all flesh is grass

by sunbreaksdown

Summary:

The zombie apocalypse is all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.

Notes:

The warnings apply to the story as a whole, and not necessarily this part -- and, for the vast majority of the time, revolve around background characters. Just thought I'd make sure people knew what they were getting into.

Chapter 1

     The fence around the perimeter of the farm has been wrapped in barbed wire. Good for slowing zombies in their tracks, even stopping them, but no kinder on living flesh, either.

     It slices your palms open, tears at your forearms and jeans as you're forced to grab on and hoist yourself over, but you can't do anything with the pain except convert it to fuel to keep moving. You hit the ground hard and immediately start sprinting, as if you can run away from the way the metal's hooked into your palms and ripped chunks of your skin away, and pull out the baseball bat from the straps of your backpack. You shrug it off your shoulders as you go, because you don't need it slowing you down in a fight.

     Up ahead, there's a girl taking on three zombies, raising a hatchet and hacking away. You've no idea how they wound up in the field, because you were told the farm was secure, offering sanctuary to any survivors; maybe one of those seeking refuge had wandered in with a bite they didn't want to talk about, and taken out the whole base. Wouldn't be the first time it had happened, won't be the last.

     Even now, your willingness to help someone out catches you off-guard. You tell yourself that it's only because you've nothing better to do, because you've seen human beings choose to do things far worse than any hungry zombie gnawing on a nice, shiny pile of guts. Nobody deserves your help, but if you don't jump into the fray, there are going to be four zombies shambling around the hillside. Not a figure you're particularly fond of.

     Besides, maybe she belongs to the farm. Save her and you've got one foot in the door.

     You announce your presence with a hrrrgh! and a swing of your bat, right into a zombie's face. It was already missing at least a third of its jaw, one eye socket slumping down to the corner of its mouth, so you don't you do too much cosmetic damage. Assuming an instantaneous second death doesn't count as cosmetic damage, that is. The baseball bat's a good weapon, in that regard: not too heavy to carry around, not too light to be ineffective, with enough of an impact area that it doesn't get caught inside of a splintered skull. Not too deep in to be pulled out again, anyway.

     The girl you're now fighting side-by-side with swings her hatchet around. You used to go for pointy things, too, until you realised how much zombie-gunk was left behind on the blades, and how easy it would be to accidentally infect yourself. Still, you think the zombie she's facing off against has more to worry about from the hatchet than she does; she pulls it back over her shoulder, embeds it into the zombie's face, and yanks it back out again, all before it stops groaning.

     Anyone who's still alive by this point either knows the right people, or knows how to take care of themselves. With her, it has to be the latter. It's been a few months since you met anyone truly incompetent, but you'd never turn down the chance to team up with someone who really knows what they're doing.

     The hatchet swings around again, this time plunging into the remaining zombie's shoulder, and you assume that she's holding it in place so you can get a good shot at its head. Not about to pass up the opportunity, you bring the baseball bat down on top of its head, and with a clunk and a squelch, it falls to its knees.

     You've forgotten all about your bloody palms, and you step back, allowing yourself a moment to catch your breath. Nothing like wiping out zombies first thing in the morning to get your heart beating. Six months on the run and it's as if you never sat around smoking your life away for all those years.

     Still holding the baseball bat loosely in one hand, you idly wipe the blood from one palm on your dirt-encrusted jeans, when the girl you've just selflessly rescued swings her fucking hatchet right at your head. Good thing you took a step back when you did, because even with your reflexes, you barely manage to raise the bat in time to block.

     She's on her back with a swift kick to the chest, and you stand over her, baseball bat held up over one shoulder. Zombies don't fight their own, she was moving too fluidly for that, anyway, and she can't have turned that quickly; no reason to let your guard down, though.

     “What the fuck is wrong with you?” you spit out, gritting your teeth together when the sting of your palms finally catches up with you.

     “I'm blind!” she shouts, waving her empty hand in front of her face.

     “I'm not a goddamn zombie!” you snap back, in no state of mind to pay any attention to how hazy her eyes are.

     She drops the hatchet into the dirt, blade first, and tries pushing herself up on her hands.

     “Yeah? Well, you definitely smell like one!”

     She's not wrong there. You've been wearing these clothes for the better part of a fortnight, haven't had the chance to soak them or scrub them down yet, and you're pretty sure there are bits of zombie brain and skull matted into your hair. No point in taking any offence, though; she doesn't look much better. There's dirt covering every inch of her, blood gushing from her nose, and she sniffs loudly, wiping it away on the back of one hand.

     You reach out to help her up, no hard feelings, and then wave your hand out when she doesn't react. Fucking rude, you think, followed by —oh, blind. Riiiiiiiight.

     “C'mon, I'll help you up,” you say, and she reaches out with her relatively clean hand – it's not bloodied, at least – fingers pattering against the air like she's pressing down on piano keys, until she finds your fingers. You grab her hand tightly, help pull her up, and that's all the apology she's getting for being shoved onto her back.

     Hell, she nearly split your skull in two after you saved her from a whole horde of zombies. If anyone here deserves an apology, it's you.

     For once.

     “Did they get you?” you ask. There don't seem to be any tears in her clothes, and you pat down her arms, the sides of her neck, any exposed skin, checking for bite marks, scratches. It's stupid, you realise a few moments later: there are open cuts on your hand, so if you had found an infected sore, you would've been signing your own death warrant in the process. She frowns, but doesn't ask what you're doing. This is practically how people say hello, these days. “The hell were you doing out here?”

     “I was heading up to the farm,” she says under her breath once your release her, kneeling in the long grass to retrieve her weapon of choice. She heads away from you, slowly, and you watch as she walks in circles, nudging the ground before her with her toes. It takes a while, but eventually she stops, crouching down to scoop up what she was searching for. Her cane, you realise.

     “Me too,” you say, a few moments too late. Keeping a conversation flowing isn't something you get to practise much, anymore. “Figure I'll be useful to them.”

     “Is that so?” she asks, tapping her way back over to you.

     You shrug for your own benefit. To convince yourself that you haven't spent long nights thinking over the fact that surely the cons of living as part of a group have to outweigh the pros.

     “I'm still alive, ain't I? Got to be doing something right.”

     She grins once she's in front of you, and you're a little proud of yourself for giving what must be a good answer. She sniffs loudly again, wipes the last of the blood on the shoulder of her shirt, and says, “They're never going to let us in smelling like this!”

*

     Terezi Pyrope tells you her name as you make your way down the hill, away from the farm. You could see one of the buildings in the distance, something that probably used to serve as a barn, and turning your back on it makes you uncomfortable, having come this far. But you suppose it isn't going anywhere.

     The exchanging of names is awkward. You've met plenty of people since survival became the order of the day that you never even mentally assigned a nickname to, because you're not supposed to get attached to anything beyond your next meal. People are fighting by your side one day, and foaming at the mouth as they try to rip out your jugular the next. You do give her your name through a grunt, though, because fair's fair, and decide that you're going to call her Pyrope to her face. It's a lot less personal.

     When the zombies aren't shambling together en mass, the world's a lot quieter than it used to be, though you don't notice this silence until you're sharing it with someone else. And so you make small talk with her: you ask if she's always been from around here, but she says no, she only moved to London to look for work. You don't ask her what sort of work, just tell her that you had a cosy little place of your own at the end of an alley near Tottenham Court Road, and you'll be damned if the thought of living day to day on people's spare change doesn't seem like some sort of heaven right now.

     You climb back over the fence, pressing your backpack against the barbed-wire and splaying your hands out across that. No point in cutting yourself up for a second time, now that there's no urgent need to get to the other side. For all you knew, a zombie could've drooled all over the part you grabbed, and that would've been as final a nail in the coffin as any bite. No wonder you've finally relented, finally decided to seek out a survivor colony: you're getting sloppy.

     There's a river, a few fields over. There were animals stored in the fields once, you think, but when the infection spread beyond humans, most people put their pets down, and farmers did the same to their cattle. Goddamn smart of them, really. Until you've been chased by a horse with half its flesh dangling off and a taste for yours, you don't have any idea of what fear really is.

     “You're definitely blind, right?” you ask, thumbs hooked under the hem of your tank, about to pull it off. It's intended as a joke, because no one has much use for modesty anymore, but it comes out rusty. Terezi laughs at you in a way that cuts off too quickly, and you mutter, “Whatever,” tossing your shirt to the side.

     The river's not very deep. Reaches just below your knees in the centre, and you can feel loose rocks between your toes, can see clouds of dirt billowing up where you disturb the riverbed; you don't have much desire to sit down. You wash quickly, back to Terezi, though the idea of finding anyone attractive enough to gawk and stare went away when the rest of civilisation did.

     You do wonder how she's managed to survive, though. Not to put too much emphasis on the situation, but she's blind, and you've seen some of the best mowed down before you. You don't ask, though, because you're certain most people would wonder how you made your way through the zombie epidemic, the nuclear warfare that came after that, and the eventual zombie apocalypse, too.

     You reach back out for your tank top, soak it in the river and wring it out a few times, and then scrub it against a rock. Once it's as clean as it's going to get, you use it to scrub at your skin, and wonder when soap started to seem like such a ridiculous concept. You don't bother with the jeans, they'll take too long to dry and probably deserve to be burnt by this point, but you do duck your head under the surface and rake out the most offending chunks of dirt and sinew from your hair.

     Drying off would be a waste of time. You climb out of the river, shake off what you can, and then wrestle your way back into your jeans and tug on your tank. You wring out your hair, but for the most part, remain as you are. It's hardly the least comfortable you've ever been.

     You've enough time to wash your bat off, too. Best to keep it in good condition. There's a crowbar in your backpack, but it's a back-up sort of weapon; the baseball bat has got you this far, and there's no reason to let your loyalties slip now. Terezi spends a lot longer washing that you do, and you sit on a rock, back to the river, staring up at the hill. You hear her splash around, hear the sound of what may well be bubbles blown in the water, and you furrow your brow, wondering if she's got this far in the new world but shrugging everything off and indulging in nonchalance.

     It's one way to do it, you guess. Give up your mind before you're put in a position where you might lose it.

     “I'm starving!” she announces, striding up to you in just her shorts, waving her white t-shirt around like a flag of surrender. “What are you hiding away in that oversized backpack of yours, Vriska?”

     She reclaims her cane, and thwacks the side of your bag with it, before you get the chance to say you don't have anything on you, so shut up and go pick some berries.

     “Where's your stuff? I don't see you carrying anything, and after that pack of zombies, I don't know how you were expecting to survive the night without me coming to the rescue!”

     Terezi shuffles back into her shirt, doesn't seem to mind that it's on backwards, label poking out against her neck, and drops herself on the rock next to you. She elbows you in the side, playfully, and you'd bet anything that she was that pointy long before the human race went back to being hunter-gatherers, heavy on the gathering.

     “Don't make yourself out to be such a hero. There were only three of them! I could take down three zombies with my eyes closed,” she says, nods wisely, and then can't keep a straight face.

     It's not funny at all, but you find yourself smiling as you shake your head, and really, what's the harm in splitting lunch with her? You were trapped inside a petrol garage, one time, zombies pounding against every window and door, with only a fire extinguisher to fight your way out with. Sharing an already paltry meal with Terezi isn't going to kill you.

     “Uh, let's see,” you say, tugging your backpack over and holding it between your knees as you unzip it. There are still two tins of soup left over from your last corner shop raid, but you lost your can opener when you panicked and thought it would make a good projectile weapon, and you don't feel like starting a fire to cook it. You rummage a little deeper, find something with a ring-pull, and grab whatever else is floating about. “How does sliced pineapple and a Kit Kat sound?”

     “Ooh! Fruit!” Her eyes light up at the prospect of pineapple, but she doesn't say anything about the chocolate. Seems like the majority of everyone's diet is made up of that, with how easy it is to get hold of. Great for calories, great for making sure you don't fade away, great for puking your guts up everywhere because you can't deal with another bite of it and yet you haven't eaten in days.

     You both eat the Kit Kats first, one finger at a time, saving the best till last. Nowadays, everything's eaten with your hands, or else you sip soup from the can, but Terezi seems to take a certain delight in the way she plunges her finger into the centre of a pineapple ring, scooping it up to eat both loudly and messily, somehow not wasting a scrap in the process.

     You lick your hands when you finish, just like she does. They might be sticky, but washing them in the river seems like a waste.

     “I lost my bag in the woods,” Terezi explains as you head back over the fence, back up the hill. “I was running from a different pack. I don't know whether a zombie grabbed it or a tree did, but there's no point going back for it now.”

     As the farm comes into view, you dig a bright blue bandanna out of your back pocket, and tie it around your head. You don't know how universal a signal of the living it is, but you do know that it's hard to wear any sort of accessory on the top of your skull when the flesh there is busy rotting off. You and Terezi both wave your arms above your head as you approach the first building you come to, because zombies aren't exactly that flexible, and can't help but feel apprehensive when you reach the front door without interference.

     People don't like to shoot for no good reason, because a single gunshot tends to draw in zombies from miles around, but a place like this is bound to have guns. One well-aimed bullet and you're a goner. Not that you're sticking around for anything in particular, but you've made it this far, so you might as well keep on going. If only out of spite.

     You pound on the door, and when no one answers, Terezi helps you out. Tired of being ignored, you're about to kick it, just to get someone's attention, when Terezi holds out a hand, gesturing for you to stop. You pause, and then you hear what she does: chains and bolts being undone and pulled to from the other side.

     The door creaks open a few inches, and you jam your foot into the gap created by it and the frame, so that it can't be immediately slammed on you. Or so that they have every opportunity to break your foot, either way.

     You're greeted by a wall of a man, no older than you are, who looks far more unsettled by your presence than someone of his stature should.

     “We're not infected!” you say, tugging the bandanna off your head.

     He peers at you both from behind his sunglasses, and then says, “Your palms are cut.”

     “Not a zombie bite. More like a parting gift from your goddamn no-good actually-genius barbed wire traps. Thanks for those, by the way.”

     Terezi hisses at you to shut up, nudges you to the side, and then greets the doorman, taking matters into her own hands. She assures him that you're both responsible enough to never even consider approaching other survivors if there was a tiny chance that you'd been bitten, and then asks about this supposed refuge the farm is offering. It works, and you follow her in, muttering under your breath that he only feels sorry for her because she's blind.

     This must've been the farmer's house, back when the word farm actually meant something. It's not huge, and there are far too many people roaming about for it to possibly be comfortable, but the man who let you in explains that most of the survivors live in former barns and grain stores. This is where they come to mingle, to request certain supplies.

     Terezi asks for his name, and he says it's Equius. You weren't in the process of giving a shit, so you don't introduce yourself and scowl when Terezi takes it upon herself to do so for you, and then wonder exactly what it is you're trying to achieve by being so hostile to these people. You're trying to find a place to live, not someone else to piss off.

     He takes you into the kitchen that still looks like a kitchen, to whom you assume must be the owner of the land. Not that property ownership is something recognised nowadays, but he's clearly the king of this castle. Equius introduces you both to him, and you keep your trap shut, only nodding when it seems appropriate.

     The man rubs his chin, and says that the barns have been becoming rather cramped, of late. They have eighty-seven souls to look over already, and even a number that insignificant makes your head spin for a moment. Even now, with four of you in the same room, you're starting to almost feel claustrophobic. If you're going to stay, he goes on to say, he's afraid you're going to have to pull your own weight.

     Yeah, obviously. You didn't expect it to be a free ride. The owner and Equius murmur amongst themselves for a moment, and conclude that you and Terezi are young and fit; there'd be a place for you, if you were willing to run into town for supplies whenever the need came up.

     Back before zombies existed outside of fiction, you could barely tackle a flight of stairs without having to stop and catch your breath halfway. You smoked too much, and though you're still as scrawny as you ever were, there's some actual muscle on you, now. Outrunning a zombie or two doesn't take much effort, but you've got the endurance to back it up. Hell yes you could run supply missions for the farm. You'd be bored out of your skull, otherwise.

     They must assume that you and Terezi intentionally came here together, because they give you both space in one of the barns to sleep, side-by-side. Doesn't matter, as far as you can tell. If you're not next to Terezi, you're only going to be sleeping beside another stranger, and you think you could take her. The farm provides you with a blanket, but they say you'll have to make your own pillows, and Equius leads you to the barn. There are at least two-dozen other people gathered in there, and none of them look at you twice.

     None of them care who you are, where you're from, or what you've done. The only thing that matters to them is that you aren't the daughter, sister, friend, lover, they've been waiting to come back to them, to walk through those doors in one piece, free of zombie bites. You're glad you don't have any loose ends like that, anyone you should believe to be dead but can't give up hope on; it'd eat at your mind, drive you to distraction. Make you sloppy. Sloppier.

     Your and Terezi's allocated spaces are marked out on the floor with chalk. You're on the upper level, where they used to store hay; there's still some of it littered about, caught between the wooden planks, and the space you're given isn't much bigger than a mattress would be. You pause, before sitting down, trying to recall what it felt like to sleep on one; you only manage to conjure up the thought of springs pressing into your spine, and it's just your mind's way of protecting you. The thought of sleeping on solid wood suddenly seems quite appealing.

     Sitting cross-legged in the centre of your spot, you open your bag, and take out four cans. You place them at the corners of Terezi's space, and then grab the end of her cane, tapping it against each can, so that she knows how much room she has. She thanks you, but then spreads her blanket out so that the edge crosses your line, anyway.

     It's barely early evening, but you're knackered. You were up hours before dawn, shaken from your sleep up in a tree by both the fear of falling out and the groans of the undead, and you don't see any harm in dropping off now. It's better to be awake during the night, anyway. That's when the zombies really come out in full-force. When the sun's out, you could be forgiven for thinking they only outnumbered your kind, the living, three-to-one.

