[Psych fic] Zombie Apocalypse! Pt. 1
Disclaimer: The television show 'Psych' and the characters of 'Psych' are not mine. This story intends no copyright infringement.
I'm Psychic, But No One Believes Me when I Say the Zombie Apocalypse is at Hand
0.
So, once upon a time Shawn made a side trip to Haiti. It was during his ‘traveler of the world’ phase, where he was trying to set foot on every continent the Earth had to offer at least once. Haiti hadn’t exactly been in his plans, but the glorious thing about being Shawn Spencer was that his plans were perpetually flexible, if they even existed at all.
While he was in Haiti, he ran into a few bad scenes. Typically enough he managed to charm his way out of them - played the ‘wide-eyed clueless tourist’ to the hilt - yet still managed to notice that some of the people who wandered around in the dark corners of the bars and storefronts weren’t quite right.
They shuffled rather than walked; their eyes were curiously flat and unseeing; they never spoke except for in a mumbling stream of sound that resembled no language Shawn had ever come across. It was as if they were sleepwalkers, or brainwashed, or dead.
“All of the above,” his chosen Gus of the week told him. (Shawn had a tradition where, once he had decided he was going to stay in one spot for longer than a day, he would pick out of his random acquaintances someone to be Gus - someone predictable and reliable and in need of adventure, someone who would put up with Shawn’s off-the-rails spontaneous approach to life, who would gripe and complain but actually enjoy the insanity of it.) His chosen Gus of the week was a native Haitian who was studying abroad at Berkeley, making a trip back home. His name was, improbably enough, Bob. “The bokor, spirit master, whatever you want to call him - he has ways of enslaving people. Sometimes dead people, sometimes living people who fall under his sway. So they are like sleepwalkers, or the brainwashed, or the dead.”
“Huh,” Shawn replied. He hadn’t thought Bob would be quite so superstitious. Though that did sort of fit in with the whole criteria of what it took to be a stand-in Gus, given Gus was gullible and still believed in ghosts.
Shawn made a mental note of the particular glaze in the sleepwalkers’ eyes, stored it away in his memory, and enjoyed the island party life.
Four years later Shawn sees that same look in the eyes of the latest murderer arrested by Santa Barbara’s finest. Well, damn, he thinks to himself. The case just got a hell of a lot more interesting.
1.
After Shawn called a dinosaur as a murder weapon and was actually right, he’d thought there’d be just a smidgeon more trust in his (fake) psychic abilities. But when he stumbles into Chief Vick’s office and mumbles, “Braiiiiiiiiiiins,” no one takes him seriously.
“No, really,” he insists. “Zombies!”
Chief Vick doesn’t say anything. She just points to the door.
2.
At the Psych office, Shawn brainstorms by drawing various cartoon zombies on scraps of paper, balling the scraps together, and throwing them at Gus’s head. Gus’s protests to the contrary, he really does have a big head, which makes aiming for it particularly easy.
Eventually Gus gets fed up of this. He closes his laptop, huffs, and stands. “If you’re not going to do anything productive today, then I need to hit at least two of the stops on my route.”
Shawn is about to launch into a spiel about how his genius cannot be rushed, it is a process, when he spots something outside the front windows. His interest captured, he says, vaguely, “Yes, right, sure, go.”
He is peripherally aware of the strange look Gus throws at him. But Gus still turns to leave, pausing when Shawn calls after him - “Hey, movie night tonight? My place. You bring the popcorn, I’ll bring the pineapple.”
Shawn can practically feel Gus considering whether or not he should participate in a Shawn Spencer movie night - the last time hadn’t ended so well, culminating in an early morning trip to the Emergency room followed by getting lost in the lower levels of the hospital and stumbling into the refrigeration units where they kept the recently dead - yet Gus remains, as ever, an optimistically trusting fool.
“No horror,” Gus says. “I mean it, Shawn. Horror movies are off the line up. Forever.”
Shawn nods, not taking his gaze off the front windows. “Got it,” he says. “No horror.” The Romero movies are for research purposes, not horror. And the Resident Evil ones are for hotness, because Milla Jovovich? Smoking.
3.
What has captured Shawn’s interest outside is a certain stumbling individual, shambling along, eyes that particular flat shade that he has seen only a handful of times before.
