Zombie fic!
Oct. 31st, 2010 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rillaliciousTitle: How Charlie Eppes PWND the Zombie Apocalypse; or, Mathematical Applications as They Apply to Kicking Ass
Fandom: Numb3rs
Pairings: Not a shippy story really. Canon ships apply. Keep in mind that I ship David/Colby, though it's not really a focal point.
Rating: PG13 for gruesome zombie stuff.
Warnings: AU, clearly.
Word Count: ~3750
Summary: It's the zombie apocalpyse. Do you need to know anything else?
A/N: Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ellensmithee for the read-through and thistle_verse for the chat. Happy Halloween and blessed Samhain, flist.
For Charlie Eppes, the most terrifying moment of the zombie apocalypse came when he realized that he was out of chalk. They were twelve hours on the run when the last piece dissolved against the concrete beneath Charlie's fingertip. When Ian had found the place for them, just outside Wells, Nevada, Charlie had announced that the bunker was useless because it lacked a decent, usable writing surface. Ian argued that the three foot thick concrete walls and the industrial steel door made up for that.
The zombies had come quickly. More quickly than anyone could have imagined. Those panicked news reports that open nearly every zombie movie in existence, in which a calm, beautiful reporter talks about a mysterious virus and rumors that the dead are coming back to life right before she and her camera crew are dragged to the ground by a pack of brain-seeking reanimated corpses? They didn't happen. There wasn't time. There were two cases of a mysterious flu, resulting in death within twenty-four hours, and then mass zombieism. Just like that. Faster than the reports could circulate through the FBI. Faster than Charlie and Amita could manage to fill a single chalkboard with equations that could potentially save their lives.
You want to ask someone in the biology department at CalSci what's going on? That's too bad. They're all dead, and coming after your brain. In fact, the only places where the zombie crisis spread faster than college campuses were prisons. Charlie and Amita, though, were at home, and didn't know any of this right away.
Don and his team were at work. They were sitting at their desks when the stench hit.
Liz looked around. "What smells like a body that's spent five days in someone's car in August?"
"I'll take 'It's My Partner's Turn to Pop the Trunk' for 500, Alex," Colby said. And then it hit him, too, and he grabbed a handkerchief to cover his nose. "Don, what's going on?"
Don had no answer, but it only took a few seconds before they saw the source.
When the assistant director stepped off the elevator, grabbed the nearest warm body, who happened to be the very unlucky Matt Li, and promptly sank his teeth into the meaty surface of Matt's neck before slamming his head against a desktop and cracking it open like a melon, the hysteria in the office began. Colby shot the assistant director squarely between the eyes, but as he approached the body, he was almost eaten by a moaning, blood-thirsty Matt Li, who stood up with one half of his skull flapping down as if on a hinge and staggered forward. Fortunately Don didn't take time to think about the absurdity of the scene before him, and splattered Matt's brains across the elevator doors. At that point, it became a free for all, and Don's team, plus one David Sinclair who had made a surprise trip back from DC to visit with his old partner, seemed to be the only group cohesive enough to make it to the garage intact.
Ian Edgerton was already behind the wheel of a fully fueled SUV, and the team split up between two vehicles, heading toward the Eppes' house, where Charlie was maintaining cellphone contact with Don for the entire ride, helping them navigate the route that would take them past the smallest number of crowded venues. When they pulled up to the house, there were zombies at the windows and the doors, falling through the glass with mindless determination. Alan's hand was visible, waving a white flag through a vent near the roof of the guest house. Ian was already gone. Don laid on the horn, and the zombie mob turned toward the car.
They escaped it like this: Don and David provided cover while Colby ran Amita and Charlie out to the car. He came back for Robin, who grudgingly allowed the escort in the interest of not wasting the last moments of her life arguing with Don about her ability to care for herself, and Alan, nearly getting a bite on the leg at the last moment when a crawling zombie lunged from beneath the SUV as Alan disappeared inside. Ian took it out with a perfect shot from a nearby rooftop. Colby assumed the shot was accompanied by the perfect one-liner, though he didn't get to hear it since they'd fled the office with only a couple of radios and a lot of guns.
In the meantime, Charlie received a frantic call from Larry, who announced with some degree of panic that a corpse he thought might be Mildred Finch had just attempted to eat him, and he and Oswald Kittner were barricaded in his office. He put this event on the short list of things for which the meditative practice of quiet contemplation had not prepared him. Liz and Nikki took the other SUV to campus with enough firepower to get them both out of the building and into the car.
"Is it just me," Nikki had quipped, "or do the CalSci zombies seem a little smarter than the garden variety zombies we've been fighting off all morning?"
