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zombie_festTitle: Walking Targets
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chibifukurou
Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing: Matt/John
Summary: They're dependent on Twitter to keep them alive
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: detailed violence, DARK!!!
AN: This got a bit long and conveluted so if you see any grammar mistakes please let me know and I'll sort them out.
When I catch up with John he is standing in the middle of what from the destroyed tables, cracked tiles and half burned kiosks had to have been the mall’s food court once upon a time. He’s muttering angry threats about birds and plucking, no doubt aimed at the harmless bit of cellular technology he has clenched between his hands.
John has gotten a lot better with technology over the last year but his hatred of all things digital hasn’t changed.
Still, if what I think he’s upset about has happened then I can’t blame him for being enraged. It’s not often that Twitter goes down but when it does everyone who relies on Tweets to tell them where bands of zombies are holed up become walking targets. Unfortunately, John and I are two of those targets and its only an hour until sundown.
Even though I know that John’s the biggest badass around I can’t keep myself from reaching for the cellular phone in John’s hand. It’s stupid and a waste of time but all my instincts are telling me that I might have a chance of finding something John’s missed.
John of course knows me well enough to guess where my panic will lead me and jerks the phone out of reach before I can even get close enough to touch it. I of course over react with a scream of “What the Hell!” You’d think that I could remember to keep quite enough not to wake the dead, or undead in this case but I still have a habit of reacting before I think.
A habit that John still finds amusing, if his cocked head and the twitch of his lips is anything to go by. He gets his amusement under control quickly though, everyone seems to do that now that there is so little to be happy about and John was stoic before this mess started.
With a growl of “Let’s go”, John heads out of the burned out temple to America’s cultural obesity and towards the wing that houses Belks. I should have known or at least thought of heading there myself, but keeping up with real world events has never been my forte.
The malls not large but it’s still big enough to have a second floor in the bigger departments stores and without a way of knowing if it’s safe to leave the mall we need to settle in. A second story means an elevator, a place we can hole up during the night. Elevators aren’t my preferred safe havens but I’ve learned to take what I can get and John keeps my claustrophobia at bay. John’s not big on elevators either but that for an entirely different reason, one I wish I’d never discovered.
At the time I’d been insulted, thinking that John just didn’t want to have to hold me close so that he could stay quit enough to remain unnoticed by the zombies. He’d pushed and pushed until John had finally lost his temper and screamed,” You want to know why I don’t like elevators, Its because I know that even if they can’t climb the rope to get to the car when its between floors they can fall from the top or just park themselves in the dark underneath the car so we can’t move and then they’ll just stand there wailing like they do until we either go mad and let them eat us, kill ourselves, or starve to death. Can you imagine being stuck in a elevator car, in the dark for days listening to them scream?”
I actually can, not that I’ll ever tell John that. When the virus first started spreading, back before John found me I was stuck in the panic room I’d made in my apartment for days. I listened to the screams my neighbors, the nice old lady down the hall and the pretty coed who lived next-door made as they were attacked and the screams as they changed, but nothing compared to the wailing sounds they made once they became zombies.
Nobody really knows what the wailing is for, some say it is a sign that the zombies remembered their humanity; others said that it is a way of communicating, like wolves on a hunt. I don’t care why they wail, I just wish they’d stop. I remember that being all I could think about when I was trapped in my panic room. That thought of getting them to stop was what drove me from the room, in a fit of madness I can only half-remember.
I can definitely stand witness to the validity of his worries that we’d go mad if trapped in a small space and forced to listen to the zombies wail. Not that I’ll ever tell him that, suspecting something is different that knowing it and I don’t want to give him a reason to avoid the dubious safety offered by the elevators. So instead I grab a couple candy bars and sodas from the smashed out mall vending machines before following him to the Belks and the latest of many elevators.
We might go mad but at least the food will keep us from starving to death as fast if we get stuck in the elevator.
