[World War Z] The Last Halloween (R)
Title: The Last Halloween
Author:
matrixrefugee/
mtxref_fic
Fandom: World War Z (extended universe)
Characters/Pairings: Max Brooks+OFC
Length: 2,198
Rating: R
Spoilers: None to speak of
Warnings: Violence, gore, people-munching, character death -- usual zombie story stuff.
Prompt: 6. Any - Any - It was unfortunate that the zombie apocalypse happened on Halloween, when everyone thought it was a prank/costume
Summary: Salem at Halloween: bad place for the zombie apocalypse to start, for one grocery store worker
[The Minutemen have made a comeback in Massachusetts, though ironically, their headquarters are not in Concord or Lexington, the site of the famous "Shot Heard Round The World". Rather, they are based out of a site of mass hysteria with possible supernatural origins. Murasaki Dalton is one of their snipers, a small, serious woman peering at the world through thick glasses that have been visibly mended several times. Despite the military-style fatigues that she wears, a faded, slightly worn baseball cap with a grocery store logo tops her cropped head.]
I'm descended from quiet dissenters, which in this case, wasn't a good thing. My several times-great grandfather on my father's side owned a farm near Salem Village during the witchcraft hysteria in the 1690s, and he had been questioned for being critical of the trials, but he was never formally arrested. My mother's people were crypto-Catholics who had hidden priests in their homes during the Tokugawa era persecution.
So, at first, you didn't believe, though you wanted to?
[She raises her thumbs in a small shrug] I thought it was a publicity stunt or the media blowing the facts out of proportion. Remember the H1N1 'epidemic'? Sure, a lot of people got sick, but it wasn't a replay of Spanish Influenza pandemic. We couldn't keep the Phalanx on the shelf in the pharmacy, and the lines to get the stuff got so long that we had to resort to crowd control. One time, when we ran out, the crowd got ugly. And I should add, there were people who barely believed that the stuff would work, while others acted like the stuff would cure everything, including AIDS, cancer and autism.
We started seeing a lot of canned goods, bottled water and batteries fly off the shelves, too, same as it does any time there's any disaster imminent. But it died down after a bit. Even a regular who's been vocal about his political views talked about getting himself a shotgun. One of our cashiers kept going on about how this was 'God's punishment for Insert Whipping Boy Demographic of Choice'. [She rolls her eyes]
So bigotry is sadly alive and well in Salem?
It's not like it was: people have pretty much learned what happens when a town takes itself too seriously. Still. You would hope it was gone, but some days, I swear there'd be another witch hunt if people were given half a chance.
And if it wasn't the bigots driving me bonkers at my register, it was Sammy Corwin and his zombie plans.
Zombie plans?
What it says on the tin. Every day at least once during my shift and especially if I had to bag for him, he'd bug me: 'Mo, what's your zombie plan?' Some days, it was all I could do to keep from saying, 'Yeah, I got seventy-seven of them, and seventy-six of them involve me throwing *you* to the zombies', but I didn't want to get written up for aggression: we had an assistant who had no sense of humor whatsoever, so you really had to tread lightly around him, when he was on duty.
I did have a few vague ideas, but nothing carved in stone. Sammy, on the other hand, was either hatching a new one each day or going off about how cool it was that zombies were real. I kept reminding him that these...things were once human beings, someone's brother or sister or mother or father or lover or friend. And that by all accounts, they were as dangerous as hell.
You wanted him to take it seriously?
Heck, yeah! I mean, I'm not above a little gallows humor myself, but he crossed that line into being just plain offensive or unrealistic about the situation. I had a feeling it wasn't going to be like "Shaun of the Dead", but more like "28 Days Later".
That's two movie references in one sentence...
Heh. I was... I am a bit of a fandom geek at the time. Still am. It's what's helped me get by. I'm always making jokes about being the live action version of an anime girl with glasses and a big gun. Heck, my call name is Meg, short for meganekko or 'glasses girl'.
So, you'd call yourself an optimist?
A realistic one, yeah. I wasn't pretending that the situation was better than it seemed. Not like some people. But the way I see it, the worst happened and we pulled through it. Worse for the wear, yeah, but humanity hasn't been completely overcome. It didn't seem possible when we were in the middle of the worst, but I refused to focus on it. Back when I was still working retail, I had to listen to people moan about their mundane, trivial problems, I guess it taught me shrug stuff off and not let it get to me, even laugh at it.
That helped you make it easier serving with the Minutemen?
