Welcome to Planet Motherfucker (3/4)
Part Two
Welcome to Planet Motherfucker Part Three
The makeshift hospital wasn’t nearly as crowded with the injured as Lyn-Z had imagined. She knew it was because most of the people that had been injured had died and reanimated already, but she still felt a strange relief at the number of people walking around.
“Kitty!” she yelled, spotting her quirkily angled pigtails through the crowd.
Kitty turned and the hurried over to her, wrapping her up in a big hug. “Oh my god, Zoid, I was afraid you were dead!”
“Still in one piece,” she said, “only slightly worse for wear.”
The building was much smaller and guarded on all sides by wary-looking survivors, and for the first time since watching the fence collapse Lyn-Z began to let herself off her guard.
“Hard to tell under all the icky,” Kitty said, pulling away and pushing a strand of Lyn-Z’s bangs away from her face, scowling at the dark residue left on her fingers.
“Like you’re pristine,” Lyn-Z said, giving Kitty’s outfit a pointed look. “You’ve totally got guts on you.”
“Since I hugged you, yeah,” Kitty teased back.
Lyn-Z glanced over to where Gerard was hurrying from pallet to pallet. “Where’s his brother at?”
“We put him in the special room,” Kitty said.
Lyn-Z bit her lip.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” she said. Lyn-Z managed to get Gerard’s attention and they followed Kitty through a curtain fashioned out of an old tarp into a darker, more depressing room.
It was clear this was where the worst-case-scenarios were being put. Lyn-Z reached over and took Gerard’s hand, squeezing it tight. He didn’t pull away.
Kitty lead them to the bed that half of the Black Parade were clustered around, and Lyn-Z braced herself for the worst.
“Hey, look who we found,” Kitty said cheerfully, and Frank turned around and almost tackled Gerard, hugging him tight enough that Gerard staggered a few steps back.
Lyn-Z couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but she untangled her fingers from Gerard’s and stepped aside, standing close to Kitty. Ray nodded to her briefly, not getting up from Mikey’s side. “Bob’s out shooting zombies from the roof,” he explained to them.
Mikey himself was sitting up, watching Frank and Gerard with a big smile across his face. He looked…
He didn’t look any worse off from the rest of them, really.
Lyn-Z glanced over to Kitty, who just shook her head.
Gerard broke the hug with Frank and dropped down next to Mikey, looking at him like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Mikey… god, I was so worried…”
“I thought I wouldn’t get to see you again,” Mikey replied, and wrapped Gerard in a hug. They stayed like that for what felt like forever, Lyn-Z awkwardly looking away because it felt too intimate to watch.
She knew logically that it had just been luck that she’d been with Gerard when the fence had fallen, but she still felt like if he’d been with his band… if she’d been with hers… things would have been better.
Somehow, things would have been better. She flushed when she remembered the alley, and how she hadn’t even thought of anyone else but herself. She could almost hear Kitty telling her practically that it was a natural reaction, that Kitty would have done the same if she’d had the opportunity, but instead of getting off everyone else had been doing shit to help people.
“Where’s Steve?” she whispered, and the way Kitty rolled her eyes did a lot to ease her fear that he was off dying somewhere.
“Somewhere around here making people miserable,” Kitty replied. “He’s not in great shape, but he’s better off than a lot of people, not that you can tell from his bitching.”
Lyn-Z smiled, but her smile faded as Gerard pulled away from his brother with a horrified expression.
“Where?” Gerard demanded in a broken-sounding voice.
Mikey swallowed and pulled aside the blanket that was draped over his legs. The left leg was fine, grimy uniform pant leg intact, but the right pant leg had been cut off above the knee, revealing a pale, knobby knee and…
“Oh, god,” Lyn-Z said, covering her mouth with her hand.
On Mikey’s right calf was a gory round wound that was unmistakably a bite mark from human teeth. The center of the wound was bruised deep purple already, and from the teeth marks red streaks of infection crept out onto pale unmarked flesh.
“It stopped bleeding,” Mikey said. “It was pouring blood, you should have seen it. And it’s gone numb, which is a definite improvement.”
“Mikey,” Gerard managed to say. “Oh god, Mikey.”
“I’ve probably got a day or two left,” he continued, like he was reciting facts that had no bearing on his own life whatsoever. “Before it gets to my heart or brain or whatever it is that kills you and turns you into a zombie.”
Gerard reached out slowly, hand hovering inches above the wound. “Mikey, what happened?”
“My boots almost saved me,” he said, looking down at the wound. “The fucking thing didn’t even have any legs! I got taken out by a gimpy zombie, can you believe that shit?”
The sound Gerard made was somewhere between a sob and a laugh.
“Take me to Steve,” Lyn-Z whispered to Kitty. She couldn’t watch this anymore.
*
“I think it makes me look dashing,” Steve said, tightening the bandage that was tied around his face. Lyn-Z recognized it as the bandana Steve regularly wore tied around his head, and told herself it wasn’t all that different.
“Like a pirate,” Kitty agreed. “A very debonair pirate.”
“Exactly!” Steve said. “And this right here is exactly why we have two eyes, anyhow.”
“Built-in spare parts!” Kitty agreed.
Lyn-Z managed to nod. Steve and Kitty continued to laugh, and she just stared at the bandage covering Steve’s missing eye and then leaned forward and hugged him tight.
He wrapped his arms around her and patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Zoid.”
“Fuck you, I’m the one who’s supposed to be consoling you right now,” Lyn-Z said, pressing her face into the shoulder of his shirt. It was warm and clean enough that she figured his gore-soaked jacket was laying around in a corner somewhere, and she just breathed in his smell.
She just stayed there, feeling something close to safe.
“Room for a group hug?”
And Kitty was there, too, smooshed in close with her head tucked up against Steve’s other shoulder.
Lyn-Z tried to not think about it, but her mind kept going back to Gerard and Mikey and how broken they’d all looked. Frank’s tired eyes and Ray’s slumped shoulders and Mikey cracking jokes to keep them all from sinking further into despair.
And Gerard…
“Do you think he’s going to be okay?” She said, then remembered to clarify, “Gerard, I mean.”
Steve and Kitty were silent, then Kitty ventured, “It’s not going to be easy for him.”
She started rubbing circles on Lyn-Z’s shoulder, and Lyn-Z just stayed there, trying to keep this memory of being safe and warm close inside, to ward off the nightmares she knew she was going to have if she managed any sleep.
Eventually Steve shoved her away with a, “God, girl, go clean some of those guts off, you reek.”
Lyn-Z tried to head-butt him with a part of her hair she could feel was grossest, and Steve pushed her away.
“Where can I clean up?” she asked.
Kitty pointed to the makeshift curtains on the left side of the building. “Over there. It’s pretty gnarly though.”
“I can handle it,” Lyn-Z said. She found the sinks and did as good a job as she could to get the blood and unidentifiable bits of zombie off her and out of her hair, scrubbing at her face and stripping off her knee socks, throwing them in with the smelly mound of discarded, unsalvageable clothing in the corner.
She took longer than she needed, carefully making sure she’d gotten everything cleaned off and assessing how many injuries she’d sustained during the course of the day.
Mostly bruises, a few scrapes and cuts, and one slice on her leg that she thought she should probably find some bandages for, as it started bleeding when she accidentally scrubbed away the scab and wasn’t stopping.
She’d found one of the people who seemed more confident with dealing with injuries - she finally was grateful for the survival and medical training the government had forced them all through, and the fact that some people had retained their knowledge better than others - and put up with the disapproving noises as they put in a few stitches and bandaged up her leg.
She returned to Steve’s side and started teasing him about his lack of peripheral vision. He’d somehow gotten a bottle of whiskey - homemade shit, she was guessing from the unlabeled bottle and the lack of color -- and was downing it steadily enough that she knew he was hurting more than he was letting on.
He offered her the bottle, and she took in a mouthful. It was similar enough to drinking paint thinner that she almost teared up as she forced it down. “I hope you didn’t pay much for this shit,” she choked out, taking another tiny sip just to feel the burn down her throat again.
She allowed herself a glance at the tarp blocking off the area where the Black Parade were holding their vigil over Mikey, and she held back the urge to give Steve another hug. Her band was safe, and she felt guilty for how relieved she was.
“I stole it,” Steve told her.
“Smooth,” she told him. She reached up and brushed her fingers lightly over the bandana over his missing eye. “Feel like sharing your war story?”
Steve nodded magnanimously and began to weave his tale, explaining how he’d been trying to get the kids left over from the show out of the building when they’d realized that the zombies were breaking in. “So I shoved this little bitch out of the way, and the dead-ass motherfucker just lurched at me and the last thing I saw was this grimy-ass finger going into my goddamn eye,” Steve concluded crankily.
“What happened to your reflexes?” she teased.
Steve stiffened, and Lyn-Z started to apologize, but realized that he was staring off towards the entrance. She turned, and Jimmy was helping Chantal along, who was glaring and looking as though she wanted anything but to be helped.
They were even gorier than they’d been when she’d last seen them what felt like years ago, and Chantal was cradling her arm strangely.
She was on her feet before she’d realized what she was doing, and she hurried over to them.
“She’s fucking… they got her,” Jimmy was babbling, looking more stricken than she’d ever seen him.
“I’m fine!” Chantal said, attempting to wrench her good arm free of Jimmy’s tight grasp. “I’m just… fuck, I’m fine, dammit.”
Lyn-Z could see what was wrong with Chantal’s arm now. She was cradling it not because it was broken, like Lyn-Z has assumed, but because of a wound just inside her elbow on the tender fleshy part of her arm.
A round, bite-shaped wound. Chantal’s arms were too grimy and covered in gore for Lyn-Z to tell for certain, but she probably didn’t have the streaks of infection like Mikey did yet. The wound was still seeping blood.
“Chantal--” she started, then stopped, unsure about what to say.
