Darkened Stars | Shklance apocalypse AU

Ch 3: Stop it in time, please

Once we were all changed into our new clothes, the group began filling the duffel bag with canned foods we found. Today was quite the bounty surprisingly, we found a good two months worth of various Campbells soups. And as we began making our way back to our base to stock up, I kept in the far back. If it isn't obvious already, I was bit back in that Spencers store, and now all I can think about is how different it is between me and Shiro. When he was bit, his side effects didn't come in until two days later. It's been, what, twenty minutes? And I'm already worse.

I can see the skin under my sleeve turning a sickly green and yellow, the veins starting to rise and pulse with an ever deepening purple. Everything felt hot, and my ears started ringing about five minutes ago because everything is just so loud. The sound of my footsteps on the concrete sounds like the low rumble of thunder, and it takes everything in my not to plug my ears. But that wouldn't help anyways wither, my heart beat is deafening and I wonder if anyone else can hear it.

"Lance?"

I look up and see most of the team turn around, and I only now realized I had stopped walking. Shiro was the one who spoke as he approached me, setting a hand on my shoulder and meeting my eyes.

His hand felt like fire.

"Lance, are you okay?"

I nodded and sucked in a strangled breath, feeling my chest tighten so it restricted me from getting a full breath, and more of a wheeze. "Yeah I'm- I'm good. Tired."

Shiro placed the back of his hand against my forehead and after a moment, drew away with a worried look. "You're burning up, are you sure it didn't-"

"I'm fine."

He stared at me for a moment before nodding and headed back to the front of the group, everyone else giving me worried stares. I won't let them ask if I've been bitten, because if they get that far into the sentence, I'd be lying if I said I was fine. I say I'm fine because I'm strangely at peace with this. It's a numbing process, like I can't feel the pain of the bite under my sweater, but I can feel the throb that's telling me it should hurt.

Keith stood next to me as we began walking again, and I felt the pressure of his hand reaching into my pocket. I could feel his hard gaze on the side of my face as he spoke.

"When we get back to the base, I want you to eat and then get some sleep. I'll take your night shift, okay?"

"What? No you need to sleep too-"

"You need it more. Besides, I'll still be able to sleep, I don't have any shifts tonight so it'll be like normal."

I sighed deeply, rubbing the wound through my sleeve. There were more rises in the skin, and I couldn't help but cringe inwardly. It was starting to bubble around the bite. I didn't think too much on it, though. This is very likely my last day, and I didn't want to spend it moping.

My good arm linked with Keiths, and he responded by taking his hand out of my pocket and twining our fingers together. The left side of me wasn't numb yet, so I could feel the heat coming off of his hands. It was nice, but a feeling that was fading fast.

I felt hungry. Now I knew it was too late to stop it, because that hunger didn't want normal food. It was a dull ache in my head, a new voice telling me that there's a clean pulse next to me, ripe for the picking. And seven more in the area. I felt safe though in a way, because I still had the consciousness to tell me those thoughts were wrong.

"Alright, you can take my shift."

But be back soon. I don't want to be alone.

We made it to our base eventually. It wasn't really a house, more of a small apartment complex. One only we had the keys to. Each of us had our own studio apartment, but I'd moved in with Keith into one of the bigger apartments. Now, you have to remember, we're in the apocalypse. It sounds nice to be living here, but I'm leaving out key factors here. There's severe water damage on the top floors, we're pretty sure there's a bloater trapped in the janitors closet, our generator is broken, we have no running water, we rely on light from flashlights and candles, the walls on the outside have vines and moss covering most of the building and it's decaying the wood, etc, etc.