Fic - Deadfield - A/U 1/?
Title: Deadfield
Fandom: Guiding Light
Pairing: Olivia/Natalia
Rating: Overall R to NC-17
Notes: This is an A/U fic. It's set in "present" day Springfield. A/U assumptions: Olivia left Springfield shortly after her heart-condition diagnosis. Emma doesn't exist.
Author's Note: I've been posting this over at IF, but I realized there's probably many people who don't read over there. So, I've decided to start posting over here too. I don't really like to throw out a ton of updates on LJ, so I'll probably put up at least two updates at a time whenever I post over here. :)
DEADFIELD
There's only one sure way
To bring the giant down
Defunct the strings
Of cemetery things
With one flat foot
On the devil's wing
Crawl on me
Sink into me
Die for me
Living Dead Girl
-Rob Zombie
My name is Olivia Spencer. That used to mean a lot of things. When people heard the name Olivia Spencer they associated it with certain concepts and ideas and preconceptions. I could tell you about all those things. I could sit you down and talk and ramble on for days about the grand and infamous past of Olivia Spencer, but that’s all been washed away. Snuffed out like a scented candle that was giving someone a headache in their living room somewhere. All it took was a flick of a wrist in a lab somewhere or a mutated gene or a… who the fuck knows, maybe God got bored and decided he wanted the future of the Earth to play out like a Romero horror film.
I suppose I’ll start my story, the real story, on the day I found a Ford F-150 on the side of the road. It had a steel grill guard that was perfect for running over things. The keys were in the ignition and the gas tank was full. Serendipity, baby.
I assumed the owner probably had a craving for brains and decided to stop at a roadside take-out stand.
It used to be called stealing when you hopped in someone’s truck and starting driving away with it. The rules have changed. I guess it doesn’t matter when the police are trying to eat your face off instead of their usual jelly-filled donuts.
I remember Rob Zombie came blasting out of the speakers when I turned the ignition. I turned it up and threw the CD on loop. What can I say? I’m a fan of irony.
I took the truck and headed to Springfield despite a million voices in my telling me to go somewhere, anywhere else. I swore I would never go back to that pit of insanity, but Chicago was turning into dust. Literally. I could still smell the smoke after being on the road for two hours. I didn’t have anywhere else to go that held any sort of familiarity for me, so I ended up shrugging my shoulders and muttering, “Springfield or bust,” as Rob Zombie growled out Living Dead Girl from the speakers.
I suppose I was lucky to get out of Chicago alive. Most people didn’t make it. I suppose I should have felt lucky and hopeful and alive, but I felt so empty I was pretty sure I could rap on my chest and hear an echo like I’d taken on the part of the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz.
There was that irony again. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just Alanis Morrissette irony. Maybe it was all just a big load of shit that got dumped onto my head.
A shiny new, only slightly used, heart pumped in my chest keeping me alive and kicking. I was so very alive even as the rest of the world seemed like it was dropping down dead all around me. They popped the heart in well over a year before I sped away from the Chicago suburbs in the Ford, and the damn thing still keeps beating on and on - it’s like the Energizer fucking bunny. There have been so many moments when I wished it would just stop. Sometimes all I wanted to do was give up the fighting and start wandering around looking for a midnight snack of flesh like the rest of the world. Life sure as hell would have been a lot easier that way.
I remember the day they told me there was a heart for me. I felt like the news threw my life into a panicked whirlwind of change. One day they were saying I was going to die if I didn’t get a new heart, and before the news even sunk in, there was a heart, a perfect match, and it was in Chicago. They called it a miracle and whisked me away in a helicopter to a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago and threw the thing in my chest before I even had time to blink.
I was alone in the hospital for much of my recovery. My daughter Ava called and visited as much as she could, but she had her own life filled with drama that kept drawing her back to that damn soul-sucking Springfield. I remember lying in my hospital bed late in the night and crying and thinking about all the things I’d done to deserve and not deserve my fate.
There was only one person - one man who stayed by my side as much as he could. David. My nurse and guardian angel. In the hospital he listened to me ramble on and on about my life and my regrets like a patient priest hearing the confessions of a demon who wanted to somehow be redeemed from a soulless past.
Somewhere along the way the fool fell in love with me. Despite everything I told him, he saw something in me that no one else ever had.
Stupid, wonderful David.
I never loved him. Not the way I should have. I would look at him and see a safety blanket. Someone into whose arms I could melt and forget about the world around me. He helped me survive the transplant with his kind words, his easy laughter, and his seemingly unconditional love. I didn’t deserve him. How do you deserve someone like that? How could I deserve someone like that?
But I let him love me. My selfish, tarnished soul let him take me home with him and let him wrap his arms around me at night. He comforted me. He healed me. When he ran his hands over my body I felt like he was cleansing the edges of my soul with his goodness. I never craved that touch like I should have though. When we had sex I felt like I was thanking him. Thanking him for saving me from myself and my life. He deserved more than that.
