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illuxions-x · 3 years

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A Little Death

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I’m not sure just a little story concept I came up with at 3 am and ran with. enjoy.

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Nothing this bad was supposed to happen here. Ever.

It wasn’t me who came up with the idea of writing everything down. I can’t remember who did, but as soon as it was mentioned everyone else seemed to like the idea too.

I'm not sure what they expect me to write exactly, but I was voted the most capable to do so out of everyone, which of course I disagree with but I don’t really hate the idea of documenting this. So if no one else will I guess it can’t hurt to give it a crack.

Eva had to dig around her room for a couple minutes to find a journal, which she must have forgotten she had because there were no more than four small sketches we had to rip out for the book to be completely empty.

I tried sitting in the living room to write, I thought maybe being around everyone would give me more inspiration to write but all that happened was everyone decided to crowd around me, all staring at the blank paper in anticipation as though whatever I wrote would impact the universe forever. I couldn’t stand it, how do they expect me to write with them hovering over me like that.

There is a reason why I was the one chosen though, because even though I have the messiest handwriting that absolutely no one can read, I'm good with getting down the small things, like the feelings.

But I want anyone reading this to know that this is me writing about my feelings and my feelings only, not Eva’s and not Noah’s. My feelings, my experiences. That's the only way this is going to work.

The only one out of all 9 of us that lived out of town was Eva, a sweet farm girl that likes to bake. We’re all lucky to be friends with her, I’m not sure if we would even be alive if we didn’t have a place out of town to stay.

I’ll be forever grateful to Eva for that.

I found a spot on the balcony, kind of huddled up in the corner. I even brought a blanket to make sure I didn’t get cold.

It's a nice spot, the balcony is where I usually have a smoke in the morning, usually with warm tea and a book every now and then. The deck squeaks wherever you step and the railings are slowly rotting away, someone will probably have to fix them soon before one of us ends up falling over the edge.

There isn’t much to do here though, everyone kind of just sits around when they’re not on watch. A few people have just finished building a garden on the roof but we need to make a small trip to a house to get seeds because I don’t think anyone thought we would even get this far ahead.

The view is nice here, the property has a bunch of gum trees surrounding it which gives us just a little bit more cover, but god do the kookaburras get loud in the morning, I honestly don’t think I’ve slept in past 7 or 8 am in months.

There’s a creek a couple hundred meters from ‘the shack’. That’s what we’ve nicknamed Eva’s, it fits pretty well too. The house is pretty run down, been here a couple decades but I think it’s the perfect place to hideout.

I know I should be writing about other things, but I feel like I have to set the scene or maybe if you’re reading this you’ve already skipping my monologue and gotten to the actual beginning, which hasn’t been written yet but it’s probably there for you.

Hopefully.

It’s been pretty boring here the last few weeks, and this has been the best idea anyone's had in a while. I feel a little guilty I have to admit, Noah seemed to really like the idea of writing everything down and I could tell he secretly wanted to be the one writing. He is a good writer too, he hasn’t said anything yet and I doubt he will.

He’s too nice to say anything, so it will probably eat away at him until he either decides to write his own version, or forget about it and do something else.

Noah is a sweetheart really, but he wasn't with us from the very beginning, he came a little bit later, so I guess it made sense that he wasn't the one chosen.

There's not much more to now than to get into the ‘story’, I’m not really sure how to do it so I’m going to start in the beginning and work my way from there to now, which should be fine if my memory is working fine.

I’m going to start in Psychology class, double period on a Friday, God it feels like a lifetime since I’ve been in a classroom and it's not like I ever hated school, it's just a bit of you don't know what you have until it's gone.

By the start of the second session an announcement was made over the loudspeaker, the principle calling a lockdown. This was odd for more than one reason.

The first being this is Australia, everyone doesn’t walk around with guns freely. The second is I haven’t had a real lockdown since grade 3 when some crackhead walked into school with a cricket bat trying to hit tiny fairies.

So we all just assumed it was a drill, even the teacher did. That was at least until Mrs Reece got an email.

I remember her asking the class who had gotten the COVID vaccine, at least half the class put their hands up, a couple of them being my friends, Ellie Newton, Emily Jackson, Jake Cross and Lucas Walker.

They were taken out of the class by some other teacher, I can't remember his name but he taught P.E which I didn’t do, obviously. He had a whole group of kids with him, saying anyone that was vaccinated had to go to the gym immediately, so when everyone left there weren't many people in the room-no more than 15 year 11’s.

