Now, if you're still here after reading all that, good on you. I'd hate to have written this vignette only for it to fall into the hands of the, shall we say, more mentally vacant among our population. Perhaps I'm biased, but I've always felt intellect makes everything easier in life, including films.
Back to the matter at hand, I feel it is my duty at this point to acknowledge the reasons for the lack of 28DL fanfiction, which I do so readily. It isn't the kind of film that encourages it. And I, certainly, am not complaining; any time fanfiction is in abundance it invariably leads to soppy romances or plot rehash wherein no original thought takes place, and the act of finding a gem among the trash becomes a task within itself.
However, sometimes ideas germinate on their own, and that is what has led to the creation of this, which is quite possibly the only of its kind. Given this assumption it must be understood that herein I am breaking a lot of the "rules" of fanfiction generally held by larger fandoms, which are by and large inapplicable here. There are no pairing labels, there are no slang terms for the contents, there are no sects with tastes to cater to. I don't even have to come up with a clever name, because it's not like we've set down precedents on that either.
Although I am historically a fan of slash (homosexual erotica) it was never my intention to write it for the sake of this fandom. (Indeed, until yesterday it was never my intention to write for the sake of this fandom at all.) Scapegoating though it may be, I must insist that no thoughts of homoerotic undertones in the film had occurred to me until a recent viewing of the DVD's audio commentary, in which the director Danny Boyle points it out himself. It was a downhill slope from there.
It is also my understanding based on the words of Misters Boyle and Garland that 28 Days Later... was, if not a fluid, then a malleable project that had as much chance of turning into something radically different as it did turning out the way it finally showed up on our theater screens. It's this principle on which I am hinging the following "what if" story, on the insistence that, if anything was at one point possible in the story universe, then it would theoretically mean this as well.
This story uses the protagonists' flee from the House as its shift in
design, and I ask that readers discard any information from the film beyond
this point. I ask you to forgive the overall sparseness of my "ending"
to 28DL, which lacks the genuine article's refinement and, to an extent,
its plausibility.
-----
56 Days Later
by K.A. Rose
28 Days Later... characters and indica © 21st Century Fox Pictures, Inc, 2003. Used without permission, for nonprofit fan appreciation.
All events within this work are entirely theoretical and do not reflect the views of 21st Century Fox, its parent, sister companies, subsidiaries, or that of the cast and crew of this production.
This work depicts two male characters in nonconsensual adult situations, as well as reference to other nonconsensual adult situations taking place offscreen, among them statutory rape. The author of this work does not by any means condone or endorse any such behavior and seeks to remind the reader of this fact.
Enjoy.
-----
"Mailer died today."
Jim looked up from his canned and vacuum-sealed
dinner, into the face of Henry West, smiling nonchalantly at him and the
other soldiers at the table. There was murmuring to either side of them
as the others chorused expressions of relief and detached interest.
"That makes it, what, fifty-six days in all?" said
Corporal Mitchell, rubbing his nose for the cold that had been developing
over the past few days. "S'nearly two months."
"Without food or anythin'," Clifton agreed. "That's
nuts, that is."
Several members at the table appeared, above and
beyond their general discomfort, confused and lost in the conversation.
They were new ones, drawn in by the broadcast. Five or six women of varying
shape and age, two men. The soldiers didn't keep men around unless they
looked fit to help out.
The ones that were fit to keep around were the sort
Jim supposed could take on an entire hoard of the Infected and come away
unscathed. They were huge, all muscle and steely glare, like actors out
of some American action film. It wasn't hard to imagine them as an asset
to West's little base.
By contrast Jim felt he looked like the sort of
little worm the soldiers would kill off instantly, purely on principle.
He was slower than most, peaceful by design, even physically weaker than
most of the women they took in.
The night that IT had happened, the soldiers had
been all too eager to do away with him as well, blaming him for the death
of two suitable females. West had stepped in and demanded they step aside.
The reasons for it had escaped Jim at the time.
"Who's Mailer?" asked one of the females, by the
name of Alex. She was about fifteen. Jim hated to look at her. He hated
that look of innocence and naivety and trust that had no place at all in
the House.