Once they reached the freeway, both vehicles met up again, and the number of zombies they had to dodge or run over decreased tremendously. Empty cars littered the road, and the SUVs dodged and darted through the maze while they argued about where to head next. Amita stared furtively into her smartphone.
"Cities, suburbs and even small towns are out of the question," said Charlie. "Think of an animal shelter at feeding time. If all the bowls are clustered in one area of the--"
"Yeah, yeah," Don said impatiently. "We've all seen the movies, Charlie. They want brains. People have brains. The zombies are going to go where the people are."
"Well, if you want to overly simplify it." Charlie bristled at the demise of what might have been his last chance to spin a mathematical analogy.
"We need to find a place with no people," Amita said, "but close enough to civilization that we'll be able to procure food and supplies, even after we've run out of fuel."
"And it has to be an area we're familiar with," said Don. "We don't need any unpleasant surprises. With terrain that's easy enough for everyone to handle, even Dad."
"Who says I can't handle rough terrain?" Alan said. "I'm in the best shape of my life!"
"Alan," said Amita, "this is a good time to consider becoming a realist."
"I think you mean a pessimist," said Alan.
"Anyway," said Charlie loudly, "we need to look into small towns, rural. Places that had smaller populations to begin with."
Nikki's voice was clear over Don's phone. "What do you say, Idaho?"
Colby raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "I can think of a few places, yeah."
They'd take US-93 Charlie decided, and when Amita concurred there was no room for argument. The only major city was Vegas, but Charlie had figured that by the time they reached it, at the rate zombieism seemed to be spreading, the chaos would have ended and the zombies would have been fanning out, looking for delicious brains in the residential areas. They got off at the strip to refuel, operating on the assumption that, according to Charlie's theory, the most heavily trafficked areas of the city would have cleared out by now.
Charlie was right.
Las Vegas had been a blood bath. The streets were peppered with staggering zombie Elvises (David and Colby sustained an impressively long argument about whether or not the proper plural was Elvii, with David insisting that it was not, nor would it ever be, a real word. Colby sensibly pointed out that as the last people on Earth, they probably had the right to edit Webster's dictionary in any way they saw fit.) and buxom zombie blondes in high heels wearing pasties and glittering knickers.
At the gas station, a small pod of zombies--which was how David had referred to them at one point, and the term stuck--started making their way toward the cars. Charlie and Larry, who had gotten out between the vehicles to converse while the others scavenged the gas station for provisions, quickly scrambled onto the roof of Liz's SUV as soon as they realized that she'd locked the doors before going into the building. Amita screamed from the other car that she had known it was a bad idea, while Charlie irritably wondered how she thought that helped him now. At least he'd taken a gun with him. With shaking hands, he pointed it at the zombie who had just fallen against the door.
It was then he realized Larry was talking. The zombie moaned. Charlie's line of vision bounced all over the place. This was nothing like the artillery range. No one had been trying to eat his brain there.
"And all that we are," Larry was saying, "all that we have the potential to be, every electrical impulse discovered and undiscovered inside our brain matter, becomes food for the next evolutionary step of human life, Charles," Larry paused, pressing his knuckles to his mouth in thought.
Charlie slammed the butt of the gun into the zombie's brain matter and it split the monster's head in two with a squelch. After a few tugs, he gave up on freeing the gun from the zombie's brain cavity and shoved the whole thing down to the pavement.
"That's great, Larry," he said, getting onto his hands and knees and lowering himself over the side to slide his legs in through the window Oswald had just rolled down. "Why don't we finish this discussion while we're moving in a more zombie-free direction?"
"Nice one, man," Oswald said.
"Thanks," said Charlie, watching the other car with concern. "Amita's going to kill me."
"Statistically speaking, chances are higher that the zombies will do it first," said Oswald.
"He makes a valid point," said Larry as he dropped into the seat beside them.
Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose. Oswald rolled up the window just in time for another zombie to collapse against the door, its bloody, decaying fingers crunching between the window and the door as they were crushed. There was a sickening crunch and blood exploded all over the window. Larry flinched. Nikki climbed into the passenger's seat.
"Don't open the windows," she said, looking twice when she saw Charlie sandwiched between Larry and Oswald. "And don't get out of the car. Genius." She tossed an armload of Ho-Hos into the back seat.
They were back on the road five minutes later. A zombie Dolly Parton tumbled from a second story window and landed on the hood of Liz's car. Liz never hit the brakes. Part of Zombie Dolly's wig was still lodged beneath a wiper blade forty miles out of the city.