     You lie back on top of your blanket, head rested on your backpack, staring at Terezi's back as she sits in the centre of her space, hugging her knees to her chest. There's a general hum of chatter throughout the barn, people coming and going, but none of that had been bothering you, until now. Rule one of surviving for as long as you have is to not waste your time wondering what anyone else's deal is, but this is the most settled you've been in months.

     You use your toes to push your shoes off, and then nudge the small of her back. No harm in being gracious enough to ask her a few questions, right? She should be grateful for that sort of generosity. There's not much of it to go around, of late.

     She swivels on the spot, and then moves onto her front, so that you're left glancing at her out the corner of your eye.

     “You speak Chinese?” you ask, and then tut at yourself. “Korean. Japanese. Whatever.”

     You've never seen anyone scowl and smile at the exact same time, but she manages to pull it off nicely.

     “Mandarin,” she corrects you, brow lifting.

     “Huh. Do you think China even exists anymore?”

     Because there are – or were – a lot of warm bodies over there. The bigger the population, the faster infection spreads.

     “I don't know,” she says, shoulder blades pushing back in what's probably a shrug. She props her chin up in her palm, and with a smile, adds, “I haven't seen the news lately.”

     You laugh despite yourself, despite the way she should've already used up her supply of blind jokes for the day. It's a light, airy sort of sound, and it reminds you of coughing after hitting a joint too hard. You stare up at the ceiling of the barn, pinching the bridge of your nose. It feels good to laugh again, you've been too serious for your liking lately, but your body doesn't know what to do with something that isn't either fear or adrenaline coursing through your system.

     “What kind of work were you after, anyway?” you ask, “You said you were in London looking for a job.”

     “Mm. I graduated with a first in law a month before people started taking the rumours of zombies seriously,” she explains. She's not bragging about her degree, you realise; she's just stating facts. It probably doesn't even mean anything to her, anymore. You can't believe that universities were a thing that functioned a little over a year ago, because in the here and now, the only accomplishments that mean anything are how much food you've managed to scavenge, and ending another day without bite marks riddled across your flesh.

     “Urgh, great, just what we need, a lawyer! Well, Prosecutor Pyrope, I've seen about eight thousand people committing eight million crimes. Want to fuck them over for me?”

     Terezi scrunches up her face, falling onto her side.

     “What makes you think I'm prosecutor-material?”

     “Hey, I saw you with that shitty hatchet today! You're goddamn vicious.”

     You grin and she must know it, because she does, too.

     You spend a few more minutes staring up at the ceiling, before announcing that you're going to grab some sleep. It's been a lifetime since you had anyone to inform of your intentions, and Terezi says okay with a yawn of her own, already in the process of cocooning herself up in her blanket.

*

     You don't sleep well.

     It's not the daylight that bothers you, or even the noise. You've dealt with both plenty of times before; it's the number of people around you that causes you to jerk awake every twenty minutes, like clockwork.

     The government dissolved after the bombings, when world leaders were slowly realising that sending off their nukes every which way wasn't the best course of action for dealing with the zombies, and only shifted the blame in directionless paths. There are new rules now, the first among them being to survive, and things like murder, torture and rape haven't been illegal in a long, long time.

     Funny what once-decent people will do under a little pressure. Surviving, it seems, means keeping your mind intact, and there are those who will do whatever they can to get through the day. And then, naturally, there were people who never put up any pretence of decency in the world before, and don't shy away from doing whatever they feel like, just because they can.

     You've heard rumours regarding places like this before. You did your best to shrug them off, because there were always rumours floating around: three months ago, scientists in some vague corner of Europe had synthesised a cure, and were going to have it delivered to every major city within a matter of weeks. Back when the zombies could no longer be held back by the police alone and the army was called in, supposed experts interviewed on whatever news channel was desperate enough for a silver lining claimed that only O+ blood was affected by what they were then calling a virus.

     So you can't believe everything you hear. Some part of you hopes that people will remember something of how they used to be, coming together like this. After all, there are even kids there, and everyone's going to want to tiptoe around them, right? Kids who have seen the end of the world, and kids who have probably had to put at least one parent down, but kids regardless of that.

     When you do manage to sleep for more than an hour at once, it's not necessarily for the best. You jolt awake, see someone sleeping next to you, and come disturbingly close to making a grab for your baseball bat and smashing their skull in. You were under long enough to completely forget where you were, heart pounding away in your chest, survival instincts almost causing you to swing first, inspect the corpse later.

     It's dark, by then. Terezi's balled her blanket up to serve as a pillow, and you settle back down, finding it no easier to sleep now than you did before.

     Everyone's having their own nightmares, and you'd rather be listening to the grunts and groans of the undead.

Chapter 2

     You're given a day to become familiar with the farm.

     Everyone eats together three times a day, at eight, one and six, and it makes you feel like royalty. There are three barns, two used as housing, one serving as a dining hall, a grain store for yet more housing and another for supplies, and there are guards constantly posted outside of it. They have a shotgun between them, and the rest pat crowbars against open palms, watching people as they pass. You make a mental note not to rob this place.

     A couple of the sheds have been converted into toilets; there are crude wooden coverings and a whole bunch of tunnels dug out into the hillside, and gravity does the rest. Beats shitting in the woods, you guess. Down one side of the hill, the river you washed in yesterday winds up closer to the farm. It's deeper there, and old garden fencing, crates, odd bits of wood, discarded doors, whatever people could get their hands on, have been hammered together, forming individual stalls for people to wash in. Pretty cool. You could get used to privacy again, if you had to.

     You take Terezi with you when you explore the farm, knowing that if you don't, you'll only have to explain what and where everything is once she gets curious. Which probably won't take that long. You don't expect anyone around the base to warm up to you, not at least for a couple of months, once you've proven that there's a chance you might not drop dead on them at any given moment. Walking around with Terezi makes you feel a little more grounded, and when someone blatantly ignores you as you pass them, it's as if they're the intruder.

     With the exception of your crowbar and baseball bat, you donate everything from your backpack to the supply shed. Hoarding probably isn't looked upon kindly here, and with the promise of food three times a day, it seems stupid to cling to a few cans of soup and half-melted chocolate.

     One that first day, your three meals together consist of: half a tin of all day breakfast, which tastes like heaven, two packs of crisps (salt and vinegar and prawn cocktail, so win-lose), a bowl of berries that have been salvaged from the brambles allowed to spread across one of the fields, and a splash of tomato soup that leaves Terezi's lips bright orange. You tell her to wipe it off, and she only ends up smearing it across half her face.

     After dinner, you head back to the barn. There's a curfew in place, which is a smart move; you're safer out during the day, and god knows some of these kids are still confused enough to go running off, given half a chance. Now that you're heading back later, you see more guards, like the ones posted outside the supply store, starting to gather around the barns. Directing people, ready to protect you all throughout the night, standing strong between you and the zombies; or, if you want to be cynical about it, keeping you all inside.

     There are a stack of books in one corner of the barn, old dog-eared magazines with the pages missing too, in a makeshift sort of library. With time to kill, you grab the first book that doesn't look too unbearable, and try making a start on it once you're flopped down in your spot. It doesn't go particularly well. You didn't read when books were in abundance, when people were still writing, and you don't know why you thought you'd get into it now.

     Terezi hears you turn the pages, and asks what you're reading. You tell her it's nothing interesting, and then feel a little bad for her, because it's not like she can even make the same effort to entertain herself. You read the first few paragraphs out to her in what you're sure is a monotonous drawl, give up a page in, and drop the book on your face.

     You don't talk much that evening. Not as much as you did yesterday, anyway. The problem with getting settled means that you now have all this time and space to think, and when there's nothing weighing your mind down, you're all too aware of how blank it is. On the lower level of the barn, two men get into an argument over something inconsequential, and you prop yourself up on your elbows to watch. Too bad for you that one of the guards comes in and breaks them up before their fists start flying.

     You fall asleep quickly, but you still don't sleep well. You have a dream that you instantly forget once you open your eyes all the way, which is probably for the best. You manage to refrain from swinging your baseball bat at anyone upon waking, even though Equius is standing above you, and has probably been lingering there for a few minutes, not sure whether he should wake you up or not.

     He says that it's time to make your first supply run, and though this would've once qualified as stupid o'clock in the morning, you're grateful that you're actually being given something to do. A whole day spent not crushing zombie skulls and already you're itching to get back out there. You shake Terezi awake, and she grumbles and buries her face back into her blanket-pillow, so you grab her by the scruff of her shirt and tug her to her feet.

     When asked, Equius says that Scratch – the name of the farm owner, apparently – will give you all the details when you go in for your briefing. He actually calls it a briefing, as if there's going to be more to it than grabbing anything that's going to keep you all alive for a few more days as quickly as you can. Terezi yawns loudly enough to draw a pack of zombies her way, stretches out her arms above her head as you're lead to the farmhouse, and by the time you're taken back into the kitchen, she seems more awake than you do.

     You're told it's going to be a simple supply run. Easy to call something simple when you don't have to involve yourself in anything beyond the planning, you suppose, but don't say as much out loud. You don't ask what happened to whoever they had running missions for them before, either; the answer would undoubtedly involve them having had their faces gnawed off in the pursuit of a few cans of beans.

     The plan is to hit a supermarket. You roll your eyes, and point out that most of the supermarkets have already been bled dry of anything remotely useful. Ah, you're told; this one is different. When whisperings of incoming bombs were first heard, a few of the bigger chains decided to lock up their stores, barricading everything behind steel shutters. Before people realised they had to get the hell out of the cities, they hit easy targets, not making much more than a dent on where you're headed.

     Terezi asks how you're supposed to get in, and Scratch, so pale that he looks as if he's never stepped out into the sun, slides a key across the table to you. The store's former manager came clambering up to the farm a few days before you did, and promised a whole treasure trove of supplies, in return for refuge. That's how he earnt his place, then. This supermarket had better be full of enough cans to keep eighty-seven mouths fed for months to come, otherwise he's going to fall out of favour in no time.

     You're told which door it unlocks. One of the delivery entrances, around the back, and then given huge, sturdy backpacks in order to stash supplies inside. There's chocolate and dry crackers for breakfast, and your orders are pretty simple: bring back as much food as you can first, and worry about luxury items later.

     Equius and two other guys walk down with you to the outskirts of the city, dragging a cart along with them. They're going to wait there, where they can escape from any zombies in a pinch, so that you only have to lug the supplies halfway back to base. You can fill your bags, empty them out into the cart, and head out for more while it's being dragged back up the hill and emptied. It's a clever way of doing it; ensures that the farm doesn't have to risk too many people over one mission.

     The supermarket in question is only a quarter of a mile from the cart. You and Terezi make your way through town slowly, carefully; the streets might look empty, but taking things at face value is the first step towards getting yourself killed. It's a relatively clear route, a few upturned cars here and there, corpses that aren't even covered with any sort of sheets piled up in places, but nothing that you can't navigate silently.

     Terezi manages her way through the rubble just as well as you do. Her being blind didn't seem to factor into any aspect of the mission, as far as anyone on the farm was concerned. Anything that was seen as a disadvantage back before the zombies isn't viewed in the same way, anymore, and like you yourself said yesterday, you have to be doing something right in order to still be alive. In the farm's mind, Terezi has already proven herself. And if she gets killed, what does it matter to them, to you? She's barely been around for two days, no one's attached to her, no one knows anything about her.

     The car park in front of the supermarket is practically deserted, and now that you're close, you jog the rest of the way there. You find the door you were directed to, and it's a hefty lock, keeping the steel shutter in place. No wonder nobody managed to break through it. There's a door behind that, but your crowbar and a few well-placed kicks takes care of that. You lock the shutter back up behind you, not wanting to take any chances, and when you step into the supermarket itself, the first thing that hits you is the smell.

     Even with all you've been through, you gag. It's pitch black in there, and you can't see a thing. The fridges and freezers died when the lights did. Unfortunately for you, all the raw meat and produce is exactly where it was all those long months ago, gone to rot, and that's before you wrap your mind around what's become of the dairy products.

     “Can't see a goddamn thing,” you say, “And don't tell me you can't either. It's fine for you! You're used to this.”

     As it turns out, Terezi doesn't have a comeback. All she says is “Urgh,” and if she's anything like you, then she's focusing very, very carefully on only breathing through her mouth. You weren't given anything other than the backpacks and the key to aid you, because it is, after all, a supermarket. Anything you could possibly need is in there. You grab onto Terezi's wrist, because she's got to have a better chance to being able to navigate the aisles like this than you do, and you reach out blindly with your free hand, trying to feel for something useful.

     It's all junk at first. Kids' toys. Books. You celebrate pre-emptively once you wrap your fingers around a torch, because clicking the switch into the on position doesn't provide you with any light, but batteries tend to be stored in the same place wherever you go. Having wasted no less than twenty minutes fumbling for a light, you've got a working torch. You make Terezi carry one, just to help you out.

     You shine the light around, and hear yourself murmur “Oh man,” as you bite down on your lower lip.

     “Did we get lucky?” Terezi asks.

     “Sure. If you really want to understate things like that! This place hasn't been touched. I think we just stumbled into our own goldmine.”

     No need to get too carried away, though. This place is secure, and only you have the key. You can keep hitting it every day until you've stripped it of all resources, if you need to. Grabbing all the torches you can, you have Terezi work on filling them with batteries, while you grab a couple of rolls of sellotape and a trolley. You tape the torches around the trolley, so it's throwing light all around you, and congratulate yourself on how good a job you've done.

     “It looks great,” Terezi says dryly, stepping back before you can elbow her in the side.

     First things first: canned food. You go for the fruit and vegetables first, because god knows you're sick of chocolate being your main food group, and push the trolley up against the sides of the aisles as you and Terezi pull great armfuls of cans into it. Usually, you'd be more careful about making noise. In every other supermarket you've been to, if there wasn't a zombie or two swaying between rows of rotting meat, then there'd be another survivor lurking in the dark, ready to stick a knife in your back to get their hands on the can of tuna you'd just pocketed.

     There have been gang wars waged over bottled water. Usually, you wouldn't take any chances, but this place is huge, and no one else is getting in; you're doubt the sound even reaches the far wall. You wheel the trolley over to the door you came in through, and begin packing the cans into your backpacks. It'd be so much easier to push everything back to the cart, but the damn trolley rattles like it's being electrified, and that's just on a flat surface.

     “I had no idea what we were signing ourselves up for!” Terezi says as she tugs the backpack up onto her shoulders. They each weigh a tonne, and your back's already aching, but it's good to be doing something. Good to be useful to others, even if your motivation is ultimately selfish; if you're going to live as part of a colony, then you're going to make sure you eat well.

     You make three runs back to Equius with the canned fruit and veg, before moving onto tinned meats and soups. You manage eight runs in total before you decide to move onto lighter things. Your legs and your back are killing you, and Terezi's suffering, too, but it's the sort of struggle that no one complains about anymore. If your only problem is tight calf muscles, then you don't really have much of a right to bicker about anything.

     You stretch your arms out above your head as you let Terezi push the trolley, making your way down one of the bathroom aisles. There are all sorts of things here that you never would've blinked at before: toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, soap, razors, and you're so excited to see mouthwash that you twist the cap off and almost swallow the whole bottle down. You swish it around your mouth and your eyes water, and spitting it to the ground, you place the bottle in one of Terezi's hands. Brow furrowed, she sniffs at it, blinks heavily, and chugs it with more enthusiasm than you did.

     You give the aisle one last look, and decide to come back later. Food first, and then luxury items.

     “Want to stop for lunch?” you ask Terezi. Your stomach growls, then so does hers, which seems to settle it.

     Summer was on its way when the store decided to seal itself from the rest of the world. There are disposable BBQs stacked up on shelves – another thing that will be good to take back to base, once the food supply has been dented – and you grab one, along with a bunch of picnic blankets. You make a nest out of them in one of the aisles, start off the BBQ between them, and set about making a real lunch.

     It's been so long since you've had a real variety of things available to you that you've almost forgotten how to choose for yourself. Drink is easy to pick: you settle on a pack of bottled water, because anything that didn't fall from the sky is like nectar to you, and take a beer each for you and Terezi. It turns out that getting drunk in the middle of an apocalypse isn't the best course of action, because it eventually only exaggerates how awful things are and dehydrates you, but one each won't do any harm.

     You open up a few cans of hot dogs, new potatoes, runner beans and sweetcorn, and let them boil in the juices they were stored in. It's the biggest meal you've had in forever, and you'd think that your body would be unaccustomed to just how much you're trying to shove into it; but in reality, it's the opposite. Once you start eating, neither of you can stop.

     “When did you first kill a zombie?” Terezi asks, chomping her way through her seventh hot dog. What you wouldn't give for a roll, a slice of bread, right now.

     “Not soon enough,” you say, shrugging. No one forgets their first kill, that much is true, but you've told this story so many times that it no longer means anything to you. You scoop out a potato with your fingers, because by the time it occurs to you that there's probably cutlery somewhere in the supermarket, you're all too aware of the fact that using it now would feel alien. “It was back when they first broke out, and I wasn't sure if they were really zombies. I know how obvious it is now, but come on, I was just being a decent human being! I didn't want to kill someone if it turned out that it was all hype, and the disease or whatever they had was going to be fixed up in a few days.”

     “So you ran away?”

     Running away isn't the sign of weakness that it used to be. It's the done thing.

     “Pretty much. Legged it out of there, but I ran back into that first zombie I saw a few days later. At least I think it was her, anyway. Her shirt sort of looked the same, even if it was covered in blood and fuck knows what. Had the same bracelet around her wrist. Maybe.”

     “What did you kill her with?”

     “Can it,” you say, opening up another tin of hot dogs to boil. God, you could stay here and eat all day. Taking supplies back to the cart isn't exactly easy work. “I'm not at that part of the story yet. Anyway, I guess she still had part of her human brain ticking away in there, because she had these two kids with her. Maybe they were her kids, and she'd gone to pick them up, bitten them when they went in for a hug. Or maybe they were just some random kids she'd seen on the street after all, haha!”

