Chapter Text
The worst part weren’t even the zombies, Ellis thought to himself as he chewed on a bite of his breakfast. It was beans, barely soaked for long enough to make boiling possible, and old enough that none of them had gone mushy despite having been cooked for over an hour. The bottom of the bucket he was sitting on was digging into his behind, and to top off the morning, one of the weak zombies had wandered up to the safehouse door to make a racket.
The worst part of this whole here situation, were the damn boredom. Ellis thought he was pretty good at makin’ do with a whole lotta nothing – he’d grown up in the rural rural south – but most of the time-wasters he knew kinda required having a buncha friends and a buncha space.
Kinda difficult to find, repair, race, and then crash a bunch of random abandoned cars if you were locked inside of a little room. Kinda hard to play ‘which girl would you do in the pussy, and which one would you do in the butt’ when there was an actual girl in the group, and the other guys didn’t know all the same girls Ellis did. There was of course target practice, but there weren’t much of a course you could set up in a two-room safehouse, and ammo was kind of real important, so you couldn’t just go out and waste a couple twenty clips.
Then again, maybe they could compete over who could kill the most without usin’ any ammo? It weren’t a game they could play now, but fightin’ over how the scoring would work could be fun! Like, how much points wouldya get for a tank? Or a witch?
Ellis grinned, and turned on his makeshift seat to yell. “Hey Nick, you wanna bet who c’n kill the-…?”
“Shut UP Ellis! Morning time is quiet time, and don’t make me say it again or I’ll feed you to a hunter!” Nick’s voice yelled from the room they called the bathroom. Kind of a funny name, considering that it was actually a bedroom that someone had installed a poop-bucket in once the apocalypse started.
They hadn’t moved the bed, and Ellis really wondered what the story behind that was. Maybe the guys setting this place up didn’t know how much a poop-an-piss bucket stank without a lid, or they’d just not wanted to cram the wooden bed through the doorway.
Either way, the bed/bathroom stank to high hell, and the bed’d gone unused.
The zombie clawing at the door snarled with enough force that it made Ellis wonder how she hadn’t broken her vocal chords yet.
“Hey calm down girl, I’ll get to killin’ ya after breakfast,” He called out with a mouthful of beans. The lady shriek-snorted, and some blackish snot sprayed out from her flared nostrils.
The safehouse was quiet. Coach and Rochelle were out – it’d been their turn to look for canned stuff and all that. It was common courtsey to refill the waterbottles they used while staying in a saferoom too, cause there might be other people on the run just like they were.
Sometimes, Ellis thought that it’d be smarter to just camp out in one of the saferooms for a while, meet up with some other group, and then just own the zombies like action hero movies! With just a couple more people in the team, stupid chargers would get shot full o’ bullets so fast they wouldn’t even get to do their stupid cow-moo! And with even just one more guy on the team, maybe Ellis could rig up something cool on one of the big off-road trucks. Plop one of them big gattlers in the truckbed, weld on some handholds, load up on gasoline …
Except there was nothin’ useful to find or do off-road. And there weren’t any other survivors anywhere, or they would’ve seen the zombies moving towards em instead of just … sittin’ around.
Ellis finished the last bite of beans, and blindly tossed the can over his shoulder in the rough direction of where he thought the trash-can might’ve been.
“Shit-! … Christ, is it too much to ask that you look before you start tossing shit over your shoulder blindly?!” Nick bit out.
“Aw shoot, did I hitchu? Well, least it wasn’t a pipe-bomb this time, right?” Ellis still felt bad about that. He though Nick had been ahead of them, honest! And he’d said sorry right after, but, well … It felt pretty awkward to apologise for nearly sendin’ someone up to the pearly gates like that. Then again, Nick’d pretty much gotten his revenge by popping a boomer in Ellis’ face right on the edge of a rooftop.