“Hmm,” Shawn says to himself, and grabs his keys, and locks the Psych Agency Office up after him as he leaves.
4.
He follows the man into a restaurant, one that is neither too exclusive nor too cheap - middle of the line, nice, dressy-casual. It has cloth table covers and candles on its counters, but the flowers are fake - that sort of place - and Shawn feels a prickle of dread tingle up his spine.
He rushes in after the man and catches him just as he is about to attack a young couple, knife raised in one hand, face eerily blank.
The knife goes wild as the man fights back.
Shawn feels the blade of it slide into the side of his neck. Blood spray splashes against the man’s face - Shawn absentmindedly notes the exact pattern, stores it in his brain in that involuntary fashion he has had trained into him and never managed to ignore - and the man collapses, as if he were a puppet and his strings have just been cut. The knife clatters to the ground. Shawn’s arms are full of deadweight man, which he lets go of to clap both hands to his neck wound.
Oh God, he thinks. Did - is this - oh god, did he get my carotid?
5.
Five hours later, Shawn has the opportunity to reflect that hospital room ceilings are always the same. It does not matter the room, the state, the country - the ceilings are always exactly the same.
What is also always exactly the same ---
“Oh my God you idiot.”
---- Gus, freaking out.
Shawn smiles. He says, voice slightly slurred from the pain meds, “Hey, do you think they’ll let us have a movie night in here? You can have half my hospital bed.”
Gus glares at him and stalks off, probably to call Shawn’s dad or something else equally lame.
So it turns out his carotid was not in fact nicked. Because that would have resulted in one very dead Shawn. No - he is sliced very haphazardly, in a way that produced an initially terrifying amount of blood, but actually managed to avoid all the major danger zones in the neck - of which there are many.
Sometimes Shawn thinks he must have been born under a lucky star, because that is the only thing that explains him.
And then he remembers that his father is Henry Spencer. Which rules luck right out, but perhaps the universe is inherently benevolent after all, and all of the good fortune it throws Shawn’s way is tacit apology for having been raised by such a man.
6.
The next morning he is released. His neck is heavily bandaged, but at least he can still turn his head. And Gus was kind to him, acknowledged that having Henry around would make Shawn feel worse overall, and didn’t call the curmudgeon, not even just to let him know that Shawn had been hospitalized. Shawn doesn’t always appreciate how Gus always puts him first, even when Gus gripes and groans and complains about it - but he does this time, makes a silent promise to himself to let up on driving Gus insane for at least a week. Well, a weekend.
Given that Shawn is a known entity to the police station, they declined to question him while he was hospitalized, requesting instead that he come in to give his statement. Shawn insists this be the first stop, even before his own apartment - Gus sighs, and goes along with him.
(Shawn has multiple reasons for wanting to go to the police station right away.
The first reason is he wants to break out his zombie act for Chief Vick, again.
The second reason is he wants to find out about the man who so nearly killed him.
The third reason is today is Thursday, and Lassiter always goes to a little corner coffee shop for lunch on Thursdays, coming back in with a grande mocha latte and a chocolate brownie - and Shawn fully intends on stealing both.
The fourth reason is that he is highly aware that he looks utterly pathetic, pale and shaking, on the verge of collapse - and that this will probably earn him significant sympathy points from Jules.)
7.
“Zombies,” Shawn insists. “Zombies!”
Chief Vick is no more willing to listen than before. She says, “Thank you for your help, Mr. Spencer, Mr. Guster.” And then inclines her head toward the door.
Shawn huffs on his way out.
8.
While munching on Lassy’s brownie and drinking Lassy’s coffee, Shawn reflects that convincing Chief Vick of his zombie hypothesis will probably take more proof than he currently has. Yet, still - she should believe him by now! He’s never wrong! He has a 100% solve rate! Where is the trust?
A hand grabs him by the shoulder, whirls him around. Lassiter’s angry blue eyes are like lasers punching through Shawn’s face.
“You stole my brownie,” Lassiter grits, and narrows his gaze, adding, “And my coffee.”
Shawn grins, attempting to look rakish. He’s fairly certain he succeeds until he catches his reflection in a pane of glass, and realizes that the giant bandages swathing his neck and the sickly grey tinge his skin has taken on detract from any charm he can manage to muster up. “They were just lying there… abandoned, unloved!” Shawn says. “I am giving them a worthy home. In my stomach.”
