease that made people eat other people? He was going off his face. Then people started going home, one by one, leaving campus, because their families were getting scared.
Might I ask why you didn’t?
[Jim is visibly uncomfortable.]
JK: Thought you weren’t gonna interrupt. Answer to that is: I didn’t have a home to go to. Well, there is a house, but nobody’s in it. Mom’s been off-planet constantly for eight years now, and I haven’t spoken to her for six of ‘em. My brother Sam’s married and lives on Deneva, so he's safe. Everyone else is either dead, estranged, or I hate their guts, especially Frank. Fucking hope Frank got eaten alive. Bones couldn’t go and see his daughter because his ex-wife’s a bitch with full custody, so he was stuck in San Fran too. We stayed until the bitter end, and I mean the bitter end. People started disappearing home faster and faster until there was just us sad bastards left with nowhere to go, then the first big groups started turning up. Of Ferals, I mean.
Can you describe one to me?
[Jim fixes me with an incredulous look]
JK: As if you don’t know what they look like.
Humour me. It’s just for the record.
JK: [sighs] They look like us, at first, for the most part. Apart from the eyes, which are all filmy and glazed over. Creepy as fuck. You can tell them from a distance by the way they move – they tend to shuffle, drag their limbs, but some other stuff is stiff and robotic. Like, they’ll turn their heads fully to look at something, instead of just their eyes. The smell is pretty distinctive as well, all decayed and shit.
And the noise they make?
JK: [stares] They don’t make noise. They might have done in the movies, moaning and growling and stuff, but in reality, they don’t. Makes it easier in some ways, because they can’t attract other Ferals, but you also can’t hear them coming. [gaze drops to his lap] We lost a lot of people because of that.
[He picks at the frayed left cuff of his battered leather jacket.]
Eventually, you left San Francisco, though. Why was that?
JK: Bones wanted to go and find Joanna – that’s his daughter. He might not have had custody, but what did that matter when things had gone to shit? The quarantine began that morning, and there were messages to every terminal giving us piss-poor excuses as to why we’d been abandoned. [He clenches his fists.] Then the disruptor wave knocked us all off the network, and our communicators went bust. Bones freaked out. I mean, we both freaked out, but Bones freaked out, because how was he meant to contact his little girl when there was no comms network anymore? So he decided to take off and find her.
And why did you?
JK: [shrugs, eyes lost] Bones was all I had. He’s my best friend, and he was frightened for his daughter. So I followed him.
‘-the fuck, Jim? They’ve abandoned us! The whole fucking Federation has left us to die!’
Jim had grown used to filtering out Bones’ all too frequent rants, but usually, he tended to listen when they weren’t directed at him. Now though, his attention was fading in and out, shell-shocked by the unsentimental message that had flashed up on the terminals in the dorm computer room, and the revelation that there was nobody coming to help. At least this time, unlike on Tarsus, there was no false hope. Bones had one hand tangled in his own hair, tugging at the roots, his teeth bared in a manic kind of rage, and Jim sank boneless into one of the creaky old chairs by the door. His communicator, as he tried it for what must have been the twentieth time that day, was unresponsive, his padd also. He closed his eyes against the burning artificial light from the overhead bulbs, their only option now that they had boarded the windows up. In a matter of days, the dorms had become a ghost town, populated by the very few that had nowhere else to go. The zombies, for want of a better word, were much more prevalent, and Jim shivered as a shadow was cast over the thin stream of light that filtered through a crack in the boards. He hadn’t met one face to face yet, but he’d seen them, seen glimpses on campus before people took off running, seen them press their expressionless faces up against the windows which weren’t boarded, misty eyes lacking anything that might once have hinted at a soul inside. More and more every day.
‘I have to go.’
That caught Jim’s attention.
‘What? Where?’
‘I have to find Jo-Jo,’ Bones rasped, his hair unkempt now that his hand had dropped to his side. ‘I can’t even call her to make sure she’s okay.’
His voice cracked on the last word, a sob escaping him, and Jim forced himself to his feet, stumbling over and clasping his biceps in support. Bones drew in a shaky breath, eyes wild and watery. Jim resigned himself to his fate.
‘Where is she?’