By the time they reached Wells, and Ian scouted out the cold war era bomb shelter, using whatever method Ian used to do those kinds of things, it was dark, and Robin, Charlie, Amita, Alan and Oswald were shuffled inside surrounded by Don's heavily armed team.
As soon as his 'discussion' with Ian was over, Charlie pulled a box of chalk out of his pocket. A nearly empty box of chalk. He began scribbling on the concrete floor. There was no cellphone coverage in the shelter--it had been sketchy since Las Vegas anyway--and Amita spread maps all over the floor as they forced Colby to stay awake long enough to show them exactly where they were headed.
Charlie hardly had time to start calculating the most likely zombie-free terrain before Colby was sprawled haphazardly in the corner with David, sound asleep.
"Look at them, spooning already," said Nikki, rolling her eyes. "I knew I was just the rebound partner."
"Don't take it so hard," said Liz. "You've still got me."
Ian snorted, looking up from Colby and David to raise an eyebrow at the female agents. "I think I want to get in on this."
"Yeah, well, dream on, pal," said Don.
"You never know," Ian said. "I might end up to be the last man on earth."
Nikki shrugged. "If that happens, we'll talk."
It was then that Charlie ran out of chalk. He jumped to his feet and began to pace, pushing his hair back, then pulling it forward again. He wasn't finished. There were zombies coming to get them and he wasn't finished.
"Hey, buddy, it's okay," Don said, after Charlie had shrugged off Amita for the third time. "We'll get you to a place that has more chalk. Pens and paper, even. We've got plenty of fuel, and plenty of ammo. All right?"
Charlie looked at Don disbelievingly, but nodded anyway.
They were on the road again in the morning, with Colby and Don driving this time. It was a little under five hours later that they found themselves approaching their destination: Rigby, Idaho.
"Birthplace of Philo Taylor Farnsworth," said Larry thoughtfully. "Inventor of the vacuum tube television display. He was living here when he drew up the plans for the first television. He would go on to invent the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor."
"Yeah?" said Don. "Well, let's just hope he stays dead, along with everyone else in the graveyards around here."
"Oh, not to worry," said Larry. "Philo Farnsworth is buried in Provo, Utah. At the pace at which the zombies are able to walk, it would take him months to reach us here."
"Mmm, that's comforting," said Liz. "Oh, Colby's signalling. Looks like we're pulling over here."
Don rolled down the window. "Why're we stopping?"
Ian leaned out of the other car. "Close to the highway, we've got grocery stores a couple of miles away, and I can get up on the roof and scout out the rest of the area."
Colby leaned over from the driver's seat. "And it looks pretty deserted. Besides, I only know one other hotel in this town, and that one's out of our price range."
Liz snorted. "Leave it to Granger to worry about pinching pennies after a total economic collapse."
It was decided that they'd all stay in the same room. Cellphone service seemed to be completely down now, and nobody wanted to take the chance of splitting up until they knew why they hadn't seen a single zombie since pulling up. The first three rooms they checked were blood splattered, and a human foot in a shoe in the middle of a bathtub was the only sign that a corpse had been there at all. They decided on the second floor, a set of adjoining rooms, and after making sure the entire floor was clear, they settled in. It was a little like a macabre vacation, one that involved gunshots at all hours of the night, and the occasional looting of a nearby grocery store. Oh, and copious amounts of gore. The proximity, though, got on everyone's nerves.
Two days in, a fist fight broke out between Ian and David. It might have been assumed that it was over Nikki, who had been known to indulge in an occasional Dodgers game or candlelit dinner with Ian, and had seemed particularly excited to see David return. Amita, however, wisely pointed out that the more likely scenario was that they were, in fact, fighting over Colby. When Charlie asked what kind of equation she had come up with to deduce that particular answer, she simply pointed to the chair in the corner, where Colby sat, red-faced, and rubbing his forehead.
"Everyone knows Colby was David's girlfriend, not me," said Nikki as she slapped thirty cents down on the table. "Last of my money's on Ian."
"I'll see that," Alan said, dropping three dimes on the table. "I like David's odds, I think."
Liz had been the one to finally break it up, when she announced that she had three bullets left and only planned on saving one for herself.
It turned out that Colby and Ian had shared an ill-timed one night stand about a month before the zombies appeared. After Ian made one too many snarky remarks about the encounter to David, who was already finding it a bit emotionally overwhelming to spend what was likely his last few hours of life with Colby, David had snapped. None of these details reached anyone's ears but Don's. The others seemed perfectly happy to conjecture in lieu of facts. Later, Colby would describe the incident as "flattering and humiliating in equal parts", while Ian, when questioned by Nikki about his orientation, would say that he wasn't a man who limited his options. She appeared to like that answer.
