Veronica Mars: Dick/Mac
Title: No Man's Land
Fandom: Veronica Mars
Characters: Dick/Mac, Wallace, Logan, Butters
Prompt: 055. Trip
Word Count:
Rating: Uhhh... light R?
Summary: It sort of got on her nerves that she had to have a chaperone wherever she went. (Sequel to Oliver Twist in Resident Evil.)
Author's Notes: Unbeta'd because I'm horrible. Feedback is muchly appreciated!
Three weeks after they moved into Neptune High, they started cleaning out the other rooms. Wallace took the sciences building, Logan took the rest of the administration and language arts building, and Dick and Mac headed out to the gym and locker rooms.
It sort of got on her nerves that she had to have a chaperone wherever she went (Dick even followed her to the freaking bathroom), but when she complained about it to Wallace he pointed out that she hadn't moved to pick up a weapon of any sort since initially killing Parker.
Mac took that as a roundabout way of saying she was the weakest member of their cracked-out little team and moved on.
She claimed Mrs. Murphy's English room - the one with all the bean-bag chairs and squishy loveseats - for her own that day and moved in three computers from the computer lab the day after. It was a stroke of luck that the electricity was still on after nearly a month, and she wasn't about to waste it.
~*~
"You know what this means?" Wallace asked. Dick had finally figured out how to work the oven in the cafeteria and managed to produce a decent batch of half-raw pizza bagels. Luckily this was unlike the hot dog casserole fiasco and he'd remembered that Mac didn't eat meat. They ate in the staff lounge and watched a VHS copy of Stand and Deliver on the television.
"What?" Mac asked. "There won't be any more Harry Potter books coming out?"
That, as shallow as it had seemed, had been her first thought after the shock wore off. Harry would never defeat the Dark Lord (although really, that meant the Dark Lord would never defeat Harry either), Anita Blake would never kill another vampire and Curious George would never annoy the man in the yellow suit again. Just those three thoughts (and the fact that she'd never know if Ron died or not) had caused her to burst into tears.
"No," Wallace shook his head. "I'm never getting my drivers' license." Mac frowned.
"You don't have one?" she asked. He shrugged.
"Veronica taught me to drive."
"Really, how was that?" Logan asked, wiping his fingers off on a napkin. Wallace shrugged.
"Bossy." Mac smiled and felt the familiar tingle of tears at the back of her eyes. "She only taught me so that I could be her get-away driver, of course." The table fell silent, like the ghost of Veronica was hovering above them and if they talked about her again, she'd huff and walk away.
That night Mac learned that Lilly Kane had taught Logan to drive. His dad had bought him his first car and evidently forgotten that Logan didn't know, so Lilly pushed Logan into the drivers' seat and watched as he promptly ran the car into the garage door of the Kane mansion. Later she even taught him to shift gears.
Dick learned from watching his dad do it. Usually his dad had someone chauffeur him around, but he insisted on driving Dick, Cassidy and Sadie - his then wife - to a fancy party just to show off his new car. Dick grabbed Cassidy and hopped into the front seat a few hours later and accidentally wrapped the Mercedes-Benz around a pole. The scar on Cassidy's leg never healed and coincidentally this was also Dick's "How I Got Desensitized to Blood" story.
Mac's first car had been a nice, white Toyota Corola. Three hours after her mother taught her to drive, she drove the car straight to the used car dealership and traded it in for a crappy old truck and three thousand extra dollars. She used the extra money to buy her laptop and told her parents someone stole the Corola.
~*~
They had to leave to get more supplies one day or another, they all knew this. They just had to figure out where to go.
"Wal-Mart," Wallace suggested. "There's one around, isn't there?" he asked when faced with three blank looks. "Supercenters are probably the best place. They have everything."
"There's not a Wal-Mart around until three counties from Pan High," Logan shrugged. "Balboa County, San Diego County and Orange County banned the Wal-Mart corporation from ever building around here to promote small business growth and encourage a community atmosphere. We don't even have malls here."
Dick snorted. "I can't believe you've lived here a year -"
"Three years," Wallace interrupted.
