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mooging(masterpost // art)
i.
Mark takes the most important phone call of his life three months into the zombie apocalypse. The sound of his ringtone makes him jump so badly that he almost drops his gun.
He'd started leaving his phone on silent weeks ago, before all this began. There had been rumours going round that he was getting burnt out, people whispering by water coolers, but Mark had thought that was sensationalising it a bit. He'd just felt simmered down, like he'd been standing over a stove and someone had turned off the heat. He wasn't the next big thing anymore. Facebook was a once-in-a-lifetime, holy-shit idea, but it was running, then, done limbering up. Mark needed it more than it needed Mark, and he didn't know quite what to do with that.
He also didn't know exactly how people got the idea that he needed a vacation from the fact that he turned his phone on silent -- he's always hated being interrupted while he's busy -- but apparently Mark's phone settings were evidence enough for in-depth investigation of his psyche.
Mark had turned the ringer back on when the radio channels started to drop one by one into blank white noise, crackling out like the television channels before them, just in case. He told himself it was because his family might call. He knew, though, that if they were going to call, he would have heard from them by then. Still, that's what he told himself.
All in, he wasn't expecting a call anytime soon, and yet here he is, standing two paces from a bloodstain on a deserted Palo Alto sidewalk and his phone is vibrating in the pocket of his grubby cargo shorts.
He fishes for it, hits answer.
"Hello?" he says, which is probably redundant, but whatever. If there is someone trying to talk to him, that'll be the first person Mark will have spoken to in thirty-two days. He can cope with some redundancies.
The line is terrible, the static as loud and angry as on every radio frequency Mark has tried, but he doesn't hang up. For a long moment, all he can hear is the crackling on the line and his own heartbeat, the blood rushing in his ears like it's rushing to the other end of the call.
Then he hears it. Indistinctly, almost indistinguishable from the noise of the phone lines breaking up, Mark hears his name.
Mark still knows that voice.
"Wardo?" he says, and his heart is suddenly beating adrenaline-fast. "Eduardo, is that you?"
"Mark," Eduardo says. The distance, the poor quality of the connection cuts him off here and there, his voice swimming up out of the sea of white noise, surfacing for Mark. Mark can only catch odd words; he gets, "I'm -" and then nothing, and then, again, "Mark - ".
Mark is clutching the phone so hard his fingers hurt.
"Wardo," he says, as steadily as he can. "Wardo, where are you?"
Even in the midst of the fucking zombie apocalypse, he still can't ask if Eduardo's okay. Which is horrible, because he probably isn't. Mark isn't. Still, he should ask: he wants to have the right to ask.
Mark is one of the youngest billionaires ever, he could buy literally anything he wants save, like, the White House, but then the world had up and ended and all the money and privilege and sleepless nights in a panic room listening to people get eaten outside the reinforced metal doors has led him here. Here is days of not talking to anyone but the dead. Here is taking a gun with him every time he goes outside. Here is Mark pressing his overpriced and increasingly pointless smartphone to his ear and not being able to ask his best friend who sued him for six million dollars if he's okay or if a zombie's chewing on his leg or something.
Here, frankly, sucks.
The line clears like they're in a movie and the music has just dipped so the audience knows this is important. Mark can hear just how tired Eduardo is when he says, perfectly distinctly, "Lake Worth, Florida."
"Wardo, are - "
"Mark, I - "
- but the line goes dead before either of them, speaking over the top of each other in an exhausted, frantic jumble, can finish what they started.
It seemed to be a recurring problem in their lives.
Mark finishes, " - you okay?" to dead silence. He brings the phone away from his face and stares down at it like Eduardo might call back. He hits redial, but nothing happens. The phone lines must have gone down.
That's some fucking timing Eduardo has.
At this point, as Mark sees it, he has two choices.
One: stay in Palo Alto, hiding in his billionaire's house with state of the art security and the panic room that is the reason he's still alive right now, only going out to find food and water when the sun is out and strong, and waiting for his inevitable last gory struggle. Option number one isn't particularly appealing insomuch as it does seem to leave him dead or craving brains - and there are so few other living people around in California that this would just lead to addiction headaches or something and, like, wouldn't that just be fucking perfect, undead and dying for a bite.
So then, option two. This one is much more simple and also much more stupid. It's just this: find Eduardo.
Of course, this would involve driving 3000 miles across the zombie-infested country to a Floridian town he's never been to before where Eduardo may or may not be or even be alive. He would have to risk being out at night in unprotected shelters, not knowing where his next meal was coming from or where the safest place to rest would be. He'd be faced with the prospect of running out of gas and ending up stranded, getting ambushed (by zombies, what even is Mark's life now) or being bitten like the stupid expendable character who dies at the beginning of a horror movie to prove what the stakes are. Option two doesn't really have a lot going for it. Option two is practically suicidal. Mark really, really should not pick option two.