‘Staten Island,’ Bones replied nasally, gravity beginning to act on the dishevelled arcs of hair that combing his fingers through it had left. ‘Jocelyn took her there when she got a new job.’
Shit. That was going to take a while if the transporters – which the terminal message had stated had been taken offline – were truly inoperable. Still, he knew that Bones would stop at nothing to find his little girl, and therefore, so would Jim.
‘Right then,’ he muttered, letting his hands slip away from Bones’ arms. ‘We should try the transporters first, but if they’re not working, I’m sure there’s a hovercar we can jack.’
Bones stared, his brow furrowing in a way that was almost familiar, but not quite.
‘What do you mean? You want to come with me?’
‘Well yeah,’ Jim confirmed, insecurity beginning to pull at his stomach. ‘I mean… if that’s okay with you. I love Jo-Jo too.’
Bones continued to stare, and he almost backtracked. While he was accustomed to the feeling of not being wanted, with Bones, it brought fresh, startling pain. His aching lungs filled with air in preparation for a get-out clause, but then Bones’ face softened.
‘Y’sure, kid? It’s a long way if the transporters are bust, and I can’t guarantee it’ll be easy.’
Just like that, Jim could breathe again. His lips curved into a smile more genuine than most had ever seen from him.
‘You’re all I’ve got on Earth, Bonesy,’ he shrugged. ‘Pathetic, but true. C’mon, let’s go pack.’
Before he could see the effect his words had had, Jim turned and left the room, ignoring the shifting shadows from outside as he strode through the corridor. The thud of heavy footsteps followed a moment later, but he didn’t turn round, just wanting to get ready and go. He had thought that this was a place he could be better, could do better, like Pike had said. Turned out to be just another nightmare. He had briefly entertained the fact that this could be some elaborate ‘Fleet hoax, conjured up by the Powers That Be in order to test the cadets. But even the brass didn’t have the power to take control of the news channels, and fuck, if those things outside weren’t real, then he’d marry a Vulcan.
Their room was on the fourth floor, so they hadn’t bothered boarding the window. Outside milled what remained of the ‘Fleet cadets, vacant and terrifying, some still in their uniforms. There was no one else in their dorm, the rest having left to find family or friends, and the place was horribly, unsettlingly quiet.
‘Christ, Jim, slow down,’ Bones complained, as he hurtled up the stairs. ‘Where’s the fire?’
‘Inside me,’ Jim snorted. ‘Hurry up, old man.’
He entered their room with his code, locked by habit, and began to shovel clothes and toiletries into a ratty old rucksack, an old relic from his teenage days when he’d run away more times than he could count. He didn’t look out of the window. There was a little time yet to play at being ignorant of the horrors that lurked outside. By his bed, Bones was doing the same, hesitantly picking up things that Joanna had made him – a misshapen clay pot, a dreamcatcher, a comb with bent prongs – and tucking them into his own bag. Jim wanted to yell at him for being sentimental, for wasting space with useless trinkets, because he knew the score when packing with no certainty at the finish line. But Bones was cradling each superfluous item the way you did precious things, and Jim had no one to love like that, and so he held his tongue.
‘What do we need?’
Bones broke the thick silence with a question quiet enough to strain Jim’s ears. He shrugged, pulling on his cracked leather jacket despite the heat.
‘Clothes. Water. Food. Weapons. Not everywhere has replicators, so we’ll have to find actual food to take. We’ve got our phasers, obviously, and the charger should work since it’s battery-powered, but have you got anything else?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like… a knife?’ Jim asked, dragging his old F-S dagger out from where it had been concealed at the back of a drawer. ‘Or a gun?’
Bones shook his head.
‘In Georgia, not here. Sulu’d be pretty useful right about now.’
Jim smiled fleetingly, remembering how deadly Sulu had been in the Academy fencing matches, epée glinting in the Californian sun as he thrashed opponent after opponent.
‘Yeah,’ he whispered, tucking his knife into his inner jacket pocket. He didn’t know what had happened to Sulu in the melée, or Gaila, or Christine, or even Uhura, and it pained him to think of them when he’d seen so many corpses in the last few days. Phasers would do for now, but if he found anything better, he’d be grabbing it. Better armed to the teeth than defenceless in this fresh hell. Food and water were their next problems then. He almost always had food on him, having known the indescribable ache of a starving belly, and the hell he had put himself through in order to feed himself and the little ones. Non-perishables were tucked into the corner of his closet, concealed under his bed, and now he removed them, throwing tins into his bag and passing some to Bones without hesitation. Bones took what he was offered, a sad understanding on his face that wasn’t expressed in words. Jim was glad for that.