After three more days had passed, it had become clear that they couldn't go on living all together between two rooms. That evening they sat in a circle on the floor, mostly in pairs, with Liz shooting a poisonous look in Oswald's direction every time he tried to scoot closer. The room was lit by candles; the power had gone off yesterday. The conversation had grown stagnant, Liz was down to her last bullet (which was one more than David, Colby, or Nikki had), and they hadn't seen a zombie in almost twelve hours. Ian had gone out to do some tracking, and couldn't find a sign of anything alive or undead in a two mile radius.
"You know," Alan said conversationally, "we prepared for this sort of thing back in the sixties."
"You prepared for the zombie apocalypse?" Colby raised his head from David's shoulder and yawned.
"No, no," said Alan. "We prepared to survive the government police state if that should come to pass." At Don's snort, he raised his hand. "You don't remember Kent State. I do. Now listen, we had all sorts of plans drawn up for communal living, getting what we needed from the land, everything. But look at what we have here. We have an entire city at our disposal."
"Wait, wait," said Don. "I see where you're goin' with this. You think now that it's quiet, we ought to branch out? Set up some kind of infrastructure?"
"If we can get a hold of the city plans," said Alan.
"We can hit up city hall in the morning," David said, looking at Colby. "It's all just there for the taking, right?"
"Sure," said Colby. "Who needs a gun anyway? You just have to aim something at the head."
"Amita and I can run some algorithms and find out the optimal locations to set up shop," said Charlie.
"Now this is what I'm talking about," said Alan. "This is what we did back then. Working together toward a common goal." He thought it was best not to mention that his particular community of hippies had dissolved during a vicious brawl over the optimal location for the compost heap. There would be time enough for that discussion.
"Well, we have to do something for the next step. We can't live in this hotel room forever," said Don. "Maybe if we get the city working again, we'll attract some more living folks."
"And if we don't, maybe we'll have to repopulate," said Ian, raising his eyebrows in Nikki's direction.
"You've got a lot of class, Edgerton," she said, shoving his arm, but smiling.
"Now that that's settled," Colby said, using David's shoulder to get to his feet, "I'm going to get some sleep. And calling dibs on the first bed. You comin'?"
"Right behind you," said David, getting to his feet.
"I call dibs on not sleeping in the same room as Ross and Rachel over there," said Ian.
The next morning, Don, Colby, David and Liz set out out for city hall with Alan. Charlie sat bent over the table, adding a few more variables to some of his equations. He took a moment to glance over at the narrow pad of paper where Oswald was scribbling his own work.
Charlie frowned. "Oh, no."
"Oh yeah," said Oswald. "If the statistics bear out what's been true in almost every zombie movie I've ever seen--and I've seen a lot of zombie movies--we probably have less than eight hours."
"Amita, get the keys," said Charlie.
"What's going on?" Robin asked.
Charlie shook his head, his dark curls bouncing. "There's a twenty-seven percent chance that a massive number of zombies are shuffling down route ninety-three right now, on their way to find our brains."
"Only twenty-seven percent?" said Robin. "Is that enough to panic over?"
Charlie looked at her over his shoulder. "There's a slightly-greater-than one in four chance that by tomorrow at this time, a zombie is going to be sitting in this very spot, using my skull as a soup bowl. So, yeah, I'd say it's time to panic."
"I'll drive," said Robin. "Just tell me how to get to city hall."
When they got there, the others had already ransacked the filing cabinets, and Alan was instructing them on what to keep and what to leave behind.
"Zombies are coming!" Charlie said breathlessly. "Eight hours or less!"
Don spun around. "Buddy, are you sure?"
"Twenty-seven percent, sure," said Charlie. "Enough to take precautions."
"All right," said Don. "Dad, take a look at those plans and see if you can find a good place for us to hole up. We're gonna need more--"
A big bag slid across the room, coming to a stop at Don's feet. Ian stood at the door, looking smug.
"Already done," he said.
As they armed themselves, Alan started rolling up the city plans. "We can go underground, near the water treatment plant."
"That sounds pleasant," said Liz.
"It's gotta smell better than the zombies," said Colby.
"It might not even come to that," said Charlie, looking up from the desk where he was huddled with Amita and Oswald. "We have a plan."
And they did. Two days and fifteen hundred dead zombies later, New Rigby, Idaho was a virtual bastion of security for the living, who began to trickle in over the next week, once Larry and Oswald had re-established radio broadcast. Charlie Eppes was elected mayor, unanimously, by the first twelve residents of New Rigby, and he set up a new city hall at the elementary school, where it would be a good long time before he would run out of chalk again.
