Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It’s nearing summer.

The balmy air passes over your exposed arms and stirs the loose strands of hair brushing your temples. You bask in it, tilt your face up to the gleaming sun with a contented sigh. You know this pleasant warmth won’t last very long—you give it a few weeks time before it turns into the stifling, oppressive heat of summer. You weren’t sure of the exact month, but you could smell it in the air, feel it in the change of the breeze and the hum of the bugs around you.

The heat was problematic for a number of reasons. Sunburn was chief among them; sunscreen is practically a figment of your imagination at this point, and there is no possible chance of you staying out of the sun. There’s only so much coverage your clothing could provide before that, too, was suffocating. Another issue was the fucking stench.

You’d long since gotten used to the scent of decay—human, animal, infected. All carcasses smelled the same in the end, rotting and putrid beneath the incessant beat of the sun, the buzz of flies, and the crawl of maggots. The fetid odor never bothered you as much as it did during the hottest days. No matter how far away you made sure to stay from the rot, it lingered on your skin. You had scrubbed yourself raw in countless rivers over the years.

You wish, sitting there on the crumbling balcony beneath the gradually warming sun, that you hadn’t lost your journal all those months ago. Perhaps it’s already been a year—you remember the day you lost it, watched it drop down into the ravine and get swept up by the river a mile out from the camp you’d been calling home at the time. It was a warm day; sunny, but not hot. The air smelled sweet. Much like today, actually.

Your journal, amongst other things, had been your primary method of keeping any sort of timeline. The tallies you’d marked on the water-stained paper had gotten up to the 800s by the time you’d lost it, lines packed in so tight that they’d been nearly indecipherable. According to your shoddy mental math, you would now be well into the thousands. Three years and some change. It feels like a lifetime.

You can’t linger for much longer. You’ve already wasted far too much daylight than you should’ve allowed yourself. These periods were your least favorite; being in between camps, the meager sum of your belongings weighing down the pack on your shoulders. Your axe is constantly stained with blood and viscera, your knives are rapidly dulling, and your single remaining gun is kept on you at all times.

It’s been a rough going for a while now, even for you. Three camps in as many months (you think, atleast) when you can usually manage to stretch one for half a year. You have had to kill more people—not infected, people—weighed down by the need for supplies, the need for survival, and the threat of others.

You didn’t buy into the kill or be killed mindset that your fellow survivors had seemed to adopt over the last few years. You killed with no need to explain it to yourself, to make it more palatable. To be frank, you often had no idea whether or not those you killed would actually kill you if they got the chance to. Maybe they would’ve offered you some sort of agreement. Partnership. Mutually assured survival. You didn’t let them live long enough to bother; you’d been burned one too many times, and you had no desire for teammates.

You weren’t always like this. There was a time when the sight of another person gave you pause, made you consider. When you’d meet sunken-in eyes across the highway and go your separate ways. When you’d save someone trapped in a bombarded house, when you’d find comfort in the plumes of smoke rising up from deep within the woods, when you'd leave camps be.

Now, you loot corpses and camps alike with little regard, knowing they’d do the same to you—and probably even worse. You’d faced more threats on your life from your fellow men than you have from the infected lately. One too many ransacked camps, stolen goods, and scars from various weapons to allow yourself to harbor any remnant of compassion anymore.

You could hardly be called a survivor nowadays. Most of the time, you felt like a predator.

You shove your pistol into the waistband of your jeans and rise to a stand. The carbon steel is a cold shock against your skin, one which you savor. Guns had been one of the first things to go, predictably, and yours were no exception to the fact. Every camp you came across had you keeping your eye out for your stolen rifle or shotgun, but you’ve had no luck all these years. You’ve only come across a handful of other people who also had guns on them this entire time, and you kept them until the ammo ran out and then chucked them in the nearest river.

Sourcing bullets for one gun was impossible enough as is—any others would just be added weight to your pack that you couldn’t justify carrying. You never shot your pistol unless you deemed it absolutely necessary, but you needed the feel of it against you to feel comforted. The last box of bullets in your possession rattling around in your pack dimmed that pathetically weak sense of security.