‘We’ll grab some stuff from the canteen, water especially,’ he said, testing the weight of his rucksack with a grimace. ‘Then we can go and check out the transporter. Your phaser charged?’
Bones nodded, his own bag considerably heavier considering the noise he made when he hauled it onto his back.
‘Right then. Let’s go.’
Bones was quiet, despite his earlier outburst, and Jim expected that the gravity of the situation had just hit him. He hadn’t quite processed it himself yet, but he still felt angry that he hadn’t truly appreciated the peace of before. Sure, he’d worked hard, and he’d enjoyed himself, but in the empty hallways of what remained, he realised how many people he’d never connected with, and how many of those people might already be dead. Dread seeped through him as they reached the canteen without incident, the kind that makes the stomach lurch in a misstep on the stairs, but he did his best to ignore it, making straight for the fridges of bottled water in the far left corner.
‘Bones, can you grab-’ he started, before realising that his friend was already raiding the shelves of the food store. ‘Never mind.’
He took as much water as he could carry, hefting his heavy rucksack onto his back and staggering off to find Bones, who emerged in a similar state.
‘I know this might seem like overkill right now, but we don’t know what’ll happen in New York.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Bones winced, wiggling his thumb underneath one of the straps so it didn’t cut into his shoulder so much. ‘Are we going? It’s not far to the transporter block.’
‘Yeah.’ Jim swallowed. ‘Have your phaser ready.’
There were a set of locked double doors at the back of the canteen, and amazingly, Jim had not seen any shadows crossing these windows in the past few days. His mouth went dry as he pressed the code in on a smudged screen, seeing Bones go white in his peripheral vision. Jim wanted to reassure him, but he didn’t know how to, instead pushing the door release and screwing his eyes up against the sudden sun. They stumbled out together into the light, hands raising to protect their vision, and Jim’s heart leapt into his throat as his ears focused and he heard shuffling footsteps.
‘This way,’ he mouthed, catching Bones’ sleeve with a finger as he moulded himself to the wall and crept along it, as silently as a child evading parental capture. In the strange quiet, he could hear Bones’ breathing quicken as they reached the corner of the building, and he peered round it, phaser drawn. Fortunately, the transporter block was in sight. Unfortunately, so were half a dozen of the infected. Jim’s eyes flicked from one to the next as they shambled across the courtyard like exhausted drunken revellers on the way home from a party, and leant back into Bones.
‘How stupid do you think they are?’ he whispered, barely audible.
‘The fuck if I know, Jim.’
Eyes narrowed, Jim bent to scoop up a handful of pebbles, throwing them as far as he could towards the shade of another building. As he had hoped, the sound of them skittering across the flagstones made heads turn, and each began a slow approach towards the noise. Jim signalled to Bones, and they bolted unseen across the strip of grass running along the edge of the stone towards the transporter block. When Jim reached the door, he scrabbled with the lock, gaze darting nervously towards the distracted group as he fumbled. Eventually though, he managed to key the right code in, and they all but fell inside, Jim only just remembering not to slam the door behind them.
‘Holy shit,’ he hissed, locking it, and making straight for the line of transporters at the other end of the room. His heart was going like the clappers, the same horrible fear that he had had in chase games as a child compressing his chest. ‘Holy fucking shit, Bones, they-’
‘Jim,’ Bones interrupted, and his voice was serious enough that Jim stopped fiddling with the wiring he had exposed with his knife.
‘What?’
‘Did you- Jim, one of them is Gary.’
Jim’s heart plummeted, a strange static buzzing in his ears. He shook his head to clear it, frowning.
‘No, no way. Are you sure?’ he asked, forgetting that they were meant to be hiding as he rushed over to the windows and peered back out. ‘Oh. Oh God.’
