Chapter Text
Sara always figured doctors were a little bit like the Hulk.
It sounds crazy when you say it like that, but hear her out. Their knowledge of the human body gives them a massive potential for destruction. They could do a lot of damage to a person, if they were so inclined. But like the Hulk, that potential stays bottled up inside of them; they use their power for the good of others, not the other way around.
Sara couldn’t explain why the thought crossed her mind, exactly, when the mustachioed devil’s face lowered onto her horizon, a full, red moon, a killer pumpkin smile.
She waited until he was crouching, one knee on the ground, his face level with hers.
“So,” he said, “you really want to take the easy route—”
“I really don’t.”
She punched him between the eyes, shattering the ridge of his nose. The pain would be so bad that he would feel, for a moment, like he was going blind. Shock drew water to his eyes before he had time to scream. She watched them fill up with water—his eyes—through the slits of the mask.
His hands flew to his nose, clutching his mask.
Sara didn’t wait for him to recover from the shock.
The only asset she had to work with here was the element of surprise.
Fast, she punched his throat, his sternum, then kicked at the knee he was using to prop himself to the ground. The blows were meticulous, sharp-aimed, done with in a mere ten seconds.
Part of her couldn’t believe how easy it was.
When she worked with human bodies at the hospital, putting them back together, a dormant thought crept into her head sometimes—how easy it would be to take one apart.
But there’d never been a need for her to do exactly that.
The man rocked, clutching his knee, an exclamation mark hitting the ground.
Sara scrambled to her feet, half impressed, half horrified. A scream came out of her when his hand pawed her ankle, and it was so girly that she smashed her foot into his head, as much as a fortress against her own terror than to knock him out. The mask slid down the man’s face, the mustache askew on his jaw. Behind it, he was young; so young.
Twenty, maybe twenty-one.
A rustle behind her spiked her nerves into alertness.
From the aisles, Kellerman emerged, slightly breathless. Aside from the film of sweat on his face, he didn’t look in a bad state; maybe like he’d been jogging around the neighborhood, not taking down three men all to himself.
His eyes went from Sara to the devil on the ground. “Holy hell. Was that you?”
She frowned. “No. He got so afraid of me that he knocked himself out.”
His silence filled her with more anger than it should have.
“Of course, it was me!”
“Wow. I mean—you took him down, on your own?”
“I’m sorry, could you try to sound more condescending? If my count is correct, you handled three.”
“Sure, but I’m more—”
He visibly couldn’t think of a way to end this sentence without spraying oil on the fire. So he kept his mouth shut, and looked at the boy spread out on the floor, to make sure he was really out.
“Wow,” he repeated.
“Look, the first time, it was flattering. Now, it’s insulting.”
“Sorry.”
She tried to glance behind him, looking for traces of the struggle or the three other devils. “You didn’t kill them, did you?”
Something sneaked into Kellerman’s eyes. She really hoped he wasn’t about to talk to her about kittens and unicorns again. “Not yet,” he said.
“Good. We’re not killing anybody.”
He blinked. “I’m sorry, is this a PG-13 apocalypse?”
“They’re children, Paul.”
He glanced at the boy, at the glimpse of face uncovered by the devil mask. “Children old enough to vote, and drive, and—you know. Run around dressed like devils and swinging baseball bats.”
Sara exhaled. When she was a child, the gap between twenty and thirty-five seemed insignificant. The more she aged, though, the more the youths straight out of high school struck her as babies. Their faces like lumps of puff pastry, uncooked, unfinished, uneverything. A car would stop to let her cross the street, and the person driving it would look young enough to need a sitter.
It was only as she turned thirty, then thirty-five, that realization bloomed into her mind fully. The eighteen-year-olds who got married, who went to war, who committed acts of violence that put them into Fox River for twice as long as they’d been alive—these people altered their lives irrevocably, before they had even fully baked into their own identities.
If tragedy was to be found in anything, in 21st-century America, then Sara thought this warranted at least a small slice of the tragic.
She crossed her arms over her chest, meeting Kellerman’s gaze. “I’m not killing a bunch of twenty-year-olds.”
“Satan worshippers, who called you Eve? Sure. You’re right. I see bright futures for the lot of them.”
“That’s not the point.”
“You’re right. It’s not.”
