Christmas Eve fic!!!
Title: Braaaaaaains
Fandom: Veronica Mars
Pairing: Veronica/Logan I guess
Rating: Some language, a lotta violence
Summary: Zombies invade Neptune. Things are always serious until the crack starts kicking in.
Notes: This is for flinkkamingo3. Merry Christmas!
Disclaimer: I don’t own the characters, etc, just using them for fun…
The day Logan woke up with Veronica spooning him, one scrawny arm slung over his torso, he knew the world just wasn’t right. Of course, it might’ve been from the yellow pus seeping down his abdomen, too.
Logan twisted sharply in bed and cried out in disgust. But not even the sound of his skin slapping against the cherry wood headboard woke Veronica. She looked dead. She looked more than dead.
“Oh, God, Veronica…”
Logan slowly reached out for the offending arm, his mouth hanging just slightly open in concentration. With frozen fingertips-why were they so cold?-he grazed the small amount of pure, soft skin left on Veronica’s now purple and disfigured arm. What happened? How had it gotten this way?
It was an open wound, a seething gash that had originally been just a bruise. It repulsed him at the same time it forced his eyes to stay on it. His hand even was drawn to it. It hovered over the gash, amazed that the wound stretched the length of Veronica’s entire forearm. Every time he remembered that it had been clutching him for who knew how long, he shivered and grimaced.
But the biting memories of Lilly and his mom and his good-for-nothing dad shook him harder. Veronica didn’t look like she was breathing.
“Veronica!” he shouted. He shook her shoulders, trying to wake her up. She still didn’t move.
Logan looked up, brow furrowed and eyes starting to well with tears, but there stood in the doorway to his bedroom no parents, no paramedic, no concierge, even. Just empty air whispering death to him, whispering to him because he’d killed Veronica Mars, the only person left in the world by some spiteful deity to love him. Now she was gone. She was ash and a windy funeral like the rest of them.
So Logan shook harder because he hated funerals and he hated paparazzi and he hated being in tabloids and people would say it was his nature to get in trouble or his typical, spoiled, rich-boy feelings of entitlement, but really it wasn’t his nature or a Trina-like need to be in the spotlight. It was God, it was nature, it was someone just pissed off at him from the moment he’d been born. It wasn’t his fault. Bad things happened to Logan Echolls because in some other fucked up lives he’d murdered John the Baptist and started the War of the Roses and stood at Hitler’s right-hand side. Who the hell would want a life like his?
“Veronica, come on,” he growled, still shaking her. “Come on!”
Veronica’s eyes shot open and her disfigured hand flew to Logan’s neck. She grasped him tightly as she stared at the wound, the tension in her brow telling him that, most of all, she was confused. Then the sun rose in her eyes, the great doors opened, and the equation was solved. She realized what was wrong.
“How dare you,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. The tremors traveled through her chest and down her arm until Logan’s neck vibrated with her anger. “I knew it! I knew you slept with Paris Hilton!”
“Veronica-”
“You gave me a zombie STD!”
Veronica gasped at her own words and then flung Logan off the bed and onto the hard floor. He scrambled to get up when he thought he saw her lunge at him, but she only sat on the bed, sobbing softly into Logan’s pillow splayed across her lap. Pus still dripped out of her wound. The arm looked ready to fall off.
“Veronica, listen to me,” Logan said as he clumsily pulled on his boxers. You’re not a zombie. It’s just an infection. We’ll get you to the hospital-”
“No!” Veronica screamed. She threw the disgusting pillow at him and stared blankly at her arm. “Why?” she whispered. “Why do I crave-”
“Veronica,” Logan said softly, hopefully soothingly. He began to approach the disaster zone of a bed cautiously now. Veronica had a fever. She had to have a fever. Logan would get her to the hospital and the doctors would give her antibiotics and a sitz bath or whatever was needed to cure her. But if she didn’t stop freaking out, he’d never be able to convince her to go.
“I can feel it,” she moaned with her face buried in her arms and knees.
“What is it?” he asked sympathetically. He was almost to the bed.
“You did this to me, Logan. You…” She then cried out and twisted around just as sharply. Logan managed to catch her, but as he was soothing her, softly rubbing her shoulder, he felt a wetness on the skin of his legs. When he gently pushed Veronica up into a sitting position, a jagged strip of wet soaking through her t-shirt glared up at him. Another wound. He almost choked on his words.
“Oh, jeez, Veronica, we gotta get you help. This is…” His words disappeared as he pulled the hem of her t-shirt up to exam the wound. Veronica let him only because she wasn’t moving on her own, but when Logan again began to make a big deal out of taking her to the hospital, she turned around and shoved him hard against the headboard.