You pulled your creased map from your back pocket. If you were just outside of Leeds like you’d hoped you were, you should reach Bradford by dusk, then Huddersfield, and then Manchester, where you’d find some halfway decent place to board up for the summer. You could admit to yourself that you were tired of the constant travel—you’ve walked more the last handful of months than you have since this all started.

With one last glance at the sky, you make your way back onto the main road you’d been traveling down earlier in the day. Ignoring the ache in your muscles and the grinding of your bones is second nature. You walk, and walk, and walk.

You could remember, in excruciatingly clear detail, the first day of the rest of your life. It came right after you’d gotten settled into your station in England.

Your deployments with the Marine Corps had you overseas more often than not, but it was rare for you to be put on temporary additional duty, and even more so without your unit. Your Captain had informed you that the plan was for you to remain on base at Lakenheath for a minimum of three months, but no longer than six, working on an ongoing mission that your team would soon join you on. You’d made it all of one month before—well, this.

The military had tried to gain some sense of control at first. White tents, army cots full of civilians, megaphones and tactical trucks and families being torn apart. A fever reading too high, a flash of red, and a gunshot. Before anyone knew that the airborne virus lay dormant inside everyone, hundreds had already been killed, and then killed again. Mandatory evacuations, roadblocks, the sonic boom of fighter jets, the sound of bombs far too close. Entire neighborhoods went up in smoke in an attempt to contain the spread. It was fruitless. There was no plan. There was no back-up, no safety net for the civilians.

In the brief flashes you managed to catch of a news station in between emergency broadcasts, the United States was faring even worse. Something to do with the migration patterns of the birds at the time, spreading the virus up along each respective coast and infecting the major cities first. You remember glimpses of New York engulfed in chaos, Chicago next, then Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Atlanta—that was the last city you remember seeing, smoke plumes and explosions and hordes of people running, before the televisions were cut and everything went black.

You never did end up finding out what became of your family back in Washington. You’d lost your phone in the commotion long before those became obsolete. Maybe they went up into the mountains. Maybe they survived the initial hit. During your especially sleepless nights, you hope they didn’t.

It was largely a blur. You operated on instinct alone for the first two full weeks, before it became apparent that you couldn’t stay on base and expect to survive. There were no body bags left. Burned corpses with headshot wounds laid in piles taller than you all throughout the rolling green fields. That was something the military figured out quickly enough: how to kill them. How to make sure they stayed dead.

Though certain memories had grown dull with time and a necessity to forget, you could still remember the first person you saw infected.

It was a woman who had found her way into the camps on base. Most civilians were contained to the stadiums first, and when those got filled up, the empty land surrounding the base were overrun with tents and barbed wire. Makeshift checkpoints with chain link fences kept a strict hold on who was allowed in—and out. It had been your second day manning the post. You heard her before you saw her.

The throaty growls and the guttural screams should’ve prompted you to act sooner. You should’ve had your gun drawn before she even got the chance to run and sunk a bullet into her skull before she got the chance to pounce on the nearest person. You don’t know which body bag she had crawled out of, and you don’t know who failed to shoot her in the head the first time. That was the extent of what anyone knew at the time. Once someone died, kill them twice—otherwise, they’d turn. It was a dormant virus, they said. A sleeper agent.

Her eyes were red and her skin was sickeningly pallid. Blood ran in thick rivulets down her chin from where she’d vomited it up in huge, dripping clots. The way her teeth gnawed and her body thrashed was animalistic—worse than. You didn’t even get the chance to blink before the man beside you was cussing some harsh expletives and shooting her between the eyes. It shouldn’t have shocked you as badly as it did.

Four weeks after that, and countless more people—infected, or maybe both, you don’t remember this part all that well—killed, you were shoving as much stuff you could into your largest pack. Nonperishables, first aid supplies, countless tampons, MREs, knives, your pistol, as many ammo boxes as you could fit. Your best set of tactical clothing rolled into tight balls, shoved into the bottom. Another pair of pants and another long sleeve shirt beneath your camo uniform. Your shotgun slung across your pack, your rifle on your shoulder. Boots tied to your pack straps that matched the ones on your feet.

