Work Text:
“I’m talking about getting rid of some waste,” Howard says, standing over the barrel of acid, and Michelle knows the only question now is, whose flesh will be dissolved in there. They have a plan, sort of—I’ll distract him, you grab his gun—but that doesn’t mean she actually has any idea what the hell to do. But this is it. They’ll have to wing it.
Howard turns his back to get his evidence, and they make eye contact, and Emmett’s face says, Now. Do it.
Howard turns back, says, “Tell me what you two are doing with these.” Michelle doesn’t waste any time.
“Oh God, Howard,” she says, looking right at him, keeping him steady. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to take them, but—I was getting so nervous…”
“What? Nervous about what?” Howard says.
Michelle takes a deep breath, as if this is painful to admit. “Emmett.” Then, turning to look at him: “I’m sorry, Emmett! I have to tell him.” Emmett stares back at her, keeping his face blank. She hopes he’s figuring out how he’s going to do his bit.
“He kept asking me,” she continues. “How long are we gonna be in here? Do I really think the air’s still contaminated? What if we went outside, just for a little, just to see? I got scared, I thought he’d try to open the airlock.” She lets her voice waver, her face crumple. “I thought I might need to—restrain him. So I took the tape and the scissors. Just in case.”
Howard narrows his eyes. That’s okay, it doesn’t matter if he believes me, just keep him intrigued. Keep him still. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks.
And now’s the time to go all the way. When she had tried to flirt with Emmett as a distraction, back at their first dinner together (and God, that feels like a lifetime ago), Howard had seen right through it, but she thinks he’ll let her go farther if he’s the target.
She reaches up—and her arms start shaking as soon as they're out over the acid, but she pushes through the fear—and holds Howard’s arms. “I’m sorry. I should have. I thought I could handle it myself. I didn’t want to bother you, you have so much else to worry about, keeping us safe…” Howard gives that little self-satisfied smile, like he’s some great hero, which normally she would find disgusting, but here it’s exactly what she wants to see. Now’s the time. She doesn’t dare glance at Emmett to see if he’s ready, because the slightest hint could give them up; all she can do is trust him.
“And I knew you wouldn’t take any chances, if you had any reason to be suspicious of Emmett, I knew you’d do what you needed to do to protect us,” she continues, clutching his arms, rambling on as if she’s on the verge of a breakdown, and Howard is enthralled, eating it up. “But I felt bad for Emmett, I couldn’t help it, I was soft. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—” and then, keeping surprise on her side, right in the middle of her sentence, she plunges Howard’s arms into the acid, up past his gloves, and he’s screaming and thrashing, and she can hear the acid sizzling on his skin, and Emmett—God bless his track star pedigree—is darting around to Howard’s side, going for the gun, and all she has to do is keep his arms in the acid until Emmett can get the gun, she’s holding on with all her strength, and she can feel the power draining from him as the acid eats away at his flesh, and then the gun is in Emmett’s hand, and there’s a click as he cocks it, and a blur as he raises it, and she leaps back out of the way, and there’s a deafening noise, and Howard falls back, and she thinks, Thank God.
But of course, it isn’t that easy. Howard, goddamn him, won’t go that quickly. (Or more accurately, Emmett isn’t that good of a shot.) Because although there’s a pool of blood spreading across his chest, he’s still twitching, gasping for breath, and he looks at her (not at Emmett, at her), and for the first time, he looks terrified.
He makes an awful, strangled sound, and Michelle realizes he’s saying Please.
She looks at Emmett, who’s standing there frozen, with the gun still pointed at Howard, trembling.
She doesn’t know if Howard deserves a quick death. But she knows she doesn’t want to witness a slow one. And she knows Emmett is waiting for her decision, for some reason, so she says, “Do it,” and her voice is steady, and Emmett pulls the trigger again, and this time the shot is true.
When Howard goes still, it hits Michelle what they’ve just done, and suddenly she feels like she’s about to collapse. She leans against the wall, and then sinks to the floor, shaking, her breathing rapid. She doesn’t know if she’s freaking out with relief that he’s dead, or horror that they’ve just committed a murder. She leans over, putting her head between her knees, trying to calm her breathing. It’s okay, she tells herself. He’s gone. It’s okay.
