Present Day
"You know what they say about you?"
The irritating, incessant voice of the girl in the jail cell worked on Ana Maria's last nerve.
A tense line to her shoulders she never quite found the skill to shake, the sheriff of the colony ignored the incessant questions coming from her prisoner.
This girl was all alone now. Her little boyfriend and nephew to their leader, Ethan, only spent the night here after breaking curfew. The two of them had a nasty little habit of breaking the rules set down by Ethan's uncle. Last night, Russell finally decided to have his nephew finally pay the price, no matter how marked down it was in comparison to anyone else who'd dare break a Richmond Hill commandment.
This little bitch, Hannah, however, was still under the sheriff's mercy until further notice. However, she acted like a bratty teenager being grounded rather than having the possibility of exile looming over her pretty little head.
Hannah blabbered on, "They say you were a crooked cop. That's what Russell says, anyways. He says that you told him you chased down and killed an unarmed man back in L.A. Said you went all the way to Atlanta on the run, but how'd ya end up here?"
"It's true," Ana Maria replied with an eerie calm as she toyed with a pistol she slowly loaded, with her back half turned to Hannah, "I killed a man in L.A. I killed a lot more men after that. Women too..." Ana Maria glares at her over her shoulder, "That's how I ended up in Georgia during the fall. Been a while since I got my kicks in. Little white Susans are the most gratifying to kill, really. I'd give anything to shut up an annoying fresh mouth permanently."
An implication, not lost on Hannah played between the two females and it irked Ana that it didn't seem to rattle her much. The colony's own little loud-mouth, Hannah made it a point to counter anything she could, to push the limits. Ana Maria noticed she got off on it. Ana would look for any opportunity she could to shoot the little bitch.
They've banished people from the colony for far less than what Hannah pulled tonight...and killed them too behind closed doors...then dumped them over the walls for the zeds to have.
Holstering the weapon into the back of her jeans, where the handle stuck out over her shirt, Ana Maria rolled her eyes when Hannah nagged behind her, "I'm hungry."
"Tell you what..." Ana Maria pulls up a folding chair with chipped paint and takes her seat in front of the cell. Her boots rest flat on the seat meant for her ass, and her ass rests on the back support with ease. "You tell me how you helped in the farms this week for the food and I'll get you something from there. Anything at all. You milk the cows? Feed them? Kill a chicken? Plant some seeds?"
Hannah's hands clasp around the rusted bars of her tiny cage. She leans through as much as she can and replies, "You tell me what you did there this week and I'll try and make up something too."
Ana Maria stands, taking her time in approaching the girl as she asks, "How long do you think you're going to get away with fucking your way to the top, hmm? Is that your strategy for staying comfy, Hannah?!"
She stops before her, mere inches from her jailed opponent's face. With just them here now, it's Hannah's word against her own. Now that she was falling out of favor with Russell, Ana felt she could get away with a little punching bag session before her boyfriend got her out of here.
Hannah smiles, in that square, fake way Ana Maria noticed she revealed often in Russell's presence.
The prisoner says, "You're definitely the last person who should be judging me for that, Sheriff. Look at you, brand new, only a couple months in and walking around here with a gun full time, talking about shit you know nothing about. I've seen the way you look at him, Russell. I've seen the way you look at Kate, too, and if you think she hasn't noticed what you're thinking, then you've misread a bunch of us. You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into and where this road leads...so much for being street smart."
Ana's hand shoots through the bars to grab Hannah's shirt, pulling her forward violently against the bars to meet her nose to nose.
Hannah reaches and before the cop knows what hit her, she's staring down the barrel of her own gun. Not often does Officer Perez get caught off-guard, nor does she underestimate anyone, but she certainly did with pretty-little-Hannah.
"Open it, or someone will be cleaning up Sheriff brains off the cellblock today," Hannah demands with steady eyes.
"You're not gonna shoot me you stupid cunt," Ana Maria stares back. She saw a deadness in Hannah too, just like she saw it in herself each morning in the mirror. Yet, the girl wasn't quite there—not on Ana's level for cold-blood. In seeing that, she found the younger female easy to challenge.
How wrong Ana was in this moment about pretty Hannah.
One shot, although not where originally aimed at her face, was all it took to drop the street cop. Clutching onto her shoulder, Ana grit out a scream of agony, as Hannah shouted unheard demands mere feet from her cell.