Mark looks around. It's mid-morning; he's got enough time to pack and get out of town, maybe even out of the state, before the heat and the light of the strong Californian sun dips enough that the zombies can lumber out of hiding. On the other hand, he probably has enough time to swing by the nearest Whole Foods on his way home, get something other than ramen for dinner. Maybe there's even be enough time for him to take a bath in his billionaire's bathroom, safe in the sunlight streaming in through the frosted glass windows, and not have to shiver his way through a shower in the panic room that leaves the whole floor wet.
Eduardo might already be dead. He might have died right after the phone cut off. Schrodinger's Eduardo, both dead and alive in the far away glow of Floridian sunlight.
"Fuck it," says Mark, aloud, like there was any way he was ever going to pick any other choice, and goes to pack a bag.
//
There's an abandoned SUV in the middle of the road two streets away from Mark's house, its driver and passenger side doors hanging open, the upholstery on the seats all but ruined. The door-open sensor is pinging away like the owner has just popped out for milk in the world's safest neighbourhood.
Mark thinks about miles to the gallon, about 3000 miles of road between here and his destination, and then he stops thinking about it, slings his gas cans into the back and slips into the driver's seat. He leans across to pull the passenger door shut, quietly and steadily ignoring the shredded chair his shoulder nudges, the bite marks on the head-rest.
The keys are still in the ignition, like he's living in some shitty movie where the protagonist only has to work for a few things -- looking cool and kicking ass in fight scenes, and how hard to kiss the girl. Palo Alto looks kind of like a movie set right now, deserted and silent, but Mark's all too aware of how real it is.
Mark can't seem to stop thinking in movie references. He's not stupid enough not to realise it's a self-preservation thing, trying to keep reality at a distance, but he thinks he's probably allowed it. Preserving his self is kind of the fucking point now. If Chris were here, he'd probably start telling Mark some self-aware psychological crap about denial not being a healthy pastime, but right now Mark's much more concerned about his physical well being. Chris isn't here to nag him otherwise anymore, and if denial is holding Mark up then Mark isn't going to stop leaning on it any time soon.
It's not like he's ever had the healthiest of coping mechanisms anyway. He sees no reason why he should start now.
The sound of the engine turning over, a coughing roar into life, is like something angry waking up. Mark doesn't know what else is out there, if there's something bigger or angrier than the fucking zombies, but he has to assume that if zombies are possible, anything is possible.
Logic can be a real bitch that way.
He grits his teeth and shoves the accelerator straight to the floor and the car ploughs forward, blind, hard obedience. It makes him feel good.
Lake Worth, Florida. All he has to do is get there and not get eaten. How hard can it be?
//
He heads for the I-40 in part because no way in hell is he heading for any city if he can help it. Palo Alto is bad enough, and Los Angeles had, like, four million more people in it than Palo Alto did, which basically now means that driving through it would open out into Mark Zuckerberg versus The Four Million Strong Zombie Hoard, and, how about no, thanks all the same. On a list of places Mark would least like to be right now, LA is second only to New York. Fucking big cities; fucking public transport; fucking airborne zombie viruses.
Gigantic undead populations aside, Mark finds himself favouring the idea of big, open states over a steady stream of coastal towns. He's a fan of open space these days, likes to be able to see what's coming. That, at least, isn't new.
//
Mark would like to say he can't imagine the beginning of the end of the world but he can give it a go. He doesn't even really have to stretch his imagination that far. He's spent enough time playing shitty video games with Dustin to be more than well acquainted with all Dustin's various zombie conspiracy theories.
Mark tries not to think about Dustin these days.
Nevertheless, he can't stop himself imagining the first time this happened, the first time someone -- maybe a hospital morgue tech, or a nurse in the middle of the night, or someone waiting by a bedside until their spouse's fever broke -- had to defend themselves against this, the first time someone looked into the eyes of someone they knew and realised they didn't know them anymore. Well, okay, so maybe it's a little less you're not the person I thought you were and a little more holy shit holy shit you're trying to eat my face, but the principle remains the same. It's disconcerting, looking at someone and seeing something completely different than you were expecting.
He wonders whether Eduardo thinks about the zombie uprising, or whether it would have needed to be a robot attack for him to see the parallels. Either way, Mark isn't coming out of that comparison particularly favourably.
He's had too much empty time on his hands recently. This isn't stuff he'd normally let himself dwell on. Then again, neither is stay the fuck down, you zombie bastard, I'm trying to reach the matches but that's still something that Mark has to deal with more often than he'd like these days. Burning may be the easiest way to be sure the undead stay actually dead, but it's also a fucking hassle. Mark's better with guns, but he'll take fire if it's that or jonesing for brains. He's not an idiot.
Mark thinks about the first time someone was bitten, in a morgue or a hospital or some quiet home bedroom, and then he thinks, eyes blurring, hands tight around the steering wheel, not me, not me, not me.
//
Mark's been driving for over eight hours when the sun finally gives up and disappears. He's somewhere around the Mojave National Preserve, not even out of California yet. His leg is cramping where he's had it jammed down on the gas pedal, and there's a crick in his neck from checking the rearview so often, but he's not been eaten and he's out in the middle of nowhere, which are both pluses. If Mark were the kind of guy to make pro and con lists, Not Being Eaten and Not Near Zombies would definitely make the good side. Not that it would really matter, because there's not really anything that can balance out the Zombie Apocalypse that's weighing down the con side with a kind of smug aplomb, but, you know, Mark's not dead yet. The pro side wins today.
