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He wakes up suspended in the dark, on his side, ringing in his ears and the pain of a sudden stop in his chest, smelling blood and dust and gasoline.
Light filters in above his head.
His cheek is pressed against glass, which is flush with the ground.
...right, anyway.
"Uh. So I maybe kind of don't remember. Anything. About, like ... monsters. And stuff."
They can get into the part where this is all a dream ... later.
"...oh, shit."
He tries his best to respect Camillo's desire for minimal freaking out. It works, like, a little.
"Like — anything?"
"No monsters. No weird repurposed McMansions. I know you but I don't remember you having, like, spikes."
"—okay. Yeah, we can do that."
He gestures around.
"So — you may have noticed how everything's fucked now."
"It's been, like...a year now."
He pokes the side of the kettle to check it.
"The monsters all used to be people. Still are, sometimes. Kind of hard to tell where the line is. —if people say 'infected', or 'mutants', or whatever, it's all the same thing."
"Yeah. —you've got a freakish immunity, don't worry about it."
Poke.
"Everybody else, though, it's, uh, think HIV. Blood or cum."
It is incredibly sweet of Z to give Camillo a freakish immunity in his dream.
"I'm, uh, getting the sense that the latter is ... relevant."
"...yep. There's a couple that'll mostly just try to kill you, but...they all kind of want to fuck. Each other, too, not just everybody clean."
Poke.
"And the part everybody's already got doesn't help. —it's got two parts. Everybody's all breathing Part A already, monster fucking just gives you Part B."
"Yeah. Basically."
The kettle's warm enough. He turns off the flame and pours some out onto a cloth.
"—Your family's not here. But they're...alive. We were coming back from the bunker."
He is less worried about his family than Z probably assumes, since they're perfectly well in the waking world, but somehow it's still nice to hear.
"Bunker doesn't have room for everyone, I guess?"
"Uh — not exactly."
He sits down in the tub and starts wiping himself down, wetting the skin.
"If you don't leave, you stop making the...stuff. That your dad's studying. In your blood. Because you're not breathing the air, I guess, and it's filtered down there. He's trying to figure out a vaccine, or a cure, or something."
"...and when you say my dad, you mean..."
It's going to be so weird if Z has resurrected his birth dad for dream purposes.
"...uh — you should know. Cato...got got. Pretty quick after it all started. —he's fine, right now, he's sane and everything, but...if he leaves the bunker it starts getting worse. So he doesn't."
"...nah. Don't think so. I'm lucky, I stopped early."
He wipes down his torso carefully with the cloth, starts to soap himself up.
"I do if I, uh, get what somebody else got, but it goes away after a while."
"Fuck you," he says, and he turns around in the tub and holds his cloth over his shoulder.
"Get my back?"
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