Chapter Text
June 29, 2013. 22:00 PM - Tall Oaks
The balmy night wind brushes Claire’s hair as she and Leon retrieve their firearms from the crushed car. Glancing anxiously in the engine’s general vicinity, she holsters her revolver, quickly moving aside to put space between herself and the potentially exploding vehicle.
Suddenly, Leon’s radio beeps, Hunnigan’s voice emerging from it as he clicks open the channel. “Leon? Claire? Are you two alright?”
“Yeah uh,” Leon begins, “we ran into a little trouble.” Claire wants to arch a brow at him. In truth, they were lucky, perhaps in an alternate world the cruiser would have blown up with them still inside. “We’re hanging in there, but we need another way to the cathedral,” he continues.
Some clacking is heard over the line like fingers on a keyboard, then, “I found an underground route that might be safer,” Hunnigan tells them, which makes Claire and Leon share a look.
There’s nothing in the road ahead of them but a pile of burning cars. Though as Claire drops her gaze she notices it, the manhole.
“Sewers, huh?” Leon notes, and she can tell from voice alone that he isn’t exactly thrilled. “Great.”
She’s not crazy about the idea either, but after all that’s happened, it’s just not as far-fetched as she would have considered it fifteen years ago. Claire glances at him, feeling the edge of her mouth picking up. “For old-time’s sake?”
A small smile flashes across Leon’s face, and though it’s fleeting and a little more rueful than it used to be, it remains the same smile he had given her at twenty-one; the same one he’s always had for her throughout the years.
He removes the heavy lid of the manhole while she busies herself with the flashlight she managed to take from the police cruiser before it went upside down, but pointing the beam into the opening only reveals the damp shine of the ground below. Nevertheless, Leon jumps in before she can comment, reckless as always. He looks up at her, his face partially illuminated by the flashlight, his grin widens slightly as their eyes meet, a flash of teeth. “I got you.”
She kisses her teeth, eyes drifting to the night sky as she entreats herself not to be charmed by the same things she’s been teasing him for, ever since they met. Though it’s hard to do when he’s got that kind of cheeky enthusiasm that always springs at the worst, or best, of times depending on one’s perspective. With a sigh, Claire throws him the flashlight, along with a side smile and crouches down, jumping into the darkness the way he did a minute ago. Leon’s arms are quick to catch her before she can so much as graze the floor.
He holds her against him for a moment, and suddenly their faces are much closer than they have been in a while. His eyes flit over her. “You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, all good,” she replies into the small space between, entreating herself not to smile as she notices his gaze drifting down to her mouth.
Leon seems about to add something more, but she never finds out what because at that moment the echo of a groan travels down into the sewers with them, reminding them of the hungry infected, still more than willing to make them their meal up on street level.
“We should move,” Claire tells him.
“Right.” he nods, and lets go of her, hands brushing her waist momentarily as he sets her down.
Claire’s eyes drift away, catching the slightest movement in her periphery which turns out to be nothing but a rat. She sighs. Maybe one day they’ll end up somewhere more glamorous. Beside her Leon is silent, and as they venture deeper into the tunnels she steals a glance at him in the meager light. His brow is furrowed and despite him keeping his gun at the ready something about his expression strikes her as remote, his attention turned inward.
Then Hunnigan buzzes in. “Guys, we are gonna be out of contact while you two are in there. I’ll track your movements anyway but be careful.”
“Ditto,” Leon replies, and then with a thoughtful look, he unclips the radio from his belt and passes it to Claire. “In case we get separated,” he replies to her questioning eyes, gesturing to the comm in his ear.
“Alright.” She nods.
They descend deeper into the sewers, sticking to the elevated path on the side to avoid the river of sludge that occupies the middle.
Casting a doubtful glance at the darkened middle distance she peers back at Leon. “You know you can talk to me, right?” Claire asks him, her tentative voice carrying in the emptiness of the tunnel. Guilt pools into her stomach at her own phrasing, at how phony and cliche it sounds. “I know you and Benford were… friends.”
