Outbreak

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Summer had already passed this year and autumn was well and truly there to stay. Not that it mattered, this town only seemed to have rain, or slightly less rain as weather anyway. It was big news when they got a dry spell, meaning everyone seemed to take it as a sign to wear as little clothing as possible to get a little colour in their pale skin. Kitty Stein was one of those very people, though she saw little point to it. It would takes a solid week of warm weather just to get her particular skin to white. She had lived in this town her whole life and had accepted the fact she would never have the golden tan all the magazines advertised. The magazines were always trying to persuade young women like herself to try the latest self tanner, or skin smoothing face cream. She personally didn't put much stock in them, and she didn't have the money for them either. A waitresses wage, even when coupled with that of an occasional bar tender, barely covered her living expenses. The only people with money in this town worked at the factory that packaged the very creams women all over the country bought by the case. 
It was 7pm and Kitty was running late for work. She was jogging across town from her job at the restaurant to get to the bar to earn a few hours extra pay. Slender fingers were running through her plum coloured hair as she went, loosening out the bouncing curls that had been tied back all day. She stopped moving only long enough to apply black kohl to her pale grey eyes right there in the street before moving on again. Kitty was in such a hurry she didn't even hear the sound of someone falling into a row of trashcans a few feet away. by 7:15 the young woman had burst through the back door of the bar, somewhat breathless.

Jack's mouth simply flapped for a good few seconds. "That's impossible!" He finally managed to splutter. "I haven't touched her in over a year, and, well... Look at her! She's not even showing at all!" He insisted, knowing how this looked. "Shannon, I swear to god if she is knocked up, it isn't mine!"

Kitty meanwhile was running into problems of her own. She had managed to evade most of the infected that had over run the station, thinking hack would probably have gone to the armoury. The problem was, most of hy he other officers had indeed done that, and that's where they had been when whatever this was... Had infected every last one of them.

"You're such a pig." Shannon snorted, slamming the door behind them and dropping herself into the chair on the far side of the room. "Don't think I don't know how often you sit your happy ass at John's bar. You've probably been taking her to a back room." She turned her head to keep him from being able to read any kind of emotion on her face. Her father had forced this man on her. His choices shouldn't bother her. 
"We should push up the wedding." Grace went on, as if there weren't anyone else but she and Jack in the room. "Before I start to show...that way people can't talk and the Judge won't say anything. I think it's a girl. I'm going to name her Kathryn..."

Jack sighed heavily and rubbed at his forehead. He was beginning to think the infected shuffling around were the lucky ones right then. "Shannon, you never gave a rats ass where I sat my ass, but for the record, it wasn't in a chair in the back room with her in my lap!" He snapped. "And you..." He returned his attention to Grace. "Stop. Just... Stop. I get it, I ruined your life, but there isn't any need to this kind of lie!"

Grace turned to him fully, her eyes fixed on his face. For a moment she was in her right mind. "You love her." She whispered. It was there. He may not be able to recognize it himself but deep down it was there. He had never been so quick to defend himself to her. He had never been so desperate to ensure that she knew the truth. 
Shannon snorted at this, shaking her head. "Jack Cartwright has never loved anything but being sheriff, Grace. Don't kid yourself." She muttered bitterly, refusing to look at either one of them. 
Those words were enough to break reality once again and Grace smiled, her eyes going glassy. She took Jack's hand before he could protest and placed it on her flat belly. "I'll take good care of her. I promise. I'll be a good mother. You'll see. Winston Athens won't be able to take that from us this time. None of them will be able to take anything else from us again." She turned her head to the window, nodding ever so slightly. "Tell Kitty I'm sorry. I..." She got nothing else out. A single bullet slid neatly through the pane of glass in behind her and embedded itself in her forehead. She tumbled forward into Jack, a smile on her lips as her eyes simply closed.

Jack was frozen in place, his arms still supporting Grace. He didn't known what had just happened. It had all seemed to go in slow motion, allowing him to see what had happened, but not yet letting his brain process it. Then it was like someone flipped as twitched and everything caught up. "Grace? Gracie..." He laid her down on his desk, shaking the young woman by the shoulders. Realisation hit and Jack's head snapped to the window. Who did it? Why why Grace? He could see nothing but red, filled with an angry rage.

Ark lowered his rifle, tapping his ear piece to cut the connection. His eyes connected with Jack's for a moment from across the expanse of the buildings and he simply stood there. The sheriff would probably never understand why he'd just done what he had. Hell, he probably wouldn't live long enough to. He'd done the poor woman a favor. That wasn't a gift he offered many. 