It made it easier to start firing on the undead, yeah.
What about the night of the Last Halloween?
Short answer, there's some stories that are better off not being told. Long answer: this one needs to be told.
The store was dead quiet -- if you'll pardon the pun, which was not exactly intended -- as it often is on Halloween night. But we did get the odd stragglers. Not everyone in Salem does the last night of Haunted Happenings: the old timers came in for bread and milk or back up bags of candy for the trick or treaters, if they got more goblins at the door than they anticipated. And they came in to bitch about Hawthorne Boulevard being closed off for the costume parade. I was bagging, Sammy was cashiering. Mick Hawthorne -- no relation to Nathaniel or John spelled without the w -- was supervising that night. That was when Ethel Cabot -- a real Cabot, related to the Cabots who lived here during the Witch Hysteria, not the pretend Cabots who want to cash in on the 'romanticism' [She makes air quotation marks with her index fingers] of the past -- came in, grousing about the hideous zombie costume she'd seen on someone in the parking lot. Mick chuckled about it, Sammy wanted to go see it, but Mick wouldn't let him go out to see it. So Sammy begged to be sent out to collect carriages, something he generally loathed doing. Mick told him that wouldn't be necessary as there were barely any carriages outside.
Then Jack Corey came in, saying he'd seen three more weirdly costumed zombie wannabes out there. Didn't surprise anyone: we figured it was a flash mob, but something seemed off.
Strange place to have a flash mob?
Yeah, though there again, don't flash mobs tend to gather where they aren't expected? Still, it twigged me a bit.
Sammy got insistent, wanted to go out and see the zombie costumers. Mick told him his place was in the store, dead or not.
That's when the group came shambling in the door. They sure looked like great costumes, but they looked *too* good. They didn't smell right, for one thing.
Costumers wouldn't smell bad?
Yeah, and they'd all come in wearing clothes, not showing up in nightgowns or naked with a Y-incision across their torso and a toe tag on their foot. And some of them wouldn't look bloated and hideous. I don't mean obesity bloated, I mean gas from decomposition bloated.
Like they'd wandered in from the morgue?
Exactly like that. I hit the deck, crawled behind an empty register. Sammy took one look at the crowd and called out, 'Oh, cool, I love your costumes!' [Pauses, looks away]
Then what happened?
[Draws in a breath through her teeth] Then his excitement turned to fear. Next thing out of his mouth was a *scream*, like nothing you'd want to come from the lungs of a human being. This wailing, burbling scream of sheer fright and pain, that couldn't possibly come from a human set of lungs. And now I'm running out from behind the register. I grabbed a bagging frame -- those things are two pounds of thick fiberglass and metal and bags -- and I just start waling on the creature that had a hold of Sammy. I hit its head, it let go of Sammy. I hit it again, across the face. It tried to grab me, so I kept hitting it till it fell to the floor and stopped moving. Even then, I kept waling on it till the skull broke open and the brains slopped out onto the tiles. There were more people screaming by now. Some ran outside, some were just standing there in shock.
By this time, Janacek, the closing manager, had grabbed a rake from the produce department -- thank God we had some left over that we hadn't closed out on -- and the guys from the bakery and the deli departments had their knives. They'd come up front to see what the commotion was. Janacek's telling the grocery guys to herd the few customers we had into the dairy cooler and close the door. It's a cold place, but they'd be safe there. He tried to get me to go back with them, but I wouldn't. I couldn't. [Pauses, looks away, eyes damp.]
You couldn't leave Sammy behind?
[Shakes head] No, I couldn't leave him like that. He was on the floor now, gripping his arm and groaning, 'It bit me! It bit me!' over and over and over... So I took off my suspenders and tied off his arm, hoping that would do something to stop the virus.
Meantime, Janacek has the door locked, but now we're locked in with the first handful of zombies and we're just... trapped. I mean, there's guys doing their best to fight the darn things, but knives aren't as affective on zombie noggins as you would hope. The rake did fine, but then Janacek snapped the handle and the zombie he was fighting off was on him in a trice. Now Mick is on the phone, calling the police, but as I later learned, the dispatcher just brushed it off, as 'typical Halloween stuff'.
So the people in the store were on their own?
It wasn't the last call, either. We had people calling 911 on their cellphones, calling from inside the store. Finally the police got wise and came to see what was going on, but by that time... I won't say by that time it was too late, but there were more of them out there, in the parking lot, by the doors. It wasn't a horde, but...