Through her panic, she’s dimly aware of Emmett dropping the gun and running to the bathroom, but it’s the retching sounds that make her get up and go to him. He’s crouched over the toilet, not actually puking, just heaving into it. She stands over him for a few moments, watching, then says, “Emmett. Emmett.” until he stops and clambers up onto the edge of the tub to sit.
He lets out a “Fuck,” and as she sits next to him, she sees he’s still shaking, making a weird whimpering sort of sound under his breath.
“It’s okay,” she says. “He’s gone. It’s over,” and he swallows hard and nods.
But in fact, it’s just begun.
It’s a simple physics problem, really. The body won’t fit in the barrel without making acid spill out. Emmett is the one to haltingly suggest cutting him up, but he can’t even finish the sentence before they’re both shaking their heads frantically.
In the end, they use another plastic bin to scoop out some of the acid, tie the barrel off to the shower faucet so it won’t tip over, and then drag him over and drape his arms—trying not to look at the already half-devoured flesh—over the edge so they dangle into the acid. Then they wait, listening to the sizzling, gurgling sounds the acid makes as it devours. When the arms are gone, they scoop out some more acid and tip his head in.
And so it goes. It’s disgusting, backbreaking work, and they don’t talk much as they wait for each body part to be dissolved. They switch off wearing their homemade gas mask when the fumes get to them.
When the body is all gone, they shove the barrel back into its hiding spot under the counter, and stand there looking at each other, drained.
“Well,” Emmett says. “We got a master bedroom now. De-luxe accommodations,” and Michelle can't believe she's laughing.
They collapse onto Howard’s bed without changing, and Michelle thinks surely she’ll pass out from exhaustion right away, but as she lies there, she can’t escape it: the smell. A combination of sweat, greasy tools, and something dark and musty she can’t quite identify. It’s Howard, and it’s her dad, and the man at the hardware store, and she’ll never be able to sleep through it.
“Emmett? You still awake?” she says softly, and he rolls over to face her.
“Yeah,” he says. “The smell, right?”
She nods, and he sighs and sits up. “Back to the old arrangements, then?”
“Hang on,” she says as he gets up. “There’s no reason for you sleep behind a shelf.”
So they drag his sad little mattress into her room. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not an invitation, not an overture of anything further. It’s just a necessity. She thinks he understands that.
They fall asleep quickly, breathing shallowly in the too-quiet dark, their mattresses lumpy islands separated by a sea of concrete.
Michelle wakes up from a deep, dreamless sleep, and in her first blurry moments of semi-consciousness, she’s shocked to see Emmett next to her. Fuck, she thinks. Howard’s gonna kill us!
And then, of course, she remembers. The gun, the body, the acid, the smell. She lets out an involuntary cry, which wakes Emmett up. He rolls over, muttering “Wha...?” and then when he sees her, the same moment of panic crosses his face, followed by a realization. “Oh. Man. Shit.”
She can’t help laughing a little. “Good morning,” she says.
“Yeah. No kidding.”
As they sit down to their cereal and rehydrated milk, he says, “So. What now?”
And that’s the question, isn’t it. “I mean, we had a plan, didn’t we?” she says. “Make a hazmat suit, take his gun, kill him, and, uh, one of goes out there…”
“Yeah,” he says, looking uncomfortable, fidgeting with his hat, which, naturally, he has put on for the walk from the bedroom to the kitchen, and then removed at the table. “Yeah, I know that, but. Which one of us goes? Heck, I mean, I don’t even know which is the worse job – being stuck here, alone, or going out there, with who-knows-what…”
It hits Michelle so quickly she almost drops her spoon. “Wait. Wait, Emmett, we’re being idiots. Why does only one of us have to go? We can just make another suit! We can do whatever we want now. We can take whatever we want. I mean, there has to be a tarp or something around here we can use.”
Emmett grins slowly. “Well, shit. Alright. Let’s do it.”
Making a second suit turns out be incredibly simple now that they don’t have to sneak around. With access to all the materials and tools they need, and with plenty of space to work out in the open, it comes together in a couple days.