Jim caught the glances the soldiers exchanged with
one another.
"A dog," West told her, "who refused the food we
set out for him, preferring to starve to death."
"Can't blame him," said another newcomer by the
name of Katrina. "Nothing for him left in the world, I suppose."
And Jim thought, Nothing left for you either,
now that you're here.
He felt West's eyes on him before the OC spoke.
"You're not eating, Jim."
He thought wildly for an answer. "Not hungry" was
never a good thing to say. Whether it was true or not, Major West would
always suspect the latter.
Jim stabbed at the slab of processed meat on his
plate. "'Seems like it's gone off."
West turned an accusatory glare toward Private Jones.
Jones, for his part, seemed to be expecting this and had prepared his retort
ahead of time.
"It wasn't! Swear to God! He's just trying to get
out o' eating it!"
Probably, Jim reasoned, West knew the truth to this.
He picked up the truth in the unlikeliest of places and sort of discreetly
kept it hidden behind his back until the time came to own up. He hadn't
yet owned up about anything concerning Jim, though, and from the shape
of things he wasn't going to anytime soon.
West smiled that sardonic little smile of his. "Now,
I'm sure Jim is absolutely insulted by such an instigation. Aren't you,
Jim?"
"Right," Jim said at once, trying to look suitably
insulted. It probably didn't work. Facial expressions weren't his strong
suit.
"He's fuckin' lying!" Jones insisted.
In the argument that ensued between the OC and his
subordinate, Jim picked himself up from the table and slinked out through
the dining room doors. He was only followed by the eyes of Alex, whose
gaze he tried everything not to meet.
The image of her curious face stayed etched in his
mind as he arrived into the darkened hall. Jim tried to take in a breath
of cool air but felt his lungs almost collapsed in upon themselves. The
House had a way of pressing in on you from all sides; he wasn't sure whether
that was just the nature of it or the soldiers presence that had made it
so ultimately unbearable.
They'd probably approach her that very night about
what it was they did here. How would she take it? She struck Jim as being
slightly more mature than Hannah had been --she'd arrived at the House
all on her own, after all, her family having all died along the way-- so
perhaps she would--
...
Her family had all died.
Jim stopped at that thought.
They'd all died trying to reach this place. Trying
to reach the fucking 'Answer to Infection', that light at the end of a
very terrifying tunnel. In effect they'd all died so that she, if no one
else, would make it and reach her salvation. This place.
Jim felt sick. He always felt sick these days. That
was another effect of the House. But now it was made worse at the thought
that in there were a bunch of hopeful survivors who thought they'd just
been handed the Promised Land, and all it meant was carrying out the soldiers'
own sick, perverted dreams of a future.
A future. FUCK. Only West was trying to convince
anyone that the women were there for a future. The rest of the soldiers
had no illusions about themselves.
Jim walked forlornly along the empty corridors.
There wasn't much of a point in going anywhere with much haste. If Infected
came, let the soldiers do the running.
Not that it had ever been said on the record, but
Jim knew that his duties on West's staff were mostly to stand there and
look pretty, like the women. Just stand there and look pretty, stand there
on the sidelines and cheer your man on and welcome him back from the fray
when it was all over.
Jim kicked at a stack of boxes in fury. The top
box toppled, scattering its contents of toilet paper rolls and toothpaste
tubes across the elegant marble floor. He made to pick them up, not out
of politeness, but because West would know it had been him otherwise.
It would have been as well as if West had actually witnessed it himself.
There was something about West and the House that made them inseparable,
almost interchangeable. If the House knew, then West knew. And vice-versa.
Adjourning to his room --he'd been given his own
room, a privilege not shared by any of the soldiers other than West-- he
stood for a moment in ponderous silence, watching the dark lawn below him,
illuminated with the cold floodlights. For a moment he thought he saw movement,
before recognizing it was a shift in the grass brought on by the breeze.
There had been winds on and off for the past few days, bringing in the
acrid scent of smoke from Manchester on the last stage of burning itself
into ash.
