Max didn't realize jumping into the tunnels like there would be some sort of memory foam mattress underneath his graciously padded feet wouldn't be a good idea until he found himself face first on the concrete. His body'd crumpled the second his ankle had landed, and the pain was worse than anything he'd ever experienced. His foot and his heart throbbed at an inhumanly fast cadence. His head foggy, Max wondered how far ahead of him Margot was and how close behind him Suzane would be. He had to get his ass up instead of lying sprawled in the center of the tunnels if he still wanted an ass by the day's end.

But a sudden realization dawned on him as he tried to stand, and panic rose like hot bile in his throat as his legs buckled underneath him. Holy shit, I think I broke my ankle.

Suzanne belted out a screech so hard and long that it wouldn't surprise Max if her vocal cords ripped to shreds. He felt like he was going to throw up. She was going to find him there, and she was going pass off that sick virus like it was some sort of baton in a relay race. And then he would be some screaming Infected person instead of Maximilian Ramanujan Iyengar; passing out for a blissful moment as the virus consumed his body before he'd be in more pain than he could bear and then he'd stand on his broken ankle, drag his foot across the floor, and run down the tunnels to infect Margot. My God, he would infect Margot if he didn't get up, and then she would be just like Hadley--

"Margot!" Max shouted in desperation as he looked around for his sister. "Margot, help!"

The first things Max noticed about the tunnel were the lights. It was pitch black, forcing his other senses to recalibrate to the loss of the most important one. With his head so close to the floor he was getting pebbles stuck in his nose, Max could easily see the dim, intermittently placed bulbs as they protruded like soldiers from the bottoms of the clear walls. The equally intermittently placed reflectors were of no use without any light to reflect off of, so Max placed his hands on the grimy sides of the tunnel to help him move forward blindly into the void. Suzanne was still yelling from somewhere above him, but she'd begun to rub entire body against something hard, grainy...like brick or concrete. Max could hear the sickening scratch scratch scratch of her skin as it wore away, leaving nothing but her exposed flesh.

"Margot!" Max was near tears now. He was going to die at the hands of the fleshless nurse, and Margot wasn't anywhere to be found. He pushed himself up onto his knees, prepared to crawl the hell away from Infected Suzanne and the end of his brief life. But before he could continue to sob out in desperation, before his hope could continue to dwindle, a voice called to him.

It was quiet and indistinguishable at first. Only an echo of a single-syllable word. Max. It had to be Margot. She had to be looking for him.

Max. There it was again, followed by a phrase. Where are you? the tunnels echoed.

"Margot! Margot, I'm here!"

Footsteps! She was coming! Max let out a sob of relief knowing that he wasn't going to die-- at least, not alone. She'd been looking for him all along, and now she'd found him. But then that sweet, single-syllabled word began to morph into something unfamiliar. It wasn't Max anymore. It was...hen? Pen? The footfalls began to near him.

"Ben!" a male voice called. It wasn't Margot. Max's spirit was crushed as quickly as his ankle. "Where the hell are you?"

"Hello? Who's there?" Max attempted to sound fierce, but the pain and fright in his voice were evident. He quickly discarded the remnants of the invulnerable, guarded construct society had convinced him to call masculinity and whimpered, "Please help!"

"Are you alright?" the voice continued. "Hello?"

"I think I've broken my ankle! And I can't find my sister!"

The non-Margot figure emerged from the darkness behind Max, kneeling down near his face. In the dim light from the open pothole, Max could barely make out his dark visage and hazel colored-irises before he turned his head towards the injury. Max heard him suck in the fishy air between his teeth at the sight of his twisted leg.

"Do you have your phone?" the figure asked. "Or a flashlight?"

Max reached down into his front pocket, cursing himself for not charging his phone before he left for Pride. He was down to a measly thirty-one percent after Margot had forced him to take a bunch of pictures of the floats at the start so she could still have room for the later ones. He was sure that if he had one percent more for every shot he'd taken of Dykes on Bikes, he'd have no less than one hundred and ten.

Max handed his phone to the stranger. "Here. It'll die in less than an hour, though, so please be careful."

The figure scoffed, flicking the device's flashlight on. Max got a better look at his supposed savior while the Hispanic teen placed his iPhone into the front pocket of his flannel shirt. Quietly, he murmured, "Your ankle is broken, there are diseased people roaming the streets, we're probably going to be Infected, and all you can worry about is when your phone is going to die? How did you even break your ankle anyway? Shouldn't you care more about that?"

Right on cue, Suzanne stopped rubbing herself into a walking bag of raw muscles and let out another one of her Who Ate the Rest of the Pizza And Left the Box in the Fridge? screeches.

"The hell is that?" the figure demanded as he looked around.