…
When I get to the Belks John is just standing there in front of the elevator, he doesn’t even notice my arrival, which is bad. John notices everything; it’s what keeps us alive. I should probably try to snap him out of it from where I ‘m standing down the hall but no matter how much he tries to convince me being cowardly is better than scaring him and ending up with his fist in my face. I’ve never been able to convince myself that it’s not completely rude to throw stuff at him when he’s upset. Not to mention that even throwing food as worthless as stale potatoe chips at him is wasteful. We need the food more than I need to avoid getting hit.
Once I get closer, I wish I’d reconsidered. The elevator is there waiting for us alright but it’s not empty. At first my mind refuses to acknowledge what I’m seeing, it tries to convince me that somebody was using pink and blue kids clothes to make a bed for themselves but I as I keep staring at the brightly colored mass my mind is forced to tell me what I’m seeing. It takes note of a coat here and a hat there and then it begins to catalog this arm and that leg and the scent of blood that overlays everything.
Somebody killed these kids, there’s no other conclusion to be drawn. If they’d been attacked the kids would be up and hunting instead of laying like broken and abandoned dolls at the bottom of an elevator car. It seems that murder can still be shocking, even when the dead are alive and killing.
I think we’d have stayed there staring at the sorry sight until dark had fallen if the waling hadn’t started. That snapped us out of our reverie fast, every instinct screaming at us to run. I only meet John’s eyes for a second but that’s all that’s needed. We won’t spend the night here even if it’s our best chance of surviving. The kids that died in the elevator deserver more respect.
Being careful not to look back into the elevator, we turn and begin to run for a staircase made by a old broken-down escalator. It’s too late in the day for us to get to another store and another elevator which means our only hope of survival is heading up. If we can get to the roof and block the doors, we’ll have at least some security, particularly if the zombies don’t catch our scent trail. They have a habit of only moving forward unless their hunting, which means going up to a place where there isn’t regularly food is our best chance.
It takes precious minutes to find the roof access, but this isn’t the first time we’ve had to hide out on a roof and we know the places to look.
The steel doors that block the roof access aren’t the strongest we’ve seen and their stability isn’t helped by the fact we’re jimmying the lock but they’re still better than wooden doors for blocking our scents and keeping the zombies out.
Once we’re on the roof we make quick work of unwinding the chain John keeps in his bag and wrapping it around the door handle and between as many heating pipes as we can find. There’s not a lot you can do to secure an inward opening door against being opened but it should hold up against a few zombies and give us an early warning if their planning to attack.
It’s going to be a tense night but hopefully will live to see tomorrow and even if we don’t, dying like this is still better than surviving because we laid on top of the bodies of a bunch of dead children.
…
That night during John’s watch, I have nightmares, no doubt brought on by the sight of the children in the elevator.
I remember how scared I was when they first announced that an unknown pathogen had been released by a terrorist organization and that everyone was to remain calm. I remembered the same “stay calm” bullcrap being put out during the FireSale and exactly how calm everyone should have been through that and had decided not to take any chances.
I’d gone out and bought as man bottles of water and nonperishable items as I could as soon as I could. I wasn’t stupid, people might be glued to their televisions at first but as soon as panic set in they’d ransack every grocery store they could find in hopes of getting survival rations. I wasn’t planning on waiting for everyone else to get on the bandwagon and figure out that preparing was the best idea. Over the next few days I watched as the world went crazy. My safe room had a generator and a computer, more than enough to let me hack into the world’s satellites and watch as everything fell to pieces.
First to fall were the cities, their populous so tightly packed that infection ran rampant, spread by what at that point was unknown means. I watched as parents murdered children, churchgoers committed mass suicide, and the world descended into madness all in the name of finding salvation from the virus. I wonder sometimes if madness was the first sign of the virus, but I know better. The madness and death was just humans being humans
The zombies on the other hand were more than human, perhaps worse than human. If nothing else they were certainly more fear inducing than the humans they evolved from. They turned my nice neighbors into killing machines that hunted and killed everything in sight as I watched through CCTV, balled my eyes out, and went a little crazy.