You wouldn’t stray too far from base; you’d go towards one of the outskirt cities, hole up and assess the situation, and come back to replenish whatever supplies you needed. They’d stopped with keeping up any pretense of security and structure in four short weeks; now, it was shoot first, ask later. You’d keep coming until the base was looted clean or overrun with infected—whichever came first.

It was a good plan. It was better than staying on that base and either waiting to become one of them, or waiting to be shot regardless. You’d seen one too many of your own men shot for the sake of keeping the peace to know that things were headed down a bleak path. You figured you would rather try your own hand at survival—you weren’t the first on base to attempt it. The barracks had been growing increasingly emptier and emptier with each passing day, more and more people slipping out of the gates unnoticed. You don’t remember feeling panicked. You knew what you had to do, and you’d always been good on a mission.

At that time, there were still more people than infected. Civilization wasn’t in total ruin. You could almost look back fondly on these days. The desperate scrabble for survival, the vague sense of companionship, the storefronts that hadn’t yet been completely demolished, the power in numbers. It was only a matter of months before things really and truly went to shit, but at that time, you were almost buoyant with something like hope. The memory makes you laugh.

You slipped out of the back gates surrounding the base and ignored the towering corpses around you. You walked, and walked, and walked.

Two days later you awaken in Manchester, boarded up in the back room of a fueling station with a filing cabinet barricading the door.

The first thing you’re made aware of is the ache in every joint of your body. You blink up at the speckled, water-stained ceiling until the blurriness clears from your eyes. After a silent moment, ears strained to listen for any snarling, you push yourself up to a seated position and pop your neck before reaching over to unzip your pack, fishing around for your canteen. Your mouth is so dry that it's painful, and your canteen has been getting dreadfully low; you’ll need to find a river soon. And wood dry enough for a fire.

Keeping your hand as steady as possible, you allow a few drops to fall from the spout and wet your tongue. Just enough to quench the dryness, to make it so that you could swallow without feeling like you had a strip of sandpaper in your mouth. It helps, if only marginally, and you take a quick inventory of the other things remaining in your pack. Your axe hangs from the front straps. You have two MREs stored away leftover from the stash you’d gotten from your last trip to base, saved for a rainy day. Your last unopened box of ammo. Two granola bars you managed to knick from some sorry fucker’s camp a week or two back, a dented can of green beans, a lighter, and your knives. One throwing knife, your prized military grade combat knife, and a clip-point that you don’t even remember acquiring.

You’ll need to hunt soon—you need meat. Squirrels are easy enough, if you flick your wrist just the right way and pin them with your knife. Birds too, sometimes, and even the occasional rabbit if you’re really lucky. You aren’t picky, and it’s easy enough to butcher the small prey and roast them over a crude fire at the same time as your water.

Staring down into the sum of your belongings feels pitiful, given how little it is. It was impossible for you to keep track of all that you lost over the years. You know you had a first aid kit at some point, and another pair of boots in far better shape than your tattered ones now. You had two other guns, and what seemed like plenty of ammo. More clothes. More food. Jugs of water. All gone, either stolen or lost or used up. You twist the cap of your canteen on and shove it back into your pack, yanking the zipper closed.

At least you’re in Manchester now. The bigger cities got hit the hardest in the beginning, and then they became desolate once everyone ran for the hills, save for the infected that mindlessly trudged along the streets. You’ve always had better chances restocking supplies and finding a suitable shelter in a city than you did on your own in the countryside.

The screech of the metal tile cabinet against the linoleum floor makes you wince as you push it away from the door. You triple-check that your handgun is in your waistband before toeing open the door and peering around the edge.

All that greets you on the other side is emptied and tipped over metal shelves. Mercifully, there’s not many places for infected to hide, so you feel comfortable enough pushing out of the back room and making your way towards the main street.