Another flicker on the lawn, but this time one brought
on by memory. He could nearly see himself, two months ago, pulling Selena
and Hannah behind him in a mad dash for their cab, the soldiers firing
their rifles wildly behind them. The sounds had brought the Infected, who
went for Hannah first, because she was the slowest...
Jim shook himself from the memory. It didn't pay
to remember anything from that stage of the all-too-recent past. It just
made dealing with the present all that much worse.
The present. A never-ending present.
Had it really been two months? For some reason it
seemed not so much an indefinite stretch of days but an indefinite stretch
of one day, just punctuated occasionally by darkness and meals and
sleep and more darkness. His awareness had been never-ceasing, his brain
maintained on a sort of high-keyed alertness.
It was like being a cat, Jim thought. A cat never
really went to sleep, not the same way humans did. The slightest sound
or movement and it was awake again, eyes blazing. Cats had to be constantly
sleep-deprived in order to maintain that kind of alertness. No wonder they
slept so much.
He, however, didn't feel like sleeping at all. Very
rarely did he feel like it, for fear of what dreams would come when he
closed his eyes. Occasionally it'd have to happen though, when the fatigue
grew simply too much to bear and every muscle screamed for the silence
of rest. It was usually on those nights where Jim was reminded just why
he'd been given his own room, for those times when Major West would appear
in the doorway and offer to treat him to a drink and talk a little and
do whatever came after that.
Jim admitted to hazy memories of "after that." When
"after that" happened he usually focused his entire mind on blanking itself
out, staring at some indistinct mark on the ceiling or the floor or whatever
he could find in view based on what his position was, fix every fiber of
his being into not thinking about what it was West was doing to him down
there.
It never worked. Not really. Jim tried blotting
out as much of the events as he could but sooner or later West grew weary
of his unresponsiveness and commanded more involvement from him. Or else.
It didn't actually ever go as far as threats. A
man like West didn't need threats. The implication that there might be
a threat later on if Jim failed to comply was terrifying enough.
Lately the act itself was getting scary enough to
compete with it, though. Lately West had begun talking while they fucked
--Jim leaned naturally toward a more polite term but there was no way in
which he was able to bring himself to call it "making love"-- and had started
asking questions. Jim, for his part, had almost never answered him, either
because he chose not to or because he couldn't, his brain scattered and
useless by his own will or by the sensations running through his body.
There were two main questions that West persisted
in asking, growing more impatient with each repetition.
The first of which was an inquiry as to Jim's full
name. It was a strange sort of irony there, Jim felt. Americans were always
the ones that placed such an emphasis on first names, to the extent that
giving one's last name was an intimate act of trust, whereas Britons were
for the most part just the opposite.
But a surname was an identifier. If you had a surname
you could find them, you could get their address and their phone number
and license plate and the name of their employer and their wife and their
kids.
A lot of good a surname did now. Where were the
computers to trace you? Where were the computers that held you at all?
There weren't any records anymore, there wasn't any proof, much less a
way to find you. All you had left was your personal name, that was all
that really identified you at all. And all it did was keep you one step
away from anonymous.
But West nearly winced every time he called Jim
by his first name. Soldiers were bound to formalities; they adored them.
Natural instinct insisted that only those close should be called by their
personal names.
Jim thought ruefully that West would have loved
to have learned his last name first, just so that when he started in with
his nighttime visits he could have taken a particular delight in calling
Jim something private and personal, as a way to hold power over him. A
way to show ownership. Now, in the absence of that, West wanted his last
name in order to do the same thing.
He'd never, ever give it to him.
And the second thing West asked him...
Jim pulled himself from whatever daze he'd drawn
himself into at the sound of his bedroom door creaking open. It was a pronounced,
practiced sound, the kind of classic creak that no door made without effort,
and it sent a shiver up and down Jim's spine at the knowledge of what had
opened it.
He turned around --slowly; let the soldiers do the
rushing about-- and squinted a little at the onslaught of light from the
hall, silhouetting the form of Major Henry West.
"Am I needed?" Jim asked. Sometimes West let him
help out with cleaning, just for the look of the thing.