In fact, it goes so quickly that Michelle realizes she’s starting to quietly panic as it becomes clear that they’ll be ready to go outside very soon. And she thinks Emmett may be feeling the same way – he’s started asking her to explain the sewing patterns, show him how to do the stitching, and it seems like he’s trying to slow down the process more than actually learn anything.
Which is why she’s relieved when, as they’re attaching the right sleeve, he says, “So, uh, you think we’re ready to go out once this is done?”
“Well,” she says. “I mean. There’s no reason to hang around here, is there?” It's an honest question.
Emmett tips back in his chair, balancing on the back legs, not looking at her. “We don’t know what’s out there, though. I mean, I saw that flash, and I swear, it was not normal. We better know what we’re doing when we go out there. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m exactly qualified to fight the, like, nuclear apocalypse. Or alien apocalypse, or whatever the hell.”
She puts down the duct tape and nods slowly, considering. “You’re right. Okay, but you know what? What is this place filled with? Crazy apocalypse survivor books, right?”
Emmett smiles. “Right. If those nutjobs were actually right—”
“Then we’ve got the motherlode,” she finishes. “Okay, so we go through the books. Study up, prepare. Gather supplies. And then, when we’re ready, we’ll go out.”
Emmett nods solemnly. “Definitely.”
If Michelle’s learned one thing, it’s that you can get used to anything. So they fall into a routine easily: Get up, breakfast, then they each grab a book and start poring over it for anything useful. (“It’s like school all over again,” Emmett complains. “Just be glad we’re not getting graded,” she replies.) By lunchtime, they’ll have a list of skills to learn, which they tackle in the afternoon. It’s something different every day: how to identify edible plants, how to build a fire, how to tell if a dead animal’s diseased, and if it’s not, how to butcher and cook it, signs of radiation poisoning, navigating by the stars, building a shelter. They have no idea if they’re stepping out into a dead planet or a war zone or what, so they cover anything that could possibly be useful.
Michelle is actually kind of enjoying herself – it’s good to feel like they’re accomplishing things (she could feel her brain starting to rot sitting around the bunker reading magazines all day), and once you get used to the insane sky-is-falling tone of the books, it’s interesting, all this stuff she never learned as a suburbs kid.
And Emmett—well, Emmett has come right into his own. He whines about having to go through the books and memorize constellations off flashcards, but when they get to building techniques, knots, anything like that, it’s clear he’s in his element. He understands this stuff, he’s confident, he takes charge in a way she’s never seen him do before, and it occurs to her that he’s smart.
She feels bad for never realizing that before. But it’s kind of lovely to see this side of him.
In the evenings, after dinner, they do a puzzle, or play a game, or curl up on the couch together with a bad movie, and it’s bizarre how normal it feels.
Of course, there are some things that aren’t normal. Sometimes, early in the morning, or before going to bed, Michelle sneaks away to the airlock. She opens the inner door and goes right up to the outer one, pressing her hand against the glass, feeling the cold through it. She doesn’t know why she’s looking – to search for signs of life, to try to figure out what the hell’s going on out there, to test her star-reading skills, to check how the plants are doing, to see the sky.
To remind herself that there is some kind of world out there, still, and that she misses it, and that she’s going to return to it one day.
When she returns from these interludes to the bedroom, sometimes Emmett is asleep, but sometimes the room is empty, and she doesn’t know where Emmett is. She doesn’t go looking for him. If she has her private moments, she figures he can have his.
When they get to the gun in their training sessions, Michelle is all too happy for Emmett to take the lead. He shows her how to load it, how to clean it, how to aim, walking her through everything short of actually pulling the trigger.
“It’s a good thing you know how to do all this,” she says, as she watches him wipe down the chambers. “I mean, it seems crazy now, but I didn’t even know if you had ever shot a gun before we…you know,” she trails off, not quite able to say, before I expected you to use one to commit a murder. They haven’t talked about the circumstances of Howard’s death since that day; aside from Emmett’s little episode afterwards, she really doesn’t know how he feels about his role in it.
“Heh. ‘Course I had,” he says, glancing up at her with a little smile, but not pausing in his work. “My daddy used to take me out to the woods on weekends, taught me to shoot, to hunt. Wasn’t really my thing. Too much sitting still. Too quiet.” He pauses for a moment, pensive as he puts down the rag and starts clicking rounds back in to their chambers. “Or too loud, I dunno. But I remember the basics. I guess it’s not your, y’know, area of expertise, huh?”