“Dooon’t,” she cried raggedly. She looked like she was having trouble with her words. Her bright eyes were wet and big and petrified, but she couldn’t let go of Logan even when he screamed at her that she was crushing his collarbone.
“I can’t…” she said as if she were talking about something else entirely. Her eyes were far away, thinking about the past or her dad or the girl that looked and acted like Paris Hilton.
Logan was rapidly losing breath. “Veronica!” he gasped. “Let go of me. You’re-”
“Dead,” she finished for him.
Like a girl awaking to find herself in an old woman’s body, Veronica’s eyes scanned over her decaying form as she continued to hold Logan against the headboard. The purple and green bruises from her arm also stretched over her stomach and her thighs and even the backs of her calves. Another open wound on the side of her left thigh glistened, and the air against the one on her back aggravated her further. She could feel something foreign, something more than a temper rising inside of her.
When the petrified feelings died and when she saw them in Logan’s wide eyes, she grew even angrier. She wanted them, the eyes, and what lied behind them. And her fingers, they were small and thin, her nails sharp, her strength immeasurable.
Her head tilted slightly when she pinpointed her craving.
“Braaaaaaains,” she said hungrily.
***
“Mac!” Wallace yelled not quite at the top of his lungs. He still had five minutes before the first bell rang, but it was a long hallway with a lot of Neptune High packed inside of it.
Mac didn’t hear him. She was too busy trying not to be grossed out at Beaver’s sweaty hands, probably also trying to convince herself that he was worth it.
Wallace shook his head and pushed through Madison Sinclair and her posse before stopping short in front of the PCHers.
Weevil turned around and tried to look amused, though his skin was paler and sweatier than normal. “Hey, where’s the fire-”
“Weevil, man, I gotta talk to Mac.”
Weevil shoved Wallace’s chest lightly, almost teasingly as he ignored the interruption. “Hold up there, Michael Johnson, I need to talk to Veronica. Where’s she at?”
“That’s what I need to talk to Mac about. No one’s seen her.”
A dark looked passed onto Weevil’s features and he said, “Oh, yeah? She was with Logan last night. You find Logan and you find-no, wait. On second thought, I’ll find Logan.”
“Yeah, you can find Logan,” Wallace said with an annoyed nod of his head. “At the morgue. Police found him dead in his hotel room this morning. And no Veronica.”
“So you’re sayin’ someone’s got her?”
“I don’t know what to think. I just wanna know if she’s checked in with Mac.”
Wallace pushed past a stunned Weevil and then hurried down the emptying hall after Mac. She and Beaver had turned and moved even further down the hall so that Mac was saying goodbye to Beaver in front of the computer lab by the time Wallace caught sight of them.
“Mac!” he yelled. The hallway was almost empty now. “Mac, wait up!”
When he reached them, he ignored Beaver’s annoyed look and started speaking rapidly. “Mac, the police found Logan dead in his hotel room and he was with Veronica and now she’s gone and no one knows where she is and has she talked to you?”
Mac, her face blank, shook her head. “W-wait. Logan is… dead?”
Wallace grimaced as he said, “Yeah, his whole… head was ripped open and his… his brains were gone. He-”
“Whoa, wait,” Beaver interrupted. “His brains were gone? Like they were eaten?”
“Dude, I don’t know what you do with brains after you steal them.”
“You mean like zombies?” Mac added helpfully.
“Yeah,” said Beaver, nodding. “Zombies, or Hannibal Lecter, but he’s not…”
“Don’t say real. None of them are real. Why am I the only one who thinks Liam Fitzpatrick did this?” Wallace angrily asked the air. “He’s psychotic enough to do it. Imagine where Veronica is now ‘cause we’re just standing here arguing about zombies!”
“No, no, she’s the zombie,” said Beaver. “Veronica is definitely the zombie.”
“No, she isn’t. And you can’t even know that. She-”
“Wallace, turn around,” Beaver and Mac said simultaneously.
Wallace froze. His anxious eyes flitted from Mac’s to Beaver’s, but their eyes were focused only on whoever was dragging their feet down the empty hallway behind him.
Wallace turned around slowly. He tried to prepare himself for whatever he was about to see. He tried to imagine security dogs sniffing out cocaine in his locker or Lucky slowly mopping up some kid’s puke. That definitely didn’t prepare him for the sight of Veronica and part of the Fitzpatrick family slowly marching toward him, some of them moaning “Braaaaaaains,” and others just looking starved to death. He tried to be prepared, and now his feet were as frozen as his shocked face.
“Time for me to leave!” Beaver cried. He ran down the hall without Mac, who stood stupefied next to Wallace.
“Wallace, what’s happening?”
“I… I think Beaver was right.”
“Are they going to eat our brains?”
“…Yeah. I think they are.”