Leon opens his mouth but then seems to think better of it. A beat passes before his response comes. “It’s— I don’t know.” As the silence stretches on, broken only by their echoing footsteps, Claire suddenly wishes they had brighter illumination than just a flashlight, since she can’t properly look at his face in the darkness.
She’s halfways convinced herself that he’ll leave it at that when Leon speaks again, quieter than before. “I guess, I feel like I should have known this would happen. Should’ve done something, I knew it was dangerous.”
Claire frowns. “You think this is about his speech, about Raccoon?”
“Isn’t everything?” he asks, a hint of irony coloring his words.
Claire turns this over in her head. It’s true, in a way. Not exactly about Raccoon City itself, that was just the catalyst, but about bioterrorism as a whole. She considers her words carefully for a moment, it might not be the right time but then again, it never is. “Why now? Why unveil the truth now?”
Leon’s eyes flicker towards her. The quiet part hangs in the air between them. Why now and not seven years ago? What’s changed? They’ve been dancing around the subject since the moment he first called to invite her to the event. And perhaps even before that, since that day in Washington, when he’d refused to give her the intel. Something shifted in their relationship after that, beyond the obvious. At the time she’d thought about it as a kind of blindfold coming off, her realizing his political connections were more important to him than the public knowing what truly happened to Raccoon City. But now… now she isn’t so sure what to believe.
Leon’s voice is low but certain when he replies. “They would have come after you, I couldn’t—” A familiar wave of stubbornness rises up inside Claire’s chest, but she bites her tongue.
“Then why tonight?” she asks again, eventually.
He’s silent for a minute, then, “Adam thought it was time, he knew it was difficult but he was set on it.”
Claire sits with that for a while, even though she can feel Leon’s eyes boring on her, waiting for a response. “And what did you think about it?”
Leon sighs. “I thought he would be… safer. I thought they might have come for his image, not— I didn’t think they’d attack him directly.” He says this, but he’s looking at her and when Claire finally returns his gaze there’s an intensity to his eyes, pleading for her to understand.
Her tone isn’t unkind when she replies. “I know you care about me Leon, but whether I’m safe or not isn’t your choice to make.”
He looks away. “I wouldn’t presume,” he replies. “And I didn’t just do it because of the government—”
“I know,” she says, but does she really? Despite his good intentions, despite what’s really at the core of him the years have changed him. Both of them. She knew that back then, but she’d always assumed that they were in similar paths. That day in Washington felt like someone pouring a bucket of cold water over her head.
She hesitates, her fingers curling in on the flashlight. It used to be so easy, talking to him. She’d be lying if she said she doesn’t mourn that, that she wasn’t somewhat surprised to see him standing at the door of her hospital room, once she was rescued from Sein island two years ago. But thinking about that feels like probing a painful tooth and she’s a lot of things, but a masoch*st is not one of them.
“I really wanted this time to be different,” Leon says, his tone holding more vulnerability than she’s heard from him in some time. “I thought that if things worked out, then maybe you’d start looking at me the way you used to.”
Claire halts, suddenly frozen. “Leon—
“You’re my best friend, Red.” The words come out strange, like he’s pulling them from his mouth with some effort, and it makes something in her throat catch in turn. “I can’t stand not talking to you.”
The hand that holds the flashlight lowers as she remains there, just looking at him for a moment. There’s a hundred different feelings vying for their place inside her chest. She remembers a time when he would only say these things in the dead of night, in the quietness of waiting for sleep to take hold. She swallows. “I miss you too,” she tells him, it’s the truth.
He nods, his mouth stretching into that bittersweet line that she knows so well.
Then as if some higher power has judged them and decided on leniency, a gust of wind sweeps by them, and when Claire focuses the beam of the flashlight again, she finds that a few steps ahead the passage opens into a wider tunnel.
“Is this—?” she wonders.
“The subway,” Leon confirms.
Skipping the couple of steps that lead down from the sewer tunnel, Claire narrows her eyes into the distance, making out a faint glow just ahead, broken only by the pillars supporting the concrete roof over their heads. Mindful of the train line, she and Leon make their way towards it, quickening their pace when a shambling figure steps into the glare of the emergency fluorescents. Claire raises her revolver to eyesight, putting two bullets into the infected’s head before it crumbles to the floor.
