It's The Little Things That Kill

[drewbear]

This is a fanfic I wrote for kissmebleeding for the apocalyptothon challenge. Many, many thanks to valarltd for beta-reading this. Please enjoy!

It's The Little Things That Kill
Betty hadn’t thought anything of it when people started getting sick. After all, those summer colds are the worst, right? She’d read somewhere that most people got sick at the office, too, since the recirculated air just trapped germs and spread it everyone.

But finding Christina passed out in the Closet scared her. Christina trembled, cold and sweaty, and this didn’t look like any kind of summer cold that Betty had ever seen. It didn’t look like any kind of flu she’d seen either. Christina had been fine that morning when they had coffee together! A little sniffly, yeah, but fine!

Betty considered moving Christina to one of the couches but couldn’t remember if she shouldn’t move people who were this sick or if that was only if they had a head injury. The thought suddenly struck her that Christina could have hit her head when she collapsed! Betty decided to not move her, to be on the safe side, but Christina was so cold that Betty brought over a couple of dresses to cover her with to try to get her warm.

Betty tried dialing 911, but the line wouldn’t connect. The automated message said something about technical difficulties, so she hung up and, starting to freak out, called the reception desk to get an ambulance. And the phone rang. And rang. And rang.

Finally, more scared and worried than ever, Betty decided to go find help herself. She babbled promises to return to Christina, who wasn’t trembling any more. Betty told herself that was a good sign and hurried to the elevators. It seemed like it took forever for the doors to open and even longer to get to the lobby, but when the doors opened, Betty wished it had taken longer.

It was a nightmare. Someone actually fell into the elevator when the doors opened, like he had been slumped against them. People had collapsed everywhere. It looked like some had just fallen where they stood, but a lot had sat or lay down wherever they were before falling over. It was like something out of The Stand. Betty used to love Molly Ringwald and watched all those 80s teen movies with her in them and when The Stand came out, she watched the entire thing. She thought it was creepy but that Molly had done a really good job. Betty dimly realized that her train of thought was going off on a tangent, but it was better than screaming to God to let this just be a TV show and not really happening.

Her reverie broke when the elevator doors tried to close on the guy blocking them and started buzzing like it was angry that it couldn’t close. The sound of the doors thudding repeatedly against the guy was just too much. Betty gingerly stepped over him then pulled him out of the elevator so the doors could close and stop that horrible sound. His body was cool and damp, like Christina was, and the not-so-sudden fear that this was very, very bad made her think about her family back in Queens.

She half ran, half stumbled through the hallways, headed for her desk so she could get her purse and cellphone and call home. The hallways were less crowded than by the elevators. Betty wondered if maybe everyone had been trying to leave when they collapsed.

Just as she was running around the corner to her and Daniel’s offices, she skidded on something slippery and fell flat onto her back, knocking her head hard against the floor. She sat up and readjusted her glasses, then rubbed her head while pushing herself up. She tasted blood; she must have cut her lip on her braces. Except that she smelled blood too.

Betty looked down to see what she’d slipped in and saw a pool of blood, already getting tacky in the cool air. It was spreading from a blonde-haired woman lying just around the corner, out of immediate sight. With trembling hands and increasing nausea, Betty started to turn her over, wanting yet not wanting to know who it was.

"It’s Alexis, Betty."

Betty jumped and jerked around to see Daniel sitting in his office, looking calm as ever until she noticed that he was too still and staring right through her.

"Daniel, what happened?"

"Dad killed her. Picked up a chair and bashed her skull in. He kept yelling that he had no daughter, that Alex had died in that accident and he was just getting rid of the abomination that took his son’s place.

"He would’ve come after me, too, but I showed him my gun and told him I’d shoot him if he came near me. I don’t think I would’ve, though. Can you imagine how that would look in the papers? ‘Meade Murders, Mother Mourns.’ I thought that headline up myself, you know."

Betty glanced down at Daniel’s hands and noticed the gleam of metal under his clenched hands. She swallowed hard and said "Da… Daniel, we have to get out of here. Everyone’s sick and I think some of them are hurt, too. We have to get help!"

