Harry Potter and the Zombie Apocalypse Chapter Four (No Challenge)
Title: Harry Potter and the Zombie Apocalypse (Chapter Four)
Summary: In the summer after Harry's fifth year, Dudley Dursley, Harry Potter, and Severus Snape are thrown together after zombies attack Privet Drive.
Characters/Pairings: Harry Potter, Severus Snape, Dudley Dursley (Gen)
Genre: Adventure/Horror/Hurt/Comfort
Rating/Warnings: PG-13/Canon Dursley abuse
Word Count: 2,097
Chapters 1, can be found here: http://hh-sugarquill.livejournal.com/1213358.html#cutid1, chapter two here: http://hh-sugarquill.livejournal.com/1220455.html#cutid1, and chapter 3 here: http://hh-sugarquill.livejournal.com/1244786.html.
Harry and Dudley sat on the street for what seemed like ages. But in reality it was only a couple of minutes.
“Whose that?” Dudley asked dully, as he watched the strange man in black shoot off spells at the house.
Not moving from his spot on the street next to Dudley, Harry answered, “Snape.”
“He’s one of yours then?”
There was no bitterness in Dudley’s voice, just an eerie sort of calm acceptance about the situation. Harry didn’t like it. He’d rather have Dudley carrying on and fussing like usual. Accepting freakishness as perfectly normal…that just didn’t fit and was uncomfortably driving the point right into his gut. Nothing would ever be normal again.
“Yeah,” Harry said, though he knew Snape would certainly not appreciate being called one of his. “He’s one of mine.” He paused for a moment. “At least I hope so,” he added under his breath.
“Should you be helping him?”
Harry stared at the black plumes of smoke billowing from the house. “Probably,” he answered.
There was a long, drawn out silence.
“So why aren’t you?” Dudley finally asked.
Harry shrugged.
“Where’s your wand?”
Harry lifted an eyebrow and pointed to the house. The last of the flames were being put out and Snape was stalking around the property, pointing his wand at the house and muttering spells beneath his breath.
“Oh. Right. I forgot.”
Harry shrugged again.
Dudley bit his lip. “Are they,” he began hesitantly. “Are they, I mean, do you think?” He trailed off, looked at his shoes, and then the house before turning back to his cousin.
Dudley could have gone the rest of his life without seeing the look Harry had given him.
“There’s no way they could have?” Dudley pleaded.
“I don’t think so, Dud,” Harry said softly.
Silence again.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said.
“You hated them,” Dudley said.
Harry looked uncomfortable and confused. “They hated me,” he answered.
And Dudley couldn’t find it in himself to disagree.
-
Severus breathed a sigh of relief as he finished. The smoke was beginning to disperse and the house would hold up for a good long time. With the boy’s cousin still alive, it would help to keep the house intact. It wasn’t the most structurally sound, but he was about eighty-five percent certain it would hold for some time.
He turned around only to see the two boys sitting in the middle of the street staring numbly at the house. Every so often their lips barely moved. It was clear from where he was standing, that Potter’s cousin didn’t like whatever Potter said.
Severus looked around the street. He noted that in a couple of houses, the doors were slowly beginning to open. At least the creatures were easy to run from; something the Dark Lord didn’t figure out until it was too late.
He stalked his way over to Potter and the other boy. “Potter!” he spat.
The boy jerked as if he had physically hit him. Severus raised an eyebrow.
“Get up!” he snapped. “We don’t have time to waste playing in the street. Pick up your cousin.”
The boy moved as if he was on automatic and did everything his professor ordered.
If this was what it took to get Potter to follow orders he would have…Severus quickly abandoned that train of thought. Even he wasn’t that cruel. Not that the idiot boy believed that.
“Hurry up,” he hissed when he saw that Potter was having trouble getting his cousin off the ground.
The boy finally opened his mouth for a retort but shut it when Severus glared at him.
“Dudley c’mon, we got to go,” the boy said to his cousin.
“But we can’t leave them,” Potter’s cousin said.
Potter closed his eyes with a wince and exhaled loudly. “Dudley,” he began.
“Get up you idiot boy. Your parents are dead and sitting in the middle of the street waiting for the same fate is a poor way to go.”
The boy, Dudley, burst into tears.
In retrospect, that had probably not been the best way to phrase it. Potter glared at him.
“You’re such an-“
“Don’t even think of finishing that sentence, Potter.”
Potter’s mouth clicked shut.
“Get your cousin. You two may be content to die like them, but I refuse to let you two imbeciles drag me down with you.”
Potter’s eyes flashed but he persuaded his cousin up, regardless.
