Distress has reduced Kara to the most basic of reactions. The first one she’s chosen is to retreat into herself. He finds her slumped on a step, the top of her shirt unbuttoned as if she’d been burning up, and one hand clawing at her throat.
“Hey, let’s get outta here,” he tries, crouching beside her.
She looks exhausted and defeated, resigned to her own fate.
It’s not even a basement down here, he realizes, tilting her chin up to face him with a curled thumb. There are only a few steps leading to an opening the size of a tiny closet holding excess canned food.
It’s a dark shoebox, small enough to make anyone question if they could survive it. Reminds him a lot of the space he spent years in.
“Hold on to me.” He slips an arm under her legs and one across her back to lift her out of the abyss.
Once in the safety of daylight again, she stands on her own two feet better than he expected, even if there’s a sway that has her leaning into his side.
“I didn’t think I was claustrophobic until right now,” she says. “Take me home?”
He does.
No dog follows them out, leaving their mission incomplete with nothing to show for it.
* * *
“We’ll find him,” Kara says stoically, while he rinses the blood from under her fingernails.
She did a decent amount of damage while caught in that crawl space. Splinters from the door stick under cracked, bleeding nails and raw skin. It’s proof of how desperate she was to escape that the first one slicing into her did nothing to stop her efforts.
“Don’t worry about the dog.” He holds her shaking palm in his, tweezering out shards of wood. She barely flinches. “We should get you to whatever doc they got here. Have them take a look at this.”
“No. I’m fine. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
She snatches her hand back. “I’ll do it myself. You don’t have to.”
“Not what I meant,” he says gently, holding his hand out again until she places her own back where it belongs.
“I haven’t been stuck anywhere that small since before the turn. I don’t know why I reacted like that. It’s not like it was crawling with the dead. There was nothing down there.”
“How’d you get caught last time?”
Her lips form a thin line while he holds her hand under the bathroom faucet to wash away the last of the blood. “How do you think?”
It’s not a sassy statement, only matter of fact.
“He locked you up?”
“Only once. It was after they arrested you for hitting his friend. After…it was only once. Only for one night. I think he just didn’t want to look at me.”
He imagines her years ago, stuck in a small room trying to claw her way out. She’d have been trembling then like she is now, complaining of the cold while shock heats her skin. For him, somewhere small is safe. For her, it’s a gateway to a pastshe hasn’t fully put behind her and a reminder that their ghosts began haunting them long before half the population died.
“About earlier…” she begins.
“It was my fault. Won’t do it again. I promise I won’t.”
She shakes her head, eyes watering so quickly she had to have been suppressing it already. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I liked it. That’s the problem.”
“How’s that a problem?” It’s an innocent question. He’s so unsure of what this means or how to react. Isn’t equipped for any of this on his best day, but especially not now.
She doesn’t answer and he doesn’t push.