She’s about to reload when all at once the rush of air becomes stronger, a deafening metallic sound hurrying towards them by the second. Claire’s blood turns to ice in her veins.
“Watch out!” Leon shouts, putting his arm across her chest and pushing her against the wall, his own back flat against the stone beside her. Only seconds after a train hurtles by, steel cars sliding just inches from their faces.
“What the f*ck?!” Claire hears herself breathe out once the train is out of view and they’re able to stand properly again. “The subway is still running?”
Leon meets her eye in the dimness of the tunnel, a half-crazed, half-ecstatic look on his face. “No one at the controls, zombie express.”
She stares at him for a few seconds, disbelief mixing with the adrenaline still bouncing through her system. “For real? We almost became beef jerky and that’s all you have to say to me?”
His mouth twists in what she recognizes is his way of trying to bite down a grin; the sight of it does something funny to her stomach. Leon shrugs. “Do you wanna say something to me, Red?”
“Oh my god,” she chuckles, pushing at his shoulder with a hand. He laughs too, light but slightly brittle in that way that says Gee, that was close! Isn’t it funny though? She guesses that at this point they’re both very familiar with that kind of giggling.
Yet despite whatever jittery amusem*nt the situation might call for, both of them hurry their footsteps, making quick work of the last stretch of tunnel before another train comes down the line. A couple undead meet them halfway, but they take care of them before their teeth can get into snapping distance. When they finally reach the station up ahead, they find their way blocked by a darkened car, this time blissfully stationary and sitting along the railing.
With a jerk of his hand Leon tries to open the door at the end, but it remains firmly shut. “Boost me up,” Claire says, tilting her chin towards the roof of the train. Leon nods, threading his hands for her to step on.
The emergency hatch lays open, so Claire proceeds to lower herself through it after a quick search. “All aboard,” she announces, manually overriding the mechanism, allowing her to open the door for Leon to join her. He tips an imaginary hat in her direction, even as his eyes deftly map each corner of the unfamiliar space.
Taking a second to reload her revolver she hums, considering her words. “You know, something’s been bothering me since we left campus.”
“Oh?” Leon glances at her briefly to let her know she has his attention just as he carefully bridges the gap into the next car.
Claire bites her lip, sweeping the inside of the train with the beam of the flashlight. It’s tight and empty but for a couple corpses on the floor, though still probably safer than the tunnel outside. Probably. “That woman, Helena,” she clarifies, and watches Leon stiffen slightly at the mention of her. “She said she was responsible for… all this.”
“Something doesn’t add up,” he finishes, voicing her line of thought.
Claire shrugs with one shoulder. “Yeah. Why would she admit it? Why incriminate herself?”
“Overpowering guilt?” Leon proposes, sounding doubtful himself, as they cross into the next car over.
“Perhaps,” Claire says, but her thoughts are scattered when they’re suddenly interrupted by a distressed voice.
They both surge forwards, past the next car, and come in full view of a woman slamming her fists— her entire body, against the automatic double doors on the side of the train, her face frantically searching the station beyond. Claire clips the flashlight to her belt as they hurry on towards her.
“Hey! Hey, please,” the woman begs once she catches sight of the two of them. “Please, I need you to open this— I have to get to him.” Tears run down her face as she claws desperately at the sliding doors. Leon meets Claire’s eyes briefly over her head.
“What happened?”
“—he’s on the other side of that door,” the woman explains haltingly, pointing at the closed gate of the station, beyond the car’s windows. “Please, he’s just a kid.”
With a quick nod, Leon helps Claire release the emergency lock on the door and the woman stumbles onto the platform, bolting instantly in the direction of the gate, calling out a boy’s name. It’s only then, once they’re out of the train car, that they can hear the groans and hisses coming from the other side of the roller door.
“No! Wait—” Claire screams arm thrusted forwards, but the woman has already pushed the gate open by the time the warning reaches her. The undead are already pouring into the platform.