"- and you haven't figured out that we don't have Wal-Marts," he grinned. "Nice!"
"This isn't good, Dick!" Mac exclaimed. "There's not another Wal-Mart for hours and no place around Neptune has everything that we need!"
Dick fell silent.
"There's one in Needles," Logan pointed to the map on the wall he'd been examining. "It's only a few hours away."
"Needles?" Dick frowned. "No one lives there. Why would Wal-Mart build there?"
"It doesn't matter, Dick!" Mac hissed. "We're going!"
"Well, then you're staying here," Dick told her. Mac frowned.
"No, I'm not. You can't make that decision!"
"God, Mackenzie, hormonal!" Dick sneered. "What if we see someone there? You're the only one of us without..." he shrugged.
Mac took a step back. "You're keeping me back because I'm a girl?" Dick looked to Logan and Wallace, who both shrugged in unison. He'd started it and now he had to finish it.
Dick shrugged again. "Just... stay."
Mac ended up going. She brought up one good point.
"What if you don't come back?"
~*~
They were out of the city within a few hours time. Sure there were a lot more of them on the streets now, a month later, but the Range Rover apparently really was "all-terrain". Of course every time Logan ran over something with a backbone, Mac's stomach lurched and she had to hold tight onto Dick's fingers to keep from crying out.
They had to keep on taking ways around cities and major highways, which took hours. But when Mac was finally able to roll down the window without a skinny gray arm reaching through or the smell of decomposition in her nostrils, she was pretty happy.
Logan pulled over at an empty rest stop in the middle of nowhere three hours later because evidently Dick didn't know that bathroom stops came before major road trips and not during. He dragged Logan along with him for once and left Mac and Wallace with the Range Rover.
"So you and Dick are together now?" Wallace asked. Mac was laying in the backseat with her legs hanging out of the car. Being in a car with three guys tended to make one claustrophobic.
"Yeah, I guess," she sighed. "Do we have another water bottle?" Wallace passed her one from the front seat.
"What happens when you guys break up or fight?" Mac thought for a moment.
"We can't."
She didn't even see it coming, but was suddenly very happy that the cold weather had forced her to leave the high school with a pair of sweatpants over her salvaged skinny jeans. When she first felt the hand on her knee she barely looked up, instead chosing to sigh and groan.
"What?"
"Uh - Mac!" Wallace shouted from the front seat. Mac looked up and saw the wheezing woman lowering her head to Mac's thigh, teeth bared. Mac cursed and thrust her leg into the woman's stomach, realizing one thing.
"Oh my god, Wallace, she doesn't have a stomach!" Mac cried, feeling the gore around her leg. The woman reached out with one hand for Mac's arm before being pulled off of Mac.
When the woman went for Dick's neck, Mac did the first thing that came to mind and grabbed the crow bar from the front seat and dug it straight through the woman's neck.
Which did no help at all.
"The head!" Logan shouted from the fountain. "Go for the head!" Mac wrenched the crow bar out of her neck and aimed for her head this time. It didn't exactly go through as cleanly as with the neck, but the woman dropped like a pinata.
She'd never kissed anyone as feverishly as she kissed Dick then.
"Keep it in your pants until Wal-Mart, Casablancas," Logan said, pushing between them to get back to the car. "At least wait until you two can get into the condom aisle."
~*~
To four college freshman who, even before a deadly virus hit the West Coast of their country, had been surviving on Top Ramen and whatever the cafeteria decided to feed them for four months, Wal-Mart was like one-seventh of the Seven Great Wonders of the Modern World.
Wallace crow-barred open the doors to their veritable paradise and slid them shut behind them.
"I'm going for produce - preservatives are god," Logan said. "Wallace, you get canned foods. Mac, personal hygiene. Dick, go for clothes."
"Why do I get personal hygiene?" Mac snorted. Logan raised an eyebrow at her.
"Do you really want me to - "
Mac raised a hand. "Right. I'm the female. I nearly got killed three hours ago. I go to the softest aisle in the entire store. Of course."
Logan shrugged. "And only you know what kind of tampons you want."
That too.
"All right, everyone, place your orders," Logan said. "I like my shirts medium, Dick. I wear a size 32/32 in pants. And I like Herbal Essences when I shower."