But I never saw that group of people again.

It only took a couple minutes and the remaining people were moved to the second gym, the old one that we only used when the new one was being used for something else. I just remember it being full of students who were all crowded in small groups all as clueless as we were.

The remaining 500 or so people of all year levels were told to sit, they set up the projector and started playing the news. I remember saying something to Sarah next to me along the lines of, ‘wow all this for the queen finally dying’. It was funny at the time I promise.

But instead of showing the royal family the screen showed people running around the city in what I can only describe as anarchy, cars were on fire and there were just bodies laying there on the road like roadkill.

It didn’t take long for someone to say it though, we were waiting for someone to shout it.

‘Zombie Apocalypse!’

I still get shivers even now, thinking about how quickly everything changed.

The news broadcast explained that the only people that were infected currently were people who got the vaccine, and it only took a few moments for things to click in my brain.

Everyone else in my family got the vaccine except me, Mum and Mad got theirs so they could go back to work, and my younger sister had to get hers done to be accepted back at kindergarten.

Not to mention the vaccine wasn’t cheap, $40 per dose. So I decided I could live without it for an extra week to two to make sure we had enough money for bills and food.

Maybe my parents being broke was what saved my life.

Then the police came and told us we couldn’t leave, which only made me want to leave even more. I felt trapped while my family was at home turning into mindless brain eaters.

I guess that was where our plan began, none of us wanted to stay there in the old gym that smelled too much like sweaty socks. The plan wasn’t even that good, we only got out by dumb luck that 10 police officers couldn’t keep tabs on everyone.

So we all went to the toilets a couple minutes apart from each other, climbing out of the small window. It was a miracle we all even fit.

I don’t know what happened to the kids that stayed in that gym, but I haven’t seen another kid from school since that day, well not alive at least.

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writerly-owl-blog · 7 years

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Undead: Chapter One

Summary: It’s been a year since the unexplained rising of the dead and mass infection of the millions, but Lance is managing to survive. He even thinks he’s doing pretty damn well, as fighting for your life goes, until he meets Keith - the boy with the sword and quiet words and constant plan. Mix in Hunk and Pidge, and they’ve got a solid team of four and a solid method of survival, but when they stumble into a hostage, an experimental, mad genius, and the odd truth, keeping some semblance of a nice, unconfrontational life may not be as easy as they had originally thought.

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

On AO3

CHAPTER ONE

Lance had gotten so used to the groans and moans of the undead that an actual, real life scream startles him more than anything.

He jumps in place a bit, broken glass crunching beneath his worn-out boots, and gingerly steps to the side to avoid getting properly speared via the wide gap in his shoe that spans from his callused toes to the middle of his foot. He isn’t having a repeat of the car window incident the other day, that’s for sure. He refuses.

“Oh, god,” Lance mutters with his mouth full, his eyes rolling of their own accord. His hand clenches into a fist at his side, the muffin wrapper noisily crumpling between his fingers.

Of course, a cry for help had to come around when he had a blueberry muffin half-stuffed into his mouth for the first time in what seems like years. His eyes close, his throat humming an old tune that he can’t quite remember the origin of, his tongue swirling around the bits of gloriously sugary yet admittedly stale muffin. Lance isn’t complaining about it, though. Not at all. Honestly, he’s had much worse, like the raw fish he’d somehow managed to catch a few weeks ago, his feet plunged into the muddy water, his hands attempting to grasp it by the tail or the middle. The fish was like a bar of soap in the way it struggled to escape from his damp fingers - a bar of soap that bites, leaving him a nice scab for his troubles.

So, given the risk of eating raw local wildlife in a land filled with the diseased undead, he’d been thrilled to see a prize for his troubles few days later while walking down the interstate with the sun beating on his back - a perfectly wrapped, dainty granola bar, sitting there in its tantalizing way on a piping-hot leather seat in the back of a car. Nice and shiny, its silver wrapping fiercely reflecting the sun. Undisturbed. Perfect.

Yes, the glass of the car window had stuck into Lance’s elbow - he couldn’t find anything else better to ram the window with. Yes, he’d spent a good thirty minutes afterwards picking it out by the car after he’d claimed his meal, hissing curses underneath his breath. And yes, once he’d stepped forward, patting himself on the back for a job well done, he’d stepped on a particularly nasty shard that found itself lodged in his foot.

