Fanfiction: You Missed 'Superpowers', Pandora (Left 4 Dead, respectawoman, Misfits AU)
Okay. Here's what happened.
- The Left 4 Dead zombie apocalypse games were released.
- zarla and jazaaboo created some AU female versions of Left 4 Dead zombies.
- zarla and jazaaboo created an AU of the above AU in which the ladies did not in fact become zombies and instead had to fight their way through the zombie apocalypse.
- I wrote the below AU of the above AU of the above AU, in which all of the above and also they have superpowers.
So, yes, this is an AU of an AU of an AU of a game I've never played. This is, I'll confess, a bit ridiculous. But I really love these OCs and wanted to do something with them (well, all right, I did write the Hogwarts AU, but I wanted to involve all four of them this time). I hope I've done them justice.
The government's actions are incredibly implausible here. I don't know how they thought they were going to get away with that.
Title: You Missed 'Superpowers', Pandora (or, alternatively, 'yo dawg I heard you like AUs...')
Fandom: erm, the Left 4 Dead OCs over at respectawoman. Hunter and Smoker belong to zarla, Charger and Jockey to jazaaboo. You can find out more about them on this page.
Rating: R
Wordcount: 6,800
Summary: AU of the survivorverse AU. Shortly before the infection strikes, Hunter, Smoker, Charger and Jockey are caught in a storm with very strange effects. Loosely inspired by Misfits.
Warnings: violence, swearing, the sort of unpleasantness you'd associate with a zombie apocalypse.
“See,” Smoker says, her voice shaking like someone’s just shoved her in a washing machine and put her on a spin cycle, “this is what happens when you go outside.”
Hunter obviously isn’t listening to her, like that’s new. She’s crept out from their shelter under a park bench to examine the hailstone that very nearly took Smoker’s head off a couple of minutes ago. “Wow. Take a look at this.”
Smoker doesn’t need a closer look; she can see from here that it’s the size of a fucking car. She says so.
“Well, you can’t stay like that forever,” Hunter says. “You coming out from under there?”
“Easier said than done,” Smoker mutters.
It takes Smoker a couple of minutes to unfold herself from under the bench with minimal back pain. Hunter watches her, smirking, bouncing a little on her feet as if to show off how annoyingly healthy she is.
“This is awesome,” Hunter says, clambering up to stand on top of the hailstone. “How do you even get weather like this?”
“I don’t know,” Smoker says, “but what I do know is the shock of it’s probably taken ten years off my life. I should get some kind of compensation.”
-
“Hey.” Hunter’s voice on the phone is breathless, excited. “Come outside. I’ve got something to show you.”
“Can’t I just see it out the window?”
“Oh, fine,” Hunter says. “But you’d better watch closely. Go out to the fire escape and look down.”
Smoker, after taking a deliberately long time to pull on a sweater, does so. Hunter waves at her from the pavement - and then she jumps and lands next to her. Five storeys, straight up.
It’s so sudden and there are so many applicable curses that Smoker doesn’t know what she’s about to say until she hears herself exclaim “SHITTING HELLCROW.”
“I can run really fast, too,” Hunter says, beaming.
Smoker is too busy hyperventilating to respond.
-
“It’s amazing,” Hunter says. “I’m gonna be the best parkour artist in history. If you’re nice to me, I’ll give you shares in my autobiography.”
“Doesn’t it take the fun out of it?” Smoker asks. “Being able to park around without any effort?”
“Honestly,” Hunter says, her eyes gleaming, “when you look this cool you don’t care.”
Twenty minutes, and Smoker doesn’t seem any closer to waking up. This has to be a dream. It really doesn’t feel like a dream, but it has to be a dream. It’s the only way this makes any kind of sense.
“Ray’s gonna kill me,” Hunter says in great satisfaction. “He was caught out in the storm as well, and all that happened to him was he got sick.”
“You think the storm did this?” Smoker asks. “Really? You think almost getting killed by giant hailstones gave you superpowers?”
“It’s the kind of thing that happens in movies, right?”
“And it gave you parking superpowers.”
“Parkour.”
“The point is, why would some storm give you powers that fit you perfectly? There were planet-sized hailstones all over town; not like it was localised straight over your head.”
“I don’t know, but it did. You’ve probably got the power to smoke nine cigarettes at once.”
“Hope so,” Smoker says. “After the shock you gave me, I need it.”
-
Smoker cannot smoke nine cigarettes at once. It would be great to be able to do that right now, because Griffin is frustrating enough when he can see and hear her and somehow manages to be even more so when she’s apparently freaking invisible.
What the fuck is going on?
“Where is she?” Sparkles demands. “If she’s gone for another smoking break...”
I’m right here, Smoker growls over their conversation, futilely. I’m trying to do my work, but I can’t get the files I need if you can’t hear me asking for them. If this is a joke, it’s not very fucking funny.
“...find her there,” Griffin is saying. “I don’t see how she can have time to do any real work anyway, always going off with that little Asian dyke-”
Smoker punches him in the face.
And, okay, maybe he can’t hear her or see her, but he can definitely feel that. He shrieks and staggers backward, clutching his nose. It’s a more dramatic reaction than she anticipated the many times she thought about doing that before; she’s never had much of a fist on her, but she guesses the surprise of getting hit by someone you can’t see kind of makes up for that.
“Oh my gosh!” Sparkles exclaims. “What happened?”
“Fuck!” Griffin squeaks, weirdly high-pitched.
A fair part of the annoyance Smoker had with her predicament vanishes. She could do this all day.
-
It’s not long before the government starts trying to interfere with her newly-discovered Griffin-punching powers, of course. Should have seen that one coming.
“Seen the news lately?” Smoker asks, when Hunter inevitably superspeeds her way into her living room uninvited. “The government’s asking everyone who was caught in that storm to report to some building.”
“Why?”
Smoker shrugs, taking a drag of her cigarette. “Say people’ve been getting ‘strange symptoms’ and it’s ‘potentially dangerous’ and we need to go to this place for a free health check-up.”
“Huh.” Hunter considers. “You going?”
“No point. I’ve got a feeling they’re not gonna know what the health side-effects of turning invisible are. And I can tell you your health risks right now: you’re gonna run face-first into a wall sooner or later.”
“You should probably go anyway,” Hunter says. “I mean, if anyone needs a free health check-up, it’s you.”
“Mmm. Good luck dragging me there.”
-
She hasn’t run like this in years, despite her nickname. Charger charges through the corridors, the sound of shouting and doors slamming into walls getting closer behind her.
Her pursuers are younger than she is, and they know the building better, but none of them are running for their lives.
She’s starting to feel lightheaded when she finally sees daylight through a frosted-glass door and slams it open so hard the glass shatters. She’s out on the street, but she’s still not safe; she can’t be sure they won’t follow her out here. Her first thought is to go to the police, but the police might be complicit in this, for all she knows.
Wanted by the government, and David is gone. She can’t go back to the zoo. What does she have left?
She can’t think about this now.
Charger hurries around to the front of the building, hoping they’ll assume she ran straight out into the streets from the side-door. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with the rest of her life; all she can do right now is try to ensure she still has it.
A teenage girl is waiting by the front door, fiddling with her braided hair, humming to herself. No official uniform. She doesn’t look old enough to work here, in any case. Which means...
“Were you in that storm?” Charger asks.
“Uh, yeah,” the girl says. “I’m here for the check-up thing.”
“You’re in danger,” Charger says. “You need to get away from this place.”
The girl looks uncertain, which isn’t really surprising. “Uh...”
She doesn’t want to do this, but there’s no time to explain fully and she needs to act fast. She takes hold of the girl’s wrist. “Trust me.”
The expression of doubt disappears immediately, and when Charger begins running again the girl runs with her.
-
They seem to be safe here. Charger keeps watching the corner of the alley, just in case, but it’s been at least ten minutes and there’s no sign of the people chasing her. If they do appear, she has the gun that she managed to wrest from the guard, so at least they’re not defenceless. She doesn’t want to shoot a human, but if they’re found she might have no choice.
“Uh, Miss,” the girl says from her right.
“Call me Charger.”
“Okay, thanks. I’m Jockey.” She pauses. “Why are we in this place?”
Charger looks over at her. “I’m sorry,” she says, after a moment. “I was being chased; there wasn’t time to explain. We’re here to hide.”
“From what?”
“The health checks are a trick,” Charger says. “They’re killing the people who were caught in the storm.”
Jockey blinks, then laughs. “No, they’re not.”
“It seems unbelievable, I know, but-”
“No,” Jockey says, “you don’t understand. My friend Travis went there yesterday. So they can’t be killing anyone, ’cause he’s fine.”