But then, Mark thinks, not even bothering to pull over to the side of the road before he kills the engine, clambers into the backseat to lie down next to the guns and the gas canisters, there's always tomorrow.
Mark doesn't think he really has the right temperament for list-making.
//
Early May, the news said there had been an outbreak of flu in New York. By early June, it was a country-wide epidemic. By early July, as far as he could tell, Mark was the only one left alive in Palo Alto, alone and terrified and locked in his panic room for the very first time.
It's August now. Mark doesn't think much of his chances of seeing September.
//
Mark is up with the sun the next morning, easing himself out of the car to stretch out his back, his shoulders. When he was younger, he could sleep anywhere, work anywhere, hunched over a laptop like he was coding himself invulnerable, shoulders a shield against interruption or doubt. Well, clearly Mark's younger self sucked at prioritizing, because all the code in the world couldn't make him invulnerable to physical ailments. Now, Mark's had carpal tunnel twice since Facebook last moved offices and he was seeing a chiropractor before his chiropractor presumably joined the ranks of the living dead. What Mark's saying here is, if the world got to pick its last few inhabitants, the select few to defend humanity against the invading armies of the undead, Mark would not even be in the top thousand.
Then again, barring, like, marines and soldiers and the other groups of people actively trained to deal with this type of shit, Mark doesn't know who would be in the top thousand. He probably doesn't know any of them. The kind of people he knows are good at computers and the only good a computer has done Mark since the dead started walking is when he used a laptop to beat a zombie away from his office door. He thinks maybe Eduardo would have approved.
He wonders how Eduardo is doing, far away in Florida. He wonders if Eduardo has been in Florida for long. The last he heard -- the last thing Chris told him -- was that Eduardo was working in Singapore. Maybe everyone in Singapore has been given zombie-apocalypse survival skills. It's not too far outside the realm of disbelief: Singapore, to Mark, feels so far away that he feels like he could believe basically anything he heard about it. Right now, standing in the early morning sunshine on a deserted stretch of road in South-East California, Florida seems far enough away for even the most outlandish rumours to sound plausible. A kraken tentacling its way up a beach? Sure! Godzilla stomping his way through Miami? Why not! Atlantis rising from the sea? Seems about as likely as Eduardo miraculously being alive and in the country and wanting to see him.
In all the zombie movies Mark has ever watched, the rumours have always been about a safe haven, somewhere the zombies haven't reached. If this were a movie, Lake Worth would be it, and Eduardo would be safe.
Mark's thinking about movies again, whole freaking film reels of avoidance.
Fine. Mark lets himself take a second to think about it, to think about somewhere with other people, open beaches, views to the horizon all around him. He thinks about getting out of his car in a few days time, dirty and sweaty and tired, to fall asleep near other people, to have someone to watch his back for the first time in weeks. Just then, just for that moment, he leans back against his stolen SUV and lets himself think about relaxing, about the possibility of falling asleep listening to someone else's breathing.
In Kirkland, during finals, Mark once woke up with Eduardo pressed all along the line of his back, nosing against the back of Mark's neck in his sleep.
Mark closes his eyes. The sun creeps higher. Time to go.
//
There's just under fourteen hours of daylight at this time of year, and Mark drives solidly all through them like he's chasing down the sunset. When he was younger, growing up with the cold winters of Dobbs Ferry, NY, he used to think about taking a road trip across this part of the country, the wider, hotter states. It's funny, he always thinks, travelling from coast to coast, that despite all his US History classes, all the freaking maps he coloured in Geography, he's always unprepared for just how big America is. He doesn't see another person, dead or alive, for the whole of Arizona. He skirts Flagstaff as best he can, still wary of the bigger cities, and makes it across the border into New Mexico before he has to kill anything. He's been awake for a little over eight hours.
//
The first time Mark killed a zombie, he was sick immediately afterwards. Like, immediately. He smashed it in the head with a baseball bat until it dropped to the ground, and he kept hitting it, watching its skull shatter into bloody pulp, exactly the opposite of clean binary, all bone fragments and brain matter splattering against Mark's feet - his skin, because he lived in Palo Alto, he could fucking well wear flip-flops if he wanted - until it wasn't even twitching, because nothing could be twitching after that. So, yeah: Mark brought the baseball bat up and paused, and then before he'd even decided to stop swinging, his body told him he was done and he was sick just to the side of his kill.
Death doesn't get Mark sick, now. It's the thought of living past it that really turns his stomach.
//
Mark stops for the night somewhere between Santa Rosa, New Mexico, and Amarillo, Texas. He's so tired that he can't remember if he's crossed the state border. He's been driving for around fourteen hours. He crawls into the back of the car, eats gas station junk food he picked up about an hour back, leans his head right back against the divide between headrests and parcel shelf.