There was a deep guttural moan that reverberated down the street. Severus snapped his head around and was quick to note that Potter had done the same. Well, at least he wasn’t completely imbecilic.
The good thing about zombies was that they weren’t very fast. The bad thing about zombies was that they were highly contagious. And they liked to travel in groups. And there was a very large group forming down the street.
Potter shifted nervously next to him.
“Er…Sn-Professor,” he corrected at Severus’ glare, “are we going to Hogwarts now?” he asked looking at his cousin curiously.
Severus resisted the urge to run his hand through his hair in frustration. Instead, he took a deep breath. He could very well take Potter to Hogwarts, but his cousin wouldn’t be able to come.
“You’re cousin’s still muggle, I assume,” he said.
Potter’s face flushed.
“Do you think it would be a terrific idea to leave your grieving cousin for the infected muggles? Even you cannot be that cruel.”
“I was just asking,” the boy muttered.
Severus raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment further. He needed to come up with a plan.
--
Dudley’s mouth tasted like ash. His fingers gripped the How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse book. He could hear people talking, himself included. He felt Harry try and pick up. By the second time, Dudley actually started trying to get up as well.
His body felt like lead and for a moment he was worried that he had caught the infection. But he would know if he had become a zombie, wouldn’t he? While Harry and the…Snape looked down the street, he hurriedly checked himself over for injuries. He exhaled a breath of relief when he didn’t see or feel anything.
“What’s the plan?” he asked dully.
The two whirled back around with identical expressions of shock on their faces. Dudley pointed at the gathering crowd of zombies down the street.
“We get out of here,” Snape said simply.
“No shit,” Dudley said.
Harry’s mouth dropped as he looked from Snape to Dudley and back again.
“Language, Mr. Dursley,” Snape said. “We’ll figure out the rest on the way.”
Figure out? Dudley saw Harry mouth.
“You mean there’s no plan?” Dudley asked incredulously. “At least Piers had a plan!”
“And we see how well that worked out.”
Dudley cringed.
The man began stalking down the street with his robes billowing behind him. Harry and Dudley hurried to follow.
As they walked through the twists and turns of Privet Drive and passed through Wisteria Walk, Dudley could hear the man’s huffs and puffs and see the constant glares that he gave Harry. Dudley wasn’t certain that he was faring much better in the man’s opinion, but the growl in the man’s voice whenever he insulted them was far more snarly when directed at his cousin.
“Jeez Harry,” Dudley began, after they took yet another perplexing turn onto a different street. “He hates you more than Dad.” And then Dudley stopped talking.
Harry just looked uncomfortable.
The Snape man’s fists clenched and unclenched as Dudley heard him take another huffing breath.
“What,” snapped the man before pausing.
“What?” Dudley asked. He was tired, hungry, his feet hurt, and his head was swimming from all the turns. Why on earth they kept going in some ridiculous zig-zag pattern, he had no idea.
The glare he got was more similar to the one he had been giving Harry.
Dudley gulped.
“What,” he hissed, “did you all think you were doing? Playing hero, again? That didn’t work out so well last year, so you thought you’d try again?” Snape directed the last part to Harry.
Dudley felt as if he was missing a huge chunk of information, especially when his cousin had the same expression on his face whenever his parents had talked about his. Harry shuttered his expression and looked down at his shoes.
“Hey!” Dudley said, shocking himself.
“Of course, everyone stands up for Saint Potter,” Snape growled.
“It wasn’t his fault!” Dudley exclaimed.
“It most certainly was.”
“He couldn’t help that he was locked in! Piers,” Dudley’s breath hitched, “Piers was the only one who could get him out.”
The man was silent and Dudley tried to decipher the look on his face. He had a feeling that they were having two very different conversations, but Snape’s expression was closed off.
The man took another turn down a different street. Harry and Dudley dutifully followed.
“Why, Mr. Potter, were you locked in your bedroom?”
Harry’s face turned red and Dudley saw him fishing for a lie.
He thought that was strange. Why would he bother with a lie?
“I expect an answer, Mr. Potter.”
Harry bit his lip and seemed to focus very hard on putting one foot in front of the other. He mumbled something unintelligible.
There was yet another huff from Snape. “Speak up, boy,” he said, harshly.
Dudley winced.
“To protect me from Voldemort.”
“Don’t say the name,” Snape hissed, gripping his left arm for a moment.
Dudley frowned.
“Whose Voldemort?”
“Don’t say the name.”
Dudley was surprised that the man could find an even meaner sound of hiss.
“Well, who is he?”