With a muttered curse, Leon opens fire on them, as fast as humanly possible and yet, not fast enough to save the woman from being devoured. Claire grits her teeth at the sight, forcing herself to focus, shoot, send enough infected down to cut a path between them and the gate, an opening wide enough for her and Leon to take the stairs up to the surface. As the legs of one hostile crumble underneath it, sending it down along two others, Leon surprises her by grabbing her hand and tugging her with him, leaving the platform and the infected behind.
Amid the chaos, the radio crackles to life, Hunnigan’s voice reaching them for the first time in what feels like hours. “Good, you made it! You can reach the street level from there.”
“What are the conditions like up there?” Leon asks into his comm.
“It’s gotten pretty bad,” Ingrid admits, much to their dismay. “Hell on Earth isn’t much of a stretch.”
Claire’s eyes flicker toward the entrance, a ways further than the ticket booth; the glow of firelight bathes the stairs in orange. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about what they would find once they made it to the city proper, but now standing so close, a hundred memories play in her mind. Leon’s eyes find hers, the ghost of his hand still lingering on her fingers. He doesn’t say anything, but as they climb the steps to street level she reasons they must be thinking the same thing. Deja vu indeed.
It feels like walking into the past, like being transported to her nineteen-year-old self all at once. Everywhere she looks there’s chaos, fires breaking out into the night, people screaming, running for their lives. It’s perhaps worse than Raccoon was in her memory, because by the time she and Leon made it to town that night, almost everyone was already dead. A distant, inhuman howl resonates in the air, and it snaps her out of her own thoughts. Like a chain reaction, a car comes into the narrow street, straight at them, headlights blinding in the darkness.
“Watch out!” Claire screams, her arm reaching for Leon out of instinct, but at the last moment the car swerves, the driver losing control of it, crashing into a nearby sign. Even the asphalt vibrates with the impact.
In the aftermath, a man starts crawling from the wreckage, his hands outstretched and pleading toward them. Like a wip, Leon runs in his direction, throwing his entire weight against the warped metal in order to free him. Claire, only a couple of seconds behind, has barely a glimpse of the scene as the fuel tank goes up in flames, the explosion knocking them back. Then before she has time to push back to her feet another burst of bright light nearly blinds her. She stares, wide eyed at the infected firefighter, or what’s left of it now that the oxygen tank on his back has burst.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” she hears herself say to Leon, shock still working its way through her system. A little ways ahead the reanimated corpse of a police officer starts unloading its service weapon with abandon. Leon nods once, grimly, and they both make a run for the nearest alley, the sound of bullets firing into the open sky at their back.
They cut to an unblocked street using some scaffolding that wraps around a construction site, but the moment they descend the catwalk on the opposite side, the path is cut short by an ambulance, crashing right into the middle of the street, only a few feet from their startled faces. Leon halts for a second, his eyes wide. “Guess we’re not going that way.”
“There,” Claire points to a seemingly untouched set of double doors, partially obscured by a precariously leaning truck.
“Nice one,” Leon nods and they hurry towards the entrance, banging the doors open on collision.
As her eyes adjust to the dimness after the fire and chaos from outside, Claire notes the rows of bottles on the walls, the pool table, the gleaming counter. A bar.
“Good idea,” Hunnigan chips in from the radio. “You’ll be safer if you keep indoors as much as possible.”
“Maybe we can even catch our breath,” Leon adds, picking the billiard’s cue from the table and sticking it through the handles on the double doors. Meanwhile Claire ventures deeper into the building, rolling her tense shoulders as she holsters her revolver. “Seems clear,” she says, the frantic beat of her heart coming down slowly.
Looking back, she finds Leon’s eyes on her upper arm. She glances down at it, surprised to see blood staining the sleeve of her top. A cut on the fabric reveals a shallow wound underneath. It could have been a scrap of metal from when the oxygen tank blew right next to them, or well, anything else really. She hadn’t really registered the pain until now.
“You’re hurt,” he says, pushing his bangs away with one soothy hand.
“I can barely feel it,” Claire replies honestly, silently cursing herself for leaving her jacket behind. Her top might be long-sleeved but the thin cotton of it provides very little protection.