Hannah's hand stretches through the bars, reaching toward the fallen Sheriff, while she demands the keys clipped to her belt loop. She'd shoot again, or so she threatens, and this time Ana didn't care to take another bullet from the psycho girl.
"FUUUUCK!" Ana cursed out after messily throwing over the keys and with the action blood pooled down from her shoulder to join the ring of red on the floor.
The tiny metal keys hit one another as Hannah frantically opened her cell and they clink against the metal like some warning bell for all the proverbial shit that aimed to hit the fan with what she just pulled.
Ana Maria crawled toward the desk and to the walkie standing upright in a taunting unheard call for help. The beacon dims as Hannah walked past her in a few short strides and swiped the walkie-talkie before Ana Maria could grab it.
"You're dead you stupid bitch!" Ana yelled after her, turning onto her back and focusing on stopping the bleeding from her shoulder. She squeezes against the biting wound, then attempts the painful task of pulling the bullet out from her blown-apart flesh.
After the retreating Hannah, the scream of the Sheriff chases after her alone.
***
Hannah Louviere is the last surviving member of her family. Parents ripped to shreds by one another, in front of her, after her father got bit by a straggling infected in their barn. Their death was the last time Hannah gave two shits about anything from her past, other than her brother.
Brother: Hamish Louviere, murdered a month ago—or so Hannah suspected as of late—by Russell Wolfe and his team of personal police. Ana Maria was certainly top of the suspect list of Hannah's. A list, that grew every day in this forsaken colony.
Outside these high-rise walls the dead waited for her, but inside—inside—the living plotted to destroy her slowly. They'd kill her when she least expected it, or exile her as they did with Isaac and the others.
In her sleep, she imagined the worst: poisoned, shot dead in her own house, or even thrown to the zombies off the wall. Hannah had seen more of the dark Russell Wolfe—their leader—than most. She alone, alongside Ethan, had been here since the beginning on the rational side of his uncle's madness. She knew Russell to be a sociopath and although Ethan hated to admit it, he saw it too. He'd even agreed with her that something wasn't right with her brother's death and though Ethan brought Hannah closer to the enemy, she believed Ethan was all that remained in protecting her.
Hamish, her brother, came to her in a panic, having seen something that night when the moon was nearly full. Something forbidden, there in the medical center in the upstairs wing that was off-limits. Like his sister, Hamish had an insatiable curiosity and the taunting weight that came with hearing the word "no" or "forbidden".
Rebels at heart, the both of them, Hamish's own nature got him killed. He'd been a member of Russell's medical team, a shrinking number of educated useful folks among the survivors, thanks to District 4's random visits to keep plucking them.
If Russell could easily make him disappear with the excuse of District 4's silent recruitment, who was next?
With the shooting of Ana Maria, Hannah feared she was about to share her brother's fate. Feared, yet had been asking for it, to see if they would dare to try and kill her too.
The thought of her own reckless actions catch up with her, but it made her running shoes hit faster along the dirt pathways of the colony. She'd look back every now and again, unaware that there were eyes in the watchtowers that spotted her. The streets seemed abandoned, as they usually did when the sun hit its highest point in the day. They were working in the fields, in the kitchens, or in the schools at this hour.
Coming to her housing section, Hannah stopped short knowing that her home would be the first place they looked. She wished she could run to Ethan, but it would be like running into the belly of the beast. Hannah had an ever-present paranoia that Ethan would turn her in should his uncle press him, as she'd seen him cave under Russell's threats and stares more times than she could count.
Choosing a random house she knew to be vacant, Hannah opened and slammed the door behind her. Slowly falling to sit on the floor as she tried to catch her breath, Hannah rests her back against the door as she tried to think of what to do next when they finally found her here hiding out. Doing this in broad daylight wasn't her best of plans, but she didn't even expect herself to shoot Ana Maria.
Closing her eyes and trying to think of the safest way out of this place, Hannah started to consider the route they all feared in Richmond Hill—going beyond the high walls that kept them all safe from the greater, hungrier enemy.
Through a dark ending to each fantasy, one question from an unknown voice breaks her panicking thoughts.
"What are you doing?" The stranger asks, from the living room of the tiny bungalow she thought to be abandoned and never to be lived in with the sparse list of survivors these days arriving at Richmond Hill.
***
The voice startled her, bringing Hannah to her feet as she stared at the young man in front of her.