Above their heads, footsteps began to pad towards the pothole. Max could no longer formulate words and resorted to letting out a strangled cry instead. Suzanne was coming, and with her--death.

"Get on my back. Hurry!"

Max looked up at his savior in confusion before he realized what he was doing. He reached up and wrapped his arms around the boy's strong neck, ignoring the pain coursing up into his thigh as his carrier stood with a grunt. He held his breath as a pair of hands shifted him higher onto their back, and he let his damaged ankle dangle in the air by his thighs. The figure let out a breath, shaking with exertion, and began to move forward at a painfully slow rate.

The tunnels turned right several feet away from the entrance Max had crippled himself at, the clear, plastic tubing seeming to stretch on forever. Suzanne's animalistic snarls only faded slightly once they'd followed the bend, and with only the littlest ray of light to guide them, Max could feel his savior's breath quickening. The two were silent the entire time, both looking for the respective relatives and finding nothing but more dark tunnels and anxious silence. Breaking this lull, Max decided he could no longer keep calling the guy whose back he was on the figure and attempted to get a name out of him.

The figure's face darkened at the age-old question, and Max was worried he'd drop him right then and there, leaving him, his broken leg, and his nosy queries to fend for themselves. But then he replied, "My mom wanted to name me Nathaniel."

Hesitantly, Max pressed on. "Wanted to? Did she do it?"

(Possibly) Nathaniel shrugged. "My dad convinced her to shorten it to Nathan, the white version. Now everyone calls me Nate."

"Alrighty then."

"And you? Your name?"

"Maximillian. Call me Max," he introduced.

Nate nodded, hiking the cripple farther up onto his shoulders. Max's nose slammed into the back of his head and began to throb in the midst of his close-cropped hair. The murmur of pain bubbling in his throat was cut off by Nate's own, "Alrighty then."

Silence again; more awkward than anxious. If Max had known he was going to be riding the back of another white-named teen and stuttering through the most common of questions and answers, he would've let Suzanne rip him limb by maladroit limb. But then he thought of what he would've done to Margot, frightened, Hadley-starved Margot, and he couldn't control himself from shouting her name one more time. His fingers around Nate's neck became slick with sweat as he mentally configured the sick image of her being all alone, her heart lodged in her throat, frantically searching for him—

A figure emerged from the tunnelway behind the two piggy-backing teens. Nathaniel whipped his entire body around at the sound of the heavy footsteps. Max nearly fell from his back as he shouted, "Who's there? Ben?"

"Nate!" the figure answered. His voice sounded just as frantic, just as hysterical, as Max had imagined Margot's to be— which could only mean one, horrible thing.

A taller, skinnier figure emerged, and sure enough, it sped after Ben with a hot fury. Silent but for its pounding feet, Max wondered if he'd run into one of the Infected. Then again, all that really mattered was that he was knee-deep in shit, and he was leading whoever was after him directly toward a crippled Max and a tired Nate. There was no way they'd outrun his pursuer.

This would be finally the end for him. Not only would he infect Margot and shred his broken ankle, but now Nate would join the diseased ranks because of his fatass and stupid instincts. How many people were going to be Infected because of him today? How much philosophical blood stained his hands? What, was he some sort of harbinger or death? Did God just hate him?

Reverberating noise whispered in Max's ears, and the entire tunnels began to do the same disorienting crap as the speakers at Dr. Greg's had. Crescendo, decrescendo; in once more, then out again. A single-syllable word echoed in his ears, dancing along his eardrum and demanding his brain to interpret it. This time, it really was Max, and the person shouting it was growing closer to them. The figure chasing Ben-- it was her. It was actually her! She'd found him! But what the hell was Margot doing chasing this poor boy around?

That was when it clicked. Ben. Nate. Ben and Nate.

"Ben, wait!" Nate shouted. "Stop running! What's wrong?"

Max craned his head around Nate's shoulder and joined him with his own cries. "Margot! Margot, is that you?"

Gulping for air, Ben skirted to a nearly violent stop behind Nate. Max watched as he stuttered through an uninterpretable sentence-- though he heard and understood every letter clearer than he would've in a quiet room. It was uninterpretable in the way that it didn't make sense, like how Hadley had been alive earlier today but was a freaking zombie now and how the same Nate who held the key to the Haven had somehow been the one to come to his rescue. It was uninterpretable in the way that it only invoked a response from Margot as she sped towards Ben faster than before, crashing into him at breakneck speed. It was uninterpretable in the way that there were only six words-- six words that meant something to Ben, Nate, and Margot, but absolutely nothing to Max.

"It's her!" Ben had shouted before he was tackled to the ground. "It's that babysitter girl!"

"That's my sister," Max whispered, but he wasn't sure if it was to himself or to Nate. "That's my sister."