And part of her knew he was right, of course. The world has changed, and you’re still playing by the old rules.
Well, maybe so.
But she was going to keep living by the old rules, by the same morals that had guided her since she’d quit drugs. If the world around her turned brown or blue, if zombies rained from the sky, if everyone else was content to act as if they were in the jungle now, and everything was allowed—that didn’t matter. Sara would sooner die sticking to her old principles than live to become someone she didn’t recognize.
Some of these resolutions must have beamed in her eyes, because the corners of Kellerman’s mouth went down.
If she had said any of it out loud, he would have probably just answered, You read too many books.
“For God’s sake, Sara. If we don’t kill them, they’ll come after us. Like you pointed out, they’re twenty-year-olds with bruised prides. You think they have better things to do than get even?”
“We could tie them up.”
“Oh, a slow agonizing death instead of a quick one. And I thought of the both of us, you were the merciful one.”
“Don’t say that, like we’re some sort of item.”
He laughed.
A You’re being ridiculous laugh.
It glided into her, queasily, that he was right.
Sometime after the devils burst into the store, Sara must have accepted the fact that she would need to establish some sort of partnership with Paul Kellerman; the idea imposed itself as detestable but necessary. Like needing to have one of your teeth removed, without anesthetics.
I won’t make it out here without him.
How many more devils were there between herself and Chicago—between herself and Michael? How many could she hope to fight off on her own?
Steel hardened her jaw as she planted her eyes into Kellerman’s.
It’s simple, Sara. Everybody knows. The devil you know beats the devil you don’t.
Kellerman exhaled. “If we leave them here, tied up, they’ll freeze to death. If someone else doesn’t find them first.”
“Well, we’ll leave them something to untie themselves with. A butter knife or something. So, by the time they cut themselves loose—”
“Sara, I hate to break this to you. But mercy, kindness, humaneness—this isn’t how the world works anymore.”
“That’s easy for you to say, when it’s never been how you worked.”
She caught her breath. She hadn’t meant for the words to sound so snappish.
A flash of real anger came over his face. “You think I like the thought of killing a bunch of people when they’re lying unconscious? Even if they call themselves demons?”
She forced on a smile, stiffer than any one she’d given during those horrendous interviews. “Then we agree. Good.”
Her shoes ground against glass as she turned her back on him. Not afraid, as it happened, that he would try to attack her or anything.
“Where are you going?”
“To get some tape.”
“For God’s sake—”
“You’d better watch the boys. Make sure they don’t come to.”
Navigating through the aisles, Sara cursed, once, then twice, then a third time. Shopping at Walmart was always, arguably, a hellish experience; but of all the times that had come before in her life, this was undoubtedly the worst one.
After she’d got her hands on a roll of tape, she found it a safe idea to stop by the pharmacy area. Blood from the cut between her fingers had pooled and dried inside her palm, and no doubt, worse injuries could come their way in the upcoming days. Finally, before she made her way back to the devils—the unconscious ones, and the one standing guard—her eyes stopped on a hunting knife, which had somehow escaped previous lootings.
Sara eyed it, cautiously.
Probably, Kellerman had his own stack of weapons, and he’d be willing to let her take one—might even insist on it.
Yet a voice whispered in the back of her mind that maybe, just maybe, it was safer to have an ace up her sleeve that he didn’t know about. Him, who seemed to have nothing but aces, all the way to his shirt collar.
She stuck the knife into her sock, underneath the leg of her pants.
Kellerman had moved the mustachioed devil closer to the other three, so he could keep an eye on all four. Something crept into her, at the sight of him—this ridiculous image of herself, going to him after grocery-shopping, like they were an old couple.
Although the thought wasn’t his fault, she tossed the tape at him a little harder than she should have. He caught it before it collided with his face; and it became undeniable that part of her wished he hadn’t.
“So, you just love tossing things at me now?”
“Shut up.”
“We’re gonna need to have a talk about manners if you keep saying that.” He sighed, but dropped to one knee so he could start tying up the devils. One victory for her. Sort of. “This reminds me,” he said, as calm as he sounded earlier when that baseball bat was swinging, “we should have a conversation, Sara.” His eyes met hers. “A serious one.”
Adrenaline was still spiking through her body, and she stopped her leg from fidgeting. Kellerman might mistake it for nerves.
