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He should’ve known something was really wrong with Mr. Martin.
Pale skin, increasingly losing the sense of reality, a fever number that definitely raised some concerned eyebrows and popped a couple eyes.
Although technically Maggie’s patient, she did ask for his input on the case. She did and all he answered was “Looks like a severe case of the flu” then moved on to probably reprimand Lucy on something that wasn’t her fault or look in a mirror or something of equal importance.
Deep down he knew, even then, it was more than that. The disperse gaze gave away something too buried to locate at first glance, perhaps not even on the tenth, but still enough for him to stop and think over it for more than one fucking minute. Those eyes had no real emotion behind them; the thought had crossed his mind while walking away from Maggie.
When he looks back on how everything went down, the sick taste of bile that’ll rise in his throat will end up as real vomit, covering the street’s concrete. A warm, honest hand always rubbing his back.
Agonizing hours spent recapitulating what he was doing and what more he could’ve done. One second he’s in the front desk and the next, Mr. Martin has his mouth clinging to the back of Maggie’s neck and she’s screaming, loudly, for someone to help her. The bite clearly had some force into it because the speed at which a puddle of blood formed was astonishing. The speed at which security approached, not so much.
He wouldn’t let go, becoming more and more aggressive with each attempt to get him off and Maggie lost consciousness at one point. Nobody knew what to do, the people who were supposed to were never trained to handle something like this. Maggie’s body went limp and it was Carol, the one brave enough to get close, who injected a sedative into Mr. Martin 's arm.
It did close to nothing, it didn’t knock him out. He only thrashed around on the floor until weakness overpowered his body, then they locked him into Exam Room One and called the police.
They tried—real emphasis on trying—to work on Maggie but a futile attempt it was. Carter will never forget how all reality seemed to be moving in slow motion, a frame of your friend getting killed then one of her body lying on a gurney, no signs of a heartbeat and hours away from being transported to the morgue, cold. And still, no interruptions or bugs or fake stillness to give him a sense of comprehension.
Nothing at all, since Maggie’s body jerked up from where she was laying on another room and began attacking whatever was on sight. Began biting, ripping off flesh, savoring the taste and eating people.
He doesn’t really remember specifics from then on. Just that people first started leaving on their own after Mr. Martin first attacked and by the time four more people were bitten, the ER was practically deserted. He can’t really blame people for leaving, not even those who were technically clocked in at their job. It was obvious his feet didn’t receive the message his brain was desperately trying to communicate. What am I still doing here?
Did he think he was gonna be some sort of help? That he’d be the one to come up with a real solution to save all those people?
All that possibility left the second he looked over at Mr. Martin’s chart and called it a severe case of the flu.
I could’ve done more. I should’ve done more.
Perhaps those patients would’ve been able to escape.
Perhaps they’d know more information, relevant to whatever this fucking shitshow seemed to be.
Perhaps Maggie would still be alive.
Alive because whatever it is you become after you’re bitten is certainly closer to being dead.
“Or perhaps you’d be fucking dead too,” says Lucy, a firm tone accompanying the words.
She’s driving his Jeep, her hands shaking over the steering wheel. He doesn’t know how the tiny grip she has over it is enough for her to not lose complete control of the car. Well, if there’s one thing he knows Lucy has is determination.
Her hair is down and tangled, a complete contrast to the two tight braids she wore when he first saw her that morning, sitting in the break room finishing some charts. Now, he stares at the result of her repeatedly running her fingers through them due to what he can only explain as confusion or deep anxiety. It’s all he feels vibrate through his skin as well.
Carter had just stood there, watching people run out of the ER—watching people die—and stayed rooted in the middle of everything, right beside the front desk. That slow motion movement, still present and engulfing him into the chaos, not a way out in sight.
And out his sight was the hand that gripped around his wrist and forcefully dragged him into a tiny hidden storage closet located in some corner of the ER. The kind that has an old and small lightbulb with a chain to turn it on, so loosely hanged, it was a miracle it didn't fall to the ground and break by the impact force to which Lucy pushed them past the door. Basically throwing Carter inside, she locked the entry and he's positive he saw her talking rapidly at the ceiling.