“God, no,” she says, shaking her head quickly.
He laughs. “I take it you’re not from around here.”
“No, I grew up outside of New Orleans. Moved out here with Ben after college, for his work.”
He stops short, half the rounds still sitting on the table. “Ben?” No expression in his voice. Not looking at her.
She’s shocked. Did Emmett not know about him? Is it possible she hasn’t mentioned him all this time? She realizes she must not have. And realizes how little she’s thought about him.
Emmett’s still waiting, looking away from her, all studied nonchalance. He adjusts his hat.
“My fiancé,” she finally says. “Former fiancé. Wow, I thought I’d mentioned him by now.” Emmett still doesn’t say anything, starts sliding the remaining rounds around on the table, clearly waiting for more. She’s a little lost here. It’s not like she owes Emmett some sort of an explanation for her romantic life—they aren’t anything, after all—but, on the other hand, she thinks how she’d feel if she suddenly found out he had some serious girlfriend he’d never mentioned. So she goes on. “We broke up. I was leaving him, actually, when he ran me off the road and brought me here.” (She doesn’t need to specify that “he” means Howard. They always refer to Howard as “him,” never by his name, as if every time they talk about him is just a continuation of one long conversation. As if all the time they spend not talking about him isn’t real.)
“What happened?”
She lets out a breath. “He was cheating. Since, um, before we were engaged, probably. I should have figured it out a while ago, but—y’know, classic me, I pretended I didn’t see anything. And then finally it got to the point I couldn’t ignore it, so I just picked up and left.”
He finally looks at her, and his expression is kind, and she’s grateful, because she doesn’t think she could handle him being mad at her, even if it was totally unjustified. “Fuck,” he says. “What a bastard. I’m sorry.”
She smiles grimly in thanks. “Well, he’s dead now, I guess.” Which she hadn’t even considered until now. She guesses she should be upset by that, but—it’s just not there.
He snorts a laugh. She reaches out to take the gun and remaining bullets from him, and their hands brush. “Here, I think I know how to do the rest.”
That night, as she’s making her way back from the airlock door, (it must be overcast outside, because she couldn’t see any stars, any moon, just emptiness) she hears a weird sort of gasping-hiccuping sound. She follows it from the living room, through the storage area, to the nook behind the last shelf outside the bedroom – Emmett’s former sleeping quarters.
Emmett is sitting there, curled up, head on his knees, shaking a little, and it takes Michelle a few moments to realize he’s crying quietly. And, at least in theory, she isn’t really surprised—she’s long since thought of Emmett as a rock, but she knows that isn’t really true, knows all this shit must have gotten to him somehow. But there’s still something awful about seeing Emmett upset, something that makes her heart clench in her chest. She slides down to the floor next to him, feet pressed up against the shelving, and exhales to let him know she’s there. He doesn’t move, but his breathing calms, slowly, and eventually she puts a hand on his back, just to be a presence.
He straightens up, looking straight ahead. She doesn’t look at him, not wanting to embarrass him. And, maybe, not wanting to see him right now, because the way people look when they’ve been crying—red eyes, puffy face—that just doesn’t square with Emmett as she knows him. As she needs him to be.
“It’s so easy to forget everyone’s dead, you know?” he says, finally. “And then when you remember, it’s…”
She nods. She can’t put words to it, but she knows.
“It’s just, my family. I mean, I didn’t do jack shit to save them.” Michelle is silent, still, listening, because she has been wondering about this, though she’d never ask him. “I saw that flash, and I just thought, how can I save myself?” He takes off his hat and starts folding the brim between his hands. “My sister’s off in Florida at college—she actually got out. Though I guess it’s not doing her any good now.” He laughs, sort of. “But my folks? They’re not far. I coulda gone and tried to get them. But I barely even thought about it. I just thought, the bunker’s not big enough for all of us, and got my own sorry ass here.”
Michelle doesn’t know if he did the right thing or not, but she knows she feels for him right now, so she offers, “Well, if you had gone and gotten them, he wouldn’t have let them in, right?”