     You spent a lot of time thinking about how those zombie kids would've still been kids, if you'd taken that first zombie out when you had the chance. Probably better for them to have been wiped out in that first wave, rather than have to live through every day as you do. Or so you tell yourself.

     “And then what?” Terezi asks, and you realise that you've paused without meaning to.

     “And then I almost pissed myself—” Terezi laughs, so you do too, “And bashed her head in with a bit of pipe I'd found.”

     “Did you throw up?”

     “Urgh, who wouldn't?” You sip on your beer, like a bad taste is still caught between your teeth. “What about you, Pyrope?”

     You'd bet anything she has a good story to tell, considering she brought the subject up in the first place, but she only makes a face. The sort of expression that never means anything good. Either she took out one of her parents, one of her friends, or she still doesn't know whether it was a zombie or not.

     “Have you ever noticed how it's the zombie apocalypse, and all anyone wants to talk about is zombies?” she asks.

     “Oh man, no kidding,” you say, but you can't think of a subject change, so you eat the rest of your meal in silence, and then hurry back to work.

     For a week, things go better for you than they have in the last six months put together. You hit the store every day, working for no less than eight hours, so that by the time you get back to the farm, you're too exhausted to worry about trivial things like thinking or being awake. There isn't much trouble with the zombies. There are a few shambling around alone, so you break their heads in before they have a chance to form a pack. Sometimes, when you know there's not too much danger, you'll step back, and let Terezi take care of whatever zombie's been unfortunate to stumble across the two of you.

     She's pretty good with whatever weapon she can get her hands on. Sometimes she'll swing too early, but then again, sometimes you do the same. You're not about to criticise her to her face.

     On one of your trips back to the cart, you see a horse that's wandered into the streets. It's leaning forward, and chewing as if on grass, though there's only a body beneath it. Happy with the flesh it already has, it ignores you and Terezi both. There's something about the infected animals that's more disturbing than the human-zombies. With those, at least you can tell they're no longer people; flesh rots off in clumps, language is lost to them, and the only thing that keeps them moving is a desire to sink their teeth into something. With the animals, they almost look normal. When you put one of those down, it feels like killing a defenceless creature; they don't come after you unless they're hungry.

     But if you let them get hungry, you'll only regret it later.

     When Scratch sees what a good job you've been doing, he sends out another two people to help. They wait at the midway point between the supermarket and the cart, and you toss your backpacks to them and take empty ones in return, speeding the whole process up.

     On the first day, you dealt with food. You're always talking food back, but on the second day, you focus on water. On the third day, you clear the shelves of all the packs of painkillers, allergy medication, plasters, bandages; everything a first aid kit needs. You even bundle in bottles of supplements, chewing a few vitamin C tablets as you go. On the fourth day, you deal in luxuries: toothbrushes and pastes, mouthwash, razors, soap, toilet rolls, deodorants, tampons, books, magazines. Other necessities on the fifth day, lighters and matches, all the batteries in the damn place, the torches you aren't using, the disposable BBQs and bags of charcoal, kitchen knives and pans, blankets and pillows. It gets a little less ordered after that, and you just grab whatever you can. Whatever looks most useful.

     You take back a lot of alcohol. Spirits, mostly, and the good stuff, too. Smirnoff, Absolut, Southern Comfort, Bacardi. The labels you never would've been able to afford before. Your reasoning is that it's good for cleaning out cuts, good for numbing people to the pain when they have to have a piece of shrapnel pulled out of them, maybe even a limb hacked off.

     On the last day, you twist the lid off a bottle of vodka, take a few mouthfuls, and offer the bottle out to Terezi. You don't then know that it's going to be the last day, of course, because the zombie pack to the north has yet to move in on this area, but as far as you're concerned, you could keep on doing this forever.

     Something about it feels weird. Off. Like somebody's working their way beneath your ribs and prying out something you haven't experienced in a long time. It took you a few days to realise that what you were experiencing was fun; it's what happens when there's no immediate danger, when you're working alongside someone who isn't completely intolerable.

     You must've had three or four shots of vodka, though you're determined to stick to your rule of not getting completely drunk, which makes it alright for you to admit that Terezi's not bad. She knows what she's doing and she gets the job done, and while you're both raiding the supermarket, or camping out to make lunch, you talk about all sorts of really pointless things to pass the time.

     She asks you about your old life, and the funny thing is that she actually sounds as if she cares. So you tell her, because now that the world's ended, there's not much shame in admitting to being in and out of work ever since you dropped out of school at sixteen, and alternating between living in flats so shitty you had to rely on whiskey to stop from freezing to death in the winter, and alleyways that were probably a step up from that. At least you didn't have to pay for those.

     Terezi tells you about her parents, in the past tense, as most people do. She tells you that she had a pet tegu, bigger than her forearm, called Pyralspite, and you both laugh over how ridiculous getting stressed over an essay deadline now seems. She tells you that she's been blind from birth, but she likes the thought of the colour red, and you chime in with hey, my shoes are red! Or they were, when they were new. Now they're a sort of greyish brown in most lights, just like everything else seems to be.

     You agree to watch each other's backs. Or you suppose Terezi is keeping an ear out for you. There's not been any real trouble at the farm, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't still be cautious. Back in the early days, when humans still huddled in the cities, gangs would roam about, offering protection from the zombies to women, and even young girls, sometimes, in exchange for certain favours.

     It was never really an offer.

     Nothing quite that shady has gone on at the farm, as far as you can tell. You're only really around for dinner, recently, but a few of the guys, teenagers especially, with give you and Terezi odd looks. They're almost resentful, and you've seen that expression enough to know what it means. And so you never go down to the river to bathe alone. You'll sit in the grass while Terezi's washing, singing to herself, and throw pebbles into the air while making a half-hearted attempt to hit them with your baseball bat.

     Turns out the only sport you've ever been any good at is zombie killing.

     Oh, and running from zombies. You're not half bad at that.

     Terezi makes you laugh. She pisses you off, too, because she never seems to shut up, and doesn't shy away from asking you even the most intrusive questions. She cackles whenever you sulk as a result of her actions, but all in all, it's not a bad feeling. It beats the mind-numbing emptiness that is boredom, and you're starting to think that's the real killer. Not zombies.

     It doesn't comes as a surprise when you kiss her, up against the rows of wine.

     Bottles rattle behind her, and you aren't surprised when she kisses you back, either.

     The world's ground to a halt, and as you see it, you're all going to be zombies within a year or two. And that's a generous estimate. There's nothing new being made, no news that reaches your ears beyond zombies, zombies, zombies, nothing to do but survive another day, and eventually, you're going to run out of things to talk about.

     Might as well let her twist her fingers in the back of your shirt while you kiss her, taking what little comfort you can from the world.

Chapter 3

     When a pack of twenty zombies in the area triples overnight, the supermarket is no longer a viable hunting ground. You've taken plenty from it, and there are still supplies left to pilfer; the pack will move on, eventually, and you'll be able to get hold of the rest when you're actually in need of it.

     You're still sent on supply runs every day, though they're less fruitful. You hit corner shops, petrol garages, that sort of thing, and no one waits for you at any halfway point. You're lucky to get a bagful of supplies from runs like those, and it leaves you with too much time to mill around the farm. At meals, you're afforded more to eat than the majority of the other survivors, because you need the fuel to keep making supply runs, and even though you're the ones risking your necks to put food on their plates, they still resent you for it.

     Scratch says that in order for the farm to keep functioning, everyone has to share whatever they find. Then again, considering how much you're doing for the farm, he later muses, perhaps it wouldn't matter if you kept one or two things to yourself, as a token of thanks. And so you keep a litre bottle of vodka in the barn, and a permanent marker on you at all times, so you know if anyone's been sipping from it while you're out. It's useful for the times you find it particularly difficult to sleep, and you keep a whole hoard of cigarettes hidden in your backpack. Not that you feel like smoking anymore, but you know how valuable they could be to you. Old addictions didn't disappear with civilisation.

     One day, when you're cutting through a park in town, you find a Gameboy Colour discarded on a bench. There aren't any corpses lying around nearby, aren't any child-zombies swaying over by the swings, and you haven't seen one of those in years, so you grab it, no longer having a use for concepts like theft. You've kept some of the batteries from the supermarket to yourself, and so you play Pokémon Silver for half an hour an evening, sound turned down to save power, trying to lose yourself in a pixellated world.

     You let Terezi choose names for all your Pokémon. Let her pick the next moves in battles sometimes, too.

     Some of your excursions are more focused than others. You've been directed to a few pharmacies, raided what's left of electronics stores for radios and walkie-talkies, any technology that can still be salvaged, and stopped by sports stores for cricket bats, hockey sticks, anything that can be used as a weapon. You avoid places like hospitals and schools, because the zombies are drawn to both, for whatever reason, and there's no need to take unnecessary risks.

     Sometimes your directives are less clear. Sometimes you'll be told to head out and see what you can find, and come back with nothing but chocolate and bottles of coke. Sometimes, you won't even have that much luck, and just spend hours mowing through lone zombies, until too many gather in one place for it to be worth working off steam like that.

     Sometimes you'll just fuck Terezi in an alleyway.

     You don't know why you do it. Well, why the hell not, right? You're both managing to wash in the river practically every day, and it's hardly as if there are going to be any consequences of your actions as dramatic as getting knocked up, so you don't see why you shouldn't be able to do whatever the fuck you want. Or whoever the fuck you want.

     Neither of you talk about it beforehand, and you definitely don't talk about it afterwards. It just happens: one moment you're catching your breath after taking a zombie out, and the next she's got you against a wall. There's nothing tender in it. You clamp your hands over each other's mouths, not wanting to alert any nearby zombies to your presence with a moan of your own, no time to take any clothing off.

     Sometimes you barely get your jeans unbuttoned.

     You're lying on the hillside, arms folded behind your head, staring up at the clouds as Terezi washes. She's singing a song you don't recognise, and you can't make up your mind whether it's a relic of the old world you've long since forgotten, or something she's made up. The lyrics are ridiculous, but you vaguely recall the sort of tuneless buzz people would blare from their cars as they drove by you.

     There are a few other people down there washing, too. If you sat up and looked, you'd be able to see their legs poking out from beneath the fencing, but you're not here for the view. Terezi's taking her time, and you wish you'd brought your Gameboy down with you. Even though Terezi would kill you for taking on the gym leader without her, and you'd be using up your allotted time for the day. Not only have you already washed for the day, but you've dried off in the sun with how long she's taking, and you'd be just as bored up there, if you headed back to the barn.

     One of the doors on the river stalls creaks open, and you sit up, even though you know it isn't Terezi. You're proven right: a woman emerges, already half-dressed, wades her way out of the river and then pulls her trousers back on. You sigh, fall back down, and then someone's shadow covers you, briefly, as they make their way down to the river.

     You push yourself up onto one elbow to get a look at him. He's got ten, maybe fifteen years on you, and a good half a foot, no matter how tall you've always been. You don't recognise him, not from your barn or from communal meals, but you're certain there are still plenty of people around the farm you wouldn't recognise. You lie back in the grass, idly dragging the tip of your knife through the dirt, not interested in the least in watching him kick his shoes off or tug off his shirt.

     You're considering dozing off in the sun, eyes blinking far too heavily, when a thudding causes you to jerk back up. The guy bangs his fist on the side of Terezi's stall as he walks past, grumbling out, “Do you want to shut up in there?”

     Terezi proves herself to be more stubborn than you are, because after a brief pause during which you assume the banging made her jump, she demonstrates how much she doesn't want to shut up. While she keeps on singing, you get to your feet, slowly making your way over. Maybe the guy's just pissed off and taking it out on whoever he comes across, or maybe this really could be the first sign of trouble.

     You've got a kitchen knife in your hand, swinging at your side. You're not brandishing it before you, like you're threatening anyone, but it's easy enough to see that it's there. People around here know you, or at least what you do; you break your way through hordes of zombies, and that should be reason enough not to want to get on your bad side.

     You stop a few feet away, but then the guy actually has the nerve to wrap one hand around the edge of the stall and peer inside.

     “What's the problem?” he asks, slowly and clearly, “No speak English?”

     “Hey!” you say, needing to draw his attention away from Terezi. Jesus fuck, you think, where the hell do people get off on thinking they can do whatever they like, just because there aren't any police to eventually catch up with them? “You got a problem?”

     He barely even glances back at you. “Not with you,” he says, and then gives the edge of the stalls a tug. The fencing it's made of creaks; it won't take much more force to splinter. Terezi calls out to you from inside, forcing herself to sound confused, rather than scared. “Be good and run along back to the barn.”

     Two days ago, you cracked a zombie's skull into three pieces with a loose brick. This guy shouldn't take any chances with you, because there's no way you're not going to kick him where it hurts and then not stop, if he keeps on tugging at the fence like that; and yet he doesn't even care that you've got a knife and he doesn't. You aren't even registering as a threat to him.

     “Terezi,” you say, not taking your eyes off him, “Come on. We're heading back.”

     There's a suddenly splash where Terezi's tearing through the water, and the guy has the nerve to laugh at the sight of her sprinting half-naked through shin-deep water, the rest of her clothes bundled up in her arms, held to her chest. You're still a way away from her, but the look etched across her face is as clear as anything.

     No zombie's ever brought that sort of fear out in her before. You feel sick to your stomach, because she must too.

     The guy moves as Terezi does, closer towards her as she scrambles up the bank, and you step to the side, placing yourself between them. You can hear Terezi panicking, not sure of where you are, not knowing how far away he is from her, and so you hold out the knife.

     “Easy, girl,” he says like you're nothing more than a horse, some animal that won't do as it's told. “Just looking for a good time here. Farms are for breeding, ain't they?”

     You thrust the knife up towards his throat at that, reaching out behind you, eventually grabbing hold of Terezi's forearm. He looks down at the blade and then chuckles to himself, as if you're pointing nothing more than a twig at his throat.

     “Rule number one of the farm: no killing the living,” he says, as if that means a damned thing to you.

     “Listen,” you hiss, though you know you should just shut up and back away while you have the chance. “Do you really think you're the first shitstain I've had to deal with? Do you really think I won't cut your throat out too?”

     You could do it, if you had to. It can't be that different to killing a zombie, in the long run: flesh is flesh, and there are only so many ways to stab someone. One more word from him, against Terezi, and you're going to ram your knife into the underside of his jaw, right up through the roof of his mouth.

     He doesn't reply. You don't think he's scared of you, but you take the chance to move regardless. A few slow steps backwards, nudging Terezi in the same direction, and you feel there's enough distance between you and him to turn your back on him. He calls up to you, when you begin to pick up the pace, says he hopes your friend's cunt is as tight as her eyes, but doesn't follow. You reach the edge of the farm, and he bellows up that neither of you are worth it.

     “You okay?” you ask her, once you're outside the barn, and she's pulled on the last of her clothing. She nods shallowly, and you don't know what else to do, when you can't check for zombie bites.

*

     Terezi doesn't eat much at dinner that night. Doesn't seem interested in playing Pokémon, either.

     You don't talk about what happened at the river, because it's just another aspect of survival. It's over and done with, you both came out in one piece, and so the only thing left to do is prepare yourself for worse things to come tomorrow. No point in reporting it to Scratch, or anyone else high-up in the farm. People didn't take this sort of thing seriously before the zombies, and now you're supposed to accept it as more of a fact of life than ever.

     You roll onto your side, back to Terezi, barely able to get comfortable even though you now have a real pillow. You're angry, even if you can't say it out loud. Angry that you do so much for the ungrateful masses here and get no recognition for it, angry that you're not taken seriously with a six-inch knife in your hand, angry that people are no better for all they've lost.

     Terezi shuffles next to you. You can tell from her breathing that she's not asleep, and she must assume the same as you, because she says, quietly, “This place really isn't what I thought it would be. We should leave.”

     You don't know when the two of you added together started forming a we, but you can tell from her tone that she's not about to leave without you. When you think about it, you wouldn't move out without her, either, unless it was unavoidable. For half a moment, you think it might mean something, until you realise sentiment you're trying to express, I wouldn't fuck off without having the decency to invite you along, isn't a particular moving one.

     You grunt, and that's all the reply you give. Because why leave now? There are going to be men like that and worse everywhere, you the two of you have a good thing going on here. You're not bored senseless day in, day out, you have some way of actually making yourself useful, and when the zombies eventually stumble across this place in numbers resembling an army, there's plenty of fire power to keep you safe.

     Terezi moves up behind you, presses herself to your back and wraps her arms around your waist. She lets out a heavy breath as she does so, like she's been building up the courage to move, and you feel it against the back of your neck. You shiver, but she buries her face in your nape, putting an end to that.

     As true to form as ever, you can let a girl fuck you against a brick wall, but you tense up when she tries to get a little comfort from you.

     “You like me, right?” she asks, and you expect her to laugh a few seconds afterwards, because that's the sort of thing she says to wind you up.

     But she doesn't.

     You bury the side of your face deeper into the pillow, draw your knees up away from hers, and mutter, “I guess you make a decent meat shield.”

*

     A little after three weeks following your arrival, there's meat for dinner.

     Real meat, in great chunks, cooked over an open fire. Not any of this processed crap you've been scraping out of the bottom of tins, made up of whatever was left over from half a dozen animals once the actual meat had been used up. You tear through it, though you're telling yourself to take your time, barely able to believe anything could taste so good.

     Scratch comes to eat with you. He usually keeps himself to himself, probably having far more important things to do to help keep the farm running smoothly. And more important things to eat, you'd wager. But he comes down for once, sits by your side as everyone around you seems to be in something resembling a good mood for once, and asks how you're liking the meat. He never specifies what kind it is, but you're not fussy. During the first few weeks, you ate rat that had come crawling straight out of the sewers.