No, he was not happy about it. So really, all fish and granola bars considered, the muffin was a steal.

“Hold on, m’comin,” he mutters to himself after he stuffs the rest of the pastry into his mouth, his hand reaching for the old-fashioned pistol that he’d swiped from a raid on what seemed to be an old woman’s house, judging from the doilies and the dolls. She’d had plenty of ammo, too, which made Lance question her hobbies, but whatever hobbies they were, he hopes she’s having a grand old time doing them in the afterlife. Or wherever she is.

Whatever. He doesn’t care. But he does care about the yell that rings out again, right from beside the gas station in a separate building that houses an old run-down car wash.

“I’m coming! Jeez, stop yelling!” he says again, louder this time. Lance quickly checks the ammo - five more rounds, wonderful - and he has to ram his shoulder into the rusted-out door in desperate need of WD-40 to burst it open, curving a hard left toward the Soap n’ Suds.

He vaguely remembers Soap n’ Suds from when he was very small, just a tot in a car seat, and and absolutely, mortifyingly terrified of car washes. Nothing struck fear into the heart of young Lance like the smiling red cartoon car looming outside of his window, telling of the horrors of strange tornado-like wipers that were looming just around the corner.

Nothing strikes fear into Lance’s heart like the rotting stench of walking corpses, either, which blasts into him like an unwelcome sauna of smell the moment he enters the car wash through the back end instead of the front. Call him a rebel. Bad to the bone.

Also call him a scared soul that screeches as a teen his age just about backs into him, his muscles straining as he hefts up an old-fashioned, rusting sword and swipes it toward one of the many zombies that stutter toward him on uncertain feet. One of them is nothing but half of a formerly full person, both of its eyes completely missing, but thankfully nowhere around, dragging itself forward by its surprisingly muscular arms, scrabbling at the boy’s ankles. The boy grunts, delivering a swift kick to the zombie’s head, but another zombie has just about caught up to him, its hand scattered with bloody hangnails, open flaps of flesh that ooze out purple and yellow and all the colors Lance would rather a wound not be, frankly.

“Get it!” Lance screeches, taking deep breaths to calm himself into the Sharpshooting Zone - a certain state of mind that he indulges himself in, whenever the situation calls for it.

Step back. Take a breath. Aim for the head. Shoot.

His finger slams against the trigger without a second thought.

His bullet smashes into the crawling zombie’s brain while the other teen sticks his sword clean through the neck of the other, grimacing as it crashes to its knees, gore and gut spilling from the cut. He plants a foot on its chest for leverage and yanks the blade out, looking toward Lance with wide eyes, and in that moment, Lance can only think one thing, zombies be damned.

“Is that a mullet?” he asks in bewilderment, pointing toward the other’s hair that curls ever so slightly at the nape of his neck. The other frowns, his self-consciously hand raising to his hair, but his eyes widen as Lance abruptly swings the front of his pistol toward his head, eyes narrowing, breath bated.

“Don’t move,” Lance mutters, gritting his teeth. The other freezes. Lifts his hands in surrender.

The pistol goes off, steadied by Lance’s hand, and something whizzes past the other’s ear, sharp as a whistle. A groan scooped from the pits of something’s belly wheezes into the air. Slick, hot blood pools against the back of his legs, spreads on the ground like a messy art project, minus the glitter. Glitter would be nice. Maybe a bit morbid, given the circumstances, but nice.

The other boy quickly takes a few steps forward, twisting around to glance at the fallen zombie for a moment or two, before locking eyes with Lance.

And oh. Lance has never seen eyes like that.

Or a mullet like that.

“Seriously, man, a mullet?” Lance says again, clicking the safety on his pistol, pressing a hand to his belly as he begins to laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

“Hey!” the other groans at him, chin tilted up. “I love my mullet.”

“Good. At least someone does.” Lance cracks up at his own joke, flashing a smile at the pinched look on the other’s face. “You deserve to be teased after ruining my muffin moment.”

“Your…” The other trails off, eyebrows knitted together.

“My muffin moment. Yes. It’s hard to find food, y’know,” Lance says defensively, shoving the pistol into his oversized pocket attached to his oversized pants that barely hang on to his hips, their saving grace an old brown belt. “If you’re looking for some, it’s in that gas station over there.”

“Oh. Thanks.” The other pauses for a moment, pursing his lips, before his eyes flick back up toward Lance’s. “What’s your name?”