His jawline sharp and boxy, it pointed out with a strong cleft chin that would have certainly been a face to remember, even if he'd looked like he's seen better days. He's somewhere around her age, but about a few inches shorter, but most guys ended up being shorter than her somehow. He leans on crutches and his leg is wrapped up in some mighty cast that looks like some six-year-olds failed paper-mache project.
"What are you doing?!" He asks again when she fails to answer, his tone more troubled than before.
"Nothing," she responds with a furrowed brow, back to the door, as her eyes dart away from him and to the floor.
Normally, this would be the time to retreat after breaking into someone's house, but this man seemed far less dangerous than the ones that would be searching for her with big guns and sharp eyes.
Fiddling with her fleece vest over her sweater nervously. She zips it up, readying to bolt again anyway if this guy decided to start screaming or called out for help.
"I'm Dalton. Did Sophie send you?" Dalton pries warily, staring her up and down uncomfortably.
"No. Sophie didn't send me. I'm not a nurse," Hannah replied with her own eyes just as diligent on him.
He says, "Then...who are you? I have tea if you want some."
"I'm Hannah," she mumbles, stammering over a bunch of vowels afterward that didn't form words as she brushes back a mess of hair from the side of her face.
Tea. Fucking tea. Was this guy for real? Who was this inviting or nice anymore? Especially, when he looked like all the hell he dragged through to get here and she just broke into his house.
He must've arrived in the last week or so that she'd been out of the loop. She heard something about newbies from walkie-talkies but thought it was a trick of the mind since no one had informed her. She was part of the welcoming committee, after all, her job was to assimilate new arrivals and track their work, their details, anything about them that District 4, or Kate, might find useful.
Hannah's mind races. Wondering, if she should still be running beyond that wall surrounding the colony, but knows she'll be better off hiding here with the new guy if he keeps to just offering her tea and keeps those crutches to himself.
"Yeah, sure," she finally responds and follows after him into the kitchen.
Hannah brushes at her sleeve that caught too much of her stray hair. She shed like a dog and in her days of confinement, she'd made quite the collection on her black clothing. Here she was, on the run from the guard she helped instill and Russell Wolfe, whose last name did him right justice. They'd be hunting for her and she was sitting here letting Dalton pour her tea in some chipped cup that was still nicer than anything she had in her own house on the other side of Richmond Hill.
Most of her nicer items she smashed against the walls months ago, when Hamish disappeared without a trace. His files were gone, she couldn't find anything wrong in his house, and no one in the medical center had seen him. He never said goodbye and became nothing more than a ghost, a memory.
The tea kettle hisses, the sound grating against her already overworked nerves.
More of a soda, or red Kool-Aid kind of girl, Hannah wasn't quite sure how to even consume the tea in this new day and age. Dalton took his seat across from her at the small kitchen table that shifted on its uneven legs. Dalton rests both his arms atop it gently, aware of the disfiguration of the wood of the table by how he balances on it. Then, he stares at her expectantly to drink. If this were Russell, she'd expect poison lacing the bottom of her cup.
Hannah watched Dalton closely, occasionally glancing out the window behind him at conjured shadows.
He caught onto her tension, his distinct chin going over his shoulder and looking out the window in her fifth insecure gaze.
"What are we looking for?" he asked.
"Nothing," she clips, taking a sip of tea and making a face of disgust with the taste. "Do people actually drink shit like this?"
Dalton let out the gust of a laugh, quickly catching it with his hand as he replied, "Yeah they drink this shit, or so I see in movies. My aunts used to make it for me too." He drops in about two tablespoons of sugar into her cup, pegging her taste for that of a true southerner. Sweet tea, Dalton came to find down here, was the one-way track to diabetes town and a staple regardless of the repercussions to health. Acquiring to her presumed taste, he waits.
"Try it now," he offers.
She sips, still staring out the window as she says, "Better. Much better. Now it tastes more like sweet tea."
He grins, displaying the whitest teeth she'd ever seen. He had a great smile, one that met his eyes, but Hannah was far too anxious to really appreciate it past the quick seconds that belonged to him in her terrified mind. Dalton's injured leg stretched out off to the side, so he didn't entirely face her. He winced whenever he gave the slightest movement.
"What happened to you?" Hannah asks, but her eyes still rest heavily on that window.
Running his fingers through his dirty blond hair, Dalton shifts it all on one side. She notices the dried blood under his fingernails, which lingers as evidence of his struggle.
