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Runner Five pondered the powdered eggs, weighing her need for protein against the odds that they would end up coming back up halfway through her mission.
She was reaching for the dry toast instead when Runner Three nudged her elbow.
“So, are you and Sam doing it, or what?”
She froze, hand hovering above the buffet of breakfast rations.
“Chill, I'm just curious. Sam always hooks up with Runner Five,” he reached past her and took the last piece of toast.
“One time-possibly twice-” Runner Ten shot a sidelong glance at Five, “is not 'always'.”
“Sam is sleeping with Janine,” Runner Six said cheerfully. Apparently this was going to be a panel discussion.
“He is not,” Runner Seven said sharply.
“He is. Just the other day I saw him leave her house in the middle of the night.”
Five opened her mouth to explain about the icecream rolls incident, then closed it again. Defending him would only set off more alarms in the rumour mill. She tried to look very interested in deciding between heavily watered down milk or heavily watered down orange juice.
“I thought he was in a triad with Jack and Eugene?” Five didn't even know which runner that was, but she hated him on principle.
“You're thinking of Sam Jones, we're talking about Sam Yao.”
“And I was joking!” someone shouted from the back of the line.
Five fixed her attention firmly on the handwritten sign above her head. Originally it read 'YOUR MOTHER DOES NOT WORK HERE, PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF : )', but some wag had crossed out 'DOES NOT WORK HERE' and scrawled 'HAS BEEN EATEN BY ZOMBIES' over the top.
She openly sighed in relief when her radio crackled and Sam was in her ear, telling her that her mission had been brought forward. She handed her tray to Sam Jones as she passed him in the line, and sprinted off towards the gates.
…
Runner Four was waiting for her by the gate, guarding a pair of archive boxes. They were going to Phoenix Comics to trade a few books and comics in for something that hadn't been memorised by the entire township.
“Don't let them give you any copies of The Walking Dead this time,” Sam whispered in her ear, punctuated by the burst of covering fire. “I don't care how hilariously meta they think it is, it just freaks people out.”
…
Twenty minutes later they were surrounded on all sides by zoms, herding them towards an overflowing storm water drain. Jodie yelled something about having to swim for it, but Five shook her head. The water was too fast, too deep from heavy rain the night before. Instead she pointed to a tree, a dozen feet away.
“Actually, that's not a terrible idea,” Sam said. “If you can hold out, we'll send Runner Ten and Seven to lead them away. Assuming that they can't climb trees. Can they climb trees? Have we checked that?”
“We're about to find out,” Janine sighed, as Five boosted Jodie into the lower branches, then scrambled up after her.
“We are so Rue and Katniss right now,” Jodie said. Her voice was light, but Five could feel how tense she was where they were pressed together, every muscle coiled tight. “Just promise you won't get killed by a spear.”
Five raised an eyebrow at her.
“Fine, you can be Katniss.”
It was almost nice, sitting high up in the air with their legs swinging. If she closed her eyes and listened just right, the moans of the horde below could almost be the sussuration of the wind in
the trees, and she was just having a peaceful day out with a friend. She felt the other girl start to relax, and let some of the tension bleed out of her own shoulders.
“So,” Jodie said. “Are you and Sam doing it, or what?”
“I'm sorry about this Runner Five, but you know how hard it is to find a private space to play. People around here will watch paint dry, so a gaming session is practically dinner theatre. And this way you get to play! That should be fun, right?” Sam coughed awkwardly. “Anyway... should be perfectly safe, today's mission is literally a milk run. Maxine will roll the dice for you.”
Maxine leaned across him to the mic, forgetting that she was already wired up with her own. There was a few seconds of screeching feedback, and the babble of the two of them trying to sort the equipment back out, before Maxine's voice came clear again. “You're the party fighter, so this should be simple enough. Raise your right hand if you want to attack, raise your left if you want to run away.”
“Wriggle your butt if you want to make a charisma check!” Jack shouted from the table. There was a soft thwap that was probably Eugene punching him in the arm.
“We really need to get her a headset of her own,” Runner Seven said.
“It doesn't matter if she has a mic or not, she's not going to say anything.” Eugene muttered.
“Be nice,” Jack hissed.
“What? I'm just saying, it's weird. Its like she's worried that if we hear her voice we'll figure out she's a KGB agent.”
“Hey, remember ten minutes ago when I miced everyone up and explained that this blinky red light means that she can hear everything you say? That was a fun conversation right? One everyone was listening to?” Sam's voice cut through the others, leaving the table in sheepish silence for several minutes.