“I’ll be fucking fine,” Chantal insisted, voice getting higher and higher. “Just pour some fucking alcohol on it, some boiling water, cut the infection the fuck out, anything.”
Lyn-Z didn’t bother to say that it didn’t work like that; Chantal clearly knew already. Jimmy pulled her in close for a hug, and looked more heartbroken than he had in the ten years she’d known him. Fuck.
“Let’s go back here,” Kitty suggested, pointing towards the sectioned-off part of the room.
It was a quarantine, Lyn-Z suddenly realized. It was where to put the people they’d have to put down like dogs as soon as the infection got too severe.
She lead the way, trying to not catch any of the Black Parade’s eyes as she and Kitty lead Chantal and Jimmy past them, Steve trailing behind, still clutching his bottle of moonshine.
She helped Kitty set up a pallet for Chantal, who glared and announced loudly, “Stop treating me like a fucking invalid. I’m not going to fucking die.”
They had the attention of everyone now. Lyn-Z glanced over and Gerard was watching them with a strange expression, like he was watching a play he’d already seen.
“Maybe some of us should leave…” Kitty offered, but no one moved.
“I don’t want you to die,” Jimmy said. “But look at your arm, Chantie, that thing got you good.”
“It’s only a flesh wound!” she said, and across the room Mikey let out a loud snort of laughter.
Chantal let Jimmy take her arm and start cleaning it with a wet cloth, revealing pale skin under the dried-on mess as he worked his way towards the wound. “I just think that this isn’t a death sentence,” she said, staring at her arm. “I know what it means, but I think that we can figure something out.”
“They won’t just chop off my leg,” Mikey said from across the room. “I already asked.”
Chantal bit her lip as Jimmy dabbled at the wound carefully with a clean side of the rag. She hissed in a breath, and then said, “Pedro’s father was in the military.”
She didn’t continue immediately, just stared at her arm, and Steve finally prodded, “And that’s got to do with this… how?”
“He told him a story this one time, about something that happened during the Rising,” Chantal said. “Pedro told me and I didn’t really believe it, but now it’s all I can think about. There was this general who was commanding one of the cleansing squads, you know, one of those groups that spent all their time tossing the undead into incinerators. And one day Pedro’s dad saw this general get bit, you know, on the ankle by a zombie he walked a little too close to. The general played it off like it hadn’t happened. But there was blood on the ground and he limped off, and Pedro’s dad figured he was fucked.”
Everyone in the room was listening, rapt, and Lyn-Z pulled her eyes away from Chantal long enough to look back at Gerard and Mikey. Frank had squirmed up next to them and was gripping on to both of them like he was going to lose them both at any second, and Ray was staring at Chantal like he was trying to force the ending of the story out with his mind.
Jimmy was dabbling at her arm without seeming to see what he was doing.
“So the general went back to the headquarters that night and then came back the next day and went about things as usual, and the day after, and the day after. He didn’t ever die,” Chantal said. “Leastways not then. So I figure that the army has something. They know how to fix this shit.”
“So you think you’ll be okay because of what a dead dude’s daddy said he thought he saw twenty years ago?” Steve said. He settled on the floor next to Chantal’s pallet awkwardly, clearly thrown off by the darkness to his right.
“No, I think that getting bit isn’t a death sentence, not when we passed an abandoned fucking military base on our way here,” Chantal said. “They might have left stuff there.”
"It's a long shot," Kitty said, though she sounded less cynical than Steve.
Chantal looked pointedly at her arm. It was still seeping blood, and the rag Jimmy was using on her arm had already turned bright red with darker spots where it was drying. "I'm not gonna give in to odds right yet."
"You're also not going to be going anywhere soon," Jimmy said. "You're hurt."
Lyn-Z had never really heard Jimmy be so concerned with someone. It was disconcerting, how much Chantal seemed to have grown on him in such a short time.
"Yeah, but you aren't," Gerard spoke up. "We can go look."
"We can go break into a military base?" Kitty said. "That's a pretty tall order."
"It can be done," Frank said confidently.
“Of course it can be done,” Steve said, leaning his head against the wall and giving Frank his best derisive glare. It hadn’t really lost its impact, Lyn-Z was happy to see. “But why would a mystery cure for an incurable disease be floating around in an abandoned military facility?”
“You know,” Ray said, “I heard they abandoned that thing kind of quickly.”
Lyn-Z blinked. Mikey was sitting up straighter and was looking at Chantal with hope.
“Some kind of chemical spill,” Mikey said. “Remember, Gee? We used to joke about getting superpowers from there.”
Gerard nodded. “People started saying it was haunted or some shit, because the people who said they were going to break in never came back out.”
“And we could?” Lyn-Z couldn’t help bursting out with.
“We do kick a lot of ass,” Jimmy said. “And we have more practice at it than the teenage dingbats who usually fall for shit like this.”
“We could at least check it out,” Kitty said. She looked around. “If there was a chemical spill there will seals on the doors and biohazard signs. If not…”
“I don’t want to get anyone killed,” Chantal said. “But fuck, I don’t want to be a zombie yet.”
“You know, that story about the general kind of plays into some of the weirder stuff that went on back then,” Mikey said. He was twisting the edge of his blanket in his hands. “Remember there were those accounts of doctors who got bit and never turned?”
“Those accounts were on Unsolved Mysteries,” Ray said skeptically.
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” Chantal said.
Jimmy had finished cleaning off Chantal’s arm and now wrapped a bandage around it, making frustrated noises when he didn’t get it right. Chantal hissed some, and Mikey said, “Don’t worry, it’ll stop hurting soon.”
“That’s scarier than the pain,” Chantal replied, and Jimmy tucked the edge of the bandage in, patting her arm in a proud sort of way.
He stood up and said, “Well, let’s go.”
“Go?” Steve said.
“Chantal thinks this place might save her, I’m going,” Jimmy said. “Gather up some weapons and let’s get to the RV.”
“Don’t you think we should talk about this some more?” Kitty said.
“What’s there to talk about?” Jimmy said. “We hop on down there, pop in and see what’s what, then we head back. Easy peasy.”
“If you ignore the giant zombie horde hungry for our flesh,” Steve said. He motioned towards his missing eye. “Those fuckers don’t play fair.”
“Neither do we!” Jimmy replied. “We can torch their asses. Shoot ‘em. Plow ‘em down. All we gotta do is get to the RV.”
“I could do with some sweet, bloody revenge,” Steve said thoughtfully.
“But we’d have to get to the RV,” Lyn-Z said. “There are a lot of fucking zombies out there.”
“We can take ‘em,” Jimmy said. “Go wild west on the motherfuckers.”
Jimmy wasn’t going to change his mind. Lyn-Z had known him long enough to tell that he was being the sort of lighthearted that meant he was going to go through with what he was planning come hell or high water. The only question left was if he was going alone or not.
“We should get together some weapons,” she said. “We’ve got shit in the RV but two blocks is a long fucking way in this shitstorm.”
Kitty nodded. “And none of you are in fighting shape right now.”
“Fuck that, I am,” Frank announced. Gerard nodded, determined through the gore that was still caked on his face. He clearly hadn’t left his brother’s side.
“We can take ‘em,” Steve said.
“Let’s fucking go,” Jimmy said. He was now clutching Chantal’s hand in his own.
Lyn-Z didn’t like the thought of returning to the fray, but she wasn’t going to let Jimmy lose Chantal, especially since she could see just how far gone for her he was.
If the situation wasn’t so horrible, she’d probably be teasing him for being a fool in love.
She glanced over at Gerard, who had wrapped an arm around his brother’s shoulder and was leaning in close, saying something.
She knew it would break him just as bad as Jimmy if he lost Mikey, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be around to see him destroyed like that. Not if there was the slightest chance that they could help.
*
She and Kitty and Steve left the quarantined ward to discuss the details of their attempt and give Chantal and Jimmy some privacy. The Black Parade stayed together, Bob appearing as if he’d been summoned after a few minutes, joining the group clustered around Mikey, talking quietly.
“You can’t go,” Kitty tried to explain to Steve.
He snorted. “You think I can sit around here watching people die while you all are out having all the fun? Fuck that. I’m going.”
He clearly was not going to accept any arguments, and Lyn-Z and Kitty just nodded. They knew better than to get between Steve and what he wanted to do, and to be honest Lyn-Z didn’t like the idea of leaving the warehouse without him.
They ransacked the makeshift hospital for weapons that looked like they’d hold up for the two-block fight they had ahead of them, and then returned to the quarantined ward, offering weapons to Jimmy and Gerard and Frank. Ray was going to stay to watch over Mikey, it was decided, and Bob was forced to stay after he reluctantly revealed he’d twisted his ankle, something that would definitely keep him from racing to the RV.
Chantal looked like she wanted to go with them, but instead just told Jimmy, “Try not to get your ass bit, too. Unless you find the cure, then you can try it out on yourself first.”
“Anything for you, sweet cheeks,” Jimmy replied. They nuzzled their heads together, and Lyn-Z looked away.
Gerard was hovering. “I shouldn’t go,” he said. “I should stay here with you.”
Mikey rolled his eyes. “If you stay you’re just going to tap your foot a lot and come up with grotesque scenarios of what’s happening to them and how the cure is never coming.”
“But I’ll be with you! If I go…” Gerard shook his head. “I don’t want to abandon you, Mikey.”
“Come on,” Frank said. “Let’s go.”
They all took stock the weapons they’d salvaged. Lyn-Z had a proper axe now, which felt better in her hands than her makeshift one had. On the way out a huge bald man Lyn-Z vaguely recognized from the party and the shows showed up holding what looked like a mace. It looked homemade, thick nails sticking out of a thick wooden club, but Lyn-Z’s hands itched to get to try it out.
“Worm!” Gerard said delightedly.