Daniel’s eyes flicked away from Betty and landed on one of the cover mockups hanging on the wall. Still in a too-calm voice, he replied, "No point. I already tried calling 911. No one answered. I tried calling the hospital and police directly, too. No one there either. I think this is big, Betty. Really big. We should do a piece about it in the next issue, mourning those lost and how to dress for funerals. Do you think we could get some models for a shoot on such short notice?"

Betty stared, mouth open. She had seen Daniel through some bad times and he had never been this… detached. Admittedly, those times had been personal instead of the growing horror that gnawed at her stomach. But Betty knew that if she couldn’t get Daniel moving, he would do something irrevocable. So she did what always worked: she yelled at him.

"Daniel! Snap out of it! You’re DANIEL MEADE, the golden boy who survived, well, everything! You’re coming with me right now and we’re getting help, even if we have to walk all the way to the hospital ourselves!"

Steely determination was her last resort and wouldn’t last for long, but hopefully it would be enough to get them someplace safe. Betty really, really hoped that her Dad, Hilda and Justin were okay.

* * *

Daniel resented Betty.

He hated feeling that way, but it was true. She had been a nothing before Bradford had hired her; before working at Mode had shown her what the life of the rich and famous was really like, before Daniel had been shown exactly how hollow that life was for him. But she had grown on him; the first woman he’d ever been friends with.

And even after the end of everything, there she was: still cheerful and wearing those god-awful tacky clothes. Where the hell did she even manage to find a star-spangled blue jean jacket anyway? Not that it really mattered. It’s not like anyone had enough energy left to care about fashion.

Well, maybe Marc.

Who would have expected catty little Marc to make it out of Manhattan when everything went to hell, anyway? He couldn’t fight, he threw like a girl, he… well, he was a stereotypical gay guy. Even after weeks of attempts to learn from Mr. Suarez, he still resorted to slap-fighting when confronted.

Daniel had originally been curious as to how Marc had escaped Manhattan intact, but when he asked, Marc only said, "Amanda didn’t make it. I did."

That single statement was stark enough, but the tone Marc said it in… Daniel never asked again because he was a little afraid to find out exactly what did happen. Not that he would ever admit it to himself. There were a lot of things he wouldn’t admit to himself; even more than before… well, just Before.

There were so many things he missed about Before. He missed driving places instead of walking block after block to get anywhere. He missed fine suits and expensive meals. He missed being surrounded by beautiful women. He missed feeling safe and secure in his position of wealth. He missed his mother and prayed to God Almighty that she had died peacefully.

The one time he returned to Manhattan with Mr. Suarez, a month after the outbreak, Daniel had looked at every body they passed, hoping yet fearing that it might bear his mother’s face. Time and again Mr. Suarez had to pull Daniel’s attention away from the anonymous dead so he could lead the way to as many exclusive, expensive sporting goods stores as he could remember Alex frequenting. That single trip they scavenged enough survivalist gear, firearms and seeds to keep them warm, armed and fed for months.

Daniel had felt proud of that until he and Mr. Suarez passed the building for Meade Enterprises and he remembered the death and despair that filled it and every other building they passed. He had never told Betty that that guy from accounting that she liked had also turned into one of those monstrous humans they now called Ragers. The surreality of seeing that mousy little man stabbing a corpse repeated with a fistful of pencils had penetrated the daze Daniel had been in that day and prompted him to hustle Betty further down the stairwell before they were seen.

Daniel knew how phenomenally lucky he had been, not just to survive the disease, but to survive the aftermath. He suspected that the Suarez family, especially Betty, hated him for living when so many other, more worthy people had died. So he went scouting for Ragers and supplies more and more often, secretly hoping that that time he would get lucky and one of them would kill him. He feared that Betty hated him a little more every time he came home alive. And he hated himself every time, too.

* * *

No one was more surprised than Marc when it turned out that he had a knack for gardening. He had always taken care of the flower arrangements he kept on his desk, sure, but monitoring a tempermental hothouse orchid was cake compared to keeping up with Wili. That glorious schemer truly had been the best boss Marc had ever had and he still missed her deeply, even after months had passed.