Leon’s mouth stretches into a complicated line. “That’s the adrenaline talking.” He places his handgun over the bar and looks about for a moment, before going around the back and opening the lower cabinets. Claire hears him rummaging for a moment, before he comes back up with a little plastic box between his hands.
She hops over the counter, turning to face Leon as he washes his hands on the sink across from her. Sitting like this, with his attention elsewhere, Claire allows herself to just look at him for a moment. Back at campus she hadn’t been able to help herself from taking him in at first glance; it’s true that they had met sporadically since they’d parted on that fateful day seven years ago, but something about this afternoon, before all the mayhem began, had been a little harder to wrap her head around. Perhaps it was the light, the twilight gilt of the sun was so similar to the one of that day, it had given her pause. She’d tried to acknowledge it later, with her comment about the suit, but it had stayed like a thorn inside her heart nevertheless.
Now with Leon’s hair a little ruffled and his broad shoulders just slightly hunched she feels affection squeeze her chest. Clearing her throat she asks, “so, are we gonna talk about it? The… nostalgia factor in all this?” She’s aware that her attempt at levity is poor, but she hopes it won’t be too obvious considering the stress of the last few hours.
Leon grows still, his head tilting a little as he turns back to her, closing the distance when he steps between her knees. His eyes seem overtly careful while he replies, “you mean the the chaos outside? Or…?”
Or whatever this is. Claire shrugs with a nonchalance she doesn’t really feel. “Either.”
The side of Leon’s mouth lifts in a rueful line. “Well I haven’t really had the chance to sit and think about it so far.”
Claire hums. He pops the box open, taking out a bottle of solution and a piece of gauze to clean her cut. His fingers are very gentle when they meet her bare skin, lifting the torn fabric of her top to expose the gash underneath. It surprises her a little, even though it isn’t uncharacteristic. He used to handle her like porcelain all the time, back in the day. Well, except when she explicitly asked him to be rough of course.
“Do you think it might be us?” she says conversationally and watches him stop in his motions for the barest fraction of a second. “Something always goes wrong whenever we meet.”
A beat passes while Leon seems to turn this over in his head. “Not always,” he says. “Plus being apart isn’t really a guarantee nothing bad will ever happen, is it?” he wonders thoughtfully, then adds, ”and even if it was, I don’t think I have another year like that in me anyway.”
Now it’s her turn to stay still. She’d meant it in jest, of course; and the world is pretty much ending just outside the door, but still his answer plucks at a taunt chord somewhere within her stomach. Claire arches her brow. “Not even for the good of humanity?”
This seems to strike him differently, and he sets the gauze aside in order to look at her directly. “I’d do it if you asked me to.” Leon’s gaze holds, like he’s purposely trying to remind her of something, she has a pretty good idea of what. The thing is though, Claire never asked him to stay away after that awful day, she just took her stuff and left. She was so pissed she didn’t even stop to consider it, and it wasn’t until the weeks of radio silence stretched into months that it hit her. The sense of loss that became of Leon’s presence almost swallowed her whole that first year; it was great for her career, she’d never been more motivated to give it her all, never been more desperate not to go home at the end of the day.
So now returning his gaze in this quasi-game of chicken she knows she can’t lie. He might have been the one to reach out first, but it isn’t as if she wasn’t incredibly ready to answer that first phone call. “Wouldn’t that be a shame?” Claire asks.
The edge of Leon’s mouth quirks up, his eyes dropping and he unrolls a bandage. Taking care to wrap it around her arm securely, his voice sounds curiously quiet when he says, “you’ve no idea.”
The chord in her belly pulls slightly at the texture of his tone. Is it a little upsetting that he still has that effect, even after all these years? Perhaps she would have thought so some time ago, but it might just be more honest to admit that he always has. Probably always will at this rate.
“I have to say though,” Leon adds wonderingly, “this is pretty similar to ninety-eight.”
Claire blinks to clear her head, grateful for the distraction. “Right? For a moment back there I thought I was dreaming.”
His eyes flicker back up to meet her face. “You still get those? The nightmares, I mean,” he questions, concern and kinship mixing in his expression.
Claire shrugs. “Don’t you?”
