Chapter Text
Preface
The moonlight gave a pleasantly ominous lighting to the deed, as a simple henchman discovered how digging up a grave was much easier said than done in the hardened northeastern soil. He wasn't one to argue or complain, out of terror. Terror certainly kept him close, he was a simple fringe mutant, on the outskirts of the Hellfire club in its heyday. Some men just couldn't help but play with fire, so of course he joined in with Selene when she was on the radar again. He'd offered ins and outs, though with the angle things had taken he was unsure how long he'd stay alive with just simple politics to be offering. He wasn't here for murder, but that's exactly what he landed in. At least he was only being asked to dig up a dead sixteen year old and forcefully resurrect him to make him an undead slave. That he could handle instead of a gun, which lacked elegance. Here, though he wheezed with a tight chest, he was doing a true act of supervillainy. At last, he struck the casket. With the last of his waning strength, he struggled yet eventually succeeded in prying it open.
Now all that was left was to inject the virus. It made him nervous for sure, with what little he knew about its danger. He didn't know more, as he knew not to ask questions that would only give upsetting answers. Ignorance truly was bliss. Except now, as he wasn't sure exactly how a corpse was supposed to revive. Was it supposed to be writhing around that much? He'd seen a few zombie movies, they didn't jerk and look like a war was occurring beneath the surface of the skin. Plain disgusting, so he turned away. Until a stillness fell upon the scene and that was suddenly even more alarming than a zombie having a seizure. Peering over the casket, he had all of five seconds to register something erupting from the chest cavity before it devoured him whole.
Doug Ramsey crawled out from his own grave, weak and confused. His mind was still coming back online, not one of a mutant or a Technarch, but rather a fusion of meat and the techno-organic. His body reflected that, the acquired flesh giving him a growth spurt for his adult mind to be matched with an adult body, a body that was a sausage casing for something shifting and hungry. Something had gone very, very wrong somewhere.
Jono Starsmore was trying his damndest to stay awake, sorely missing the caffeine provided by black coffee he'd declined. He didn't want to be in that place he'd gotten the pickup truck at anymore than the guy wanted him to be there. Funny how still he was naturally unwelcome. It was as if he'd traded off his position in the freakshow for one at the circus. From a living furnace for a chest and no lower jaw to looking like a smaller version of Apocalypse, it got even more stares than just being bundled up. He couldn't hide this with just his wrappings. At least he'd finally gotten a car, sure it was used and god knew the real mileage as the man was surely lying, but it was much better than the bloody bus. Just had to avoid getting pulled over for police to realize he lacked a license. He'd gotten one in England once upon a time, and in his mind it couldn't be that difficult to step back behind the wheel and abide by American traffic laws. Like riding a bicycle. However he'd quickly realized that driving a 1,200 kilogram hunk of metal speeding at 80 kilometers per hour was far different than a bicycle. A bicycle wouldn't kill a man if you ran him over. Probably. Jono wouldn't have known. But he was about to know the sensation of running over a man as a figure darted out in the darkened road and was swiftly run down by the pickup truck, for all his wild swerving.
Screeching to a halt, Jono took a moment to bang his head on the steering wheel and silently curse his luck before looking at the damage. To his relief, the man wasn't dead. To his horror, he should have been.
The new roadkill was slowly getting to his feet like a baby deer, head lolling from the obviously broken neck. Skin was sloughing from the left shoulder and neck, really from the entire left side that had taken the brunt of the pickup truck. Though not as visible as the finger falling off one hand, the dark blood stains and greasy streamlets running out from under that ill-fitting battered suit were a sure sign of the damage. Although that certainly was a horror show of its own, worse yet was revealed from beneath shed skin. Writhing black coils, not quite solid yet not quite liquid, trying their best to rescue some of the flesh that wasn't sliding off in clumps. The blonde zombie was trying to realign his head as the black mass squirted blood and tried to stuff back in flesh, but the efforts were in vain. Some vital support within was obviously now too broken to be fixed, so he just glared in indignation at the frozen Jono.
Jono was paralyzed by fear and growing need to vomit. He suppressed that urge, while it was a free expression he now had with the joy of an actual mouth and jaw, the act would only add to the disaster zone that was still unfolding. As the zombie tried to wobble away, his voice came back to him in the most natural form: snarking. "Are you really trying to walk that off, mate?"
Biohazard turned and rapidly signed at him, anger evident. The signage was sloppy and already confusing given the missing digits- and was already incomprehensible to Jono who woefully barely knew how to fingerspell.
"Wot?"
The zombie gave up and instead gave a universal hand signal of the middle finger.
"Right."
On one hand, this was obviously more trouble than it was worth. On the other, this situation was admittedly his fault given that he was the one who hit them with a car. So, after a long inhale, Jono spoke out. "You need a ride, Romero?" Romero seemed a fitting name if any, and he wasn't providing any other from the torn vocal cords. In response Romero shook his head and tried to keep walking before his leg buckled and he nearly face-planted onto the road. He appeared to have enough of a working brain to see the problem, and with obvious reluctance and suspicion, turned to Jono with a nod.
"Alright. Get in-" Before it was too late, Jono remembered the guitar occupying the passenger seat. Quickly he ran to it before Romero could get in and bleed all over the case. Stuffing it into the compartment behind the seats best he could, he turned to the shuffling zombie. "Don't get too much blood on the seat." The vindictive glare made it clear that he would make damn sure to bleed all over the car he'd been struck with. Great. And to think Jono had only been worried about police discovering he didn't have a license if he got pulled over.
