We Can Run, Or We Can Die [Frerard]

Fifteen|Apparently Kung Fu Panda Didn't Have A Samurai Sword

Lindsey found Ryan slumped in the corner of the room, as far away from the zombie as he could get, and she exhaled through her nose before going and standing beside him. She was frustrated, to say the least.

"C'mon." She said. "I need your help." Ryan shook his head, so she crouched down and placed her hands on his arms. "Ryan, please." She was met with silence. "I thought you would've been the least bit grateful." With every word her voice got harder, and so did her grip. "Do you know how hard it is to go into a horde of zombies and pluck him from their grip? I fixed him up for you, kept him, hoping that I could find you and reunite you. And you're not even going to say thank you?" Her hands went up to his neck, forcing him to look at her. "Fine, then. You won't mind if I just let him out -"

"No!" He cried. He was trembling shooting glances between the zombie - not his dead boyfriend - and Lindsey. "Please...don't...don't..." He locked eyes with the zombie, and it seemed to still, warmth flooding into its eyes. If it wasn't so decayed, he'd might be mistaken in thinking that his boyfriend was back.

He shrugged off her hands and got to his feet, stepping closer to the cage in which the zombie stood, abnormally quiet. It was watching him closely, carefully, for reasons unknown. It was weird.

"Can't you, like...reverse the process?" He whispered, a foot away from the cage.

"No, Ryan. He's too decayed." Lindsey replied, straightening up. "He's too dead. His heart isn't even beating. I've managed to prolong the decaying process, but beyond that..."

"I reckon I could." He reached out, pressed his fingers against the bars, waiting for a hand to grab him. But no hand came. Instead, the zombie pressed its own hand to the same bar, mirroring that of its former lover. "I could do it. I created the virus in the first place, I bet I could -"

"I'm sorry, what?!"

He smiled. "My father was a neurobiologist. He was massively into the nervous system and brains and stuff. He was in a department that almost had the cure for various brain cancers and stuff, and I was his apprentice. And together we created this thing that we thought could be a cure, kinda like how a vaccination works, y'know?" Silence from Lindsey. "And so we injected it into someone with cancer, a volunteer, and we hoped that it would work. But twenty-four hours later, they were dead. And we thought, shit, what's happened? And then they were alive twenty minutes later, all pale and groaning and white-eyed, and we restrained it instantly. My father spent ages studying the brain, which seemed to be the only thing keeping it going, y'know? And then one day it bit him, and the next day he was one of them, and - and -"

"So this - all of this - what is essentially the end of the world...is your fault?"

Ryan nodded. "Yes," he whispered. There was silence from Lindsey, so he continued. "If you can turn Ray into a weird vampire-hybrid thing, then I can reverse the effects of a zombie bite. It should be easy."

"If it's so easy, then why hasn't anybody done it yet?"

"Because nobody's bothered to try."

~

He could smell them. They'd been gone for several hours, and the rain had washed away most of their tracks, but he could smell them.

They'd lingered around the gas station for some time, he knew, possibly for an hour? It hadn't been long. Maybe not as long as he'd thought. It didn't matter. So long as he could still smell them, and he could, though only faintly.

He'd find them soon enough, though. He had to.

~

Bert and Gerard were asleep, but they'd ended up outside some house, and Frank was bored. He was on edge and couldn't sleep even if he'd wanted to - he was supposed to be on watch, though wasn't doing a very good job of it, watching everything else but.