"What the hell..." Shannon was on her feet, behind Jack but knowing better than to touch him or Grace. She'd turned her head to argue with the other woman just in time to see the shot and the spray of blood as it splattered all over his face. It was hard to wrap her head around what had happened.

It wasn't Jack's rage that Ark really needed to worry about. The Sherrif was a pussy cat compared to the real lion named Kitty. If she ever found out who had shot Grace, death would be a blessing for them. As it was, Kitty was still in the basement level, unaware that her best, and only, friend was now dead.

Jack could barely breathe. He still didn't understand what was happening around them, which made it harder to accept that maybe Grace was better off.

Shannon said very little as she retrieved an emergency blanket from Jack's closet and tried to lay it over Grace's still form. Already she was going cold. She was ashamed to realize that the woman was dead and she hated her for that to. Yet another reason for Jack to obsess over her.

Jack checked what supplies were I his office, then turned to look at Shannon. "We're leaving. Grab your shit and let's go." He didn't even look at Grace's corpse, like he was in shock and denial about what had actually happened.

"I'm not going anywhere until I find my brother." Shannon said firmly, shaking her head. "I promised Daddy I would make sure he got out of this city safe and I will not leave him here."

"And where was your daddy dearest when you promised him that? In a private jet to the other side of the world?" Jack sneered, making his hatred for Shannon's father more than obvious.

"My father is an important man and you know that, Jack." Shannon snapped, though she sometimes thought little more of her father herself. "He was probably gone long before this whole thing started. He can't help what he is any more than you can."

"You don't find it a little fucking convenient that he just happens to be gone the moment we realise something's wrong?" Jack growled as he began shoving things into a bag. "Even you can't be that blind!"

"Don't talk to me right now." Shannon said as she once again tried to dial her brother's cell number. This time she found that the signals were dead. She cursed under her breath. "You've had it in for my family from the beginning. I don't even know why you bothered to try and become part of it. How much did he offer you for that?" She growled, dropping her phone back into her pocket.

"That's the part you fixate on? Not that dearest daddy basically tried to sell you?" Jack snorted as he jerked open the door, too scared to glance at Grace's unmoving form. If he looked at her, he may well believe that a bullet in his own head was the best course of action.

"Why don't you just do it?" Shannon hissed, seeing the way he was looking back at Grace. Jack would have no idea just how hard she was fighting to keep emotion out of her voice. Her face was set in hard lines as she jerked open the door, refusing to look back at the man or the body. "Join her or whatever where the terrible Judge can't stop you."

"You mean where he can't manipulate me to get what he wants?" Jack muttered, pulling Shannon back to step through the door ahead of her. It wasn't in his nature to let someone else step into danger before him. Despite his mistakes, jack genuinely just wanted to keep people safe.

"I'm sorry about your girlfriend." Shannon said softly. "Whoever did it was probably aiming for me. If that makes you feel any better."

Jack didn't say anything for a long moment. He was thinking about the last conversation he had had with Grace. He should have stopped her. He should never have let her get out of the car. "She wasn't my girlfriend, Shannon." He breathed at last. "She was a piece of my last I just couldn't let go of. You know how it is... You always cling to your first love, right?"

"I wouldn't know." Shannon said softly, shrugging her shoulders. "Love has never been in the plan for me. I'm glad it worked for you. And now you see where it got you. Come on. I still need to find my brother and we probably need to find out where that whore Kitty got off to. I can't afford to have her find Winston first. You know how much she hates him."

"She has a pretty fucking good reason, don't you think?" Jack growled as they cautiously moved along the hallway. "So..." He asked after a few minutes. "Did you even want to be a cop, or was that something else daddy forced on you?"

Shannon watched the rigid way Jack held himself, trying to decide just how she wanted to answer the question. Answering it wrong could make trouble for everyone involved and her father would have her head. She spent time chewing on her full bottom lip instead, thinking about the night her brother had raped the girl that now lay dead in the sheriff's office. 