“Sure. I delight in talking to you. It’s the prospect that keeps me going on rainy days.”
“Well. You’re in a mood.”
“I’m in a—” she stopped, because she was done repeating what he said in outrage. Her fists clenched, and fresh blood started flowing from the nicked flesh between her fingers.
It’d feel good, wouldn’t it?
To just scream at him, pretend he’s the problem, that he’s the only thing about this entire situation worth screaming at.
Yet he was also her only ally.
And he had just fought three devil-masked men to save her ass.
Well. Both their asses.
Still, if there was ever to be a moment of truce between them, it should be right now.
“Okay, yeah,” she said. He cocked a brow, and she sensed how surprised he was that she would put her weapons down. “I’m in a mood. We were just attacked, I broke a kid’s nose and knocked him out, and you—you just saved my life. I hate it when you save my life.”
His gaze narrowed. At this point, she didn’t know why the words kept coming out.
“That’s the third time, now, that you save my life. And honestly? It gives me actual shivers of disgust. I viscerally hate it when you do that.”
“Er—” he looked like he was piecing together an especially confusing puzzle. “More than you would viscerally hate being dead?”
She fell silent.
“I really wish you didn’t have to think about it that long,” he said. A chuckle came out of him. “I had no idea you felt that way.”
“You had no idea I would hate being saved by someone who waterboarded me and left me to drown?”
“Well—yeah.”
That should have made her want to throw things at him again; but for some reason, it didn’t.
“It’s a way of making amends,” he said. “As good as any I can think of, anyway.”
She bit down the flesh of her bottom lip. “Here’s that talk about making amends again.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s wrong is I didn’t ask for it, Paul.” She shook her head. His face the contrite, more mature man who’d been voted into office and had invaded her TV screen over the past few years. “What’s wrong with it is you’re trying so hard to earn my forgiveness, to push that redemption arc down my throat—”
“Well, I’d hardly call it—”
“And maybe I don’t want reasons to forgive you. You ever think about that? You ever think I don’t want you to be a born-again decent guy? That maybe I’d just sooner think you’re hateful—that it’s easier to live with what you did to me if I think that?”
To his credit, he seemed to give it genuine consideration. “So, you prefer for me to be—indecent?”
One of the devils grunted on the ground, and Kellerman punched him without breaking eye-contact.
Then, she was the one to laugh, from sheer exhaustion. “Of course not. Forget it.”
“No, I mean—I hear you. I get it. If it helps, I’m sorry. I never thought about it that way.”
He returned to his task. For a time, no sounds save the rip of tape and the wind howling outside.
“What did you want to talk about?” she said. “Earlier, you said we needed to have a conversation.”
“Right.” He cocked his head to the side. “I really don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“I’ve been having such a good day, I think I can handle a little bad.”
Amusement gleamed in his eyes, and she did not hate it as much as usual. “I’ve been thinking, we have to start talking about—well. You know. Hierarchy.”
She frowned. “Hierarchy?”
“Yeah. As in, who between us makes decisions, and who listens.”
That finished pouring water on the fragile flame of sympathy that had lit up inside her. “This had really better not be your way of saying you’re voting yourself into boss-hood here.”
“I’m not voting, and boss-hood isn’t a word.”
“Can you quit talking like a politician for one second?”
He tore the last piece of tape with his teeth and got to his feet.
She refused to look away from him, to give him an out. “Let’s be straight to each other.”
“Yeah. Okay.” He waved at the mass of devils on the floor. “There’ll be more decisions like this one, Sara—a lot more. Dilemmas, life-and-death calls we can’t waste one second about. We can’t afford to be bickering all the time.”
“So,” she tried to follow, “the one way out of this is for you to proclaim yourself—what? Commander in Chief?” Her arms locked over her chest, so tight, she wasn’t sure you could unclench them with a crowbar. “I think we already established, I wouldn’t give you my vote. And I don’t see a horde of Kellerman-groupies here.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just trying to be pragmatic. In times of crises—”
“Dictators tend to blossom like fruit from a tree.”
He flashed her a grin. Not plastic teeth, but very much devilish. “That’s actually quite poetic, Sara. Why don’t you write a blog about it?”
“Wow,” she said.
But really? The thought that he had been getting angry at all her blog articles about human rights, before the apocalypse, brought her an odd kind of satisfaction. I knew part of him wanted to strike back. I knew he wasn’t made of steel.