Lucy saved his life, he’s pretty sure.
As soon as the dome of unsure security fell on top of them, they both collapsed to the floor. In what only could have been first-time panic attacks from both of them, Carter remembered the on-going chit-chat that had been flooding the hospital for the past week: an incident from a Californian ER had landed its way to County’s halls.
An infection they called it. Something so very gruesome to make half of the nurses staff quit, alongside the resignation of three residents and two attendings. He wasn't sure what to make of it, hell, he didn't even know what the infection actually was or if anything he heard was actually true.
No further information arrived their way. Conspiracies formed about how they tried to cover-up how bad it actually was. Tabloids and government officials just announced the development of a new seasonal virus, yet the Department of Health made no contact to establish new safety protocols.
Carter genuinely believed the whole thing to be a hoax and didn't entertain the gossipy conversations that week at the ER.
It didn't help the e-mail he received from a former classmate. Someone he knew who also went into medicine and was doing their residency in California. The text detailed what was a caricatured depiction of the so-called ER attack all the chatter was about. Something insanely ridiculous about patients in a state of sickness so severe, they should have been pronounced dead, yet somehow acted alive enough to be aggressive. So aggressive in fact, they ate the flesh of other people. Straight out of a horror novel, he remembered actually laughing at it, before marking the e-mail as spam and blocking his old contact.
Stupid, stupid, fucking stupid. Nothing made any fucking sense.
Mentally, he’s not sure how long they stayed locked inside the closet.
At one point, Lucy shuffled closer to him and held his face in her hands just to stare at him for a long minute; though the interaction should’ve felt weirder—with them not acting anywhere close to this since that slip of judgement in the suture room—he couldn’t help but lean into the touch before mirroring the same action. He held her face and twirled a strand of her hair until his breathing settled.
A reminder they were at least together. A confirmation something bigger than them was happening.
The noises they could hear outside the door were more than just unsettling. He wonders, sitting in his Jeep, watching the streets go by, how do you live after hearing someone get eaten alive? Can he say with complete certainty that’s what was happening outside? He sure as hell wasn’t seeing it, but the ear is no useless thing. Is it better to not have visual confirmation? Right now, he can’t say it is.
When he finally found the strength to look at it, his watch confirmed they had been locked inside for a little more than four hours. It took them another hour of building up courage to finally unlock the door and look outside; the fact that no sound could be heard also helped.
The ER was deserted. A new image now seared into his brain that had never existed in the almost five years he’d given to County. A reality that had never been—ever—since its conception. Aside from empty, the other word you could have used to describe it was bloodbath. Walls painted by the stickiness of blood, limbs torn apart and laying on the floor, a couple of bodies that Carter and Lucy had to attest, were actually dead, no pulse to be found. The feeling that settled inside his stomach was so strong, he vomited for the first time that day.
The ambulance bay doors, by some miracle, were intact. Quickly, he blocked the entrance with a couple gurneys, adding a layer of comfort to their already fragile state of mind.
Lucy put on the news. The tiny TV that hanged on one corner of the waiting room—whose remote actually sat on the the desk’s supply drawer, the one place it never is—updated them on what the fuck was actually happening.
NATIONAL EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT: UNKNOWN LETHAL VIRUS OUTBRAKE. TAKE NECESSARY PRECAUTIONS.
It’s what they read on the screen.
“—they don’t know what it is, where it comes from, and we should feel scared—”
“—multiple attacks on every state of the country and first outbreaks spotted across the globe despite enforced quarantines—”
“—if you come in contact with any of them, there is no official way to stop the virus from spreading—”
“—for their benefit, abandon those close to you in case of infection—”
“—you will try to harm others—”
“—soon, power outages will begin to take place—”
“—they’re being transferred to what they’re calling Safety Locked States, or SLS’s,—”
“—evacuations have taken place in all the Chicago metropolitan area. If you were somehow left behind, take the necessary precautions to ensure your safety or try to approach the nearest SLS if it's located at a sensible distance from you. We are all in danger. Take care.”