“Bryar told me what was up,” Worm said. “You’re not gonna get far without some muscle.”
Lyn-Z and Jimmy exchanged glances. They could definitely use muscle like this dude.
Gerard slung the baseball bat Chantal had given him on his shoulder, mouth set in a determined scowl. “Let’s go.”
*
The fight to the RV was more gruesome than Lyn-Z had expected.
Lyn-Z could barely remember what the hordes had been like on the way in; she’d been so lost in just getting there, making sure everyone was alive and safe, hoping and terrified. Zombies ran together in her mind into one big blur of graying flesh, white bone shining through torn skin, an endless amorphous mass of rotting limbs and gaping mouths.
Now that she’d had time to rest a moment and see what damage the zombies could wreak, she’d had time to get scared. She couldn’t freeze up now, though.
Worm took the lead, cutting a path through the zombies easily, bashing heads with his mace and jerking it out easily, unbothered by the skull fragments that clung to the nails as he moved along.
Lyn-Z took Steve’s bad side, making sure no one snuck up on his blind spot. They didn’t insult him by having someone else take his other side, but Lyn-Z exchanged glances with Jimmy and he stuck close enough to swing if things got nasty.
Frank was a blur, moving from the front to the back of the group constantly. Gerard and Kitty took the rear, making sure nothing snuck up on them and taking out the zombies that slipped through to get too close to the center of their group.
They system worked while they were still within sight of the warehouse. As soon as they got far enough away that the lights were the only dim beacons of safety remaining, Lyn-Z felt a stab of nervousness in her belly.
The zombies weren’t any denser, but further away from the source of fresh meat there seemed to be an undercurrent of… desperation.
It was ridiculous to think that, Lyn-Z knew perfectly well that zombies only really had one mode, and it was hungry, not desperate. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that things were going to get a lot worse before they managed to get to the RV.
This was supposed to be the simplest part of their journey. Lyn-Z took a swing at a zombie, feeling the thud of impact up through her arms in that perfect, satisfying way.
In the time it took for her to make sure the zombie was no longer a threat, straighten up and swing again, everything went to hell.
Everything was chaotic, people screaming over the constant guttural moans of zombies from all sides, thuds and the splintering cracks of shattering bone. Lyn-Z kept getting flashes of what was going on around her, like her eyes wouldn’t focus for long enough to completely take in the scene.
Frank stumbled. Lyn-Z saw him out of the corner of her eye darting back to join Worm at the front of the group. He tripped over a fallen corpse, landing hard on the pavement.
Gerard yelled. Kitty shrieked, “Stop, no!”
Lyn-Z didn’t see what Kitty was yelling at.
Worm spun on his heels, eyes going wide with shock as he saw Frank on the ground, Gerard stumbling forward to help him.
Jimmy and Steve were both right there, trying to fend the zombies away from Frank. Gerard grabbed his hand, pulled, and Frank screamed. Gerard dropped his arm and Frank tried to scramble to his feet, letting the arm hang limply to his side. It was clearly broken, and Lyn-Z could only imagine how much Gerard’s helpful gesture had hurt.
Lyn-Z kept hacking away at the zombies coming at her, trying to keep any from slipping through and getting to everyone.
Worm stopped dead in his tracks.
Lyn-Z kicked away a dismembered arm that was still trying to inch towards fresh meat and then looked up. For a moment - a horrifyingly long moment, stretched out double, triple, a dozen times the length of a normal moment - she saw why Worm had stopped.
A zombie that had presumably fallen, head intact, had its mouth clamped around Worm’s calf, high enough that it wasn’t protected by his boots. Bright red blood stained the zombie’s crooked teeth, and Lyn-Z could see how quickly the dark stain was spreading on the remaining pants leg.
Worm hit at the zombie with his mace, but there was already another one, this one taking a bite out of his arm, and another, and another, rotting arms encircling Worm’s body. Gerard and Frank tried to rush over, stave off the influx of zombies, but Lyn-Z could already tell that the damage was too severe.
They had to run for it, do their best to keep away from the undead. Gerard and Frank were just going to get themselves killed trying to save a dead man.
Frank was whacking at the zombies with his good arm, but his face contorted with pain as his shattered arm jostled with every swing. Gerard was hitting at the zombies with the frantic, terrified speed of someone trying to brush spiders off themselves, and it was a losing fight.
“You grab Gerard,” Jimmy said as he and Kitty moved towards Frank, Kitty protecting Jimmy’s back from attack as he grabbed Frank around the waist and pulled him back. Lyn-Z watched Steve’s back as he did the same to Gerard, whose shoulders slumped with defeat as he was pulled away, unlike Frank, who kicked and screamed the whole way.
Lyn-Z was going to be haunted by the anguished look in Worm’s eyes as he didn’t even try to follow them, just fell to his knees, still swinging his mace ineffectually at the zombies that has overtaken him.
The RV was in sight, still sitting where they’d parked it eons ago, looking none the worse for wear.
They raced towards it, terror giving them speed they hadn’t had before, and they reached the RV itself without anyone sustaining major injury or getting bit.
Jimmy struggled with the door a bit, trying to jam the key into the lock as they formed a circle to fight off the stray zombies that approached.
Finally he managed to wrench open the door and they piled in, slamming it shut behind them, locking it and quickly checking to make sure that all the windows were still secure.
When they all realized they were in relative safety, there was silence in the RV, just the sound of them all slowly getting their breathing back to normal.
Then Gerard made kind of a choked sound, and Lyn-Z automatically reached over and rested her hand on his. He jerked away, hugging himself, faraway look in his eyes.
“Worm’s dead,” he said in an empty, disbelieving tone. “Worm died and Matt died and all those kids died.”
“And now we’re going to do every fucking thing we can to make sure that Chantal and your brother don’t join them,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah,” Frank said. He was perched at the edge of his seat, arm held gingerly against him. Steve went to the cabinet where they stored their first aid supplies and fashioned Frank a makeshift sling, offering him a drink out of the bottle of whisky they kept with the bandages and medicines. “Gerard, you don’t fucking give up. What gives?”
“I don’t want Mikey to die alone,” Gerard said, voice tiny.
Frank immediately began to protest, telling him Mikey wasn’t going to die, that Mikey was surrounded by friends. Lyn-Z didn’t say anything, just like the rest of her band didn’t.
Life and death were sudden, unpredictable things, especially now, especially when things were this bad.
Lyn-Z didn’t bother to consult with everyone before she spoke up. She already knew what had to be done with Frank. “We’ll drop you back off,” she said. “On our way to the facility.”
“You don’t know the way there,” Frank said immediately.
“We saw it on the way in,” Steve said. “Besides, you can draw us a map.”
“Gerard can, anyway,” Frank said, motioning towards his useless arm.
“We can handle it,” Kitty said in her no-nonsense tone that no one could argue with.
“I want to help save him,” Gerard protested.
“You did,” Lyn-Z said. She wanted to hug him, wanted to wrap her arms around his shoulders and let him rest his head against her and feel comfort, but she didn’t think that he would let her.
He looked closed-off, as if Worm’s death was the final nail in the coffin, as if he just couldn’t bear to see anything else today.
She couldn’t blame him - the day was wearing on her, each minute bringing new images and experiences that would haunt her nightmares, and she hadn’t even loved the people who she’d watched die. Everyone she loved was here, in this RV, and she felt a horrible stab of satisfaction that they were all okay.
“We’ll do our best,” she promised him, knowing that it was the best she could do. She couldn’t promise him a cure, couldn’t promise that they’d even make it back. Jimmy went to the front and started the RV, the rumbling of the engine making the journey finally seem real, cementing the fact that they were going to go out, break into a government facility, and try to find a cure for Gerard’s dying brother, going to find a cure for bright, bubbly Chantal.
She fumbled around and found a bent-up pack of cigarettes. She offered one to Gerard, then took one herself before passing the pack on to Frank. She realized she didn’t have a lighter, but then Gerard held out the one that’d lit their way in the dark of the warehouse. She took it gratefully.
Gerard met her eyes as the RV lurched into gear, and he slowly reached across the table and took her hand. They stayed like that, silent, dirty hands laced together, until Jimmy lurched the RV to a stop as close to the warehouse entrance as possible.
It hurt a little when he pulled his hand away, physically because the zombie gunk on their hands had dried together, but also because Lyn-Z wasn’t sure if she was going to see him again. There was no telling what the future might bring, she thought, surprising herself with how fatalistic her attitude had gotten since seeing Worm, a giant of a man, fall so easily.
So she threw her arms around his neck and pressed a kiss on his neck just below his ear, and whispered, “I’ll do my best.”
Gerard squeezed her close for a moment in response, and then he was helping Frank out, dashing into the warehouse, disappearing into the dark.
*
The RV felt empty with just the four of them, and Lyn-Z felt disconcerted. It’d been just them for so many years, and now suddenly that didn’t feel like enough. They were all strangely quiet as they left the city, the RV bump-bump-bumping over the fallen with a disregard that made Lyn-Z a little queasy.
They all spent time scrubbing themselves clean of the day, of the bits that used to be people and the stains that they couldn’t identify. Lyn-Z was relieved when the only injuries she had were little nicks and bruises that clearly hadn’t been caused by the teeth of the undead, and everyone else seemed that much brighter once they realized that they were safe, they’d survived.
Jimmy kept swerving erratically and finally Kitty took over.
“Too much time to think,” Jimmy said as he handed the wheel over.
“She’s going to be okay,” Kitty replied, squeezing him close before settling down in the driver’s seat.
Lyn-Z tried to not worry about Gerard, but it was impossible. She picked at the hem of her jacket, curled up in the corner of the couch as the RV bumped along the debris-covered road.
“You look like you’re the one missing an body part,” Steve said, leaning over and patting her knee. “What’s up, Zoid?”
