Chapter Text
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Pearl pressed down on the accelerator, sailing down the highway and speeding past the roadkill. Veering to the left, she narrowly dodged an abandoned car sticking halfway off of the shoulder, and something moved in its backseat.
She shivered, though she wasn’t sure if it was because of the danger or the cold. Pearl had figured out the hard way that winters in the U.S. were colder than they were in Australia, and January was the worst so far. It didn’t help that she had the truck’s heating turned off, since she wanted to preserve as much battery life as she could. Instead, she just clenched her teeth and ignored her breath’s fog against the windshield.
The only piece of the dashboard Pearl kept running was the radio, continually scrolling through channels as she drove. In the last three months since she’d started searching, the habit had lost any element of hope and withered slowly into a lonely desperation. Three months since she’d left the station. Four months since she’d last seen a living person. Five months since the lockdown began.
Her eyes flicked from the horizon as she spotted something to her right: a spire reaching out of the pines, surrounded by the barely-visible rooftops of a small town. Keeping her hand on the wheel, Pearl looked back over her shoulder to examine her rations, though she was confident that she’d need to resupply soon. Two jugs of water, a few granola bars, a lucky bag of beef jerky she’d scored at a pillaged gas station.
She took the next exit.
The ramp trickled off into the forest, and Pearl tapped the brake gently as the curves in the road grew sharper. Every so often, she would catch a glimpse of something in the trees, and it would inevitably begin to trail after her. The white noise of the radio static and the rumbling engine didn’t block out the groans.
After several minutes of regretting her decisions and wondering if she’d made a mistake in leaving the highway, the trees grew sparse and Pearl finally entered the town. Every town she’d visited had felt empty, drained of life, but this one was even worse. Windows were broken, walls were charred, cars were flipped, but… she didn’t see a single zombie.
On edge, she slowed to a crawl, peering past shattered glass and into homes in hopes of spotting some form of movement, but there was nothing. Her heart started to lift, excited by the signs. The infected could smell the living, or sense them, or something like that. If there were no zombies around, they might have been lured away by the lure of food.
Pearl reached over on the dashboard after debating for a brief moment and flipped on the siren. It warbled to life, breaking the town’s eerie silence with a wailing call that echoed between empty houses and buildings. She stopped in what seemed to be the center of town and lowered the windows, waiting to see if anyone — or anything — responded.
She didn’t see anything, but she heard it. A faint groan. No, a few of them. More than a few. Flicking the siren back off to listen more closely, she eased off the brake and rolled forwards, tracing the origin of the sound towards the stone spire still leering over the rooftops. As the truck rounded a corner, Pearl gasped as she finally spotted the source.
A crowd of hundreds of zombies formed a sea of rot, all clustered around what she could now tell to be a cathedral. The heavy iron doors were shut, and at least from here, the church didn’t seem to be damaged.
Her heart climbed into her throat, daring to hope for success after all this time. The last time Pearl had thought she’d found another survivor, it had turned out to just be a cat in a tree, surrounded by a horde of drooling zombies. But this… this seemed like it might be it.
Pearl reached over to the passenger seat, pulling on her heavy gloves and making sure her armor was secure. The firefighter’s uniform kept her warm in the winter, but more importantly, no zombie had been able to chew through the Kevlar, at least so far. She grabbed the fire axe and laid it across her lap in case the cathedral turned out to be a cemetery.
Bracing herself, she accelerated, pushing her way through the crowd and ignoring the bumps as skulls and torsos squished under her wheels. A monotonous banging began as rotten fists knocked at the sides of the truck, asking politely to be let inside.
Pearl leaned forward to examine the cathedral. The actual door was surrounded by zombies, but what looked to be a courtyard stuck off to one side, sealed off by high stone walls. She stopped the truck a meter from the wall, leaving a small gap.
Now for the hard part. She’d done this a few times, but it never got any less scary. Pearl lowered the window about halfway and turned the truck off, grabbing the keys from the ignition and tucking them safely into her pocket. She holstered her axe in a makeshift leather loop on her hip and began the slow process of shimmying her way out of the gap.
The fire engine was tall enough that zombies couldn’t quite reach her, but it didn’t stop them from trying, jostling each other as they grabbed at the air with bony fingers. Pearl grabbed onto a bar on the side of the truck, hoisting herself onto the roof and rolling onto her back with a sigh of relief.
She stared up at the dreary gray sky for a moment before sitting up, ready to continue her mission. Pearl climbed to her feet, standing on top of the cab and looking into the courtyard. It seemed safe enough; withered grass surrounded a well in the center, and her heart skipped a beat at the sight of an ashen campfire in one corner. A cat couldn’t do that.
Pearl crept to the edge of the cab, doing her best to avoid glancing down at the mass of rotten flesh begging her to slip. She stepped forwards, spanning the gap between truck and wall and stuck her foot firmly on the stone lip. After hyping herself up for a moment, she brought her other foot forwards as well, balancing on the wall.
She crouched down and grabbed the lip, carefully turning in a circle to face the wall as she slid off. Her knees banged painfully against the stone when she swung down, but otherwise she was alright. Pearl released her grip and dropped the last distance to the ground.
Exhaling in a cloud of fog, she turned to examine her surroundings. The pile of ash was definitely a campfire, and upon sticking a hand close to the charred remains, she could still feel a trickle of warmth. Adrenaline made her hand start to shake, and she quickly withdrew it.
Pearl turned on the spot, unable to wait any longer, and jogged towards the door. She placed her hand on the door and… hesitated. What if she was wrong? What if she was alone?
Before she could continue to doubt herself, the door swung outwards, slamming into her and bashing her in the face. She fell backwards, clutching her nose, and landed hard on the dead grass.