“He was in the storm?” Charger asks, taken aback. If it’s true, perhaps he knows something. “Have you spoken to him since he went?”
Jockey hesitates.
Travis probably can’t help them, then. Charger has never been good with these situations. “I know it’s probably difficult to take in, but-”
Jockey suddenly starts laughing again, and Charger falls silent, startled. “No, you’ve definitely made a mistake,” Jockey says through her high-pitched giggles. “If they were doin’ anything like that, he’d have gotten away to warn me. And he hasn’t said anything. So he’s fine.”
Charger could say, My husband was just shot in front of me. She doesn’t. “Regardless, you need to stay away from there. Don’t tell anyone you were in that storm.”
“Why?” Jockey asks. “What’s that storm have to do with anything? I mean, if they were doin’... what you said, why would they do that?”
The man who killed David was young and awkward and very upset, almost hyperventilating, desperately trying to explain and apologise before he pulled the trigger. “Some of the people caught in the storm became aggressive,” Charger says. “They turned into mindless killers. And it seemed to be contagious. The government apparently thought the best course of action would be a... cull.”
Zombies was the word he’d used. It sounds impossible, but it wouldn’t be the only impossible thing that’s happened recently.
There’s a wheezing, spluttering sound coming from somewhere behind her.
-
Smoker is trying to get her television to show something more interesting than static when there’s the now-familiar sound of someone pulling themselves through her window. She walks through to meet Hunter, already prepared to make a snide comment, and...
Hunter looks half-dead. She’s curled on the floor, pale and shivering. The sleeve of her sweater is ripped up and covered in something that looks horribly like blood.
“What the heck happened to you?” Smoker demands, helping her to her feet.
Hunter is shaking all over.
“Ray,” she says.
-
So it’s the zombie apocalypse.
Jesus Christ.
“You say he bit you?” Smoker asks, bandaging Hunter’s arm.
Hunter looks away, shivering. “Yeah. I think - I think maybe he killed Jordan. I don’t know. I ran away.”
“How are you feeling?” Smoker asks. “Anything weird? Any-”
“I don’t think I’m sick,” Hunter says, quietly. “I don’t know.”
Smoker doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then, because maybe it’ll be true, she says, “You’re not sick.”
“Smoker,” Hunter says. “It’s happening to everyone. We need to get out of here.”
“Oh, it’s easy as that, is it? And go where?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter says. “Somewhere safe. There’s gotta be somewhere.”
“Where’s gonna be safer than here?” Smoker asks, and that’s when a zombie breaks down her apartment door.
-
Smoker’s car has somehow ended up overturned and on fire, so they need to make a move on foot. Hunter was right: it’s happening to everyone. Everyone is weird and mutated and trying to kill them. There are zombies who try to grab them with their really long tongues and zombies who try to cut them open with their really sharp claws, and surely if this many people have changed this quickly it could happen to them at any moment.
But, so far, it hasn’t.
Smoker shoots down a zombie that’s going for Hunter, just in time. Her aim’s gotten a lot better in just the few hours since they looted the gun store. It’s pretty intensive practice.
“Whoo, that was close,” Hunter says. “Thanks.”
Something’s been bugging Smoker. Well, okay, a lot of things have been bugging Smoker, but this thing in particular is bugging her right now. “You don’t need me here to look out for you,” she says. “You could get away from this whole mess, easy. You’re a lot faster than those things.”
“What, and leave you on your own?” Hunter asks, grinning. She seems less messed up than she did back at Smoker’s apartment this morning; it’s a fucked-up situation they’re in right now, but Smoker guesses it’s a lot less fucked up than what Hunter had to go through with her friends earlier, so maybe having zombies who weren’t once people she loved trying to kill her is a welcome distraction. “You wouldn’t last a second without me.”
“I’ve got a power of my own, y’know. I’m not completely defenceless.”
“You don’t even know how to use it properly! Besides, they can probably smell you. I’d be able to hunt you by smell, all that smoking you do.”
Any clever response Smoker might come up with will have to wait, because she rounds the corner and suddenly there’s a zombie on her head. She stumbles around, barely able to stay upright under its weight - she can’t see, and it’s clawing at her face, cackling wildly, and when she tries to yell she gets a mouthful of bloodied misshapen fingers.
“SMOKER!” Hunter shouts, but it’s cut off halfway through, becomes a strangled sound, and the thing on Smoker’s head is still blocking her view but it sounds like one of the long-tongues has her. So much for Hunter staying behind to protect her. Now they’re both going to die, because they’re both idiots.
There’s a gunshot, and the head-zombie jerks and shrieks. Smoker stumbles, falls to the ground, and the zombie thrashes around on her back until there’s another shot and it goes still.
Smoker crawls out from underneath the zombie-corpse and drags herself into a sitting position just in time to see the thing with its tongue around Hunter’s throat take a shot to the head. Hunter struggles out of its grip and falls to her knees, gasping.
But then who...?
“Are you hurt?”
Smoker turns to see the woman who presumably just saved her life. She’s crouching next to her, holding out a hand. Smoker takes it and allows herself to be helped to her feet, and just for a moment she knows that everything’s going to be all right.
And then the stranger is going over to check on Hunter, and they’re in the middle of the street in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and chances are things aren’t going to be all right at all, actually.
Smoker walks over to where Hunter is dusting herself off and telling their saviour (Smoker can’t keep from smiling when she hears it) thanks, but she could probably have taken him on her own, just so you know, and, by the way, hi, she’s Hunter.
“Charger,” the stranger says. “Are there only the two of you?”
“Nearly two less than that,” Smoker says. “Thanks for the help.”
“It would probably be safer to move in a larger group,” Charger says. “The infected seem good at isolating people and killing them; having more backup could help to avoid situations like the one you just found yourself in.”
Smoker doesn’t think she means it to sound patronising, but she can’t help bristling anyway, and apparently neither can Hunter.
“Well,” Hunter says, “it’s not like we’re two normal people.” And she runs twice around Smoker and Charger, so fast she’s almost impossible to see.
Charger’s eyes widen very slightly. “Were you in that storm?”
Hunter starts. “You know about the storm?”
“You should try not to let others know,” Charger says. “There’s a chance-”
“Hey, Charger,” a voice calls, and Smoker turns to see another stranger coming toward them: a blonde girl, probably a teenager. She’s dressed in a bloodstained yellow shirt and bloodstained white pants, although with everything bloodstained now it hardly seems worth saying so, and she’s holding something that looks a lot like a chainsaw. “Are these your friends?”
“Fellow survivors,” Charger says. “This is Hunter, and...?” She looks over at Smoker.
“Smoker,” Smoker says.
“I’m Jockey!” the girl says cheerfully, dropping the chainsaw to hold out a hand. “Pleased to meetcha!”
Smoker stares. Has this girl not noticed that they’re in the middle of what feels a lot like the end of the world?
“Uh,” Hunter says, “hi.”
“Are we gonna travel together?” Jockey asks, putting her hands in her pockets and bobbing up and down on her feet. “It’d be great to make some new friends. I can’t wait to introduce you all to Travis. I bet you’ll really like him. And he’ll probably like you. I mean, I know I’ve only just met you, but I bet you’re really nice people.”
“Travis is a friend of hers,” Charger says quietly to Smoker. “He’s most likely dead.”
Right. Of course anyone who instantly decided Smoker was a ‘really nice person’ was going to be totally insane.
-
They do all end up travelling together, even though Smoker isn’t totally comfortable with Jockey being there. She seems nice enough; there’s just something... not quite right about her. But Charger’s smart, she knows a lot about staying alive, and, if Smoker’s honest with herself, they probably need her. Seems that Jockey comes as part of the package.
Plus, with someone who knows what they’re doing keeping watch, they can actually get some sleep. Smoker was starting to think they’d die of exhaustion before the zombies got them.
Must be tough on Charger, though. Smoker glances at her as they walk along. Hunter offered to take over the watch last night, but she refused. How is she still on her feet?
“Hey, hey, Hunter!” Jockey sings.
Smoker looks up. There’s a greenish blur leaping from building to building, coming in their direction: Hunter, back from her superspeed scouting mission.
“Did you find the evacuation centre?” Charger asks, as Hunter drops to the ground in front of them.
Hunter shakes her head. “I mean, yeah, but it’s been overrun. Zombies everywhere. The posters are saying we need to go to Mercy Hospital instead.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Smoker says.
“Mercy Hospital isn’t that much farther,” Charger says, beginning to walk on. “We should be able to make it if we stay focused. Good work, Hunter.”