It’d been hell trying to hold onto the ledge while there were a bunch of zombies trying to crush his vomit-slicked fingers, and the sound of a Smoker somewhere below had pretty much made his life flash in front of his eyes. But he’d made it out, and Nick had made it through the pipe-bomb too, so they were good. They’d never hashed it out like that, but it counted, right? They all made mistakes, ‘n if they were REAL stupid ones, one of the others would shove or knock you around a bit, and then it was all fine again. Water under the bridge.
Nick scowled at him by way of an answer, and came to stand next to him in front of the safe room door. “Any idea when they’ll be back?”
“Nope,” Ellis shrugged, making his bucket-seat creak warningly. “Y’woke up only a few minutes after they left, so could be anywhere from ‘n hour to three. They were planning on hitting all the apartments, ‘n they took the big bag, so probably more like three.”
Nick just sighed.
The zombie at the door snorted wildly, and drew her arm back outside so she could switch to the other one, throwing all her weight into the movement. Her black hair was cut into a short bob, and a decorative pin of a ladybug was hanging on for dear life on the end of a loose pluck of hair. A Hello-Kitty tattoo poked out from under her sleeveless top, and the broken remnants of a gemstone pendant clicked against the metal of the door.
She reminded Ellis of a girl from his hometown. Niece of his da’s second-best friend Tommard, called ‘Kelsay’ or something close to it. She’d been kind of a bitch, but she’d had a tattoo of a rabbit on her right boob, and if you said you didn’t believe her she’d lift her top and flash you right then and there.
“You gonna take care of that?” Nick asked, briefly flicking his head back in the direction of the rabid woman.
“Naw. Just watching. ‘S kinda like TV, you know?”
“Iieeejiiijjghh!” Zombie-lady contributed, mashing her face against the bars and adding a new streak of apocalypse-gore to the door.
“Oh, sure, it’s almost like I’m watching MTV,” Nick said mockingly. “Just with a lot less exposed cleavage and butt-shaking.”
Ellis laughed at the imagery. “Could’ya imagine, whole horde of bouncin’ titties coming at us, twerking so hard they knock us to the ground!”
A single “Heh,” was the extent of Nick’s laugh, but the humor in it was real. They watched the zombie for a while longer in silence. When Ellis glanced over at the safehouse’s clock, only fifteen minutes had passed since he had started breakfast.
Ellis took in a breath, and let out a long, loud sigh, letting himself fall back from the bucket and onto the thin matrass he’d slept on the night before. “Man. I miss boobs.”
Nick didn’t even miss a beat. “Forget boobs, I miss jerking off without one of you idiots breathing down my neck.”
“Christ, yeah. Like, I appreciate y’all, half the time the toilet’s just a bucket in the middle of the room! And the few times there’s a sep’rate room, it’s got no lock!” Ellis groaned and sat up.
“And some asshole with a sense of humor stocked dirty mags in each of these places, except the only time you can rub one out is when it’s dark, and you can’t look at the fucking things,” Nick grumbled. “Yeah, sure I can take my flashlight into the toilet with me in the middle of the fuckin’ night, but at that point I might as well stand up and say ‘Alright I’m gonna go masturbate don’t bother me!’, at which point Coach is gonna kick my ass.”
“Yeah, he’s got somethin’ against that kind of thing. Remember when I said that that one zombie lady looked like the kind of girl I’d rail? Thought he was gonna turn into a zombie and bite my head off himself, he was so mad!”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure he got mad at you for that one because that zombie lady looked like Rochelle,” Nick said. “Or maybe his daughter, who knows.”
“Ooooh…” Ellis nodded slowly. “Yeah awrite, that makes sense then. Still scared the crap outta me.”
“Next time, maybe don’t go into excruciating detail? None of us wanted to hear any of that.”
“Sure, sure.”
Silence returned, but it wasn’t quite as comfortable as it had been before, because Ellis should’ve known better than to even think about sex stuff. Cuz now he was horny, and all out of ways to fix that.