Maybe this is all a punishment for my never-ending selfishness. Only I could take a pure heart like his and use it for my own selfish needs.
But there I go again. Always making everything about me. Olivia Spencer: Center of the Universe.
Even if the disaster wasn’t about me, I had my fair share of punishment because of it.
The second day the news stations started reporting about the mysterious plague that was sweeping across Canada and the northern US states, I bought a gun. I’d seen countless reports of looting on the news, and I’d be damned if I was going to let anyone invade David’s home. I had the fully-loaded gun in one hand and a box of cookies, David’s favorite, in the other hand. I was hoping I could flash my smile and the cookies and he’d let me keep the gun without too much protest. Not that I’d get rid of it if he asked me to, I just didn’t want to fight with him about it.
I used to like to fight. It got my adrenaline flowing and I’d feel my scalp tingle like tiny fireworks were blasting off from my skull. It made me feel alive and sharp. After the transplant, it scared me. It made me feel like I was losing control of the second-chance life I’d been given. I wasn’t a fighter anymore. I was something new. Something I could never define. I could never quite decide if I liked the new me or not.
As I drove the Ford toward Springfield, I realized that was something I didn’t have to worry about anymore.
When I got home after buying the gun, the door of the house was unlocked. Strange. David always locked the doors. Sometimes I’d have to ring the bell because he would forget and slide the chain lock closed. It seemed like he was always trying to keep the outside world at bay. I liked that about him - even when it locked me out. Hell, I didn’t deserve to be in there anyway.
I walked in tentatively, and I remember my palm starting to feel sweaty as I grasped the gun’s handle and positioned my index finger onto the trigger. I always assumed the worst in life, and that time was no exception. I walked through the house, toward the kitchen, and saw that the backdoor was wide open. There was movement out back. A darting blur of motion passed back and forth two… three times. I wanted to run. I wanted to spin around and never go back because my heart knew what had happened.
I kept my forward progress anyway. David deserved that much. Maybe my heart was wrong. It wasn’t really mine, after all. Maybe I could save him. Maybe there was still time.
I passed through the back door and that’s when I realized I was right.
I hadn’t taken more than one step through the threshold when I heard a guttural scream tear through the air. Then suddenly David was sprinting toward me.
It only took a second to see the look on his face. Gone was the endless compassion and love I always found there. Gone were bright baby blue eyes that held more light than I ever thought possible in a human being.
Gone.
I raised the gun in my hand and shot him between the eyes just as he took a running leap toward me.
Everything was gone.
After that, the plague spread everywhere. You couldn’t drive your car down the street without seeing one of them. It was horrible. Chicago was literally being devoured by people who had been infected by what the news started calling The 4Gen Plague. Ground zero was apparently some obscure little research lab in upstate Minnesota named 4Gen Research.
The only thing that kept me alive was that I didn’t give a shit.
I suppose putting a bullet through the skull of an angel can do that to you.
I spent the better part of three weeks after David’s death driving around the city actually looking for people infected with 4Gen. I’d shoot them and kill them for a second time. It felt good - a sort of insane cathartic healing for the soul.
I spent my days killing, and I spent my nights crying.
I saved people. I saved a lot of people. I suppose I became a sort of angel in my own right, or at least that’s what people started calling me.
One time there were ten of them surrounding a bus. The man driving, who looked more like a banker than a bus driver, was too scared to run any of them over. I stopped my car, hopped out, and began shooting. I assumed I would die. I suppose that’s why I did it. I wanted the insanity to end. But a steady hand and fifteen bullets delivered the bus load of people to safety. They were mostly children. They all wanted to hug me and touch me and call me a miracle, but I shrugged them off and busied myself with yelling at the driver. I told him to start driving his bus like the devil’s snow plow. I told him half the city was dead because they didn’t have a 13 ton weapon at their disposal and that he’d be nothing short of a murderer if he ever stopped again without a plan for getting away from any zombies that might pop up.
He cringed when I said zombies. The ‘z’ word had become the newest curse word to hit the streets. It irked me a bit to witness people denying the truth, but I suppose it was a hard thing to accept. The monsters fit every profile in just about every zombie movie I’d ever seen. The only good thing was that they didn’t gain any super powers when they died. They were just dead humans who stood up again after their hearts stop beating.
That sounds familiar.
I gave the bus driver a fully-loaded shotgun before I left. He took it like I was handing him an apple that had “To: Snow White” etched into it and asked me what he was supposed to do with it. I wanted to take it back and slam him in the head with it.
“Aim at their heads and shoot,” I said to him. “You’ve seen movies, right? It’s a pretty easy concept. If Billy Bob from Bible-belt Podunkville can do it, I’m sure you can too.”
He nodded firmly and squared his shoulders when I said that. He kept straightening his tie. He looked like my ex-husband Bill Lewis, and it annoyed me. After assuring me he could pull a trigger, I told him to get the fuck out of my face and climbed back into my car.