Judge Peter Athens never lost his cool about anything. He was screaming and yelling, throwing things. His wife was sobbing in the corner. Shannon herself was kneeling behind her brother, trying to apply pressure to the gunshot wound that Kitty Stein had given him. She swore she was going to kill the other woman for hurting her baby brother.
Winston himself was rocking slowly back and forth, giggling. In his mind he'd done nothing wrong. He'd simply taken what he'd been wanting since they'd moved to the run down town. After all, it was his right. He deserved to have everything he wanted. 
"This is going away." Peter said, his chest heaving as he turned his head toward his two children. It was clear in his cold brown eyes that the wheels were already beginning to turn. "This is all her fault. She was flaunting herself. She was asking for it." 
Shannon didn't dare look up at her father but she'd raised an eyebrow. She'd seen Grace Carmichael around town. That woman never asked for anything. Least of all to be taken advantage of. That most suggestive thing she'd ever worn was a dress that went past her knees to church a few weeks ago.
Peter was nodding his head. "The both of them were coming onto you, Winston. Grace just got to you first. Of course we'll have to break it to..." He stopped speaking and looking at his son, his eyes now on his long legged daughter. 
"Peter, no." His wife rarely spoke up. The cost of it was very high for her. "Please. Not Shannon. Not for what he's done. We can't keep sacrificing to hide these things. This is too..." 
"Shut up!" He barked at her. "Princess..." He turned to his only daughter, his eyes sliding over her expensive clothes and shoes, not leaving out her hair and nails. "Just how much do you want to keep living the life you're accustomed to?" 
She had been sent that night to tell Jack she'd seen Winston and Grace sleeping together in a back bedroom of the Judge's mansion. She would never forget the look of devastation in Jack's eyes. Then she'd done the horrible thing of helping him throw all of the young woman's belongings out into the snow. 
Shannon had never wanted to be a cop but her father insisted. It was the only to keep herself close enough to Jack to keep him interested. She pushed herself on him for fear her father was going to yank the rug out from under her and leave her on the street with nothing. She'd seen what it had done to Grace and Kitty. It wasn't the fear of losing the clothes as much as it was the fear of being alone. 
All the while her father had been tying Jack to a set of strings of his own, making him dance to his own puppet dance.

"You ask stupid questions, Jack. You should know me well enough to know I never do anything I don't want to." Shannon answered finally, her voice taking on a prim and hateful tone it often did when she was lying through her teeth. "You don't give a shit about me. Don't pretend to just because we might die. It makes you look like a pussy, sheriff."

Ooc: how am I supposed to follow that? That was amazing!

Ic: Jack didn't say anything at first, the hate in Shannon's tone piercing right the way through him. Grace was the last person he had ever suspected would cheat on him, so when the beautiful daughter of the town judge suddenly seemed to sympathetic and so interested in him, he had been right to build up his walls. The lies he had been fed by Shannon's family had broken his heart, something he still believed he would never get over. "Rather a pussy than a heartless whore who gets off on other men leering at her like a piece of rancid meat!" He finally growled before stomping on ahead.

Shannon hung back a little, his words digging deeply at the already raw wound. She knew she deserved the hell Jack put her through. She probably deserved so much more than that. Sighing softly she paused by the room where they kept the evidence, ashamed to remember that she'd spent many hours there burning things that would prove what a monster her brother really was.

Jack was hurting so much more than he was letting on. Every step felt like he was caught in tar and it was pulling him down to simply lay there and die. It was the sound of gunshots somewhere in the building that finally alerted him to the fact they weren't the only survivors.

"Winston..." The hair on the back of Shannon's neck stood on end. No matter what her brother had done he was still her family. She had promised to take care of him and she would. Or die trying. If that was Kitty trying to hurt him...
She let go of the door handle and took off running, forgetting that there were monsters in the building and that she had a fiancee with a slightly bigger gun and better aim.

Kitty had been the one firing. She was taking aim at anything that moved after someone had tried to take a bite out of her when she found her way down here. It didn't matter that it was Winston she was firing at, in fact... That probably made her all the more determined to hit him.

Winston Athens was a bad man. He always had been. He had spent much of his child hood killing animals of all sizes and pulling them apart to see what their insides looked like. Then as he got older he graduated to people. He'd hurt more people than even his family knew. What they had covered up for was only a small portion of the sins he had committed. 
Just now he was hunting Kitty Stein. He was planning to do things to her that would make a normal man sick at the mere thought. He was hiding in the shadow near her now, sliding his thick knife along his tongue. He was getting hard just imagining what she would look like covered in blood. Would she beg as her friend had?

Winston made the same mistake mist people did when it came to Kitty. The reason her friendship with Grace had lasted from them being small children was due to their complimenting personalities; Kitty had always been the one keeping one eye looking over both their shoulders. She hadn't liked Winston since she first laid eyes on him. She had seen the way he looked at Grace, and had gotten more than satisfaction from shooting him, she was onto sorry she hadn't killed him. In that moment she was searching the corpse of one of the downed officers for any kind of weapon, or even a few soare ammo clips.

"Winston!" Shannon shouted her brother's name, not caring that something other than him could hear her. She was desperate to find him. If he were dead it would mean that she was alone and all the sacrifices she'd made for him and because of him had been for nothing. 
The younger of the Athens children jerked his head up, his knife missing Kitty by little more than an inch. It slammed into the wall and he cursed, forced to reveal himself to the dark haired woman now directly beneath him.