     “It's great!” you tell him, and that goes for a lot of things. Earlier on in the day, you hit a clothing store, and so you're decked out in a brand new set of jeans, shoes and a tank, eating real meat, and it's enough to make you feel like you're on top of the world. It's only a matter of time before zombie-gunk ends up encrusted into your clothes again, but for now, you're enjoying the moment, because it's the only thing you can do.

     Even Terezi has cheered up some. All it took was a little overkill on a few zombies, and she's slurping down a coke next to you like she's never had a care in the world.

     Scratch explains that they staggered killing the animals. Kept them safe and kept them hidden, so there was no chance of the zombies turning them, and slaughtered them once the previous supply started to dwindle. He doesn't like to waste the reserves frivolously, but the meat won't last forever, and a good meal helps boost people's morale when things start getting particularly rough.

     He does all that he can to be a good host, and regrets that it's not enough.

     You nod in all the right places as he speaks, because you're too busy chewing on the chunk of lamb-beef-horse-whatever to attempt getting a word in edgeways, and once you've defeated your current mouthful, you tell him that he must've had one up on everyone else when things went to shit. He was already used to producing, killing and preparing his own food, while everyone else was dependant on supermarkets and the like.

     “Actually,” he says, taking a small sip of his water, “I never was a farmer. Before the zombies broke out, I was a doctor. But in practice, it's much the same.

     “Huh. How'd you end up in charge of this place, then?”

     It's probably not the most interesting of stories. The old farmer and his wife abandoned the farm, wanting to be with their family, when the first wave hit, or they were both already infected by the time Scratch stumbled across the place. A double-suicide or a murder-suicide out of perceived mercy might make the tale a little more interesting, but you're sure you've heard it all before.

     “There was a disagreement,” Scratch explains evenly, and you pop the last piece of meat in your mouth. “The previous owners had taken me and some of the others that now act as guards in, but hadn't listened to reason when we suggested they put their animals down. They were strangely attached to them.”

     “So?” you ask, chewing loudly. “What happened?”

     “We let them have it their way. We didn't separate them from their cattle.”

     The meat caught between your teeth suddenly seems like enough to choke you, and your mouth becomes watery, in the way it always does before you're sick. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, wonder if it would be bad form to spit the meat onto your plate, but know that the best course of action lies in not reacting at all.

*

     Two days prior, when you were gutting what was left of a petrol garage, you'd run into one of the guards in town. He'd been carrying a gun, which he'd pointed between you and Terezi and didn't lower the barrel when he realised who you were, and asked if you'd seen any other survivors around. You said no, and he described one of the men from the farm, saying that he'd made a break for it.

     At the time, you'd thought the man in question had stolen something from the supply store, or otherwise caused trouble for himself, but now, you're not so sure. Perhaps he only wanted to get away, having realised that there's something off about the farm. And who could blame him?

     Terezi doesn't press against you during the night again. Not while she's awake, at least. Sometimes, she'll roll over in her sleep, throw an arm over you, and you won't bother pushing her off until you have to get up to pee. You're the one who makes the move this time, purely out of practicality; if you don't get close, then people will be able to hear what you're saying, and you don't doubt the information would spread like wildfire.

     “Calm down,” Terezi murmurs into your hair, once you finally mustered up the resolve to bring the issue up with her, you sort of rolled over, flopped against her with your face buried in her shoulder, and blurted it all out in a hurried whisper. “I'm sure you didn't eat human flesh. Scratch probably just had them killed!”

     Like that is somehow so much better. But you can't help it, you feel sick every time you think about what you could've been eating, and how much you were enjoying it. People must've resorted to eating their own kind, there's no doubting that; all it takes is being trapped inside with zombies pounding at the walls, and nothing but a fresh, infection-free corpse sprawled out on the ground before them to keep them going, until the zombies retreat. Cannibalism probably doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, in cases like that.

     “We need to get out of here,” you grumble into her shoulder.

     It doesn't matter if it was only beef you ate. Something about the way Scratch spoke so nonchalantly makes your skin crawl, and you're not about to risk being here for something even weirder happening. Terezi doesn't reply, and you don't need her to. You know what she's thinking.

     Something bad almost happens to her, and you shrug, leaving her to get over it in her own time. Something bad may or may not have happened to you, and now you're planning your escape, finally ready to take action. Some things never change, you guess. Your mother always said you were abhorrently selfish, especially after you left her side, and in that moment, you don't know why Terezi would want to leave with someone like you.

     You tighten your arms around her waist. “... we should've left when you wanted to,” you admit, swallowing thickly. If she says anything even resembling I told you so, Serket! then you're going to give her two black eyes.

     Again, she doesn't reply. You swear to god, if she's fallen asleep while you're trying to talk to her, you're going to push her down onto the lower level of the barn, and it's hardly as if there are any zombies milling around to break her fall.

     You look up at her, and she smiles when you do so, having felt you shift. Scrunching up her face, she says, “Okay,” and leans forward, kissing you on the nose.

*

     Leaving is easier said than done. It's the longest you've staying in one place since the outbreak, and honestly, you were getting restless before you allowed yourself to comprehend just how uncomfortable things had got. Scratch and his guards have set up this compound because it's in their own interest; they need all of you here in order to have a population of their own to rule over, in order to indulge in their own sick fantasies of power.

     Some people have embraced the end of the world with more enthusiasm than others.

     Sneaking out during the night is out of the question. There are too many people out keeping watch after curfew, and escaping while you're out on a supply run brings its own problems, too. You've come to realise that they aren't just going to let you leave. They'll send someone out to find you, someone and their gun, and you long since learnt not to underestimate anyone.

     You know too much. You know how many people are on the farm, how many guns are spread out amongst them, and what types. You know where they forage supplies from, exactly what they keep in the supply store, and how long they could wait out a zombie raid, if push came to shove. The first supply run you went on was a test, to see whether you could get there and back without dying and reanimating in the process, and now that you've proven yourself, you're a valuable asset to them. They aren't about to give you up if they can't get something in return.

     There's no one you can rely on for help. You and Terezi don't make a habit of speaking to the others, especially not after what happened down by the river, and the only other person you really have contact with is Equius. You've tried talking to him a few times, as he drags the cart to and from the farm during supply runs, but he's as blunt as anything with all the personality of damp cardboard. He's loyal to the farm, that you're sure of, which leaves him out of the question.

     You plan in hushed whispers and don't get anywhere. You keep heading into town to scavenge what you can, until eventually, your flat, hollow mood of the last few days is explained, and you never want to move again.

     You're not exactly ever in high spirits, what with the state of the world and everything left in it, and you weren't the most cheerful person you'd ever met before that, but for a while, you've been worse than ever. Shorter with Terezi than you were before, instantly dismissing all of her ideas, not caring about the way you made her lips tug downwards in the corners, head bowing when you were more spiteful than usual.

     She gives away far too much in her expressions, but you suppose she can't help it. It's not as if she's ever read anyone else's face before, as if she's had the opportunity to figure out what it is she needs to conceal.

     So there you are, curled in a ball against the floor, gripping at your stomach. You dig your nails in, occasionally, as if raking pain across the surface will stop the deep-seated ache from rotting your insides, and you haven't been this goddamn uncomfortable since this time last month. They're not willing to give you painkillers, not for this. You've brought back dozens – hell, maybe even hundreds – of packs, and still they won't spare you two lousy ibuprofen.

     It's because they're men, you know it. If they had to deal with this, they'd be guzzling down drugs by the handful.

     This is one thing TV never taught you how to deal with. As far as you know, there's never been a special on surviving shark week during the zombie apocalypse because, right, all of those shows are made by guys, and fuck, fuck, fuck. You've downed the last of your vodka, can still taste it when you run your tongue across the back of your teeth, but it didn't help for long. Twenty minutes, maybe.

     Terezi takes pity on you and rubs the small of your back when you curl up on your side, and you grunt, pretending that it doesn't help. There were hot water bottles in one of the department stores you raided recently, and you wish you'd picked one up, though you know it'd do you no good. The only liquid you really have free access to at the moment is rainwater and warm soda, but maybe they'd let you go out and start up a fire, throw a brick on there and wrap it in a blanket once it was hot.

     You don't know. You'd take anything, right about now.

     You sleep as well as you expect to, as far away from Terezi as you can get without crossing into someone else's space. You don't want to touch her, or to be touched. You don't really want anything, other than to chuck your guts up, and you regret sipping on that vodka when you weren't in dire need of it.

     When you fall into something resembling a deep sleep, you're woken up within an hour. You don't even have time to be pissed about it, because you're suddenly sat bolt upright, moving as if your uterus isn't waging war on every single muscle in your body. It's a gunshot that's woken you up, and within eight seconds, everyone else in the barn is either praying or screaming or both, and you have to wonder how stupid they really are.

     A gunshot can only mean one thing: there are zombies, a lot of them, and they're close. And noise, that's only bound to give them a reason to start drawing in faster. Everyone in the barn knows this, they've survived for longer than they apparently deserve, and yet there they all are, not able to keep their mouths shut.

     Whatever. You fall back down on your side, bundle your blanket into a ball and pressed it to your stomach as you close your eyes, as if you're really going to be able to fall back to sleep like this. There are a few more gunshots, and you barely even start. Right now, all you want those zombies to do is come in, bite off the faces of everyone who's working themselves up into a frenzy, because that's the only way you can see them shutting up any time soon.

     You'll be fine. You'll up on a higher level, a ladder between you and them. Zombies can't use ladders, no matter how determinedly they throw themselves against them.

     Terezi, at least, knows when to keep her trap shut. She puts a hand on your shoulder but doesn't say anything, and so you reach up, patting your hand against the back of hers, because you don't need to add her constant fretting to the long list of things that are currently annoying you.

     More gunshots. The barn door swings open, everyone seems to suck in a collective breath, but the boots you hear against the floorboards thud too fluidly to belong to a zombie. A guard, then, you decide, and sure enough, he starts talking. Says that everyone needs to calm down, that they've got the problem under control.

     Great. You're reassured. Now, if only everyone would let you get some damn sleep.

     “Serket.” A gruff voice sounds above you, and you belatedly realise that the footsteps had been drawing closer. “We need you out there as a decoy. You too, Pyrope.”

     “Fuck off,” you say, not even bothering to open your eyes. They couldn't even spare two pills for you, and now they want you to put your neck on the line for them, let a whole pack of zombies chase you down a hillside in the dark. To hell with them. “I'm not leaving this spot.”

     “It wasn't a request,” you're told, and when you look up at the guard, there's another by his side. You feel your lips curl when you realise who it is, and you scramble for your life to stick through them both when you crouch down, grabbing Terezi by her elbows. “Either you help out, or she's going out alone. Everyone's gotta pull their weight around here.”

     The guy from the river grins as they begin tugging Terezi away. She calls out to you, then she struggles, but there's no way she's going to get out of their hold.

     “Bastards,” you spit, grabbing all the weapons you can in earnest, your baseball bat and the tire iron Terezi's been using, “Fuck you!”

     “Sorry,” the guard says, easing Terezi down the ladder. “This is just how it's gotta be. You knew what you were getting yourself into.”

     Your legs feel too light to hold up the rest of your body when you stand. Everything aches, and the thought of movement makes you light-headed, but you've no choice but to follow them down, out of the barn and into the fray. You've really screwed up big this time, Serket. You've gone and done it, let yourself get attached to someone, and now you've got to put yourself through hell to deal with that.

Chapter 4

     Scratch personally apologises to you the next morning.

     He's sorry things got out of hand, but your help was invaluable last night. Vital, in fact. You want to tell him to go to hell, because you were forced into it, made to run down the hillside with a blaring radio strapped to your back, drawing the pack towards you. Instead, you say nothing. There's a bruise so purple across your right cheek and jaw that it looks as if someone's crushed berries against your face, your hands are cut to ribbons from trying to navigate the fence in the dark, and at least one rib has to be broken.

     And still, they're not offering you any painkillers. The most they've done is check you for bites. Three times.

     You've been tossed into the old stables with the rest of the injured. Terezi's there, but doesn't really need to be; she's got a few cuts and scrapes, but nothing lasting. You managed to give her your baseball bat, telling her to stay low, as close to the farm as she could, before they strapped the radio to your back, and it served her well. There are a couple who look like they might not make it, but they weren't infected, so everyone's acting as if they still stand a chance, as well as those who are having splints made out of hockey sticks for their broken bones, pieces of gravel picked out of cuts with tweezers.

     Scratch says that there's no rush, but once you're back on your feet, he'd like to you do a quick supply run. It's understandable, he says, considering the assault you just faced. As you sit on a bale of hay, staring at your shoes, he explains that it's the biggest gathering he's ever had the misfortune of facing, as if he himself was in the fray. No wonder it's the biggest group he's ever come across; he's been making himself cosy in the farmhouse for all these months, thick stone walls and tens of warm bodies between him and the horde.

     If Scratch wants you to run a mission, you'll go. You make no promises about returning, though, but you're so red hot with anger that you can't part your lips to tell him as much. Hands pressed flat to your knees, you try to stand up, get onto your feet, but then double over with pain.

     You'll go tomorrow. Or in a few tomorrows.

     Best to wait until the aching deep in your stomach fades, and your rib stops giving off the impression that it's going to burst your lung with every breath you take.

     The next week is spent healing. That's something you haven't taken the time to do throughout this past year, something you'd almost forgotten could happen. It's as if the concept of time and rest helping to stitch you back together is a mythical one, and you don't quite believe that you really do feel a little better, with each day that passes.

     If you aren't washing or eating, then you're lying on your back in the barn, forearm draped over the bridge of your nose, staring up at nothing. Staying still no longer suits your disposition, and idleness only makes way for remembrance: you recall how it felt, throwing yourself down the hill and letting dozens of the infected chase you, and though they were so close that you could hear the rumble emanate from the backs of their throats, feel their fingers claw at your arms, your back, all you were really thinking about was what was going to happen to Terezi.

     Maybe she'd already been bitten. Maybe she wouldn't be that lucky, and the men that had dragged her out of the barn had come to the conclusion that these were their last desperate moments on this Earth, and they had to make the most out of them.

     The more you think about it, the more you realise you should've let her get mauled by the first three zombies you saved her scrawny butt from.

     You don't talk to Terezi, but she doesn't seem to mind. She talks at you regardless of whether or not you reply, or even show any signs of acknowledging her, and after a while, you get used to the constant hum of her voice. It thrums through you, and you fall asleep to the sound of it more than once.

     And then, when you're so bored you vaguely consider throttling her to death, just to have something to do, you nudge her awake early one morning, and say, “Let's go help out the Doc.” Her morning cloud of confusion lifts as soon as you say this, mouth forming a silent oh of realisation. Time to get out of here. She knows what you're planning, and doesn't do anything out of the ordinary because of it.

     Nobody can suspect a thing. You don't take anything more than you usually would on a run. Your batteries, cigarettes, all the little things you've gathered together over time remain in your backpack, with the exception of the game cart out of your Gameboy. The Gameboy can be replaced later, but you've got weeks worth of progress saved on that game. No way you're leaving that behind. You slip it into the back pocket of your jeans, along with a penknife, and pick up the baseball bat.

     Ammunition's running low after last week's zombie raid, and Scratch wants you to check the police stations and any army vehicles left scattered around for what you can find. Sure thing, you tell him, taking care to sound as half-hearted about it as you always do. Equius meets you at the farm's entrance, drags the cart down behind him, and you walk by his side, knowing that saying goodbye isn't worth the risk.

     “You're limping,” he states plainly, and you tut under your breath. You aren't limping, the muscles in the back of your leg are just a little tight. That's all. “You're in no fit state to be searching out supplies. It's irresponsible.”

     You roll your eyes, more aware than ever of how much your right calf is aching, now that he's pointed it out. It'll be fine once you get into the city, once you've had the chance to loosen up a little.

     “What's the worst that could happen?”

     “You could die,” he says, and you sigh, waving one hand out as if that will get him to shut up. No such luck. He stops in his tracks for half a second, letting go of the cart's handles to readjust his grip. “I mean it. You have been on numerous missions since arriving, and the chances of you dying now that you're injured are extraordinarily high.”

     You keep up your pace, not wanting to stop walking now that you're moving to a rhythm, one-two, one-two, heavy on the two, and glance at him out of the corner of your eye. Terezi seems to have caught onto something, too, because she's got her head tipped forward, teeth digging into her lower lip. You can always tell when she's listening extra hard.

     “Huh. Guess that's not completely unlikely, even if it would take more than a city full of zombies to take down the likes of me! You guys must have got through a huuuuuuuuge number of chumps to go out foraging supplies for you, huh?” You don't want to say too much, don't want to be too obvious, but you can't let this opportunity slip through your fingers. “What would happen? If someone did get the jump on us?”

     “I would be required to confirm that you were dead,” he goes onto say, “If you had not returned to the cart without the two hour allotted time period.”

     “And if you found us dead,” Terezi says, “What then?”

     “There would be little point in bringing the bodies back to the farm. They would only take up room in the cart, and there would always be a chance of your corpses spreading infection among the living. You would be left, for the infected creatures to feed upon.”

     Cheerful.

     You pass the rest of the journey without another word, listening to the way the wheels of the cart rattle and clack against the frame with every loose rock and uneven dirt part they're dragged across, eventually settling into a constant click when you reach the street. Equius sets the cart down where he always does, takes out his usual weapon, a hunting crossbow, from inside, and stands guard.

     There are scratches around his throat, down his forearms, and you realise that he was out there fighting when you were. He probably put an arrow or two into a few zombies' backs, probably saved your neck without you even realising it. Maybe he's not as stuck-up as you thought he was.

     “You really are in no fit shape for this,” he tells you as you leave.

     You walk backwards so that you can wave to him, and with a shrug say, “I know. Guess it's do or die, though!”

*

     Equius won't come looking for the bodies you aren't going to leave behind. He'll wait out the two hours, and then an hour more, before heading back up to the farm to deliver the news. You died fighting, and didn't even have anything worth taking back on you. A zombie got into your throat, and then Terezi's, and he had to put an arrow through your skulls, just to be sure. Or maybe infected ravens got to your eyes, and that was that.