“Nothing,” she said sullenly, feeling like she was seventeen again trying to avoid her mother’s questions about where she’d spent the night.
“She’s mooning over loverboy,” Kitty called from the driver’s seat.
“I do not moon!” Lyn-Z said. “Except for hilarious purposes.”
“Notice she didn’t deny the loverboy part,” Jimmy said slyly, perking up for the first time. “Somebody got some!”
Lyn-Z felt her cheeks going pink and she said, “Fuck you guys, aren’t we on a covert mission? Shouldn’t we like… scheme?”
“Scheme, schmeme,” Jimmy said, hitting his stride. “We bust the gate, we haul our asses inside, we try not to turn into mutants. Now’s time for girl talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Lyn-Z said.
“Was he a gentleman?” Kitty asked. Lyn-Z could see the crinkles of a smile in the bit of her face reflected in the side view mirror.
“I bet he was,” Jimmy said. “Please and thank you and oh here’s my jacket to lie upon, my queen!”
“I bet he found a rose-petal covered bed,” Steve offered. “Lacy curtains wafting around.”
Lyn-Z kind of got the impression that normally Gerard was that sort of knight in shining armor. “When the hell could we have found a rose-petal covered bed?”
“Ooh, so it was down and dirty,” Steve said. He did a complicated hand-gesture.
“I don’t even know what that meant,” Lyn-Z said, motioning towards Steve’s hand, “but it wasn’t that big a deal. Just sort of pumped up from all the killing and whatnot.”
She refused to share more, even when Jimmy tickle-attacked her, grabbing her sides and making her wheeze with laughter. She didn’t have a real reason to hold back on the details - she’d dished all sorts of things to them in the past, they were her best friends - but still, the atmosphere in the van was lighter.
It was a relief, laughing. They all laughed til tears were running down their cheeks, sides sore as the laughter trailed off into gasps and chuckles. She leaned back on the familiar, stained couch and just looked at the lightening sky outside.
Dawn had arrived, and they were all alive.
*
She jolted awake when the RV came to a slow stop. Lyn-Z wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep - not long, she figured. She wasn’t stiff and her limbs still had the heaviness that came along with bone-deep weariness.
Steve was drooling on her shoulder, bandana hiding the mess his eye had become. She stretched up as much as she could without disturbing him, trying to see out the window. All she could see was soft blue morning sky, and she turned to see what Jimmy and Kitty were doing.
They were standing in the front of the RV, heads close together, discussing something intently.
Lyn-Z shook Steve’s shoulder, moving her hand quick enough to avoid his usual early-morning slap at anything disturbing him, and managed to untangle herself from him.
Once she was standing, she could see what was going on.
They were parked a few hundred yards from the gate of the facility, which was thickly crowded with zombies.
“Let’s run the ass-munches down,” Jimmy said. Lyn-Z approached slowly, rubbing at her eyes, making sure they were really at the facility. That it really existed.
“We’re not gonna smash the gate,” Kitty said. “We’re going to open the gate so we can close it and both have a vehicle to get away in and something between us and the zombies while we’re inside.”
“I’ll get the weapons,” Lyn-Z said, deciding to let them fight it out.
By the time Steve was up and moving and Lyn-Z had distributed weaponry, they had a plan worked out.
Kitty pulled the RV a dozen or so yards from the gate. Armed and ready, they stood in a line, RV to their back so they couldn’t get surrounded. The zombies advanced.
Slowly.
“They’re just shuffling right along, aren’t they?” Steve observed. “Maybe we should sit down. Conserve some energy.”
“It could be their plan,” Jimmy replied, holding his axe at the ready. “Show signs of being a lard-ass and they go into super-mode!”
Kitty gave Jimmy a disbelieving look. “Their brains are leaking out of their ears. Do you really think they have a plan?”
Jimmy lowered his machete and turned to Kitty. “Zombies are metaphysical motherfuckers, they don’t need brains to plan.”
“I think you’re the metaphysical motherfucker,” Lyn-Z said, propping her axe on her shoulder and leaning against the bus. She eyed the approaching horde. A few of the zombies appeared to be drifting away from the group.
“They just don’t have the same lust for life that city zombies have,” Steve said. “Think it’s the thrill of the forbidden flesh?”
They waited and the zombies got closer and closer.
“Now!” Kitty yelled, and they all turned and hopped back in the RV. They plowed over the zombies and halted to a stop at the now nearly-deserted gate. Jimmy hurried out with their bolt-cutters and the gate swung open, Jimmy standing on the RV’s runner boards to hop out and close the gate again after they’d gotten through.
The drive across the field towards the facility was filled with high-fives, disbelieving that their plan to lure zombies away from the gate had worked.
When they got close, Steve said, “Alright. We ready for this?”
Lyn-Z wondered if her responding grin looked as bloodthirsty as she felt.
They pulled as close as they could to the entrance and Lyn-Z eyed the space. “Steve, you gonna stay here and guard the RV?”
Steve blinked and she tried to not imagine what was going on underneath his bandana. “Is this because I’ve only got one eye now? Because lots of one-eyed dudes have taken out entire hordes of zombies.”
“And I’m sure they’d had more time to adjust to their new lack of depth perception than you have, Cyclops,” Kitty replied.
“Right-o,” Jimmy said. “Steve, my one-eyed wonder, it’s not like you’ve never taken point before.”
“What the fuck ever,” Steve said sullenly. “I’ll just do my best to shoot things.”
“That’s a boy,” Lyn-Z said, patting his arm. He flipped her off.
Working up the courage to step out of the relative safety of the RV into the unknown of an abandoned military research center was easier than Lyn-Z thought it would be. They checked their weapons and ammo and then lined up at the door, waving and telling Steve they’d see him in a few.
Then they filed out and hurried to the door they’d scoped out.
Lyn-Z and Jimmy kept an eye out while Kitty worked on the door, tip of her tongue stuck out as she managed to get the lock loose. “Someone’s been here before,” she said. “This lock’s been jimmied before.”
“Well at least some of the rumors are right, then” Jimmy said. “Kiddies came here for make outs. But did they make it out again?”
He made a spooky sound and wiggled his fingers, and Lyn-Z elbowed him as they went through the door. There were no seals, no signs to indicate there had been a massive chemical spill.
Mostly it looked as though the place had been abandoned in a hurry.
There were yellowed papers scattered across the floor, and thick layers of dust covered everything. Some places it looked disturbed, though by what Lyn-Z couldn’t tell. They walked in a short distance. There were flickering florescent emergency lights still on, and Lyn-Z wondered what sort of generator they were hooked up to that was still working after years of neglect.
Maybe someone had been stopping by to ensure it was working. But why?
“I don’t like this,” she said aloud, her words echoing oddly in the empty halls. “It feels wrong.”
“We’ve just got to find the lab,” Kitty said.
“We’re not punking out now,” Jimmy said. He sounded grim and determined. “I can’t go back and watch her die.”
Lyn-Z nodded. It felt like moving through quicksand, forcing one foot in front of the other, but she did it. They’d do the same for her.
They filed down the most promising hallway, following scuff marks in the dust that didn’t look anything like footprints. The lights were dull and yellow and cast strange shadows on the wall as they swung overhead.
“Be sure to yell if you see anything move,” Kitty whispered. Lyn-Z nodded.
Jimmy was practically walking backwards to ensure that nothing crept up on them, and Lyn-Z felt more and more tense the deeper into the facility they went without seeing any signs of life.
They passed an office with a desiccated apple still sitting on the desk, and Lyn-Z bit her lip. “You guys, this place was abandoned in a hurry.”
She didn’t like how her voice wavered, but no one called her a scaredy pants like she thought they would. Instead Jimmy just said, “The lab, then we’re gone.”
Kitty just nodded.
Lyn-Z kept going down the hall, peering down the corridors that branched off but sticking to the main pathway, figuring it would lead them to the lab areas. Or, she thought, at the very least to some sort of map or fire escape planning route taped to the wall or something.
She glanced behind her. Kitty had her determined face on, clutching her rifle with both hands, and Jimmy had his hand on the revolver still in his gun-belt, ready to draw. She could barely make out the bright shine of natural light at the entrance of the building, and then she saw…
She froze.
Something had moved.
“What?” Kitty hissed, and Lyn-Z pressed her finger to her lips. She stared down the hall, trying to pinpoint exactly where and what she’d seen.
Everything was motionless.
“What did you see?” Jimmy whispered.
“I don’t know,” Lyn-Z said. She didn’t want to look away, feeling as though whatever it was she’d seen would reappear the second her back was turned. “I thought I saw something move.”
“Something like a cute fuzzy critter or something like an undead killing machine?” Jimmy asked. “Because I will have a different reaction, depending.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She bit her lip. “It was too quick.”
She couldn’t even form a picture in her mind to any accuracy of what it had looked like. Just the impression of motion that left her feeling exposed.
She forged ahead, Kitty close behind. She was glad she’d replaced her gloves; she was pretty sure the gun would have slipped from her hands already, her hands were so sweaty. The dull yellow light seemed to wash away the worst of the shadows, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was walking straight into something terrible.
At the end of the hall was a fork. She stopped, looking at both options.
“Well, the one on the left definitely looks more foreboding,” Jimmy said. “It’s got kind of the ‘gonna pull out your teeth to shove them up your ass’ vibe to it.”
“The what?” Kitty said, then shook her head. “They’re both identical. It’s a crapshoot.”
“Then left it is,” Lyn-Z said. She thought both empty, dusty hallways looked pretty fucking foreboding and she didn’t want to spend any more time than they needed to standing still and thinking about things. It was ridiculous, but she kept thinking they were getting stalked.
Zombies didn’t have higher brain function, though. What made them dangerous was numbers, and there wasn’t any way that in this silent, sprawling building they were going to run into a riot of zombies unawares.
There had to be something else in here, and she didn’t have the beginning of an idea of what it could be.