It's stupid, what he's doing, driving during the day and sleeping at night. The day is sunlit, safe. Safer, at least. It's a habit he's kept from the time when it was safe, when Mark only had to turn on a nightlight to assuage his baby sister's fear of the dark. She used to have nightmares about ghosts, about vampires, but Mark knew there was nothing like that out there, knew the difference between stories and real life like only a kid could, completely certain.
Here on the open road, Mark checks the car locks five times before he lies down on the backseat, and another three before he's able to fall asleep. He knows what's out there in the dark of the night.
//
When the virus first hit California, Mark watched someone turn. It wasn't the first zombie Mark ever killed, but he was still so unused to it that it turned his palms clammy, just the thought of it. He didn't know the guy, just saw him slumped in the street, half on the sidewalk and half on the road. It was early enough in the outbreak that there were still other people on the streets but late on enough that you stepped over bodies, or around them, if you were sensible or you didn't have a gun.
Mark had a gun, by then.
When Mark was maybe five feet away, the guy lurched up, up into a second life, graying skin, bloodshot eyes, his face still shining with fever sweat, and he saw Mark, and he groaned.
Mark thinks about that low noise more than any other, more than the sounds of the undead outside his panic room at night, more than the screams in the streets towards the end.
Mark shot the guy in the head, a clean shot between the eyes, and that was the day he went into his panic room and didn't come out again until everything had gone quiet.
//
Mark stops again somewhere just across the border into Alabama, sleeps fitfully, broken dreams. He killed five zombies the day before, four the day before that. There are more towns on the road this far east, coming back into built up America. Mark's on edge.
There's no signal anymore, hasn't been for days, but Mark still charges his phone in the car when the battery runs down. He keeps it in his pocket, presses the flat of his palm to it every now and then while he's driving, to remind himself it's there. It reminds him of Eduardo, that he really heard his voice on the other end of the phone, that he's driving to someone, not somewhere, that there's a point to what he's doing. It's easy to run mad, alone for so long, afraid for so long. Mark is not the kind of guy who likes to admit when he's afraid, but there does come a point when not even the most stoic guy could pretend otherwise, and that point is pretty much now.
When he crosses into Florida, Mark's heart starts thumping like he's running for his life.
He stops at a gas station somewhere around Gainesville, wanting to be able to stay as far away from Orlando as he can, as wary of the big cities here as he was when he was in California and avoiding LA. It's late in the day, long shadows, and he's tired and hyped up at once, and he almost shoots too late when the zombie drags itself round the side of the SUV. Mark has to push it away from his door; he gets its blood on his hands. His hands slip on the steering wheel as he pushes the gas pedal down, floors it back out onto the road.
//
Mark's never been to Lake Worth and it's bigger than he was expecting. He doesn't know where to start looking. He shakes out the map he's been using, taken from a gas station a few miles into Florida, stares down at it like it's going to suddenly grow a little arrow: Eduardo is here. He takes another look. There's a part of Lake Worth separated by a stretch of water from the bulk of the mainland, and he thinks, going on instinct, on survival technique, that that's where he'd go. Zombies can't rise from the sea, right? So it should be safer surrounded by more of it.
Not once since Mark left Palo Alto, not once has he thought about Eduardo not making it. It's been days since the phone call, anything could have happened. Mark hasn't thought about anything other than Eduardo surviving.
Mark heads for Lake Worth Bridge, and Eduardo is going to be alive.
//
Mark's just driven onto the bridge -- empty; completely, apocalyptically empty -- and there's a flash of movement right at the other end, taking shape at the horizon. Mark jolts, one hand going for the shotgun on the passenger seat and drives on, cautious.
He knows, though. He doesn't know how, but he knows.
It's Eduardo, running full pelt down the length of the bridge, and Mark drives as fast as he dares until Eduardo comes properly into view, long legs, stupid hair, red-faced. He must have been looking out for Mark. Some habits are apparently hard to break.
Mark's eyes start to burn, exhausted and grateful. He throws the car into park and gets out, and there's Wardo, alive and not dripping brains from his mouth or anything, and thank god. Eduardo's wearing a grubby grey tee and a pair of jeans so dirty Mark can see the stains from halfway across the bridge, and he's running to Mark and Mark's whole body aches with relief, an actual physical ache.
It's been six years and three thousand miles, and Mark has never been gladder to see anyone in his entire life.
"Mark!" Eduardo's voice tears almost like it did when he stormed across the Facebook office, but it's different this time, hot midday sun on Mark's back and blood on his hands, and Wardo running, running towards him. Eduardo gets within five paces and Mark stumbles forwards and throws his arms around him, exhausted and sick and so fucking glad to see him.
"Mark," says Eduardo, quieter, into the hot, sweaty side of Mark's neck and Mark says, "Wardo, Wardo," against his. He's shaking with unused adrenaline. His chest is tight. Eduardo is babbling nonsense at Mark's skin, stupid things like I've got you and you came, and Mark balls up his fists in the back of Eduardo's t-shirt, shuts his eyes, finally breathes in.
//
(on to part two)
i.