“No problem,” Hunter says, sounding a little brighter than when she brought home the bad news. “D’you want me to-”
Out of nowhere, a hooded zombie pounces Charger to the ground, pins her down, begins to slash at her. Smoker sees the familiar tape around its arms, sees Hunter freeze out of the corner of her eye, and she knows she’s got to deal with this herself. She raises her gun, lines up the sights - gotta be careful, can’t hit her - and-
-and the zombie’s stopped scratching. It’s settling down on Charger’s chest like it’s planning to go to sleep there, making weird little noises, half-growl, half-purr.
“Charger?” Smoker asks, keeping the gun up in case the zombie starts getting dangerous again. “You okay?”
Charger, Smoker sees now, is gripping its wrist tightly with one hand. Not letting go, she uses her other hand to push the zombie off her, carefully but firmly. It growls a little as it’s dislodged, but it doesn’t attack.
“It’s only docile for as long as I’m touching it,” Charger says. Now that the thing’s off her, Smoker can see the bloody lines scored across her shoulder, stark through the rips in her shirt. “You should kill it now.”
“How the heck are you doing that?” Smoker asks.
“We can discuss it later.”
Smoker looks over at Hunter, who is still frozen, staring at the zombie. It looks like there are tears in her eyes.
“Any way we can run instead?” Smoker asks.
“We shouldn’t take chances.”
Which makes sense, but Smoker still feels like a shitbag when she pulls the trigger.
-
They find a room that seems secure to rest for the night. Hunter, who hasn’t said a word since that zombie attacked, goes to curl up a little way apart from the rest of them, ignoring Jockey asking her what she’s doin’ all the way over there.
It feels weird for Smoker, not having the pest pressed into her side. They’ve only had a couple nights on the road so far, but it already feels like having Hunter curled up against her is... the natural order of things, or something.
Better not tell Hunter that.
“So, what, you can calm things down?” Smoker asks Charger quietly, as they listen to the howls and screeches echoing far away, still not far enough. “How’d you find that out?”
“My husband and I had a zoo,” Charger says. “I noticed that the animals seemed easier to handle after the storm, even before we found out that David could speak to them. And then David... David told me that he felt safe when I touched him.”
She’s not looking at her. Smoker knows better than to ask where David is now.
-
“Hey,” Hunter says, suddenly. “Can you hear crying?”
Smoker listens. Now that Hunter mentions it, she can hear sobbing coming from somewhere. It sounds like a woman. “You think someone’s alive around here?”
“I think it’s coming from...” Hunter creeps around a corner. “Yeah, there she is.”
Smoker walks over to her, followed by Charger and Jockey. Hunter is standing at one end of a narrow side-street, and at the other, curled up on the ground, is what looks like a young woman, crying loudly.
“She’s infected,” Charger says. “We shouldn’t get close.”
Smoker looks over at her. Charger has her rifle raised; she’s looking through the scope.
“Are you sure?” Hunter asks. “Most of the zombies come straight for us.”
“It might be that she just hasn’t noticed us yet,” Charger says, passing the rifle to Hunter. “Look at her through this.”
Hunter lifts the rifle and looks through the scope, frowning.
“Look at her hands,” Charger says.
Hunter draws in a sharp breath. “Okay, she’s definitely infected. Should I shoot?”
“But shouldn’t we find out why she’s crying?” Jockey asks.
“I haven’t seen this type of mutation before,” Charger says. “We don’t know how she might attack. It’s probably best not to engage her if we don’t have to.”
“I wish we knew more about these things,” Smoker growls. “Right now, we see a new one, we don’t have a clue what it’s gonna do until it spits acid on us or tries to strangle us with its tongue.”
For a moment, Charger seems about to speak. When Smoker and the others look at her, she hesitates, then says, “I know where we might be able to find information.”
“Where?” Hunter asks.
“It would require some backtracking,” Charger says. “And it could be very dangerous. We need to leave the decision of whether to investigate up to Smoker.”
Oh, Smoker doesn’t like the sound of this. “Why me?”
-
The place Charger leads them to is a big building with a government logo and no windows, surrounded by what Smoker would conservatively describe as a fuckload of zombies. It takes what Smoker would equally conservatively describe as a goddamn year to clear them out, even with Hunter flashing around at high speed to confuse them.
“Hey,” Smoker says, reloading and taking out the last couple of threats, “this the place we were meant to come if we got hit by that storm?”
“Yes,” Charger says. “It was a trap. They thought there was a link between the storm and the infection; they were trying to cut it off at the source.”
There is a pause.
“Cut it off how?” Hunter asks. She sounds a little uncomfortable.
Charger says nothing.
“Christ,” Smoker mutters. Then, “Wait, do you think the people at the evac will be in on this?”
“I don’t know,” Charger says. “But for now, going there and hiding that we were in the storm seems to be our best option. If they attack us, we’ll have to find another way.”
Great. Smoker had been thinking in terms of ‘get to the evac, get out of here’; it hadn’t occurred to her that they might have to contend with non-zombies trying to kill them.
“It’s unlikely that anyone will still be working here,” Charger says, “but it’s possible, which is why Smoker is the most logical choice to investigate; she won’t be seen. The corridors are very narrow, which means one person with a gun has a tactical advantage over the zombies - they can only come at you from two sides, and you can shoot them before they’re close enough to attack - but it also means that we can’t all move in to cover you; we’d end up shooting each other.”
“What,” Smoker says, “you think they might have some research on the infection in there?”
“It’s possible,” Charger says. “I don’t know whether there was any real research here, but I hope there’s something that might help us.”
“Okay,” Smoker says. “I’ll go in.”
“Me too,” Jockey says, immediately. “Maybe Travis is still in there.”
Oh, Jesus, no. Smoker gives Charger a desperate look. Don’t make me go in there with Little Miss Crazycakes.
“You could be seen,” Charger explains to Jockey. “You’d be putting both of you in danger. And we need you out here in case there’s another attack.”
“I don’t think Travis is there, Jockey,” Hunter says, gently.
Jockey looks downcast for a moment, then brightens up again. “If you see Travis, can you tell him I’m out here?” she asks Smoker. “I know he’ll want to see me again. Maybe you could...” She looks around, then darts over to the nearest house and vaults over the low wall surrounding its front lawn. A moment later, she returns with a handful of daisies. “Can you give him these?”
Smoker hates this. She never knows what to say with Jockey. “I guess.”
It takes her another half-hour to actually manage to turn invisible. She’s crap at this.
-
Hunter is getting frantic, hopping back and forth in a high-speed blur and asking whether they shouldn’t go in to look for her now, when Smoker manages to reappear.
“Fucking finally,” she exclaims. She really needs to learn how to control this invisibility thing better. “I’ve been out of there for ten minutes.”
Hunter’s expression of relief immediately changes to embarrassment and anger. “Why didn’t you touch one of us or something? You can’t just stand there and watch me thinking you’ve died!”
“Because you would have shot me,” Smoker explains, quite reasonably. A group of jumpy people with guns, fighting for their lives; she’s not about to creep up to them when they can’t see her and tap them on the shoulder.
“Did you manage to find anything out?” Charger asks.
“A little,” Smoker says. “They’ve got some notes on the different zombie types and how they’re all gonna try to kill us. The one that took out my door’s called a Tank; that one’s a whole pile of laughs. The crying one we saw is a Witch, and it’s a good thing we didn’t get too close; you’ve gotta be real careful around those. You won’t believe what they’ve named some of the others.”
“Did you find if there was really a link between the infection and the storm?” Hunter asks. “I mean, are we gonna...?”
“Most people who were out in the storm got infected,” Smoker says. “I mean, that’s what the documents say; maybe they were just trying to make excuses in case someone found out what they were doing. But it looks like they were starting to think people who got other effects were immune.”
Which sounds like good news to her - she was already suspecting they were immune, but if the government knows it they’re less likely to be shot on sight when they make it to the evac, which is something that’s been nagging at her since Charger told them what this building was used for - but Charger practically visibly flinches, looking away.
“So we’re safe?” Hunter asks.
“Oh, yeah. Never been safer. We can stop running away from the bloodthirsty zombies now and start inviting them round for tea.”
“Ha ha ha. I mean we’re not gonna change, right?”
This is where things get tricky. Smoker looks over at Jockey. She’s sitting on the remains of a smashed-up truck, swinging her legs and singing to herself, off in her own little crazy world.
Charger knows what she’s getting at, of course. “You and Smoker and I all have our... abilities,” she explains to Hunter, quiet enough so Jockey probably can’t hear. Smoker’s not sure it’d make any difference if she could hear every word; nothing seems to get through to that girl. “We don’t know what effect the storm had on Jockey, if any.”
There is a pause.
