Yet
A Crispy Zombie Side Quest
The bag was Wendy's since back when a go-bag was a precaution. Now it was a way of life.
She set it on her cot. Worn left strap with supple leather. Room for everything they'd need on the road.
Wendy started packing…
She'd run the numbers on herself. Distance, terrain, pace with the knee brace versus without. Fifteen miles in a day if the ground cooperated. Twelve if it didn't. Bradley Ashford covered twenty on a patrol shift and didn't seem to notice. She'd been watching. Filed that information away.
He didn't know she'd been watching.
Medical supplies next, but not the standard kit. She'd quietly pulled essentials for a controlled burn one. The literature on warmth-conversion injuries was thin and mostly wrong. Written by people who'd observed from a distance and called it a disease. Sweet Salvation taught her real treatments. The warmth wasn't a disease.
She'd known that in the corridor with Bradley. The way it moved under his skin. Responsive. Controlled. That wasn't infection. That was a language. It spoke in heat.
Maps went in next. Her maps. She'd been annotating the standard encampment charts for six weeks. Routes. Fuel caches. Settlements that had gone dark and settlements that hadn't. Supply lines that still held. She knew this region the way she knew her inventory.
Bradley could sense the Burned Ones. That was an advantage. She knew where everything else was positioned. They were a dynamic duo.
She folded the maps with the annotations facing in. You protected your intelligence the way you protected your supplies. You didn't leave your work exposed.
She'd wanted to be a superhero since she was seven years old. Not the flying kind. She'd wanted to be the kind who was prepared with all the toys. Who walked into the impossible situation and had the correct thing in her left pocket. Knew the building layout, the guard rotation, the one structural weakness that changed everything. The hero that looked at chaos and solved the puzzle, methodically.
Her mother called it a gift. Her ex-husband called it exhausting. Then a man stood in a corridor with fire under his skin and looked at her like she was the only thing standing between him and disaster.
Fire-resistant gloves. Two pairs. She held them a moment before packing them. The practical reason was proximity. Traveling with a partially converted warm one meant accounting for heat variance. Thermal spikes under stress. The possibility of involuntary flare.
She packed both pairs and moved on.
Bradley hadn't said he was leaving. He wouldn't. She knew his command style. He'd absorbed his own transition with silence and documentation. He'd announce his departure when he'd already decided everything. Frame it as solo. Use the word liability at least once.
She'd already prepared her counterargument. She knew the settlement supply networks for ninety miles in every direction. Which encampments had medical capacity and which were running on borrowed time. The thermal protocol gaps from Sweet Salvation. Which routes the Burned Ones abandoned and which they'd recently discovered.
She knew that the man hiding in plain sight had eleven days of solo transition management. No external support. No idea what was coming next.
She would be his Q.
She'd decided. He'd have no choice.
Q never went into the field, technically. Q had a lab and controlled environments. Solutions to problems that hadn't happened yet. Q handed the agent the equipment and sent them out.
Wendy had a forty-three-year-old go-bag with a worn left strap and the best annotated maps in the region and a plan.
Bradley's Q was going into the field.
Oh, the notebook. Small. Spiral-bound, red cover, the kind of thing you found in bulk at office supply stores. In the before times. She'd had it since she was nine. The pages were full of mission plans. The careful nine-year-old handwriting documenting imaginary operations, equipment lists, allies with their strengths and weaknesses charted in columns.
She'd been a thorough child.
She picked it up. Set it down. Picked it up again.
The thing about imaginary missions was that they'd been practice. She'd known that even at nine. She'd been training for something she didn't have a name for yet.
She put the notebook in the bag.
The warmth. It was a seductive desire.
His hands in the corridor. The amber light, deep, and responsive. He'd pressed his palms together and the glow dimmed. The way he concentrated & it obeyed.
That's control.
I want to know what that feels like.
The controlled burn version. The thing Bradley built in the dark at 0300, alone. The thing Ignacia Torres had made into a weapon. A calling.
The warmth that answered.
She didn't know if she could even ask for it. Was proximity enough? Didn't know if Bradley would offer and hadn't decided yet if she would ask.
She wasn't afraid.
She knew that forty-three years of being exactly useful enough left her with a go-bag and a door-shaped hunger for something that didn't appear on any manifest she'd ever written.
She zipped the bag.
Set it beside the cot.
In the morning Bradley Ashford would run his 0600 briefing. He'd stand at the front of the room with nineteen years of law enforcement in his posture. Eleven days of warmth. He’d brief his people on encampment status and patrol rotations.
He wouldn't know that one row back, Wendy Rollins was packed.
The journey hadn't started.
Yet.
My Creativity is fueled by tea. Lots of tea.
Written for Bradley Ramsey Pandamonium Prompt.
OMG, Maryellen, I am simultaneously very impressed by your character work and slightly concerned that you’ve quietly drafted me into a post-apocalyptic side quest 😅 Also “Bradley’s Q was going into the field” is SUCH a good line... cackling...