One of them was Gary, still in his cadet uniform, but a great tear in it revealed the bloody wound he had received, stark against the pale skin around it. Jim hadn’t looked closely at each figure before, focused on getting them to safety, but now nausea pulsed in his belly as he noted the blank stare in what had once been such dynamic eyes. Shit. Gary had been awful to him, but he didn’t deserve this. Tearing his gaze away, Jim stalked back over to the transporters and went for the wiring again, fingers feeling numb and clumsy.
‘Jim… Jim, I’m-’
‘Don’t.’
‘But-’
‘He was an asshole, okay. I don’t care.’
That was a lie.
‘Are you going to let me get a sentence out?’ Bones chided softly, a hand coming to rest on his shoulder as he worked. Jim couldn’t suppress a flinch, a souvenir of darker days, but clutched at Bones’ hand when he tried to remove it. There was a familiar sigh.
‘I’m sorry, alright? I fucking hated him for the way he treated you when you guys were together, but it’s okay for you to be upset.’
‘It isn’t if it slows me down,’ Jim said flatly, scowling as his rewiring had no effect. ‘I’m fine. But it looks like these are busted. Bastards weren’t joking.’
He looked up at Bones, knowing that this would be a blow.
‘You alright?’
Bones nodded once, his lips set in a grim, thin line.
‘I’m still goin’ for her,’ he growled. ‘However long it takes. D’you reckon hovercars will work?’
Jim swiped his tongue across his lower lip, shrugging.
‘They’re supposed to work via gravity manipulation, but they also work with satellites, so I guess we’ll just have to see. There’ll be one nearby somewhere.’
‘Let’s go then,’ Bones snapped, tugging at the collar of his shirt. He’d never been one for the heat, but Jim knew that it might freeze where they were going.
‘You did bring a coat, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah, I’m not fucking stupid.’
Jim opened his mouth to retort, but then there was a crashing sound behind the transporters, and Jim got his first look at a real-life zombie as a ‘Fleet engineer came lumbering into view. He whipped out his phaser, adrenaline pumping, and fired on stun as it staggered towards them, glazed eyes wide and unblinking. It did nothing. Jim panicked, agonising over whether or not to switch to kill as it approached, stumbling over torn uniform pants, and thank god for Bones. Frozen, Jim watched as the phaser blast hit the unfortunate thing square in the forehead, and it keeled over in a heap of tangled limbs barely a metre away.
‘They’re already dead, Jim,’ Bones told him, arm falling back to his side. ‘Remember that.’
Jim nodded, though still he stared at the fallen engineer, unease trickling down his spine. His phaser raised in case of another attack, he gestured for Bones to follow him towards the second, rarely-used exit, adrenaline overtaking any fear that lingered. They made their way to the door unmolested, but Jim could see a few more of the infected through the grimy window set into it.
‘Is that- Are they-?’
Bile rose in Jim’s throat as he realised why they were crouching. With gore smeared across their faces, they were pulling some poor bastard apart, teeth ripping into flesh with a spray of blood of concrete, tearing skin from bone. Jim felt sick.
‘At least it’ll give us a chance to get to a hovercar,’ he muttered, swallowing against his gag reflex. ‘There’s one over there, see?’
He pointed towards where a lone hovercar was parked haphazardly in a bay, door open, but no one inside.
‘Pray it damn well works. Otherwise we’ll have those three after our asses.’
Jim hesitated.
‘Okay, if it doesn’t, there’s a place near here with a few petrol cars,’ he remembered. ‘Far as I know, the guy who owns them keeps them in good shape, and with a tank of gas.’
‘And how would you know that?’
‘My dad had a penchant for classic cars,’ Jim muttered, suppressing a nervous cough as he reached for the old-style handle, glancing back at Bones, who nodded sharply. The door opened with a quiet hiss, but even that was enough to spark Jim’s nerves, gaze flicking back and forth between the feeding frenzy mere metres away from them, and the abandoned hovercar. He sent Bones ahead of him with a quick hand gesture, blood rushing in his ears as he kept his weapon trained on the group tearing into another human being like wild animals, the gravity of the situation only now beginning to dawn on him. By the time he had stumbled over to the hovercar, Bones was already poised by the driver’s seat, finger stabbing uselessly at the ignition button. There was a horrible anxiety in his eyes as he looked up at Jim, making the same repetitive motion.