“Guess not. Actually, he’d have closed up by then, so all three of us woulda been screwed.”
“And if you hadn’t gotten in, I’d still be stuck here alone with him, probably.” She shudders at the thought.
“Huh. Yeah. So, does that make me a coward or a hero?”
She smiles, shrugs. “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
He turns to stare at her, clearly baffled, and she doesn’t think she’s up to introducing him to Whitman right now, so she just says, “Never mind. Both, I’d say.”
He nods slowly, contemplative. “Life’s funny, huh? You never know.”
There’s nothing you can really say to that, so she just slides closer to him, and he does the same, and they sit like that, bodies pressed together, staring at the canned corn, for a long time.
Of course, they start fucking. How could they not? Really, it’s a wonder it took so long.
The seed is planted that evening: They eventually doze off behind the shelf, and she’s woken up by Emmett mumbling into her neck in the middle of the night. She can feel her legs cramping up from the awkward position, so they struggle to their feet and stumble into the bedroom, barely awake, leaning on each other. After being pressed up against him for hours, it just feels too cold to be separated in the concrete room, so she slides her mattress over next to his. He doesn’t say anything, just wraps his arms around her when they lie down, and they drift back into sleep like that, his breath tickling the back of her neck.
When she wakes up in the morning, she’s not alarmed to feel him pressed up against her—it just feels nice, and she snuggles back into him until she feels him wake up. She rolls over to face him, and he rubs his eyes and doesn’t look surprised to see her so close. She kisses him briefly, chastely, because, well, he’s right there, and he smiles sleepily, and she thinks, So here we go.
They manage to keep their hands off each other throughout the day (how to whittle a spear out of a tree branch), but the tension between them keeps building, until it feels like there are sparks shooting across the table at dinner. It’s ridiculous, really – they’ve been sharing a room and spending nearly every waking moment together for weeks now, and nothing has actually changed yet; all they’ve done is share a bed for one night – and yet, she can feel herself blushing every time he looks at her.
It’s her turn to do the dishes, but Emmett follows her to the sink, like he doesn’t want to be away from her for even a second. Which she doesn’t mind. The sink isn’t really big enough for two people to use it productively, but he stands there next to her anyway, and they get through the dishes in record time, bumping elbows, passing suds between them. When they’re done, she grabs the dish towel and dries her hands, then takes his hands and dries them, and then the towel falls to the floor and they stand there, holding hands, looking at each other, and it’s so ridiculous she bursts into giggles like some kind of teenager.
He raises his eyebrows. “Jeez,” he drawls, perfectly deadpan. “I’m not that funny looking, am I?”
And finally, she kisses him properly.
And it’s funny—it’s just a kiss, just a silly, sloppy kiss, but it’s everything she didn’t even realize she missed so much: tongues and teeth colliding, laughing into each other, touching someone with abandon—hell, doing anything with abandon, that’s what she hasn’t had all these months. Even after Howard was gone, every time she touched Emmett it felt in a way like a transgression, like a step along an unfamiliar path, but here, finally, it feels right. Like they’ve arrived where they should have been all along.
They stumble down the steps and toward the bedroom. Which is weird—it’s not exactly the most romantic setting—but somehow it’s appropriate. Maybe because this room is their space; Howard’s lurking presence is much weaker here than in the rest of the bunker. And anyway, this isn’t about romance, really. It’s about needing someone. Needing each other.
He lets himself fall onto their mattresses, and she lands on top of him lightly, straddling his lap. They just grin at each other for a moment, and then they’re kissing again, and his hand starts exploring her breasts. She gives a little mm of encouragement and pushes her hips into him, and she doesn’t think about what they’re doing, whether it’s going too fast, she just moves. She snakes a hand inside his jeans, and yep, there it is, he’s ready. (It occurs to her, for the first time, that when he would go missing in the evenings, sometimes he was probably thinking behind his shelf, but sometimes he also must have been jacking off, because when else would he? She wonders if he would picture her.)
When she touches him, he gasps, breaks out of the kiss, and falls back onto the floor. He looks away from her, awkward again. “I don’t, uh, I don’t have any—”
“It’s fine,” she says. “I have an IUD.”