“So it did get on your nerves, after all.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“You give me an order, Paul, just one, I’ll be out of here so fast you’ll think you dreamt me.”
“I wouldn’t dare to dream you, Sara. Thanks for taking an interest.”
“Unbelievable. I haven’t even agreed to a partnership, and you’re already trying put a crown on your head.”
“So, how much would you say you concern yourself with what I dream about? Once a day, twice—”
“What is it, Paul? Do you miss being the boss of people? Is that what you liked about politics? Or is it just something you’ve been wanting to try since Caroline Reynolds was the boss of you?”
Sara’s tongue turned into salt in her mouth.
Kellerman locked his fingers together. The smile on his face looked so cordial, goosebumps broke down her arms.
Maybe she should know better than to rile him up by now.
Maybe she should remember that he was never as cold as he looked on the inside.
“This is all proving my point,” he said.
All she could manage was, “Ah.”
“It does no good to either of us, arguing like that. If we run into another life-threatening situation, and we will—we won’t have time to debate what to do. One of us will need to make a call. And the other will need to comply.”
“Fine,” she said, “why don’t I get to be the boss of us?”
He laughed so sincerely, she thought her glare might set him on fire.
“You’re joking,” he said.
“No!”
He sobered immediately. It was insulting how shocked he looked. “Because—I don’t know how I can say this politely. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“Right, and you were just born to survive a zombie apocalypse. In fact, you had a whole survival kit with you, you C-sectioned your way out all on your own with a crossbow.”
“A crossbow—” he stopped. Visibly resisted palming his forehead. “Look. If we ever have to perform surgery on someone, I’ll go all captain o my captain on you.”
“Please don’t.”
“But in the meantime—”
“Wait. That’s actually not a stupid idea.”
He arched a brow, as if startled that she would miss out on an occasion to call his ideas stupid.
“We both have skills that the other lacks,” she said. “Why don’t we just—divide decision-making based on specific areas? I get to make certain calls. You get to make others.”
The devil who had called himself Lucifer stirred on the ground. Kellerman said, “Suppose we walk and talk at the same time?”
Outside, the February wind snuck into every pore of her skin. She felt its bite, blinked back the tears almost freezing solid on her eyelashes.
Kellerman hoisted a hiking backpack on his shoulder—he must have left it in the aisle before he came out to talk to her, when they first met in the store. “What have you got in there?” she asked.
“Just the souls of my hundreds of victims.”
She resisted rolling her eyes; he might take it as a victory.
“You were saying,” he went on. “Instead of appointing a leader, between you and me, we—divide areas of decision-making?”
“Right.”
He squinted, gauging how much slack she was really cutting here. “So, you take medicine, potential surgeries and patching people up, and I take everything else?”
It was hard to laugh while trying to keep her teeth from chattering. The cars pebbling the streets were ice sculptures. Though a winter sun burned bright as a white diamond, sunset couldn’t be more than three hours away.
They needed to get to shelter now. Yesterday. But they also needed to cover enough ground that the devils wouldn’t find them.
“In your dreams,” she said.
“You’re really interested in my dreams then.”
“You’re good at handling situations like the one we were in, earlier. So, you can have those.”
He frowned, as if looking for loopholes. “I get decision-making rights over critical situations?”
“Some.” She shrugged. “You told me to run, earlier. I ran. Turns out, I’m not interested in letting myself be enrolled into a satanic cult just to spite you.”
“It goes straight to my heart.” His eyes were still serious. The cold didn’t even seem to bother him all that much. “What if I make the decision that we’re in mortal danger, and we need to eliminate the threat?”
Sara licked her lips. It was hard to say this while meeting his eyes, but she didn’t want to break eye-contact; to reveal even more weakness. “I’ve killed people in self-defense before.”
If curiosity gnawed at his mind, it didn’t let on.
“If it’s the only option. Only if it’s the only option. If we can get away with leaving them unconscious, then that’s what we do.”
“Oh, so, really, you’re in charge of critical situations.”
“No. But since you’re bringing it up, I think I should handle the decisions that have to do with our—our moral compass.”
“Our moral compass?”