I don’t know what I would have done if John hadn’t found me before I acted in my insanity, I fear that it wouldn’t have been good and that fear is no doubt to blame for the dreams I have of murdering children while trapped in my safe room.
When I wake, John is crouched over me eyes intently trained on the door even as his blunt nails dig into my cheeks. I must have made some sort of noise in my maddened dreams, luckily it doesn’t seem to have been enough to alert the hunting parties I can hear wailing beneath us, to our presence.
Once he’s sure we haven’t been discovered John moves off of me and lets me up. His face is pinched, though I doubt it’s from his lack of sleep. John might be getting on in years but he’s no slouch when it comes to stamina and a couple hours of missed sleep won’t bother him.
I want to act brash and order him to tell me what’s got him so upset but I’ve traveled with him long enough now to know that ordering him around won’t accomplish anything. Instead we sit together and watch as the sun begins to rise over the haze covered skyscrapers that surround the squat mass of the mall.
John finally talks when the sun is high enough in the sky to scare the zombies back into their hiding places and the air falls silent around us. His voice seems to ring out like a death knell when he says those first three horrible words, “Freddie was killed.”
...
Even after all these years of hearing John call him that It still takes me a moment to place who Freddie is, but not long enough. Warlock was the closest thing I had to a friend beyond John and hearing that he was dead hurt on a personal level, but even more concerning was that Warlock had been one of the four people who keep Twitter running. Without him information in our part of the world, the part he kept an eye on would be sketchy at best and even worse, I hadn’t heard of any hackers left who could take up the mantle Warlock had always jokingly called the “Twitter Lord.”
Of course at that point John dropped the second bombshell. They were calling me in to act as the new Twitter Lord and there wasn’t anything John or I could do to stop it. I’d managed to keep from being drafted for the position before because of Warlock’s interference but that had obviously changed.
Now I was going to be forced to give up even the bare trappings of freedom John and I had been able to maintain during our run from the zombies. I was going to be locked up in a “cell” of barbed wire and computers forced to work for what was left of the North America’s government until such a time as somebody in the facility go infected and killed everyone or an agent of another world leader assassinated me.
Either way the position was a guaranteed death sentence. Warlock was the forth “Twitter Lord” to be killed in the last six months.
I can see John’s hand clenching spasmodically around his gun. A gun I haven’t seen since we got down to the last bullets and decided to save them for just in case. This was one of those times, but unfortunately, we couldn’t use them like we’d always talked about.
For all we would give up almost anything to stay together, neither of us was willing to give up the existence of Twitter and the help it provided the survivors. The government representatives would take me away soon no doubt arriving by helicopter to make sure I didn’t get killed before I could serve my purpose, but they won’t take John.
No doubt, they will have some good excuse for why he can’t come and promise to find a way for him to join me later, just like they promised Warlock when they left his mother behind. They’ll be lying of course, but that won’t matter.
John knows enough to know that they won't allow him to come on the helicopter with me, but he doesn’t know why and I don’t plan to tell him, just like I won’t tell him that Warlock died by his own hand.
Warlock had known that I was one of the last hackers left in North America and had warned me what would come when I took his position. The North American Leaders wanted to dismantle the worldwide Twitter community and force all the other countries to rely on our Tweets in order to survive. Warlock had died to keep that from happening and I will as well, but first I have to say goodbye to John.
Looking him in the eye and acting like I accept this change is the hardest thing I’ve had to do and that’s saying a lot considering all I’ve done since this whole mess began but I do it anyway. John’s life depends on his letting me go without a fight. He has a chance of surviving against the zombies but not against the government agents.
So I smile and act like I’ll see him again once the government decides its safe and when the helicopter lands and walk into the grasping maw of its doors with a smile on my face and a babbling monologue about being saved at last on my lips.
I can hear John’s breath turned raspy from rage but I don’t turn back to look. I’ll be to tempted to take him up on the offer I know is in his eyes. The bullets are still in the gun he’s clutching and he could probably kill both of us before the agents could stop him, but I can’t let him do that, can’t take the easy way out.
My death is going to mean something and I can’t allow anything, even love, to change that.