This morning his main concern was the need to go buy groceries. The total shift in reality seemed so absurd, his body curled up in ugly, loud laughter; which in return earned him a forceful kick in the leg by Lucy, who had been wearing a decisive frown in her face since they started watching the news.
One glaring truth became painfully obvious: they’re alone.
Chicago had been evacuated; it’d be a fault in the system if you hadn’t gone away.
They somehow missed it, locked inside that storage closet. He tried to remember if a siren had gone off, if an announcement on a megaphone could have maybe slipped through the cracks of his brain but he came up empty.
Or perhaps it did.
Those four hours felt honestly more like four minutes. There’s a good possibility he blacked out for a moment and doesn’t remember. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter; nobody was truly at fault, he said to himself. Just try focusing on what’s happening now.
One; they were in danger. Plain and simple. Two; they should do something about it. Talk to each other, come up with something. And three; it’d be a good thing if his brain could actually communicate with the rest of his body.
How the fuck is this happening? Is this some sort of alternate reality? Could all this be just a bad dream? How are Gamma and Chase? Where are Gamma and Chase? Maggie is dead. Lucy is with me. Lucy is alive. Lucy is yelling at me.
“Carter!”
He shook himself out of his own trap. “Wha–What?”
Lucy’s decisive frown melted, for a tiny fraction of a second, into a worrying one. Despite clearly being way more grounded than him, he noticed her big blue eyes glazed, making them shine even more than usual. She moved to stand right in front of him. With a gentler tone, moving her hands in front of her body, she said, “I asked, if you brought your car with you this morning.”
He nods. “Ahm, yeah, yes, I did.”
“Okay,” she copied his movement, “Come here,” she moved behind the front desk, he followed. She grabbed Jerry’s backpack and his stomach churned in distress.
Where was everyone? Did everybody evacuate to a SLS? He knew the chances of that happening were low. Some definitely got infected, some’s bodies were hiding inside the walls of the ER.
Emptying the backpack, she launched it at him, then gestured for him to continue following her. They reached the supply closet and he watched in amazement how Lucy began rummaging inside. Various objects and boxes—from isopropyl alcohol to multiple bottles of ibuprofen, from rolls of sterilized gauze to an insane amount of soap bars—found their way into the big ass backpack Carter kept holding open. He poignantly ignored the two boxes of condoms Lucy threw in as well, since she probably didn't even notice. Lucy was quickly scanning everything she could get her hands into, reading the labels and dropping it in the almost full backpack; she was a girl on a mission.
When she ordered him to go find another bag, he only obeyed. For the first time since meeting, he had no ground to establish authority. Certainly not now, frozen on the same spot, only being able to function thanks to Lucy’s commands.
He came back, Chuny’s gigantic purse emptied in his hand, and asked, “What are you doing?”
Her response only served to confuse him more. “Making sure that when the time comes, you don’t die.”
They grabbed their stuff from the break room—a space of more brutal scenes that made them close their eyes and avoid looking around—and after a quick assessment of the parking lot from Lucy, they found themselves inside the Jeep.
She never asked if she could drive, just snatched the keys from his jacket when he wasn’t looking, but he didn’t mind. Out of the two, she’s the one competent enough to not crash them into a tree.
And now they were here—sitting in the same car he got as a graduation gift from undergrad. The destination, unknown to him. Streets and roads continue to pass them by as they drive, all missing the main component, and making him sick. Lucy’s been driving for about twenty minutes and has now entered a suburban type neighbourhood he’s never seen before. He notices how the front doors of most houses seem to have been left open; probably, the families in a rush to evacuate. It must have been pretty scary for everyone—even if most hadn’t had an encounter with the infected—if you believed you were leaving your home for good, not caring whether or not it’s left protected. The history and testimony that you once were part of it. He wonders if those people have hope of seeing Chicago again.
