I can't even begin to think of a suitably weird title..

[freakylemurcat]

Roger knows that occasionally some nutter will attempt to sneak into his house and pounce on him from the top of a bookshelf.

Ok, maybe not the bookshelf part quite so much. This is why the man who was balancing on top of his copy of War and Peace surprises him so much.

He nails his assailant with a right hook and knees him in the stomach, hoping that the yelp he made when the man jumped on top of him wasn’t as unmanly as he thought it was.

“You... bastard...” wheezes the man from the floor. His voice is familiar, and Roger groans. Of course.

“Andy...” he begins to sigh. The American leaps up and tackles him, and Roger begins to wish that he had carpet instead of hardwood floors.

“Keep down! They’ll see you!”

Normally, Roger would quite like to be pinned to the nearest available surface by Andy - but mostly after he’d been suitably boozed up. And even though Andy is certainly acting like he’s drunk, the Swiss has not been partaking in the merriment. Therefore he knees Andy again, and scrambles up.

“Ow!! Rogi!”

After seeing what alcohol could do to a man, Roger snatches a bottle of water from the fridge instead of the ever so tempting half-bottle of wine he’d left from last night. He’s leaning against the counter and peering out the window when Andy scuttles in.

“Rogi!”

The icy look he’s gifted stops him in his tracks, but he still glances nervously at the windows and ducks down slightly. Roger’s stare gets a bit chillier.

“If you are drunk and have brought crazy stalkers to my home, I will not be happy.” He swigs his water. “In fact, if you are just drunk, I will not be happy.”

“I’m not drunk!” Andy pauses. “Well, not particularly. But you’d need a stiff drink if you’d seen what I have!”

“Oh, God.” Roger dumps the water down the sink and dives for the wine. “The sex is not worth this.”

“Hey!” For a moment Andy looks annoyed. “The sex is pretty damn good. I mean, zombies take some beating, but I’m pretty sure-“

“What?!” interrupts Roger, “What was that?! Did you say zombies?!”

Andy looks bemused. “Yeah. Didn’t I mention them a while back?”

“No.”

“Oh.” The American laughs nervously. “Well, there are zombies out there. Eating people. Or something.”

Roger gulps down one last mouthful of wine, slams the bottle to the counter top and starts to steer Andy out of the kitchen. “Zombies... You sneak into my house, jump on me from a bookshelf and then tell me it was because of zombies. Honestly.” He pushes Andy into the chair beside the front door and fumbles with the lock. “You walked past a movie set while they were filming. That was all. Go home, get sobered up and come back tomorrow with an invitation to dinner and a new bottle of lube, understand?”

He opens the door. He stares out at the street beyond. He closes the door.

There are zombies out there.

After that shock, the wine is swiftly depleted. Roger spends the next hour on his kitchen floor with a poker he’d snagged from the fireplace while running towards the safety of his drinks cupboard. Andy skulks from room to room, peering out the windows like an annoying neighbour. Eventually he comes back to report his findings.

“They’re everywhere.” He slides down the side of the kitchen island to sit beside the Swiss. “Well, except the garden. I don’t think they can figure out gates. And they’re having problems with the step up from the road to the sidewalk.”

“Are they crawling in that determined way they always do in the movies?”

“Yup. Scraping themselves across the pavement. Blood trails everywhere.”

“Oh. Lovely.” Roger holds the poker closer and shudders.

“I also found your phone,” continues Andy cheerfully. “Did you know Marat has your number?”

“What does he want?”

“’To meet up at the courts and then maybe go for a drink. You know, the usual.’” His voice takes on an aggrieved tone. “You do know you have a boyfriend, don’t you?”

“The jealous act was not attractive when I was trying to sleep. It is still not attractive now we are about to be eaten by zombies. And I am not that stupid, either. What did he really want?”

“’To meet up at the courts, please, the zombies are going to kill me and I don’t want that.’” huffs the American.

“Stop pouting.” Roger stands up and taps the poker against the floor. “I am not going to sleep with him, just save him from being eaten.”

“You are going to save Marat from being eaten?!”

“Is there a problem with that?”

Andy eyes the poker. “You are a tennis player. Not Indiana Jones.”

“I shall deal with the situation as I do best. Get the car warmed up. I have to get my racquets.”