I miss that car. It was a nice little car. White and shiny and it had a satellite radio that seemed to be able to play every kind of music ever made.
I remember the day the reception went out on that shiny black gadget. I’d just laid a couple headshots into two of David’s best friends who were cleverly disguised as zombies and was tucking their strangely vast gun collection into the backseat of the car when Boom Boom Pow flipped over to silence just as Fergie was about to say “you so 2000 and late.”
Annoying. I like that part.
I climbed into back into the driver seat and fiddled with the radio but had no luck finding anything. I even checked the stations that had taken to screaming about Jehovah and the Book of Revelations, but there was nothing left.
I checked my cell phone. No bars.
Boom Boom Pow.
One day, somewhere into week three (I’d started measuring time by how long it had been since I buried David in his backyard), I was driving around and I saw a little girl crouched down by the side of the road. She looked like she might have been crying, and I stopped. I’m not sure why. I don’t know where I would have taken her. Almost everyone who was still breathing had gotten the hell out of Dodge. I stepped out of the car and walked slowly over to her.
I saw that she was clutching something in her hands. It was an arm. My stomach churned. My first instinct was to feel pity for the child. I thought maybe her mother or father had been ripped apart by one of the infected and she was in shock, carrying around this grotesque memento because she didn’t know what else to do. Then I saw her raise the arm to her mouth and greedily begin gnawing on it. I blanched. For the first time since David, I felt a surge of sorrow fill me.
As I emptied the clip from my handgun into her head, tears poured from my eyes.
The sound of rapid-fire gunshots captured the interest of countless infected, and as they ran and crawled and limped toward me, I felt an over-powering desire to survive. I didn’t want to end up dead because of these monsters, and I definitely didn’t want to become one of them. I ran back to my car and slammed my foot on the accelerator until the whole car shook from the speed.
I found the truck when my car was nearly out of gas. I wasn’t sure what to think about that. Luck? Fate? God? I didn’t question it. I didn’t want to question it. If there really was some higher power out there keeping tabs on me, I figured it was playing with me like a cat with a ball of yarn.
I decided to go back to Springfield because if any place on this planet can be immune from the outside world it’s that incestuous little hovel. Plus, people seem to be able to rise from the dead there without turning into flesh-eating corpses.
When I passed the Welcome to Springfield sign, chills began running up and down my back because the town looked untouched. It looked just like it did the last time I saw it over a year ago. I found it impossible to believe I was right. Had 4Gen really not reached Springfield? What kind of strange magic did the little town in Illinois possess?
No. Impossible. I shook my head and told myself to stop being a hopeful fool. Springfield is only a three hour drive from Chicago. The very idea they’d been left untouched was insanity.
I hadn’t been back there since the diagnosis. I thought I’d never return. Every stubborn bone in my body would have refused it a month prior, but as I slowly drove the Ford through the quiet roads of town, I could almost feel the warm arms of Springfield sliding around my shoulders and welcoming me home.
I hated it. I hated that a place which caused me so much heartache and pain could also make me feel so comfortable.
Such a fucking masochist.
The truck felt huge as I pulled it into the parking lot of Company. I gritted my teeth and sighed when I saw Buzz’s car in the parking lot. One part of me smiled at the thought of finding Buzz, of seeking solace in his kind arms, and another part of me whispered, “Buzz Burgers with extra brains, please” and laughed at me.
I sat in the car for a moment after turning the motor off and listened to my own breathing. I figured there was a good chance it would be the last time I’d ever hear it. I ran my fingers through my hair, rubbed my face, and took a deep breath before steeling myself for my fate.
I don’t know what I expected to find when I walked through the doors of Company with a cocked and loaded shotgun in my hands, but it definitely wasn’t what I found.
I couldn’t pick my jaw off the floor.
There were people eating dinner and sitting at almost every table. A few waitresses scurried around busily. I saw faces I recognized and faces I didn’t. Faces and people everywhere. They were talking and touching and laughing.
I felt like screaming, “What the fuck is going on here?” but I couldn’t even move. The best-case scenario I ever dreamed of was maybe finding a few people huddled in a corner with guns and axes crying over the fact that they just had to chop their best friend’s head off.
What the fuck?
“Olivia?” said a surprised female voice from somewhere. I slowly blinked my eyes and attempted to refocus. Maybe I lost my mind? Maybe I slipped into a parallel universe?
“Olivia!” said another voice and suddenly arms were around me, hugging me. I still couldn’t move. The voice laughed and the hug ended. I stared into the voice’s face and watched as it said, “Hey! Whatcha got there? Whoa!” He laughed again. “I didn’t know you were into hunting!” He was loud. The voice was really loud, and I felt my knees start to give out.
“Buzz?” I said softly, my voice barely a whisper, and then felt my knees give out completely. Darkness engulfed my vision as I sunk to the ground.