A half smile stretches across his mouth, sturdy enough to carry years of practiced ease. “Raccoon is a recurring one in my repertoire.”
Then because despite everything that has happened, despite the mayhem outside, her first impulse will always be to tease him, she asks, “am I in your dreams too? Blasting zombies, running around?”
Leon’s smile widens, sharpening a little at the edges as his eyes narrow in amusem*nt. “In the good ones, always.”
Feeling herself chuckle at that, Claire eases herself off the counter, lingering in the narrow space between it and him for a moment. “Good to know,” she says and funnily enough, means it wholeheartedly.
After that, they search the bar for leftover supplies and exit through the only other door at the rear, their pockets stuffed with unopened rolls of gauze and loose bullets. A storeroom leads them into the back of a small town house, perhaps the owner’s. Though it is as quiet as the bar itself, they walk in on high alert, stopping only once they come into the living room.
An unmoving family of three still sits in front of the TV, slumped over the sofa, their mouths and fingers already turning an unnatural gray. Whatever lightness Claire might have felt vanishes at the sight. Leon is silent beside her, but she catches a glimpse of his hands curling into fists as they cross the room.
On silent feet, Claire tries the door by the kitchen, but finding it shut she turns to rummage through a few drawers until she comes out with a paperclip. She’s messing with the lock when she notices Leon frowning at the TV with a strange look on his face. A news bulletin plays out, but instead of it having to do with the virus spreading through town, the anchor gestures towards the picture of a submarine.
“—Went missing on the twenty-sixth of this month at eleven twenty-seven,” says the woman on the TV. “The final message received claimed there was an attack, authorities are now investigating whether—” static floods the screen, cutting the transmission short, a stand-by image appears on as it tries to regain the signal.
Claire blinks at Leon as she releases the lock on the door. “Everything okay?”
He shakes his head as if to clear it. “Yeah, let’s go.”
They file out into the backyard in wary silence and climb a low fence that deposits them at a crossroads. Orange brilliance seeps from the distance, rising to the night sky, a large fire has probably broken somewhere close. Claire can’t help but to take the scene in for a minute. It’s amazing really how fragile the balance between order and chaos is, that a viral agent and a few hours are enough to send everything crashing down.
Suddenly a scream pierces the night, cutting even over the blare of sirens in the distance. Claire turns, only to find Leon’s understanding gaze already looking at her. He nods and they venture in the direction of the sound. The voice comes from a gas station a little down the street, where a group of survivors are barely holding off against a wave of infected.
“I don’t wanna die,” a woman sobs as her hands frantically unload almost an entire magazine into the chest of an undead man, her voice rising with desperation. “Why is this happening?!”
Using the infected’s distraction to their advantage, Claire and Leon slip into the fight seamlessly, with him placing a couple of headshots while she trips a hostile over and crushes its head with a nearby pipe. Swiping the legs from under another, she hears one of the survivors yell over the ruckus.
“First day as a cop and already at a shootout!”
In the middle of the fight, Claire finds a second to arch a brow at Leon over the head of a reaching undead. Putting a bullet through the thing’s brain she’s about to call out when out of nowhere, a piercing howl blazes over the gunfire. Her hands press against her ears in a desperate attempt to muffle it. She spins on her heels, searching for whatever creature could emit such an inhuman sound.
Atop a car an infected man stands looking at the sky. Its clothes are torn to shreds around the neck, as if he’d tried to claw at them with bloody hands. Not wanting to wait and see what kind of trick this one might pull, Claire raises her revolver just as the creature inhales, and dreadful understanding dawns on her. Its throat expands, glowing a painful shade of orange, and when the scream comes again from its distended mouth, the sound is so ear splitting, so painful that Claire’s knees buckle under her.
An arm slips around her just in time, steady and solid. Leon doesn’t say anything, perhaps he can’t, but she feels his hand gripping hers and as she gets back on her feet she raises her gun, shooting straight into the thing’s throat. The swollen skin bursts, exploding in a mix of blood and matter, the scream dying out when the creature collapses, crumbling to the ground.