Glass crunches beneath your boots as you cross through the fueling station and step over the empty door frame. It’s early enough in the morning that the sun has yet to fully rise, casting the tall, cramped buildings around you in the dim glow of dawn. The air is damp, humid with the oncoming heat of the day, and it’s so deathly silent that even your own footsteps seem obtrusively loud.

The comfort of the city around you, however overrun and desolate it may be, was an unexpected but welcome thing. Your shoulders relax infinitesimally from their permanently tensed state. You keep your ears attuned to the slightest noise: the shuffling of heavy feet, the kicking of a rock, the ragged breaths of an infected. Your next immediate priority is supplies.

As the sun rises and the morning warms up, you poke through a number of storefronts and collect whatever you can. A can of beans in a convenience store, an untouched roll of gauze in a pharmacy that feels like a gold mine. You walk for at least a handful of hours before you come across your first infected.

It’s a man, shoulders hunched and clothing hanging off his emaciated frame in blood-stained tatters. He stands mindlessly beneath a stop sign just ahead of where you’re perched behind a car. You drum your fingers against your thighs and consider your options carefully. They never travel in packs, but you know well enough by now to understand that a gunshot would undoubtedly attract whatever others lingered in the area, and it would be a needless waste of ammo that you certainly couldn’t afford.

You reach over your back and grip the blade of your axe, pulling it free from the criss-crossed front straps of your pack. The wooden handle is hefty in your hands. You clench and unclench your fingers around it once, twice, and then you’re rising to a stand and hurrying around the car. You keep your footsteps light so as to not alert the infected to your presence too quickly, and as soon as you’re within arms reach and the infected turns to you with a blackened, bloody face, a snarl curling it’s grotesque and rotted lips, you raise your arms high above your head and slam the blade of the axe down into its forehead.

It immediately goes still. You wrench the blade free with a grunt and kick the corpse down to the ground, where it falls with a dull thud, cracking its skull even further on the pavement.

Your lip curls at the sight. You’ve killed thousands upon thousands of these things by now, and even still, the sight of them revolts you. Angers you, almost. You step over the body and continue down the street with your axe in hand. You make it only a few blocks before you come across another.

This time, it sees you at the same time you see it. The infected immediately picks up in a run towards you, hands already grasping for you and black blood trailing from its agape mouth in sickening streams. This one seems livelier than the last, less gaunt looking, which leads you to believe it has fed recently. There’s likely even more lingering in the area. You don’t have time to ponder on this any further before the stench of the thing reaches your nose, and then you’re swinging your axe into the side of its neck.

It’s not enough to kill the thing, but it halts it in its tracks. Its hands bat at your shoulders and make clumsy attempts to grab at your neck, fingers slipping on your skin from the blood, no doubt smearing it there. The length of the axe keeps you separated enough so that it has no purchase, but the more it fights back, the more it pushes forward. You hurriedly rip the axe free from it’s neck and ignore the splatter of blood that flies across your face from it. The movement jostles the infected just enough so that you have time to swing the axe into its head.

Its hands fall from your neck. You take a moment to inhale and shake the hair out of your face before pulling your blade free once again, this time much more gently, so as to not splatter yourself with even more blood. You have no idea when you’ll get an opportunity to clean yourself off again, and you’d rather not get to the point of filth where you have to use what’s left in your canteen.

You take a quick glance around the intersection you stand in. Burned out cars line the streets and shattered glass from broken windows litters the pavement. There’s not as many corpses around as you would’ve expected, and you aren’t sure what to attribute that to, so you try not to think about it at all.

The sun sits high in the sky now, warming you up enough that sweat beads along your forehead. You crouch down onto one knee and slide your pack off your shoulders, rooting around inside until you grab one of the granola bars you’d stolen. That’ll have to be enough to satiate you until tomorrow, when you can properly set out to hunt and make a fire. For today, you need to keep your focus on supplies, and finding a shelter.