If someone had told him six months ago that he would end up living with Betty “Fashion Tragedy” Suarez in fucking QUEENS while the rest of the city, hell, the rest of the world for all he knew, collapsed into chaos, he’d have called security because a mental patient had OBVIOUSLY made it past Amanda without her calling to warn him. If he’d been told that he would be grubbing in the dirt and LIKING it, well… let’s just say that Amanda would have her perky little ass in a sling for that little failure to communicate.

Amanda. Half the time, Marc still woke up in a cold sweat, remembering what had happened to her. The blood, the screams, the sickly smell of fear… He didn’t really believe in God, but he still prayed that Amanda had died quickly.

Maybe that was why he threw himself so much into the gardens they secreted away anywhere there was enough flat space and sufficient cover. If he could hide and protect any life from the Ragers, maybe it would be enough. To think that organic produce used to be so expensive and here he was, growing his own carrots and peas.

He usually ended up working with Justin, since his mom wanted him somewhere relatively safe. And Marc had to admit, it was kind of fun talking fashion with the kid, but there’s only so much a grown man can talk about with a 12-year-old, or however old Justin was, before they run out of things to say. He genuinely liked Justin, though; he had the kind of loving, homophobia-free childhood that Marc had always wanted. Until now, of course. This really sucked as childhoods went.

He occasionally wondered about his mother; whether she’d died from the initial infection or turned into a Rager or just killed herself rather than face a world she couldn’t control. But mostly, he thought about his gardens and the upcoming winter. It would be colder than any other, if humanity’s bad luck kept going the way it was.

* * *

The first time Justin killed someone, he and Marc were at one of the gardens they’d made on a strip mall’s roof a few blocks from the house.

They’d been weeding the tomatoes when they heard shouting from down the street. Marc stuck his head out to look and quickly pulled it back, his face all white and bloodless. Justin had thought that was only an exaggeration before this and he found it interesting in a back corner of his brain while the rest of him started panicking. He watched as Marc crouched and scurried away from the ledge as the shouts got louder and louder. They weren’t even words, just this low, raspy, painful-sounding scream of rage and hate that kept getting closer and closer and closer until it was right below them.

Wide-eyed and terrified, Justin crawled over to the edge of the roof and peeked over it. There were two of them. Ragers: people twisted by the disease into feeling nothing but anger and seething hatred, but still with a human intelligence and cruel creativity.

These two didn’t look to be any different. They were filthy and bloodstained, but were already getting ready to circle behind the building to get at the ladder. The last one looked up just before he turned the corner and caught Justin’s gaze, holding it for a long moment before flashing a wide, smirking, evil smile.

Justin jerked back from the edge and stared at Marc, both of them scared out of their wits. Then, both turned to the single, last-resort shotgun that his abuelo had made them take. Marc started shaking his head back and forth, faster and faster and moaning something into his chest as he curled into a ball.

Justin slowly picked up the shotgun and pointed it where the access ladder came up and waited. It was heavier than he thought it would be; a lot more than the prop gun he’d had in that musical version of Old Yeller that his school had put on last year. It shook in his hands as he aimed it.

When the first head popped over the edge, Justin pulled the trigger more in surprise than intent. The recoil knocked him on his back and blew the breath out of his body, but he scrambled up as quickly as he could. He picked up the shotgun again, his hands even shakier, and waited for the Ragers to try to come up again. And waited. And waited.

Finally, after the setting sun threw shadows across his face, he went over to the ladder and looked down. At the bottom were both of the Ragers, dead. His wild shotgun blast had taken off a lot of the head of the first guy and that one’s body had fallen on the other one, the grinner. From the roof, it looked like the grinner had broken his neck or something; nobody stayed that still under a cold corpse that long.

It looked like something out of a movie, or like a pile of bodies that a director would carefully set up for a spotlit musical finale.

Justin wondered whether his Dad had looked like that when he was killed, too.

* * *

Hilda had been keeping an eye on her boy ever since he and Marc got back after dark that night, hours late, and told them what had happened. She would NOT let her little boy become another ghost to haunt her.

Papi was bad enough, his presence lingering everywhere, little things that just screamed that he should be there, taking care of them while cooking up something fantastic using half an onion, some garlic and a whole chicken. She could still smell the spices hovering in the kitchen, telling her that Papi was just behind her, waiting for her to get out of the way so he could get to the stove.