Appreciation fills his chest when they encounter someone infected, tumbling through the sidewalk in direction to them, and Lucy only steps on the gas, leaving his chances of hyperventilation behind and making him feel relatively okay. It happens three more times until Carter feels competent enough to have words leave his mouth.
“Where are we going?”
“To my house. I’m sorry, we can go to yours or your grandma’s after, I just…” she takes a deep breath, it stabilizes her, “I need to see what’s there.”
Carter didn’t even know Lucy was a Chicago native. Never cared to ask, he figured he’d get no actual answer from her. In her overachiever-type persona, he always assumed she moved to pursue medical school or something. It’s not exactly a surprise, he thinks—something he does much when it comes to her—and Carter remembers he knows close to nothing about Lucy.
Lucy’s life is an almost blank canvas for him yet she knows about Gamma.
How did that happen? How did he let it happen?
The rest of the drive is filled with silence. Not an uncomfortable one, just pure lack of noise. Ten minutes later, Lucy is parking in front of a medium-size, green-painted, two-stories house—the kind that has a mowed lawn and well-kept pots with blooming roses. They rapidly get out of the Jeep and Lucy grabs a pair of keys from her backpack, he notices a doormat with the word welcome scribbled in cursive before she opens the door and lets them inside.
As soon as the door closes behind them, she abandons him to rush upstairs. He’s left alone in what he can only assume is Lucy’s childhood home.
It’s not what he expects; not that Carter had any real expectations, but it all certainly surprises him.
From what he can see—a literal shrine dedicated to Lucy—she is an only child. The mantle that sits in the middle of the living room is filled with a progression of Lucy’s life, represented in the form of carefully arranged framed photographs. It starts with Lucy’s first birthday, a photo of a young woman—whose resemblance to his student is so uncanny, he almost thinks it’s her—holding a baby with the chubbiest cheeks he’s ever seen on someone, next to white-frosted cake with only one lit-up candle. Carter sees Lucy’s first day of kindergarten, her tenth birthday, the day she first got glasses, a picture which serves as his discovery for Lucy being a cheerleader in high school, and the most recent, her college graduation.
The rest of the house, or at least its first floor, feels as cozy as the way the mantle made his heart soar. More frames decorate the walls, and overall, the place feels lived-in, like it has stories to tell, like somebody yearns to come home to it every day. He continues to walk around it, the kitchen is just as homey, with pantries full of ingredients and small-size paintings that carry the name Julia Knight on their right corner. Carter is not surprised when he reaches the laundry room and finds on the frame of the door the little marks of progress for Lucy’s height. He laughs at the fact that the last one appears to be from ten years ago, around the time Lucy was fourteen. It’s the first time he’s laughed since the world started turning on them.
One thing becomes abundantly clear: Lucy grew up loved.
Lucy is loved.
He doesn’t have time to dwell on why that makes him ache a bit, since Lucy rushes out of the stairs and finds him in the kitchen.
“They’re gone,” she says, “their stuff is gone as well, so,” she moves around the room and Carter follows close behind, “this is good, it means they evacuated correctly.”
She moves towards the living room, picking up the phone that sits on the tiny table next to the couch. “Line’s dead here too,” she looks around and shrugs, “at least there’s still electricity here.”
Carter doesn’t know how Lucy has the capacity of looking for details and drawing conclusions. It’s perhaps the mundanity of it all, as if this is a regular Monday for her, that finally makes him snap. Or maybe—most definitely—she’s making him feel small and needs to do something about it.
He just didn’t anticipate the tears. “What the fuck is your problem?”
It’s as if he had slapped her. “What?”
“How the fuck are you acting all normal about this? Lucy, people are fucking dying. The world might be ending, do you even understand the severity of that?”
There he goes, using that condescending attitude with her again. He has tried to tone it down since the Ritalin incident happened but it still slips out of him sometimes and she knows that, if the harsh eyeroll he receives is anything to go by.