A woman stood above her, staring at her warily. There were a few seconds of silence as the two took each other in. The survivor had red, curly hair, tied back in a loose bun that looked almost too domestic for their current circumstances, and wore a pair of smudged glasses low on her nose as she stared down at Pearl. The heavy bags under her eyes and sleep lines on one cheek clashed with the candleholder she waved menacingly.
The woman cleared her throat, opened her mouth, and asked in a hoarse voice, “Are you real?”
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Gem shot up at the screaming. The wails of the nightmare slowly bled away as she blearily blinked awake, but the sound didn’t stop. It shifted, growing higher in pitch until it almost resembled a siren.
Her heart sank. Was she finally going crazy?
She slid to the ground, getting up from the mattress where she spent most nights. The cathedral was chilly in the mornings, and she wrapped her blanket around her shoulders. Her basement hideaway was warmer than the rest, at least. Cozy. Ish.
It used to be an office before everything went to hell. Now, the desk was relegated to the corner, and her bed sat in the middle. Desperation had made her inventive; upon getting tired of the back aches, Gem stripped all of the cushions off of the pews upstairs, laid them out in a rectangle on the floor, and stacked it several layers high. The result was a makeshift mattress, though the length of the cushions made it about twice as long as it needed to be.
To block out the sound, she’d taken the rest of the cushions and lined them up against all the walls. The result was a successful refuge, insulated from the cold and from the constant cries and groans from outside the cathedral.
The siren shut off, and Gem crept to her door, kicking away the pillow sealing the gap and creaking it open to listen. It was hard to hear anything over the horde, but… an engine, quiet and getting louder. Her heart skipped a beat. Looters, maybe? She hadn’t seen any, but during the first few days, it had been all over the news. Before people realized that this was much, much worse than just an excuse to steal a new blender.
Gem grabbed a golden candelabra from the desk, gripping it firmly by the base and squeezing it tightly. If the engine wasn’t friendly, she needed a weapon, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to use her other option. She crept out of her room, pointedly ignoring the dark door at the end of the hallway and what dwelled inside.
Following the stairs, Gem continued to listen closely. The engine was louder now. So were the zombies. Someone was close. She made it to the top of the stairwell and carefully let the door swing open, raising her candelabra. Thankfully, the sanctuary was empty, still exactly how she’d left it.
The pews were mostly pushed against the wall, though she’d burned through half of them as firewood by now. She hadn’t touched the altar, though. She wasn’t religious, but it still felt like bad luck.
Off in the back corner was her food, stacked high with maybe twenty cans. Gem had first started out with over two hundred, but over the last four months, her rations had slowly dwindled. Her other supplies sat next to the food, holding various items she’d smuggled from home or found in the church.
Still holding her club at the ready, Gem stalked towards the window and leaned forwards to peer through the bars. A writhing mosh pit greeted her, still patiently waiting to be let inside as they clustered around the walls and cried out to her. She was about to pull away when something tugged at the corner of her attention. Bright red, sticking out like a sore thumb amidst the dull colors of a zombie horde.
A… fire truck? The truck slowly rolled towards the cathedral, pushing through the crowd and stopping outside the courtyard wall. Gem craned her neck and pressed her cheek against the glass to catch a glimpse of what was going on, and as she watched, a woman began to climb out of the window.
Like some sort of ninja-firefighter hybrid, she squeezed through the crack and climbed onto the roof of the truck. Standing high and looking around, the woman paused only briefly before jumping onto the wall and vanishing from view.
Gem stumbled backwards, mind reeling. She was either fully, finally, insane, driven to delirium by day after day of isolation, or a ninja firefighter was at her back door. Taking slow, deep breaths as she prepared to confront her own hallucinations, Gem crept towards the side door to the garden. She paused as she reached it, listening closely but not hearing anything.
Two options. Insane, or mystery woman. She was hoping for one option, but expected the other.
She shoved the door open, already resigned to her fate, and yelped when it hit something, hard. Gem stepped backwards, steeling her nerves and shaking hands on the cool metal of her bludgeon. The woman fell to the ground, clutching at her nose.
Gem squinted, a little bit suspicious of her own mind. She’d hallucinated once or twice (who hadn’t?), but if this wasn’t real, she was truly impressed by her own handiwork. Only one way to verify.
She opened her mouth to speak and only managed a pathetic wheeze, bookended by a voice crack. Grimacing, she cleared her throat and tried again. “Are you real?”
The woman on the ground in front of her stared at her for a second and slowly climbed to her feet, eyes flicking warily from Gem to her weapon. Her own hand slid to a fireman’s axe at her belt. “I think so,” she replied carefully. “Are you?”
Gem nodded, but didn’t move from the doorway, holding her ground to drink in the first person she’d seen in four months. The first besides her own reflection, that is. And besides the zombies, if those count.
She really was wearing firefighter gear. No helmet, but everything else looked like she’d stepped off of a calendar. The heavy jacket and pants were khaki brown, each with a few reflective yellow stripes that burned Gem’s eyes. As she stretched to her full height, Gem cringed as she found herself looking upwards, staring up at the woman who must’ve been a whole head taller than her. She was pretty. Her long brown hair was pulled back, probably to keep it out of reach of grasping hands.
“Is there anyone else here?”
Gem blinked, surprised she hadn’t noticed the Australian accent the first time that she’d spoken. “Uh, no. No, it’s just me.”
The firefighter nodded slowly. “Okay. Are you going to put down the… candleholder?”
The redhead hesitantly lowered it to her side, though she wasn’t planning on putting it down anytime soon. Her opponent followed suit, letting her fingers drop from the axe. “Is there anyone else with you?” Gem asked.
She shook her head. “No, I’m alone.”
Gem thought for a moment and stepped to the side. “Do you… do you want to come inside?”