Author:
chibifukurou Fandom: Live Free or Die Hard
Pairing: Matt/John
Summary: They're dependent on Twitter to keep them alive
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: detailed violence, DARK!!!
AN: This got a bit long and conveluted so if you see any grammar mistakes please let me know and I'll sort them out.
When I catch up with John he is standing in the middle of what from the destroyed tables, cracked tiles and half burned kiosks had to have been the mall’s food court once upon a time. He’s muttering angry threats about birds and plucking, no doubt aimed at the harmless bit of cellular technology he has clenched between his hands.
John has gotten a lot better with technology over the last year but his hatred of all things digital hasn’t changed.
Still, if what I think he’s upset about has happened then I can’t blame him for being enraged. It’s not often that Twitter goes down but when it does everyone who relies on Tweets to tell them where bands of zombies are holed up become walking targets. Unfortunately, John and I are two of those targets and its only an hour until sundown.
Even though I know that John’s the biggest badass around I can’t keep myself from reaching for the cellular phone in John’s hand. It’s stupid and a waste of time but all my instincts are telling me that I might have a chance of finding something John’s missed.
John of course knows me well enough to guess where my panic will lead me and jerks the phone out of reach before I can even get close enough to touch it. I of course over react with a scream of “What the Hell!” You’d think that I could remember to keep quite enough not to wake the dead, or undead in this case but I still have a habit of reacting before I think.
A habit that John still finds amusing, if his cocked head and the twitch of his lips is anything to go by. He gets his amusement under control quickly though, everyone seems to do that now that there is so little to be happy about and John was stoic before this mess started.
With a growl of “Let’s go”, John heads out of the burned out temple to America’s cultural obesity and towards the wing that houses Belks. I should have known or at least thought of heading there myself, but keeping up with real world events has never been my forte.
The malls not large but it’s still big enough to have a second floor in the bigger departments stores and without a way of knowing if it’s safe to leave the mall we need to settle in. A second story means an elevator, a place we can hole up during the night. Elevators aren’t my preferred safe havens but I’ve learned to take what I can get and John keeps my claustrophobia at bay. John’s not big on elevators either but that for an entirely different reason, one I wish I’d never discovered.
At the time I’d been insulted, thinking that John just didn’t want to have to hold me close so that he could stay quit enough to remain unnoticed by the zombies. He’d pushed and pushed until John had finally lost his temper and screamed,” You want to know why I don’t like elevators, Its because I know that even if they can’t climb the rope to get to the car when its between floors they can fall from the top or just park themselves in the dark underneath the car so we can’t move and then they’ll just stand there wailing like they do until we either go mad and let them eat us, kill ourselves, or starve to death. Can you imagine being stuck in a elevator car, in the dark for days listening to them scream?”
I actually can, not that I’ll ever tell John that. When the virus first started spreading, back before John found me I was stuck in the panic room I’d made in my apartment for days. I listened to the screams my neighbors, the nice old lady down the hall and the pretty coed who lived next-door made as they were attacked and the screams as they changed, but nothing compared to the wailing sounds they made once they became zombies.
Nobody really knows what the wailing is for, some say it is a sign that the zombies remembered their humanity; others said that it is a way of communicating, like wolves on a hunt. I don’t care why they wail, I just wish they’d stop. I remember that being all I could think about when I was trapped in my panic room. That thought of getting them to stop was what drove me from the room, in a fit of madness I can only half-remember.
I can definitely stand witness to the validity of his worries that we’d go mad if trapped in a small space and forced to listen to the zombies wail. Not that I’ll ever tell him that, suspecting something is different that knowing it and I don’t want to give him a reason to avoid the dubious safety offered by the elevators. So instead I grab a couple candy bars and sodas from the smashed out mall vending machines before following him to the Belks and the latest of many elevators.
We might go mad but at least the food will keep us from starving to death as fast if we get stuck in the elevator.