“You-Know-Who,” the man said simply, as if that resolved it all.
Dudley shook his head. “No…I don’t know who.”
Harry bit his lip and Dudley quickly realized that he was trying to keep from laughing at him. Bloody git.
The man muttered something that sounded like “muggles” before turning and quickening his steps.
The next few minutes were agonizingly quiet. Dudley fervently wished that he was back home with the telly or his computer. He wanted everything to go back to normal again, where Harry would be locked in his room and he could taunt him for it, where his father raved about young hoodlums and motorcyclists and anyone abnormal. He wanted his mother clucking around him, trying to squeeze him to death.
And while it was small, Piers book weighed heavily in his hand. So far they had avoided any more zombies, but in all the movies it was only a matter of time before they would be accosted by another and one of their group would be picked off.
And so, when Dudley was trying to figure out his likelihood of being the first to die (he rather hoped it would be the Snape man, he was scary), a big, giant red bird appeared in a blaze. Dudley yelped, his mouth dropped open, and he resisted the urge to place his hands protectively over his bum.
The bird dropped a small white note into Snape’s hand and trilled at his cousin. It sounded almost happy. Except for the whole fact that birds couldn’t sound happy. They were just birds.
Of course, this one did just pop up on fire.
And as soon as the bird appeared, it disappeared in another blaze of fire.
Dudley watched the man unfold the note and saw his jaw tighten.
“We need to keep going,” was all the man said and Harry looked worriedly at Dudley which didn’t serve to calm him one bit.
“But we’ve been going,” Dudley whined. He knew he was being childish, but he couldn’t help it.
“By all means, stay here and laze about. I’m sure you and Potter are quite good at that. Just don’t come running to me when you get bitten.”
Through the sarcasm and irritability, Dudley supposed that he had a point.
--
The bloody idiot. He was trapped taking care of two extremely incompetent children in the muggle world. At the rate they were going, he was almost surprised that he didn’t have to tie their shoes. Actually, he was quite surprised that he didn’t have tie Potter’s shoes. The amount of times he had come into class with an untied shoe was astonishing. Careless, lazy boy.
He had crumpled the note in his pocket. But the weight of it felt unbearably heavy.
S,
Stay in the muggle world. It is imperative.
A.D.
Questions rolled around in his head and each new answer he could come up with seemed worse than the last.
Yasona//Slytherin//70 points for Slytherin!
Summary: In the summer after Harry's fifth year, Dudley Dursley, Harry Potter, and Severus Snape are thrown together after zombies attack Privet Drive.
Characters/Pairings: Harry Potter, Severus Snape, Dudley Dursley (Gen)
Genre: Adventure/Horror/Hurt/Comfort
Rating/Warnings: PG-13/Canon Dursley abuse
Word Count: 2,097
Chapters 1, can be found here: http://hh-sugarquill.livejournal.com/1213358.html#cutid1, chapter two here: http://hh-sugarquill.livejournal.com/1220455.html#cutid1, and chapter 3 here: http://hh-sugarquill.livejournal.com/1244786.html.
Harry and Dudley sat on the street for what seemed like ages. But in reality it was only a couple of minutes.
“Whose that?” Dudley asked dully, as he watched the strange man in black shoot off spells at the house.
Not moving from his spot on the street next to Dudley, Harry answered, “Snape.”
“He’s one of yours then?”
There was no bitterness in Dudley’s voice, just an eerie sort of calm acceptance about the situation. Harry didn’t like it. He’d rather have Dudley carrying on and fussing like usual. Accepting freakishness as perfectly normal…that just didn’t fit and was uncomfortably driving the point right into his gut. Nothing would ever be normal again.
“Yeah,” Harry said, though he knew Snape would certainly not appreciate being called one of his. “He’s one of mine.” He paused for a moment. “At least I hope so,” he added under his breath.
“Should you be helping him?”
Harry stared at the black plumes of smoke billowing from the house. “Probably,” he answered.
There was a long, drawn out silence.
“So why aren’t you?” Dudley finally asked.
Harry shrugged.
“Where’s your wand?”
Harry lifted an eyebrow and pointed to the house. The last of the flames were being put out and Snape was stalking around the property, pointing his wand at the house and muttering spells beneath his breath.
“Oh. Right. I forgot.”
Harry shrugged again.
Dudley bit his lip. “Are they,” he began hesitantly. “Are they, I mean, do you think?” He trailed off, looked at his shoes, and then the house before turning back to his cousin.
Dudley could have gone the rest of his life without seeing the look Harry had given him.
“There’s no way they could have?” Dudley pleaded.
