Chapter Text
“It’s just this way, Mr. Graham,” the curator tells him, moments before the world begins to die. “You know, you’re the second person that’s asked to see the Blake -”
Behind them, something thuds hard against the glass front of the museum entryway.
Will turns towards the sound and sees a man with a bloody face take a step backwards and throw himself against the glass again, pulverizing his nose against it in a spray of brown blood.
Then there are others, a dozen at least, all trying to break through the glass, and Will has just begun to register the ghastly wounds that mar their bodies when three of them find the revolving door.
The curator moves past Will, defended only by the paper shield of his own sense of duty, and the fastest of the crazed people tackles him. Her hands claw clumsily at his face, and as she wrenches the curator’s head upwards Will sees the tips of her fingers are the bruised black of a days-old corpse. She bows her head to the curator’s throat, tearing it out with such a frenetic speed that the curator’s scream is cut off almost as soon as it begins.
There’s a faint dinging sound behind him, and Will turns slowly to see the elevator doors slide open.
No!, he wants to say, Go back up, but the words catch in his throat, and that doesn’t matter because he sees the security guard inside has already pressed the button to close the doors, and that doesn’t matter either because the other two crazed people also heard the elevator dig, and are running towards the doors.
They move perhaps only a little more slowly than a healthy person might run, but jerkily, as though they are puppets whose strings are controlled by some outside force. One of them jams his shoulders through just as the door is about to close, and then the other shoves him from behind, pushing them both through as the safety feature sends the sliding doors open again.
It closes again about ten seconds later, muffling the agonized howling of the guard inside as the elevator carries them all upwards.
It’s early in the day, nearly two hours before the museum was meant to open its doors for guests, and looking around Will sees the only person inside with him now is the woman who killed the curator. She is still crouched over the body, her back to Will, and he realizes without much shock that she is eating it.
He looks away, turning his eyes instead to the museum’s entrance. The crowd banging on the glass has grown, he sees. The only reason they haven’t flooded inside is because one of them is jammed in the revolving door. Others are trying to push through regardless, crushing the trapped man’s chest in the process, but it remains stuck.
Will isn’t sure how long that will take to change, and moving very quietly and slowly to avoid attracting the attention of the woman kneeling over the curator’s body he opens the door to the stairwell and slips inside.
Will isn’t sure where to go from there, but he doesn’t want to stay where he is, and so he is halfway up to the second floor when the third floor door bursts open.
A man dressed in a dark suit backs through the door, fending an attacker off with one of the big black cases that the museum uses to store paintings. The man gives ground, backing slowly until he comes up against the safety railing, and then he suddenly changes tactics.
Pushing hard with his makeshift shield he shoves the attacker away from him, then drops the case and side steps quickly. He catches his attacker by the shoulders and lifts him off the ground, then in one smooth motion twists to fling him over the railing.
He falls silently, finally landing two floors below with a sickening crunch.
Will looks back up at the man in the black suit, and sees that he is starting down the stairs. Then something happens that Will cannot see from his vantage point, and he suddenly sticks his arms out, flailing for balance, then tumbles down the stairs.
Looking back on it later, he will wonder if he really did hear Dolarhyde’s ankle snap, or if that is only a false memory produced by his own always overactive imagination.
Now, Will hurries up the next flight of steps to meet the man at their base. He’s managed to pull himself into a sitting position, but when he tries to stand his face goes the color of curdled milk. The bulge of the broken bone is visible, even beneath the fabric of his slacks, and Will tears his eyes away from that to look up to see what made him fall.
The second of the crazed people from the elevator drags herself through the doorway, clawing at the smooth marble as she struggles to move forward. There’s something wrong with her legs, and she’s been beaten terribly around the face, and though her jaw is obviously broken it still moves, working up and down as she quests around for something to bite.
Will understands now that she caught the man in black by the ankle and made him fall. She’s coming towards them now, though slowly, but Will doesn’t want to wait around for her to tumble down the steps and into their laps.
He looks back to the man and sees in the tautness of the lines of his body that he is preparing to attempt to rise again, and says hurriedly, “Don’t. Let me help you.”
The other man looks up at Will, seeming to really see him for the first time, and something between rage and animal fear happens in his eyes. His upper lip, which has a faint scar denoting a repaired cleft lip, curls to bare teeth, but at the same time he cringes away.