“Lance. Otherwise known as the man who just saved your life. You?”

“I’m sure I would’ve been just fine. And it’s Keith.”

“Nice.”

And the two stand in silence.

“Sooooo. Where’re you headed?” Lance awkwardly asks, shuffling a foot into the concrete.

“I…have no idea.”

“Cool. Same.”

More silence. Then -

“Safety in numbers.” It’s Keith, his eyes locked on Lance’s again. Purple? Blue? Lance doesn’t know, but he tries to search out every individual fleck of color, out of sheer curiosity, of course. Not because they’re pretty. Of course not. That would be ridiculous.

“Yeah. You wanna come with?” He pointed his thumb proudly to his chest, flashing a cheesy smile. “I’m the best sharpshooter on this side of the country!”

“Yeah, I saw,” Keith says, whirling his sword in his hands. “And I stab.”

“A sharpshooter and a stabber. What else does one need?” Lance jokes, beginning to stroll out of the small stall of rubber tornadoes and endless smiling car doodles. He doesn’t ask about the sword. He’s seen weirder weapons in this new world.

“That’s a good question,” Keith dryly notes, beginning to follow, and there’s no trace of a smile on his face. In fact, Keith hasn’t laughed at any of Lance’s jokes. Not a one.

Challenge accepted.

_______

One of the first thing Lance notes about Keith is that he isn’t a talker. Notably so.

This first occurs to him in the first few hours that they’re walking on the road, the dry, hot sun sending sweat pouring down their necks, pooling in the collars of their shirts, but besides the obvious, imminent heat stroke approaching, Keith still can’t seem to take that damn red jacket off.

“Aren’t you hot?” Lance pipes up a few miles down the road, his hand carefully rested on his pistol. Keith’s eyes flicker to his as if alarmed, or waking from a particularly intense dream. Or both.

“Uh. No.”

“Oh…well.” Lance chokes on his words, pulling down on the sleeves of his old green jacket that’s tied around his waist, marked with bold yellow rectangles on the side. He remembers when it wasn’t so tattered and faded, particularly in the house - draped over the wooden dinner table, hung up in him and his brother’s walk-in closet, in the corner of his eye during the occasional scuffles they’d get into over who was to wear it that day, or that week. It was rarely washed, always crusted over with the remains of beans they’d had for dinner, or a spot of sticky Coca-Cola, but when it was washed once in a blue moon it was as soft as a piece of prized felt, smelling of the old familiar detergent his family used. It was always the same brand, for as long as he can remember - it smelled of lilac and lavender, like clean, space-themed sheets and the hoodies he’d used to wear all the time.

He doubted he’d ever smell that ever again, given what’s happened. If they ever were blessed by the miracle of stumbling by a grocery store, he’d probably scan the cleaning aisles, searching for it. Just for a whiff of home.

Home. Safety. The opposite feeling that flashes through Keith’s eyes as they zero in on his arm, carefully scan over his trigger-happy fingers.

“Not for you, buddy. I thought I’d proved that earlier,” he says, pursing his lips.

“Yeah. It’s just. You can never be-”

“Too careful, yeah.” His sister had always said that. Her and her smart mouth, and her tough attitude that knew just when to be soft on him. Her and her sisterly advice to her clumsy, rambunctious younger brother.

Lance sniffs.

Keith whips his head toward him, an odd look plastered on his face, as if he were about to perform open-heart surgery on someone without even knowing how to do chest compressions.

The old Lance would joke. Flash him a set of finger guns, say some joke to throw the whole situation on its head, blowing the other person’s mind - obviously. When did he not blow anybody’s mind? Never, that’s when.

So the old Lance is still there. Obviously. Just dormant. Hiding, ever since his mother was the first to go. Afraid to let go, drown into itself, lose all the seriousness needed to survive.

But damn, if it didn’t burst out sometimes. Just…not now.

_____

During dinner, or during the meal in which what meager food they’ve both stacked up and traded is choked down as soon as humanly possible, Lance actually decides to try.

He had to admit that he was liking the current fire they had going - the land had a habit of turning from a summer-in-California kind of temperature to one of an indoor penguin exhibit the moment the sun dipped below the horizon, the kind that caused Lance to shrug his green jacket back on and lean towards the pocket of warmth, the leaping licks of orange and yellow. The two are closely surrounded by leafy greens in the untamed bits of vegetation on the side of the two-lane highway, just off the road sign that warns of deer and car crashes and things nobody has to worry about anymore.