“Fuck you! Of course I understand, you asshole. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m relying on pure assumptions here.” He knows he fucked up when Lucy’s voice begins to crack. “I don’t know where my family is, I’m scared, I’m here with, of all people, you, and we’re in danger.” She puffs her chest and stands on her words. “But at least I’m here, I’m present. I’m trying to think, which is more that you can say. I’m not the one crying and screaming at the one person who hasn’t abandoned me.”
Reality strikes him across the face. He goes to sit on one of her couches and puts his head between his hands. “I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s just, I’m—I”
“Scared,” she interrupts, or finishes for him, he’s not sure, “I get it.” Lucy follows him to the other side of the couch and puts a hand on his knee. “We need to think, Carter. I need you to think with me.”
He’s not sure at which moment exactly, he and Lucy became a team. Probably when her hand wrapped around his wrist and she yanked him inside a storage room saving his life. Or when he was first assigned to her, or when they ran around Chicago looking for a little girl’s blood. It doesn’t matter. They’re now in this together.
She puts on the news, reveling in the fact the power outages haven’t reached this part of the city yet. They need all the information available to them, and now, with a steady hand on his knee grounding him, he’s able to retain the full landscape, not just parts of it.
“Experts are saying this all stemmed from an ER attack in California; the first ever registered case and how little the hospital did on reporting it to authorities have led us here. Right now, it's estimated one third of the American population has been infected. Apparently, those infected have reached a state of both alive and dead, leaning strongly on a decomposing action from the body. Due to this, there is hope. If the Department of Health is not able to find a cure on time, they’re saying in about a year all those infected would have ceased to exist thanks to the extreme climate circumstances their bodies would go through. But this can only happen if no more people get infected. If you were somehow left behind in the evacuations, take necessary precautions or try reaching the nearest SLS. There’s currently four operating: Pennsylvania, Washington, California and New Mexico. This is a great loss for our country. Stay safe.”
It’s the one third that makes her squeeze his knee. In less than a second, his hand finds hers, interlocking their fingers and using his thumb to rub over her knuckles. It’s almost instinctive, the need to ground each other by touch.
So, the world is only sort of ending. That’s good, he thinks. In a weird fuck up kind of way where millions of people have died—or will die?—but eventually, it’ll all go back to normal. Or not. Most definitely not.
They have to make sure they both end up alive when the end arrives though. At least not everything has gone to shit is what he’ll recite to himself in the quiet. Still, there are a lot of loose ends to combat through. Lucy knows this as well, or it seems she does from the way she blurts out:
“Are you hungry?”
And when you’re hiding for your life, experiencing what will surely come back to haunt you as severe PTSD, you don’t really have time to remember the last thing you ate was a stale blueberry muffin from the hospital cafeteria midway through your morning shift and now it’s almost 8 p.m and the rumble in your stomach that barely comes out makes itself hungrily present.
“Starving,” he laughs.
She nods, “I can make us something.”
“There’s Kraft mac and cheese in the pantry.”
Lucy makes them dinner.
He still isn’t sure the percentage of fine Lucy truly is, which only serves him to feel much more like shit for his earlier tantrum. Her hands would tremble out of nowhere while steering the pot of noodles, and she avoids his eyes when answering the dumb small talk he keeps trying to maintain alive. From it, he learns this is technically her grandparents house—yes, the ones who’ve been married 56 years, she answers after he points it out—but her mom and her have lived here their entire lives. Lucy’s mom—Barbara—is a middle school teacher and had her her final year of undergrad; there’s a picture somewhere in the house of a young Barbara Knight in cap and gown holding a three month old Lucy, she tells him.
In return, he offers no information about himself and Lucy doesn’t ask. It’s not like there’s much to tell, or rather much he wants to say. It isn’t until Lucy is two minutes deep into an anecdote about her grandma’s bingo group and slicing up some apples that she remembers a particular detail about Carter’s life.
“Oh my god, your grandma! I totally forgot about her,” she says, abruptly washing her hands and turning off the stove, “You wanna go check on her?”