Lassy looks as if his internal organs pain him, as if his intestines are reaching up their looping lengths to his throat to strangle him from the inside, he is so infuriated by Shawn. He lets go of Shawn’s shoulder and steps back. “This is the only time,” he says, “The only time I will ever let you get away with stealing my brownie. And my coffee.”
Before Shawn can come up with a suitable reply, a young female voice is crying, “Oh my god, that’s him! He’s the one! He saved us from that mad man!”
He turns, and sees the couple from the other day - standing with Jules, being interviewed, or whatever it is that the police code is calling it these days.
Shawn tosses a grin to Lassy, polishes off the rest of the brownie, and heads on over to the people whose lives he may well have saved. It’s nice, basking in adulation.
9.
Except it’s not adulation that the male half of the couple heaps upon Shawn.
His stare is cold enough to freeze Shawn into a Shawnsicle; Shawn files this fact away into one of the many corners of his memory, for a later date where it will all miraculously make sense the way so many things seem to happen for him.
When he is done making small talk with the not-so-grateful couple, he turns to leave - Gus ahead of him five paces - and is stopped by Jules’ hand on his arm, hesitant.
Shawn turns to face her and attempts a grin. It feels a bit flat on his face. She says to him, “You don’t look so good,” and he winces at both the words and the worry blatant on her face. Because even though he sort of wants to have her Florence Nightingale him, at the same time, he doesn’t like how anxiety twists the lines of her forehead into tortured lines, doesn’t like how her voice carries that current of strain.
“I’m fine, Jules,” he reassures. He pushes the thought that, well, if the knife had slashed even a millimeter one way or the other he could have died. He says, “I’ll catch you later, okay?” And feebly punches her on the shoulder to denote he is feeling buddy-buddy and not at all awkward.
She smiles, though the worry doesn’t fade from her face.
10.
Shawn pulls the guilt-and-worry card on Gus shamelessly, though, saying that while he has been ordered by doctors to take it easy for the next two weeks, he will die of boredom if he isn’t working on the case in at least some aspect.
Gus sighs, weary, and relents to renting all of Romero’s ghastly graphic zombie movies, as well as the Resident Evil series. (Though, as Shawn had suspected, Gus doesn’t protest nearly as much at the Resident Evil movies. Because, dude, Mila Jovovich - you can’t get any better when it comes to action flick chick.)
They are heading back into the Psych Agency Office for a movie all-nighter, when Shawn notices -
“Oh crap.”
A familiar blue pick up truck. Rusty, falling apart.
Henry Spencer outside of it, leaning against the driver’s side door, arms folded across his chest, ball-cap tilted over his face, hiding his eyes.
He is the very picture of ‘not happy’.
Shawn belatedly wishes he had come up with some way to hide the bandages on his neck because there is no way it is ever a good idea for Henry Spencer to see his son injured. It tends to make him - irrational. In a most annoying way.
11.
Two hours later and Shawn is at his father’s beach front home.
“I have a perfectly good apartment,” Shawn says.
Henry doesn’t respond, either via look or voice - keeps his back to Shawn, doesn’t say a word, is eerily silent and still.
“Technically, keeping me here against my will is kidnapping,” Shawn tries again.
Gus has left him behind like the traitor he is. He hastily dropped Shawn off outside the Psych Agency Office and then drove away, recognizing the look in Spencer Senior’s eyes for what it was - overwhelming Papa Bear rage. Gus has lived through it before; it has never been pretty.
“Oh, come on,” Shawn says, “I’m a grown man, you seriously don’t have to do this.”
“Shawn,” Henry finally says, still without turning around, “If you don’t shut up right now I am going to handcuff you to the sofa and duct tape your mouth shut.” He finally moves, turns his body, faces Shawn - and the look on his face is terrible to see. His every feature is carved into harsh lines, stark and unforgiving. His eyes are so much more intent than Shawn has ever seen, even when Henry was at his most dedicated in the line of duty. Henry’s gaze flicks down to the wad of cotton bandaging bundled about Shawn’s neck. “Non-negotiable.”
Shawn resigns himself to a night in his father’s home.
12.
It’s not all bad. Apparently Henry can’t stand zombie gore. He mutters something about stress flashbacks to when Shawn was a teenager, and stomps off.