     God, you have zombie-birds.

     But even though you know Equius won't come looking for you, you feel as if you should wait out those three hours before moving on with your life. That's something that you've got far too accustomed to, lately: waiting. You're even sloppier than you were before you turned up at the farm, acting as if the luxury of time is on your side, as if it's more than a mere illusion.

     For a while, you and Terezi wander the streets in silence. There's half a zombie with its arms wrapped around a post box, spine trailing out behind it, and you're almost sorry to have to kill the pathetic thing. But not sorry enough to refrain from stomping its skull flat once you've batted it onto its back.

     It's not until Terezi stops in her tracks, drops her tire iron and cane alike onto the floor and shouts out “Woohoo!” hands held above her head, that you realise just how trapped you'd felt before. Your life isn't going to be any easier, now that it's just the two of you, and you've no fixed abode, no stash of food or tips to follow, but you're going to be making your own choice. You'll be as safe as anyone in this world can.

     She's grinning, laughing, and you need her to shut up, because she's only going to draw attention to you, but you don't understand how wrapping your arms around her waist and spinning her on the spot is going to help with that. But you do it anyway, and she loops her arms clumsily around your head as you hoist her up so high that your face ends up smushed in her chest.

     She elbows your ear, and the celebration doesn't stop when you drop her back to the ground. Your baseball bat's gone the way of her weapons, and you grab her jaw, guiding her up into a kiss. It's easier to excuse this sort of behaviour when you're in the middle of what's now conventional danger, running purely on a state of fear, or excitement, it's all the same right now, because you're not thinking anything through. It's just happening. It's been a while, almost two weeks, and it's happening, but you're not rushing into it, not biting on her lips or trying to back her against anything.

     “Don't get too mushy on me, Serket,” she mumbles against your lips, hands on your shoulders as she breaks away. “We need to start gathering supplies of our own!”

     You're a little disappointed by the abrupt return to reality, but she's right. The game cart in your back pocket isn't going to do you any good when you're too hungry to think straight, let alone raise your baseball bat over your shoulder to make a solid swing, and you can't be expected to carry supplies with your bare hands.

     The first corner shop you come to does you some good. There's a body on the floor that can't have been there for more than a week, and the knife in his back says that a human got to him long before a zombie had the chance to. A small mercy. There are three cats feasting on it, clearly infected themselves, and they peer up at you when your entry causes the bell above the door to chime, tails swaying as an early warning.

     You leave them be, covering your nose and mouth with one hand. It reeks beyond reason in there, and you've no desire to interrupt their meal. There's not much around that actually looks edible, just a wall of magazines and newspapers printed in vain, and so with Terezi's help, you knock down the door behind the counter, to see what they were keeping out back.

     There's enough to get by on, if you don't manage to find any real food. You make a note to come back here, and gather up all you can carry into an empty cardboard box that's lying around. Crisps, chocolate, chewing gum. The usual. There are lighters behind the counter, so you grab those on the way out, and once you're back on the street, able to take deep breaths of air that don't make your breakfast threaten to bubble up in your throat, you sit on the kerb, and serve up lunch.

     Your next stop is a Sports Direct. It was gutted fairly early on, and anything resembling a weapon has been taken, but there's still plenty to choose from. Might as well change into some running clothing, while you're there, so that you're able to move freely. You pull on a pair of knee-length tights and a vest top, and then laugh at the sports bras. Oh, right. People used to bother with those, in the old world. People used to bother with all sorts of ridiculous contraptions, back then.

     There are still huge bags up on high shelves left over, and with Terezi's assistance and a step ladder from out back, you manage to pull a few down, and then pile in the food you've collected, as well as whatever else you can think to take with you. You treat yourself to some new shoes, uncover a few zombies that are barely hanging in there when you rummage through the upturned racks of clothing, and then kit your knees and elbows out in skateboard pads when you come across them.

     You've been knocked down too many times to consider thinking twice about it. You grab a helmet and strap that on too, hiding your grey matter under a nice, tough plastic shell, and then throw one over to Terezi.

     “Catch, Pyrope!” She doesn't manage to catch it, but that's alright. You didn't throw it far enough to hit her in the face. She crouches down, feels around for it, and then proceeds to put it on backwards, the first time around. “Well, you got there in the end. That's the bit that matters! —and it's red, by the way.”

     You leave the store, stepping over a severed arm you didn't even notice on the way in, and then for whatever reason, decide to stop off at a pub.

     When people started to accept that their homes were no safer than the streets, some of them got it into their heads that they'd be safe down at their local. As if they could all band together, drink their way through the zombie apocalypse, and let the barkeeper and his trusty shotgun deal with the undead. The end result was predictable: they were sitting ducks, and the infection spread throughout in a matter of moments.

     This one hadn't even got around to boarding up its windows. The door opens as you twist the handle, and as you make your way inside, Terezi says, “Where are we?”

     “Three guesses,” you say, holding out an arm to stop her in her tracks as you scan your surroundings.

     “Hmm. The King's head?”

     Three bodies on the floor. One slumped against a table, two dead at the bar.

     “Nope.”

     You take your knife out of your back pocket, unfold it, and systematically stab the corpses into the nape of their neck, blade directed up towards their brains. You don't want any rude interruptions once you get drinking. Together, you drag the other bodies to the far end of the bar, into the toilets. It does something to keep the smell at bay.

     “The Crown?”

     There's not much alcohol left in there. If you're going to die a horrible, torturous death, and then possibly eat the faces of those you love, then you might as well be as wankered as you can for it. It's hardly as if you have much use for your liver, at that point.

     “Nothing to do with the royals.”

     You pull on the taps, not expecting beer to gush forth. They creak a little, but nothing more. Most of the bottles behind the bar are either empty or smashed, but there's an almost-full bottle of Bells up on the optics, and you make short work of freeing it.

     “Oh! Are we in a Red Lion?”

     You grab a couple of tumblers from under the bar, and join Terezi around the other side, hopping up onto a stool of your own.

     “Congratulations!” you say, pouring out two generous servings of the whiskey. “Great job, really! Hey, we should even make a toast.”

     “What to?” she asks, reaches for her drink, and takes a sip of it before you can answer.

     “To us, duh! And the fact that we finally got our butts out of there! I can't believe I had to spell that out for you.”

     It's fun, at first. Just like these things always are. You talk about taking down every zombie in this place and claiming the city for your own, and then laugh about how you'll send them all off in the direction of the farm with a set of wire cutters so that the fence doesn't slow them down. Terezi laughs a little too hard at the thought, you notice. You tell jokes that haven't been relevant in months, and probably weren't funny when they were first thought up, and share all kinds of pointless stories; incidents from school that you'd forgotten about until today, the first time you knocked back too much alcohol, what drove her to want to study law.

     Halfway into the bottle, and you've stopped caring about your no getting drunk rule. You're off your face, so much so that you're convinced that the mood is never going to fade, but it does shift, and surprisingly fast. The conversation dies down, and you're taking small, regularly sips to avoid having to talk, while it's getting darker outside. You drink more, as if that will help revive the pointless, upbeat conversation, and only end up feeling rotten, inside and out.

     Terezi spends a lot of time giving the impression of staring at one spot on the wall, doesn't so much as blink when you slur something to her, and then asks, suddenly, “Did you ever think about killing yourself?”

     That isn't what she means. She means Did you ever try to kill yourself?, or How were you going to do it?, because everyone's had those thoughts, and more than once, at that. A lot of people couldn't face the zombies, couldn't deal with a world in which their children's faces were foetid, couldn't live with having nothing to do day after day but live to see another one. You've come across plenty of bodies like that. Hanging from beams, from staircases, empty pill bottles next to them; even with their fingers still wrapped around a gun, in some case.

     Everyone thinks about it, and those who go through with it might just be the clever ones.

     “Yeah,” you say, because there's no point lying. No chance of that happening when you're this drunk, even if you wanted to keep it to yourself. “A few weeks before the bombs, when zombies were suddenly a thing, I went to visit my mum. Haha, don't know why I even thought it'd be a good idea! It's not like I'd seen her for, like, eight months before that, not like she would've been expecting it.”

     “Why not?” Terezi asks, and pours you another drink. Some of the whiskey runs across your fingers, but you don't mind. Trust her to wonder how you and your mother ended up like that, strangers under the same roof for the first sixteen years of your life; you've heard about her parents, and it sounds like she had the picture-perfect home life.

     “She was a junkie,” you say, licking the whiskey off your fingers. There's no other way you can think to describe her. “I swear to god, when I was a kid, the only bloody reason she kept me around was for the benefits, and so that she had someone to go pick up for her.”

     But you hadn't left. You'd had plenty of chances, and social services had spoken to you more than once, but you shrugged and shuffled your feet, saying everything was fine at home. So what if she only used you to sate her own cravings? You could usually rummage around for enough money to afford dinner, you had a roof over your head, and it beat being put into foster care.

     “Oh. Vriska, I'm sorry—”

     “—aaaaaaaanyway, long story short, when I got there, she was already dead.” You mime as if you've an invisible syringe in your hand, needle digging in at the crook of your elbow. Your hand might as well be invisible too, because Terezi doesn't catch the motion. “She overdosed.”

     You still had your old key, knowing that she'd never have the clarity of mind to change the locks. You'd known she was dead before you opened the door, could smell it from the corridor, but none of the neighbours had bothered to get close enough to ensure that she was alright. The smell had hit you like a lorry, and though you now have to breathe it in most days, it's never made you shudder as much as it did then.

     She was sat in her favourite armchair. The one she'd spent your entire childhood confined to, watching the TV on mute. It had been off then, though, and you'd tried not to look directly at her. On the coffee table next to the chair, a few things were scattered around: a lighter, a spoon, an empty baggie, and a worn old drawing you'd done when you were six or seven, a thousand years ago. It was a spider scrawled out in a web, next to a bigger one; a Mother's Day project they'd ensured everyone participated in at school. Personalised cards.

     She'd said she'd liked it. That was on one of her clearer days.

     You untied the tourniquet from around her arm, and not knowing what else to do, had sat in the armchair opposite her. Sitting, staring, not blinking, as if you might miss her twitch back to life, if you did.

     “So I picked up the needle. There was still a lot of stuff in there! God, she must have blown all the money she never had on that. And I thought, I thought— if my mum spent all those fucking years shooting herself up, then there had to be something good about it, right? She picked that fucking poison over me every goddamn time, even made me go out in the dark, when it was pissing down with rain, just to get her next hit. So I thought, yeah. I could do that. It might even be a good way to die. Get pretty buzzed, freak out while my heart stops or whatever the fuck happens, but maybe I'd be able to think the zombies were all hallucinations.”

     You'd gone as far as picking up the needle. You'd even tapped the tip against the inside of your elbow.

     “And then what?” Terezi asks when you don't continue, as if she doesn't want to hear anymore, but needs to know what happened next. As if there's some chance that you went through with it.

     “And then I realised I didn't know how to do it. So I put it back down.”

     You'd stared at the veins under your skin for a long, long time, and when you only hesitated because you were worried about stabbing the wrong thing and bleeding to death, you realised that you couldn't have wanted to die as much as you first thought.

     You'd placed the needle back down on the coffee table, put the picture in your mother's lap, and then covered her with a blanket. Later, mum, you'd said, closing and locking the door quietly behind you.

     By the time you finish talking, you're shaking. It genuinely surprises you to see the way your fingers are digging into your knees, unable to stop trembling, as if you expected to tell the tale of discovering your mother's dead body without flinching. Especially while this drunk.

     “Vriska...” Terezi says, and her voice is far too soft. Like there's anything else left inside of you to break. She reaches out to you, but you bat her hands away, eyes screwed shut as you take deep breaths.

     Your chest heaves, but you compose yourself as best you can. You blink your eyes open, wipe them with the back of one hand, and when it occurs to you that you've verbally spewed all this shit without having to be provoked into it, you ask through grit teeth, “What about you, Pyrope?”

     She doesn't have an answer for you. At first, you think she's outright ignoring the question, because she turns her attention back to her glass. But once she's downed the last few sips, she turns it upside down, and presses two fingers to the top. Using her other hand, she slowly drags the glass away, leaving her fingers hanging there, kicking out against the air.

     You keep quiet. Press a hand to the back of her wrist so that she knows you understand what she's trying to show you. When she reaches for you again, you don't stop her. She places her hands on your arms, between the shoulder and elbow, and you try leaning towards her, try to get to your feet. Not even memories that weighty are enough to sober you entirely, and your movements are clumsy, just like hers. You rise to meet one another at the same time, knock over your barstool in the process, and have your face buried in her neck before you can think to do anything else.

     She wraps her arms around you, and your breathe in her skin, and then kiss it. You like it, her skin, warm against your lips, and you want to feel more of it, all of it, pressed against your own body. But there's never time for that, never time to make yourself that vulnerable, and you realise that, even when you're this drunk.

     You grab at her hips, pull her onto the bar. Lift up her shirt, and press your mouth to her stomach as her nails dig into your shoulders. You rub your fingers against her through her shorts, and she makes noises that are bound to draw in every zombie within a hundred mile radius, but you can't bring yourself to clamp a hand over her mouth.

*

     The next morning, you wake with Terezi's arm around your waist, most of your clothing still in place. Shoes included. You're lying in one of the booths, where the chairs are padded, and you ease yourself out of her grasp, sitting up to rub at your temples. Your stomach makes a noise like molten lava bubbling, and before you can berate yourself for being stupid enough not to arrange a schedule for keep watch last night, you double over, emptying your guts out onto the floor.

     Good thing you salvaged all those packs of chewing gum yesterday. Terezi's still sleeping as soundly as she ever does behind you, and you use your foot to drag over the bag closest to you, careful to avoid your impressive sick pile in the process. Now that your stomach's empty and the worst of the hangover is out of your system, it's time to stuff your face with junk food and forget about the rest of the world.

     And forgetting about the rest of the world would be a hell of a lot easier, if a stark reminder of it didn't throw itself against the pub window halfway through your chocolate bar.

     You reach over, shake Terezi by the shoulder to wake her up, and desperately rack your brain, trying to work out where the hell you left your baseball bat.

     There's a rattling as you watch the handle turn, and goddammit, you hate the way some of their hands haven't rotted away enough to make doors an obstacle to them.

Chapter 5

     With Terezi's help, you push a table onto its side and up against the door. It won't keep the zombies out forever, won't keep them out for more than a few minutes, but it buys you enough time to grab your helmets from the bar, pick up your weapons, and dart upstairs. You leave your bags down in the bar, knowing you've more chance of escaping if you're not worrying about lugging them behind you, but do stop for one of the bodies.

     It's putrid and hard to get a grip on, and you feel bad for Terezi, because she hasn't had the chance to purge herself yet. You heave as you grab the wrists and she takes the ankles, but nothing comes up. Its head tilts all the way back, bumping against each stair as you go, and you'd feel bad about disrespecting the dead if the world had any respect for the living left in it.

     Upstairs is used as storage, and there are still whole crates of beer up there, untouched. You drop the body on the floor, open up a window, and peer out onto the street below. There are eight zombies down there, four more on their way, and once they get through the door, or otherwise smash the windows in, it won't take them long to get to where you are. Stairs, though the bane of much of you existence, don't do anything to hold zombies back.

     Zombies might be offensively easily to take down when there's just the one of them, but you don't fancy your chances against a dozen of them in such a confined space. There's no way you'll be able to tear past them without one of you getting bitten.

     “How many are down there?” Terezi asks, voice groggy. She rubs at the corner of her eye with her knuckles, so hungover that you don't doubt she's considering curling up on the floor and trying to sleep off this whole sticky situation.

     “Way too many. Looks like breakfast is on us!”

     You both lift the corpse back up again, cling to the back of its shirt and the waist of its jeans, and sling it out of the window with as much force as you can. It doesn't fly far. It lands with a squelch a few feet away from the front of the building, but it does the trick: the zombies let out a groan, almost sound interested in what's happened, and for a moment, stop pounding against the door.

     They circle the corpse, crouch down by it, swiping chunks of flesh away with ease. Fresh kills are what they go for, and a mouthful of still living flesh is even better, but they can't always afford to be fussy. One thing you've noticed about zombies is the way they don't fight over their kills. They don't fight over territory, either, and you suppose it's just another way you can tell they're no longer human at heart. Once there's something for them to gnaw on, it's as if they don't even notice each other. They take what they can, and move on.

     The body isn't going to keep them distracted forever, and there are still too many of them down there. You step back from the windowsill, tear open one of the crates of beer, and decide that they'll have to do; they're heavy, at least, and even zombies don't take kindly to shattered glass being embedded in their skulls.

     “Ready, aim, fire,” you say, though there's not much aiming, where Terezi comes into it. She throws the bottles blindly, in the general direction of noise, and there are enough of them gathered for her to hit, more often than not. You silently celebrate all of your head shots, three of them taken down with sixteen bottles, others dazed, groaning all the louder as they step on broken glass.

     But all the smashing and shattering can only do so much to help you. You've cleared a hole in the zombies, given yourselves some chance of getting away puncture-free, but you're drawing in packs from all around you. You grab Terezi by the wrist, drag her back down the stairs, and pull your helmet off, launching it right at one of the windows.

     It cracks and shatters, doesn't really form a big enough hole to slip safely through, but you tell yourself that you've lived through worse, because there's no way you're stopping now. Still holding tightly onto Terezi, you hold your bat across your chest, padded elbow pointed out, and feel the jagged edges snag against you as you leap through.

     A couple of the zombies were distracted by the cause of the disturbance, and are watching the way your helmet rolls across the ground. The rest of them, they start shambling towards you immediately, and you sprint harder, even if this is only serving to remind you, in excruciating detail, how much your leg is still aching.