“Oh, good,” he says, “Cuz I really didn’t wanna think about whether he stocked this place with condoms.”
“Jesus. That’s disgusting,” she says through her laughter, and it suddenly feels like the moment is broken, like they’re back to just having a conversation. But she leans over, unbuttons his jeans, kisses him again, and they’re off.
After all their time in the bunker together, Michelle would have thought she knew Emmett incredibly well, but now, as he reaches under her shirt and she pulls down his jeans, she realizes there are whole realms of each other that are totally unfamiliar. She’s gotten so used to seven easy, predictable years with Ben that she barely remembers how to figure this stuff out for the first time.
And yet, somehow, it works. Somehow, their bodies come together easily, and when elbows or knees get in the way, it’s obvious how to adjust, until they fit together like a matching pair. Somehow, they can adjust their own rhythms to each other, until they’re moving together as equals. Somehow, they can figure out what the other likes as they go, reading expressions and gasps and movements as easily as they’d have a conversation. Before long, they’re perfectly in sync, and she’s almost overwhelmed by how good it feels, to just move with him, touch him, without thinking, without worrying, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
After, they lie there together, touching each other in all the little, casual ways reserved for people who are truly comfortable with one another. She laces their hands together. He twists a lock of her hair around his finger. She’s delighted by his expression of total, amazed joy, and wonders if she looks the same. Neither of them feels a need to say anything. She knows there is a staggering amount they need to talk about. But not yet.
On the other hand, if you live together, and work together, and cook together, and sleep together, and it’s all so domestic and routine that your life could almost be a sitcom, what is there to talk about, really?
Mostly, things are the same, but now there’s this deep level of comfort under it all, because there’s nothing else they could want from each other. They touch each other so casually, any time they want; sometimes food inventory turns into kissing, sometimes combat practice turns into sex, sometimes waking up turns into staying in bed together for hours. They don’t talk about what this means, whether it's only happening because they’ve been stuck together for months and have hormones, or whether they actually are something, and will continue to be something when they leave.
If they leave.
Because they’re getting through their lessons, making great time, but they have no timetable, no plan for actually leaving. Michelle is starting to think they’re just chickens until she figures out the problem: in order to leave, they have to need something from the outside world. Something they can’t get in here. And she doesn’t know what that could be.
It gets to the point that she starts to think, if this is her life, she could be okay with that. She has everything she needs, really. Warmth, food, shelter. And someone to—someone she—cares about. If nothing else.
The more she thinks about it, the more impossible it becomes to imagine what could ever make them leave. They’ve reached an equilibrium here. Something disastrous would have to happen.
She’s in the middle of one of her regular airlock excursions, staring at the constellations, testing whether she can figure out where they are and which way they should go, when she notices something odd—a clump of stars down near the horizon goes dark, then a few stars above those go dark too, then some of those closest to the horizon reappear, and it takes a minute to piece together that there is something moving in front of them. Her first, dumb response is euphoria, because a large moving object—a ship, it has to be some kind of ship—means there must be somebody still alive to move it, and maybe that somebody has come to save them, and she calls out, “Emmett!”
But in the next moment a bit of light catches the ship, and though she can barely see its outline, there's enough--the unfamiliar shape, the jagged, spiky edges--to tell her there is something unfriendly about it. It's less a logical judgment than a subconscious reaction, a sort of creeping dread that comes right from the pit of her stomach.
"Emmett!" she calls again, and the panic must have come through in her voice, because he's there next to her in a second, panting, going, "What is it, are you okay--"
Until he sees it. And then he goes quiet.
They watch the ship slowly make its way toward them, and Emmett speaks for both of them when he whispers, "What."
As if in response, the ship starts emitting a thick, green smoke that billows out in enormous clouds. And the dread goes beyond creeping. That smoke is like nothing she's seen before. The word poison crawls through her mind, unwelcome.
Emmett amends his previous question: “What. The fuck.”
“What is that,” she says, though she can’t imagine Emmett has an answer.
He shakes his head. “Dunno. Doesn’t look like anything he ever talked about. Maybe something new…China…Russia…”
He trails off, not saying what they’re both thinking: this thing did not come from any place they’ve ever heard of.