"Get me L'Oreal, please?" Dick asked Mac. "I like my mousse in soft hold."
"All I need is some Old Spice - Cinnamon scent," Wallace spoke up.
"Oh, and Zest - I like lemon scent."
"Schick razors?"
"Guys!" Mac exclaimed. "You're acting like... Madison Sinclair." She shook her head and walked away.
"Soft hold!" Dick shouted after her. "And meet me in Condoms! We have some decisions to make!"
Mac scoffed.
~*~
They hit the guns last - after they'd stocked up the back seat floor with cans and the produce that hadn't grown mold and Dick had loaded the back seat with clothes and bedsheets.
Mac peered into the backseat after he finished tossing the last of her cart's contents in. She reached into the trunk and pulled out a pink bra just as the alarm went off inside.
"How'd you know I was 32B?" she scowled. He shrugged. She grabbed a pack of underwear. "Dick - I don't wear these!"
"Decisions, decisions, Mackenzie."
A shot behind them alerted them to the fact that they'd been "followed" back to the car by a former Wal-Mart employee.
"Get in the car!" Logan shouted from the double doors. Wallace was close behind him. "We just pissed off a hell of a lot of dead guys."
~*~
Before the outbreak, Mac would have thought a couple of hundred times before ever sleeping with a guy a day after they first kissed. Now, she couldn't wait for another warm body in her bed.
Dick reminded her she was alive with every touch and kiss. She only hoped she could do the same.
~*~
She heard the radio transmission one day after playing an old Selena tape in Principal Clemmons' old green Buick. It was her thing - listening to tapes she'd gotten on their last "shopping trip" for some alone time. The "dead guys" pawing at the fence couldn't disrupt her in her little green bubble.
She'd just ejected the tape and heard the fuzzy whine of the radio when suddenly it wasn't so fuzzy anymore and there was a clear voice coming through.
Mac never thought she'd be so happy to hear the fake Captain Krunk again.
~*~
Dick begrudgingly let Mac go along with Logan to pick up Butters, since she was the only one who knew where he lived. He pressed one last kiss against her lips and made her promise she wouldn't get hurt before boosting her over the fence.
They made it to Butters' neighborhood in ten minutes time. The populations got larger as they ventured into the suburbs - too many people had gotten "caught" while still in bed or fixing breakfast. Each time Logan ran into an unlucky un-soul, Mac had to close her eyes and hope it didn't go straight through the windshield.
Logan stopped in front of the house that Mac pointed out and the car lurched backward with a screech.
"We're here," he said jovially. Mac raised her eyebrows when she saw the undead quickly start approaching the car from all corners.
"His room is in the basement," she told Logan. "In the back of the house."
He nodded. "Let's get there fast then."
He opened the door and knocked down the closest undead guy with an aluminum baseball bat, courtesy of the Pirates Softball team. They made it to Butters' basement in seconds and Mac knocked on the door quickly.
"Butters!" she shouted. "Butters!"
They were close to surrounding them now, one of them grabbed onto Logan's bat with one decapitating hand and another tried to bite into it.
"Hurry!" Logan urged, reaching into the back of his pants and pulling out his trusty nine millimeter.
"It's Mac!" Mac yelled, knocking again. "Uhhh... Neptune High? Alterna-Prom? I was your date! Dude, I totally understand if you're having some alone time, but we kind of need to get - " the door swung open.
"Oh, hey Mac," Butters greeted happily.
~*~
Butters rode in the backseat on the way back to the high school. It was only a stroke of luck that the kid who could barely climb the PE rope could climb an iron fence to get inside of the place they'd all come to hate.
Dick couldn't keep his hands off of her when he saw her and immediately dragged her back up to the English room, muttering something into the crook of her neck about her being "fucking alive" and "really hot right now". She giggled, her adrenaline rush from being outside still not having worn off, and when they got up to the room took no time in removing her blood-spattered shirt and jeans.
He traced the line of her hips with his hands before diving to capture her lips once again and moving his hands around her back to unhook her bra.