Andy shifts his grip on the steering wheel anxiously. “Are you sure about this?”

“Of course.” Roger tosses a tennis ball up and catches it with an easy movement. They’ve lowered the roof of the convertible to make it possible for bone-breaking serves to be performed. “Just do not go around the corners too fast or I will fall out.”

“All right.” The American reaches for the garage door remote. “Ready?”

Roger nods and tightens his grip on his racquet. “Go.”

The car screeches out onto the street, and zombies start to collapse left, right and centre when fuzzy yellow projectiles begin to bounce off their skulls.

They find Marat huddling behind the bar, brandishing two bottles and trying to tie them together to use as a cross. Andy, clearly not in the best of moods, snatches one and peers at it suspiciously. “Zombies, not vampires, mate. Axes work better. And anyway, vodka? Bit stereotypical, isn’t it?”

Marat grabs the vodka back and tosses the other bottle to Roger. All Andy gets is a glare and a snort.

“All right, whatever. Any port in a storm, I suppose.”

Roger looks longingly at the vodka bottle and sets it down. He’s already had far too much wine tonight, and anyway, alcohol does unpleasant things to his serve.  “Andy, I would have offered you some, but remarks like that remind me how much you have had to drink already. Puns are unpleasant and you know it.”

The American shrugs and wanders off to secure the exits. He has miniature bottles of scotch tucked inside his pockets anyway.

“I thought I was going to be all alone,” says Marat eventually. Andy shoots him a look over his shoulder.

Roger can’t help looking toward the vodka again. This is going to be a long night.

“...and then he nearly crashes into the other lamp-post.” Roger’s smirks at the glower on Andy’s face and goes back to his story. “Of course, there is smoke everywhere, so we cannot see where we are going and we run directly into the door.”

All three of them are sitting on the floor behind the bar. They have barred the doors and windows the best they can, and the zombies haven’t discovered the wheelchair ramp at the front door yet, so they were having problems even reaching the front of the building.

Marat snorts in amusement and catches sight of the American man’s expression. “Cheer up. Have some Smirnoff.” He pushes the bottle over. Andy takes it, stares at it until the other two men turn away and then surreptitiously tips it onto the floor. “You ran all the zombies down?” continues Marat.

“What?”

“All the zombies who got in your way. You ran them down?”

“Oh, no. Andy hit two by accident, but he swerved between most of them. I kept the rest away with tennis balls to the face.” He glances over at Andy. “What was my score?”

“You think I was keeping count?”

“You were not?”

Andy shrugs. “Hey, there were a lot of zombies!”

Roger wakes to a horrible scrunching noise. He peers about blearily, noting he fell asleep using Andy’s head as a pillow and now there’s a rather odd, ear shaped dent in the American’s forehead. Marat is nowhere to be seen.

He crawls over to the end of the bar and looks around at the room sneakily. There’s no Russian there, but the room is also zombie-less. This is a definite good thing - even if that scrunching sounds worryingly like bone being crushed.

“You creep about the floor like this a lot?”

The Swiss springs up right in shock. Marat is sitting on the opposite side of the bar, rustling with a packet.

“I remember why I never slept with you now,” sighs Roger, “The wise-ass remarks I could stand. The midnight snacking, not so much.”

“Hey!” Andy’s voice drifts up, already peeved.

“That and the fact I already have a boyfriend.”

“Well, thank you for remembering me!”

Roger ignores the other men as they begin to bicker and wanders closer to the doors. From what he can see through the plate glass windows, only two zombies have made it to the front - by crawling determinedly up the steps. He’s beginning to reckon they aren’t all that bright at all, and that he’s in more danger from old age than having his brains eaten.

There’s a tennis ball abandoned on the floor and he picks it up, rolling it absently between his fingers before chucking it lightly at the window where one of the zombies is pawing lethargically at the glass at ankle height. It recoils as hurriedly as it can, in a sort of full body slump.  The ball bounces back and Roger scoops it up, an idea beginning to form.

This time he rolls the ball towards the remaining zombie. It covers its face and lolls about like a walrus on speed, flailing rubbery limbs everywhere.

“Playing fetch with the zombies, Rogi?” calls Andy.

Roger ignores him. “Is there a way up to the roof?”