     The glass crunches underfoot as you join the street, taking a sharp left and tearing away from the pack outside the pub, only to be met with a wall of at least two dozen zombies. You skid to a halt, yank Terezi back as you turn on your heels, and you think she must've been fit before this whole apocalypse thing happened, because she's always been able to run faster than you. The zombies head towards you, and it's not the fact that they might catch you up that worries you; they'd never be fast enough for that.

     With all the attention you've drawn to yourselves, the real threat lies in running into yet another wall of zombies. Once they have you trapped, you're well and truly screwed.

     You slow down when you have to scramble over an upturned car, crumpled into the side of a double-decker bus, and you glance over your shoulder to see how far behind you the zombies are. What you almost run into next isn't another pack of zombies. What you almost run into next is a woman holding an ice axe in one hand hockey stick in the other, with a mammoth of a White Shepherd by her side.

     She stares at you dead in the eyes, and neither of you blink. You're both thinking the same thing: what if she's infected, what if she's going to kill you for whatever supplies are in your pockets, the clothes off your back. She pulls the axe back over her shoulder, and you try to raise your baseball bat, but the dog growls from the back of its throat.

     “Don't move,” she warns, finally breaking eye contact to glance at the flood of zombies shambling towards you.

     “Vriska?” Terezi asks, “What's going on?”

     “That's what I'd like to know. Who the hell are you?” you ask the woman, who's lowered her weapon enough to place a hand against the top of the dog's head. It doesn't look infected, at least, but you can never be too certain.

     “Kanaya Maryam,” she says flatly, “And if you don't want your remains to have to be flossed from between forty sets of yellowed teeth, I suggest you remain still.”

     She pats the dog between its ears, and it slinks forward, towards you. It buries its muzzle against your stomach, sniffs at you, and then does the same to Terezi. You don't know what the hell the dog is doing, or why it's now wagging its tail like that, but the pack is drawing closer, and you're itching to get away.

     “This is Becquerel. Or Bec, if you'd prefer. He has something of a knack for sniffing out the infected,” Kanaya says as he wanders back over to her side. You're about to say Great, so you know we're not infected, what now?, when a zombie, not part of the pack, clambers over the upturned car, arms swinging out towards you. There's no need to raise your baseball bat; before you can, the air whistles, and a bullet lands slap bang in the middle of its skull. Kanaya sighs. “And that would be Jade.”

     “Did we just get our butts saved?” Terezi asks, and you elbow her in the side, hissing shhhh.

     Kanaya turns to the building behind her, hooks the ice axe into a belt loop, and blocks the sun from her eyes with a hand against her brow, squinting at a far-up window.

     “We'd best hurry.”

     She leads you across the street, between cars, some of them facing the wrong direction, some of them on their sides, to the entrance of an apartment building. The lock's been smashed in so that it no longer serves its purpose, and the door's propped open with an old TV, box-shaped, while you slip inside. Once you and Terezi are in there, you help pull the TV back into the foyer, and bundle up a whole heap of junk against the door to keep it closed.

     No matter how huge the apartment complex looks from the street, the narrow corridors and plain stone steps inside make the place feel smaller than it really is. You follow Kanaya up three flights of steps, and then through another door, leading to a wide, open roof. There are saucepans and buckets out here, dozens upon dozens of them, left out to collect rainwater, but Kanaya's walking too briskly for you and Terezi to do much more than mumble between yourselves. There are plants out there too, more natural colours than you've seen in months, but you don't get more than a glance.

     You head into a second tower, up yet more stairs. Eight or nine floors, you aren't really counting, but you've taken so many turns that you're starting to feel dizzy. When you finally leave the stairwell, you're greeted by three narrow doors, all of them looking as if they lead to nothing more than a storage closet. But Kanaya throws herself against the middle one, the one with a busted lock, and a hallway opens before you, no fewer than eight doors leading off it in turn.

     “Here we are,” Kanaya says, and Bec wags his tail. “I suppose I ought welcome you to our humble abode. It's definitely better than residing with the dead, at least. Jade? Put that ridiculous excuse for a sniper rifle down. We have guests—”

     The door of the room Kanaya's just stepped into swings shut, and you don't hear anything else. You consider backing away and making a break for it, grabbing Terezi's wrist and bolting, but you don't really know why. You think you'd get lost in a maze of identical looking doors and corridors, and Terezi wouldn't be any help there.. So you follow Kanaya into what turns out to be the kitchen, and find this Jade she's been talking about. The one who took the zombie's head off a hair's breadth away from you.

     In the middle of the kitchen, there's a girl staring at you with wide-eyes and a wider grin, no younger or older than the rest of you. You raise your baseball bat, immediately wonder why you've done so, and drop the weapon to your side.

     “Sorry,” you say. Sorry's not a word you've had much reason to use, lately. Jade slowly lowers the rifle she's been peering out of the window with, and glances over at Kanaya. As if she needs to ensure that she's okay; that you haven't taken a bite out of her.

     Seemingly unaware of the fact that you could all beat each other bloody within minutes, Kanaya sighs to herself, points to the door, and says, “I'll set up rooms for the both of you.”

     “Rooms?” Terezi mumbles under her breath, and you wish that the plurality of it didn't catch you off-guard, too. But hey, this place could be solid. Maybe you're not going to need to watch each other's backs overnight. Wouldn't that be something.

     Kanaya's gone, you've put the bat on the counter top, but Jade is still staring at you like you're going to use it to knock her nose clean through into his brain. On second thoughts, that's probably not what she's thinking at all; it's what you'd do in a pinch, if someone had cornered you in your own home. After all, she's the one with the gun here. You're stuck listening to her.

     You consider rolling your shoulders back, wandering around the room, but you don't know Jade, and you don't want to startle her with any sudden movements. Funny how you're just as cautious around humans as you are the undead. She might throw that can of hot dogs on the tabletop at your forehead. Rolling your eyes, you fold your arms across your chest, and lean against the counter.

     “So is this where we introduce ourselves and act like we're gonna be best friends forever, 'cause one of us ain't gonna die tomorrow?”

     You'd point out that you're all on the same side here, but it's not as if you know what side she could possibly be on, or what difference picking a side makes in this world. Jade shakes her head, as if snapped from a trance, and runs her fingers across the can on the table. Despite yourself, you nearly whip baseball bat back up. You're the deer in headlights, not her.

     “I'm sorry. It's just Kanaya! I know she's only trying to do good and help whoever she can, but sometimes I worry about her getting her guts chewed out.” She speaks with an accent. Your ears are ringing and you can't tell what it is, but she definitely has an accent. “Jeez, are you alright? That looks painful.”

     “Huh?”

     Jade lifts a hand, placing it against the side of her neck, and you mimic the motion. You pull your fingers away, red and wet, and feel the torn skin against your throat again. How did you do that? It doesn't seem to matter now. Before Jade pointed it out, it didn't hurt any more than any other part of your body, and it's definitely not a bite.

     You wipe your fingers on the leg of your trousers, and look around the kitchen. No point in noting how much of a mess it is, because everything is a mess in this world, but you don't think it was particularly tidy before the zombies crawled in. Cupboard doors hang off at odd angles, there are chips in the counter, and all of the colour washed out years ago. There's no table, just a breakfast bar stretching out from the worktop, covered in packs of food and cans that it looks were being sorted into place.

     Terezi asks if you're alright, tries to feel out whatever wound it may be, and you bat her off.

     There's also a bottle of vodka, Value brand. Back before the world first ended, Value produced all sorts of things, alcohol, sliced ham, kitchen cleaner, apples, cakes, yoghurt, and all at such a low price that you just knew they couldn't really be made of what their labels proclaim. You sway towards one of the stools, slump on it, and reach out for the bottle.

     “Awesome set-up you have here, Jade! You, a fussbucket who can't mind her own business, a dog, and some booze.”

     “We've been using it to treat cuts,” she says, poking her tongue out at you.

     You shrug, twist off the cap, and swish a shot of it around your mouth. There's a cut inside your right cheek, something else you hadn't noticed, and it stings so much you barely manage to swallow the vodka. Not that you give a shit, because the pain carves a slice of clarity into your mind, and it suddenly occurs to you that you're inside a building, sitting at a breakfast bar, in an apartment with three other human beings who probably aren't going to throw you to the zombies, or worse.

     You think you might laugh. Being in an screwed-up world hasn't suddenly opened up all the buildings in all the cities to you. If anything, you're more reluctant than ever to step into them. You feel like an intruder, disturbing the dead, and so most of these buildings remain as nothing more than features of the landscape to you; as if they're solid stone all the way through, full of bricks, not rooms.

     Jade takes the bottle from you, and says, “So, seeing as Kanaya's told you my name, are you going to introduce yourselves?,” as she carries over a saucepan of rainwater to the breakfast bar, dipping a cloth into it, “The water's been boiled, so don't look at me like that!”

     She wrings the cloth out, holds it up, and you tuck your hair back over your shoulder.

     “This one probably won't tell you our names without a fight, but I'm not that rude!” Terezi says, smiling as she leans on the breakfast bar next to you, one hand on your knee. Like you need the comfort. “I'm Terezi Pyrope, and this spidery bundle of anger and resentment is Serket.”

     “Ow,” you say flatly as Jade wipes the dry blood off, rolling your eyes at Terezi, and then you both laugh, because of course it doesn't hurt enough to complain, not after all that you've been through.

     And then you seem to realise that it's not a very good reason to laugh at the same moment, and things fall quiet again. Even Terezi only chuckles under her breath.

     When most of the blood's gone, she wrings a few more drops out of the cloth, and tips the neck of the vodka bottle against it. She presses that to the wound, which hurts even more, but you don't try making jokes this time. You wonder if it actually does anything to help, in the same way that you wonder how much anything you do these does does anything to help; it probably only works in the movies.

     “Vriska,” you eventually say, and then slowly add, “Like Pyrope said, it's Serket. Vriska Serket,” because you feel like you should say something more. Even if full names, surnames and all, no longer make sense as a concept to you.

     Jade says it's nice to meet you, which probably just means that it's nice you didn't swing your bat against the back of her skull. Or else she really means it; she already seems more upbeat than Terezi on her good days. You thank her for her help, and then things fall quiet, because nobody really remember how to talk to strangers.

     It's not entirely clear what happens next. You think Jade offers you something to eat, but in spite of how hungry you are, you can't see anything coming of it but a return journey. Kanaya comes in and takes you to the room you barely remember her saying she was arranging for you, she must do, because you wake up after what feels like a lifetime spent sleeping in a rickety frame that passes for a bed.

*

     Your mother died around the time most of the population did. The knowledge of her passing is less of a pain you've come to live with and more a fact of life, and you're grateful, in one way, that she was dead by her own hand, not made to rise again. It doesn't make your head ache to think about your dead mother. Your father, you never knew his name to roll his name through your thoughts, but your mother is someone you can think back to when your mind feels barren and empty, hollowed out and about to be crushed by the weight of a desolate world.

     There's not much you remember about her, from the time. Much of what you know comes from second-hand sources, what people said about her on the streets, but you remember general things like watery smile, excellent at cooking microwave meals and shot up in the mornings, and also at dusk. Strangely, she was a devoutly religious woman, and not particularly privately so. Whenever she was high, she'd ramble on about right and wrong to you, while you sat drawing with crayons.

     Once your head stops spinning, you look around. The room is small, even with barely anything in it. It's long and thin, and the metal rack that serves as a bed frame takes up half of the width. The carpet's threadbare, grimy, and all of the furniture is old and dented. The desk and shelves above it are imitation wood, and they look like they've been glazed to better preserve them. The wardrobe is built into the wall, and you assume the other door is an en suite bathroom. You're not ready to look in there yet.

     Student accommodation, you think. Low-end, at that. Still, it's as good a place as any for Kanaya and Jade to have holed up in. Although some people lived their lives in ignorance, convinced that nothing bad could happen to them, not here, by the time a third of America had been overrun, schools and universities decided to shut down. Temporarily, they claimed. Most of the students would've headed back to their childhood homes, which means the bodies in this apartment complex are probably few and far between.

     First things first, you decide to see what's left of use to you in the room. Your legs ache when you stand up, just as they do every morning, and you head to the window, trying to pull it open. It doesn't budge more than a few inches, probably designed to keep drunk students safely inside, which means you're going to have to do some adjustments of your own. It's already warm and the sun's barely risen, and within a few hours it'll be unbearable in there.

     You must've slept through yesterday's storms, because the city looks dank, stained dark grey. That means you were more exhausted than you initially assumed, desperate to get somewhere with Terezi by your side; and now it's better for you to take your time. You need to go about it properly, slowly, gathering the things you need. (Because if you head out into the city and Terezi never finds out exactly what happened to you, what then?)

     There's a thin box of matches on the desk from a chain of bars that you once went to, six matches left inside. Even if the owner of the room wasn't a smoker, there are rows of tea-lights along the edge of the desk and along the windowsill, and after a little rummaging, you come out with a handful of cheap, colourful lighters, six for a quid. You put the matches and the lighters in a bag, along with three of the candles. They're of more use to you in the room, but you take a few, just in case.

     There are textbooks scattered around, worksheets, notepads. They'll make good kindling material for when you need to get a fire going, so you take some of these, too; funny how quickly you forget the original purpose of things. The rest is useless to you. A watch that doesn't work. A pack of cards. You suppose you can get a game going with Terezi. Maybe the others will join you, too. There's some clothing left in the wardrobe, but that doesn't fit, and you don't want to put yourself in danger by tripping over your the legs of your own jeans.

     Whoever lived in this room when people still lived in permanent places must've found the time to take most of their belongings with them. With the main room thoroughly inspected, you decide to move onto the bathroom. Whatever's in there, you've seen worse. A few weeks after the biggest wave, when you were still raiding freezers and fridges though the electricity had long since died, you'd find rotten meat so rancid that the stench had clung to the back of your throat for days.

     It was almost worse than the bodies.

     You twist the handle, and push it to slowly, as if there's any chance that somebody's going to be in the shower, on the toilet, and you need to give them the opportunity to throw themselves against the door. It's empty, of course. It's dark, too, because the light from the window doesn't quite make it in, so you retrieve a few of the candles, fumble with the lighter, and end up with a few flames flickering around the edge of the sink.

     It's not so bad in there. Damp spots have claimed the shower curtain and it reeks of limescale, but there's nothing overly offensive at a first glance. There's a mirror above the sink, but you've yet to look in it, and everything else you'd expect of a bathroom: a chewed toothbrush, half a tube of toothpaste, a pack of razors, a hard white bar of soap, shampoo. Deodorant, Value range, toilet roll.

     God, it's been a while since you saw toilet roll.

     The shower doesn't run and the toilet doesn't flush, not that you were expecting them to, but when you lift the lid off the back of the tank, you find water shining beneath you, rusty-red in places. It's cold but cleaner than rainwater, so you strip off, using one of the oversized shirts from the wardrobe as a cloth, and wipe yourself down. You use one of the razors, and then the hard soap that becomes slippery again soon enough, but don't even consider washing your hair. There's just too much of it, you'd never be able to rise the shampoo out with what's left in the toilet tank.

     You're the cleanest you've been in months, and when you blow the candles out, it's too dark in the bathroom to inadvertently catch your own reflection. Dressed again, you head to the kitchen, only now aware of how unnerved you are by the thought humans other than Terezi being so close.

     Kanaya and Jade are both in there, sat at the breakfast bar. Immediately, you're struck by the image of Jade having been hovering around the kitchen all night; the worktops are certainly a lot cleaner than they were yesterday.

     Bec barks excitedly at you, Jade hops to her feet to wave out a good morning, and in spite of this all, you feel vulnerable without your baseball bat. Kanaya says she hopes you're feeling better, and as soon as she offers you breakfast, you forget all about how you wanted to throw up yesterday, and realise that you're shaking with hunger.

     You ask where Terezi is, trying not to sound too concerned, and Jade tells you she's still sleeping. You're not surprised, she must be knackered.

     The high-pitch ringing has momentarily retreated from your ears, and you decide that Jade's accent is Australian. Definitely Australia. She gestures towards the cupboards, and says you can take your pick of anything inside; they visit a different apartment on a different floor every day, and bring back anything that'll be of use in the long run. A good way to keep themselves occupied, you suppose. It's good to have a goal upon waking up in the morning.

     The cupboards are packed with the sort of food that has lasted since the zombies took over. The ground is all dead and dried up, you're not going to get anything substantial from it any time soon, so you have to make do with what's left. Packs of sweets, slabs of chocolate, energy bars. Mints, chewing gum, bubblegum. Tin meat, corned beef, Spam, hot dogs, sardines, tuna. Canned fruits and vegetables, sweetcorn, peas, baby carrots, pineapple slices, pear halves, mandarins. Packs of biscuits, packs of pasta, bags of rice, instant noodles. Cereals, jars of peanut butter, jam, other preserves.

     Your eyes almost water at the sight. It's been weeks since you had anything resembling a piece of fruit, you're sick to death of gorging on chocolate for the calories, so you grab the pineapple slices, tugging at the ring-pull. You take the peanut butter, too, because you need something to really fill you up, you're losing weight like nobody's business, and Kanaya hands you over a spoon when you take a seat next to her.

     Though you were fine with the thought of eating with your fingers. You do wish you had some toast to spread the peanut butter on, but the last of the bread went bad a lifetime ago, and you've long since become accustomed to taking what you can get.

     “Me and Terezi are just passing through,” you tell them both through a mouthful of peanut butter, bringing up one hand to wipe the pineapple juice from the corner of your mouth. Neither of them had asked what you were doing in the city in the first place, because nobody knows what they're doing anywhere, and you say it casually, as if they might suddenly realise that oh, now you mention it, they know the exact sort of place that would suit the pair of you. “We won't take up much space for long, don't worry. And we can replace whatever stuff we've used! We're used to running supply missions.”