She was pretty sure Logan and the guys could hear their moans from the library, but she couldn't really care.
~*~
It was night time when she got hungry again and she pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans before wandering back out into the hallway and heading into the library. Usually Logan left out a snack for her when it was this late. She could see the dim light glowing from his corner when she walked to the table in the center of the room and climbed on top.
"So you and Dick Casablancas, huh?"
Mac whipped her head around quickly, her eyes adjusting to the darkness so that she could see Butters watching her from her old place behind the counter. She picked up an opened can of corn and grabbed a spoon that Wallace had left.
"Yeah, me and Dick," she shrugged.
"When'd you guys hook up?" Butters asked. "Alterna-Prom? You did sort of disappear midway through there."
She remembered - she'd gone to get some more punch and stood by the punch bowl for a few seconds, actually contemplating asking Dick to empty out some of his party pig into her cup, before getting involved in another Linux versus Apple argument with Pete Kaminsky.
"No, it's a pretty recent development," Mac let him know. "Not that it's really any of your business, though." She wasn't about to tell him that she and Dick had kissed for the first time four days ago and were now providing the wordless soundtrack to Having A Sex Life in a Post Apoctalypic World.
"Mac? You're still awake?" Logan asked emerging from his side of the library. "Thought you'd be... otherwise occupied," he said dryly. Mac idly flicked at a fly on her upper arm. He looked at Butters and gestured to Mac. "Her and Dick? They're zombies of a different kind."
Mac smacked Logan on the arm.
"There's no such thing as zombies."
~*~
They were found in Neptune High on Mac's birthday. Ironically this was also the day that she found out that the guys had been hiding all of the make-up they'd found in the locker rooms from her so that they could present it to her as her "gift".
Mac was on top of the sciences building with Wallace when she saw them approaching. She and Wallace spent quite a lot of time up there. Wallace brought up a telescope and an astronomy book, apparently trying to further his education even while under seige by differently dead. Mac just stared up at the stars and wondered if this sort of stuff happened on other planets at all frequently.
She'd just sat up to look at the undead, who had began to crowd around the fences in the dozens since Butters had arrived, when she saw the small, bright lights in the distance.
"Wallace," she tapped him on the shoulder. "What are those?" Wallace lowered the telescope so that he could see what she was talking about.
"They're... trucks," he frowned. "Trucks." They glanced at each other, then back at the trucks.
Mac frowned. "Dude, are we saved?" she asked. "I'm not sure how I feel about that."
~*~
The first thing Mac did, after the initial interviews and embarassing physical exams to make sure she didn't have any of the "virus", was eat a dozen doughnuts. It hadn't been the healthiest thing she'd ever done, and she'd started to regret it around the fifth doughnut, but she was in a competition with Logan and she had to win.
Dick had followed her to Quebec, to see her family; and Logan had followed Dick. Wallace had gone to England to find his mom. It wasn't the first time Mac had been glad that Canada and Mexico had immediately closed off their borders to America once the first headline hit that a new disease was on the loose.
Logan rented them two rooms at a hotel the night before they'd arrive in the suburb where her parents were staying and they ordered more food than three people really should eat over the course of one night.
It was the first time Mac had been able to eat since being rescued. She figured it was some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder thing that allowed her to eat this much food now. That, and she had been seperated from Dick for most of the interrogation and examination process. She felt a lot better now that he was close by.
Logan won the doughnut-eating contest - raising his hands above his head and whooping when he finished his sixteenth doughnut. Mac collapsed backwards on the bed and groaned.
"You all right?" Dick asked, flopping beside her. Mac groaned again. "So, where are we going to live?" Mac frowned. "What? You don't think I'm actually going back to Neptune now, do you? Totally lame, dude. Canada's too cold, dude - there's no way we're living in the frozen north."
"Italy's quite warm," Logan piped up from his place on the floor. "They don't have the greatest pizza, though - surprisingly. And everybody's really angry over there..."
"We could move to the Bahamas..." Dick traced her shoulder with one finger. "Or Hawaii..."
"Figures that's where you'd want to go," Mac snorted. "How about we figure it out tomorrow, all right? Right now, I think I can beat Logan at eating hamburgers this time."