When Marat comes up onto the roof an hour later, he finds Roger Federer, tennis extraordinaire, lying on the edge of the roof, dropping tennis balls onto people’s heads. There’s a giant yellow fuzzy pile of the things beside him and Andy is corralling several of the escapees back towards their brethren.

“There are others,” says the Russian simply.

“Other whats?” snaps Andy as a ball sneaks past him to get stuck in the gutter.

“People. Normal people. The news was on. A quarter of us are still here.”

“Do they know what caused this?” Roger takes careful aim and lobs another ball. There’s a distinct ‘oof’ and the Swiss punches the air in triumph.

“No.” Marat rolls his eyes. “It is a mystery.”

“If this was a zombie movie, they’d have a damn good reason by now,” says Andy, “Virus, bacteria, evil scientist, aliens. There’s a lot to choose from.”

“If this was a zombie movie, it would not be a particularly good one,” replies Roger casually, “These zombies are useless. And I have just discovered a cure. It is too soon.”

“What?!” yelp the other two men at the same time.

“I have discovered the cure and there are still the three of us left.” Roger stands up and smiles. “If this was a zombie movie, then one of us would have to have been eaten. I suspect Marat. Sorry.”

Marat bleats, “Why me?” Andy grins and slaps him on the shoulder.

“See, mate, Rogi’s the main character and can therefore can only be seriously injured, but not seriously enough to prevent him from saving the day in the end. There’s a distinct lack of girls around here, so I’m clearly the obligatory love interest. You are the best friend, who will sacrifice himself bravely so the other two can get away and save the world. We’ll grieve, of course, but only so we don’t get accused of murdering you.”

“I do not like this story,” mutters Marat sullenly. Suddenly he looks up. “Did he just say something about a cure?”

“Yes.” Roger grins. “Tennis balls.”

It takes a long time for Roger to convince the other men he hasn’t gone completely insane, and to prove that he’s telling the truth. This involves bouncing a lot more tennis balls off the zombies below, and turns out to be rather unpleasant.

“You see,” says Roger, eventually, as Marat scores a direct hit on a zombie that had got itself stuck in a decorative hedge, “The bit I don’t like is when they turn back into normal people.”

“Oh, you mean the part where all the other zombies turn on them and the whole thing turns into an orgy of biting and flailing and screaming until everybody’s properly zombified again?” Andy casually snags a ball off the Russian and chucks it back onto the pile. “Yeah, that’s a bit disturbing.” He pauses. “Why didn’t you notice this before? Like when you were lobbing balls at the zombies while we were driving?”

“Not so much driving. Possibly darting. Or thundering. Thundering is probably the best term. And anyway I was paying more attention to not falling out of the car.”

They settle down to watch the zombies regroup and begin their determined crawling again.

“Maybe...” says Roger, after a while, “Maybe we should, you know, share this discovery. Instead of condemning the rest of the world to a horrible zombie death.”

“You have a point.” Andy prods Marat’s shoulder, cheerfully ignoring the death glare he gets in return. “Did that news report tell you where the rest of us are?”

“Nearest place is the hospital.”

“Right.” Roger stands up and stretches, before striding over to the stairs. “Gather up those tennis balls. Get a bag or something.”

Andy and Marat exchange a glance as Roger disappears down the stairs.

“We’re doing what he says, aren’t we?” says Marat glumly, “Why are we doing what he says?”

“Oh, that’s an easy one. He’s pretty.”

An hour later, all three men have a kit bag full of tennis balls and a racquet each. They’re standing at the front door, and they haven’t moved for ten minutes.

“One of us is going to have to go first,” says Andy. He doesn’t move.

“Yes,” says Roger. He doesn’t move either.

Marat glances sideways at the other men and sighs. “Which car is the one we want?”

Andy points at a nearby saloon. It’s the closest car to the front door, but there are still a lot of zombies in between the tennis players and their escape. Marat sighs again, and pushes his equipment into Andy’s hands.

“The first thing you are to do when you get to that hospital is burst into tears and wail about how it was not my turn to go, all right? Then, you are to demand that I am the first to be cured.” He takes a deep breath and grabs Roger’s collar. The Swiss can see where this is going and glares at Andy to silence any protests. The kiss that follows is sloppy and Roger begins to wonder if he should be worried about the number of men that like to try to stick their tongues down his throat. It’s not pleasant on his side, but it seems to bolster Marat’s spirit.