It was more than before and more than the local cops could take on.
[Nods] I heard later that they called in the National Guard, but by that time, Merton, the head of dairy had started herding customers into the dairy cooler, telling them it was a terrorist attack and they'd be safer there because the walls were bomb-proof. Don't know if they are, but the door is six inches thick and the walls are insulated. I got herded into the cooler with the rest of the crowd, bringing Sammy with me. Igor, the guy in receiving, helped dog the door shut, but people were still panicking, and things weren't looking too good for Sammy.
He was starting to change>
Yeah. [Looks away, adjusts glasses, looks back] Igor and Mick were trying to calm people down, while I was trying to make Sammy comfortable. And in the middle of this, Mrs. Trumble from the senior citizen housing up the street, had started growling about how 'None of this would have happened if these immature young men would keep their roving hands to themselves'.
You're kidding. She blamed the virus on young people being frisky.
I wish I wasn't. Like I told you there was still a lot of narrow minded, wrong thinking people left in Salem.
So. I sat next to Sammy and said to him. 'You want me to do it?' Of course he replied with something rude to the point of being inappropriate, and I gave him a Look.
But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't resort to his old tricks, that would usually get him written up for causing trouble in the workplace?
At that point, I didn't care: when there's zombies roiling around outside, the last thing you care about is some kid's crude remarks.
So I said, 'No, I meant, did you want me to end this before you've lost your humanity?' He paused, then he said, 'Yeah, go ahead. I know you've been wanting to rip my head off because of my bad jokes.'
[Lengthy pause] So I did. I twisted his neck till I heard it crack. We popped the door open long enough for Igor to fetch the hoe we used to push the cardboard down the compacter and we used that to separate the head from the body. Then we dropped the head down the trash chute and Igor turned the switch on to crush it. We weren't taking any chances.
I heard it took three days for the National Guard to get everything under control.
[Shakes head] It was thirty-six hours, actually, but let me tell you, it felt like three days. We had plenty of milk and orange juice to keep people hydrated and nourished, but by the time we got out, we were ready for something that required teeth.
I used to like Halloween....
Not any more?
Feels like every day is Halloween. But I keep going. For the other Sammys in this world.
The kids who thought zombies were cool?
For the ones who had it get too real.
Author:
matrixrefugee/
mtxref_fic
Fandom: World War Z (extended universe)
Characters/Pairings: Max Brooks+OFC
Length: 2,198
Rating: R
Spoilers: None to speak of
Warnings: Violence, gore, people-munching, character death -- usual zombie story stuff.
Prompt: 6. Any - Any - It was unfortunate that the zombie apocalypse happened on Halloween, when everyone thought it was a prank/costume
Summary: Salem at Halloween: bad place for the zombie apocalypse to start, for one grocery store worker
[The Minutemen have made a comeback in Massachusetts, though ironically, their headquarters are not in Concord or Lexington, the site of the famous "Shot Heard Round The World". Rather, they are based out of a site of mass hysteria with possible supernatural origins. Murasaki Dalton is one of their snipers, a small, serious woman peering at the world through thick glasses that have been visibly mended several times. Despite the military-style fatigues that she wears, a faded, slightly worn baseball cap with a grocery store logo tops her cropped head.]
I'm descended from quiet dissenters, which in this case, wasn't a good thing. My several times-great grandfather on my father's side owned a farm near Salem Village during the witchcraft hysteria in the 1690s, and he had been questioned for being critical of the trials, but he was never formally arrested. My mother's people were crypto-Catholics who had hidden priests in their homes during the Tokugawa era persecution.
So, at first, you didn't believe, though you wanted to?
[She raises her thumbs in a small shrug] I thought it was a publicity stunt or the media blowing the facts out of proportion. Remember the H1N1 'epidemic'? Sure, a lot of people got sick, but it wasn't a replay of Spanish Influenza pandemic. We couldn't keep the Phalanx on the shelf in the pharmacy, and the lines to get the stuff got so long that we had to resort to crowd control. One time, when we ran out, the crowd got ugly. And I should add, there were people who barely believed that the stuff would work, while others acted like the stuff would cure everything, including AIDS, cancer and autism.
We started seeing a lot of canned goods, bottled water and batteries fly off the shelves, too, same as it does any time there's any disaster imminent. But it died down after a bit. Even a regular who's been vocal about his political views talked about getting himself a shotgun. One of our cashiers kept going on about how this was 'God's punishment for Insert Whipping Boy Demographic of Choice'. [She rolls her eyes]
So bigotry is sadly alive and well in Salem?