“But she’s gotta be immune, right?” Hunter asks. “I mean, it’s been a couple weeks since the storm.”
“Did you find any information on the onset of infection, Smoker?” Charger asks.
Smoker shakes her head. “Not much. Some people who were in the storm got symptoms straight away, some took a few days or a week, or more. And obviously folks who weren’t in the storm can catch it from other infected people.” She instinctively tries to take a pull on her cigarette, realises it’s the pen she used to write notes from the research on her arm, drops it as she fumbles for her Marlboros. “That’s probably all we’re getting. I’m pretty sure no one in there’s still doing research.”
She takes a long, deep drag, and blows out the stream of smoke as slow as she can manage, and then she says, quiet, “So what do we do about her?”
“We protect her,” Charger says.
“And what if she starts trying to eat us?”
Charger hesitates. “Then we’ll have to protect ourselves,” she says. “With luck, it won’t come to that, but we need to be prepared for the possibility.”
-
Smoker knows something’s wrong before the others even get back to the safe room. They’ve been away too long; it doesn’t take that much time to scout the area. All she can do is sit and wait and hope they come back in one piece; if she goes out to find them on her own, she’ll be torn apart in seconds.
Eventually, the door opens. Smoker leaps to her feet. Maybe they’re okay. Maybe Jockey has finally gone off the deep end and shot them both and come back for her. Maybe-
Hunter, blood-flecked and sweaterless and looking ill, walks in with something in her arms.
It’s Jockey. She’s twitching and shifting restlessly, mumbling to herself. There’s blood everywhere.
“Jesus,” Smoker says. “Is she-”
“It was a Witch,” Charger says, slamming the door shut. “Do we have any bandages left?”
“I think we used the last of them,” Smoker says. “Still got some antiseptic, if that’ll - I mean, do you think...?”
“We’ll just have to try,” Charger says, holding out her hand. There’s a waver to her voice that Smoker has never heard there before. “Give me the first-aid kit.”
Smoker passes her the kit as Hunter sets Jockey down on the pile of blankets, very gently. Jockey opens her eyes, sees Smoker and smiles as if she’s not losing enough blood to fill a swimming pool. “Hi, Smoker, hi,” she says.
Her eyes look weird, too bright, like she’s on the edge of tears.
God, this can’t be happening.
Charger works in silence for a few minutes, while Jockey giggles vaguely and fiddles with her braid and talks to herself. Hunter walks over to Smoker and wraps herself around her arm.
“That’s all I can do,” Charger says eventually, quietly. “It might not be enough.”
There’s a silence. Hunter goes to curl up on the floor next to Jockey, presses herself against Jockey’s shoulder. “But she might be okay, right?” she asks.
Charger takes a deep breath. “Jockey, do you understand what’s happening?”
Jockey bursts into high-pitched, uncontrolled laughter. Somewhere in the middle it turns into a coughing fit. “I’m not scared,” she manages. Hunter’s sweater is soaked through with blood where it’s tied around her stomach. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Jockey,” Charger says, “you need to stay still.”
“It’s fine.” She’s shaking all over. “I’m gonna see Travis again, and - and - I can’t rem... and Jordan and David, and all our friends, and I’ll show them where you guys are, and we’ll all be together again. You’ll see.”
Jockey’s stopped looking at them. She doesn’t seem to be looking at anything. She’s gazing vacantly at some point somewhere to the right of Smoker, her eyes glassy.
“I can’t-” she begins to say, and then her entire body spasms and she gives out a little cry of pain. “I’m not scared. I’m not - it’s gonna be fine.”
Charger breathes for a moment, then takes hold of Jockey’s hand. The shivering subsides, and Jockey looks up at her with wide, trusting eyes.
“Hey,” Hunter says, shifting uncomfortably. “I don’t know... should you be doing that?”
Charger is silent for a long moment, and then she says, “I don’t know.”
Smoker turns away and lights up, because that’s going to fucking help. She can’t be here. She-
-and then she feels herself disappearing, and fuck.
It takes a moment for Hunter to notice, and the moment she does she’s furious. “Smoker!” she shouts, leaping to her feet. “Jockey’s - she’s - you have to be here, you can’t just disappear, how can you-”
I didn’t want to, Smoker snarls, trying to become visible again, but it’s no use and she knows that Hunter can’t hear her.
Charger is the only one watching when Jockey dies.
-
They can’t bury her - they’d be out in the open to dig, it’s too risky - but Hunter wants to have some kind of goodbye to Jockey, something more than just leaving her there, so she breaks into a furniture store to steal a white sheet. Smoker provides covering fire and tries not to think about anything.
Charger meets them at the safe-room door.
“Her wounds are gone,” she says.
“What?” Smoker asks.
“Jockey,” Charger says. “While I was watching, her wounds just... healed.”
Hunter freezes. “Is she still...?”
“I’m sorry,” Charger says, “yes. I don’t know what it means. It might have-”
And then there’s a groan from further inside the room, and Smoker hasn’t finished having a heart-attack when Jockey wanders into view.
“Hey, guys,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “What’s up?”
-
“Y’see,” Jockey says happily, when they’ve explained what happened to her, or at least what little of it they understand, “I knew it.”
Smoker raises her eyebrows. “You knew you were gonna come back to life? Because that’s the kind of thing it would’ve been good for the rest of us to know in advance.”
“I mean I knew our friends would be okay.”
“Did you see them?” Charger asks, immediately.
“No,” Jockey says. “But if I came back, they must be okay. Right?”
There is an uncomfortable pause.
“You know, she could be right,” Hunter says.
Smoker turns to look at her.
“Maybe all the immune people are like this,” Hunter suggests. “Maybe none of us can die.”
“No,” Charger says, without a hint of doubt.
Hunter doesn’t suggest it again.
-
The good news is they’ve got Jockey back. She’s alive, singing and laughing and giving them covering fire. Smoker hadn’t realised it before, but Jockey does lighten the mood. Sometimes. When she’s not bringing it through the floor by assuring Hunter and Charger that everyone’s alive, really, they’ll see all their friends again soon.
The bad news is they’ve got Jockey back and she seems even more unhinged than before. Not that Smoker isn’t more relieved than she’d ever have expected herself to be to see her again, but that’s all they need. And now she’s got evidence for her crazy delusions, what the fuck.
So maybe it’d be best if they left her to find her own way out of here. Jockey’s alive, and that’s great, but maybe she should be alive somewhere else. Not like she needs protection, and Smoker can’t shake the feeling she’s going to fill them all with lead one day because it’s all a game, right? Nobody ever dies; everyone’s fine, right?
“She’s immortal,” Smoker says privately to Charger. Up ahead, Jockey throws a Molotov at a group of zombies and then yelps at the fireball, as if she somehow wasn’t expecting it. “She doesn’t need us. And she’s as nutty as a bag of nuts.”
“There are more reasons to move in a group than staying alive,” Charger says. “She needs someone to keep her grounded.”
Smoker can’t hold back a shudder at the thought of Jockey wandering around a ruined world forever, immortal, calling for Travis. Still... “She’s a long way past grounding, if you ask me. Hunter tells me the reason she got killed in the first place was she was trying to stop a Witch crying.”
“And we need her,” Charger says. “The more of us there are, the smaller the chances that we’ll find ourselves in a situation where none of us can help the others. This isn’t up for discussion.”
-
“Oh my God, this is horrible,” Hunter whispers.
“There’s no other way through,” Charger says, but she looks shaken.
“Hey!” Jockey calls, darting back and forth near the sobbing figure curled up on the ground. “Hey! Crybaby! Hey! Come over here!”
“Are you sure she knows what she’s doing?” Hunter asks, twisting the shredded remains of her left sleeve between her fingers.
“She was the one who came up with this plan,” Charger says. “We have to trust that she does.”
“I could do it instead,” Hunter says. “I can run; it’d never catch me. I don’t think we should-”
The Witch bursts into a shriek and rushes at Jockey. She barely has time to cry out before she’s knocked to the ground.
Smoker looks away, but the noises are still enough to make her throw up.
-
“Wow,” Jockey says when she wakes up in the safe room, “that hurt a lot. Let’s only do that when we really have to, okay?”
Smoker says nothing. Jockey is sitting up in front of them, looking completely healthy, but she can’t get the image of her body just after the attack out of her mind: Jockey lying in the blood-spattered hallway, her ribcage clawed open.
“Thanks for doing that for us,” Hunter says, quietly.
“No problem! I couldn’t let her hurt any of you guys, right?”
That’s right, Smoker realises. Jockey did this to protect them. She might be a little off, but maybe it’s safe for them to keep her around. Maybe it would be best for them all to stick together.