‘Can you fix it?’ he mouthed, brow creased in anguish, and Jim shrugged helplessly. He knew bikes, knew old cars to some extent, but not hovercars. He felt like he was being watched, out here in the open, hairs rising on the back of his neck in some primitive warning mechanism, and before he could decide whether to stay and try and start it, or go to the garage, Bones made the decision for him. In clumsy desperation, he came stumbling round the bulk of the hovercar towards Jim, and his foot came into contact with an unseen bottle by the right front wheel. Jim watched in abject horror as the bottle skittered away from them, the dull thud of glass meeting boot soon dwarfed by the smash that signalled its contact with the wall. Such an inconsequential sound, in normality. But this was no longer normality. Bones was choking on an apology by the time it was halfway to its dooming destination, but apologies did not prevent the rise of four heads from their prey’s ruined body, nor the inevitable staggering to their feet, and pointed approach. Jim swore under his breath as he raised his shaking hand and shot, missing his mark the first time, but not the second, toppling a stringy-haired blonde girl into a tall black man like human skittles. He was shifting his aim to finish the job when Bones’ soft whimper drew his attention –
‘Jim.’
His arm dropped as he followed Bones’ finger, eyes focusing on an approaching mob, thirty- or forty-strong – and every deadened gaze was trained on them.
‘Fuck,’ he squeaked, panic spurring him into movement. The mob was perhaps less than a hundred metres away, and gaining. ‘Bones, we gotta-’
‘Move!’
Bones shoved him, hard, and he started running, firing blindly behind him as he tried to use muscle memory to remember the way to the garage, memory failing. One of the original group was almost on them when Bones swung around and shot it in the head, no time to make sure that the job was done as they left the relative safety of campus, pounding pavement. Jim grabbed Bones’ hand and dragged him, alarm bells shrieking in his head as the main road yielded yet more rising bodies, hands snatching out at them from open windows and slumped heaps in the road.
‘The next right, then to the end of the road,’ Jim whispered urgently, trying to ignore the increase in shuffling footsteps. He pulled Bones with him as he turned the corner, skittering to a halt as the road narrowed and the numbers increased, picking a few off as he tried to decide what to do.
‘Can’t go back, Jim,’ Bones growled, shooting at the closest – a dark-suited woman, and – fuck – an Andorian. He was right. Though the approaching mob didn’t make a sound, he could still hear their movements, and as he took out a set of Caitian twins and a sparrow-boned teenager, he began trying to thread his way through the gaps before they closed, starting as a fingernail scraped his ear and Bones shot whatever was clawing at him. They were almost there, almost there, the crowd thinning a little the further away from the main road they got, and Jim sprinted towards the garage in a final burst of energy, dragging Bones in and slamming the doors behind them. Black spots danced over his vision as his lungs fought for air, forcing it inwards with a ragged inhale, and Bones didn’t look much better, bent forward with his hands on his knees. His backpack fell to the floor with a loud thud.
‘We gotta go,’ Jim said hoarsely, flinching at the first slam against the bowing wooden doors. His eyes ran over each pristine car, making the appropriate calculations. ‘The Jeep’s our best bet, I think.’
‘Right,’ Bones replied weakly, shoving his backpack into the passenger footwell along with Jim’s.
‘And we’re gonna need about six petrol cans.’
The slamming against the doors was becoming more and more frequent, and Jim wasted no time hefting two cans into the backseat from where they sat in rows against the back wall, not bothering with the roof rack. Bones was following his lead when there was a splintering noise, and they both whirled to see a crack widening in one of the doors, the weight of too many bodies pushing against it.
‘Shit. Go!’
Bones obeyed, pushing his two next to the first, and went back for more as Jim sprang for the ignition, keys resting on the blind as they always did. With another loud crack, a panel splintered away from the rest, and Bones dropped a can in fright, petrol spilling over the floor.
‘Leave it,’ Jim hissed, the car sputtering gloriously to life just as the door cracked almost in two and the frenzied mob came into view, held back only by the centre piece of wood. ‘Come on!’