Mark takes the most important phone call of his life three months into the zombie apocalypse. The sound of his ringtone makes him jump so badly that he almost drops his gun.
He'd started leaving his phone on silent weeks ago, before all this began. There had been rumours going round that he was getting burnt out, people whispering by water coolers, but Mark had thought that was sensationalising it a bit. He'd just felt simmered down, like he'd been standing over a stove and someone had turned off the heat. He wasn't the next big thing anymore. Facebook was a once-in-a-lifetime, holy-shit idea, but it was running, then, done limbering up. Mark needed it more than it needed Mark, and he didn't know quite what to do with that.
He also didn't know exactly how people got the idea that he needed a vacation from the fact that he turned his phone on silent -- he's always hated being interrupted while he's busy -- but apparently Mark's phone settings were evidence enough for in-depth investigation of his psyche.
Mark had turned the ringer back on when the radio channels started to drop one by one into blank white noise, crackling out like the television channels before them, just in case. He told himself it was because his family might call. He knew, though, that if they were going to call, he would have heard from them by then. Still, that's what he told himself.
All in, he wasn't expecting a call anytime soon, and yet here he is, standing two paces from a bloodstain on a deserted Palo Alto sidewalk and his phone is vibrating in the pocket of his grubby cargo shorts.
He fishes for it, hits answer.
"Hello?" he says, which is probably redundant, but whatever. If there is someone trying to talk to him, that'll be the first person Mark will have spoken to in thirty-two days. He can cope with some redundancies.
The line is terrible, the static as loud and angry as on every radio frequency Mark has tried, but he doesn't hang up. For a long moment, all he can hear is the crackling on the line and his own heartbeat, the blood rushing in his ears like it's rushing to the other end of the call.
Then he hears it. Indistinctly, almost indistinguishable from the noise of the phone lines breaking up, Mark hears his name.
Mark still knows that voice.
"Wardo?" he says, and his heart is suddenly beating adrenaline-fast. "Eduardo, is that you?"
"Mark," Eduardo says. The distance, the poor quality of the connection cuts him off here and there, his voice swimming up out of the sea of white noise, surfacing for Mark. Mark can only catch odd words; he gets, "I'm -" and then nothing, and then, again, "Mark - ".
Mark is clutching the phone so hard his fingers hurt.
"Wardo," he says, as steadily as he can. "Wardo, where are you?"
Even in the midst of the fucking zombie apocalypse, he still can't ask if Eduardo's okay. Which is horrible, because he probably isn't. Mark isn't. Still, he should ask: he wants to have the right to ask.
Mark is one of the youngest billionaires ever, he could buy literally anything he wants save, like, the White House, but then the world had up and ended and all the money and privilege and sleepless nights in a panic room listening to people get eaten outside the reinforced metal doors has led him here. Here is days of not talking to anyone but the dead. Here is taking a gun with him every time he goes outside. Here is Mark pressing his overpriced and increasingly pointless smartphone to his ear and not being able to ask his best friend who sued him for six million dollars if he's okay or if a zombie's chewing on his leg or something.
Here, frankly, sucks.
The line clears like they're in a movie and the music has just dipped so the audience knows this is important. Mark can hear just how tired Eduardo is when he says, perfectly distinctly, "Lake Worth, Florida."
"Wardo, are - "
"Mark, I - "
- but the line goes dead before either of them, speaking over the top of each other in an exhausted, frantic jumble, can finish what they started.
It seemed to be a recurring problem in their lives.
Mark finishes, " - you okay?" to dead silence. He brings the phone away from his face and stares down at it like Eduardo might call back. He hits redial, but nothing happens. The phone lines must have gone down.
That's some fucking timing Eduardo has.
At this point, as Mark sees it, he has two choices.
One: stay in Palo Alto, hiding in his billionaire's house with state of the art security and the panic room that is the reason he's still alive right now, only going out to find food and water when the sun is out and strong, and waiting for his inevitable last gory struggle. Option number one isn't particularly appealing insomuch as it does seem to leave him dead or craving brains - and there are so few other living people around in California that this would just lead to addiction headaches or something and, like, wouldn't that just be fucking perfect, undead and dying for a bite.
So then, option two. This one is much more simple and also much more stupid. It's just this: find Eduardo.
Of course, this would involve driving 3000 miles across the zombie-infested country to a Floridian town he's never been to before where Eduardo may or may not be or even be alive. He would have to risk being out at night in unprotected shelters, not knowing where his next meal was coming from or where the safest place to rest would be. He'd be faced with the prospect of running out of gas and ending up stranded, getting ambushed (by zombies, what even is Mark's life now) or being bitten like the stupid expendable character who dies at the beginning of a horror movie to prove what the stakes are. Option two doesn't really have a lot going for it. Option two is practically suicidal. Mark really, really should not pick option two.
Mark looks around. It's mid-morning; he's got enough time to pack and get out of town, maybe even out of the state, before the heat and the light of the strong Californian sun dips enough that the zombies can lumber out of hiding. On the other hand, he probably has enough time to swing by the nearest Whole Foods on his way home, get something other than ramen for dinner. Maybe there's even be enough time for him to take a bath in his billionaire's bathroom, safe in the sunlight streaming in through the frosted glass windows, and not have to shiver his way through a shower in the panic room that leaves the whole floor wet.