“Woah, woah, woah, calm down,” he motions with his hands, “One, there’s no way we’re leaving at night. Two, trust me, if most of Chicago evacuated nicely, Gamma is amongst those people. She’s not above using her connections.”
She waits a beat. “Huh. So it’s just you and me then.” The ‘there’s nobody waiting at home for us’ goes unsaid.
“Well, no need to sound so disappointed.”
She rolls her eyes at him, for once, not an ounce of malice behind it.
Carter offers to serve and clean and Lucy doesn’t have enough pride in her to refuse. While they eat, they watch old TV runs of—funnily—I Love Lucy, thankful for some kind of normalcy in the day. If he only focuses on the past two hours, Carter can almost lose himself in the feeling that this is another typical Monday: dinners in front of a screen, a big time distracting himself from the horrors of the world—a little too literal this time.
And there was always Lucy.
He would lie—to anyone who dared asking—about how much time he usually spent thinking of Lucy. Deep down, he knows it’s a real problem, hell, Roxanne basically broke up with him because of it; still, it’s justified, he tells himself. It’s completely within line of reason to wonder, passionately, about how she uses up her free time, because she has to study for rounds; if she has any friends inside the hospital, he once saw her talking to a guy from radiology for a bit too long, and it’s important to establish connections in this field of work. He’s being a good teacher, she’s the one who keeps choosing to do another ER rotation, so what else is he supposed to do?
It’s just weird to have a materialized version of his every night thoughts next to him.
She’s an enigma he wants to crack. He’s a real bad detective, or perhaps, his work is only done imaginatively. He asks no questions but has them lined up all the time. She’s a constant presence in the turbulence; whether it’s good or bad, he doesn’t know.
But he sure as hell should find out. Right?
Between the bites of a heavily-focused Lucy, Carter says, “Look, I know you yelled at me for asking earlier, but really, how are you so calm about all this?”
She stops chewing, and to his surprise, doesn’t really react, instead, she looks alarmingly sheepish. “Okay, you have to promise not to laugh.”
“I can’t promise that, Lucy.”
She sighs, “Fine,” she looks away, creating a layer of distance that he immediately resents, “I’ve sort of, um, been preparing for this.”
“What?”
“I had to be realistic, you know? I just assumed it would actually never happen, but in the extraordinary case it did, I had to be prepared. I was not going to die, Carter.”
“So what? Wait—Let me get this straight. You’ve been preparing yourself for a deadly global pandemic just in case?”
A huff makes its way to where he’s sitting. “Have you ever seen Night of the Living Dead?”
This is where he actually laughs. “Come on, Lucy. That’s a movie about zombies.”
Lucy can only look at him with exasperation. That, mixed with all the heavy emotions they were both still experimenting, brings back her usual attitude. Frustrated with him, she raises her voice, “And what do you think we ran off from today, John?”
The use of his first name does not go unnoticed by him, it only makes an appearance when he’s hit a particular nerve. Sarcastically, he answers, “Ah, I don’t know, the infected?”
No emotion behind, “So, zombies.”
“They’re not fucking zombies, Lucy, that’s stupid.”
“Think, John. A merge between dead and alive, the fucking news even described them that way. They feed off flesh, they transmit the virus via biting. You just don’t have the balls to call them what they are.”
He scoffs, “I’m just mature enough to point out what they’re not. Plus, they don’t even eat brains.”
If eye rolls were lethal, he’d be buried underground. “That’s a common misconception that stems from Return of the Living Dead,” she explains, as if this is normal information any person would know and he’s uncultured, “They’re zombies, Carter. Deal with it. And you know what? That wasn’t even my point!”
He laughs. He can’t help but find it all incredibly ridiculous. Incredibly amusing. And the tight feeling in his chest that’s been keeping him somewhat walking on eggshells around Lucy dissolves when he hears her laugh joining his in perfect symphony.
“How do you even know this stuff?”
She blushes; Carter has to pinch himself in the thigh to avoid looking below her neck and see how far it goes. “I’ve always been into zombies, I guess. Ran the film club in high school, did a whole month on them,” she shrugs.