Fandom: Veronica Mars
Characters: Dick/Mac, Wallace, Logan, Butters
Prompt: 055. Trip
Word Count:
Rating: Uhhh... light R?
Summary: It sort of got on her nerves that she had to have a chaperone wherever she went. (Sequel to Oliver Twist in Resident Evil.)
Author's Notes: Unbeta'd because I'm horrible. Feedback is muchly appreciated!
Three weeks after they moved into Neptune High, they started cleaning out the other rooms. Wallace took the sciences building, Logan took the rest of the administration and language arts building, and Dick and Mac headed out to the gym and locker rooms.
It sort of got on her nerves that she had to have a chaperone wherever she went (Dick even followed her to the freaking bathroom), but when she complained about it to Wallace he pointed out that she hadn't moved to pick up a weapon of any sort since initially killing Parker.
Mac took that as a roundabout way of saying she was the weakest member of their cracked-out little team and moved on.
She claimed Mrs. Murphy's English room - the one with all the bean-bag chairs and squishy loveseats - for her own that day and moved in three computers from the computer lab the day after. It was a stroke of luck that the electricity was still on after nearly a month, and she wasn't about to waste it.
~*~
"You know what this means?" Wallace asked. Dick had finally figured out how to work the oven in the cafeteria and managed to produce a decent batch of half-raw pizza bagels. Luckily this was unlike the hot dog casserole fiasco and he'd remembered that Mac didn't eat meat. They ate in the staff lounge and watched a VHS copy of Stand and Deliver on the television.
"What?" Mac asked. "There won't be any more Harry Potter books coming out?"
That, as shallow as it had seemed, had been her first thought after the shock wore off. Harry would never defeat the Dark Lord (although really, that meant the Dark Lord would never defeat Harry either), Anita Blake would never kill another vampire and Curious George would never annoy the man in the yellow suit again. Just those three thoughts (and the fact that she'd never know if Ron died or not) had caused her to burst into tears.
"No," Wallace shook his head. "I'm never getting my drivers' license." Mac frowned.
"You don't have one?" she asked. He shrugged.
"Veronica taught me to drive."
"Really, how was that?" Logan asked, wiping his fingers off on a napkin. Wallace shrugged.
"Bossy." Mac smiled and felt the familiar tingle of tears at the back of her eyes. "She only taught me so that I could be her get-away driver, of course." The table fell silent, like the ghost of Veronica was hovering above them and if they talked about her again, she'd huff and walk away.
That night Mac learned that Lilly Kane had taught Logan to drive. His dad had bought him his first car and evidently forgotten that Logan didn't know, so Lilly pushed Logan into the drivers' seat and watched as he promptly ran the car into the garage door of the Kane mansion. Later she even taught him to shift gears.
Dick learned from watching his dad do it. Usually his dad had someone chauffeur him around, but he insisted on driving Dick, Cassidy and Sadie - his then wife - to a fancy party just to show off his new car. Dick grabbed Cassidy and hopped into the front seat a few hours later and accidentally wrapped the Mercedes-Benz around a pole. The scar on Cassidy's leg never healed and coincidentally this was also Dick's "How I Got Desensitized to Blood" story.
Mac's first car had been a nice, white Toyota Corola. Three hours after her mother taught her to drive, she drove the car straight to the used car dealership and traded it in for a crappy old truck and three thousand extra dollars. She used the extra money to buy her laptop and told her parents someone stole the Corola.
~*~
They had to leave to get more supplies one day or another, they all knew this. They just had to figure out where to go.
"Wal-Mart," Wallace suggested. "There's one around, isn't there?" he asked when faced with three blank looks. "Supercenters are probably the best place. They have everything."
"There's not a Wal-Mart around until three counties from Pan High," Logan shrugged. "Balboa County, San Diego County and Orange County banned the Wal-Mart corporation from ever building around here to promote small business growth and encourage a community atmosphere. We don't even have malls here."
Dick snorted. "I can't believe you've lived here a year -"
"Three years," Wallace interrupted.
"- and you haven't figured out that we don't have Wal-Marts," he grinned. "Nice!"