"No, no," West said kindly. "The women offered to
take care of it, as thanks."
Thanks. Jim's stomach twisted at the word.
West shifted on his feet a little, his pleasant
smile lost in the shadows on his face.
Care for a drink? Jim thought in his head.
"Care for a drink?"
I could say no, Jim reasoned. I could
say I'm tired and I just feel like going to bed right now and I'm not up
to any drink or chit-chat. Except he won't accept that. It's only delaying
things.
"All right," Jim said.
The door swung shut.
Afterwards he'd remember there vaguely being a drink.
Theoretically there was one before every little session of theirs, possibly
as a way to warm Jim up. But he didn't know what it was, and didn't care.
Some bottle stolen from the stores of one of the refugees, perhaps, something
filched from the House's cellars. It didn't matter. It all ran together
after a while anyway.
Lately West had been giving him more and giving
himself less. This was another power thing. Jim knew it. He let it happen
anyway. He was actually anticipating the time West felt it necessary to
get him actually, thoroughly drunk before starting.
When West gently pried the glass from Jim's hand,
Jim's extremities were numb with a sort of tingling warmth. Breathing was
as difficult as ever, and now the air tasted stale and poisoned.
He faced the window. West permitted it, as he slinked
his arms around Jim's waist and ran cold hands over his midsection through
the cloth of his jacket. He whispered something in Jim's ear, but it was
ignored, or unheard, or both. Jim was already receding back into that safe
corner in his mind where he could barricade himself from the world.
Jim felt the cold, tainted air on his skin as West
unbuttoned his borrowed army jacket and let it fall to the floor. He suppressed
a shiver when West nuzzled his head on his shoulder, slinking a hand down
under his pants.
A word floated up and penetrated the cloud of protection
Jim had set up around himself.
"Jim."
"Mm."
"Answer me."
"What?"
"Answer me."
"What was it again?"
Undaunted, running lips and tongue over Jim's bare
flesh, West murmured, "Why aren't you happy here, Jim?"
"Should I be?" Jim squirmed a little. The extraction
from his blank state had rendered it more difficult to ignore the sensations
running through him. It was everything he could do not to utter that pained
and pleasured groan West expected from him.
"We have everything for you here. I do everything
that I can for you." This was true. West had done everything in his power
to exempt Jim from anything that might endanger him.
...Just stand there and look pretty...
"I know."
More cold drove in as Jim's trousers were unbuttoned
and unzipped, allowed to fall to his ankles. Next his undergarments, leaving
him exposed and bare and vulnerable, open to all the cold to come wrap
around him and engulf him in the bitter chill of the House.
"Then why does your mind go away every time that
I come to visit you like this?"
There was nothing for it. He'd know if Jim was lying,
and the end would be the same anyway.
"I don't like this."
Out on the lawn below, a small flicker in the grass
as he once again replayed those final moments, pulling Hannah and Selena
away with him, some mad dash to escape...
"You'll grow to like it," West assured him.
"No."
"Yes, you will." A command this time.
"No..."
"You will. Do you understand?"
"No!"
In a movement so sudden it shocked West, Jim tore
out of his embrace and spun away, tripping on the discarded clothing by
his feet so that he half-backed up, half-stumbled into the wall, which
he clutched like a lifeline.
"Stay away from me."
"You're too old for this childishness, Jim," West
said, cracks beginning to appear in his placid and friendly tone as he
picked his way across the floor towards him. "The more you protest the
more difficult you make it on yourself, you understand? I thought we'd
been over this."
"It doesn't matter what we've been over before,"
Jim snapped back, edging along the wall in a desperate act to get farther
away from the approaching OC. "I don't-- I don't want to--"
"It doesn't matter what you want, Jim. Just
be a good boy and behave, won't you?"
"NO!"
West lunged out at the same moment that Jim ran
for the door. West was quicker. He caught Jim's arm and held so tightly
that when Jim was jerked to a stop it felt nearly like his shoulder being
dislocated. West gripped him with both arms that held Jim at bay no matter
how he struggled, how he kicked and flailed and scratched and bit, being
pushed down onto his bed with sheets like ice and West searing like fire,
pinning him down and straddling him around the waist, forcing him into
one kiss after another, groping and kneading and clawing and biting all
over, opening up the old wounds from previous nights and licking the blood
from them and savoring the taste.