“Emmett,” she says. “I hate to ask, but—do you think the filtration system can handle that…whatever that stuff is?”
He shrugs. “He built it to handle any kind of chemical weapons he knew about, and some stuff that was being developed that he’d heard rumors about…but if this is something new? Something nobody was expecting? Then who knows.”
She shudders.
“And the only way we’ll find out,” he adds, “Is the hard way.”
(In the dark, neither of them sees the small pod drop down from the ship into the tall grasses.)
It doesn’t take long, no more than an hour, before they start to smell it. A foreign smell, so faint at first she can barely notice it, then stronger and stronger. They’ve studied how to recognize chemical weapons in their training sessions, but this doesn’t match anything they’ve read about: a weird combination of sweet and acidic, she may not recognize it but she knows how it makes her feel: uncomfortable, panicky. Like death is coming in through the vents.
“Is there anything we can do to the filter? Make it stronger somehow?” she asks Emmett.
“I wish I knew,” he replies. “I don’t even know how the damn thing works, really. Just set it up, he designed it. Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wish he was here now.”
She can’t bring herself to agree with that, but then she can’t really disagree with it either, so she just says, “So what do we do?”
He just looks at her, at a loss. She breathes shallowly, trying to inhale as little of the poison as she can. “Okay, okay, Emmett…we have to leave. Don’t we?”
As soon as she says it, she knows it’s true, and she feels her heart rate speed up, her legs get shaky. Whether out of panic or excitement, she can’t say.
Emmett barely reacts, but she can see the wheels turning. His hand goes to his hat, but he doesn’t fidget with it like usual, just leaves it there.
She puts a hand on his shoulder, looks him in the eyes. He nods, slowly.
They pack in a hurry. Gas masks on first (and she thinks it helps, she thinks she can’t smell the poison as much now, but really it’s hard to say), then supplies into their packs: dried meat, nuts, vitamin C powder, water purification tablets, rope, compasses. Then suits on, and then weapons into their homemade holsters. Emmett takes the gun, while they both have homemade spears and the sharpest knives from the kitchen. Not that they have any idea what they’re fighting against, but. It’ll have to do. They make a few vague attempts to talk through some semblance of a plan, but they never get very far because of the unavoidable fact that they don't know anything. Where the ship is from, if there's more of them, what other weapons it has, if there's anyone else around--it's all a mystery. All they know is, they have to get out of here.
When they're fully suited up and on the move, at the foot of the stairs, she’s stopped by Emmett's hand on her elbow. She turns, and he says, “Sorry, can’t resist,” then lifts his gas mask, then her own. She smiles, leans in, and they share a kiss (The last? she wonders). It’s nervous, rushed—but it’s good enough that she can barely force herself to pull away and push her mask back down.
They make their way up the stairs and open the first door. But before opening the outer door, they stop. They should be ready to go, hurrying to get out of there before the poison gets to them, but they can’t help pausing, savoring their last moments in the bunker, taking in the view: the sun is coming up now, and it paints the field gold and orange, like each stalk of grass is glowing. It even gives a strange sheen to the faint green clouds of smoke that are now drifting away in the breeze.
“It’s beautiful,” she says, and reaches out for Emmett’s hand, and then she sees it: a movement in the grass, and then it comes out into the clearing. Her stomach turns, and she can barely even register what she’s seeing—worm—snake—legs—mouth—scales—armor—none of it makes sense, all it adds up to is: alien.
She screams.
The creature stalks—crawls?—slithers?—there are no words, but somehow it moves toward them until it’s maybe a foot from their door, and then it rears up on its—not legs—on its back end, and its face-hole-thing is right in front of the window, and she doesn’t think it has eyes but somehow she knows it’s looking at them.
Emmett is going, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck,” under his breath, and she can’t even scream any more, she just clenches his hand tighter until he’s just breathing, and she can feel his heartbeat through his hand, in time with her own.
The creature opens its mouth-hole and another piece comes out, some kind of tongue-thing, exploring, tasting the air.
They breathe.
And it feels like it could go on forever, this moment, the two of them standing there, watching the creature dart and bob in front of them, holding on to one another’s hands, blood pounding through them, waiting for someone to make the first move.