Jockey looks down at her ruined shirt and grimaces. “Aww, I’m gonna need to find new clothes.”
- The Left 4 Dead zombie apocalypse games were released.
- zarla and jazaaboo created some AU female versions of Left 4 Dead zombies.
- zarla and jazaaboo created an AU of the above AU in which the ladies did not in fact become zombies and instead had to fight their way through the zombie apocalypse.
- I wrote the below AU of the above AU of the above AU, in which all of the above and also they have superpowers.
So, yes, this is an AU of an AU of an AU of a game I've never played. This is, I'll confess, a bit ridiculous. But I really love these OCs and wanted to do something with them (well, all right, I did write the Hogwarts AU, but I wanted to involve all four of them this time). I hope I've done them justice.
The government's actions are incredibly implausible here. I don't know how they thought they were going to get away with that.
Title: You Missed 'Superpowers', Pandora (or, alternatively, 'yo dawg I heard you like AUs...')
Fandom: erm, the Left 4 Dead OCs over at respectawoman. Hunter and Smoker belong to zarla, Charger and Jockey to jazaaboo. You can find out more about them on this page.
Rating: R
Wordcount: 6,800
Summary: AU of the survivorverse AU. Shortly before the infection strikes, Hunter, Smoker, Charger and Jockey are caught in a storm with very strange effects. Loosely inspired by Misfits.
Warnings: violence, swearing, the sort of unpleasantness you'd associate with a zombie apocalypse.
“See,” Smoker says, her voice shaking like someone’s just shoved her in a washing machine and put her on a spin cycle, “this is what happens when you go outside.”
Hunter obviously isn’t listening to her, like that’s new. She’s crept out from their shelter under a park bench to examine the hailstone that very nearly took Smoker’s head off a couple of minutes ago. “Wow. Take a look at this.”
Smoker doesn’t need a closer look; she can see from here that it’s the size of a fucking car. She says so.
“Well, you can’t stay like that forever,” Hunter says. “You coming out from under there?”
“Easier said than done,” Smoker mutters.
It takes Smoker a couple of minutes to unfold herself from under the bench with minimal back pain. Hunter watches her, smirking, bouncing a little on her feet as if to show off how annoyingly healthy she is.
“This is awesome,” Hunter says, clambering up to stand on top of the hailstone. “How do you even get weather like this?”
“I don’t know,” Smoker says, “but what I do know is the shock of it’s probably taken ten years off my life. I should get some kind of compensation.”
-
“Hey.” Hunter’s voice on the phone is breathless, excited. “Come outside. I’ve got something to show you.”
“Can’t I just see it out the window?”
“Oh, fine,” Hunter says. “But you’d better watch closely. Go out to the fire escape and look down.”
Smoker, after taking a deliberately long time to pull on a sweater, does so. Hunter waves at her from the pavement - and then she jumps and lands next to her. Five storeys, straight up.
It’s so sudden and there are so many applicable curses that Smoker doesn’t know what she’s about to say until she hears herself exclaim “SHITTING HELLCROW.”
“I can run really fast, too,” Hunter says, beaming.
Smoker is too busy hyperventilating to respond.
-
“It’s amazing,” Hunter says. “I’m gonna be the best parkour artist in history. If you’re nice to me, I’ll give you shares in my autobiography.”
“Doesn’t it take the fun out of it?” Smoker asks. “Being able to park around without any effort?”
“Honestly,” Hunter says, her eyes gleaming, “when you look this cool you don’t care.”
Twenty minutes, and Smoker doesn’t seem any closer to waking up. This has to be a dream. It really doesn’t feel like a dream, but it has to be a dream. It’s the only way this makes any kind of sense.
“Ray’s gonna kill me,” Hunter says in great satisfaction. “He was caught out in the storm as well, and all that happened to him was he got sick.”
“You think the storm did this?” Smoker asks. “Really? You think almost getting killed by giant hailstones gave you superpowers?”
“It’s the kind of thing that happens in movies, right?”
“And it gave you parking superpowers.”
“Parkour.”
“The point is, why would some storm give you powers that fit you perfectly? There were planet-sized hailstones all over town; not like it was localised straight over your head.”
“I don’t know, but it did. You’ve probably got the power to smoke nine cigarettes at once.”
“Hope so,” Smoker says. “After the shock you gave me, I need it.”
-
Smoker cannot smoke nine cigarettes at once. It would be great to be able to do that right now, because Griffin is frustrating enough when he can see and hear her and somehow manages to be even more so when she’s apparently freaking invisible.
What the fuck is going on?
“Where is she?” Sparkles demands. “If she’s gone for another smoking break...”
I’m right here, Smoker growls over their conversation, futilely. I’m trying to do my work, but I can’t get the files I need if you can’t hear me asking for them. If this is a joke, it’s not very fucking funny.
“...find her there,” Griffin is saying. “I don’t see how she can have time to do any real work anyway, always going off with that little Asian dyke-”
Smoker punches him in the face.
And, okay, maybe he can’t hear her or see her, but he can definitely feel that. He shrieks and staggers backward, clutching his nose. It’s a more dramatic reaction than she anticipated the many times she thought about doing that before; she’s never had much of a fist on her, but she guesses the surprise of getting hit by someone you can’t see kind of makes up for that.
“Oh my gosh!” Sparkles exclaims. “What happened?”
“Fuck!” Griffin squeaks, weirdly high-pitched.
A fair part of the annoyance Smoker had with her predicament vanishes. She could do this all day.
-
It’s not long before the government starts trying to interfere with her newly-discovered Griffin-punching powers, of course. Should have seen that one coming.
“Seen the news lately?” Smoker asks, when Hunter inevitably superspeeds her way into her living room uninvited. “The government’s asking everyone who was caught in that storm to report to some building.”
“Why?”
Smoker shrugs, taking a drag of her cigarette. “Say people’ve been getting ‘strange symptoms’ and it’s ‘potentially dangerous’ and we need to go to this place for a free health check-up.”
“Huh.” Hunter considers. “You going?”
“No point. I’ve got a feeling they’re not gonna know what the health side-effects of turning invisible are. And I can tell you your health risks right now: you’re gonna run face-first into a wall sooner or later.”
“You should probably go anyway,” Hunter says. “I mean, if anyone needs a free health check-up, it’s you.”
“Mmm. Good luck dragging me there.”
-
She hasn’t run like this in years, despite her nickname. Charger charges through the corridors, the sound of shouting and doors slamming into walls getting closer behind her.
Her pursuers are younger than she is, and they know the building better, but none of them are running for their lives.
She’s starting to feel lightheaded when she finally sees daylight through a frosted-glass door and slams it open so hard the glass shatters. She’s out on the street, but she’s still not safe; she can’t be sure they won’t follow her out here. Her first thought is to go to the police, but the police might be complicit in this, for all she knows.
Wanted by the government, and David is gone. She can’t go back to the zoo. What does she have left?
She can’t think about this now.
Charger hurries around to the front of the building, hoping they’ll assume she ran straight out into the streets from the side-door. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with the rest of her life; all she can do right now is try to ensure she still has it.
A teenage girl is waiting by the front door, fiddling with her braided hair, humming to herself. No official uniform. She doesn’t look old enough to work here, in any case. Which means...
“Were you in that storm?” Charger asks.
“Uh, yeah,” the girl says. “I’m here for the check-up thing.”
“You’re in danger,” Charger says. “You need to get away from this place.”
The girl looks uncertain, which isn’t really surprising. “Uh...”
She doesn’t want to do this, but there’s no time to explain fully and she needs to act fast. She takes hold of the girl’s wrist. “Trust me.”
The expression of doubt disappears immediately, and when Charger begins running again the girl runs with her.
-
They seem to be safe here. Charger keeps watching the corner of the alley, just in case, but it’s been at least ten minutes and there’s no sign of the people chasing her. If they do appear, she has the gun that she managed to wrest from the guard, so at least they’re not defenceless. She doesn’t want to shoot a human, but if they’re found she might have no choice.
“Uh, Miss,” the girl says from her right.
“Call me Charger.”
“Okay, thanks. I’m Jockey.” She pauses. “Why are we in this place?”
Charger looks over at her. “I’m sorry,” she says, after a moment. “I was being chased; there wasn’t time to explain. We’re here to hide.”
“From what?”
“The health checks are a trick,” Charger says. “They’re killing the people who were caught in the storm.”
Jockey blinks, then laughs. “No, they’re not.”
“It seems unbelievable, I know, but-”
“No,” Jockey says, “you don’t understand. My friend Travis went there yesterday. So they can’t be killing anyone, ’cause he’s fine.”
“He was in the storm?” Charger asks, taken aback. If it’s true, perhaps he knows something. “Have you spoken to him since he went?”