Marat lets Roger go, nods to Andy, takes another deep breath and strides out of the building.

“We should run,” says Andy.

“He is going to be eaten!” bleats Roger.

“Tough shit. We can mope after we avoid suffering the same fate. Now move!”

They run.

“We left a man to die.”

“We did not leave a man to die.” Andy hauls hard on the wheel and winces as a zombie fails to lurch out of the way in time. “We left a man to get turned into a blood-thirsty zombie. Completely different.”

Roger sighs. “You know, people will think we are crazy when we tell them what the cure is.”

“Rogi, look about you. Nothing will be considered crazy after this.”

The hospital is on top of a hill and not many zombies had bothered to crawl their way up it. Andy still parks the car directly in front of the doors, neatly scraping a big chunk out of an ambulance in the process.

Anxious eyes watch them from inside the building. There are a couple policemen near the doors and one plucks up the courage to unlock them and stick his head out.

“You two normal?”

“Define normal,” says Andy glumly. Roger ‘accidentally’ thwaps him over the head with his racquet in the process of removing the equipment from the back seat.

“Yes,” he says, smiling as pleasantly as possible at them. “Can we come in?”

“Yeah, sure.” The cop’s eyes narrow. “Here; you’re that tennis bloke.” He looks at the racquets and the three bags the men are carrying. “You take that stuff seriously, don’t you?”

Roger mutters something non-committal and squeezes through the door. There aren’t that many people in the foyer, but he can see pale faces in the fluorescent lights in the corridors beyond. Most of the people nearby are watching him closely.

Hoping that they’re desperate enough for a cure to ignore the stupidity of what he’s about to say, he opens his bag and pulls out a tennis ball. “So, is anyone here working for a way to fix this? Because...”

After Roger finishes explaining a white coated woman brow-beats a couple of burly men with hard hats to haul the bags of tennis balls up to a lab. He feels rather gratified to see them struggle under the weight, and tries not to look smug.

“Do we have to do the weeping thing?” says Andy, as they search out a row of seats to lurk on.

“Depends.” Roger considers his options for a bit. “Is he going to find out?”

“Probably not.”

“Let’s not, and tell him we did. We’ll say no one listened, just in case he asks around.” Roger flops down on a chair.

“Crafty. I like it.” Andy slumps down beside him. “What do we do now?”

“Sit around and wait. Unless you have a science degree somewhere about your person.”

“Sounds good.”

When Roger finally gets a chance to return home there is yellow fluff all over the street. Many of his neighbours look a little grey still and fairly embarrassed to boot, and he has to shoo a pair of small children away from his ankles although that might have been normal small child behaviour. There is a bouquet of flowers on his doorstep, with a note from Marat. The Russian had flown straight back home as soon as the airports had opened again.

The Swiss stuffs the flowers in an old teapot he found in the back of a cupboard for wont of anything more suitable and trudged into the kitchen.

Andy is standing there. Naked. Part of Roger’s brain shuts down.

“Why are you always in my house?” he asks, trying not to stare.

“Guess.” Andy smirks at the derailed look on Roger’s face.

“Sex?”

“It’ll do for now.” He spreads his arms welcomingly.

Roger gathers all the wits he can find at such short notice and ambles around the other side of the room. “Are all the zombies gone yet?”

“Christ! I’m angling for some action and then you bring the mouldy dead guys up!” The American snags Roger’s arm and tugs him closer.

“Well?”

“Yes. They’re all gone. No one actually died either. Now can we get back to the sex?”

“No. I like this game.” It was Roger’s turn to smirk. “Why is the street covered in fluff?”

“Because?”

“Try harder.”

“The felt! It was the damn felt, you withholding bastard!”

“So that was the cure then!” Roger pulls out of Andy’s grasp for a second. “I suppose it made sense to just spread the felt around, instead of bombarding the place with tennis balls.”

“Yes, Roger,” sighs Andy. He looks a bit crest-fallen, and Roger takes pity on him.

“But I don’t think you want to be talking about fluff right now, do you?”

Andy rallies magnificently. “How did you guess?”