Shawn manages to drive his father off for some much needed ‘alone’ time simply by putting in the first of the Romero movies. “Night of the Living Dead”, or something like that.
13.
At some point Shawn falls asleep.
His dreams are full of hungry noises.
Later on, when he wakes up he figures that the hungry noises were just from the television screen, the sound of zombies devouring human flesh.
It doesn’t make the dreams he did have any less creepy in retrospect, however.
14.
His dad doesn’t let him go home until Monday rolls around. Even then, he gives Shawn the eyeball, tersely commands, “You check in with me every night. If I hear you landed yourself in the hospital again…” and his voice trails off, ominous.
In the three days and four nights that Shawn has stayed at his father’s house, he has achieved these things:
1) Sneakily rearranged Henry’s tackle box so that the lures are organized in descending order of which is shiniest. Shawn has always been a bit of a magpie, occupied with the glitter of jewelry or chocolate bar wrappers - part of his fixation on candy as a child, not because of the taste, but because of the foil they came with.
2) Switched the salt in the salt shaker for sugar. And then, for good measure, switched the sugar in the sugar canister for salt. (This will come back to haunt him in two weeks, when his father surprises him with homemade pineapple spice cookies. Shawn is too surprised and touched by the gesture to admit that the cookies are horrifically salty and instead eats them with tall glasses of milk.) (Henry never admits that he knows of Shawn’s sugar-salt switch, and that this is his own oblique way of getting revenge. Some fathers and sons go golfing together. This is what the Spencer men do, instead.)
3) Read through Henry’s entire collection of who-dunnits, most of which are woefully inadequate in terms of plot, characterization, and believability. If Shawn had the patience to do so, he could most definitely write a better mystery than these so-called ‘greats’.
4) Started a spontaneous bonfire. Henry was mad about that one. He yelled something about, “Furniture is not firewood!” But honestly by that point Shawn had been so bored he had tuned Henry out.
5) Found Henry’s secret diaries (“Journals”, Henry called them in his entries, yet Shawn knew what he saw when he saw it, and Henry had a collection of diaries that fourteen-year-old girls would die of envy to see) and flipped through them. Shawn had initially been interested in reading them in detail to collect dirt on his father - yet all the entries ever seemed to say were either, “My son is an idiot and this is why - blah blah blah,” or lists of recipes. Though he did find the much scratched out evidence of what might have been a poem at the very back of one of Henry’s diaries - Shawn had been so weirded out by that that he had stopped reading immediately and altogether, placing Henry’s diaries back in their hiding place and resolving never to mention having found them to his father. Ever.
6) Called Gus a total of fifty-seven times. Gus had stopped picking up after the seventh call. Shawn had fun coming up with insulting rhymes and ditties to sing into Gus’s answering machine, along the lines of how Gus was a traitorous best friend who left poor injured psychic detectives to the mercy of looming, hulking, ominous he-men.
7) Called Chief Vick a total of twelve times. She threatened to get a restraining order against him if he attempted a number thirteen, and her voice had just enough of a crazed tilt to it that Shawn believed her. He was always more convincing in person, anyhow.
8) Called Lassy a total of twenty-three times. Mostly just so that he could practice his fake voices on the Irish detective, see which ones - his high pitched falsetto, his New Yorker, his yokel from the sticks - would provoke a hang up the fastest.
9) Attempted to call Juliet ten times. He never quite managed to punch in the last number of her sequence. It was kind of pathetic, really.
10) Worked out one of the fundamental logical questions posed to modern philosophers. It was surprisingly simple. But probably only if you had memorized every philosophical text ever written - which Shawn cringes to admit he has, partially due to an ill conceived attempt to impress a girl who had been a philosophy major at UCLA, and partially due to his inability to forget a single thing, not even the words on the pages he briefly flipped through in a thousand-page book he picked up five years ago. This is why he hates his father, Shawn thinks to himself, wanting to gouge out the parts of his brain that are full of useless trivial information, random knowledge that he is incapable of ever discarding, that he must carry with him wherever he goes - and the weight, each day, week, month, year, just continues to grow heavier until it seems as if he cannot move.
11) Watched and rewatched and watched again the zombie movies. Occasionally with Gus at his side, occasionally with his father making retching noises in disgust in the background, but mostly on his own. “Research,” he tells himself, though really he just likes seeing Milla Jovovich kicking ass in a short skirt. Hey, he’s a guy, it’s expected.