Jockey hesitates.
Travis probably can’t help them, then. Charger has never been good with these situations. “I know it’s probably difficult to take in, but-”
Jockey suddenly starts laughing again, and Charger falls silent, startled. “No, you’ve definitely made a mistake,” Jockey says through her high-pitched giggles. “If they were doin’ anything like that, he’d have gotten away to warn me. And he hasn’t said anything. So he’s fine.”
Charger could say, My husband was just shot in front of me. She doesn’t. “Regardless, you need to stay away from there. Don’t tell anyone you were in that storm.”
“Why?” Jockey asks. “What’s that storm have to do with anything? I mean, if they were doin’... what you said, why would they do that?”
The man who killed David was young and awkward and very upset, almost hyperventilating, desperately trying to explain and apologise before he pulled the trigger. “Some of the people caught in the storm became aggressive,” Charger says. “They turned into mindless killers. And it seemed to be contagious. The government apparently thought the best course of action would be a... cull.”
Zombies was the word he’d used. It sounds impossible, but it wouldn’t be the only impossible thing that’s happened recently.
There’s a wheezing, spluttering sound coming from somewhere behind her.
-
Smoker is trying to get her television to show something more interesting than static when there’s the now-familiar sound of someone pulling themselves through her window. She walks through to meet Hunter, already prepared to make a snide comment, and...
Hunter looks half-dead. She’s curled on the floor, pale and shivering. The sleeve of her sweater is ripped up and covered in something that looks horribly like blood.
“What the heck happened to you?” Smoker demands, helping her to her feet.
Hunter is shaking all over.
“Ray,” she says.
-
So it’s the zombie apocalypse.
Jesus Christ.
“You say he bit you?” Smoker asks, bandaging Hunter’s arm.
Hunter looks away, shivering. “Yeah. I think - I think maybe he killed Jordan. I don’t know. I ran away.”
“How are you feeling?” Smoker asks. “Anything weird? Any-”
“I don’t think I’m sick,” Hunter says, quietly. “I don’t know.”
Smoker doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then, because maybe it’ll be true, she says, “You’re not sick.”
“Smoker,” Hunter says. “It’s happening to everyone. We need to get out of here.”
“Oh, it’s easy as that, is it? And go where?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter says. “Somewhere safe. There’s gotta be somewhere.”
“Where’s gonna be safer than here?” Smoker asks, and that’s when a zombie breaks down her apartment door.
-
Smoker’s car has somehow ended up overturned and on fire, so they need to make a move on foot. Hunter was right: it’s happening to everyone. Everyone is weird and mutated and trying to kill them. There are zombies who try to grab them with their really long tongues and zombies who try to cut them open with their really sharp claws, and surely if this many people have changed this quickly it could happen to them at any moment.
But, so far, it hasn’t.
Smoker shoots down a zombie that’s going for Hunter, just in time. Her aim’s gotten a lot better in just the few hours since they looted the gun store. It’s pretty intensive practice.
“Whoo, that was close,” Hunter says. “Thanks.”
Something’s been bugging Smoker. Well, okay, a lot of things have been bugging Smoker, but this thing in particular is bugging her right now. “You don’t need me here to look out for you,” she says. “You could get away from this whole mess, easy. You’re a lot faster than those things.”
“What, and leave you on your own?” Hunter asks, grinning. She seems less messed up than she did back at Smoker’s apartment this morning; it’s a fucked-up situation they’re in right now, but Smoker guesses it’s a lot less fucked up than what Hunter had to go through with her friends earlier, so maybe having zombies who weren’t once people she loved trying to kill her is a welcome distraction. “You wouldn’t last a second without me.”
“I’ve got a power of my own, y’know. I’m not completely defenceless.”
“You don’t even know how to use it properly! Besides, they can probably smell you. I’d be able to hunt you by smell, all that smoking you do.”
Any clever response Smoker might come up with will have to wait, because she rounds the corner and suddenly there’s a zombie on her head. She stumbles around, barely able to stay upright under its weight - she can’t see, and it’s clawing at her face, cackling wildly, and when she tries to yell she gets a mouthful of bloodied misshapen fingers.
“SMOKER!” Hunter shouts, but it’s cut off halfway through, becomes a strangled sound, and the thing on Smoker’s head is still blocking her view but it sounds like one of the long-tongues has her. So much for Hunter staying behind to protect her. Now they’re both going to die, because they’re both idiots.
There’s a gunshot, and the head-zombie jerks and shrieks. Smoker stumbles, falls to the ground, and the zombie thrashes around on her back until there’s another shot and it goes still.
Smoker crawls out from underneath the zombie-corpse and drags herself into a sitting position just in time to see the thing with its tongue around Hunter’s throat take a shot to the head. Hunter struggles out of its grip and falls to her knees, gasping.
But then who...?
“Are you hurt?”
Smoker turns to see the woman who presumably just saved her life. She’s crouching next to her, holding out a hand. Smoker takes it and allows herself to be helped to her feet, and just for a moment she knows that everything’s going to be all right.
And then the stranger is going over to check on Hunter, and they’re in the middle of the street in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and chances are things aren’t going to be all right at all, actually.
Smoker walks over to where Hunter is dusting herself off and telling their saviour (Smoker can’t keep from smiling when she hears it) thanks, but she could probably have taken him on her own, just so you know, and, by the way, hi, she’s Hunter.
“Charger,” the stranger says. “Are there only the two of you?”
“Nearly two less than that,” Smoker says. “Thanks for the help.”
“It would probably be safer to move in a larger group,” Charger says. “The infected seem good at isolating people and killing them; having more backup could help to avoid situations like the one you just found yourself in.”
Smoker doesn’t think she means it to sound patronising, but she can’t help bristling anyway, and apparently neither can Hunter.
“Well,” Hunter says, “it’s not like we’re two normal people.” And she runs twice around Smoker and Charger, so fast she’s almost impossible to see.
Charger’s eyes widen very slightly. “Were you in that storm?”
Hunter starts. “You know about the storm?”
“You should try not to let others know,” Charger says. “There’s a chance-”
“Hey, Charger,” a voice calls, and Smoker turns to see another stranger coming toward them: a blonde girl, probably a teenager. She’s dressed in a bloodstained yellow shirt and bloodstained white pants, although with everything bloodstained now it hardly seems worth saying so, and she’s holding something that looks a lot like a chainsaw. “Are these your friends?”
“Fellow survivors,” Charger says. “This is Hunter, and...?” She looks over at Smoker.
“Smoker,” Smoker says.
“I’m Jockey!” the girl says cheerfully, dropping the chainsaw to hold out a hand. “Pleased to meetcha!”
Smoker stares. Has this girl not noticed that they’re in the middle of what feels a lot like the end of the world?
“Uh,” Hunter says, “hi.”
“Are we gonna travel together?” Jockey asks, putting her hands in her pockets and bobbing up and down on her feet. “It’d be great to make some new friends. I can’t wait to introduce you all to Travis. I bet you’ll really like him. And he’ll probably like you. I mean, I know I’ve only just met you, but I bet you’re really nice people.”
“Travis is a friend of hers,” Charger says quietly to Smoker. “He’s most likely dead.”
Right. Of course anyone who instantly decided Smoker was a ‘really nice person’ was going to be totally insane.
-
They do all end up travelling together, even though Smoker isn’t totally comfortable with Jockey being there. She seems nice enough; there’s just something... not quite right about her. But Charger’s smart, she knows a lot about staying alive, and, if Smoker’s honest with herself, they probably need her. Seems that Jockey comes as part of the package.
Plus, with someone who knows what they’re doing keeping watch, they can actually get some sleep. Smoker was starting to think they’d die of exhaustion before the zombies got them.
Must be tough on Charger, though. Smoker glances at her as they walk along. Hunter offered to take over the watch last night, but she refused. How is she still on her feet?
“Hey, hey, Hunter!” Jockey sings.
Smoker looks up. There’s a greenish blur leaping from building to building, coming in their direction: Hunter, back from her superspeed scouting mission.
“Did you find the evacuation centre?” Charger asks, as Hunter drops to the ground in front of them.
Hunter shakes her head. “I mean, yeah, but it’s been overrun. Zombies everywhere. The posters are saying we need to go to Mercy Hospital instead.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Smoker says.
“Mercy Hospital isn’t that much farther,” Charger says, beginning to walk on. “We should be able to make it if we stay focused. Good work, Hunter.”