Fandom: Numb3rs
Pairings: Not a shippy story really. Canon ships apply. Keep in mind that I ship David/Colby, though it's not really a focal point.
Rating: PG13 for gruesome zombie stuff.
Warnings: AU, clearly.
Word Count: ~3750
Summary: It's the zombie apocalpyse. Do you need to know anything else?
A/N: Thanks to
ellensmithee for the read-through and thistle_verse for the chat. Happy Halloween and blessed Samhain, flist.For Charlie Eppes, the most terrifying moment of the zombie apocalypse came when he realized that he was out of chalk. They were twelve hours on the run when the last piece dissolved against the concrete beneath Charlie's fingertip. When Ian had found the place for them, just outside Wells, Nevada, Charlie had announced that the bunker was useless because it lacked a decent, usable writing surface. Ian argued that the three foot thick concrete walls and the industrial steel door made up for that.
The zombies had come quickly. More quickly than anyone could have imagined. Those panicked news reports that open nearly every zombie movie in existence, in which a calm, beautiful reporter talks about a mysterious virus and rumors that the dead are coming back to life right before she and her camera crew are dragged to the ground by a pack of brain-seeking reanimated corpses? They didn't happen. There wasn't time. There were two cases of a mysterious flu, resulting in death within twenty-four hours, and then mass zombieism. Just like that. Faster than the reports could circulate through the FBI. Faster than Charlie and Amita could manage to fill a single chalkboard with equations that could potentially save their lives.
You want to ask someone in the biology department at CalSci what's going on? That's too bad. They're all dead, and coming after your brain. In fact, the only places where the zombie crisis spread faster than college campuses were prisons. Charlie and Amita, though, were at home, and didn't know any of this right away.
Don and his team were at work. They were sitting at their desks when the stench hit.
Liz looked around. "What smells like a body that's spent five days in someone's car in August?"
"I'll take 'It's My Partner's Turn to Pop the Trunk' for 500, Alex," Colby said. And then it hit him, too, and he grabbed a handkerchief to cover his nose. "Don, what's going on?"
Don had no answer, but it only took a few seconds before they saw the source.
When the assistant director stepped off the elevator, grabbed the nearest warm body, who happened to be the very unlucky Matt Li, and promptly sank his teeth into the meaty surface of Matt's neck before slamming his head against a desktop and cracking it open like a melon, the hysteria in the office began. Colby shot the assistant director squarely between the eyes, but as he approached the body, he was almost eaten by a moaning, blood-thirsty Matt Li, who stood up with one half of his skull flapping down as if on a hinge and staggered forward. Fortunately Don didn't take time to think about the absurdity of the scene before him, and splattered Matt's brains across the elevator doors. At that point, it became a free for all, and Don's team, plus one David Sinclair who had made a surprise trip back from DC to visit with his old partner, seemed to be the only group cohesive enough to make it to the garage intact.
Ian Edgerton was already behind the wheel of a fully fueled SUV, and the team split up between two vehicles, heading toward the Eppes' house, where Charlie was maintaining cellphone contact with Don for the entire ride, helping them navigate the route that would take them past the smallest number of crowded venues. When they pulled up to the house, there were zombies at the windows and the doors, falling through the glass with mindless determination. Alan's hand was visible, waving a white flag through a vent near the roof of the guest house. Ian was already gone. Don laid on the horn, and the zombie mob turned toward the car.
They escaped it like this: Don and David provided cover while Colby ran Amita and Charlie out to the car. He came back for Robin, who grudgingly allowed the escort in the interest of not wasting the last moments of her life arguing with Don about her ability to care for herself, and Alan, nearly getting a bite on the leg at the last moment when a crawling zombie lunged from beneath the SUV as Alan disappeared inside. Ian took it out with a perfect shot from a nearby rooftop. Colby assumed the shot was accompanied by the perfect one-liner, though he didn't get to hear it since they'd fled the office with only a couple of radios and a lot of guns.
In the meantime, Charlie received a frantic call from Larry, who announced with some degree of panic that a corpse he thought might be Mildred Finch had just attempted to eat him, and he and Oswald Kittner were barricaded in his office. He put this event on the short list of things for which the meditative practice of quiet contemplation had not prepared him. Liz and Nikki took the other SUV to campus with enough firepower to get them both out of the building and into the car.
"Is it just me," Nikki had quipped, "or do the CalSci zombies seem a little smarter than the garden variety zombies we've been fighting off all morning?"