Bones hauled the last can into the Jeep and dragged himself into the passenger seat, slamming the door as the crackcrackcrack of wood grew louder. Jim revved the engine, heart pounding, and then the door gave way, and he slammed his foot down on the accelerator, the Jeep bucking wildly as they mowed down a dozen writhing bodies, yet more clawing at the armoured sides of the Jeep. They skidded as they hit the open road, Jim barely keeping control when they ploughed through the greatest mass of the mob, and then they were leaving most behind them, a heady relief filling Jim as he watched them in the rear-view mirror.
‘Fuck,’ he gasped, trying to keep an eye on Bones as they weaved through stragglers. ‘Are you alright?’
‘I’m alive, aren’t I?’ Bones deadpanned. ‘Fuck, Jim, ’course I’m not alright, and neither are you!’
‘Yeah, that’s true,’ Jim rasped. His breathing was calming now, and he had only just realised how hot he was in his jacket, shrugging it off. Bones helped him drag the oppressive fabric away, and he sighed at the mild relief, trying the A/C. It worked, thank God.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’
‘Interstate 80E,’ Jim nodded, swallowing against the dryness in his throat. ‘Travelled it before. It’s going to take us a few days, though, even if we take turns sleeping.’
Bones sighed, one booted foot swinging up to rest on the dashboard. His laces were double-knotted and fraying, like usual, and it comforted Jim to see even such a small slice of familiarity. When Bones didn’t seem to want to reply, gaze blank and unfocused, Jim turned his attention elsewhere, running over a thrashing body with the barest hint of a wince. As they sped through suburbia, he saw horrors he had never before witnessed, endless streams and pockets of bloody walking corpses, old and young, male and female, black and white, human and Orion and Andorian. Still more bent over the remains of their kin with teeth bared, blood and brain and bone strewn carelessly across too-green grass and uneven concrete, and for a gut-wrenching moment, Jim wondered if he and Bones were the only ones left.
‘They’re feral,’ Jim remarked, the silence having become too much to bear. He watched as a pack descended on a screaming man in the distance, but by the time he went for the accelerator, the poor guy’s throat had been ripped out. ‘That’s what we should call them. Ferals.’
Bones had turned to stare at the carnage they left behind, fingers twitching like they did whenever he saw someone in pain and couldn’t get to a hypo.
‘I mean, ‘zombie’ is too cheesy,’ Jim babbled, nausea returning with a sudden vengeance. He slammed the brakes on, and opened the door to dry heave onto the road, Bones’ large warm hands coming to rest on his shoulders, and a gentle sting in his neck signalling a depressed hypospray. The drugs worked just as well as they always did, a welcome constant, and before a nearby Feral could come crawling up to him, he shut the door again.
‘You okay?’ Bones asked, brow as crinkled as ever, and Jim nodded, flinching as the Feral pressed its face up against the window, a handsome face marred by a frozen, unnerving stare. He pressed the accelerator, and promptly stalled, trying again with the car in gear. He let out a shaky breath as they set off again, ignoring the squeak of the Feral sliding across his window.
‘I’m fine, I think. Did you notice that it’s more than humans?’
‘What? No!’
‘That’s why they’ve quarantined us, the bastards,’ Jim hissed, slowing a little as they hit the dual carriageway, and met a queue of hovercars, bodies weaving between them. ‘Fuck, we’re gonna have to go round. Why are there so many here?’
‘The disruptor shit only happened this morning, Jim,’ Bones pointed out, swearing as Jim pushed them up onto the verge beside the road. Ferals turned to look as they sped past the abandoned vehicles, beginning to stagger after them, and seeing the human vultures prey upon the remains of the drivers and their families, Jim was unbelievably glad that they had the Jeep.
‘Try and get some shut-eye, will you?’ he asked, swinging back onto the road as it cleared in the wake of a barrier. ‘I’ll have to at some point, and I don’t want us sleeping at the same time in this shit.’
‘As if I’m going to be able to sleep like this, dimwit,’ Bones snapped, but he closed his eyes anyway, leaning back against the headrest. Jim noticed the thread bracelet he was wearing for the first time as his hands came to rest in his lap, and remembered with a jolt that Joanna had made it for him for Father’s Day. Fuck, he hoped she was still alive. He hoped that there was help to be found somewhere. No stranger to terrible situations, Jim gritted his teeth against the fear and dread and floored the accelerator, the stark image of Gary’s glazed eyes tormenting him.