Part Four
Welcome to Planet Motherfucker Part Three
The makeshift hospital wasn’t nearly as crowded with the injured as Lyn-Z had imagined. She knew it was because most of the people that had been injured had died and reanimated already, but she still felt a strange relief at the number of people walking around.
“Kitty!” she yelled, spotting her quirkily angled pigtails through the crowd.
Kitty turned and the hurried over to her, wrapping her up in a big hug. “Oh my god, Zoid, I was afraid you were dead!”
“Still in one piece,” she said, “only slightly worse for wear.”
The building was much smaller and guarded on all sides by wary-looking survivors, and for the first time since watching the fence collapse Lyn-Z began to let herself off her guard.
“Hard to tell under all the icky,” Kitty said, pulling away and pushing a strand of Lyn-Z’s bangs away from her face, scowling at the dark residue left on her fingers.
“Like you’re pristine,” Lyn-Z said, giving Kitty’s outfit a pointed look. “You’ve totally got guts on you.”
“Since I hugged you, yeah,” Kitty teased back.
Lyn-Z glanced over to where Gerard was hurrying from pallet to pallet. “Where’s his brother at?”
“We put him in the special room,” Kitty said.
Lyn-Z bit her lip.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” she said. Lyn-Z managed to get Gerard’s attention and they followed Kitty through a curtain fashioned out of an old tarp into a darker, more depressing room.
It was clear this was where the worst-case-scenarios were being put. Lyn-Z reached over and took Gerard’s hand, squeezing it tight. He didn’t pull away.
Kitty lead them to the bed that half of the Black Parade were clustered around, and Lyn-Z braced herself for the worst.
“Hey, look who we found,” Kitty said cheerfully, and Frank turned around and almost tackled Gerard, hugging him tight enough that Gerard staggered a few steps back.
Lyn-Z couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but she untangled her fingers from Gerard’s and stepped aside, standing close to Kitty. Ray nodded to her briefly, not getting up from Mikey’s side. “Bob’s out shooting zombies from the roof,” he explained to them.
Mikey himself was sitting up, watching Frank and Gerard with a big smile across his face. He looked…
He didn’t look any worse off from the rest of them, really.
Lyn-Z glanced over to Kitty, who just shook her head.
Gerard broke the hug with Frank and dropped down next to Mikey, looking at him like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Mikey… god, I was so worried…”
“I thought I wouldn’t get to see you again,” Mikey replied, and wrapped Gerard in a hug. They stayed like that for what felt like forever, Lyn-Z awkwardly looking away because it felt too intimate to watch.
She knew logically that it had just been luck that she’d been with Gerard when the fence had fallen, but she still felt like if he’d been with his band… if she’d been with hers… things would have been better.
Somehow, things would have been better. She flushed when she remembered the alley, and how she hadn’t even thought of anyone else but herself. She could almost hear Kitty telling her practically that it was a natural reaction, that Kitty would have done the same if she’d had the opportunity, but instead of getting off everyone else had been doing shit to help people.
“Where’s Steve?” she whispered, and the way Kitty rolled her eyes did a lot to ease her fear that he was off dying somewhere.
“Somewhere around here making people miserable,” Kitty replied. “He’s not in great shape, but he’s better off than a lot of people, not that you can tell from his bitching.”
Lyn-Z smiled, but her smile faded as Gerard pulled away from his brother with a horrified expression.
“Where?” Gerard demanded in a broken-sounding voice.
Mikey swallowed and pulled aside the blanket that was draped over his legs. The left leg was fine, grimy uniform pant leg intact, but the right pant leg had been cut off above the knee, revealing a pale, knobby knee and…
“Oh, god,” Lyn-Z said, covering her mouth with her hand.
On Mikey’s right calf was a gory round wound that was unmistakably a bite mark from human teeth. The center of the wound was bruised deep purple already, and from the teeth marks red streaks of infection crept out onto pale unmarked flesh.
“It stopped bleeding,” Mikey said. “It was pouring blood, you should have seen it. And it’s gone numb, which is a definite improvement.”
“Mikey,” Gerard managed to say. “Oh god, Mikey.”
“I’ve probably got a day or two left,” he continued, like he was reciting facts that had no bearing on his own life whatsoever. “Before it gets to my heart or brain or whatever it is that kills you and turns you into a zombie.”
Gerard reached out slowly, hand hovering inches above the wound. “Mikey, what happened?”
“My boots almost saved me,” he said, looking down at the wound. “The fucking thing didn’t even have any legs! I got taken out by a gimpy zombie, can you believe that shit?”
The sound Gerard made was somewhere between a sob and a laugh.
“Take me to Steve,” Lyn-Z whispered to Kitty. She couldn’t watch this anymore.
*
“I think it makes me look dashing,” Steve said, tightening the bandage that was tied around his face. Lyn-Z recognized it as the bandana Steve regularly wore tied around his head, and told herself it wasn’t all that different.
“Like a pirate,” Kitty agreed. “A very debonair pirate.”
“Exactly!” Steve said. “And this right here is exactly why we have two eyes, anyhow.”
“Built-in spare parts!” Kitty agreed.
Lyn-Z managed to nod. Steve and Kitty continued to laugh, and she just stared at the bandage covering Steve’s missing eye and then leaned forward and hugged him tight.
He wrapped his arms around her and patted her shoulder. “It’s okay, Zoid.”
“Fuck you, I’m the one who’s supposed to be consoling you right now,” Lyn-Z said, pressing her face into the shoulder of his shirt. It was warm and clean enough that she figured his gore-soaked jacket was laying around in a corner somewhere, and she just breathed in his smell.
She just stayed there, feeling something close to safe.
“Room for a group hug?”
And Kitty was there, too, smooshed in close with her head tucked up against Steve’s other shoulder.
Lyn-Z tried to not think about it, but her mind kept going back to Gerard and Mikey and how broken they’d all looked. Frank’s tired eyes and Ray’s slumped shoulders and Mikey cracking jokes to keep them all from sinking further into despair.
And Gerard…
“Do you think he’s going to be okay?” She said, then remembered to clarify, “Gerard, I mean.”
Steve and Kitty were silent, then Kitty ventured, “It’s not going to be easy for him.”
She started rubbing circles on Lyn-Z’s shoulder, and Lyn-Z just stayed there, trying to keep this memory of being safe and warm close inside, to ward off the nightmares she knew she was going to have if she managed any sleep.
Eventually Steve shoved her away with a, “God, girl, go clean some of those guts off, you reek.”
Lyn-Z tried to head-butt him with a part of her hair she could feel was grossest, and Steve pushed her away.
“Where can I clean up?” she asked.
Kitty pointed to the makeshift curtains on the left side of the building. “Over there. It’s pretty gnarly though.”
“I can handle it,” Lyn-Z said. She found the sinks and did as good a job as she could to get the blood and unidentifiable bits of zombie off her and out of her hair, scrubbing at her face and stripping off her knee socks, throwing them in with the smelly mound of discarded, unsalvageable clothing in the corner.
She took longer than she needed, carefully making sure she’d gotten everything cleaned off and assessing how many injuries she’d sustained during the course of the day.
Mostly bruises, a few scrapes and cuts, and one slice on her leg that she thought she should probably find some bandages for, as it started bleeding when she accidentally scrubbed away the scab and wasn’t stopping.
She’d found one of the people who seemed more confident with dealing with injuries - she finally was grateful for the survival and medical training the government had forced them all through, and the fact that some people had retained their knowledge better than others - and put up with the disapproving noises as they put in a few stitches and bandaged up her leg.
She returned to Steve’s side and started teasing him about his lack of peripheral vision. He’d somehow gotten a bottle of whiskey - homemade shit, she was guessing from the unlabeled bottle and the lack of color -- and was downing it steadily enough that she knew he was hurting more than he was letting on.
He offered her the bottle, and she took in a mouthful. It was similar enough to drinking paint thinner that she almost teared up as she forced it down. “I hope you didn’t pay much for this shit,” she choked out, taking another tiny sip just to feel the burn down her throat again.
She allowed herself a glance at the tarp blocking off the area where the Black Parade were holding their vigil over Mikey, and she held back the urge to give Steve another hug. Her band was safe, and she felt guilty for how relieved she was.
“I stole it,” Steve told her.
“Smooth,” she told him. She reached up and brushed her fingers lightly over the bandana over his missing eye. “Feel like sharing your war story?”
Steve nodded magnanimously and began to weave his tale, explaining how he’d been trying to get the kids left over from the show out of the building when they’d realized that the zombies were breaking in. “So I shoved this little bitch out of the way, and the dead-ass motherfucker just lurched at me and the last thing I saw was this grimy-ass finger going into my goddamn eye,” Steve concluded crankily.
“What happened to your reflexes?” she teased.
Steve stiffened, and Lyn-Z started to apologize, but realized that he was staring off towards the entrance. She turned, and Jimmy was helping Chantal along, who was glaring and looking as though she wanted anything but to be helped.
They were even gorier than they’d been when she’d last seen them what felt like years ago, and Chantal was cradling her arm strangely.
She was on her feet before she’d realized what she was doing, and she hurried over to them.
“She’s fucking… they got her,” Jimmy was babbling, looking more stricken than she’d ever seen him.
“I’m fine!” Chantal said, attempting to wrench her good arm free of Jimmy’s tight grasp. “I’m just… fuck, I’m fine, dammit.”
Lyn-Z could see what was wrong with Chantal’s arm now. She was cradling it not because it was broken, like Lyn-Z has assumed, but because of a wound just inside her elbow on the tender fleshy part of her arm.
A round, bite-shaped wound. Chantal’s arms were too grimy and covered in gore for Lyn-Z to tell for certain, but she probably didn’t have the streaks of infection like Mikey did yet. The wound was still seeping blood.
“Chantal--” she started, then stopped, unsure about what to say.