Once they reached the freeway, both vehicles met up again, and the number of zombies they had to dodge or run over decreased tremendously. Empty cars littered the road, and the SUVs dodged and darted through the maze while they argued about where to head next. Amita stared furtively into her smartphone.
"Cities, suburbs and even small towns are out of the question," said Charlie. "Think of an animal shelter at feeding time. If all the bowls are clustered in one area of the--"
"Yeah, yeah," Don said impatiently. "We've all seen the movies, Charlie. They want brains. People have brains. The zombies are going to go where the people are."
"Well, if you want to overly simplify it." Charlie bristled at the demise of what might have been his last chance to spin a mathematical analogy.
"We need to find a place with no people," Amita said, "but close enough to civilization that we'll be able to procure food and supplies, even after we've run out of fuel."
"And it has to be an area we're familiar with," said Don. "We don't need any unpleasant surprises. With terrain that's easy enough for everyone to handle, even Dad."
"Who says I can't handle rough terrain?" Alan said. "I'm in the best shape of my life!"
"Alan," said Amita, "this is a good time to consider becoming a realist."
"I think you mean a pessimist," said Alan.
"Anyway," said Charlie loudly, "we need to look into small towns, rural. Places that had smaller populations to begin with."
Nikki's voice was clear over Don's phone. "What do you say, Idaho?"
Colby raised his eyebrows and shrugged. "I can think of a few places, yeah."
They'd take US-93 Charlie decided, and when Amita concurred there was no room for argument. The only major city was Vegas, but Charlie had figured that by the time they reached it, at the rate zombieism seemed to be spreading, the chaos would have ended and the zombies would have been fanning out, looking for delicious brains in the residential areas. They got off at the strip to refuel, operating on the assumption that, according to Charlie's theory, the most heavily trafficked areas of the city would have cleared out by now.
Charlie was right.
Las Vegas had been a blood bath. The streets were peppered with staggering zombie Elvises (David and Colby sustained an impressively long argument about whether or not the proper plural was Elvii, with David insisting that it was not, nor would it ever be, a real word. Colby sensibly pointed out that as the last people on Earth, they probably had the right to edit Webster's dictionary in any way they saw fit.) and buxom zombie blondes in high heels wearing pasties and glittering knickers.
At the gas station, a small pod of zombies--which was how David had referred to them at one point, and the term stuck--started making their way toward the cars. Charlie and Larry, who had gotten out between the vehicles to converse while the others scavenged the gas station for provisions, quickly scrambled onto the roof of Liz's SUV as soon as they realized that she'd locked the doors before going into the building. Amita screamed from the other car that she had known it was a bad idea, while Charlie irritably wondered how she thought that helped him now. At least he'd taken a gun with him. With shaking hands, he pointed it at the zombie who had just fallen against the door.
It was then he realized Larry was talking. The zombie moaned. Charlie's line of vision bounced all over the place. This was nothing like the artillery range. No one had been trying to eat his brain there.
"And all that we are," Larry was saying, "all that we have the potential to be, every electrical impulse discovered and undiscovered inside our brain matter, becomes food for the next evolutionary step of human life, Charles," Larry paused, pressing his knuckles to his mouth in thought.
Charlie slammed the butt of the gun into the zombie's brain matter and it split the monster's head in two with a squelch. After a few tugs, he gave up on freeing the gun from the zombie's brain cavity and shoved the whole thing down to the pavement.
"That's great, Larry," he said, getting onto his hands and knees and lowering himself over the side to slide his legs in through the window Oswald had just rolled down. "Why don't we finish this discussion while we're moving in a more zombie-free direction?"
"Nice one, man," Oswald said.
"Thanks," said Charlie, watching the other car with concern. "Amita's going to kill me."
"Statistically speaking, chances are higher that the zombies will do it first," said Oswald.
"He makes a valid point," said Larry as he dropped into the seat beside them.
Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose. Oswald rolled up the window just in time for another zombie to collapse against the door, its bloody, decaying fingers crunching between the window and the door as they were crushed. There was a sickening crunch and blood exploded all over the window. Larry flinched. Nikki climbed into the passenger's seat.
"Don't open the windows," she said, looking twice when she saw Charlie sandwiched between Larry and Oswald. "And don't get out of the car. Genius." She tossed an armload of Ho-Hos into the back seat.
They were back on the road five minutes later. A zombie Dolly Parton tumbled from a second story window and landed on the hood of Liz's car. Liz never hit the brakes. Part of Zombie Dolly's wig was still lodged beneath a wiper blade forty miles out of the city.
By the time they reached Wells, and Ian scouted out the cold war era bomb shelter, using whatever method Ian used to do those kinds of things, it was dark, and Robin, Charlie, Amita, Alan and Oswald were shuffled inside surrounded by Don's heavily armed team.