You eat as you continue walking. For a stale, crumbling granola bar, it tastes far better than it has any right to, and you savor it as best you can despite your gnawing stomach all but forcing you to eat it in one go. The blood on your face dries down to an itchy crust, and the sweat drips from your hairline down into the collar of your shirt. You’ve become far too accustomed to discomfort to pay any mind to either of these things.

You peer into the cars you pass and step into each and every store you come across, rifling through whatever was left by the previous scavenger. You know better than to trust any one of the buildings right off the street as a safe place to sleep. You’ll need to go further out, trail along the backroads and edge along the perimeter of the city to find what you’ll need. Something not completely destroyed, and preferably something with two stories, though you’ll take what you can get.

More time passes in this way. You walk, you loot, you skirt around infected that are too far away for you to bother killing. The sun begins its downward set by the time you finally decide you’ve gathered as much as you’ll be able to today and begin your trek out of the city proper.

You walk between two tall buildings, keeping you shadowed from the sun. You’ve long since retired your axe back to its position in the front straps on your pack and your pistol slides against the sweat-slick skin of your side with each step you take. You go to round the corner and head down a side street just off the main one you’d been traveling along when you see it, diagonal to you across the street, just visible over the roof of cars.

It’s—you blink, somehow startled by this discovery. It’s a man. A human man. He’s squatted down onto his haunches in front of a staircase leading to a boarded up town home. His shoulders move around like he’s rifling through something, and when you raise onto your toes, you see a large black pack at his feet.

You inhale through your nose at the sight, eyes taking in the rest of his frame. He’s got on a gray fleece jacket; your first thought is he must be sweltering. A dark green tactical vest is secured over it, and he has on a pair of camouflage fatigues with what appears to be a holster around his thigh. The boots on his feet are shockingly similar to yours. From behind, you can see he’s got something black covering his head, the seam of it running right down the middle of his skull. A ski mask? A balaclava? You frown.

Actually, many things about his appearance make you frown. You can’t fathom how a scavenger would’ve acquired such gear: the vest, the fatigues, the holster. There’s no gun immediately visible on him, or any other weapon for that matter. You frown even harder when your eyes trail back down to the boots on his feet. They could be an exact match for yours; the pair you’d taken with you from base, that you’d treated like a prized possession all this time.

It takes you an embarrassingly long moment to finally place where you recognize his gear from. It’s military.

The thought gives you pause. There was the occasional scavenger that got lucky and came across a dead soldier, or perhaps was even able to loot a base for supplies, but even then the fit of their tactical gear looked clunky in a way that always gave them away. They didn’t hold themselves the right way, didn’t have the stature, could hardly handle the weapons. And they sure as shit didn’t care enough to grab things such as tactical vests and thigh holsters and utility pouches.

Could he be someone you knew? Someone you worked with, if only for a month? Someone you saw in passing on base?

Would it matter?

If anything, his status makes him even more of a threat to you. You hadn’t run into another person from the military since you left base, which felt impossible, but you’d always figured they all either stayed holed up in their own respective bases, fled to the hills, or died once it became clear they wouldn’t be able to keep their tenuous hold of control.

Movement snaps you out of your train of thought. He rises to a stand, and in a smooth, practiced motion, slides a pistol into the holster at his thigh. Your heart kicks into a hard rhythm.

You can tell he’s too tall and too big for the axe to be effective, and you don’t want to waste a bullet. That, and your curiosity is strong enough that for once it overrides your instinct to just kill him from afar. At the very least, you want all of his shit, and to ask where he came from.

He crouches back down again to continue rifling through his pack. You scooch back further against the building and quickly, and quietly, you slide your own pack off your shoulders and hurriedly unzip it, grabbing the first knife you see. Your fingers almost tremble with adrenaline.

By the time you’ve righted yourself again and peered back out towards the street, he’s zipping up his pack, rising to a stand, and swinging it around his shoulders. You’ll have to be fast, and so silent that he won’t hear you coming. You don’t know if it’s an impossible task, don’t know if you’ll die doing it, but the possibilities of what could be in that black pack are far too promising for you to even think about leaving him be. Before you talk yourself out of it, you dart out between two cars and cross the street.