     Kanaya furrows her brow and looks down at her breakfast, because the only thing she can think to say probably revolves around how hopeless it is to just keep drifting from city to city. But Jade, as energised as ever on a bowl of cereal, no milk, jumps to her feet, and slams both hands down against the breakfast bar. She's as tall as you, now that she's hopped from the stool, and you can't help but smile as her points a finger at you, and says, “Did you not see that rifle I had? You guys will be way better off with us!”

     Bec gives a yelp of agreement, Kanaya looks all the more concerned, and you reluctantly agree with her when she says that you should spend a few days getting settled. Your head's still fuzzy, and you can't yet believe that you're not freaking out in the company of other people, eating breakfast like civilisation is still a thing; nor have you yet to process how grateful you should be to them. And so that's what you spend the next day doing: getting settled, like you have some semblance of a home.

     Kanaya shows you the way back to the street. The apartment complex still feels like a maze to you, there are too many floors and too many doors leading off them, and they all look the same, so you learn your way up by counting your steps. Not just the stairs, but the the open roof, too. You tend to lose count after seventy steps, so you start again, usually making your way back up to eighty. You're off by a step or two sometimes, but more often than not, you make your way to the right apartment without a problem. Terezi doesn't have quite as much luck.

     When you reach the open roof between the first two apartment blocks, there are two plastic signs against the wall. One reading RECYCLING, the other GENERAL WASTE. You head in the direction of general waste.

     It's strange that they've picked an apartment so high up, because it only means that it'll be easier to get out, when the zombies gather. But you suppose wanting to claim the higher ground is just another instinct that surfaced in the aftermath of the first bombs falling.

     Kanaya tells you a little about herself as you help her gather up the pots, pans, and buckets of a morning, before the sun can evaporate what you've managed to collect. She was a fashion designer, back before the world was in rags, and had just returned to England a few days before France was hit. Which makes her lucky, in a way. She met Jade when the zombies had driven her out of her own home, and together, they'd got by in the woods, until the city was emptied enough to stake their claim somewhere.

     You don't ask about her family, about anyone she might have lost. Everyone's story is the same, when it comes down to it. Instead, you let her talk about Jade. A post-graduate quantum physics student who came all the way from Australia to study, and couldn't make her way back home. Nice to know that people can still fall in love when zombies are trying to get to their grey matter, you guess.

     She takes you to the edge of the roof, and says that this is where she comes to keep lookout. She doesn't say what she's keeping lookout for, but you get the feeling she's more wary of humans than zombies. With an awkward cough, she tells you that there are buckets up on a higher roof, close to the rainwater shower Jade's rigged up, and says not to leave any toilet roll up there, because the rain ruins it and they only have so much.

     With a laugh, you pat her on the back, and tell her you're used to leaves. You're not going to squander luxury items like that.

     Even after a mere day spent resting, you feel the muscles in your legs knitting themselves back together, when you're given the chance to do nothing. The wounds on your throat begins to heal over, and Kanaya says although they're going to scar, at least it isn't infected. You achieve other great feats, such as washing your hair and looking at yourself in the mirror (you're paler than you remember, thinner, too, but the food steady supply of food is doing something to fix that), and give Terezi the same tour that Kanaya gave you.

     You sit on the edge of the roof where the plants are, radishes, beans, corn and tomatoes fighting away to grow against the current climate. Jade's given you a pair of binoculars, so that you can scout out the area, and Terezi sits by your side, kicking out her legs, asking you what you see, every so often.

     Zombies. A fire burning in the distance, smoke billowing up. A helicopter crashed into a school playground. Two survivors darting between streets, trying to keep out of view. Two infected dogs and an infected ram working together to finish off a body that looks as if it only just stopped twitching. A gap on the skyline where Big Ben and parliament used to stand, and a crater of a city behind that. A dried out husk, where the Thames used to flow.

     “Are we going to talk about it?” Terezi asks.

     “Talk about what?”

     You can see the pub you spent the night in from here. Maybe Jade and Kanaya were keeping track of your movement all along.

     “About getting so drunk we almost got ourselves killed, Vriska!”

     There's another survivor at the end of the street, wearing the helmet you lost in your escape.

     You shrug your shoulders, grunting under your breath.

     “Probably not.”

     A change in environment doesn't mean that you suddenly know how to say whatever it is she wants to hear.

Chapter 6

     It's a little strange, washing without Terezi lingering around outside, but you don't have much use for a guard, up here. There aren't many points left in the city higher than this, and Jade's makeshift shower beats wading through any river in an effort to get clean. More often than not, it just left you with muddy feet. It has an actual shower head, as if you're still living in a civilised world, because, as Kanaya tells you, when people looted the gardening and DIY stores, they went looking for anything sharp and pointy, anything that could be used as a weapon.

     They didn't take bags of compost, packets of seeds, shower heads or shower curtains, like the ones wrapped around you now.

     You can't stay under there for too long, seeing as Jade and Kanaya's water supply now has to go twice as far, and the pressure isn't exactly substantial, but the thought of a shower being hot seems like something out of a dream now. You dry off, overlooking the city, stepping into clean clothes.

     Kanaya must've been through every damn wardrobe in the entire apartment complex, because she has a ridiculous selection of clothing stacked up in one of the unused bedrooms. You even have pyjamas, and you decide that this is it; this is as good as your life is ever going to be again. You might as well give up the struggle now, spend the rest of your days in this flat, idling away in the company of running showers, hot meals and clean clothes.

     You all eat dinner together for the first time that night. Jade gets a fire going in the bottom of one of the ovens, and sets out two steak pies in a can to cook while Kanaya works on boiling vegetables. Thank god for the atrocious eating habits of first year students. You weren't even aware that pies came in cans, but they come out piping hot, golden-brown on the surface, and you can't remember the last time you ate anything remotely resembling pastry.

     Jade opens up a bottle of orange squash and mixes up a jug of it, claiming that it's a special occasion, and once everything is laid out on the table, you're thinking that maybe you could get used to a life like this, if Terezi doesn't want to move on.

     It's easier to talk over dinner, now that you and Terezi are rid of your respective hangovers, now that all four of you know the others aren't infected, or liable to stab you in the back at any moment. If scraping by from day to day has taught you anything, it's that you have to go with your gut and not let yourself overthink the situation, and you grudgingly admit that Kanaya and Jade might just be trustworthy.

     Either that or you're digging into a poison pie, though you don't see what they have to gain from two dead bodies. Those are hardly in anything but abundance.

     They've been living there for three months, and they've known each other for four. It was harder when they first decided to move in, because there were more gangs still working the cities, back then. They had to keep quiet, couldn't get any fires going when it was dark, couldn't work up on either of the roofs. People had got in a few times, taking what they could from the place, though not as often as Kanaya had first expected. There were plenty of abandoned buildings to go around, and far more supplies, at first, so it was hardly as if anyone desperately needed to search every nook and cranny of a place.

     They'd only been stumbled across twice, because the place could feel like a maze, if you didn't know where you were going, and both times, Jade had managed to politely convince the intruders to leave. With a gun in hand, of course. Now that most people have decided to take their chances out in the countryside, out by the coast, they can move more freely. It was worth hanging on through the rough patches, because they've got a garden of their own going, and though they know it's not much yet, it's a start.

     Jade's apparent intellect doesn't suit her disposition, but it's a welcome contrast, and if she can do things like rig up that shower, you don't care how much she keeps grinning as if the world hasn't yet ended. From the way she holds her rifle, you can tell she knew the ins and outs of it before zombie head-shots were the order of the day, and when you ask her how the hell she managed to get hold of so many guns, she just shrugs, and says the black market has its uses.

     As you're all eating, Terezi slips Bec chunks of steak from her pie under the table. Everyone pretends not to notice.

     Once dinner's gone down, you do a quick sweep of the building before bed. There were a few zombies when they first turned up, and those were soon dealt with, and a few students who'd ended up having to stay behind, later taking their own lives when things became too much for them, and though they doubt anyone else is getting in, better safe than sorry. Better to waste an hour opening doors and finding rooms empty than to be woken up with a chunk of your forearm missing.

     In the room that you guess is officially yours now, whether or not you actually intend to stay, you have more trouble than you did the night before settling down. You're no longer feeling rotten from all that whiskey you should never have drunk, your head isn't spinning from fresh wounds, and you're no longer so surprised at still being alive that you deal with it all by falling unconscious.

     The bed's too comfortable. It might seem like a weird thing to complain about, but you're used to hard wooden floors, uneven concrete; the closest thing you get to comfort is dirt. You feel like you're going to sink into the mattress, as if it's going to lull you into a false sense of security with its cotten-laden wiles, and you'll wake up with springs poking through your ribs. You toss and turn, and when that doesn't work, you toss and turn some more, huffing into your pillow.

     How you can fall asleep in a barn full of strangers and yet you can't even close your eyes here for more than eight consecutive seconds is beyond you. You throw out one arm, and it drapes off the edge of the bed. Throw out the other and your wrist bumps against the wall. This is getting ridiculous now. You've no idea how much time has passed, because you stopped wearing a watch when the screen of your old one cracked and everything read as 88:88:88, but you must have been at this for at least an hour now.

     An hour spent fighting against yourself in an effort to sleep, and you don't even have anyone to complain about it to.

     Well, this is a monumental waste of time and energy. You throw off the covers, and decide it's about time you paid Terezi back for all the random limbs that would come flying your way in the barn, and open up your bedroom door as quietly as you can. It's as dark in the corridor as it was in your room, and so you drag your fingers across the wall, counting the doors as you pass. Empty room, kitchen, Jade and Kanaya's room, empty room, empty room, Terezi's room.

     You don't hesitate. You don't knock, either. You just take hold of the handle, twist it quickly and quietly, and slip inside. Terezi must've been sleeping, because her reaction is delayed, but you see her shift, black silhouette moving against the black of her room.

     “It's me,” you say. You didn't come here to scare her.

     “Oh,” she croaks, and sinks back down against the bed.

     Maybe she falls back to sleep, because while you're standing there in the middle of her room, not knowing what to do, she doesn't say a word. You didn't come to scare her, and you're not gripped by the urge to shake her shoulders and disturb her from her sleep. You're stuck in the awkward position of not wanting to acknowledge that you've simply come here to see her, because it's strange and unsettling not having her by your side, not always knowing exactly where she is, and not wanting to back out without saying or doing anything.

     That's just one of the things about going about your daily business of survival throughout the zombie apocalypse, you suppose. If somebody's sleeping by your side, if you're watching out for one another, that should only go away when one of you dies. And the last time you checked, you and Terezi were still both in one piece.

     You hook your thumbs under the hem of your shirt, pull it over your head and drop it off at your feet. You step out of your shorts as you make your way over to the bed, climbing on top of her, straddling her lap through the duvet. She shifts, murmurs sleepily in confusion, and you place your hands against the sides of her face, leaning in to kiss her, before taking her top off, too.

     She lets you do it, but doesn't really understand what you're doing until you're tugging at her shorts. She leans up, burying her face in the side of your neck, kissing your collarbone, and her hands find your hips, nails settling into place, crescents in your skin.

     You want her now in a way that you haven't done so before. There's no urgency, no desperate pang of relief that you need to feel; she hooks one leg around you, tries pulling you closer, but you ease her hands off, and say, “No, I don't—”

     Terezi places one hand to your cheek, and gives you time to gather your thoughts, time to finish. But when you can't say any more, when you can't work around the block in your mind that's stopping echoes of feelings from taking form, she says, “It's okay, Vriska,” and you forget when you ever tried to struggle against her.

     You fall down against her, and stop trying to make sense of any of this. You wrap your arms around Terezi, and she lets you move her as you need to, until you're next to her on the mattress, pressed up to her back, knees tucked behind hers. She doesn't say anything, just crosses her arms over yours, and you press your lips to the nape of her neck, using your nose to nudge away her short hair.

     You don't think about much, curled up with her like that. You think about all the times you haven't cried since the outbreak, and you think about how tired you are; and more than anything, you think about how warm she is next you, skin against skin, helping you ease back into your own bones.

*

     Jade catches you in the corridor when you emerge from Terezi's room alongside her, and proves that she isn't one for subtlety when she gives you a thumbs-up.

     Breakfast that morning is dry cereal with peanut butter to dip it in, and tea brewed with boiled rainwater, and Terezi announces her intention of spending the day playing fetch with Bec. He perks up at the news, having already taken a shine her due in no small part to her generosity with the pie last night, and off they head into the corridor. You finish your own breakfast up slowly, listening to the sound of thuds followed by barks followed by laughter coming from the corridor, every time Terezi throws the ball Jade keeps lying around for Bec, and then head up to the roof to help Kanaya bring in the night's rainwater.

     “So what's the deal?” you asks, pouring two bowls with no more than a few drops in each into a bigger pan. “Are you and Harley really going to let us stay here? You've both got a pretty great thing going here, and no offence, but if you're just going to let a couple of strangers crash, that makes you both suckers.”

     Kanaya doesn't seem too perturbed by the implication that you could make off with their supplies in the night, or otherwise off them for the territory, and shrugs as she tends to one of the plants.

     “This is the first time in three months we've taken somebody in, and the two of you are capable. And if you suddenly become unwilling to help out, you know where the front door is.” She pauses, and with a smile, adds on, “And Bec, despite being adorable, makes for a ferocious guard dog. You would do well not to fuck with me or Jade in our own household.”

     You laugh, and pat her on the back as you gather up the last of the buckets. She takes Guess you've got a brain between those ears after all, Maryam, as the compliment it is, and says that if you're feeling particularly restless, you could go on a supply run with her today. There's a nearby camping-climbing-general outdoors store that Jade's been keeping an eye on through her rifle's scope, and she hasn't seen anyone, living or shambling, going in or out. She thinks there's a good chance of finding the right sort of rope and pulleys she needs for her latest project.

     You agree immediately, telling Kanaya to let you know all about it on your way out. Which she does, without seeming to need to take a breath all the while. One of the building's biggest weak points are the stairs, and she's been watching the way packs of zombies have been gradually building up in this area, over the past weeks. It won't be long before they get in here, but if she can block off the stairs and gut the long since dead lift, then she can set up a series of ladders lowered in on ropes in the shaft, and blah blah blah, more technical details that go in one ear and out the other.

     Terezi was still playing with Bec when you left. She'd told you to be careful, to which you'd said jeez, that never occurred to me before, Pyrope. Thanks!

     Kanaya's got a different weapon today. You've stuck with your baseball bat that's looking a little worse for wear, and she's got a garden spade slung over one shoulder. Though you don't doubt Kanaya knows what she's doing, there's something about being out with someone other than Terezi that doesn't feel right. Even though Kanaya has the advantage of two perfectly functioning eyes, even though you don't have to worry as much about Terezi, knowing that she's safe up in the flat, with Jade and her guns looking out for her.

     And it's not that you miss Terezi, definitely not, because when Kanaya starts asking questions about her, you groan, and do all you can to change the topic.

     You encounter three zombies on the way to the store. You'd say there was something graceful about the way Kanaya moves in for the kill, but her shovel ends up causing as much rotting flesh and brain matter to splatter everywhere as anyone else's weapon does, so you don't put too much stock in it. She knocks them down, you crush in the skulls to make sure they're well and truly dead for good this time, and you move on.

     Jade's hunch turns out to be right. There's still plenty in the store that can be put to good use, and after a thorough sweep of the place (one zombie behind the counter, three more out in the warehouse, two dead bodies inside a display tent) you get to work on taking what you can.

     “What would you do,” you begin, glancing over your shoulder at Kanaya as you speak, “If Jade got chewed on one day? Ended up as a zombie.”

     You pick your words carefully. What you'd really meant to say was What are you gonna do when Jade becomes a zombie?, but you've been thinking it over, and have had the time to instil a little sensitivity into your words. Not that it doesn't seem like an inevitability.

     Kanaya's, who's been packing things away far more neatly than you have and thus has managed to collect far more in her backpack, slows what she's doing, and you feel a little bad for having made her think about it. Although you do still want the answer.

     “If I were to lose Jade, I would be understandably devastated. It would fall to me to look after Bec and our keep, and so that's what I'd do. She wouldn't want it any other way,” she says, finally, and then adds pointedly, “It would be terrible, true, but these last few months would've been nothing but misery, without her by my side. I wouldn't regret having become involved with her.”

     “Right,” you say, and get back to business.

     Maybe Kanaya's onto something there. Live in the moment, squeeze out every drop of fresh blood you can from your stony life, and take what you can while it's still there for the taking. That's one way to do things. She certainly seems happy. Well, happier than anyone else you've stumbled across, which has to count for something.

     Once you've both taken what you can carry, Kanaya heads out before you, squeezing your shoulder as she passes. It might not be so bad, living like this. Collecting scraps for Jade to make her whacked out inventions with, and being surrounded by people who you wouldn't exactly object to calling themselves your friends. Maybe. Sure as hell beats living on a farm, though. There's no way these two are going to hold back the painkillers in your time of need.

     Outside, Kanaya climbs onto a bench, and then atop the bonnet of a car that's slammed into a lamppost. Safer to stand on the ones that are already wrecked; less chance of setting off any alarms and letting the zombies know that it's feeding time in your general vicinity. She scans your surroundings with her binoculars, and you wish you'd thought to pick up a pair before this. Would've saved an awful lot of squinting and trying to trying to figure out if those were deceptive shadows in the distance, or a pack of hungry zombies.

     “Everything clear?”

     “It would appear so,” Kanaya says, and doesn't seemed thrilled by her observations. It's always a little unnerving when things are too easy, and so you make sure your grip on baseball bat is tight enough to hit a— whatever you hit in baseball. You don't even remember where you found this thing. Who the hell plays baseball in England, anyway?

     You're about halfway back to base and everything is clear. Kanaya leads, and you keep close, turning to look behind you every few feet. They might spend most of their time groaning hideously, but sometimes, even zombies are too hungry to make that much noise. You wouldn't be the first person to assume that zombies always give you fair warning and get caught off-guard that way.