For all he knew, there wouldn’t ever be another moment to chat up a girl and have some sex. Maybe there weren’t even any girls left anymore aside from Rochelle and Zoey, and the whole human race was just gonna die out so that racoons or cockroaches could become the next dominant species or some shit.
“Aw, fuck that,” Ellis mumbled to himself. He stood up and walked over to the door. “Nick, cover me.”
He took the bar from the door, and pulled it open fast enough for the zombie-lady to lose her balance. She stumbled in, halfway following the pull of her arm that was still stuck in the little grate, and halfway falling from a sudden lack of support. It was the work of a second to elbow her in the solar-plexus, sending her toppling to the ground.
“Ellis, what the fuck are you doing?!”
Ellis followed her down, locking her limbs against her side in a bear hug that’d gotten significantly stronger since the start of the apocalypse. “Nick, close the door ‘n help me tie her up!”
Nick had the door shut before Ellis finished talking, and he’d already pulled out a pistol when the rest of what he’d said sank in. “Tie her -…?! Oh what the fuck, you can’t be serious. Please tell me you’re not thinking of fucking a zombie.”
“Well, ugh, they’s not technically zombies,” Ellis replied, wincing when the infected woman’s teeth snapped shut right near the tip of his nose. “I mean, she’s warm, she’s breathing – so it aint necro-feelia or whatever.”
“Holy fucking hell Ellis, ‘breathes and is warm’?”
“Well -urgh- what more you need? Don’t -huff- tell me you only look for women with personality when you wanna have sex. Shit, stop squirmin’ lady!”
“You’re a creep,” Nick’s nose wrinkled with disgust, but he still put away the pistol and started rummaging for rope. “Try and sit her up so I can tie the arms together.”
The zombie-lady didn’t make it easy, still wriggling and doing her best to bite his face off, but like all of the common infected she was weirdly weak and uncoordinated. Soon enough Ellis was on his knees, with the infected’s thighs wedged between them, and her arms still useless in the bear-hug. Nick grabbing one of her arms freed up one of Ellis’ hands, which he immediately used to grab a fistful her hair and yank her teeth away from his face.
“NNJIIII!” the zombie-lady raged ineffectively, her milky eyes so clouded that it was impossible to tell what she was looking at.
“Aw, I’m sorry girl, I know you gals don’ like hair-pullin’ but I aint too keen on getting bit in the face again,” Ellis told her. “Just go on ‘n be a good girl and it’ll be over ‘fore you know it.”
“If that’s how you flirt with women, I’m not surprised you’re stooping to fucking a zombie,” Nick snarked from where he was finishing up his task.
Once the woman’s arms were tied behind her back, and a cloth gag rendered her teeth a non-issue, she was pretty much harmless. Whatever the green flu did to make people hyper-aggressive, it didn’t seem capable of adapting to a host that didn’t have arms to punch with anymore, so lady-zombie simply charged at them and rubbed her head at them aggressively while her teeth chomped at her gag.
From there on it was easy as pie to pull her to the bed in the other room, and tie her down. One rope per leg, keeping ‘em spread, and two loops that went under her armpits and to the headboard. Nick was good with the knots. The end result almost looked like something out of a beady-essem booklet, with the zombie tied down so snugly that you could almost forget she was more feral than a honeybadger.
“Prior experience tying up women off the street?” Ellis joked as he took out a knife to start cutting off her clothes.
“Fuck off.” Nick said with a flash of world’s most acidic smile.
The woman’s shirt was so worn that the knife was barely necessary to pull it apart, and the bra only needed three small cuts. The sight of her breasts falling free was like a shock of hot water – a kind of arousal that Ellis had almost forgotten used to be commonplace.