"This isn't good, Dick!" Mac exclaimed. "There's not another Wal-Mart for hours and no place around Neptune has everything that we need!"
Dick fell silent.
"There's one in Needles," Logan pointed to the map on the wall he'd been examining. "It's only a few hours away."
"Needles?" Dick frowned. "No one lives there. Why would Wal-Mart build there?"
"It doesn't matter, Dick!" Mac hissed. "We're going!"
"Well, then you're staying here," Dick told her. Mac frowned.
"No, I'm not. You can't make that decision!"
"God, Mackenzie, hormonal!" Dick sneered. "What if we see someone there? You're the only one of us without..." he shrugged.
Mac took a step back. "You're keeping me back because I'm a girl?" Dick looked to Logan and Wallace, who both shrugged in unison. He'd started it and now he had to finish it.
Dick shrugged again. "Just... stay."
Mac ended up going. She brought up one good point.
"What if you don't come back?"
~*~
They were out of the city within a few hours time. Sure there were a lot more of them on the streets now, a month later, but the Range Rover apparently really was "all-terrain". Of course every time Logan ran over something with a backbone, Mac's stomach lurched and she had to hold tight onto Dick's fingers to keep from crying out.
They had to keep on taking ways around cities and major highways, which took hours. But when Mac was finally able to roll down the window without a skinny gray arm reaching through or the smell of decomposition in her nostrils, she was pretty happy.
Logan pulled over at an empty rest stop in the middle of nowhere three hours later because evidently Dick didn't know that bathroom stops came before major road trips and not during. He dragged Logan along with him for once and left Mac and Wallace with the Range Rover.
"So you and Dick are together now?" Wallace asked. Mac was laying in the backseat with her legs hanging out of the car. Being in a car with three guys tended to make one claustrophobic.
"Yeah, I guess," she sighed. "Do we have another water bottle?" Wallace passed her one from the front seat.
"What happens when you guys break up or fight?" Mac thought for a moment.
"We can't."
She didn't even see it coming, but was suddenly very happy that the cold weather had forced her to leave the high school with a pair of sweatpants over her salvaged skinny jeans. When she first felt the hand on her knee she barely looked up, instead chosing to sigh and groan.
"What?"
"Uh - Mac!" Wallace shouted from the front seat. Mac looked up and saw the wheezing woman lowering her head to Mac's thigh, teeth bared. Mac cursed and thrust her leg into the woman's stomach, realizing one thing.
"Oh my god, Wallace, she doesn't have a stomach!" Mac cried, feeling the gore around her leg. The woman reached out with one hand for Mac's arm before being pulled off of Mac.
When the woman went for Dick's neck, Mac did the first thing that came to mind and grabbed the crow bar from the front seat and dug it straight through the woman's neck.
Which did no help at all.
"The head!" Logan shouted from the fountain. "Go for the head!" Mac wrenched the crow bar out of her neck and aimed for her head this time. It didn't exactly go through as cleanly as with the neck, but the woman dropped like a pinata.
She'd never kissed anyone as feverishly as she kissed Dick then.
"Keep it in your pants until Wal-Mart, Casablancas," Logan said, pushing between them to get back to the car. "At least wait until you two can get into the condom aisle."
~*~
To four college freshman who, even before a deadly virus hit the West Coast of their country, had been surviving on Top Ramen and whatever the cafeteria decided to feed them for four months, Wal-Mart was like one-seventh of the Seven Great Wonders of the Modern World.
Wallace crow-barred open the doors to their veritable paradise and slid them shut behind them.
"I'm going for produce - preservatives are god," Logan said. "Wallace, you get canned foods. Mac, personal hygiene. Dick, go for clothes."
"Why do I get personal hygiene?" Mac snorted. Logan raised an eyebrow at her.
"Do you really want me to - "
Mac raised a hand. "Right. I'm the female. I nearly got killed three hours ago. I go to the softest aisle in the entire store. Of course."
Logan shrugged. "And only you know what kind of tampons you want."
That too.
"All right, everyone, place your orders," Logan said. "I like my shirts medium, Dick. I wear a size 32/32 in pants. And I like Herbal Essences when I shower."