“I’ll be fucking fine,” Chantal insisted, voice getting higher and higher. “Just pour some fucking alcohol on it, some boiling water, cut the infection the fuck out, anything.”
Lyn-Z didn’t bother to say that it didn’t work like that; Chantal clearly knew already. Jimmy pulled her in close for a hug, and looked more heartbroken than he had in the ten years she’d known him. Fuck.
“Let’s go back here,” Kitty suggested, pointing towards the sectioned-off part of the room.
It was a quarantine, Lyn-Z suddenly realized. It was where to put the people they’d have to put down like dogs as soon as the infection got too severe.
She lead the way, trying to not catch any of the Black Parade’s eyes as she and Kitty lead Chantal and Jimmy past them, Steve trailing behind, still clutching his bottle of moonshine.
She helped Kitty set up a pallet for Chantal, who glared and announced loudly, “Stop treating me like a fucking invalid. I’m not going to fucking die.”
They had the attention of everyone now. Lyn-Z glanced over and Gerard was watching them with a strange expression, like he was watching a play he’d already seen.
“Maybe some of us should leave…” Kitty offered, but no one moved.
“I don’t want you to die,” Jimmy said. “But look at your arm, Chantie, that thing got you good.”
“It’s only a flesh wound!” she said, and across the room Mikey let out a loud snort of laughter.
Chantal let Jimmy take her arm and start cleaning it with a wet cloth, revealing pale skin under the dried-on mess as he worked his way towards the wound. “I just think that this isn’t a death sentence,” she said, staring at her arm. “I know what it means, but I think that we can figure something out.”
“They won’t just chop off my leg,” Mikey said from across the room. “I already asked.”
Chantal bit her lip as Jimmy dabbled at the wound carefully with a clean side of the rag. She hissed in a breath, and then said, “Pedro’s father was in the military.”
She didn’t continue immediately, just stared at her arm, and Steve finally prodded, “And that’s got to do with this… how?”
“He told him a story this one time, about something that happened during the Rising,” Chantal said. “Pedro told me and I didn’t really believe it, but now it’s all I can think about. There was this general who was commanding one of the cleansing squads, you know, one of those groups that spent all their time tossing the undead into incinerators. And one day Pedro’s dad saw this general get bit, you know, on the ankle by a zombie he walked a little too close to. The general played it off like it hadn’t happened. But there was blood on the ground and he limped off, and Pedro’s dad figured he was fucked.”
Everyone in the room was listening, rapt, and Lyn-Z pulled her eyes away from Chantal long enough to look back at Gerard and Mikey. Frank had squirmed up next to them and was gripping on to both of them like he was going to lose them both at any second, and Ray was staring at Chantal like he was trying to force the ending of the story out with his mind.
Jimmy was dabbling at her arm without seeming to see what he was doing.
“So the general went back to the headquarters that night and then came back the next day and went about things as usual, and the day after, and the day after. He didn’t ever die,” Chantal said. “Leastways not then. So I figure that the army has something. They know how to fix this shit.”
“So you think you’ll be okay because of what a dead dude’s daddy said he thought he saw twenty years ago?” Steve said. He settled on the floor next to Chantal’s pallet awkwardly, clearly thrown off by the darkness to his right.
“No, I think that getting bit isn’t a death sentence, not when we passed an abandoned fucking military base on our way here,” Chantal said. “They might have left stuff there.”
"It's a long shot," Kitty said, though she sounded less cynical than Steve.
Chantal looked pointedly at her arm. It was still seeping blood, and the rag Jimmy was using on her arm had already turned bright red with darker spots where it was drying. "I'm not gonna give in to odds right yet."
"You're also not going to be going anywhere soon," Jimmy said. "You're hurt."
Lyn-Z had never really heard Jimmy be so concerned with someone. It was disconcerting, how much Chantal seemed to have grown on him in such a short time.
"Yeah, but you aren't," Gerard spoke up. "We can go look."
"We can go break into a military base?" Kitty said. "That's a pretty tall order."
"It can be done," Frank said confidently.
“Of course it can be done,” Steve said, leaning his head against the wall and giving Frank his best derisive glare. It hadn’t really lost its impact, Lyn-Z was happy to see. “But why would a mystery cure for an incurable disease be floating around in an abandoned military facility?”
“You know,” Ray said, “I heard they abandoned that thing kind of quickly.”
Lyn-Z blinked. Mikey was sitting up straighter and was looking at Chantal with hope.
“Some kind of chemical spill,” Mikey said. “Remember, Gee? We used to joke about getting superpowers from there.”
Gerard nodded. “People started saying it was haunted or some shit, because the people who said they were going to break in never came back out.”
“And we could?” Lyn-Z couldn’t help bursting out with.
“We do kick a lot of ass,” Jimmy said. “And we have more practice at it than the teenage dingbats who usually fall for shit like this.”
“We could at least check it out,” Kitty said. She looked around. “If there was a chemical spill there will seals on the doors and biohazard signs. If not…”
“I don’t want to get anyone killed,” Chantal said. “But fuck, I don’t want to be a zombie yet.”
“You know, that story about the general kind of plays into some of the weirder stuff that went on back then,” Mikey said. He was twisting the edge of his blanket in his hands. “Remember there were those accounts of doctors who got bit and never turned?”
“Those accounts were on Unsolved Mysteries,” Ray said skeptically.
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” Chantal said.
Jimmy had finished cleaning off Chantal’s arm and now wrapped a bandage around it, making frustrated noises when he didn’t get it right. Chantal hissed some, and Mikey said, “Don’t worry, it’ll stop hurting soon.”
“That’s scarier than the pain,” Chantal replied, and Jimmy tucked the edge of the bandage in, patting her arm in a proud sort of way.
He stood up and said, “Well, let’s go.”
“Go?” Steve said.
“Chantal thinks this place might save her, I’m going,” Jimmy said. “Gather up some weapons and let’s get to the RV.”
“Don’t you think we should talk about this some more?” Kitty said.
“What’s there to talk about?” Jimmy said. “We hop on down there, pop in and see what’s what, then we head back. Easy peasy.”
“If you ignore the giant zombie horde hungry for our flesh,” Steve said. He motioned towards his missing eye. “Those fuckers don’t play fair.”
“Neither do we!” Jimmy replied. “We can torch their asses. Shoot ‘em. Plow ‘em down. All we gotta do is get to the RV.”
“I could do with some sweet, bloody revenge,” Steve said thoughtfully.
“But we’d have to get to the RV,” Lyn-Z said. “There are a lot of fucking zombies out there.”
“We can take ‘em,” Jimmy said. “Go wild west on the motherfuckers.”
Jimmy wasn’t going to change his mind. Lyn-Z had known him long enough to tell that he was being the sort of lighthearted that meant he was going to go through with what he was planning come hell or high water. The only question left was if he was going alone or not.
“We should get together some weapons,” she said. “We’ve got shit in the RV but two blocks is a long fucking way in this shitstorm.”
Kitty nodded. “And none of you are in fighting shape right now.”
“Fuck that, I am,” Frank announced. Gerard nodded, determined through the gore that was still caked on his face. He clearly hadn’t left his brother’s side.
“We can take ‘em,” Steve said.
“Let’s fucking go,” Jimmy said. He was now clutching Chantal’s hand in his own.
Lyn-Z didn’t like the thought of returning to the fray, but she wasn’t going to let Jimmy lose Chantal, especially since she could see just how far gone for her he was.
If the situation wasn’t so horrible, she’d probably be teasing him for being a fool in love.
She glanced over at Gerard, who had wrapped an arm around his brother’s shoulder and was leaning in close, saying something.
She knew it would break him just as bad as Jimmy if he lost Mikey, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to be around to see him destroyed like that. Not if there was the slightest chance that they could help.
*
She and Kitty and Steve left the quarantined ward to discuss the details of their attempt and give Chantal and Jimmy some privacy. The Black Parade stayed together, Bob appearing as if he’d been summoned after a few minutes, joining the group clustered around Mikey, talking quietly.
“You can’t go,” Kitty tried to explain to Steve.
He snorted. “You think I can sit around here watching people die while you all are out having all the fun? Fuck that. I’m going.”
He clearly was not going to accept any arguments, and Lyn-Z and Kitty just nodded. They knew better than to get between Steve and what he wanted to do, and to be honest Lyn-Z didn’t like the idea of leaving the warehouse without him.
They ransacked the makeshift hospital for weapons that looked like they’d hold up for the two-block fight they had ahead of them, and then returned to the quarantined ward, offering weapons to Jimmy and Gerard and Frank. Ray was going to stay to watch over Mikey, it was decided, and Bob was forced to stay after he reluctantly revealed he’d twisted his ankle, something that would definitely keep him from racing to the RV.
Chantal looked like she wanted to go with them, but instead just told Jimmy, “Try not to get your ass bit, too. Unless you find the cure, then you can try it out on yourself first.”
“Anything for you, sweet cheeks,” Jimmy replied. They nuzzled their heads together, and Lyn-Z looked away.
Gerard was hovering. “I shouldn’t go,” he said. “I should stay here with you.”
Mikey rolled his eyes. “If you stay you’re just going to tap your foot a lot and come up with grotesque scenarios of what’s happening to them and how the cure is never coming.”
“But I’ll be with you! If I go…” Gerard shook his head. “I don’t want to abandon you, Mikey.”
“Come on,” Frank said. “Let’s go.”
They all took stock the weapons they’d salvaged. Lyn-Z had a proper axe now, which felt better in her hands than her makeshift one had. On the way out a huge bald man Lyn-Z vaguely recognized from the party and the shows showed up holding what looked like a mace. It looked homemade, thick nails sticking out of a thick wooden club, but Lyn-Z’s hands itched to get to try it out.
“Worm!” Gerard said delightedly.