As soon as his 'discussion' with Ian was over, Charlie pulled a box of chalk out of his pocket. A nearly empty box of chalk. He began scribbling on the concrete floor. There was no cellphone coverage in the shelter--it had been sketchy since Las Vegas anyway--and Amita spread maps all over the floor as they forced Colby to stay awake long enough to show them exactly where they were headed.
Charlie hardly had time to start calculating the most likely zombie-free terrain before Colby was sprawled haphazardly in the corner with David, sound asleep.
"Look at them, spooning already," said Nikki, rolling her eyes. "I knew I was just the rebound partner."
"Don't take it so hard," said Liz. "You've still got me."
Ian snorted, looking up from Colby and David to raise an eyebrow at the female agents. "I think I want to get in on this."
"Yeah, well, dream on, pal," said Don.
"You never know," Ian said. "I might end up to be the last man on earth."
Nikki shrugged. "If that happens, we'll talk."
It was then that Charlie ran out of chalk. He jumped to his feet and began to pace, pushing his hair back, then pulling it forward again. He wasn't finished. There were zombies coming to get them and he wasn't finished.
"Hey, buddy, it's okay," Don said, after Charlie had shrugged off Amita for the third time. "We'll get you to a place that has more chalk. Pens and paper, even. We've got plenty of fuel, and plenty of ammo. All right?"
Charlie looked at Don disbelievingly, but nodded anyway.
They were on the road again in the morning, with Colby and Don driving this time. It was a little under five hours later that they found themselves approaching their destination: Rigby, Idaho.
"Birthplace of Philo Taylor Farnsworth," said Larry thoughtfully. "Inventor of the vacuum tube television display. He was living here when he drew up the plans for the first television. He would go on to invent the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor."
"Yeah?" said Don. "Well, let's just hope he stays dead, along with everyone else in the graveyards around here."
"Oh, not to worry," said Larry. "Philo Farnsworth is buried in Provo, Utah. At the pace at which the zombies are able to walk, it would take him months to reach us here."
"Mmm, that's comforting," said Liz. "Oh, Colby's signalling. Looks like we're pulling over here."
Don rolled down the window. "Why're we stopping?"
Ian leaned out of the other car. "Close to the highway, we've got grocery stores a couple of miles away, and I can get up on the roof and scout out the rest of the area."
Colby leaned over from the driver's seat. "And it looks pretty deserted. Besides, I only know one other hotel in this town, and that one's out of our price range."
Liz snorted. "Leave it to Granger to worry about pinching pennies after a total economic collapse."
It was decided that they'd all stay in the same room. Cellphone service seemed to be completely down now, and nobody wanted to take the chance of splitting up until they knew why they hadn't seen a single zombie since pulling up. The first three rooms they checked were blood splattered, and a human foot in a shoe in the middle of a bathtub was the only sign that a corpse had been there at all. They decided on the second floor, a set of adjoining rooms, and after making sure the entire floor was clear, they settled in. It was a little like a macabre vacation, one that involved gunshots at all hours of the night, and the occasional looting of a nearby grocery store. Oh, and copious amounts of gore. The proximity, though, got on everyone's nerves.
Two days in, a fist fight broke out between Ian and David. It might have been assumed that it was over Nikki, who had been known to indulge in an occasional Dodgers game or candlelit dinner with Ian, and had seemed particularly excited to see David return. Amita, however, wisely pointed out that the more likely scenario was that they were, in fact, fighting over Colby. When Charlie asked what kind of equation she had come up with to deduce that particular answer, she simply pointed to the chair in the corner, where Colby sat, red-faced, and rubbing his forehead.
"Everyone knows Colby was David's girlfriend, not me," said Nikki as she slapped thirty cents down on the table. "Last of my money's on Ian."
"I'll see that," Alan said, dropping three dimes on the table. "I like David's odds, I think."
Liz had been the one to finally break it up, when she announced that she had three bullets left and only planned on saving one for herself.
It turned out that Colby and Ian had shared an ill-timed one night stand about a month before the zombies appeared. After Ian made one too many snarky remarks about the encounter to David, who was already finding it a bit emotionally overwhelming to spend what was likely his last few hours of life with Colby, David had snapped. None of these details reached anyone's ears but Don's. The others seemed perfectly happy to conjecture in lieu of facts. Later, Colby would describe the incident as "flattering and humiliating in equal parts", while Ian, when questioned by Nikki about his orientation, would say that he wasn't a man who limited his options. She appeared to like that answer.