12) Looked up his old buddy Bob’s contact information, because he figures at some point he’s going to have to ask someone in the know for a set of actual answers. Especially if he wants to give that set of actual answers to Chief Vick. Surprisingly, old buddy Bob is a professor over at Stanford - not tenured, or anything, but impressive nonetheless. Shawn foresees a roadtrip in his future, just as soon as Henry lets him out of visual range.
13) Tried to forget how his blood had looked, the pattern of it splashed onto the zombie man’s face.
15.
The roadtrip to Stanford is something Shawn springs on Gus. He distracts Gus by explaining the whole shtick he had going with his replacement-Guses all the years he had been away from home. Gus scoffs at him, but Shawn thinks Gus secretly looks pleased - flattered, even, surprised that he is so important to Shawn.
But then it clicks in his head that they are going to go visit an alterna-Gus, and he doesn’t seem to like that idea at all. His eyes go flinty and his hands grip the steering wheel tightly, his jaw set in stubborn lines.
Huh. Who knew Gus was so possessive of being… well, Gus.
16.
Bob hasn’t changed all that much. He’s still the seven foot tall muscle bound intellectual of a man. He draws Shawn into an enthusiastic embrace, wincing at the sight of the Shawn’s neck, saying, “Spencer! It is good to see you again!”
Shawn claps his hands against Bob’s massive, muscled back. Bob has retained his good clothing taste, wearing only tailored suits that are both elegant and casual, simultaneously. “Bob, it’s been a while.”
They step back from one another simultaneously, and Shawn gestures to Gus. “This is who you were my stand in for,” he says, because of course he had let Bob know exactly what Bob was getting into all those years ago.
Bob grins at Gus and pulls him into a massive hug as well. “Any friend of Spencer’s,” he says, magnanimous. “I have heard much about you!”
Gus throws a semi-panicked look at Shawn, but Shawn chooses not to bail him out. Theirs is a friendship of mutual abandonment and perpetual juvenile payback.
17.
“Zombies,” Bob says, uncharacteristically serious. He sighs. “I hadn’t thought I would run into such a problem in America. Not for a good long while. Decades, at the least.”
He leans across his desk toward them, and tells them what they need to know.
18.
On the car ride back to Santa Barbara, Gus scoffs, “Zombies? Seriously? Come on, Shawn, you know everything that guy said to us was completely bogus.”
Gus is nothing if not gullible. If the Wilting Flower debacle hadn’t taught Shawn that, then Gus’s rigorous determination to never cross the path of black cat would have clued him in. All Shawn has to do is give him one long, extended, quelling look.
Gus gulps. He looks slightly convinced.
19.
Upon entering Santa Barbara city limits, Shawn checks his cell phone for missed calls.
There are thirty. Over half are from his father. Out of the macabre curiousity of having to know just what his father has said to him now, Shawn listens to the first one - it is a minutes long tirade on how Shawn is not fit to travel, how Shawn is an idiot, how Gus is an idiot for humoring Shawn - and goes on until Henry’s voice cuts off from inadequate message space. Bemused, Shawn figures that the rest of the messages from his father are more of the same and deletes the entire round of them in one fell swoop.
(It should be noted: the second to last message Henry Spencer left on his son’s cell phone was one that was tender and warm hearted and forgiving, baring more of Henry’s soul than he had ever previously done. Its recording was an accident, as Henry believed he had hung up.
The very last message from Henry is, predictably enough, “You’re an idiot, Shawn.” In the process of deleting all of these messages, Shawn somehow miraculously saves that last one to his cell phone’s memory - and, in a freak process of random electronics and fate, manages to program his Henry’s voice saying, “You’re an idiot, Shawn,” as the ring tone for when his father calls. At first this causes consternation. But after a while, Shawn finds it hilarious and chooses not to change it after all.)
Five of the missed calls are from random acquaintances he probably had some sort of event scheduled with. Shawn is a social animal.
Two are from his mother, who heard about his close call and plays the martyred-mom act on him over the phone, acting all self-pitying and petty. Shawn loves her, but he gets why his parents split - his dad is too overbearing, his mom too manipulative. It had never made for a happy household.
And then there’s one from Chief Vick, asking him to come in to the station.
Shawn grins. They’re in business.
Continue to ze conclusion!