Chapter Text
Grace Ashcroft blinked awake in a terrible daze with a throbbing head. She wasn't sure where she was for one confused moment but as the blur of sleep faded from her vision she recognized the cold fluorescent lighting of the Rhodes Hill Care Center and had to stifle a scream as she scrambled to push herself up from the hard floor. Her hand flailed frantically for the nearest solid ground but it landed somewhere soft with a moist, sticky give that filled the air with an odor like feces and decay; an unknown substance caking her hand and curdling beneath her fingernails.
She yelped and launched herself backwards, her back landing hard against a wall. She looked to where she'd been and saw the gored corpse of a police officer. She'd plunged her hand directly into his intestines.
"W-what the fuck!?" she screamed and immediately covered her mouth with her clean hand,
"Oh my god, I-I, oh my god… I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she apologized frantically to the corpse as she looked around and attempted to gain her bearings.
The lighting alone had been enough of a giveaway but the sickly, mint green walls and blood-marred marble floors of the hallway made it obvious she was back again. Back to where that nightmare began and her life had been well and truly ruined. It didn't make sense. The government had foreclosed the building, hadn't they? After a thorough investigation, it'd been set to be demolished. So why was there a fresh corpse here after all that? And more importantly, why had she woken up here?
Just as her mind was beginning to catch up to her surroundings, she heard heavy footsteps far down the bend of the hallway and instinctively her hand reached for her gun. Only, she had no gun, and felt an empty holster where it should have been.
"Fuck," she whispered, and searched frantically for its location as the footsteps drew closer.
She was just losing hope when she finally noticed a dark glint in the last place she wanted to see it, buried deep in the guts of the same carcass which she'd unintentionally violated seconds earlier. She winced and took a steadying breath as she reached for the sleek metal grip of her pistol which released from the corpse with a meaty squelch. Instantly, she aimed it down the hall and tried to remember what she was supposed to say on the off-chance it was a human coming down that hallway.
Something like "Freeze! FBI!" seemed effective enough, because it had few syllables and thus a smaller chance of her betraying her own fear by stuttering through it like a wreck. It didn't matter if she wasn't technically in the FBI anymore, she just needed to convey some level of authority.
The figure of a round and imposing man rounded the hallway, pale-skinned and bald with hatred in his eyes as he looked upon her with disgust so palpable she could see it even from several meters away.
"F-freeze! FBI!" She tried, but the man didn't even regard it as he began to march down the hallway. He was a zombie. She didn't hesitate a moment longer in pulling the trigger.
The click of an empty magazine dropped like an icicle directly on her heart, "No…"
She began a frantic search for a magazine, first on her person and then on the ground. She found nothing, so she ran the opposite direction instead, and the zombie sped up in pursuit.
She came to a closed door at the end of the hallway. The handle turned, but the door did not budge.
"Oh, come on!"
She jiggled the door handle with increasing intensity to no avail, failing that she began to slam against the door with all her weight, it moved a little but not enough. The man only drew closer, "Open, open!"
Her shoulder ached from the repeated slams but the door would not give, and when at last she turned around again to face the man she saw that he was mere feet away,
"D-don't come any closer," she tried to make it sound like a threat but it came out like a plea as she backed away closer to the door and the zombie paid it no mind as he took slow steps towards her.
He screamed, waving his knife and charged at her, she attempted to duck past and only succeeded at hitting the ground at his feet. For a fleeting moment, she thought this would be the end for good. But then she heard the sound of a gun firing and saw the man go down.
"You okay, Grace?" a familiar voice asked, a voice she thought she'd never hear again.
"Leon!?" she scrambled up from the floor, and looked up to see him, there he was. The man she owed her life to.
"It's alright, I'm here," he extended a hand and after one dumbstruck moment she took it and hugged him,
"I thought you were dead."
He smirked and raised a brow, "I must have forgotten."
She gave him a confused look and the room felt oddly still.
"But you won't forget, will you Grace?"
"What are you-"
Her question was interrupted by the sound of pounding against the windows as the air filled with a cacophony of infected groans and screams, the walls seemed to close-in as a crowd of them rushed down the hall, and pounding began from the door behind her.
"C-come on, we need to go-!"
A sickening splat was the only answer she received and she turned around to see Leon's headless corpse at her feet.
She fell to her knees in disbelief.
"Please, please no," her voice wavered with sobs.
The infected continued to encroach, the windows finally shattered.
"No!"
She took the decapitated head in her hands as the zombies surrounded her, its eyes opened and it smiled at her, and she began to scream.
~
And Grace woke up screaming. It was not the first time this had happened and would likely not be the last. Her neighbors had complained about it at least a few times and once the motel owner had even gotten on her case and warned her about disturbing the other guests. As if anybody would choose to sleep so restlessly.
Her heart raced and her hair stuck to her face with sweat, but neither of these things felt as pressing the dull ache which pulsed behind her eyes and threatened to gnaw away the last lingering vestiges of her sanity. Those, she would need for work. And she knew there was only one thing which would save them. The solitary antidote to her fear, headaches, and memories.
She dared not open her eyes to the morning light and instead fished blindly among the sheets for her medicine, hand sifting through strewn papers, discarded clothes, and snack wrappers. Eventually, she found her half-empty bottle of Captain Morgan and took a swig just in time for the burn in her chest to beat the next pulse of her headache. Finally, she could open her eyes.