Maxine rescues them, rapping her knuckles on the table. “Ok guys, house rules. The GM's decisions are final. Nobody is allowed to play a drow, a half drow, or an elf who behaves remarkably like a drow. Nobody is allowed to use the words 'Magic Missile' and 'the darkness' in the same sentence. And nobody is allowed to put on their robe and wizard hat. Questions? No? Great. You all meet in an inn...” the players groaned in unison. “I'm sorry, I'd like to see you put together an original and exciting adventure while also single handedly running a field hospital. You all meet in an inn, when ZOMBIES!”
“I think I have a scroll for Turn Undead,” Runner Seven said, shuffling his papers.
“No, actual zombies. You've got... one, two, three, four zombies at eight o'clock Runner Five.”
The radio transmission dissolved into half a dozen voices shouting conflicting advice over the top of each other. Only one word came through clearly.
“Run!”
Runner Five shifted her weight as slowly as she could, trying to get some blood flow back to her limbs without jostling Runner Ten.
According to the briefing Chris had given her at the gate, they were out to observe the movement patterns of the zombs when they were unaware of human presence, so he could use a poisson distribution to determine the optimum placement of a few precious working cameras she had scavenged earlier in the week. She had nodded and smiled.
In plain English, that meant they were crammed head to toe in a hunter's hide, stretched out on their bellies with their chins resting on their forearms, waiting for the living dead to wander by.
Her hand kept drifting to her ear. She instinctively kept trying to adjust her receiver, because being out in the field without Sam or Janine or Maxine in her ear felt wrong. Itchy. But the whole point of the mission was that they were in the dead zone, the part of the forest where there are no guard towers or cameras yet, and there was no point taking up a radio operator's time for runners they can't see.
The silence stretched on, until Chris broke first. “I set this as an assignment once. Before.”
Five didn't turn to look at him. She kept sweeping her gaze across the tree line, looking for movement. But she made an encouraging “Hmm?”
“Not to lay about in the woods with young women, of course. They did enough of that on their own time. The assignment was to pick a person and calculate the probability that they would survive a zombie apocalypse.. I got a bit of guff from the principal about being morbid, but they loved it. Kids can be dark little buggers.”
Silence blanketed them for a moment, one of those awkward pauses that happened all the time in Abel, when both members of a conversation realised that the people they're talking about are all dead.
“Most students chose celebrities, of course. Louis Tomlinson, Chuck Norris, Felicia Day. But one boy chose to write about me. Middle aged man, no military training, sedentary job, living in a population dense area. According to his essay, my chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse are 7%.”
There wasn't much Five could do except reach out and give his ankle a comforting pat.
“I gave him an A.”
Life in Abel was a series of trade offs. Everyone knew where they ranked, even if no one ever discussed it. When food supplies were low, the runners ate first. When there was dangerous work to be done, Maxine and the Major couldn't even try to volunteer. You picked up weapons over equipment, equpment over food, food over anything else (a list that slipped and slid around on a daily basis, depending on what was running short today).
But some decisions were harder than others.
“Runner Five, ignore him and listen to me. Drop the cigarettes, grab the bag and come home,” Janine said.
Five turned the bag over in her hands. She had no idea why someone would stuff a bag so full of brand new sports bras that the Hanes logo had stretched and distorted, the red cut through with white scars, then dumped it in the woods. Maybe another runner, faced with the same decision, had abandoned it there.
“What are you... no! Runner Five, leave the bag,” Sam said.
“We have a stockpile of cigarettes, Mr Yao. We need that bag.”
“We stockpile them for a reason! They're practically the only stable currency we have left, and if we run out of them the zombs and New Canton are going to be the least of our problems. Sports bras are hardly mission critical equipment.”
Five shifted the pack on her back. It was already stuffed to capacity with food, so whichever one she picked up would have to be carried back to Abel in her arms. She could carry both easily, but that would prevent her from using her baseball bat if she ran into trouble. Not to mention that if Runner Seven caught her trying to carry too much, he would give her that sad look and the 'dog with two bones' lecture again.
“Hardly mission critical equipment? Abel township is a machine powered by runners. And a runner's breasts will move up to eight inches during intense exer-”
“You can't just tell me things like that!” Sam shouted. “My job is a little creepy as it is, sitting here watching people through security cameras all day. Now I'm going to be thinking about... bouncing...”
Five peered into the bag. The top one was in her size, and her heart twinged with want at the idea of fresh, strong elastic and an underwire that didn't occasionally pop out and stab her in the sternum.
“Runner Five, I know that you agree with me. Just grab the bag and go. Run!”
She tucked the bag into the crook of her arm and took off, ignorning Sam's spluttering.
As soon as her feet were moving, she felt something untwist deep in her chest. Things made more sense when she was moving, with the breeze in her face and the ground disappearing between her feet. She hit her stride, and turned towards home.