“No problem,” Hunter says, sounding a little brighter than when she brought home the bad news. “D’you want me to-”
Out of nowhere, a hooded zombie pounces Charger to the ground, pins her down, begins to slash at her. Smoker sees the familiar tape around its arms, sees Hunter freeze out of the corner of her eye, and she knows she’s got to deal with this herself. She raises her gun, lines up the sights - gotta be careful, can’t hit her - and-
-and the zombie’s stopped scratching. It’s settling down on Charger’s chest like it’s planning to go to sleep there, making weird little noises, half-growl, half-purr.
“Charger?” Smoker asks, keeping the gun up in case the zombie starts getting dangerous again. “You okay?”
Charger, Smoker sees now, is gripping its wrist tightly with one hand. Not letting go, she uses her other hand to push the zombie off her, carefully but firmly. It growls a little as it’s dislodged, but it doesn’t attack.
“It’s only docile for as long as I’m touching it,” Charger says. Now that the thing’s off her, Smoker can see the bloody lines scored across her shoulder, stark through the rips in her shirt. “You should kill it now.”
“How the heck are you doing that?” Smoker asks.
“We can discuss it later.”
Smoker looks over at Hunter, who is still frozen, staring at the zombie. It looks like there are tears in her eyes.
“Any way we can run instead?” Smoker asks.
“We shouldn’t take chances.”
Which makes sense, but Smoker still feels like a shitbag when she pulls the trigger.
-
They find a room that seems secure to rest for the night. Hunter, who hasn’t said a word since that zombie attacked, goes to curl up a little way apart from the rest of them, ignoring Jockey asking her what she’s doin’ all the way over there.
It feels weird for Smoker, not having the pest pressed into her side. They’ve only had a couple nights on the road so far, but it already feels like having Hunter curled up against her is... the natural order of things, or something.
Better not tell Hunter that.
“So, what, you can calm things down?” Smoker asks Charger quietly, as they listen to the howls and screeches echoing far away, still not far enough. “How’d you find that out?”
“My husband and I had a zoo,” Charger says. “I noticed that the animals seemed easier to handle after the storm, even before we found out that David could speak to them. And then David... David told me that he felt safe when I touched him.”
She’s not looking at her. Smoker knows better than to ask where David is now.
-
“Hey,” Hunter says, suddenly. “Can you hear crying?”
Smoker listens. Now that Hunter mentions it, she can hear sobbing coming from somewhere. It sounds like a woman. “You think someone’s alive around here?”
“I think it’s coming from...” Hunter creeps around a corner. “Yeah, there she is.”
Smoker walks over to her, followed by Charger and Jockey. Hunter is standing at one end of a narrow side-street, and at the other, curled up on the ground, is what looks like a young woman, crying loudly.
“She’s infected,” Charger says. “We shouldn’t get close.”
Smoker looks over at her. Charger has her rifle raised; she’s looking through the scope.
“Are you sure?” Hunter asks. “Most of the zombies come straight for us.”
“It might be that she just hasn’t noticed us yet,” Charger says, passing the rifle to Hunter. “Look at her through this.”
Hunter lifts the rifle and looks through the scope, frowning.
“Look at her hands,” Charger says.
Hunter draws in a sharp breath. “Okay, she’s definitely infected. Should I shoot?”
“But shouldn’t we find out why she’s crying?” Jockey asks.
“I haven’t seen this type of mutation before,” Charger says. “We don’t know how she might attack. It’s probably best not to engage her if we don’t have to.”
“I wish we knew more about these things,” Smoker growls. “Right now, we see a new one, we don’t have a clue what it’s gonna do until it spits acid on us or tries to strangle us with its tongue.”
For a moment, Charger seems about to speak. When Smoker and the others look at her, she hesitates, then says, “I know where we might be able to find information.”
“Where?” Hunter asks.
“It would require some backtracking,” Charger says. “And it could be very dangerous. We need to leave the decision of whether to investigate up to Smoker.”
Oh, Smoker doesn’t like the sound of this. “Why me?”
-
The place Charger leads them to is a big building with a government logo and no windows, surrounded by what Smoker would conservatively describe as a fuckload of zombies. It takes what Smoker would equally conservatively describe as a goddamn year to clear them out, even with Hunter flashing around at high speed to confuse them.
“Hey,” Smoker says, reloading and taking out the last couple of threats, “this the place we were meant to come if we got hit by that storm?”
“Yes,” Charger says. “It was a trap. They thought there was a link between the storm and the infection; they were trying to cut it off at the source.”
There is a pause.
“Cut it off how?” Hunter asks. She sounds a little uncomfortable.
Charger says nothing.
“Christ,” Smoker mutters. Then, “Wait, do you think the people at the evac will be in on this?”
“I don’t know,” Charger says. “But for now, going there and hiding that we were in the storm seems to be our best option. If they attack us, we’ll have to find another way.”
Great. Smoker had been thinking in terms of ‘get to the evac, get out of here’; it hadn’t occurred to her that they might have to contend with non-zombies trying to kill them.
“It’s unlikely that anyone will still be working here,” Charger says, “but it’s possible, which is why Smoker is the most logical choice to investigate; she won’t be seen. The corridors are very narrow, which means one person with a gun has a tactical advantage over the zombies - they can only come at you from two sides, and you can shoot them before they’re close enough to attack - but it also means that we can’t all move in to cover you; we’d end up shooting each other.”
“What,” Smoker says, “you think they might have some research on the infection in there?”
“It’s possible,” Charger says. “I don’t know whether there was any real research here, but I hope there’s something that might help us.”
“Okay,” Smoker says. “I’ll go in.”
“Me too,” Jockey says, immediately. “Maybe Travis is still in there.”
Oh, Jesus, no. Smoker gives Charger a desperate look. Don’t make me go in there with Little Miss Crazycakes.
“You could be seen,” Charger explains to Jockey. “You’d be putting both of you in danger. And we need you out here in case there’s another attack.”
“I don’t think Travis is there, Jockey,” Hunter says, gently.
Jockey looks downcast for a moment, then brightens up again. “If you see Travis, can you tell him I’m out here?” she asks Smoker. “I know he’ll want to see me again. Maybe you could...” She looks around, then darts over to the nearest house and vaults over the low wall surrounding its front lawn. A moment later, she returns with a handful of daisies. “Can you give him these?”
Smoker hates this. She never knows what to say with Jockey. “I guess.”
It takes her another half-hour to actually manage to turn invisible. She’s crap at this.
-
Hunter is getting frantic, hopping back and forth in a high-speed blur and asking whether they shouldn’t go in to look for her now, when Smoker manages to reappear.
“Fucking finally,” she exclaims. She really needs to learn how to control this invisibility thing better. “I’ve been out of there for ten minutes.”
Hunter’s expression of relief immediately changes to embarrassment and anger. “Why didn’t you touch one of us or something? You can’t just stand there and watch me thinking you’ve died!”
“Because you would have shot me,” Smoker explains, quite reasonably. A group of jumpy people with guns, fighting for their lives; she’s not about to creep up to them when they can’t see her and tap them on the shoulder.
“Did you manage to find anything out?” Charger asks.
“A little,” Smoker says. “They’ve got some notes on the different zombie types and how they’re all gonna try to kill us. The one that took out my door’s called a Tank; that one’s a whole pile of laughs. The crying one we saw is a Witch, and it’s a good thing we didn’t get too close; you’ve gotta be real careful around those. You won’t believe what they’ve named some of the others.”
“Did you find if there was really a link between the infection and the storm?” Hunter asks. “I mean, are we gonna...?”
“Most people who were out in the storm got infected,” Smoker says. “I mean, that’s what the documents say; maybe they were just trying to make excuses in case someone found out what they were doing. But it looks like they were starting to think people who got other effects were immune.”
Which sounds like good news to her - she was already suspecting they were immune, but if the government knows it they’re less likely to be shot on sight when they make it to the evac, which is something that’s been nagging at her since Charger told them what this building was used for - but Charger practically visibly flinches, looking away.
“So we’re safe?” Hunter asks.
“Oh, yeah. Never been safer. We can stop running away from the bloodthirsty zombies now and start inviting them round for tea.”
“Ha ha ha. I mean we’re not gonna change, right?”
This is where things get tricky. Smoker looks over at Jockey. She’s sitting on the remains of a smashed-up truck, swinging her legs and singing to herself, off in her own little crazy world.
Charger knows what she’s getting at, of course. “You and Smoker and I all have our... abilities,” she explains to Hunter, quiet enough so Jockey probably can’t hear. Smoker’s not sure it’d make any difference if she could hear every word; nothing seems to get through to that girl. “We don’t know what effect the storm had on Jockey, if any.”
There is a pause.
“But she’s gotta be immune, right?” Hunter asks. “I mean, it’s been a couple weeks since the storm.”