…
When I get to the Belks John is just standing there in front of the elevator, he doesn’t even notice my arrival, which is bad. John notices everything; it’s what keeps us alive. I should probably try to snap him out of it from where I ‘m standing down the hall but no matter how much he tries to convince me being cowardly is better than scaring him and ending up with his fist in my face. I’ve never been able to convince myself that it’s not completely rude to throw stuff at him when he’s upset. Not to mention that even throwing food as worthless as stale potatoe chips at him is wasteful. We need the food more than I need to avoid getting hit.
Once I get closer, I wish I’d reconsidered. The elevator is there waiting for us alright but it’s not empty. At first my mind refuses to acknowledge what I’m seeing, it tries to convince me that somebody was using pink and blue kids clothes to make a bed for themselves but I as I keep staring at the brightly colored mass my mind is forced to tell me what I’m seeing. It takes note of a coat here and a hat there and then it begins to catalog this arm and that leg and the scent of blood that overlays everything.
Somebody killed these kids, there’s no other conclusion to be drawn. If they’d been attacked the kids would be up and hunting instead of laying like broken and abandoned dolls at the bottom of an elevator car. It seems that murder can still be shocking, even when the dead are alive and killing.
I think we’d have stayed there staring at the sorry sight until dark had fallen if the waling hadn’t started. That snapped us out of our reverie fast, every instinct screaming at us to run. I only meet John’s eyes for a second but that’s all that’s needed. We won’t spend the night here even if it’s our best chance of surviving. The kids that died in the elevator deserver more respect.
Being careful not to look back into the elevator, we turn and begin to run for a staircase made by a old broken-down escalator. It’s too late in the day for us to get to another store and another elevator which means our only hope of survival is heading up. If we can get to the roof and block the doors, we’ll have at least some security, particularly if the zombies don’t catch our scent trail. They have a habit of only moving forward unless their hunting, which means going up to a place where there isn’t regularly food is our best chance.
It takes precious minutes to find the roof access, but this isn’t the first time we’ve had to hide out on a roof and we know the places to look.
The steel doors that block the roof access aren’t the strongest we’ve seen and their stability isn’t helped by the fact we’re jimmying the lock but they’re still better than wooden doors for blocking our scents and keeping the zombies out.
Once we’re on the roof we make quick work of unwinding the chain John keeps in his bag and wrapping it around the door handle and between as many heating pipes as we can find. There’s not a lot you can do to secure an inward opening door against being opened but it should hold up against a few zombies and give us an early warning if their planning to attack.
It’s going to be a tense night but hopefully will live to see tomorrow and even if we don’t, dying like this is still better than surviving because we laid on top of the bodies of a bunch of dead children.
…
That night during John’s watch, I have nightmares, no doubt brought on by the sight of the children in the elevator.
I remember how scared I was when they first announced that an unknown pathogen had been released by a terrorist organization and that everyone was to remain calm. I remembered the same “stay calm” bullcrap being put out during the FireSale and exactly how calm everyone should have been through that and had decided not to take any chances.
I’d gone out and bought as man bottles of water and nonperishable items as I could as soon as I could. I wasn’t stupid, people might be glued to their televisions at first but as soon as panic set in they’d ransack every grocery store they could find in hopes of getting survival rations. I wasn’t planning on waiting for everyone else to get on the bandwagon and figure out that preparing was the best idea. Over the next few days I watched as the world went crazy. My safe room had a generator and a computer, more than enough to let me hack into the world’s satellites and watch as everything fell to pieces.
First to fall were the cities, their populous so tightly packed that infection ran rampant, spread by what at that point was unknown means. I watched as parents murdered children, churchgoers committed mass suicide, and the world descended into madness all in the name of finding salvation from the virus. I wonder sometimes if madness was the first sign of the virus, but I know better. The madness and death was just humans being humans
The zombies on the other hand were more than human, perhaps worse than human. If nothing else they were certainly more fear inducing than the humans they evolved from. They turned my nice neighbors into killing machines that hunted and killed everything in sight as I watched through CCTV, balled my eyes out, and went a little crazy.