His brown eyes lock onto hers harshly, "I broke it. Fell quite a-ways down a hill. Landed directly on it. Snapped it below the knee."
"Ouch," Hannah replied genuinely, "How'd you get here then if you couldn't walk?"
"Nick pretty much carried me here. It was just us before we got here. Just him and me..." He stares back at her and Hannah can't help but notice how his eyes have lost a bit of life to them with how hard he's looking.
Dalton takes a deep breath and asks, "Who are you running from Hannah and why do you have a gun?"
Hannah's jaw tightens and her eyes narrow into bright fine slits.
She thought he didn't see the gun she put in the waistband of her jeans, but maybe she'd underestimated Dalton as Ana Maria had underestimated her. Hannah didn't trust easily. In fact, Hannah didn't trust at all. Even Ethan, whom she considered to be her best friend, held with suspicion in her heart and mind. She feared at times he told his uncle too much about her and that his ignorance and sometimes, cowardly nature around his uncle, turned him into a traitor on more than one occasion.
Blood was thicker than water and although Ethan was a friend, at the end of the day, Ethan was still a Wolfe.
She'd learned to trust no one, long before the old world ended. Her hand goes to the gun, ready to pull it on Dalton, to get him before he can get her.
Yet, the longer she looked at this stranger, her hand moved back to the teacup. Maybe, she was being stupid, with her emotions all over the place in her state of panic, but she instantly trusted Dalton to a degree foreign to her. His injuries couldn't mark him as much of a threat and he had no connections to Russell if he was truly a new arrival. He could be her ticket out of here, a temporary ally to help her in some way.
"I shot the Sheriff," she confessed.
"But you did not shoot the deputy...?" Dalton joked. Still, neither of them laughed.
"No. I shot her. Ana Maria, the Sheriff. She's alive. I think. I don't know." Hannah blinked, rising from the chair as her hands went to cover her throbbing head.
Dalton grabbed one of his crutches but stays seated when his effort to lift himself fails.
"So...is your plan to hide out here? You know they are going to search and clear all the houses..." Dalton says.
"I don't know! I don't know! I don't know what I'm doing!" Hannah paces and this is when Dalton took his slow, pained stand.
Dalton opened his mouth to speak, but static filled the room. Static, then a pained voice belonging to the Sheriff filled the airways of the walkie-talkie Hannah stole. That too stuck out of her jeans in the compelling evidence of her grand escape.
"Russell, anyone, come in, I've been hit. She shot me! The bitch shot me! Hannah! She's running! Over..."
Hannah notices how Dalton's eyes close and his shoulders grow tense at this news. Biting at her lip, her fingers outstretched as if ready to grab that gun again, her mind is a flurry with what he could possibly be thinking or worse, planning against her.
"Why did you shoot her?" Dalton asks through closed lids.
Hannah shrugs, throwing her hands up in exasperation as if it were the stupidest question she'd ever been asked.
"I don't know, because I didn't want to be locked up in that damn jail cell anymore over nothing? Because I'm tired of them controlling how I spend every second of my day? Because I know they killed my brother and won't admit it!"
Dalton raises a hand up in surrender as her voice bounces of the walls.
"Listen, Hannah, I don't know you, I don't know anyone here, really. I'm sure you didn't deserve any of what they did to you, but you have to admit you went about it all wrong..."
"Gee, thanks, Captain fucking obvious! I know that! I had to get out! You have no idea what goes on here, what they're capable of...what they've done! What am I going to do?!" She paces, her radio now on the table with conversations going back and forth as they cover the sections of the colony in search of her. The gun shakes in her clutched hand as she grabs it, leading Dalton to take a giant step back. She's grabbing onto her head on both sides, gun trembling against her hair as if her sanity is slipping out from her temples.
"I hide you here," Dalton replies, sure and steady, and it's a tone Hannah needs to hear right now.
Her hands lower, the gun easing in her hand as the tension creeps away from her arms, but she notices how Dalton can't mirror her ease with every glance he gives the gun.
She asks, "You'd do that for me?"
"Yes."
"Why?" She asks as her eyes narrow again suspiciously.
He blows air out through his lips in a short, pondering moment before he replies, "Because I know what it's like to be alone, without a single person understanding what you're going through. And, because, you have a gun and you're scaring the shit out of me."
Dalton grins for a fleeting moment and it causes Hannah to bring the gun back into concealment.