She avoided looking too much at her room and checked her phone instead. She'd slept past her alarm and she would need to be at work in 20 minutes. The drive alone was 15.
"OK Grace," she whispered to herself, "You've handled worse, just get your uniform on and get to the building."
She maintained that line of thought even as she scrambled to find her uniform amid the room's clutter and tripped over one of her old bottles. She hit the ground with a hard skid and felt carpet burn bloom on her knees. A moment which was just so… blatant that for a split second every ounce of false composure was drained and the back of her throat burned like she was about to cry as hot tears threatened the edges of her eyes, and she was overtaken by the overwhelming urge to scream or break something or curl into a tiny ball and never stop crying.
She didn't.
"Just get your uniform on, and get to the building," she repeated to herself even quieter now,
When at last she found her uniform, a cheap, vaguely 50s style waitress ensemble all white and pale yellow, she tore off her sleep shirt and pulled on the mini-dress in a hurry. She quickly checked herself in the mirror and froze for just a moment. Her hair looked greasy, it'd been a couple days since she'd showered. There was a visible stain on her apron and she grimaced looking at it. She hastily applied very basic makeup and avoided looking too much as she did.
She spritzed on some cheap perfume and turned to rush out of the door, but the bottle on her bed caught her eye again. Even arriving a little late, it'd be a long shift. She hesitantly picked up the bottle again, then took a second deep swig for the morning. She felt better then, the anxieties and dread of the day in front of her fading into the warm burn in her chest and belly. She smiled unevenly and finally left for work.
~
The sunlight hit her eyes unpleasantly as she stepped out of the drivers seat of her black sedan. She squinted and felt the last remnants of her earlier headache faintly behind her eyes again, but she managed to blink it away as she stepped into the diner. It wasn't packed inside but it was busy by Jordan Heights standards. Several booths in the restaurant were already populated by over-60s deep in conversation about unimportant things. Some of them watched the TV in the corner which had a baseball game on, and one old couple was praying over a plate of eggs and hashbrowns. It all settled over Grace with a painful familiarity.
"You're late again Grace," came a voice, behind the counter,
Grace snapped out of her people-watching and instantly looked up at Polly, her boss and the morning manager of the establishment. She was also the owner.
"Sorry Miss Stuart, I-I couldn't get my car to start and-"
"Tch!" Polly clicked her tongue and held up her hand, her infuriating gesture of 'don't talk, listen'.
"You know the policy. I don't care what you were doing, I care where you aren't and when you aren't. And where you weren't was work when you were meant to be. I've gotta write you up. In the mean time take that plate coming out to the lady in 5A."
"Yes ma'am," Grace said, voice equal parts nervous and resentful. She'd been written up no less than seven times since starting, they didn't really mean anything. Polly just liked feeling powerful.
It'd be a long day yet in the diner but Grace was used to it. Beyond that, the hustle and bustle provided the one thing she craved more than anything else in life: distance. Distance from her thoughts and her aching teeth and that little voice which reminded her how much gentler it'd be to just stop experiencing things. In the diner she could focus on customers, coffee, and the slow grind of a pointless day collecting tips. So long as she made enough to afford rent and rum, everything was okay enough. She could survive another day. How many people had died for her? How selfish would she have to be to not at least do that for them?
~
She went home with a pocket far lighter than she'd been hoping for. Good days at the diner would regularly net her over a hundred dollars, and great ones sometimes nearly two-hundred. Today she'd made forty-seven dollars and spent ten of it to bring her gas tank back up from empty. Rent was due in nine days, she couldn't eat too many more days like this one.
As she ascended the steps towards her second-floor motel room and reached the door, she felt a strong urge to not go inside right away. The dusk sky was a pale purple and only a few stars peaked out from behind the clouds, but Grace stared up at them anyway. She didn't think about anything for a moment, even her push towards that bottle on her bed was briefly forgotten. She just looked up at the sky and felt the cool evening air hit her face.
She stood leaned against the rails of the second floor walkway for several minutes before the the moment broke and she shuffled back inside without a word. She kicked off her shoes as soon as she entered and crinkled her nose at the foul air inside the room. She was walking towards the bathroom when she stepped on something sharp and let out a yelp, falling ass-first onto her bed and immediately cradling her foot to inspect the damage. Broken glass embedded in her heel.
"Fuck," she hissed.
It was, thankfully, a big enough piece that she could fish it out with just her fingers, and she did just that. She winced only a little as she plucked the bloody shard from her flesh and placed it gingerly in a bunched up napkin on the nightstand. She next checked where she'd stepped for the source of the glass and to see if there was any more. She found a fallen picture frame, and her heart sank.
"No," she whimpered, and picked up the picture of her mother which had watched over her from the nightstand since she'd first moved into this room,
"No…" she said again, quieter and more pained.
The tears came before she could even try to stop them and they fell fast and ugly. She hugged the frame like a stuffed animal and bawled her eyes out, curled up atop the bed.
"Mom," she sobbed, "I'm so sorry," her voice was choked and agonized and she felt as if the whole world was coming apart around her.
"I'm so sorry mom."