“So you know how to make a fire, woodsy guy,” Lance says as they plop down on the ground, tearing into his beef jerky like a wild beast. He grimaces as soon as the unfortunate taste hits his tongue. Pepper jerky. He’d never been a fan of it, sure, but he’d be a fan of Spam itself if it meant he didn’t have to starve. “What were you, a boy scout?”

Keith doesn’t answer for a moment, and Lance thinks he’s not going to respond at all, before he does. “Nah. I used to live in the woods,” Keith muses, slipping those poor excuses for gloves off of his fingers, letting the flames flicker closer to his fingers than probably advised by Smoky the Bear. “I made a lot of them. It always came naturally.”

“You lived in the woods? Like, in a tent?” Lance hates camping. Poison ivy. Mosquitos. Which is a lot like the position he’s in, right this second.

Probably not a good time to mention that. Or think too hard about it.

“No, I lived in a cabin.”

“With your family?”

“Nope. Just me.” He says it so simply, without much emotion, and Lance can’t quite pick up on how he feels about that. Just a vagabond teen, living in the woods. No big deal.

Lance can’t imagine life without his family.

Well. Actually, he can, now.

“Oh. Did you like it?” Lance hesitantly asks, sipping loudly on one of the multiple water bottles that he has stuffed in his industrial-grade, probably atomic-bomb-proof backpack that he’s had since the 8th grade. He imagines himself like a Lance-shaped camel, hoarding his goods in the bag hump for a later day. Or a camel-shaped Lance? Either way, Keith speaks before he can delve into that particular topic.

“Sometimes.”

And that’s all Keith has to say about that.

The silence means that Lance can hear the fire peacefully crackling, a low, comforting noise that reminds him of home almost as much as lavender and lilac, taking him back to the fire pit they’d built in the back yard when he was six and had a hankering for some s’mores, a trait that never really left him. But it also means that he can hear the eerie whistling of the wind rusting through the trees as if disturbing them on purpose, cruelly tearing its leaves off and slamming them into the ground. One of them, an enormous, broad oak leaf, slaps Lance square in the forehead, pasting itself firmly to his face thanks to the wind, and Lance lets out an almost feral growl as he scrabbles at its edges, flinging it into the fire.

“Stupid leaf,” he mutters, scrubbing his hands all over his face to rid it of its itching, and Keith’s head is bowed, his bangs flopping over his forehead in an oily mess.

It takes Lance far too long to recognize the solitary shake of his shoulders, the crest of a grin glinting on his face for a blessed moment, before it disappears.

“Are you laughing at me?” Lance squawks, winding his arms together in a tight knot. “I’ll have you know, that leaf was brutal! I could have died!”

Of all the things that made Keith laugh, it had to be a leaf attacking Lance’s face. If that momentary scoff could be counted as a laugh, that is.

When Keith looks up, however, his expression is much more sober, his eyes glinting with something drained of all amusement and filled with wary, careful flickers of…something. Fear? Apprehension? Confusion?

“I wonder where they are,” he quietly says, his voice carrying along with the wind, but Lance manages to hear it.

“Who?”

“I mean, we haven’t seen many today. I wonder if they’re hiding.”

Oh. Them.

“Or maybe there aren’t many in this area. We’re kind of in the middle of nowhere, here,” Lance counters.

“It’s still not…right.” Keith’s face is pinched, even more than the regular, run of the mill Keith-pinch that Lance has begun to recognize in such a short time. His hands fiddle in his lap, turning something over, and over, and over, and Lance would ask, pry into it, if he wasn’t hit with a sudden wave of exhaustion. His little-sleep high had just crashed. Shit.

“Hey, I’m gonna get some sleep. Wake me up when it’s time for me to be sentry,” Lance murmurs, wincing as he shoves his backpack off his back and huddles onto it like a pillow. Only the pillow is filled with the uncomfortable edges and bumps of plastic water bottles.

Water bed. It’s a water bed. Sure.

And despite the screeching of the wind grating against his eardrums, and Keith’s constant poking at the fire, leaving the logs of wood rolling over each other, he somehow finds solitude, pulled down into an uneasy yet dreamless sleep.

#keith #lance #klance #vld #voltron #I first posted this on my side blog and then decided to just #post it on tumblr #haven't written fan fiction in a while here we go

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