"Get me L'Oreal, please?" Dick asked Mac. "I like my mousse in soft hold."
"All I need is some Old Spice - Cinnamon scent," Wallace spoke up.
"Oh, and Zest - I like lemon scent."
"Schick razors?"
"Guys!" Mac exclaimed. "You're acting like... Madison Sinclair." She shook her head and walked away.
"Soft hold!" Dick shouted after her. "And meet me in Condoms! We have some decisions to make!"
Mac scoffed.
~*~
They hit the guns last - after they'd stocked up the back seat floor with cans and the produce that hadn't grown mold and Dick had loaded the back seat with clothes and bedsheets.
Mac peered into the backseat after he finished tossing the last of her cart's contents in. She reached into the trunk and pulled out a pink bra just as the alarm went off inside.
"How'd you know I was 32B?" she scowled. He shrugged. She grabbed a pack of underwear. "Dick - I don't wear these!"
"Decisions, decisions, Mackenzie."
A shot behind them alerted them to the fact that they'd been "followed" back to the car by a former Wal-Mart employee.
"Get in the car!" Logan shouted from the double doors. Wallace was close behind him. "We just pissed off a hell of a lot of dead guys."
~*~
Before the outbreak, Mac would have thought a couple of hundred times before ever sleeping with a guy a day after they first kissed. Now, she couldn't wait for another warm body in her bed.
Dick reminded her she was alive with every touch and kiss. She only hoped she could do the same.
~*~
She heard the radio transmission one day after playing an old Selena tape in Principal Clemmons' old green Buick. It was her thing - listening to tapes she'd gotten on their last "shopping trip" for some alone time. The "dead guys" pawing at the fence couldn't disrupt her in her little green bubble.
She'd just ejected the tape and heard the fuzzy whine of the radio when suddenly it wasn't so fuzzy anymore and there was a clear voice coming through.
Mac never thought she'd be so happy to hear the fake Captain Krunk again.
~*~
Dick begrudgingly let Mac go along with Logan to pick up Butters, since she was the only one who knew where he lived. He pressed one last kiss against her lips and made her promise she wouldn't get hurt before boosting her over the fence.
They made it to Butters' neighborhood in ten minutes time. The populations got larger as they ventured into the suburbs - too many people had gotten "caught" while still in bed or fixing breakfast. Each time Logan ran into an unlucky un-soul, Mac had to close her eyes and hope it didn't go straight through the windshield.
Logan stopped in front of the house that Mac pointed out and the car lurched backward with a screech.
"We're here," he said jovially. Mac raised her eyebrows when she saw the undead quickly start approaching the car from all corners.
"His room is in the basement," she told Logan. "In the back of the house."
He nodded. "Let's get there fast then."
He opened the door and knocked down the closest undead guy with an aluminum baseball bat, courtesy of the Pirates Softball team. They made it to Butters' basement in seconds and Mac knocked on the door quickly.
"Butters!" she shouted. "Butters!"
They were close to surrounding them now, one of them grabbed onto Logan's bat with one decapitating hand and another tried to bite into it.
"Hurry!" Logan urged, reaching into the back of his pants and pulling out his trusty nine millimeter.
"It's Mac!" Mac yelled, knocking again. "Uhhh... Neptune High? Alterna-Prom? I was your date! Dude, I totally understand if you're having some alone time, but we kind of need to get - " the door swung open.
"Oh, hey Mac," Butters greeted happily.
~*~
Butters rode in the backseat on the way back to the high school. It was only a stroke of luck that the kid who could barely climb the PE rope could climb an iron fence to get inside of the place they'd all come to hate.
Dick couldn't keep his hands off of her when he saw her and immediately dragged her back up to the English room, muttering something into the crook of her neck about her being "fucking alive" and "really hot right now". She giggled, her adrenaline rush from being outside still not having worn off, and when they got up to the room took no time in removing her blood-spattered shirt and jeans.
He traced the line of her hips with his hands before diving to capture her lips once again and moving his hands around her back to unhook her bra.
She was pretty sure Logan and the guys could hear their moans from the library, but she couldn't really care.