“I don’t think so, Dud,” Harry said softly.
Silence again.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said.
“You hated them,” Dudley said.
Harry looked uncomfortable and confused. “They hated me,” he answered.
And Dudley couldn’t find it in himself to disagree.
-
Severus breathed a sigh of relief as he finished. The smoke was beginning to disperse and the house would hold up for a good long time. With the boy’s cousin still alive, it would help to keep the house intact. It wasn’t the most structurally sound, but he was about eighty-five percent certain it would hold for some time.
He turned around only to see the two boys sitting in the middle of the street staring numbly at the house. Every so often their lips barely moved. It was clear from where he was standing, that Potter’s cousin didn’t like whatever Potter said.
Severus looked around the street. He noted that in a couple of houses, the doors were slowly beginning to open. At least the creatures were easy to run from; something the Dark Lord didn’t figure out until it was too late.
He stalked his way over to Potter and the other boy. “Potter!” he spat.
The boy jerked as if he had physically hit him. Severus raised an eyebrow.
“Get up!” he snapped. “We don’t have time to waste playing in the street. Pick up your cousin.”
The boy moved as if he was on automatic and did everything his professor ordered.
If this was what it took to get Potter to follow orders he would have…Severus quickly abandoned that train of thought. Even he wasn’t that cruel. Not that the idiot boy believed that.
“Hurry up,” he hissed when he saw that Potter was having trouble getting his cousin off the ground.
The boy finally opened his mouth for a retort but shut it when Severus glared at him.
“Dudley c’mon, we got to go,” the boy said to his cousin.
“But we can’t leave them,” Potter’s cousin said.
Potter closed his eyes with a wince and exhaled loudly. “Dudley,” he began.
“Get up you idiot boy. Your parents are dead and sitting in the middle of the street waiting for the same fate is a poor way to go.”
The boy, Dudley, burst into tears.
In retrospect, that had probably not been the best way to phrase it. Potter glared at him.
“You’re such an-“
“Don’t even think of finishing that sentence, Potter.”
Potter’s mouth clicked shut.
“Get your cousin. You two may be content to die like them, but I refuse to let you two imbeciles drag me down with you.”
Potter’s eyes flashed but he persuaded his cousin up, regardless.
There was a deep guttural moan that reverberated down the street. Severus snapped his head around and was quick to note that Potter had done the same. Well, at least he wasn’t completely imbecilic.
The good thing about zombies was that they weren’t very fast. The bad thing about zombies was that they were highly contagious. And they liked to travel in groups. And there was a very large group forming down the street.
Potter shifted nervously next to him.
“Er…Sn-Professor,” he corrected at Severus’ glare, “are we going to Hogwarts now?” he asked looking at his cousin curiously.
Severus resisted the urge to run his hand through his hair in frustration. Instead, he took a deep breath. He could very well take Potter to Hogwarts, but his cousin wouldn’t be able to come.
“You’re cousin’s still muggle, I assume,” he said.
Potter’s face flushed.
“Do you think it would be a terrific idea to leave your grieving cousin for the infected muggles? Even you cannot be that cruel.”
“I was just asking,” the boy muttered.
Severus raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment further. He needed to come up with a plan.
--
Dudley’s mouth tasted like ash. His fingers gripped the How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse book. He could hear people talking, himself included. He felt Harry try and pick up. By the second time, Dudley actually started trying to get up as well.
His body felt like lead and for a moment he was worried that he had caught the infection. But he would know if he had become a zombie, wouldn’t he? While Harry and the…Snape looked down the street, he hurriedly checked himself over for injuries. He exhaled a breath of relief when he didn’t see or feel anything.
“What’s the plan?” he asked dully.
The two whirled back around with identical expressions of shock on their faces. Dudley pointed at the gathering crowd of zombies down the street.
“We get out of here,” Snape said simply.
“No shit,” Dudley said.
Harry’s mouth dropped as he looked from Snape to Dudley and back again.
“Language, Mr. Dursley,” Snape said. “We’ll figure out the rest on the way.”
Figure out? Dudley saw Harry mouth.
“You mean there’s no plan?” Dudley asked incredulously. “At least Piers had a plan!”
“And we see how well that worked out.”
Dudley cringed.
The man began stalking down the street with his robes billowing behind him. Harry and Dudley hurried to follow.
As they walked through the twists and turns of Privet Drive and passed through Wisteria Walk, Dudley could hear the man’s huffs and puffs and see the constant glares that he gave Harry. Dudley wasn’t certain that he was faring much better in the man’s opinion, but the growl in the man’s voice whenever he insulted them was far more snarly when directed at his cousin.