He’d seen breasts just last week, technically, when Rochelle had gotten pinned by a hunter for a near-deadly twenty seconds. The thing’s claws had done their damned best to get to her lungs through the cage of her ribs, and Ellis had applied emergency stick-on-stitches as fast as humanly possible while Coach and Nick held off a tidal wave of zombies. Boobs had been the last thing on his mind at the time – to the point that he only remembered he saw them at all when Rochelle told him to ‘forget it or regret it’ a few minutes later.
“Oho yeah,” he whispered, a hand already reaching, and then landing on one of the woman’s breasts. Not even the tacky layer of sweat on her skin could ruin first contact. “Juuus’ as soft as I remember!”
“Right, I think that’s my cue to get the hell out of here. You start moaning, I’m kicking your ass and the zombie to the curb to finish up outside, you hear?” Nick said, already walking out of the room. “Have fun catching zombie-syphilis or some shit.”
Ellis paid him no mind, and started cutting off the woman’s jean shorts and underwear. An impressive amount of dirt fell out of ‘em when he did, probably courtesy of how all the lil zombies liked to roll around and scramble on the floor everywhere. Going by the smell of rank piss, she’d peed herself at least once, and had never gotten lucid enough again to try ‘n fix it. Before all the zombies and running and pukin’, that probably would’ve been a dealbreaker. Now he just wet a rag and wiped down the woman’s crotch until he could pretend it was all clean.
Well. And he blindfolded her too, but that honestly wasn’t because he had trouble lookin’ women in the eye! It was cuz milky eyes made him think there was danger ‘round, which was a real boner-killer. With a strip of cloth over the eyes she just looked like a regular person - ... just a little bit gray-skinned. And looking really unhappy to be tied up and naked in a bed.
“Well shit, now I feel like an asshole,” Ellis mumbled to himself as he crawled up onto the bed and began to undo his pants. “Least she aint crying though. Don’t think I could do it with a crying girl.”
The sex was over with fairly quick. There wasn’t any of the usual flirting and heavy petting and kissing, and askin’ for her feedback wasn’t an option either. It was just Ellis, gettin’ to do whatever the hell he wanted.
He laid on top of her for a little bit after he was done, cheek pillowed on one of her tits. She was warm, almost to a sickly degree, and he’d have to remember that if this whole situation lasted into winter. They could tie up a bunch of infected, throw a blanket over top, and boom, instant heater. Though the movin’ would make it hard to fall asleep. And the smell. And the noises... Well, there had to be some way to make it work, but they’d get to it when it was actually cold outside.
Ellis rolled off the bed, stretched, and made himself presentable. “Bathroom’s free,” he announced when he walked out, as was the polite thing to do when you had so many people living in close quarters. “Man, I really needed that.”
Nick was smoking at the door of the saferoom, throwing him another one of those looks that Ellis never quite knew how to translate right. “You better clean it up before Coach ‘n Rochelle get back.”
“Aw, you don’t wanna have a turn?” Ellis joked, before he had to dodge the burning end of a cigarette aimed at his exposed underarm. “Alright alright, I’m goin’, geez...”
“Don’t cut up the ropes, might need them later,” Nick yelled after him, before blowing another cloud of smoke out through the gap in the saferoom door.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ellis drawled back. A quick slice of the knife opened up the zombie’s throat, and by the time he was done loosening the knot near her left ankle, she’d bled out completely. The bed was now definitely ruined, but nobody had been sleeping on it anyway, and if you really needed a bed, you could just flip the matrass over and it’d be good as new.
After undoing the ropes, he rolled the read body off the bed, and into a corner. A quick look into the cabinets produced a bedsheet, and vwa-laa, zombie-girl was hidden. Sure, it’d start to stink in a day or two, but they’d be long gone by then, and this place already smelled to high hells courtesy of the poop-bucket in the other corner.
Ellis came back into the ‘main’ room of the safehouse, and sat back down on his bucket-seat to wait out the rest of the time. A glance at the clock revealed that the whole situation had taken about an hour and a half, start to finish. It hadn’t really been all that, but anything that wasted a good chunk of your time in the apocalypse was something to celebrate.