You press in close enough that his pack pokes into your front and you keep the knife tight against his throat, arm hooked around his neck. Just as you predicted, he’s tall enough that it’s a bit of an awkward reach, but it’ll work well enough for what you need. He immediately goes rigid, hand instinctively flying towards the pistol at his thigh and his hips pivoting to turn towards you, but you’ve already pulled the gun out with your free hand. You click the safety off and press the muzzle into his lower back.

“Don’t fucking move.”

It’s been so long since you’ve spoken that your voice is rough and scratchy, the sound of your voice unfamiliar even to your own ears. You clear your throat before speaking again. “I’ll shoot you. I don’t really need you alive for this next part.”

Much to your surprise, he obliges, only shifting to raise his hands in a show of surrender. You don’t retract your gun, nor do you ease up its pressure, but your fingers do relax around the hilt. You’re so close that you can hear him inhale slowly, measuredly, like he’s at ease. You can’t see much of his front from the angle you’re at, but you don’t need to see it to know your knife has sliced through the black fabric covering his head.

You swallow in an attempt to ease your vocal cords. “Take off your pack. Slowly.”

His shoulders rise with another inhalation, but again, he complies. You step back just enough to give him space to maneuver it off of his body. It falls to your feet with a heavy thud, and the promise that noise carries has your spine tingling in excitement.

“Turn to face me, and keep your hands up.”

He does just that, and you adjust the weapons accordingly, now pointing the knife just beneath the bump of his Adam's apple and keeping the gun pressed firmly against his lower stomach. One wrong move from him, and he’s either getting stabbed through the throat or shot in the intestines. You finally get a good, real look at him. He’s got a pair of black sunglasses on, and you see clearly what is covering his head: a skull painted black balaclava. You can just make out the bridge of his nose and the skin around his eyes from beneath the sunglasses. You can’t tell where he’s looking, which unsettles you, if only slightly. You don’t recognize his appearance, but that doesn’t count for much nowadays.

You’ve not been around another human being in so long that you almost don’t know how to act. Your brain cycles through a few rapid fire questions to ask, but you end up settling on, “Do you have any other weapons on you?”

He doesn’t move for a second too long. You increase the pressure of the tip of your knife against his throat, and finally, he clears his own and speaks. “No.”

His voice is even more rough and gravely than your own, but you have no way of telling if that’s the result of disuse or just the natural state of his voice. You don’t believe him, of course, but it doesn’t really matter.

You readjust your grip on the gun. It falters against his stomach slightly, and he must feel the movement, because his head dips down. You imagine he’s looking at where the muzzle presses into his skin. “You know how to use that thing?”

The question catches you off guard. “Want me to prove it?”

For good measure you push the gun further against him, hoping it’ll bruise, or at the very least be mildly uncomfortable. He simply lifts his head again and doesn’t respond. You flare your nostrils in a sharp inhale. “Are you military?”

Though you have no actual proof of it, you get the sense that this question makes him glare at you. The line of his shoulders seems to become even tenser than before. Ah. Hit the nail on the head.

A long, silent moment extends between the two of you. You stare unflinchingly into the impenetrable black sunglasses. You can barely
make out your reflection in them: the disarray of your hair falling out of its days old braid, the dark blood splattered across your cheek and chin, the steeliness of your eyes and the harsh line of your lips. You blink, and then he finally responds.

“Why?”

You wonder what possible reason he would have to be defensive over answering that. He’s traveling alone—at least, you presume so, seeing as you glanced into all the empty buildings surrounding you and didn’t see another living soul before ambushing him—and there’s no functioning military base in operation anymore. Not that you’ve heard of, anyways. With how well stocked he is, and how relatively clean his clothes look, you wouldn’t be surprised if he had connections somehow. The notion only makes you more desperate for answers.

“Your gear.” You jerk your head down in reference to his vest, the utility pouches lining his chest, the empty holster on his thigh. “Where’s it from?”