Eduardo might already be dead. He might have died right after the phone cut off. Schrodinger's Eduardo, both dead and alive in the far away glow of Floridian sunlight.
"Fuck it," says Mark, aloud, like there was any way he was ever going to pick any other choice, and goes to pack a bag.
//
There's an abandoned SUV in the middle of the road two streets away from Mark's house, its driver and passenger side doors hanging open, the upholstery on the seats all but ruined. The door-open sensor is pinging away like the owner has just popped out for milk in the world's safest neighbourhood.
Mark thinks about miles to the gallon, about 3000 miles of road between here and his destination, and then he stops thinking about it, slings his gas cans into the back and slips into the driver's seat. He leans across to pull the passenger door shut, quietly and steadily ignoring the shredded chair his shoulder nudges, the bite marks on the head-rest.
The keys are still in the ignition, like he's living in some shitty movie where the protagonist only has to work for a few things -- looking cool and kicking ass in fight scenes, and how hard to kiss the girl. Palo Alto looks kind of like a movie set right now, deserted and silent, but Mark's all too aware of how real it is.
Mark can't seem to stop thinking in movie references. He's not stupid enough not to realise it's a self-preservation thing, trying to keep reality at a distance, but he thinks he's probably allowed it. Preserving his self is kind of the fucking point now. If Chris were here, he'd probably start telling Mark some self-aware psychological crap about denial not being a healthy pastime, but right now Mark's much more concerned about his physical well being. Chris isn't here to nag him otherwise anymore, and if denial is holding Mark up then Mark isn't going to stop leaning on it any time soon.
It's not like he's ever had the healthiest of coping mechanisms anyway. He sees no reason why he should start now.
The sound of the engine turning over, a coughing roar into life, is like something angry waking up. Mark doesn't know what else is out there, if there's something bigger or angrier than the fucking zombies, but he has to assume that if zombies are possible, anything is possible.
Logic can be a real bitch that way.
He grits his teeth and shoves the accelerator straight to the floor and the car ploughs forward, blind, hard obedience. It makes him feel good.
Lake Worth, Florida. All he has to do is get there and not get eaten. How hard can it be?
//
He heads for the I-40 in part because no way in hell is he heading for any city if he can help it. Palo Alto is bad enough, and Los Angeles had, like, four million more people in it than Palo Alto did, which basically now means that driving through it would open out into Mark Zuckerberg versus The Four Million Strong Zombie Hoard, and, how about no, thanks all the same. On a list of places Mark would least like to be right now, LA is second only to New York. Fucking big cities; fucking public transport; fucking airborne zombie viruses.
Gigantic undead populations aside, Mark finds himself favouring the idea of big, open states over a steady stream of coastal towns. He's a fan of open space these days, likes to be able to see what's coming. That, at least, isn't new.
//
Mark would like to say he can't imagine the beginning of the end of the world but he can give it a go. He doesn't even really have to stretch his imagination that far. He's spent enough time playing shitty video games with Dustin to be more than well acquainted with all Dustin's various zombie conspiracy theories.
Mark tries not to think about Dustin these days.
Nevertheless, he can't stop himself imagining the first time this happened, the first time someone -- maybe a hospital morgue tech, or a nurse in the middle of the night, or someone waiting by a bedside until their spouse's fever broke -- had to defend themselves against this, the first time someone looked into the eyes of someone they knew and realised they didn't know them anymore. Well, okay, so maybe it's a little less you're not the person I thought you were and a little more holy shit holy shit you're trying to eat my face, but the principle remains the same. It's disconcerting, looking at someone and seeing something completely different than you were expecting.
He wonders whether Eduardo thinks about the zombie uprising, or whether it would have needed to be a robot attack for him to see the parallels. Either way, Mark isn't coming out of that comparison particularly favourably.
He's had too much empty time on his hands recently. This isn't stuff he'd normally let himself dwell on. Then again, neither is stay the fuck down, you zombie bastard, I'm trying to reach the matches but that's still something that Mark has to deal with more often than he'd like these days. Burning may be the easiest way to be sure the undead stay actually dead, but it's also a fucking hassle. Mark's better with guns, but he'll take fire if it's that or jonesing for brains. He's not an idiot.
Mark thinks about the first time someone was bitten, in a morgue or a hospital or some quiet home bedroom, and then he thinks, eyes blurring, hands tight around the steering wheel, not me, not me, not me.
//
Mark's been driving for over eight hours when the sun finally gives up and disappears. He's somewhere around the Mojave National Preserve, not even out of California yet. His leg is cramping where he's had it jammed down on the gas pedal, and there's a crick in his neck from checking the rearview so often, but he's not been eaten and he's out in the middle of nowhere, which are both pluses. If Mark were the kind of guy to make pro and con lists, Not Being Eaten and Not Near Zombies would definitely make the good side. Not that it would really matter, because there's not really anything that can balance out the Zombie Apocalypse that's weighing down the con side with a kind of smug aplomb, but, you know, Mark's not dead yet. The pro side wins today.