I don’t know what I would have done if John hadn’t found me before I acted in my insanity, I fear that it wouldn’t have been good and that fear is no doubt to blame for the dreams I have of murdering children while trapped in my safe room.
When I wake, John is crouched over me eyes intently trained on the door even as his blunt nails dig into my cheeks. I must have made some sort of noise in my maddened dreams, luckily it doesn’t seem to have been enough to alert the hunting parties I can hear wailing beneath us, to our presence.
Once he’s sure we haven’t been discovered John moves off of me and lets me up. His face is pinched, though I doubt it’s from his lack of sleep. John might be getting on in years but he’s no slouch when it comes to stamina and a couple hours of missed sleep won’t bother him.
I want to act brash and order him to tell me what’s got him so upset but I’ve traveled with him long enough now to know that ordering him around won’t accomplish anything. Instead we sit together and watch as the sun begins to rise over the haze covered skyscrapers that surround the squat mass of the mall.
John finally talks when the sun is high enough in the sky to scare the zombies back into their hiding places and the air falls silent around us. His voice seems to ring out like a death knell when he says those first three horrible words, “Freddie was killed.”
...
Even after all these years of hearing John call him that It still takes me a moment to place who Freddie is, but not long enough. Warlock was the closest thing I had to a friend beyond John and hearing that he was dead hurt on a personal level, but even more concerning was that Warlock had been one of the four people who keep Twitter running. Without him information in our part of the world, the part he kept an eye on would be sketchy at best and even worse, I hadn’t heard of any hackers left who could take up the mantle Warlock had always jokingly called the “Twitter Lord.”
Of course at that point John dropped the second bombshell. They were calling me in to act as the new Twitter Lord and there wasn’t anything John or I could do to stop it. I’d managed to keep from being drafted for the position before because of Warlock’s interference but that had obviously changed.
Now I was going to be forced to give up even the bare trappings of freedom John and I had been able to maintain during our run from the zombies. I was going to be locked up in a “cell” of barbed wire and computers forced to work for what was left of the North America’s government until such a time as somebody in the facility go infected and killed everyone or an agent of another world leader assassinated me.
Either way the position was a guaranteed death sentence. Warlock was the forth “Twitter Lord” to be killed in the last six months.
I can see John’s hand clenching spasmodically around his gun. A gun I haven’t seen since we got down to the last bullets and decided to save them for just in case. This was one of those times, but unfortunately, we couldn’t use them like we’d always talked about.
For all we would give up almost anything to stay together, neither of us was willing to give up the existence of Twitter and the help it provided the survivors. The government representatives would take me away soon no doubt arriving by helicopter to make sure I didn’t get killed before I could serve my purpose, but they won’t take John.
No doubt, they will have some good excuse for why he can’t come and promise to find a way for him to join me later, just like they promised Warlock when they left his mother behind. They’ll be lying of course, but that won’t matter.
John knows enough to know that they won't allow him to come on the helicopter with me, but he doesn’t know why and I don’t plan to tell him, just like I won’t tell him that Warlock died by his own hand.
Warlock had known that I was one of the last hackers left in North America and had warned me what would come when I took his position. The North American Leaders wanted to dismantle the worldwide Twitter community and force all the other countries to rely on our Tweets in order to survive. Warlock had died to keep that from happening and I will as well, but first I have to say goodbye to John.
Looking him in the eye and acting like I accept this change is the hardest thing I’ve had to do and that’s saying a lot considering all I’ve done since this whole mess began but I do it anyway. John’s life depends on his letting me go without a fight. He has a chance of surviving against the zombies but not against the government agents.
So I smile and act like I’ll see him again once the government decides its safe and when the helicopter lands and walk into the grasping maw of its doors with a smile on my face and a babbling monologue about being saved at last on my lips.
I can hear John’s breath turned raspy from rage but I don’t turn back to look. I’ll be to tempted to take him up on the offer I know is in his eyes. The bullets are still in the gun he’s clutching and he could probably kill both of us before the agents could stop him, but I can’t let him do that, can’t take the easy way out.
My death is going to mean something and I can’t allow anything, even love, to change that.