It's not like it was: people have pretty much learned what happens when a town takes itself too seriously. Still. You would hope it was gone, but some days, I swear there'd be another witch hunt if people were given half a chance.
And if it wasn't the bigots driving me bonkers at my register, it was Sammy Corwin and his zombie plans.
Zombie plans?
What it says on the tin. Every day at least once during my shift and especially if I had to bag for him, he'd bug me: 'Mo, what's your zombie plan?' Some days, it was all I could do to keep from saying, 'Yeah, I got seventy-seven of them, and seventy-six of them involve me throwing *you* to the zombies', but I didn't want to get written up for aggression: we had an assistant who had no sense of humor whatsoever, so you really had to tread lightly around him, when he was on duty.
I did have a few vague ideas, but nothing carved in stone. Sammy, on the other hand, was either hatching a new one each day or going off about how cool it was that zombies were real. I kept reminding him that these...things were once human beings, someone's brother or sister or mother or father or lover or friend. And that by all accounts, they were as dangerous as hell.
You wanted him to take it seriously?
Heck, yeah! I mean, I'm not above a little gallows humor myself, but he crossed that line into being just plain offensive or unrealistic about the situation. I had a feeling it wasn't going to be like "Shaun of the Dead", but more like "28 Days Later".
That's two movie references in one sentence...
Heh. I was... I am a bit of a fandom geek at the time. Still am. It's what's helped me get by. I'm always making jokes about being the live action version of an anime girl with glasses and a big gun. Heck, my call name is Meg, short for meganekko or 'glasses girl'.
So, you'd call yourself an optimist?
A realistic one, yeah. I wasn't pretending that the situation was better than it seemed. Not like some people. But the way I see it, the worst happened and we pulled through it. Worse for the wear, yeah, but humanity hasn't been completely overcome. It didn't seem possible when we were in the middle of the worst, but I refused to focus on it. Back when I was still working retail, I had to listen to people moan about their mundane, trivial problems, I guess it taught me shrug stuff off and not let it get to me, even laugh at it.
That helped you make it easier serving with the Minutemen?
It made it easier to start firing on the undead, yeah.
What about the night of the Last Halloween?
Short answer, there's some stories that are better off not being told. Long answer: this one needs to be told.
The store was dead quiet -- if you'll pardon the pun, which was not exactly intended -- as it often is on Halloween night. But we did get the odd stragglers. Not everyone in Salem does the last night of Haunted Happenings: the old timers came in for bread and milk or back up bags of candy for the trick or treaters, if they got more goblins at the door than they anticipated. And they came in to bitch about Hawthorne Boulevard being closed off for the costume parade. I was bagging, Sammy was cashiering. Mick Hawthorne -- no relation to Nathaniel or John spelled without the w -- was supervising that night. That was when Ethel Cabot -- a real Cabot, related to the Cabots who lived here during the Witch Hysteria, not the pretend Cabots who want to cash in on the 'romanticism' [She makes air quotation marks with her index fingers] of the past -- came in, grousing about the hideous zombie costume she'd seen on someone in the parking lot. Mick chuckled about it, Sammy wanted to go see it, but Mick wouldn't let him go out to see it. So Sammy begged to be sent out to collect carriages, something he generally loathed doing. Mick told him that wouldn't be necessary as there were barely any carriages outside.
Then Jack Corey came in, saying he'd seen three more weirdly costumed zombie wannabes out there. Didn't surprise anyone: we figured it was a flash mob, but something seemed off.
Strange place to have a flash mob?
Yeah, though there again, don't flash mobs tend to gather where they aren't expected? Still, it twigged me a bit.
Sammy got insistent, wanted to go out and see the zombie costumers. Mick told him his place was in the store, dead or not.
That's when the group came shambling in the door. They sure looked like great costumes, but they looked *too* good. They didn't smell right, for one thing.
Costumers wouldn't smell bad?
Yeah, and they'd all come in wearing clothes, not showing up in nightgowns or naked with a Y-incision across their torso and a toe tag on their foot. And some of them wouldn't look bloated and hideous. I don't mean obesity bloated, I mean gas from decomposition bloated.
Like they'd wandered in from the morgue?
Exactly like that. I hit the deck, crawled behind an empty register. Sammy took one look at the crowd and called out, 'Oh, cool, I love your costumes!' [Pauses, looks away]
Then what happened?