He rears his head back ever so slightly, and when he speaks, his voice sounds almost disbelieving. He ignores your question and asks one of his own. “Are you?”

You look into where you imagine his eyes would be. Nothing about your attire would suggest prior military involvement—not your tattered plain shirt, not the dirt stained jeans you wear. The only giveaways would maybe be your boots and your pack, but you aren’t sure he even saw either of those. There’s no real reason for you to not answer that, but you don’t want to talk about you. You tell him as much. “This isn’t about me. I asked you a question.”

You punctuate your sentence with pressing the tip of your knife further into his neck. You see the tiny hole it’s created in the black balaclava, the flash of pale skin. He raises his hands marginally higher, as if to remind you he’s complying, but otherwise says nothing.

You’re steadily growing impatient. You run your tongue along the back of your teeth and consider your next options. You want to grab his pack and make a run for it, but you don’t trust that he’s currently unarmed, and you don’t trust that he wouldn’t just chase you. Something about the tenseness of his body and the set of his feet spells danger that you’re just barely containing in your current positions. You could just slot your knife right beneath his Adam’s apple and then shoot him in the head, but something stops you from considering that further. You want more from him. You want answers; you want to know if he does have a base, and if so, where it is.

In an effort to buy yourself time, your eyes sweep down his body again. It would be so easy for him to be hiding a knife in the arms of his jacket or a pants leg. So long as you keep him incapacitated enough to where he can’t reach for it, it shouldn’t be an issue. You’ve taken down men of his size and stature before, but that was before, when you were healthy and eating regularly and working out. Now, you aren’t so sure.

He seems content to let you mull your next steps over. Just as you make a decision and open your mouth to speak, you see his hands drop slightly, coming to rest at his thighs. His shoulders raise and square themselves even further. He tilts his chin up, imperceptibly, and before you have time to process his sudden change in body language, you hear heavy footfalls behind you.

They come up fast. Faster than you can turn around. The man in front of you twists your wrist and rips the knife from your hand, and in the same motion, he uses your shock at the change of events to take the gun from your suddenly lax grip. You blink, your body already tensing and your hands forming into fists, ready to fight, but before you can so much as move there are two thick arms wrapping around your shoulders and pinning you.

You can feel the hard chest of a man pressed against you, even through your pack. He squeezes you so tightly against him that it almost chokes the air out of you. Pure, instinctual panic overrides any shock you might’ve felt at the prospect of being trapped by two men—two large, apparently armed men. Your mind forces you to imagine all the ways they could torture you, kill you, steal from you, rape you. You don’t even think as you begin thrashing within the other man’s hold.

You kick your heels back as roughly as you can against his shins. You claw at his exposed forearms, fingernails digging in so sharply that you draw blood, and you can hear voices. Two voices, yelling, cussing. You can’t make out any of their words in your frenzied state as you feel the man in front of you attempt to grab at your flailing wrists.

You shoot your hands out haphazardly towards his masked face and manage to knock his sunglasses off and to the ground. A pair of dark brown eyes, pupils black pinpoints with the sudden onset of the sunlight, stare at you in evident frustration. His eyebrows are furrowed deeply. He immediately forgoes trying to grab your wrists and instead turns your own knife against you.

Before the blade can make contact with your skin, you rear your elbow back and slam it into the face of the man still holding you. It makes contact, the collision of bone on bone rattling up into your arm, and you finally hear your first coherent word from the man as the roaring in your head momentarily dies down. “Fuck!”

The arms around your body loosen and you don’t hesitate to rip them off completely. It all happens so quickly that you feel dizzy, blood thrumming in your veins, vision almost blurred with adrenaline and fear. The men are yelling again, but you can’t tell if it’s at you or at each other. You can’t hear anything beyond your own rapid heartbeat.

You turn your body at your hips and prepare to run, but you don’t get a chance to step away from them. The skull-faced man slams you in the temple with the butt of his pistol, and the last thing you feel is your knees slamming into the pavement before you’re out.