"Stop... stop..." Jim whimpered, as the assault
grew more intense and West found some way to remove his own trousers, his
erection burning against Jim's thigh as he prepared his entry with some
jar of cream found in one of the upstairs bathrooms. "In God's name, stop
it..."
And he couldn't, not for the world, shut off his
senses and return to that cloud of safety in his mind, so for the first
time ever he experienced all of it, every second of it to its fullest,
sending incomprehensible data to his brain at such a rate that he felt
like it might explode from the overload.
Normally West would muffle Jim's cries by enveloping
him in another kiss when he started giving way to sensation, but this time
West did not. Jim tried to puzzle at this, but found himself incapable
of it, his thoughts extending only so far as telling himself to stay quiet
anyway, just to keep West from any further pleasure.
But this was growing a more and more difficult task,
as their pace quickened and West's thrusts drove deeper into whatever it
was that caused certain aspects of Jim's own anatomy to stiffen and and
ache for release. And that was when the questions started.
"Do you love me?" West asked. "I said, do you love
me?"
"I..." Jim murmured.
"I love you. I can't tell you how much I love you,
Jim."
No. No, that's wrong, said Jim's thoughts.
You're
just trying to justify it. You're trying to make what you do sound rational.
You want to give it a reason so you can settle it with yourself...
"Do you love me? Say that you love me, Jim. Please."
Love died out on the lawn two months ago, you
bastard. Love doesn't exist anymore. You fucking killed it. You fucking
murderer.
"Love me. Tell me you love me." Commands again.
It meant Jim's chances were running out. It was asking for a lie but a
lie would only mean more suffering, regardless.
With some effort Jim focused on West's perspiring
face, to see the major's eyes fixed on him, desperately seeking an answer
from his... it certainly wasn't a lover, whatever it was. Fuck-buddy, maybe?...
and Jim saw for the first time no commanding glare for the truth, no demand
for it, just a plea for an answer.
Any answer.
It didn't matter what Jim told him. It didn't matter
if it was a lie, a horrible, blatant lie. For once West was in a place
where the line between truth and falsehood didn't exist, or was seriously
blurred, or was simply ignored. Jim could tell him anything and he'd accept
it as the truth, so given that, why not make the truth something that wouldn't
lead to more pain?
"Y-yes," he answered, a strangled cry. He rolled
his eyes up into his head as he said it, another wave of sensation swallowing
him up like the tide. Please, don't make me say it again...
"You do?"
"Yes." It was a helpless, pitiful squeak. Dear
God, just let it fucking end.
He averted his eyes at the sight of West's smile,
that laughably insincere smile that made Jim's sickness twist yet further
every time he used it, that thankful and gratified smile that was already
burned into Jim's brain to where he didn't need to look to know it was
there.
He felt a roughness like sandpaper on his skin when
West bowed his head and rested it on his chest, nearly halting in his movements
as he did so. A warm liquid hit Jim's skin which he passed off as sweat
from West's brow.
"I'm glad," West whispered.
When he resumed his ministrations, Jim was vaguely
aware of a different feel to West's movements. It was not any slower or
shallower than what he had so far experienced, which for all Jim knew or
cared was the worst a man could do to another in his entire life, but now
it just seemed more... tolerable. Reaching his peak, as their bodies' joined
motion reached its own sort of climax, Jim discovered --with horror-- that
for the first time it actually felt... good.
Spent and exhausted, the two men collapsed fully
on the bed beneath them, and spent a while in recovery, breathing and watching
the room spin around them. West had his arms wrapped around Jim's body,
something Jim expected him to do only until the point where West had regained
enough of his strength to get dressed and leave the room, before suspicions
arose among the other men.
This time, however, he remained, and, still holding
on to his partner's shoulders like a child would hug his favorite teddy
bear, he fell into peaceful sleep.