[Draws in a breath through her teeth] Then his excitement turned to fear. Next thing out of his mouth was a *scream*, like nothing you'd want to come from the lungs of a human being. This wailing, burbling scream of sheer fright and pain, that couldn't possibly come from a human set of lungs. And now I'm running out from behind the register. I grabbed a bagging frame -- those things are two pounds of thick fiberglass and metal and bags -- and I just start waling on the creature that had a hold of Sammy. I hit its head, it let go of Sammy. I hit it again, across the face. It tried to grab me, so I kept hitting it till it fell to the floor and stopped moving. Even then, I kept waling on it till the skull broke open and the brains slopped out onto the tiles. There were more people screaming by now. Some ran outside, some were just standing there in shock.
By this time, Janacek, the closing manager, had grabbed a rake from the produce department -- thank God we had some left over that we hadn't closed out on -- and the guys from the bakery and the deli departments had their knives. They'd come up front to see what the commotion was. Janacek's telling the grocery guys to herd the few customers we had into the dairy cooler and close the door. It's a cold place, but they'd be safe there. He tried to get me to go back with them, but I wouldn't. I couldn't. [Pauses, looks away, eyes damp.]
You couldn't leave Sammy behind?
[Shakes head] No, I couldn't leave him like that. He was on the floor now, gripping his arm and groaning, 'It bit me! It bit me!' over and over and over... So I took off my suspenders and tied off his arm, hoping that would do something to stop the virus.
Meantime, Janacek has the door locked, but now we're locked in with the first handful of zombies and we're just... trapped. I mean, there's guys doing their best to fight the darn things, but knives aren't as affective on zombie noggins as you would hope. The rake did fine, but then Janacek snapped the handle and the zombie he was fighting off was on him in a trice. Now Mick is on the phone, calling the police, but as I later learned, the dispatcher just brushed it off, as 'typical Halloween stuff'.
So the people in the store were on their own?
It wasn't the last call, either. We had people calling 911 on their cellphones, calling from inside the store. Finally the police got wise and came to see what was going on, but by that time... I won't say by that time it was too late, but there were more of them out there, in the parking lot, by the doors. It wasn't a horde, but...
It was more than before and more than the local cops could take on.
[Nods] I heard later that they called in the National Guard, but by that time, Merton, the head of dairy had started herding customers into the dairy cooler, telling them it was a terrorist attack and they'd be safer there because the walls were bomb-proof. Don't know if they are, but the door is six inches thick and the walls are insulated. I got herded into the cooler with the rest of the crowd, bringing Sammy with me. Igor, the guy in receiving, helped dog the door shut, but people were still panicking, and things weren't looking too good for Sammy.
He was starting to change>
Yeah. [Looks away, adjusts glasses, looks back] Igor and Mick were trying to calm people down, while I was trying to make Sammy comfortable. And in the middle of this, Mrs. Trumble from the senior citizen housing up the street, had started growling about how 'None of this would have happened if these immature young men would keep their roving hands to themselves'.
You're kidding. She blamed the virus on young people being frisky.
I wish I wasn't. Like I told you there was still a lot of narrow minded, wrong thinking people left in Salem.
So. I sat next to Sammy and said to him. 'You want me to do it?' Of course he replied with something rude to the point of being inappropriate, and I gave him a Look.
But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't resort to his old tricks, that would usually get him written up for causing trouble in the workplace?
At that point, I didn't care: when there's zombies roiling around outside, the last thing you care about is some kid's crude remarks.
So I said, 'No, I meant, did you want me to end this before you've lost your humanity?' He paused, then he said, 'Yeah, go ahead. I know you've been wanting to rip my head off because of my bad jokes.'
[Lengthy pause] So I did. I twisted his neck till I heard it crack. We popped the door open long enough for Igor to fetch the hoe we used to push the cardboard down the compacter and we used that to separate the head from the body. Then we dropped the head down the trash chute and Igor turned the switch on to crush it. We weren't taking any chances.
I heard it took three days for the National Guard to get everything under control.
[Shakes head] It was thirty-six hours, actually, but let me tell you, it felt like three days. We had plenty of milk and orange juice to keep people hydrated and nourished, but by the time we got out, we were ready for something that required teeth.
I used to like Halloween....
Not any more?
Feels like every day is Halloween. But I keep going. For the other Sammys in this world.
The kids who thought zombies were cool?
For the ones who had it get too real.