“But you were a cheerleader in high school.”
She frowns and looks at him as if he’s stupid. He is. “I did cheerleading and ran the film club – wait, how do you even –” she looks back at the mantle, “were you snooping?”
“I wasn’t – I swear I – what was I supposed to do? You left me here!”
She laughs again, putting her head in between her hands and shaking her head.
He thinks, briefly, they can somehow find comfort in each other.
Carter does the dishes, Lucy dries them. There’s an unspoken agreement to not comment on how the other does it. A truce. He believes she does it way too rough, missing a few spots and almost always forgets to thoroughly do the bottom correctly. But for once in his life, he learns to keep his mouth shut with something regarding Lucy.
Most of the time, he knows when he’s being an ass, and right now, he knows the thing they both need is a friend. So he doesn’t fight Lucy when she says all the entryways to the house are definitely locked. He has to trust her, and if there’s still some part of him that finds it hard, well, he’ll just have to learn how to get rid of it—fast.
Joy engulfs him when he enters Lucy’s room. The concept is strange to him—to still consider your childhood room your room. Lucy is twenty-three and feels familial towards her house; Carter knows he’s the odd one out here, his family residency, much too enormous to feel homey, much too lonely to feel warm. He crosses the door and lets out a dry chuckle, immediately getting swarmed, being surrounded by movie posters—from The Princess Bride and Psycho, to one of The Empire Strikes Back he actually thinks is pretty sick—and the image of a nerdy too-big glasses Lucy announcing a Hitchcock week to her clubmates is all too much clear.
She gives him some pajamas from her grandfather’s closet that are much too short on the legs and much too big on the chest, and asks if he wants the door closed before actually doing it; the gesture feels nicer than he’d expected. A hand rubbing his back.
Carter tries—God knows he tries—to actually get some sleep. He ruffles the blankets, turns on the bedside lamp and turns it off at least a dozen times, before finally succumbing to the dark corners of his mind that have instead made it forefront.
Maggie is dead.
He watched her get bitten, watched somebody rip off a chunk of her flesh in front of his very eyes then eat it, watched her drop to the floor and bleed to what he believed was the better outcome; a not peaceful death.
Then he watched her do the same to a little girl.
It’s comical. How he actually believed he was gonna sleep tonight. Would actually be able to not think about any of it just because he spent the majority of the day with Lucy. Not even that can outweigh the real weight of hopelessness and death.
He throws off the blankets and paces the room. With not much of a clear head, he rushes to open the window that he very clearly shut close when he first entered the bedroom after examining it. Deep breaths make their way down his lungs but it's still not enough. It’s not the second comings of another panic attack, thankfully, his breathing just decided to make friends with his head and fuck him over.
Five minutes pass and it settles. In an instant, he shuts the window close when he hears some ruffling approaching the street—there’s a reason he’s still unable to sleep and it’s out there. It stays clawed inside his skin. It won’t ever heal nor leave.
It becomes devastatingly clear: he can’t be alone right now. Worse, It seems he has entirely lost the capacity for it.
Carter doesn’t sense the seconds that pass until he reaches the door, he just knows that when he opens it and finds Lucy already behind it, he’s able to make his heart stop over-beating for the wrong reasons.
For once, they don’t speak. They have nothing to say to each other. For once, it seems mutual understanding overpowers their encounter.
When she grabs his hand, he has no quick remark, and when she lies them both on her twin size bed, he lets her. Her huge wool blanket in any other occasion would suffocate him, but now it grounds him enough to not freak out. For better or worse, Lucy keeps their hands interlocked. She senses his still tense demeanor and she just closes his eyes using the fingers on her free hand, he sighs in a strange relief he’s not familiar with.
“Let’s rest, John,” she whispers. And he does.
The next morning, he wakes up to a peaceful Lucy wrapped around his arms and the bright image of dawn through her window, even though the clock already reads 6:30 a.m.
Yes, he quietly thinks, this does feel nice.