“If we’re going to act as a team, we need to have one. And since we said we were dividing executive functions based on expertise—”
“So, wait, I don’t have a moral compass? I’ve been a senator for four years.”
“And politicians are notorious for their integrity.”
He blew air through his teeth. She watched it come out in steam.
“Did it occur to you that, the world being as it is, my moral compass would be a lot more useful than yours?”
She tucked her hands on her hips and halted. He stopped, too, casting an annoyed glance behind his shoulder.
“Sara, we need to keep moving.”
But she needed him to take this seriously. She wouldn’t let Kellerman drag her into his world of morally gray—probably, what he called gray by now was she still what she called abyss-black.
“If it’s an emergency, if it’s a life-or-death situation, you get to decide,” she said. “But you decide based on my rules. Or there’s no deal, Paul. You agree, or we go our separate ways. Right now.”
His lips pressed together. “Tough negotiator, are you? I do what you want, or I do without you.”
“You were the one to say we needed a captain. Just listen, will you? They’re not difficult rules.”
“Great. I abhor difficult things.”
“Don’t be a baby.” He frowned, and she went on before he could interrupt—had she really just said that? “No killing. Not bad guys, not good guys—not anybody. No killing unless there is absolutely nothing else we can do.”
She gauged him, carefully. No matter what else she thought about him, she respected his intelligence. If he pledged to use it in order to spare as many lives as they possibly could, even in critical situations—then maybe teaming up with him would mean fewer deaths in her future. Not more.
“Jesus,” he said. “So this is a PG-13 end of the world situation.”
“Hey, I didn’t walk into your apocalypse, Kellerman. You walked into mine.”
“Um—I think that’s debatable. Also, what?”
“The same goes for violence,” she went on. “Only as a last resort. Only if it’s an us or them situation.” The word burned on her tongue—us—and she swallowed what felt like a spoonful of cinders.
Though the exhale he let out was almost a sigh, he didn’t actually protest. “Anything else?”
“No acts of sadism. No brutality.”
“You know, it’s a little insulting you’d feel you need to say that.”
“I’m sure bruising your feelings will haunt me till my old age.” More seriously, she went on, “We take no prisoners. No recruits. I don’t care how the army is doing things—we’re not making anyone do anything without their consent.”
“Agreed. Now, can I do anything more to ease your mind, Sara? Do you want me to put a knee on the ground so you can knight me, perhaps?”
“I don’t see myself putting a sword to your neck, Paul. I’m not sure it’d be wise.”
“Okay, all right. We only use violence as a last resort.” Looking at her, with an earnestness that seemed overly emphatic, he said, “I can live with that. More rules, your highness?”
If he thought he could shame her out of having standards by treating her like a princess, he was dead wrong. Sara had years of experience in being a princess. She could earn a diploma in the arts of princesshood. Her whole childhood, to start, had given her ample time to hone those skills, although admittedly it had been the lonely-princess experience, with a golden tower and a cold-hearted king.
Not that Kellerman needed to know that.
“Just one.”
“Thank heaven.”
“You don’t lie to me. Ever.” Her eyes drilled into his. A shameful thrill of pleasure ran through her as she caught the imperceptible shift in his face, as he resisted taking a step back. “I’ve been fooled twice, now, and you’re not about to make that a third. One lie, Paul, a single one, and this is over.”
He was silent for a while, serious, though she could feel the smile looming at the edges of his lips. Devious. Ever devious.
“That sounds reasonable.”
“I want your word.”
“You have it.”
The air between them hung with the unfinished part of his sentence. For what it’s worth.
“For my defense?” he said. “I didn’t actually fool you twice—just once. It’s hardly my fault if Michael fooled you first.”
Sara held his eyes, more glacial even than the air sneaking through her coat collar. “Actually, I’d argue the fact Lincoln would never have been put in Fox River if you hadn’t helped frame him for murder makes it entirely your fault.”
“Entirely my fault?”
Now who was repeating after who?
He sighed, but his eyes didn’t waver as he repeated, “No more lies. I promise.”
They started down the road again, silent save for the thud of their footsteps and the banshee howl of the wind.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, Sara thought.
This is me, doing what it takes to make it back to Michael. To make it home to my family.
She didn’t have to like Kellerman—she didn’t even have to trust him.
Things would be okay.
So long as she didn’t allow herself to forget that the devil she knew was still a devil.