It reminds Will of nothing so much as a mistreated dog, that reaction, but there’s no time now to try to parse it out. Circling around to the man’s left side, Will crouches to drape the man's arm over his own shoulders and hauls him up.
He’s not a small man to begin with, but he’s much heavier than Will expected. His arms and back are corded with muscle, all of it tense and hard and burning with an anxious feverish heat.
Once he’s on his feet he seems willing enough to go with Will, but Will is faced now with uncertainty as to just where they should go next.
The stranger seems to read his mind.
“My van’s in the basement parking garage,” he says.
There’s no earthly way that they’re going to make it down the stairs like this, and with Will barring as much of the other man’s weight as he can, the two of them limp out of the stairwell and out into the second floor hallway, then call the elevator.
The guard’s body is in there, of course, mangled and chewed, chunks of meat missing from his throat and his belly and his arms.
There’s a telescoping baton laying in the pool of blood beside the body, and after helping the other man to lean against the corner of the elevator car, Will bends to pick it up.
The guard moans and moves its head, turning baleful eyes on Will. It’s jaw starts to chatter, almost as though it's cold.
There is always, for Will, an instinct to help, and he starts to say, “I’ve got to -” and then the man reaches out from behind him and grips his wrist, yanking him away from the guard.
“He’s dead,” he tells Will. “They’re all dead.”
“Yeah,” Will agrees vaguely. “I guess I knew that.”
They make it to the basement garage before the mauled zombie gathers the wherewithal to rise, then slip as quickly as they can from the elevator.
The parking garage is still, and they make it to the van without incident. Will opens the rear doors and helps the stranger slide inside, sitting on the floor with his broken leg sticking out straight in front of him.
It feels vital that they get out of the city, and Will drives the van up to the surface and out onto the street with no clear plan beyond that.
They emerge out into the early morning light, and as Will Graham navigates the van around a tangle of abandoned cars, something bangs heavily against the rear of the van. Francis Dolarhyde looks up from his broken leg to see a balled and bloody fist strike for a second time at the tinted back window.
A face appears in the window, and Dolarhyde sees that its nose and lips and most of one cheek have been chewed away. It presses the white cartilage of its missing nose against the glass, trying to find him. When this does not work it slides its tattered face along the dark glass, as though looking for a better angle, leaving a long smear of blood in its wake.
Another figure shoves in beside the first and tries to force its gnawed fingers into the thin gap between the van’s rear doors. The face of this one looks almost human, but its face is slack and stupid, the only signs of life burning in its hungry eyes.
The zombies can’t see him through the tinted glass, Dolarhyde knows, but nonetheless they know that he’s here. They know that he isn’t alone, too, because through the side windows he sees another one circling around the side of the van to claw ineffectually at the driver-side front window.
The van accelerates, and hurriedly Dolarhyde claws his way backwards along the floor, lifting his butt and pushing with his good leg for extra momentum until he’s wedged himself against the back of the front passenger seat and the wheel well. Bolts of agony shoot out from his broken leg as he does this, radiating all the way up to his belly, which roils sickly with the Dragon digesting inside it.
It’s a bad break. Dolarhyde can tell that much just by looking at the odd angle at which it lies now; crooked just above the ankle, with the toe of his brightly polished Oxford pointing inward. He thinks he might have done something to his knee, too.
The movements of the van - every sudden stop and sharp turn and jerking evasion - jar his leg, yet the pain is a vague thing to Dolarhyde, subsumed by confusion and fear as he returns his attention to the monster behind the steering wheel.
There’s a funeral home a few streets down from the museum, and as they pass it Dolarhyde sees that the windows are broken out. The door hangs open, and there are a few badly mangled bodies lying in the lawn.
"That’s where they came from," Will says, in an oddly flat voice.
They drive on, the van weaving between small clusters of undead and abandoned cars. Dolarhyde has no sense of the passage of time, and isn’t sure how long they’ve been going when they come to a quiet place at last.
The van pulls off onto the shoulder of the empty road, and Dolarhyde clamps down hard on his fear when Will Graham shifts in the driver’s seat to look back at him and asks, “Are you alright?”