world war z

[assistingconsultant]

This was not what Joan had intended, at all.

The door had been innocent, and she supposed that was the real mistake. In her defence, though, upon going through, nothing had been out of sorts. Her eyes, trained as they were, actively picked out details in the building as she walked through, looking for the exit. She'd wanted to explore, that was all, though she kept the door back to the Nexus firmly locked in her mind, direction-wise. Like Las Vegas, she just wanted to see something new.

The real hints came slowly as she approached the street. It had been an office building, and sometimes a painting was askew, a chair knocked over. Down in the lobby, though, with its glass walls, she was able to see that outside there were cars parked on the sidewalk, the traffic lights were off. She had paused, uncertain, because she knew that this could be a bad idea. What if there was a pathogen, here, like in Fran's world? But then she had heard screaming, and Joan simply could not ignore it - she tore out the building and into the street.

Zombies. Zombies. Really?

She supposed her other mistake had been in assuming that the only real danger in the Nexus was the danger she faced every day in New York during her work, nothing more than that. A dangerous assumption. The woman at the end of the block could not be saved, Joan saw that immediately upon going out on the street - but now she was exposed, and then she was running, unable to get back through the building's front door without being intercepted. The best she could do was try to loop around, get in through the back, and get back to the Nexus. And never go through this door ever again.

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[burdenofproof]

The world was fever bright in his anger as he moved through the abandoned office with all the grace and silence of a bull, his head down, his jaw tight as the strangeness of the situation wound about him like vice. He had put it together by that point, but the absurdity of what his brain was telling him simply did not mesh with what Luther had come to believe as reality. He was fueling himself then on the idea that he'd perhaps blacked out and wound up here in this abandoned building he did not recognize, but he knew even as he attempted to fit that explanation into the facts as he understood them, that was not the case.

He had opened the door to exit his flat, and instead of finding himself on the London street, had instead wound up in some sort of posh hotel. When he'd attempted to go back through the door that he'd entered, he wound up here. It was possible that he was a nutter, probable even, that all the shit that'd happened with Zoe had broken something inside him, but it had not been his ability to rationalize or assess a situation. He wasn't crazy and this shit seemed real enough to him, so the only thing left to do was figure out what it was, and why the hell he was there.

He slowed as he began to notice the disarray of the office, and that while there was a bank of windows at the front, no light shone in. He paused a good distance back, still and silent and listening, squinting out toward the street when he saw things moving. They were the draggy, jerky movements he'd been seeing in movies since he was in short pants, and entirely unmistakable for that movies.

"Bloody christ," he breathed, his muscles tensing as he prepared to turn back the way he'd come as there'd surely been no dead people walking in that hotel, when he saw her. She was small and moving fast, but perhaps not fast enough. He could see the horde staggering toward her even if she couldn't, and he swore roughly as he pushed out the door and hit the sidewalk, running in her direction for all he was worth, his coat flapping behind him.

"Ay!" He called at her, then realized his mistake as a number of half rotted heads that were too terrifying to count turned in his direction.