“Bryar told me what was up,” Worm said. “You’re not gonna get far without some muscle.”
Lyn-Z and Jimmy exchanged glances. They could definitely use muscle like this dude.
Gerard slung the baseball bat Chantal had given him on his shoulder, mouth set in a determined scowl. “Let’s go.”
*
The fight to the RV was more gruesome than Lyn-Z had expected.
Lyn-Z could barely remember what the hordes had been like on the way in; she’d been so lost in just getting there, making sure everyone was alive and safe, hoping and terrified. Zombies ran together in her mind into one big blur of graying flesh, white bone shining through torn skin, an endless amorphous mass of rotting limbs and gaping mouths.
Now that she’d had time to rest a moment and see what damage the zombies could wreak, she’d had time to get scared. She couldn’t freeze up now, though.
Worm took the lead, cutting a path through the zombies easily, bashing heads with his mace and jerking it out easily, unbothered by the skull fragments that clung to the nails as he moved along.
Lyn-Z took Steve’s bad side, making sure no one snuck up on his blind spot. They didn’t insult him by having someone else take his other side, but Lyn-Z exchanged glances with Jimmy and he stuck close enough to swing if things got nasty.
Frank was a blur, moving from the front to the back of the group constantly. Gerard and Kitty took the rear, making sure nothing snuck up on them and taking out the zombies that slipped through to get too close to the center of their group.
They system worked while they were still within sight of the warehouse. As soon as they got far enough away that the lights were the only dim beacons of safety remaining, Lyn-Z felt a stab of nervousness in her belly.
The zombies weren’t any denser, but further away from the source of fresh meat there seemed to be an undercurrent of… desperation.
It was ridiculous to think that, Lyn-Z knew perfectly well that zombies only really had one mode, and it was hungry, not desperate. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that things were going to get a lot worse before they managed to get to the RV.
This was supposed to be the simplest part of their journey. Lyn-Z took a swing at a zombie, feeling the thud of impact up through her arms in that perfect, satisfying way.
In the time it took for her to make sure the zombie was no longer a threat, straighten up and swing again, everything went to hell.
Everything was chaotic, people screaming over the constant guttural moans of zombies from all sides, thuds and the splintering cracks of shattering bone. Lyn-Z kept getting flashes of what was going on around her, like her eyes wouldn’t focus for long enough to completely take in the scene.
Frank stumbled. Lyn-Z saw him out of the corner of her eye darting back to join Worm at the front of the group. He tripped over a fallen corpse, landing hard on the pavement.
Gerard yelled. Kitty shrieked, “Stop, no!”
Lyn-Z didn’t see what Kitty was yelling at.
Worm spun on his heels, eyes going wide with shock as he saw Frank on the ground, Gerard stumbling forward to help him.
Jimmy and Steve were both right there, trying to fend the zombies away from Frank. Gerard grabbed his hand, pulled, and Frank screamed. Gerard dropped his arm and Frank tried to scramble to his feet, letting the arm hang limply to his side. It was clearly broken, and Lyn-Z could only imagine how much Gerard’s helpful gesture had hurt.
Lyn-Z kept hacking away at the zombies coming at her, trying to keep any from slipping through and getting to everyone.
Worm stopped dead in his tracks.
Lyn-Z kicked away a dismembered arm that was still trying to inch towards fresh meat and then looked up. For a moment - a horrifyingly long moment, stretched out double, triple, a dozen times the length of a normal moment - she saw why Worm had stopped.
A zombie that had presumably fallen, head intact, had its mouth clamped around Worm’s calf, high enough that it wasn’t protected by his boots. Bright red blood stained the zombie’s crooked teeth, and Lyn-Z could see how quickly the dark stain was spreading on the remaining pants leg.
Worm hit at the zombie with his mace, but there was already another one, this one taking a bite out of his arm, and another, and another, rotting arms encircling Worm’s body. Gerard and Frank tried to rush over, stave off the influx of zombies, but Lyn-Z could already tell that the damage was too severe.
They had to run for it, do their best to keep away from the undead. Gerard and Frank were just going to get themselves killed trying to save a dead man.
Frank was whacking at the zombies with his good arm, but his face contorted with pain as his shattered arm jostled with every swing. Gerard was hitting at the zombies with the frantic, terrified speed of someone trying to brush spiders off themselves, and it was a losing fight.
“You grab Gerard,” Jimmy said as he and Kitty moved towards Frank, Kitty protecting Jimmy’s back from attack as he grabbed Frank around the waist and pulled him back. Lyn-Z watched Steve’s back as he did the same to Gerard, whose shoulders slumped with defeat as he was pulled away, unlike Frank, who kicked and screamed the whole way.
Lyn-Z was going to be haunted by the anguished look in Worm’s eyes as he didn’t even try to follow them, just fell to his knees, still swinging his mace ineffectually at the zombies that has overtaken him.
The RV was in sight, still sitting where they’d parked it eons ago, looking none the worse for wear.
They raced towards it, terror giving them speed they hadn’t had before, and they reached the RV itself without anyone sustaining major injury or getting bit.
Jimmy struggled with the door a bit, trying to jam the key into the lock as they formed a circle to fight off the stray zombies that approached.
Finally he managed to wrench open the door and they piled in, slamming it shut behind them, locking it and quickly checking to make sure that all the windows were still secure.
When they all realized they were in relative safety, there was silence in the RV, just the sound of them all slowly getting their breathing back to normal.
Then Gerard made kind of a choked sound, and Lyn-Z automatically reached over and rested her hand on his. He jerked away, hugging himself, faraway look in his eyes.
“Worm’s dead,” he said in an empty, disbelieving tone. “Worm died and Matt died and all those kids died.”
“And now we’re going to do every fucking thing we can to make sure that Chantal and your brother don’t join them,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah,” Frank said. He was perched at the edge of his seat, arm held gingerly against him. Steve went to the cabinet where they stored their first aid supplies and fashioned Frank a makeshift sling, offering him a drink out of the bottle of whisky they kept with the bandages and medicines. “Gerard, you don’t fucking give up. What gives?”
“I don’t want Mikey to die alone,” Gerard said, voice tiny.
Frank immediately began to protest, telling him Mikey wasn’t going to die, that Mikey was surrounded by friends. Lyn-Z didn’t say anything, just like the rest of her band didn’t.
Life and death were sudden, unpredictable things, especially now, especially when things were this bad.
Lyn-Z didn’t bother to consult with everyone before she spoke up. She already knew what had to be done with Frank. “We’ll drop you back off,” she said. “On our way to the facility.”
“You don’t know the way there,” Frank said immediately.
“We saw it on the way in,” Steve said. “Besides, you can draw us a map.”
“Gerard can, anyway,” Frank said, motioning towards his useless arm.
“We can handle it,” Kitty said in her no-nonsense tone that no one could argue with.
“I want to help save him,” Gerard protested.
“You did,” Lyn-Z said. She wanted to hug him, wanted to wrap her arms around his shoulders and let him rest his head against her and feel comfort, but she didn’t think that he would let her.
He looked closed-off, as if Worm’s death was the final nail in the coffin, as if he just couldn’t bear to see anything else today.
She couldn’t blame him - the day was wearing on her, each minute bringing new images and experiences that would haunt her nightmares, and she hadn’t even loved the people who she’d watched die. Everyone she loved was here, in this RV, and she felt a horrible stab of satisfaction that they were all okay.
“We’ll do our best,” she promised him, knowing that it was the best she could do. She couldn’t promise him a cure, couldn’t promise that they’d even make it back. Jimmy went to the front and started the RV, the rumbling of the engine making the journey finally seem real, cementing the fact that they were going to go out, break into a government facility, and try to find a cure for Gerard’s dying brother, going to find a cure for bright, bubbly Chantal.
She fumbled around and found a bent-up pack of cigarettes. She offered one to Gerard, then took one herself before passing the pack on to Frank. She realized she didn’t have a lighter, but then Gerard held out the one that’d lit their way in the dark of the warehouse. She took it gratefully.
Gerard met her eyes as the RV lurched into gear, and he slowly reached across the table and took her hand. They stayed like that, silent, dirty hands laced together, until Jimmy lurched the RV to a stop as close to the warehouse entrance as possible.
It hurt a little when he pulled his hand away, physically because the zombie gunk on their hands had dried together, but also because Lyn-Z wasn’t sure if she was going to see him again. There was no telling what the future might bring, she thought, surprising herself with how fatalistic her attitude had gotten since seeing Worm, a giant of a man, fall so easily.
So she threw her arms around his neck and pressed a kiss on his neck just below his ear, and whispered, “I’ll do my best.”
Gerard squeezed her close for a moment in response, and then he was helping Frank out, dashing into the warehouse, disappearing into the dark.
*
The RV felt empty with just the four of them, and Lyn-Z felt disconcerted. It’d been just them for so many years, and now suddenly that didn’t feel like enough. They were all strangely quiet as they left the city, the RV bump-bump-bumping over the fallen with a disregard that made Lyn-Z a little queasy.
They all spent time scrubbing themselves clean of the day, of the bits that used to be people and the stains that they couldn’t identify. Lyn-Z was relieved when the only injuries she had were little nicks and bruises that clearly hadn’t been caused by the teeth of the undead, and everyone else seemed that much brighter once they realized that they were safe, they’d survived.
Jimmy kept swerving erratically and finally Kitty took over.
“Too much time to think,” Jimmy said as he handed the wheel over.
“She’s going to be okay,” Kitty replied, squeezing him close before settling down in the driver’s seat.
Lyn-Z tried to not worry about Gerard, but it was impossible. She picked at the hem of her jacket, curled up in the corner of the couch as the RV bumped along the debris-covered road.
“You look like you’re the one missing an body part,” Steve said, leaning over and patting her knee. “What’s up, Zoid?”
“Nothing,” she said sullenly, feeling like she was seventeen again trying to avoid her mother’s questions about where she’d spent the night.