     And when they finally do catch up with you, it isn't any earthly groaning that causes you to start swinging your bat. It's the shrieking from directly above you that makes every horde you've been up against before seem like nothing, because godfuckingdammit, you hate zombie birds. You can't even figure out how zombie birds even became a thing. How the first one got infected is beyond you, but the spread of infection has never been your area of expertise.

     Right now, your field revolves around swinging your bat as fast as you can, as hard as you can. Kanaya's doing the same with her shovel, aiming for the crows that dive bomb her, and you're both trying to run, bags already dropped to the ground.

     The birds have a lot of advantages over human-based zombies, speed not being the least amongst them. They dart at you, over and over, flapping their wings as they squawk, creating a constant beat of confusion all around you. You feel your bat come into contact with something solid a few times, but you can't see clearly enough to tell whether you're doing anything more than beating them back a few feet.

     Don't let them peck you, don't let them peck you, don't let them peck you, your mind blares out, as if you need any more of a reminder of how much shit you're in, because one bite from them and you're joining the ranks of the undead. You're glad Terezi isn't out there with you, because you'd have to get her to safety, would have to push her under a car, in through a smashed window, before you even thought about taking care of yourself. She wouldn't stand a chance.

     Kanaya reaches out, grabs your wrist, and you almost swing your bat at her, mistaking her fingers for talons. She seems to have the right idea in running, because there's no way you can even make a dent in their numbers, and so you clear a hole, sprinting off down the street with everything left inside of you.

     You feel their talons tangle in your hair, and the worst thing you could do is reach back and try tearing them away. The last thing you want to do is give them the opportunity to peck at your hands, and even if the infection does spread slowly at first, you're not up for having an arm removed. Kanaya's digging into her pockets as she runs, and you see her pull out some sort of personal alarm; the best you can do now is confuse the birds, because they're not about to give up on prey that easily.

     She activates it, and the sound pierces right through your skull. She throws it as hard as she can behind you, and the birds squawk louder. Maybe a few of them pull away, or maybe she just draws more of them towards you, but before you can even begin to take a stab at your chances of getting out of this in one piece, you're met with a face full of feathers, and screwing your eyes shut doesn't stop a talon from tearing through.

     Even there, in the middle of such a monumental mess, lungs burning from sprinting and panic alike, you can tell exactly how bad it is. You hear yourself shriek out something about your fucking eye, even though you know screaming is only going to make it close to impossible to get out of this mess.

     There's blood oozing from your face, running down your cheek, into the back of your throat every time you scream. Kanaya grabs your shoulder as well as you arm, and you let yourself be pulled into a building, door kicked in.

     Running for cover like this from zombies isn't always the wisest course of action, because they'll wait you out, but it's a little different with birds. A few of them get in, before Kanaya can manages to slam the door shut, and you only know because you hear her swearing through grit teeth, hear a squawk and then a thud as she puts them down.

     You're on your side, clutching your face. You're trying to put down pressure, trying to stop the bleeding, but you don't way to feel too much; your skin's torn, peeling up in ridges towards your palm, and you think you might still be screaming, because your fucking eyelid's been torn down the middle, and you're trying as hard as you can not to think about what's become of your eye itself.

     “Let me see,” Kanaya says, kneeling beside you. She takes hold of your wrists, tries pulling your hands away, but you fight against her, because how the hell can she see anything when you can't see a single thing? Your vision is red, flashing into black when you try moving your eyes in your skull, and even the eye that hasn't been damaged, as far as you can tell, gives the impression of trying to see through smog.

     “They fucking got me!” you screech, voice so high-pitched that only Bec really stands a chance of understanding you.

     “They didn't get you,” Kanaya says, and though she's doing her best to say calm, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference. She could be kicking and screaming, and you still wouldn't be able to pay her any heed. “I was watching. They didn't peck you, only clawed, so if you'd let me take you back to flat, I can—”

     “Only clawed? They've taken my goddamn eye, haven't they, they've taken my eye... !”

     “Vriska.” Kanaya makes a noise from the back of her throat, a swallowed back nngh that tells you she's trying not to throw up. “I'll be able to help you, if we can get home.”

     Kanaya can't help you. Terezi and Jade can't, either. What you need now is a hospital, ideally an ambulance to get you there, but you let Kanaya put her arms around you and pull you to the feet you can no longer really feel, because you're delirious enough to believe that you can move away from the pain.

     There are painkillers back in the base, if nothing else. Kanaya drags you along, through the building for all you know, talking incessantly in your ear, and every time you try to spit blood out of your mouth, it ends up splattering against the front of your shirt. You know you shouldn't whimper and shriek as you are, but you no longer have control over any part of your body that Kanaya isn't clinging onto.

     Whether you make it back to the flat before passing out is unclear. You're aware that you're drifting in and out of consciousness as you stumble with Kanaya's help, and each time it becomes harder to pull yourself back up. If she had any sense in that skull of hers, she'd leave you behind, and let the zombies take even more of your body.

*

     You're back on the streets, tucked away between the alley wall and your trusty dumpster.

     No point opening you eyes yet. It's too early for that, and even if the traffic is buzzing past you already, maybe you can catch another half hour of sleep, before you make your first move of the day. Begging for change is the best way to start off, while all the suits are headed into work. It's not difficult to evoke sympathy when you're a homeless girl, and you'll be back on your feet in no time.

     You try to recall what you were dreaming about. Something about zombies. Your snort, rolling onto your side, and wonder what brought that on. You weren't even drinking last night. You grab at your sleeping bag, pull it up past your shoulders, but then you hear it: there's someone down in your alleyway, someone who's going to try jacking whatever you have left on you.

     You move onto your back, trying to do so without making it look as if you're stirring, but then you move quickly, wrapping your fingers tightly around the intruder's wrist.

     You open your eyes, but only one of them responds.

     “Vriska!” someone says, “It's alright, Vriska. It's me.”

     It's Terezi. Half of Terezi. The blurred edges of Terezi, transparent hands plastered next to her more solid one. She places a hand on your shoulder, because she can't risk touching your face, not like this, and you realise that you've been screaming. Because they've taken your eye, because your whole life up until this point wasn't a dream.

     “Shh, shhhh,” she says, trying to hold you down. You feel a weight against your eye socket; they've taped padding across the wound, and you wonder if they poured vodka into this cut.

     “Harley,” you say thickly, like your throat has been ripped to shreds, too. You're sitting up now, Terezi supporting you with one hand against your back and the other against your shoulder, because you just wouldn't keep still against the mattress. “Give me one of your guns. The pistol. Got to finish this job off—”

     “Oh nooo,” she says, leaning forward to squint at you. She tilts her head, eyes locked onto yours. Just the one of them. “You haven't even taken the drugs yet, and you're already delirious!”

     She takes your hand, and presses an assortment of drugs into your palm. You can't tell what they are from glancing down, because your vision is blurred and your damn head won't stop pounding, but you can make a guess. Paracetamol and codeine. You want to ask her where your damn morphine is, but instead you say, “I'm not delirious. Someone's got to finish the job, because otherwise you'll all be bitching that Vriska 'Zombie' Serket started chewing on you in the night.”

     “You're fine,” Jade says, gripping your wrist tightly and pushing the pills up towards your lips. “Kanaya says the bird didn't even peck you. Now take your pills!”

     You swallow them down, because it doesn't seem as if Jade is going to relent any time soon, and they're the powdery sort, and stick in your throat. You gag, and Kanaya appears from somewhere with a glass of water.

     “Still could've infected me,” you murmur, falling back against the bed. “Maybe they'd been—I don't know, licking their talons.”

     You bring a hand up to the right side of your face, not daring to touch the edges of the padding itself, as if you can ignore what's underneath it forever.

     “... do birds even have tongues?”

     Alright. You may, in fact, be somewhat delirious from the blood loss, along with the severe shock that's been dealt to your system. There's laughter in the room, and you think that it's appropriate, because you're living in a world overrun by zombies. Half of it's been blown to hell, and here you are, the last few survivors of the whole race, swinging baseball bats at birds, risking everything to gather a few lousy ropes. Zombies. Zombies actually exist, and you've managed to make it this far. You, Vriska Serket, the kind of screw-up who couldn't even succeed in taking a stab at one piece of homework a week, who couldn't go for a month without getting into a fight at work.

     Maybe the whole of the miserable planet has recognised itself to suit your needs, has had to resort to zombies to get you motivated.

     By the time that you realise you're the one laughing, you're a fraction of a second from passing back out.

*

     Terezi's by your side when you wake up for the second time. She looks clearer, less hazy, but further away than ever. She's out of reach, but if you could just get hold of her face, if you could only splay your palm out across her cheek and pull her close, then you could press your skin to hers. She looks cold, in contrast to you; the whole of your body is burning, sweat mingling with dry blood.

     She knows that you're awake, somehow. Seems to know before you do, though that probably has something to do with all the tossing an turning you've done in your sleep. The drugs haven't done much to touch the pain, and it only seems to be boring deeper into your skull, but the codeine makes you feel light-headed, like your muscles are drifting away from one another, and you almost don't care that it hurts so very badly.

     “Hey, Terezi...” you murmur, and you're pretty sure that's a smile on her face. It suits her, you think, and she takes hold of your wrist, drawing your hand close enough to kiss the palm. You brush your fingertips across her cheek, and what a disappointment; she isn't made of ice. “Listen, if I am infected...”

     She bows her head, kisses the inside of your wrist, this time, and then shakes her head.

     “I know. You want me to put you down. To have the honour of taking out the great Vriska Serket!” Both hands wrap around one of yours, and even though she squeezes your hand tightly, tremors still get the better of her. “If it's what you need, Vriska.”

     “No,” you say, shaking your head. You thought Terezi knew better than that, but apparently not, because here she is, talking about putting you down like a sick, mangy dog. You can't possibly imagine what gave her that idea. “If I'm infected, I'm going to bite you. And then we're going to shamble as fast as our rotting feet will let us, and eat everyone on that damn farm.”

     She laughs at that, breath rushing out over your knuckles. If your life was any sort of overblown action movie, you would've headed back to the farm at the first chance you had, would've taken down everyone inside, and claimed the land for your own. It would've been revenge, and it would've been owed to you. But why? Nothing happened there that wouldn't have happened elsewhere. There are too many guards with too many guns, and you'd be shot between the eyes as soon as they caught sight of you. After all, you're dead. That's what Equius told them.

     You keep your eye on Terezi, because you need something to focus on. She closes her eyes, kissing the tips of your fingers, and says, “Just you and me, Serket?”

     “That's right,” you tell her, grinning at the thought of your own demise and prompt reanimation. “Just you and me.”

*

     The next time you come to, it occurs to you that Jade and Kanaya aren't there. When Terezi tells you that they've gone to raid an old doctors' surgery for more efficient meds, you nearly knock her out in an effort to get out of bed and storm out after them.

     You can't believe the nerve of them. First off they let you in, no questions asked, and now they're out there, putting themselves at risk. And for what? You? There's nothing noble about what they're doing, dragging your miserable existence out another day, and you couldn't be more angry at them if you tried. Jesus Christ, don't they know what could happen to them out there?

     Someone could lose an eye!

     You laugh, and then belatedly choke on the thought. You keep imagining what's beneath your eye patch; you picture your eyelids in shreds, cornea split like an egg yolk, white strips of stringy tissue dangling down. And then, for some reason, you see maggots feasting, worming their way into your skull beneath the festering wound.

     You've half a mind to get up, take everything that Kanaya and Jade have and be on your way, because you can't get over how stupid they are, how vulnerable they've let themselves be. Fortunately for them, the other half of your mind is bracing itself in an effort to not make you throw up everywhere, and that takes all the concentration you can afford it.

     “They're our friends,” Terezi says, having gathered up the courage to start stroking your hair. You'd bat her hand away, but it feels nice, and incidentally, you've been given enough drugs to be loopy enough to admit to that. “You need to calm the fuck down, Serket. We are absolutely not stealing any of their things, just to teach them a lesson! They know what they're doing. They've survived for this long, and they wouldn't put each other at risk like that if they didn't think they could make it back in one piece.”

     You grit your teeth, turning away from her. “Didn't even realise I said that all out loud. God!”

*

     You're not sure when Jade and Kanaya return, but when you realise they're there, you sit up, suddenly, and shake Terezi's shoulder, because she must've missed them come in. Otherwise she'd be reacting more, would've got to her feet to ensure that they were alright and thank them for bringing back what they could, because she's that sort of person. Terezi laughs, but even with only one eye, you can still see that she's worried; Jade and Kanaya have been back for a while, she tells you. They gave you antibiotics, along with a whole host of other medical wonders they managed to sweep, and you lie back down against your mattress with an oh.

     Your recovery happens slowly, because there's no real end in sight. Your eye isn't going to heal, that's never coming back, and the best you can hope for is not to die from an infection less dramatic than those the zombies carry. There are bad days, and then there are days where you want to use your nails to claw out whatever's left in your eye socket, because maybe that will alleviate the ache that seems to bleed into your brain. Terezi and Kanaya even have to hold your arms back, a few times.

     But you do feel better, as the days pass on. They move your bed into the kitchen, where you can be close to everyone, and though you've just had an eye torn into pieces by a zombie-bird, this is the closest your life has felt to normal in a long, long time. And that includes the directionless waste of time that came before the zombie influx. You share some of your own ideas with Jade, and say that a few more bed frames could be brought in. Prop an extra mattress up against the wall, and you've got yourself a sofa.

     It's not quite as complex as anything Jade's come up with, and maybe the reason she hasn't already set them out is because the idea's just too simple. And so they make two mattress-sofas, either side of your bed, Jade and Kanaya curled up on one, Terezi and Bec on the other. Kanaya and Jade bicker amongst themselves, occasionally, arguing over which sort of pet food tastes better, in a pinch. Jade says it's dog food without a doubt, the canned, meaty stuff, and explains that she has to be right, because Bec agrees with her, don't you boy?

     Kanaya always ends these arguments by kissing Jade on the forehead and saying that it isn't worth bickering over, though she always glances over the top of Jade's head at you and mouths cat food. You're sort of with her on this one. You camped out in a pet shop, a few weeks after the outbreak, and after you'd taken care of an infected rabbit, you'd had to live off the cans scattered around the shelves. Some of it wasn't bad; tasted sort of like tuna in a fancy sauce.

     They're good people, though you thought for sure the apocalypse had wiped out the last of them. You understand why they'd want Terezi around, but what they're doing picking up the slack after you is beyond you. When it comes to thanking them, as you rightly should, for all that they've given without taking, you stand awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen, and say, “Hey, so...”

     And they know what you're getting at. They know exactly what it is you want to say, how grateful you are and how much that kills you, and so they stare at you with smiles they're doing they best to stop from becoming full-blown smirks, patiently waiting for you to spit it out.

     Terezi's always there, by your side. Even when your bed is taken back into your own room. To be honest, you're getting a little tired of it! But if she wasn't there, you know you'd only be bored out of your skull, and you guess tolerating her constant presence does do something to prove your strength of character.

     She doesn't hold back from talking about what happened to your eye. Doesn't try to tiptoe around the subject. “So!” she'll say, “You lost an eye! Well, that sucks for you, but at least we've still got one of them between us. You might not really be blind, but I can still help you out! Having no depth perception beats having no perception of anything at all.”

     “You know what, Terezi?” you say one night, arm wrapped around her waist. A few days ago, she leant in and kissed you, telling you how goddamn adorable it was that you were using her first name, finally, which brought a stop to it for a while; but now, in the dark, with Kanaya and Jade tucked away in their own room, you're not about to give into Terezi trying to make you uncomfortable through teasing. You'll call her whatever you want. “I'm glad I didn't become a zombie.”

     “Me too! Because then—” She starts off like she's about to make a joke, about to say Because then you'd smell even worse, or Because then you'd be even more stubborn, but she trails off, turning to face you, forehead rested against your shoulder. “Me too.”

     You bring up a hand to the back of her head, and you talk about the future. That's something most people haven't dared to do since living in the present became dangerous enough, but there you are, telling her how this place really could be great. How you could get Jade's now slightly more ambitious project of an actual working lift going, how you could find other survivors and give them a place to stay. How you could find a new Gameboy and get back to training your party.

     Neither of you sleep, even after you both fall quiet. You keep wrapping your arms around her tighter, every so often, and she responds by squeezing at your waist. Deep down, both of you know that getting involved like this is only going to make it harder later on, when the inevitable happens. When it isn't just an eye you're losing. You're not just fucking her in alleyways for a moment's relief, anymore; this is a different creature altogether.

     You kiss her without any haste. Wrap your arms around her because you want to, not because you need to cling to something to keep steady. You talk to her, and when you do, you don't go to great lengths to act as if you resent her being there, as if she's some sort of burden to you.

     She tells you things about her old life. Bits and pieces that don't quite fill in all the gaps, and you know without pushing her that she's going to tell you more. Her parents were some of the first to be turned, her father was a doctor and he carried the infection into their household before people even realise there was an infection, but you don't yet know how it spread to her mother. How she managed to get away.

     She'll tell you more, when she can, that you're sure of, and there's no need to rush anything along, because this is all you have now. There's no cure, no magic fix that is going to make this alright, and civilisation isn't going to rise again overnight. The only hope lies in remaining sane enough to wait this out, staying sharp enough to keep your stomach full while the zombies slowly starve, and what comes after that is beyond your comprehension.

     It's dangerous, letting yourself get this close. You know that, and she does too, because gone are the days when you would've pushed her in front of you, meat shield that she was.

     She shuffles to get more comfortable against you, and you sink a little lower, pressing your lips to her forehead. You tell yourself you're stupid, but you don't care. You're Vriska Serket, and you're one of the few survivors who have made it this far in the husk of what the world once was. You deserve to take whatever you please, have earnt the right to give away whatever you want.

     You might be dead tomorrow, but hell, for all you know, you might not be.