Wallace grabbed Mac, prepared to turn and bolt, but a cold, slimy hand fell on his shoulder and Liam shoved him against a nearby stretch of lockers.
“BRAAAAAAAINS!”
Wallace screamed and struggled against the zombie Liam, but more hungry zombies surrounded him and tore at his yellow t-shirt and his hair until they completely engulfed him in a zombie dog pile. He cried for help, he cried in pain, he cried when he felt his own blood dripping down his neck, but despite the commotion coming from outside the zombie free-for-all, Wallace could barely even see.
“Mac!” he screamed.
“Wallace!” she cried. “I think I found Logan!”
“What?!”
“He’s a zombie! And he and Veronica are, ew, trying to eat each other’s brains!”
“He doesn’t have any more brains! She ate them all!”
“Maybe that’s a zombie’s way of making out! They’re together even in death. Ouch, get off of me, you pervert.”
“Mac? MAC!” Wallace still couldn’t see anything. The zombies wouldn’t get off and they kept trying to rip his hair out, but he could hear a lot of moaning and punching.
“No!” he cried. “That’s not angsty! They can’t be together in the end! It would ruin everythiiiiiiiing! …And why aren’t you being eaten like me?!”
“Oh, I gave them Beaver.”
That was pretty smart, thought Wallace. He pretty much kept thinking that until he died and became a zombie. When all the other zombies realized he was dead, they started after Mac.
Wallace got up and tried to remember the last thing he was thinking when he died. All he could come up with was braaaaaaains, so he said it out loud and started swaying toward Mac. Except she was suddenly surrounded by men in black suits with gleaming shades and pointed pistols, pistols that started plunging bullets into decaying zombie skin.
One of the men in black turned to Mac and asked, “Cindy Mackenzie? We’re with the government. We’ve been assigned to save any and all assets in Neptune that might one day be of use to the CIA. You’re status as a ‘computer nerd’ has earned you a spot on our ‘Do Not Kill’ list. You’re going to have to come with us to Washington now where you’ll be assigned the status of ‘Q’ to one of our agents.”
Mac stared blankly at the man until the shooting started up again. Her jaw almost unhinged itself when she saw a dead Aaron Echolls growling “Braaaaaaains” as he walked wavering down the hall towards her, half his face blown off.
“Um, Mr. Government Guy? Why is Aaron Echolls lurching toward me and hungrily reaching out for my brains?” she asked her new friend.
“Oh, yes, we’ve been monitoring the actions of Paris Hilton for some time now and we’ve managed to conclude that she is the sole source of all this chaos. Seeing as Aaron Echolls slept with any and all loose women in sight, he managed to contract a dormant strain of zombiencephalitis, which has only recently become active. Lilly Kane was just gunned down near Mr. Echolls’ grave. Who knows what other arrogant actors and corrupt politicians are rising from their graves right this moment?”
“You mean like Woody Goodman?”
“Yes, he might also have gotten zombiencephalitis from Aaron Echolls.”
Mac nodded. In addition to a giant zombie invasion, the prospect of becoming a true “Q”-even if it wasn’t to Veronica’s “Bond”-excited her. It was time to get the hell out of Neptune.
“Bye zombie Wallace,” she said cheerfully as the five government agents whisked her away. “You know how it is: live and let die, die another day, from Russia with love, license to kill, the world is not enough… I could go on.”
***
Keith stretched once and then slowly rubbed a sore muscle in his back. He would have to stop falling asleep during stakeouts. He realized he was getting old, but to keep relying on Veronica for things that used to be so simple…
He started a pot of coffee and then realized how late it really was.
“Hmm,” he murmured. “I guess I should be at the office right now…”
So he showered, dressed, ate, and did everything Keith normally did in the mornings. Then, right before he left, he grabbed his pistol and left his place with an odd feeling.
It didn’t take him long to realize that something was up in Neptune. One didn’t become a sheriff (and then lose the job) through ignoring one’s intuition. But was it really intuition when half the buildings in Neptune were burning? It could only mean one thing: zombiencephalitis.
Keith gunned the engine of his old car and sped off toward the edge of town, grimacing when the car wouldn’t go over one hundred and ten and then when too many abandoned cars littered the highway.
“Come on, come on,” he growled. Then he saw the sign, the beautiful “City Limits” sign. And he smiled at what sat sobbing underneath it.
Keith pulled over ten yards away from the crooked sign and got out. He walked slowly and languidly toward the sobbing figure underneath it until he was too close to ignore.
“This is… this is all my fault,” sobbed Duncan Kane.
Keith stared at him. Then he reached into his coat.
“I’ll give you something to cry about, you son of a bitch.”
Keith shot Duncan in the head and then drove off into the distance.
The End