Playlist for the Apocalypse (Sweet Pea/Betty)

Hidden Track: Zombie

December 31, 2017

New Year's Eve of 2017 will not go down in any history books. People will not look back on it as the day the world ended. Historians may never realize how, as the clock ticked it's way to the new year, the world would cease to exist before it ever began.

It was not the date of the end of the world. It was the date that was the end of the beginning.

The only people left who would be able to tell you that died fairly early on. It's not as though people are in the habit of marking things down anyway; no, history is for later. During a war, it's about survival.

That's the thought of one of the lead scientists as he's frantically trying to escape the labs. He thinks that one day someone might know this date as important. Maybe it will be when the world rights itself again, or, maybe it will be after humanity has hit re-start, archeologists will find something or people can use their minds to just know things. Maybe they'll laugh at this generation of humans the way that we do about the fall of the dinosaurs. Or maybe, he muses last, no one will ever know at all.

It's all useless, he figures, thinking about this. It is; maybe he should have thought about his mother or his brother or his nephew in his last moments. Maybe he should have thought about how he was almost going to call in sick today and take one more day to celebrate the first couple days of 2018. Maybe he should have been thinking about God or religion or the afterlife.

None of it really matters. He's dead before he can use his keypad to unlock the doors.

After that, he's undead.

This is day six.

On day zero- December 31st, 2017- it begins with a mistake. It begins in a lab where it shouldn't have mattered that there was a mistake since they dealt mostly in chemicals to grow better corn. The world would be laughing if they knew about this if everyone one day turned out okay.

One drop of a 'harmless' chemical, mixed with the wrong something in the air and no one knew until it was much, much too late. The man who sneezed and dropped the vial was checked over, but no doctors found anything wrong, and he went home to celebrate New Years with his wife. Within a month, it will have spread through DC. Within two months, it will have started creeping through the USA. By day 131, they will consider the Wildfire Virus to have infected everyone on earth.

But that's getting ahead of everything, for, at this moment, there are celebrations around the entire world.

In a tiny town called Riverdale, on the North Side, Betty Cooper shoves a mask back into her desk drawer. She tells herself that the Black Hood is gone; she and Archie have seen to that. She tells herself this despite how much-in the back of her mind- she just knows it to be untrue.

Her phone vibrates and it's Veronica, reminding her that her presence is forcefully requested for her New Year's Eve party. The message is followed by a bunch of smiley faces and purple hearts, with a promise that it will be an 'intimate event'. To Betty, that means just her and Veronica. To Veronica, it means at least ten people, but no more than twenty-five.

Archie will be there. They kissed, and that was that. They both were not dating others, so it's not as though someone did something wrong. But, now Archie is back together with Veronica and Betty is still broken up with Jughead.

She didn't think that anything would come of the kiss, but she'd be lying if she hadn't thought about that possibility, late into the night. The almost preposterous idea that she and Archie might start something together.

It's preposterous because she knows how much Veronica loves Archie, and that wouldn't be fair to her best friend. However, it's only been three and a half months since she tried to kiss Archie and reveal feelings to him, so some part of Betty still burns quietly for the friend she knows she cannot have.