“Did you find any information on the onset of infection, Smoker?” Charger asks.
Smoker shakes her head. “Not much. Some people who were in the storm got symptoms straight away, some took a few days or a week, or more. And obviously folks who weren’t in the storm can catch it from other infected people.” She instinctively tries to take a pull on her cigarette, realises it’s the pen she used to write notes from the research on her arm, drops it as she fumbles for her Marlboros. “That’s probably all we’re getting. I’m pretty sure no one in there’s still doing research.”
She takes a long, deep drag, and blows out the stream of smoke as slow as she can manage, and then she says, quiet, “So what do we do about her?”
“We protect her,” Charger says.
“And what if she starts trying to eat us?”
Charger hesitates. “Then we’ll have to protect ourselves,” she says. “With luck, it won’t come to that, but we need to be prepared for the possibility.”
-
Smoker knows something’s wrong before the others even get back to the safe room. They’ve been away too long; it doesn’t take that much time to scout the area. All she can do is sit and wait and hope they come back in one piece; if she goes out to find them on her own, she’ll be torn apart in seconds.
Eventually, the door opens. Smoker leaps to her feet. Maybe they’re okay. Maybe Jockey has finally gone off the deep end and shot them both and come back for her. Maybe-
Hunter, blood-flecked and sweaterless and looking ill, walks in with something in her arms.
It’s Jockey. She’s twitching and shifting restlessly, mumbling to herself. There’s blood everywhere.
“Jesus,” Smoker says. “Is she-”
“It was a Witch,” Charger says, slamming the door shut. “Do we have any bandages left?”
“I think we used the last of them,” Smoker says. “Still got some antiseptic, if that’ll - I mean, do you think...?”
“We’ll just have to try,” Charger says, holding out her hand. There’s a waver to her voice that Smoker has never heard there before. “Give me the first-aid kit.”
Smoker passes her the kit as Hunter sets Jockey down on the pile of blankets, very gently. Jockey opens her eyes, sees Smoker and smiles as if she’s not losing enough blood to fill a swimming pool. “Hi, Smoker, hi,” she says.
Her eyes look weird, too bright, like she’s on the edge of tears.
God, this can’t be happening.
Charger works in silence for a few minutes, while Jockey giggles vaguely and fiddles with her braid and talks to herself. Hunter walks over to Smoker and wraps herself around her arm.
“That’s all I can do,” Charger says eventually, quietly. “It might not be enough.”
There’s a silence. Hunter goes to curl up on the floor next to Jockey, presses herself against Jockey’s shoulder. “But she might be okay, right?” she asks.
Charger takes a deep breath. “Jockey, do you understand what’s happening?”
Jockey bursts into high-pitched, uncontrolled laughter. Somewhere in the middle it turns into a coughing fit. “I’m not scared,” she manages. Hunter’s sweater is soaked through with blood where it’s tied around her stomach. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Jockey,” Charger says, “you need to stay still.”
“It’s fine.” She’s shaking all over. “I’m gonna see Travis again, and - and - I can’t rem... and Jordan and David, and all our friends, and I’ll show them where you guys are, and we’ll all be together again. You’ll see.”
Jockey’s stopped looking at them. She doesn’t seem to be looking at anything. She’s gazing vacantly at some point somewhere to the right of Smoker, her eyes glassy.
“I can’t-” she begins to say, and then her entire body spasms and she gives out a little cry of pain. “I’m not scared. I’m not - it’s gonna be fine.”
Charger breathes for a moment, then takes hold of Jockey’s hand. The shivering subsides, and Jockey looks up at her with wide, trusting eyes.
“Hey,” Hunter says, shifting uncomfortably. “I don’t know... should you be doing that?”
Charger is silent for a long moment, and then she says, “I don’t know.”
Smoker turns away and lights up, because that’s going to fucking help. She can’t be here. She-
-and then she feels herself disappearing, and fuck.
It takes a moment for Hunter to notice, and the moment she does she’s furious. “Smoker!” she shouts, leaping to her feet. “Jockey’s - she’s - you have to be here, you can’t just disappear, how can you-”
I didn’t want to, Smoker snarls, trying to become visible again, but it’s no use and she knows that Hunter can’t hear her.
Charger is the only one watching when Jockey dies.
-
They can’t bury her - they’d be out in the open to dig, it’s too risky - but Hunter wants to have some kind of goodbye to Jockey, something more than just leaving her there, so she breaks into a furniture store to steal a white sheet. Smoker provides covering fire and tries not to think about anything.
Charger meets them at the safe-room door.
“Her wounds are gone,” she says.
“What?” Smoker asks.
“Jockey,” Charger says. “While I was watching, her wounds just... healed.”
Hunter freezes. “Is she still...?”
“I’m sorry,” Charger says, “yes. I don’t know what it means. It might have-”
And then there’s a groan from further inside the room, and Smoker hasn’t finished having a heart-attack when Jockey wanders into view.
“Hey, guys,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “What’s up?”
-
“Y’see,” Jockey says happily, when they’ve explained what happened to her, or at least what little of it they understand, “I knew it.”
Smoker raises her eyebrows. “You knew you were gonna come back to life? Because that’s the kind of thing it would’ve been good for the rest of us to know in advance.”
“I mean I knew our friends would be okay.”
“Did you see them?” Charger asks, immediately.
“No,” Jockey says. “But if I came back, they must be okay. Right?”
There is an uncomfortable pause.
“You know, she could be right,” Hunter says.
Smoker turns to look at her.
“Maybe all the immune people are like this,” Hunter suggests. “Maybe none of us can die.”
“No,” Charger says, without a hint of doubt.
Hunter doesn’t suggest it again.
-
The good news is they’ve got Jockey back. She’s alive, singing and laughing and giving them covering fire. Smoker hadn’t realised it before, but Jockey does lighten the mood. Sometimes. When she’s not bringing it through the floor by assuring Hunter and Charger that everyone’s alive, really, they’ll see all their friends again soon.
The bad news is they’ve got Jockey back and she seems even more unhinged than before. Not that Smoker isn’t more relieved than she’d ever have expected herself to be to see her again, but that’s all they need. And now she’s got evidence for her crazy delusions, what the fuck.
So maybe it’d be best if they left her to find her own way out of here. Jockey’s alive, and that’s great, but maybe she should be alive somewhere else. Not like she needs protection, and Smoker can’t shake the feeling she’s going to fill them all with lead one day because it’s all a game, right? Nobody ever dies; everyone’s fine, right?
“She’s immortal,” Smoker says privately to Charger. Up ahead, Jockey throws a Molotov at a group of zombies and then yelps at the fireball, as if she somehow wasn’t expecting it. “She doesn’t need us. And she’s as nutty as a bag of nuts.”
“There are more reasons to move in a group than staying alive,” Charger says. “She needs someone to keep her grounded.”
Smoker can’t hold back a shudder at the thought of Jockey wandering around a ruined world forever, immortal, calling for Travis. Still... “She’s a long way past grounding, if you ask me. Hunter tells me the reason she got killed in the first place was she was trying to stop a Witch crying.”
“And we need her,” Charger says. “The more of us there are, the smaller the chances that we’ll find ourselves in a situation where none of us can help the others. This isn’t up for discussion.”
-
“Oh my God, this is horrible,” Hunter whispers.
“There’s no other way through,” Charger says, but she looks shaken.
“Hey!” Jockey calls, darting back and forth near the sobbing figure curled up on the ground. “Hey! Crybaby! Hey! Come over here!”
“Are you sure she knows what she’s doing?” Hunter asks, twisting the shredded remains of her left sleeve between her fingers.
“She was the one who came up with this plan,” Charger says. “We have to trust that she does.”
“I could do it instead,” Hunter says. “I can run; it’d never catch me. I don’t think we should-”
The Witch bursts into a shriek and rushes at Jockey. She barely has time to cry out before she’s knocked to the ground.
Smoker looks away, but the noises are still enough to make her throw up.
-
“Wow,” Jockey says when she wakes up in the safe room, “that hurt a lot. Let’s only do that when we really have to, okay?”
Smoker says nothing. Jockey is sitting up in front of them, looking completely healthy, but she can’t get the image of her body just after the attack out of her mind: Jockey lying in the blood-spattered hallway, her ribcage clawed open.
“Thanks for doing that for us,” Hunter says, quietly.
“No problem! I couldn’t let her hurt any of you guys, right?”
That’s right, Smoker realises. Jockey did this to protect them. She might be a little off, but maybe it’s safe for them to keep her around. Maybe it would be best for them all to stick together.
Jockey looks down at her ruined shirt and grimaces. “Aww, I’m gonna need to find new clothes.”