But even though Claire had managed to kill it, the shriek was high enough, loud enough to draw the nearby undead. A dozen of them appear, brought by the call, their dead eyes and rotting limbs reaching for their group.
“Aim for their heads!” Leon yells at a guy firing all his rounds into the air. “You’re a cop, right? You can handle a gun.”
“It’s my first day, man!” the uniformed guy barks back with wild eyes. “How can I aim in all this?”
Like before, Leon’s eyes flash at Claire amid the chaos, baffled. Despite it all she chuckles, emptying the last of her ammo on the approaching horde, picking up a crowbar when her revolver emits that last, dreadful click.
“Stay calm and pick a target,” Leon instructs, still trying to reason with the man.
With an angry groan the guy replies. “Who made you the leader?” but whatever comedic effect it might have had is sadly lost when out of nowhere a truck comes skidding down the avenue, straight for the gas station. In a second, Claire grabs Leon’s sleeve and hauls him back, where they both roll on the floor, barely managing to avoid the deafening impact as the truck collides head first into the gas pumps.
The ceiling partially collapses as the pillars holding it up start to tip. The neon sign above it emits a shower of sparks as it balances precariously over the whole tableau, an electric cherry atop a cake. With wide-eyed alarm Claire, still next to Leon on the ground, sees the gas bursting upwards from the destroyed pumps like water from a fountain.
From either stupidity or sheer desperation, someone screams, “shoot the gas! We can blow these things to kingdom come!”
Claire has no time to yell in opposition. Leon throws his body on top of hers, and what’s left of the building explodes like a fireball.
A few minutes go by before the brightness recedes and she can open her eyes again. Her body aches where it’s pressed against the asphalt, but despite that she’s alright, safe. Her heart leaps into her throat though, when she becomes aware of Leon’s unmoving weight atop her. Her hands search his back, moving frantically into his hair. He doesn’t seem to be hurt but—
“You could at least buy me dinner first, Red,” he rasps.
“Holy sh*t, you scared me,” she admits, catching her breath, feeling his words reverberate over her collarbone laying like they are, with him draped over her like chainmail.
“Yeah well,” he says, lifting himself up to his knees and extending a hand to her. “Please don’t tell me the hair at the back of my head is all burnt.”
Claire laughs, barely fighting the urge to put her arms around him. “Ah, a bad haircut, the worst nightmare.”
“At this point my looks are all I have,” he says wryly, rolling his shoulders.
On the bright side, the explosion did actually blow most of the infected sky high, or so she notices once she’s able to look around. On the other hand, fires are still breaking across the street and once the flames reach the abandoned cars, it’ll probably only get worse. It’s then that one of the survivors, the cop, yells at them. “Hey come on! It’s safer here.” He disappears around the corner and Claire and Leon share a look.
“Whaddya think?” he asks with a wince.
Claire shrugs. “I think we don’t really have a choice.”
The “safer” place turns out to be a gunshop, which under the circ*mstances actually lifts Leon’s spirits somewhat.
Two of the survivors bust the lock open despite the protests of the owner who appears to be holed up in the second floor. Despite some annoyance he finds can’t really blame him, all things considered. Still, there are worse places to be stranded in during an outbreak, evidenced by Claire making a beeline for one the shelves and plucking two ammo boxes with one hand, as one would a can of tomato soup from the convenience store.
Leon takes stock of the situation. Six people, cramped quarters and a lot of noise. A slight glimmer snags his attention when he looks at the racks, and he approaches them with a chuckle, holstering his Wingshooter for the time being.
“For you,” he says to Claire after, when he finds her peering out one of the barricaded windows.
She blinks back at him, then at the shotgun he’s presenting her with, and grins like a kid on Christmas day. “You really know how to please a lady, Kennedy.”
Leon shrugs. “ One lady.”
Her eyes shoot back up to his face. He braces himself up for something, some sort of cheeky reply, or gentle let-down, but she only winks. Even in this admittedly… complicated situation it’s enough to send a thrill through his stomach.
Then because there truly is no rest for the wicked, a dull groan filters in through the boarded window. Claire snaps to attention beside him, the rest of the survivors share a nervous look. A minute goes by and then a thud echoes around the room, followed by another and a dozen faster ones right after.