“She’s mooning over loverboy,” Kitty called from the driver’s seat.
“I do not moon!” Lyn-Z said. “Except for hilarious purposes.”
“Notice she didn’t deny the loverboy part,” Jimmy said slyly, perking up for the first time. “Somebody got some!”
Lyn-Z felt her cheeks going pink and she said, “Fuck you guys, aren’t we on a covert mission? Shouldn’t we like… scheme?”
“Scheme, schmeme,” Jimmy said, hitting his stride. “We bust the gate, we haul our asses inside, we try not to turn into mutants. Now’s time for girl talk.”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Lyn-Z said.
“Was he a gentleman?” Kitty asked. Lyn-Z could see the crinkles of a smile in the bit of her face reflected in the side view mirror.
“I bet he was,” Jimmy said. “Please and thank you and oh here’s my jacket to lie upon, my queen!”
“I bet he found a rose-petal covered bed,” Steve offered. “Lacy curtains wafting around.”
Lyn-Z kind of got the impression that normally Gerard was that sort of knight in shining armor. “When the hell could we have found a rose-petal covered bed?”
“Ooh, so it was down and dirty,” Steve said. He did a complicated hand-gesture.
“I don’t even know what that meant,” Lyn-Z said, motioning towards Steve’s hand, “but it wasn’t that big a deal. Just sort of pumped up from all the killing and whatnot.”
She refused to share more, even when Jimmy tickle-attacked her, grabbing her sides and making her wheeze with laughter. She didn’t have a real reason to hold back on the details - she’d dished all sorts of things to them in the past, they were her best friends - but still, the atmosphere in the van was lighter.
It was a relief, laughing. They all laughed til tears were running down their cheeks, sides sore as the laughter trailed off into gasps and chuckles. She leaned back on the familiar, stained couch and just looked at the lightening sky outside.
Dawn had arrived, and they were all alive.
*
She jolted awake when the RV came to a slow stop. Lyn-Z wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep - not long, she figured. She wasn’t stiff and her limbs still had the heaviness that came along with bone-deep weariness.
Steve was drooling on her shoulder, bandana hiding the mess his eye had become. She stretched up as much as she could without disturbing him, trying to see out the window. All she could see was soft blue morning sky, and she turned to see what Jimmy and Kitty were doing.
They were standing in the front of the RV, heads close together, discussing something intently.
Lyn-Z shook Steve’s shoulder, moving her hand quick enough to avoid his usual early-morning slap at anything disturbing him, and managed to untangle herself from him.
Once she was standing, she could see what was going on.
They were parked a few hundred yards from the gate of the facility, which was thickly crowded with zombies.
“Let’s run the ass-munches down,” Jimmy said. Lyn-Z approached slowly, rubbing at her eyes, making sure they were really at the facility. That it really existed.
“We’re not gonna smash the gate,” Kitty said. “We’re going to open the gate so we can close it and both have a vehicle to get away in and something between us and the zombies while we’re inside.”
“I’ll get the weapons,” Lyn-Z said, deciding to let them fight it out.
By the time Steve was up and moving and Lyn-Z had distributed weaponry, they had a plan worked out.
Kitty pulled the RV a dozen or so yards from the gate. Armed and ready, they stood in a line, RV to their back so they couldn’t get surrounded. The zombies advanced.
Slowly.
“They’re just shuffling right along, aren’t they?” Steve observed. “Maybe we should sit down. Conserve some energy.”
“It could be their plan,” Jimmy replied, holding his axe at the ready. “Show signs of being a lard-ass and they go into super-mode!”
Kitty gave Jimmy a disbelieving look. “Their brains are leaking out of their ears. Do you really think they have a plan?”
Jimmy lowered his machete and turned to Kitty. “Zombies are metaphysical motherfuckers, they don’t need brains to plan.”
“I think you’re the metaphysical motherfucker,” Lyn-Z said, propping her axe on her shoulder and leaning against the bus. She eyed the approaching horde. A few of the zombies appeared to be drifting away from the group.
“They just don’t have the same lust for life that city zombies have,” Steve said. “Think it’s the thrill of the forbidden flesh?”
They waited and the zombies got closer and closer.
“Now!” Kitty yelled, and they all turned and hopped back in the RV. They plowed over the zombies and halted to a stop at the now nearly-deserted gate. Jimmy hurried out with their bolt-cutters and the gate swung open, Jimmy standing on the RV’s runner boards to hop out and close the gate again after they’d gotten through.
The drive across the field towards the facility was filled with high-fives, disbelieving that their plan to lure zombies away from the gate had worked.
When they got close, Steve said, “Alright. We ready for this?”
Lyn-Z wondered if her responding grin looked as bloodthirsty as she felt.
They pulled as close as they could to the entrance and Lyn-Z eyed the space. “Steve, you gonna stay here and guard the RV?”
Steve blinked and she tried to not imagine what was going on underneath his bandana. “Is this because I’ve only got one eye now? Because lots of one-eyed dudes have taken out entire hordes of zombies.”
“And I’m sure they’d had more time to adjust to their new lack of depth perception than you have, Cyclops,” Kitty replied.
“Right-o,” Jimmy said. “Steve, my one-eyed wonder, it’s not like you’ve never taken point before.”
“What the fuck ever,” Steve said sullenly. “I’ll just do my best to shoot things.”
“That’s a boy,” Lyn-Z said, patting his arm. He flipped her off.
Working up the courage to step out of the relative safety of the RV into the unknown of an abandoned military research center was easier than Lyn-Z thought it would be. They checked their weapons and ammo and then lined up at the door, waving and telling Steve they’d see him in a few.
Then they filed out and hurried to the door they’d scoped out.
Lyn-Z and Jimmy kept an eye out while Kitty worked on the door, tip of her tongue stuck out as she managed to get the lock loose. “Someone’s been here before,” she said. “This lock’s been jimmied before.”
“Well at least some of the rumors are right, then” Jimmy said. “Kiddies came here for make outs. But did they make it out again?”
He made a spooky sound and wiggled his fingers, and Lyn-Z elbowed him as they went through the door. There were no seals, no signs to indicate there had been a massive chemical spill.
Mostly it looked as though the place had been abandoned in a hurry.
There were yellowed papers scattered across the floor, and thick layers of dust covered everything. Some places it looked disturbed, though by what Lyn-Z couldn’t tell. They walked in a short distance. There were flickering florescent emergency lights still on, and Lyn-Z wondered what sort of generator they were hooked up to that was still working after years of neglect.
Maybe someone had been stopping by to ensure it was working. But why?
“I don’t like this,” she said aloud, her words echoing oddly in the empty halls. “It feels wrong.”
“We’ve just got to find the lab,” Kitty said.
“We’re not punking out now,” Jimmy said. He sounded grim and determined. “I can’t go back and watch her die.”
Lyn-Z nodded. It felt like moving through quicksand, forcing one foot in front of the other, but she did it. They’d do the same for her.
They filed down the most promising hallway, following scuff marks in the dust that didn’t look anything like footprints. The lights were dull and yellow and cast strange shadows on the wall as they swung overhead.
“Be sure to yell if you see anything move,” Kitty whispered. Lyn-Z nodded.
Jimmy was practically walking backwards to ensure that nothing crept up on them, and Lyn-Z felt more and more tense the deeper into the facility they went without seeing any signs of life.
They passed an office with a desiccated apple still sitting on the desk, and Lyn-Z bit her lip. “You guys, this place was abandoned in a hurry.”
She didn’t like how her voice wavered, but no one called her a scaredy pants like she thought they would. Instead Jimmy just said, “The lab, then we’re gone.”
Kitty just nodded.
Lyn-Z kept going down the hall, peering down the corridors that branched off but sticking to the main pathway, figuring it would lead them to the lab areas. Or, she thought, at the very least to some sort of map or fire escape planning route taped to the wall or something.
She glanced behind her. Kitty had her determined face on, clutching her rifle with both hands, and Jimmy had his hand on the revolver still in his gun-belt, ready to draw. She could barely make out the bright shine of natural light at the entrance of the building, and then she saw…
She froze.
Something had moved.
“What?” Kitty hissed, and Lyn-Z pressed her finger to her lips. She stared down the hall, trying to pinpoint exactly where and what she’d seen.
Everything was motionless.
“What did you see?” Jimmy whispered.
“I don’t know,” Lyn-Z said. She didn’t want to look away, feeling as though whatever it was she’d seen would reappear the second her back was turned. “I thought I saw something move.”
“Something like a cute fuzzy critter or something like an undead killing machine?” Jimmy asked. “Because I will have a different reaction, depending.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She bit her lip. “It was too quick.”
She couldn’t even form a picture in her mind to any accuracy of what it had looked like. Just the impression of motion that left her feeling exposed.
She forged ahead, Kitty close behind. She was glad she’d replaced her gloves; she was pretty sure the gun would have slipped from her hands already, her hands were so sweaty. The dull yellow light seemed to wash away the worst of the shadows, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was walking straight into something terrible.
At the end of the hall was a fork. She stopped, looking at both options.
“Well, the one on the left definitely looks more foreboding,” Jimmy said. “It’s got kind of the ‘gonna pull out your teeth to shove them up your ass’ vibe to it.”
“The what?” Kitty said, then shook her head. “They’re both identical. It’s a crapshoot.”
“Then left it is,” Lyn-Z said. She thought both empty, dusty hallways looked pretty fucking foreboding and she didn’t want to spend any more time than they needed to standing still and thinking about things. It was ridiculous, but she kept thinking they were getting stalked.
Zombies didn’t have higher brain function, though. What made them dangerous was numbers, and there wasn’t any way that in this silent, sprawling building they were going to run into a riot of zombies unawares.
There had to be something else in here, and she didn’t have the beginning of an idea of what it could be.
Part Four