She tried to take his place, cooking for everyone as best she could. Betty had tried at first, but please. The girl could burn water. Marc spent most of his time in the gardens and Daniel… Well, he was quite a looker, but not much use until he had found some guns somewhere and started going on scavenger patrols with Papi. It was on one of those trips that that fucking diabla tore his throat out. Daniel said he shot the puta between the eyes and Hilda really hoped that it was true; that her father’s killer wasn’t running around free while her Papi was dead and buried in the backyard.

Hilda had buried a lot of people now and knew exactly how deep to go so that wild animals wouldn’t dig up the bodies. Seeing what those dogs had done to Gina Gambaro’s body… She may have hated her, but that desecration shouldn’t be visited on anyone. Gina was another ghost that followed her around. Sometimes she looked like the tramp she had been when she stole Walter from Betty; those times she silently yelled at Hilda about living when she had died. Sometimes she looked like the dog-eaten corpse, shambling towards her like a zombie out of one of those horror flicks that Santos had liked.

Oh, how she still missed Santos. He would have made it through all this with no problem and been good and kind to her and Justin. Hilda still had the wedding dress up in her closet. She didn’t look at it much anymore, but it was one of her last connections to him. She thought that he would’ve approved of the changes in Justin. Their son was more muscular from scavenging and carrying heavy loads of supplies everywhere. He could shoot a gun now and properly, not in that gangster video way that Santos had once told her was crap for aiming.

Sometimes she worried that she was going crazy. But she couldn’t go crazy; she had her family to take care of. Betty took care of Daniel and Hilda took care of everyone else. There was no one else who could.

* * *

The horde of Ragers was right outside the house and while they’d managed to barricade the doors and large windows, it was only a matter of time before one of them decided to try climbing the tree or drainpipe to the second story.

Daniel had been escorting Marc back from a supply run when they first heard the engines. Somehow, a gang of Ragers had managed to not only not kill each other, but had found enough motorcycles to go hunting for… well, for whatever they could find.

The two had ran for the house and made it with enough time to slam the last pieces of their pre-made barricade into place. Betty looked up from the gun she had been cleaning and, taking in the looks on their faces, immediately yelled out while grabbing the gun and running up the stairs to take her position at the front window.

"Hilda! Justin! They’re coming! Get into position!"

Hilda grabbed Justin from the kitchen table and dragged him upstairs, leaving the pot of boiling potatoes to spill over; this was more important right now.

When the first ‘cycle pulled to a stop outside the house, Daniel didn’t even wait for the rider to get off; he shot the wild man with blood-stained beard right between his eyes. If there had been any doubt that the riders were Ragers, it was quickly dispelled: those remaining jumped, fell and scrambled off their bikes in their hurry to run to the house and pound at it while screaming their fury.

Betty aimed through the open window and carefully squeezed off a shot, hitting one in the leg. The wild woman toppled and was trampled under the feet of her fellow monsters. Betty fought back her gorge but moved on to the next target. They didn’t have much ammunition and she had to make each of her shots count.

Justin, on the other hand, fired into the screaming crowd indiscriminately, just trying to get them to stop coming after them. His last shot managed to somehow punch right through the skull of the loudest Rager.

Hilda passed him a reload and kept shooting at those hijos de putas, imagining that each one was the bastard who’d killed her Papi. She would keep her son safe or die trying. And if she did die? Well, at least Santos would know that she’d done her best for their son.

Marc kept refilling the clips from their dwindling supply of ammo and passing them on to whoever needed them. He was scared out of his mind, of course, but who wouldn’t be and still be sane? He kept telling himself that things like this just didn’t happen in a sane world, that this was some awful nightmare that he would wake up from soon. In the meantime, he would survive it. He had to.

And Ignacio’s ghost stood invisibly at the front door, holding it shut against those who would dare to hurt his familia. A faint smile crossed his face, even as he strained to hold the door shut. His girls, his lovely girls, had more than made him proud and he would willingly send his spirit to El Infierno before he let these diablos into his home.

Comments

[sal101010.livejournal.com]

Great premise, and I loved Ignacio's ghost at the end.

[drewbeartx.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I was a little worried about introducing Ignacio's ghost at the end there, but he needed to be there and ghosts are definitely soap opera. :-)