The drive was every bit as awkward as Jono had expected it to be. The upside to being a pessimist was that with a mutant's luck, he was often right. Romero didn't speak or breathe, but the shifting innards made a thoroughly unpleasant noise, of pork belly sliding across a metal bar. Turning on the radio, to Jono's disappointment he had very few choices. Between a local pastor's station and NPR, he settled for the loudest, modern pop. The blaring of Britney Spears to drown out the zombie's unnatural functions added an all the more surreal feeling to the drive. He couldn't help but bark out a laugh, which got a puzzled glare from his passenger.
His grip on the steering wheel was tight, as he also tried to get a grip of himself. He'd seen similar horror to the one next to him, Paige shed her skin all the time. But she didn't exactly have the quality of a gusher beneath the sloughing skin. Still, that wasn't what truly set Jono on edge. It was the constant unblinking surveillance from Romero, as he analyzed data from some unknown source. Jono was used to not being in the know, but that didn't mean he had to like it. The look he was getting wasn't the milky stare of a zombie either, not one with nothing behind the eyes. No, he'd seen the same look in a zoo, watching a tiger pace around its enclosure.
The look and tension witnessed there was the same posture and stare in Romero: A predator's awareness. It was ill-fitting with the zombie's general look, he was a roadkill Bambi. He had a delicate build and wavy blonde hair that would have shone if you gave him a shower. And those eyes, those dewy wide eyes that saw everything. A deer in headlights one may say, but more accurately, that of a horror flick chick turning to see the face of her imminent death as the camera zooms in on her scream.
At last, the drive had ended with destination reached: some shithole motel he'd been bunkering down at. The Sunset Strip, whatever that meant. Some God, whoever had it out for him, had decided to give him a break this time as there were no witnesses to see him escorting a corpse to his room. Romero seemed to have a rabbit's nerves out in the open, analyzing threats unseen to Jono before he was whisked inside.
Jono pointed to the bathroom. "Look, I don't want you bleeding on the sheets. Go sit in there while I figure out what to do with you." Pondering for a minute, he decided the best course of action was to grab some kind of medical supplies. He'd gotten money from the guy who gave him the pickup, in fact paid to take it off their hands. A bad sign that he may be arrested for a murder he didn't commit, but that was a problem for the future. Right now, he had a zombie to take care of.
Romero had the bathroom door wide open and was still monitoring Jono's every move with unblinking eyes. As he opened his mouth to address the walking corpse, the skin of the left hand finally gave way and fell to the floor. Jono's mouth snapped shut as he grimaced, before getting back on track.
"I'll be back, I'm going to get something to clean you up. Don't go anywhere." The glare shot back clearly said that he couldn't go anywhere even if he wanted to. Jono was a bastard, so he acknowledged it. "Don't let your leg fall off."
Back outside in the parking lot, the street lamp began to flicker on as the sun faded in the horizon. As he walked across it to a nearby store, unfortunately there was now a witness. Some biker, waiting around for his gang. The one who showed up too early. What was he, the rebel teacher's pet?
He called out to Jono in a rough and sneering voice. "Hey, you a mutie?"
Jono replied in a voice dripping with even more hatred and vitriol than that which was launched at him. "Are you a wanker?"
He stalked off from the encounter before his smart-mouth started another fight he didn't need, and went into the dollar tree. There, he started picking up an armful of bandages. Maybe he could be wrapped up like a mummy, good a plan as any. What else was he going to do, superglue his fingers back on? He paused, seriously considering it for a minute. No, probably wouldn't work. Probably? Who knew how that goopy physiology worked. He had a good feeling he didn't want to know.
Before heading to the counter, he paused, and picked up a hoodie. Romero was dressed in the clothes he'd been buried in, and they were falling apart at the seams. Roughly guessing, Jono picked up jeans as well. He didn't owe him anything, Jono didn't care, it was just… common decency. "Just common decency" he muttered to himself as he trudged back through the parking lot. A cold chill ran down his spine as he got closer to his room. Somebody had forced entry, and the door was swung wide open.
The obvious culprit, the biker, was nowhere in sight but his motorcycle was still there. Well shit. Dropping the bags, he realized even more urgently: Romero. If the zombie had any brains, he could have laid low and hid in that bathroom, lest the guy fuck him up even worse. Shit, could he die? Would a headshot do him in? Was cinema accurate? He hadn't seen a gun on the guy but he hadn't been looking. More urgently, Jono needed to worry for himself. If there was a gun in the equation, the Apocalypse muscles wouldn't be much use. But if he could catch him off guard….
Wildly charging in, ready to rugby tackle the biker to the ground, Jono found nobody there and nothing to stop his motion until he slammed into the wall. Looking around, there was nobody in the room.. but there were signs of a struggle.. and a dropped gun. Oh fuck. The bathroom door was wide open, and a trail of blood led into it.
Whatever he had been preparing himself to see, the preparation was not nearly enough. Most recognizable, hanging halfway out of the tub was the mutilated body of the biker. Jono's mind tried to protect him by blurring what he was witnessing. In the tub, something organic was lurking. Despite the little voice in the back of his mind, he kept looking, and now he could see.
Oh god, now he could see. Adrenaline kicked in and every hair on the back of his neck stood up as the urge to vomit rose. He wanted to scream but his lips felt glued together and he could only look in horror. The biker was being… digested. That was certainly one word for what was happening. Processed. Broken down. By means that should have been restrained to only happening inside the human body.
The noises coming from it were hideous, the slurping of gristle through a straw. What was eating it was something amorphous and raw, the full form of that writhing, grotesque thing he'd witnessed beneath Romero's skin. Shiny with blood, a biological metal that was absorbing the corpse in one half of the tub and creating in the other. Flesh slithered and knotted; tangled and pulsated; as the body of Romero was being rebuilt from the flesh of the biker.
The reformed head lazily blinked at the horrified Jono, and spoke. "You really ought to thank me, given that he was waiting around to kill you."