After three more days had passed, it had become clear that they couldn't go on living all together between two rooms. That evening they sat in a circle on the floor, mostly in pairs, with Liz shooting a poisonous look in Oswald's direction every time he tried to scoot closer. The room was lit by candles; the power had gone off yesterday. The conversation had grown stagnant, Liz was down to her last bullet (which was one more than David, Colby, or Nikki had), and they hadn't seen a zombie in almost twelve hours. Ian had gone out to do some tracking, and couldn't find a sign of anything alive or undead in a two mile radius.
"You know," Alan said conversationally, "we prepared for this sort of thing back in the sixties."
"You prepared for the zombie apocalypse?" Colby raised his head from David's shoulder and yawned.
"No, no," said Alan. "We prepared to survive the government police state if that should come to pass." At Don's snort, he raised his hand. "You don't remember Kent State. I do. Now listen, we had all sorts of plans drawn up for communal living, getting what we needed from the land, everything. But look at what we have here. We have an entire city at our disposal."
"Wait, wait," said Don. "I see where you're goin' with this. You think now that it's quiet, we ought to branch out? Set up some kind of infrastructure?"
"If we can get a hold of the city plans," said Alan.
"We can hit up city hall in the morning," David said, looking at Colby. "It's all just there for the taking, right?"
"Sure," said Colby. "Who needs a gun anyway? You just have to aim something at the head."
"Amita and I can run some algorithms and find out the optimal locations to set up shop," said Charlie.
"Now this is what I'm talking about," said Alan. "This is what we did back then. Working together toward a common goal." He thought it was best not to mention that his particular community of hippies had dissolved during a vicious brawl over the optimal location for the compost heap. There would be time enough for that discussion.
"Well, we have to do something for the next step. We can't live in this hotel room forever," said Don. "Maybe if we get the city working again, we'll attract some more living folks."
"And if we don't, maybe we'll have to repopulate," said Ian, raising his eyebrows in Nikki's direction.
"You've got a lot of class, Edgerton," she said, shoving his arm, but smiling.
"Now that that's settled," Colby said, using David's shoulder to get to his feet, "I'm going to get some sleep. And calling dibs on the first bed. You comin'?"
"Right behind you," said David, getting to his feet.
"I call dibs on not sleeping in the same room as Ross and Rachel over there," said Ian.
The next morning, Don, Colby, David and Liz set out out for city hall with Alan. Charlie sat bent over the table, adding a few more variables to some of his equations. He took a moment to glance over at the narrow pad of paper where Oswald was scribbling his own work.
Charlie frowned. "Oh, no."
"Oh yeah," said Oswald. "If the statistics bear out what's been true in almost every zombie movie I've ever seen--and I've seen a lot of zombie movies--we probably have less than eight hours."
"Amita, get the keys," said Charlie.
"What's going on?" Robin asked.
Charlie shook his head, his dark curls bouncing. "There's a twenty-seven percent chance that a massive number of zombies are shuffling down route ninety-three right now, on their way to find our brains."
"Only twenty-seven percent?" said Robin. "Is that enough to panic over?"
Charlie looked at her over his shoulder. "There's a slightly-greater-than one in four chance that by tomorrow at this time, a zombie is going to be sitting in this very spot, using my skull as a soup bowl. So, yeah, I'd say it's time to panic."
"I'll drive," said Robin. "Just tell me how to get to city hall."
When they got there, the others had already ransacked the filing cabinets, and Alan was instructing them on what to keep and what to leave behind.
"Zombies are coming!" Charlie said breathlessly. "Eight hours or less!"
Don spun around. "Buddy, are you sure?"
"Twenty-seven percent, sure," said Charlie. "Enough to take precautions."
"All right," said Don. "Dad, take a look at those plans and see if you can find a good place for us to hole up. We're gonna need more--"
A big bag slid across the room, coming to a stop at Don's feet. Ian stood at the door, looking smug.
"Already done," he said.
As they armed themselves, Alan started rolling up the city plans. "We can go underground, near the water treatment plant."
"That sounds pleasant," said Liz.
"It's gotta smell better than the zombies," said Colby.
"It might not even come to that," said Charlie, looking up from the desk where he was huddled with Amita and Oswald. "We have a plan."
And they did. Two days and fifteen hundred dead zombies later, New Rigby, Idaho was a virtual bastion of security for the living, who began to trickle in over the next week, once Larry and Oswald had re-established radio broadcast. Charlie Eppes was elected mayor, unanimously, by the first twelve residents of New Rigby, and he set up a new city hall at the elementary school, where it would be a good long time before he would run out of chalk again.