“They’re coming for the windows, they know we’re here,” someone at the back says, panic lacing through their voice.
“Steady now,” Claire replies, her hand lingering in the air for a second. The barricade nearest to them rattles slightly, and then more violently as hands and fingers start prying into the empty spaces between the boards. Leon readies his gun.
The blockades don’t last long and as the undead begin forcing their way inside, a thought that had occurred to Leon while they were still on campus makes a return. This isn’t right . The infected are too ferocious, too rabid.
“f*cking zombies,” one of the survivors hisses and Leon would have to agree, except that he doesn’t think this is the T-Virus.
Everything that’s happened so far, Adam, the fog, what Claire said earlier about Helena, starts coalescing into a crooked picture in his mind. All the while he puts as many bullets into the incoming horde as he can when suddenly one of the fallen corpses starts convulsing on the floor.
It all happens fast, too fast for it to register properly, but steam seems to rise up from the thrashing body, the skin breaking away to reveal sharp bone and bloodshot tissue underneath. The creature rises, twitching, and launches itself at one of the survivors, tearing their throat with its snapping, animal teeth.
Blood sprays out, someone screams and bullets fly wide. Leon takes a step in front of the creature and yells without looking back, “get that second floor open, now!” He doesn’t turn to see if anyone is doing as he said, shooting instead at the monster to get its attention; quickly dodging it before it can sink its claws on him.
“Get down!” Claire’s voice rings out like a bell over the thing’s growls. Leon rolls aside and she fires the shotgun on the creature’s head, once, twice, driving it back. After a third round, the thing falls to its knees and Leon closes in on it, kicking it down. “Catch!” Claire throws him a crowbar and he beats the monster into the ground.
“Get up here!” A voice yells from the second floor, and they both retreat into it, before the creature gets back up, dispatching a couple of infected on their way to the stairs. An old man bars the door closed behind them. The shop’s owner apparently.
A tearful kid huddles in the corner of the room. “What was that thing?” he wonders with terrified eyes.
“Looked like a licker, only on two legs” Claire says, reloading the shotgun before returning it to its place on her back. When the rest of the survivors look at her uncomprehendingly, she amends, “another type of infected.”
“Alright people,” says the old man. “I’ve got some folks comin’ for me on a bus. Any minute now.”
This news seems to go about well, as Leon sees the relentless horror drain a little from the faces of their companions. “If we can make it on board it’s a straight shot to Tall Oaks Cathedral.”
At this, Leon and Claire share a look. “The cathedral?” she asks cautiously, doubtlessly thinking about what Helena had said, what she’d asked of them before she disappeared back at campus.
The man nods. “Yeah, people are evacuating there, I heard it on the radio.”
Leon frowns at the coincidence, in his experience, those are never good. “Why the church?”
“It’s a big old building,” the old man shrugs. “And it’s public.”
Perhaps he is right, and even though Leon doesn’t really have the opportunity to discuss it with Claire privately, a part of him does want to see what Helena was about. The wave of guilt he’s been pushing to the back of his mind, ever since he was forced to put Adam down, resurfaces for a second. He sighs. His back feels stiff and he’d do about anything for a glass of scotch if that was a possibility; but he’s unharmed and so is Claire, which is all he can ask for given the circ*mstances.
He meets her gaze where she stands, across the room, in conversation with a girl that looks only shy of eighteen. People don’t usually get a choice when it comes to companionship during times like these, but if he did he would still pick Claire a hundred times over.
“Here,” she says when Leon gets close, passing him a full box of nine-millimeter ammo she’d stashed somewhere on her body before the attack.
Leon smiles, with the shotgun on her back and a full bandolier across her body she looks so— Well, badass might actually be the word; like a bandit from an old western. Her sky eyes sparkle a little, as if she can tell what he’s thinking with only a glance.
“Okay! Come on,” someone by the window says, bringing him out of his thoughts. “Ride’s here.”
“Shall we?” Leon asks Claire, hand outstretched, and when she twines her fingers into his they file out via the fire escape, down into the school bus below.