But then, Mark thinks, not even bothering to pull over to the side of the road before he kills the engine, clambers into the backseat to lie down next to the guns and the gas canisters, there's always tomorrow.
Mark doesn't think he really has the right temperament for list-making.
//
Early May, the news said there had been an outbreak of flu in New York. By early June, it was a country-wide epidemic. By early July, as far as he could tell, Mark was the only one left alive in Palo Alto, alone and terrified and locked in his panic room for the very first time.
It's August now. Mark doesn't think much of his chances of seeing September.
//
Mark is up with the sun the next morning, easing himself out of the car to stretch out his back, his shoulders. When he was younger, he could sleep anywhere, work anywhere, hunched over a laptop like he was coding himself invulnerable, shoulders a shield against interruption or doubt. Well, clearly Mark's younger self sucked at prioritizing, because all the code in the world couldn't make him invulnerable to physical ailments. Now, Mark's had carpal tunnel twice since Facebook last moved offices and he was seeing a chiropractor before his chiropractor presumably joined the ranks of the living dead. What Mark's saying here is, if the world got to pick its last few inhabitants, the select few to defend humanity against the invading armies of the undead, Mark would not even be in the top thousand.
Then again, barring, like, marines and soldiers and the other groups of people actively trained to deal with this type of shit, Mark doesn't know who would be in the top thousand. He probably doesn't know any of them. The kind of people he knows are good at computers and the only good a computer has done Mark since the dead started walking is when he used a laptop to beat a zombie away from his office door. He thinks maybe Eduardo would have approved.
He wonders how Eduardo is doing, far away in Florida. He wonders if Eduardo has been in Florida for long. The last he heard -- the last thing Chris told him -- was that Eduardo was working in Singapore. Maybe everyone in Singapore has been given zombie-apocalypse survival skills. It's not too far outside the realm of disbelief: Singapore, to Mark, feels so far away that he feels like he could believe basically anything he heard about it. Right now, standing in the early morning sunshine on a deserted stretch of road in South-East California, Florida seems far enough away for even the most outlandish rumours to sound plausible. A kraken tentacling its way up a beach? Sure! Godzilla stomping his way through Miami? Why not! Atlantis rising from the sea? Seems about as likely as Eduardo miraculously being alive and in the country and wanting to see him.
In all the zombie movies Mark has ever watched, the rumours have always been about a safe haven, somewhere the zombies haven't reached. If this were a movie, Lake Worth would be it, and Eduardo would be safe.
Mark's thinking about movies again, whole freaking film reels of avoidance.
Fine. Mark lets himself take a second to think about it, to think about somewhere with other people, open beaches, views to the horizon all around him. He thinks about getting out of his car in a few days time, dirty and sweaty and tired, to fall asleep near other people, to have someone to watch his back for the first time in weeks. Just then, just for that moment, he leans back against his stolen SUV and lets himself think about relaxing, about the possibility of falling asleep listening to someone else's breathing.
In Kirkland, during finals, Mark once woke up with Eduardo pressed all along the line of his back, nosing against the back of Mark's neck in his sleep.
Mark closes his eyes. The sun creeps higher. Time to go.
//
There's just under fourteen hours of daylight at this time of year, and Mark drives solidly all through them like he's chasing down the sunset. When he was younger, growing up with the cold winters of Dobbs Ferry, NY, he used to think about taking a road trip across this part of the country, the wider, hotter states. It's funny, he always thinks, travelling from coast to coast, that despite all his US History classes, all the freaking maps he coloured in Geography, he's always unprepared for just how big America is. He doesn't see another person, dead or alive, for the whole of Arizona. He skirts Flagstaff as best he can, still wary of the bigger cities, and makes it across the border into New Mexico before he has to kill anything. He's been awake for a little over eight hours.
//
The first time Mark killed a zombie, he was sick immediately afterwards. Like, immediately. He smashed it in the head with a baseball bat until it dropped to the ground, and he kept hitting it, watching its skull shatter into bloody pulp, exactly the opposite of clean binary, all bone fragments and brain matter splattering against Mark's feet - his skin, because he lived in Palo Alto, he could fucking well wear flip-flops if he wanted - until it wasn't even twitching, because nothing could be twitching after that. So, yeah: Mark brought the baseball bat up and paused, and then before he'd even decided to stop swinging, his body told him he was done and he was sick just to the side of his kill.
Death doesn't get Mark sick, now. It's the thought of living past it that really turns his stomach.
//
Mark stops for the night somewhere between Santa Rosa, New Mexico, and Amarillo, Texas. He's so tired that he can't remember if he's crossed the state border. He's been driving for around fourteen hours. He crawls into the back of the car, eats gas station junk food he picked up about an hour back, leans his head right back against the divide between headrests and parcel shelf.