“Jeez Harry,” Dudley began, after they took yet another perplexing turn onto a different street. “He hates you more than Dad.” And then Dudley stopped talking.
Harry just looked uncomfortable.
The Snape man’s fists clenched and unclenched as Dudley heard him take another huffing breath.
“What,” snapped the man before pausing.
“What?” Dudley asked. He was tired, hungry, his feet hurt, and his head was swimming from all the turns. Why on earth they kept going in some ridiculous zig-zag pattern, he had no idea.
The glare he got was more similar to the one he had been giving Harry.
Dudley gulped.
“What,” he hissed, “did you all think you were doing? Playing hero, again? That didn’t work out so well last year, so you thought you’d try again?” Snape directed the last part to Harry.
Dudley felt as if he was missing a huge chunk of information, especially when his cousin had the same expression on his face whenever his parents had talked about his. Harry shuttered his expression and looked down at his shoes.
“Hey!” Dudley said, shocking himself.
“Of course, everyone stands up for Saint Potter,” Snape growled.
“It wasn’t his fault!” Dudley exclaimed.
“It most certainly was.”
“He couldn’t help that he was locked in! Piers,” Dudley’s breath hitched, “Piers was the only one who could get him out.”
The man was silent and Dudley tried to decipher the look on his face. He had a feeling that they were having two very different conversations, but Snape’s expression was closed off.
The man took another turn down a different street. Harry and Dudley dutifully followed.
“Why, Mr. Potter, were you locked in your bedroom?”
Harry’s face turned red and Dudley saw him fishing for a lie.
He thought that was strange. Why would he bother with a lie?
“I expect an answer, Mr. Potter.”
Harry bit his lip and seemed to focus very hard on putting one foot in front of the other. He mumbled something unintelligible.
There was yet another huff from Snape. “Speak up, boy,” he said, harshly.
Dudley winced.
“To protect me from Voldemort.”
“Don’t say the name,” Snape hissed, gripping his left arm for a moment.
Dudley frowned.
“Whose Voldemort?”
“Don’t say the name.”
Dudley was surprised that the man could find an even meaner sound of hiss.
“Well, who is he?”
“You-Know-Who,” the man said simply, as if that resolved it all.
Dudley shook his head. “No…I don’t know who.”
Harry bit his lip and Dudley quickly realized that he was trying to keep from laughing at him. Bloody git.
The man muttered something that sounded like “muggles” before turning and quickening his steps.
The next few minutes were agonizingly quiet. Dudley fervently wished that he was back home with the telly or his computer. He wanted everything to go back to normal again, where Harry would be locked in his room and he could taunt him for it, where his father raved about young hoodlums and motorcyclists and anyone abnormal. He wanted his mother clucking around him, trying to squeeze him to death.
And while it was small, Piers book weighed heavily in his hand. So far they had avoided any more zombies, but in all the movies it was only a matter of time before they would be accosted by another and one of their group would be picked off.
And so, when Dudley was trying to figure out his likelihood of being the first to die (he rather hoped it would be the Snape man, he was scary), a big, giant red bird appeared in a blaze. Dudley yelped, his mouth dropped open, and he resisted the urge to place his hands protectively over his bum.
The bird dropped a small white note into Snape’s hand and trilled at his cousin. It sounded almost happy. Except for the whole fact that birds couldn’t sound happy. They were just birds.
Of course, this one did just pop up on fire.
And as soon as the bird appeared, it disappeared in another blaze of fire.
Dudley watched the man unfold the note and saw his jaw tighten.
“We need to keep going,” was all the man said and Harry looked worriedly at Dudley which didn’t serve to calm him one bit.
“But we’ve been going,” Dudley whined. He knew he was being childish, but he couldn’t help it.
“By all means, stay here and laze about. I’m sure you and Potter are quite good at that. Just don’t come running to me when you get bitten.”
Through the sarcasm and irritability, Dudley supposed that he had a point.
--
The bloody idiot. He was trapped taking care of two extremely incompetent children in the muggle world. At the rate they were going, he was almost surprised that he didn’t have to tie their shoes. Actually, he was quite surprised that he didn’t have tie Potter’s shoes. The amount of times he had come into class with an untied shoe was astonishing. Careless, lazy boy.
He had crumpled the note in his pocket. But the weight of it felt unbearably heavy.
S,
Stay in the muggle world. It is imperative.
A.D.
Questions rolled around in his head and each new answer he could come up with seemed worse than the last.
Yasona//Slytherin//70 points for Slytherin!