"What's in it for you?" Hannah asks with unspoken accusations filling the question.
Rising again on both crutches this time, Dalton closes the moth-eaten curtains to the window Hannah had been so fixated on earlier.
He replies, "What's in it for me is that you can keep me company and help me not get up so much. My leg is killing me and they tell me they're pretty much out of pain killers here. So, having you around to make my food and stuff will be a big help until you decide to either turn yourself in or keep on running."
"What if someone finds me here? Sees me? You know that you're risking your life by doing this, right? They're going to search each and every cottage, every building!"
He shrugs like it's no skin off his back and replies, "I don't really see either of us having much of an option now. We wait out the search and I can get someone to help you out of here when the sun goes down."
Making his way down the short hall, Dalton stops in the doorway, looks at her, then motions his chin to his bedroom. "Only one bedroom. I'd be chivalrous and offer you the bed, but that's not gonna cut it with my leg, sorry. You can share it with me—no creepy stuff—or you can take the couch. But if I were you, I'd find a place to hide."
He goes in, easing down on the mattress and groaning out against his leg that he tried to slide himself onto the mattress. Hannah follows, keeping her distance from the stranger compelled to help her, and then paces a hole into his bedroom floor.
She's searching the small room he entered for somewhere to hide. She couldn't think, only act, but her actions weren't cutting it now. She was out of ideas and this guy seemed to be full of them.
They'll take Dalton, probably lock him away...or worse. Maybe they'll shoot him on sight, like Russell and his guard did back when they all took over this place, or throw him over the wall, or poison his tea...
"Hannah..." Dalton coos breathlessly, "Calm down, please. Take a seat while I try and pretend my leg doesn't weigh five tons."
She huffs out, "There's nowhere to hide! I'm dead. I'm so fucking dead!"
Knocks sound at the door. Once. Twice. Three times.
They stare at one another, unsure of what to do and how quickly they've chosen to search Dalton's house of all places between here and the jailhouse. It's here where Hannah thinks of the snipers on the watchtowers when she should've thought of them as a threat all along.
"Under the bed," Dalton suggests and in Hannah's lack of a better idea, she crawls underneath the mattress.
Swinging himself over and finding his unsteady feet again, Dalton bites down on his bruising lip as he tries to hurry to the door. They've forced themselves in by the time he makes it to the small living space.
"Gentlemen, sorry. Tried to get up quick enough to meet you," Dalton says with a smile, as they rush into the bedroom before anywhere else. "Can I help you with something?"
They don't answer. The two men from The Guard are looking in the closet, checking the bathroom, and turning his place upside down in search of Hannah.
"Hey, what the hell is going on here?!" Dalton yells out, pretending to be clueless and passing it off pretty well, Hannah notes as she becomes painfully aware of how loud she's breathing.
The walkie-talkie left on the table stands as a beacon of Hannah's presence. Dalton sees it first, inching towards it, but one of the men from the guard snatches it after alerting the others of the discovered evidence. This halts the guard on one knee before the bed, whose bulky legs Hannah stares at widely.
Gun clenched tightly in her shaking hand, she squeezes the trigger. The guard falls over screaming with the perfect shot to the femoral artery and he begins to bleed profusely out onto Dalton's bedroom floor.
Dalton falls back at the sound, catching himself on the counter, then the walls as the other guards rush the bedroom. Unsteady on his crutches, they fall, his body catching onto the open front doorway.
Hannah's crawled out from under the bed and continues to shoot down the other guards who don't see her coming. Not once, but four times into the head when the other guards too, hit the floor dead.
"I'm sorry," she says to Dalton as she returns the warm metal weapon to the form fit of her jeans, "But I have to go..."
As Dalton uses his remaining strength to pivot out of her way, Hannah contemplates how much this guy must regret helping her. He could've been a new friend, but she'd done nothing to deserve his temporary hospitality. By every right, she thought him to be the crazier out of the two for helping her. Still, in her distrust, she'd grabbed the radios off of the bloodied men and the table, preventing Dalton to call anyone for help. The condemning airways sizzled in the fire meant to burn her alive.
She steps over the last dead body acting as a barricade between them. She passes Dalton, close enough that the fabric of her clothing makes contact with his white t-shirt. For a moment, she dares to meet his eyes. She reflects the gratefulness she wishes to express, but she keeps her momentum toward escaping. Her life, not approval, was all that mattered.