It's stupid, what he's doing, driving during the day and sleeping at night. The day is sunlit, safe. Safer, at least. It's a habit he's kept from the time when it was safe, when Mark only had to turn on a nightlight to assuage his baby sister's fear of the dark. She used to have nightmares about ghosts, about vampires, but Mark knew there was nothing like that out there, knew the difference between stories and real life like only a kid could, completely certain.
Here on the open road, Mark checks the car locks five times before he lies down on the backseat, and another three before he's able to fall asleep. He knows what's out there in the dark of the night.
//
When the virus first hit California, Mark watched someone turn. It wasn't the first zombie Mark ever killed, but he was still so unused to it that it turned his palms clammy, just the thought of it. He didn't know the guy, just saw him slumped in the street, half on the sidewalk and half on the road. It was early enough in the outbreak that there were still other people on the streets but late on enough that you stepped over bodies, or around them, if you were sensible or you didn't have a gun.
Mark had a gun, by then.
When Mark was maybe five feet away, the guy lurched up, up into a second life, graying skin, bloodshot eyes, his face still shining with fever sweat, and he saw Mark, and he groaned.
Mark thinks about that low noise more than any other, more than the sounds of the undead outside his panic room at night, more than the screams in the streets towards the end.
Mark shot the guy in the head, a clean shot between the eyes, and that was the day he went into his panic room and didn't come out again until everything had gone quiet.
//
Mark stops again somewhere just across the border into Alabama, sleeps fitfully, broken dreams. He killed five zombies the day before, four the day before that. There are more towns on the road this far east, coming back into built up America. Mark's on edge.
There's no signal anymore, hasn't been for days, but Mark still charges his phone in the car when the battery runs down. He keeps it in his pocket, presses the flat of his palm to it every now and then while he's driving, to remind himself it's there. It reminds him of Eduardo, that he really heard his voice on the other end of the phone, that he's driving to someone, not somewhere, that there's a point to what he's doing. It's easy to run mad, alone for so long, afraid for so long. Mark is not the kind of guy who likes to admit when he's afraid, but there does come a point when not even the most stoic guy could pretend otherwise, and that point is pretty much now.
When he crosses into Florida, Mark's heart starts thumping like he's running for his life.
He stops at a gas station somewhere around Gainesville, wanting to be able to stay as far away from Orlando as he can, as wary of the big cities here as he was when he was in California and avoiding LA. It's late in the day, long shadows, and he's tired and hyped up at once, and he almost shoots too late when the zombie drags itself round the side of the SUV. Mark has to push it away from his door; he gets its blood on his hands. His hands slip on the steering wheel as he pushes the gas pedal down, floors it back out onto the road.
//
Mark's never been to Lake Worth and it's bigger than he was expecting. He doesn't know where to start looking. He shakes out the map he's been using, taken from a gas station a few miles into Florida, stares down at it like it's going to suddenly grow a little arrow: Eduardo is here. He takes another look. There's a part of Lake Worth separated by a stretch of water from the bulk of the mainland, and he thinks, going on instinct, on survival technique, that that's where he'd go. Zombies can't rise from the sea, right? So it should be safer surrounded by more of it.
Not once since Mark left Palo Alto, not once has he thought about Eduardo not making it. It's been days since the phone call, anything could have happened. Mark hasn't thought about anything other than Eduardo surviving.
Mark heads for Lake Worth Bridge, and Eduardo is going to be alive.
//
Mark's just driven onto the bridge -- empty; completely, apocalyptically empty -- and there's a flash of movement right at the other end, taking shape at the horizon. Mark jolts, one hand going for the shotgun on the passenger seat and drives on, cautious.
He knows, though. He doesn't know how, but he knows.
It's Eduardo, running full pelt down the length of the bridge, and Mark drives as fast as he dares until Eduardo comes properly into view, long legs, stupid hair, red-faced. He must have been looking out for Mark. Some habits are apparently hard to break.
Mark's eyes start to burn, exhausted and grateful. He throws the car into park and gets out, and there's Wardo, alive and not dripping brains from his mouth or anything, and thank god. Eduardo's wearing a grubby grey tee and a pair of jeans so dirty Mark can see the stains from halfway across the bridge, and he's running to Mark and Mark's whole body aches with relief, an actual physical ache.
It's been six years and three thousand miles, and Mark has never been gladder to see anyone in his entire life.
"Mark!" Eduardo's voice tears almost like it did when he stormed across the Facebook office, but it's different this time, hot midday sun on Mark's back and blood on his hands, and Wardo running, running towards him. Eduardo gets within five paces and Mark stumbles forwards and throws his arms around him, exhausted and sick and so fucking glad to see him.
"Mark," says Eduardo, quieter, into the hot, sweaty side of Mark's neck and Mark says, "Wardo, Wardo," against his. He's shaking with unused adrenaline. His chest is tight. Eduardo is babbling nonsense at Mark's skin, stupid things like I've got you and you came, and Mark balls up his fists in the back of Eduardo's t-shirt, shuts his eyes, finally breathes in.
//
(on to part two)
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Date: 2011-09-05 08:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-07 10:17 pm (UTC)