~*~
It was night time when she got hungry again and she pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans before wandering back out into the hallway and heading into the library. Usually Logan left out a snack for her when it was this late. She could see the dim light glowing from his corner when she walked to the table in the center of the room and climbed on top.
"So you and Dick Casablancas, huh?"
Mac whipped her head around quickly, her eyes adjusting to the darkness so that she could see Butters watching her from her old place behind the counter. She picked up an opened can of corn and grabbed a spoon that Wallace had left.
"Yeah, me and Dick," she shrugged.
"When'd you guys hook up?" Butters asked. "Alterna-Prom? You did sort of disappear midway through there."
She remembered - she'd gone to get some more punch and stood by the punch bowl for a few seconds, actually contemplating asking Dick to empty out some of his party pig into her cup, before getting involved in another Linux versus Apple argument with Pete Kaminsky.
"No, it's a pretty recent development," Mac let him know. "Not that it's really any of your business, though." She wasn't about to tell him that she and Dick had kissed for the first time four days ago and were now providing the wordless soundtrack to Having A Sex Life in a Post Apoctalypic World.
"Mac? You're still awake?" Logan asked emerging from his side of the library. "Thought you'd be... otherwise occupied," he said dryly. Mac idly flicked at a fly on her upper arm. He looked at Butters and gestured to Mac. "Her and Dick? They're zombies of a different kind."
Mac smacked Logan on the arm.
"There's no such thing as zombies."
~*~
They were found in Neptune High on Mac's birthday. Ironically this was also the day that she found out that the guys had been hiding all of the make-up they'd found in the locker rooms from her so that they could present it to her as her "gift".
Mac was on top of the sciences building with Wallace when she saw them approaching. She and Wallace spent quite a lot of time up there. Wallace brought up a telescope and an astronomy book, apparently trying to further his education even while under seige by differently dead. Mac just stared up at the stars and wondered if this sort of stuff happened on other planets at all frequently.
She'd just sat up to look at the undead, who had began to crowd around the fences in the dozens since Butters had arrived, when she saw the small, bright lights in the distance.
"Wallace," she tapped him on the shoulder. "What are those?" Wallace lowered the telescope so that he could see what she was talking about.
"They're... trucks," he frowned. "Trucks." They glanced at each other, then back at the trucks.
Mac frowned. "Dude, are we saved?" she asked. "I'm not sure how I feel about that."
~*~
The first thing Mac did, after the initial interviews and embarassing physical exams to make sure she didn't have any of the "virus", was eat a dozen doughnuts. It hadn't been the healthiest thing she'd ever done, and she'd started to regret it around the fifth doughnut, but she was in a competition with Logan and she had to win.
Dick had followed her to Quebec, to see her family; and Logan had followed Dick. Wallace had gone to England to find his mom. It wasn't the first time Mac had been glad that Canada and Mexico had immediately closed off their borders to America once the first headline hit that a new disease was on the loose.
Logan rented them two rooms at a hotel the night before they'd arrive in the suburb where her parents were staying and they ordered more food than three people really should eat over the course of one night.
It was the first time Mac had been able to eat since being rescued. She figured it was some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder thing that allowed her to eat this much food now. That, and she had been seperated from Dick for most of the interrogation and examination process. She felt a lot better now that he was close by.
Logan won the doughnut-eating contest - raising his hands above his head and whooping when he finished his sixteenth doughnut. Mac collapsed backwards on the bed and groaned.
"You all right?" Dick asked, flopping beside her. Mac groaned again. "So, where are we going to live?" Mac frowned. "What? You don't think I'm actually going back to Neptune now, do you? Totally lame, dude. Canada's too cold, dude - there's no way we're living in the frozen north."
"Italy's quite warm," Logan piped up from his place on the floor. "They don't have the greatest pizza, though - surprisingly. And everybody's really angry over there..."
"We could move to the Bahamas..." Dick traced her shoulder with one finger. "Or Hawaii..."
"Figures that's where you'd want to go," Mac snorted. "How about we figure it out tomorrow, all right? Right now, I think I can beat Logan at eating hamburgers this time."