Jim watched his face curiously. In his head replayed
a conversation.
"If you're trying to rebuild, why trouble yourself
with me?"
"I suppose there are some things that can't be
helped."
He'd thought: That's right, leave your men to
be concerned with making children, making this idea of a future you set
in their heads. While you go off with another guy and fuck his brains out
whenever you happen to feel like it. Is that how it is?
What he'd said was: "Oh."
In the silence that lay in the wake of their activities,
Jim heard sounds from some of the other bedrooms along the corridors. Muffled
screams and pleas for mercy, sobbing and unintelligible ravings. All from
women, he noted.
That was why West hadn't suppressed his cries. Who
would have noticed?
'The answer to Infection is here,' West had
said on the recorded broadcast. 'You must find us. The answer to Infection
is...'
And what was it? Fighting it off with land mines
and rifles, that's nothing but barricading yourself within while the trouble
persists throughout. You lure people here with their food stores and guns
and tell them they're safe here and then you take their men off and put
bullets through their heads so there's no one to defend the women when
you tell them about what's really waiting for them here, and it's enough
to make them want to be Infected...
Very carefully Jim pulled West's arms from his body
and laid them aside, so that he himself could stand up and walk unsteadily
toward where his pile of clothes lay. He dressed quickly, stopping only
when the heaviness in his fogged brain grew unbearable and he had to stop,
clutching his forehead as he waited for the feeling to pass. And then,
all dressed, he silently picked his way across the room and slinked out
of the door, shutting it quietly behind him.
The hallways echoed with the sounds of the far-off
bedroom couples. Most of them quieted after a while, giving way to the
silence that so set the House apart from anything else Jim had ever experienced.
One voice carried on, persisting only by her weakness, not by strength.
That would be Alex...
'The answer to Infection is here.'
Can you imagine being surrounded by the last traces
of your family, huddling around a small makeshift radio and being told
that, assured that, by a far-off, disembodied voice, a strong and commanding
voice you just felt like you had to believe in. Believe that somewhere
out there there was a cure, there was a way out of this.
She's FIFTEEN! raged the thoughts in Jim's
head. What the fuck's the world come to? What the hell have they all
come to? Who in their fucking minds would...
Lure them in, take their food and their supplies
and kill their men unless they're strong enough and look the sort that
won't interfere with anything West and his men try to do. Turn the House
into a bed of sin where children are raped nightly and it has to be permitted,
because it's for the future. And kill the ones that try to escape
because better off dead than lost, better off dead than Infected.
And what about him? What the hell was he doing?
Why wasn't he stopping them, why wasn't he rescuing the women and running
away with them to safety, wherever that happened to be?
And, what, kill them all like Selena and Hannah?
Disassociation had become the only viable course
in the recent weeks. It got to the point that Jim couldn't find a way to
include himself in the equation, even if he felt like it. By all accounts
it seemed that his interactions with West were of a different breed than
anything that went on with the hopeful refugees and the rest of the soldiers.
West wasn't concerned in taking part in that, either because he was naturally
inclined against such a thing or because a part of him felt some residue
of guilt still, and it seemed only natural that as punishment to himself
he should remove his lineage from the human gene pool indefinitely.
And vent his passions on Jim? That was when the
equation really started to fall apart. Surely there were other ways that
West could take care of carnal necessities, most of which involving his
right hand; it didn't have to involve Jim. The idea that he used
Jim purely as a means of justification for an uncharacteristic act of mercy
was unlikely as well. And control? He had enough control without cementing
it like that.
What was left was the necessity to take West's words
at face value. In which case...
"Fffffffuck," Jim hissed, lashing out at a wall
in anger.
It didn't pay to think like that. It never, ever
paid to think like that.
Wasn't it all lies? It had to be. You start
with a huge fucking lie like promising an answer to a thing there is no
answer to, just a means to protect yourself until one side or the other
dies out, and everything out from there was small change.
He passed the front doors of the House, left ajar
by the night watch. He saw the lawn lit up so brightly it shone as white.
"I'll cut your fucking throat here an' now!"
sang the voice of memory's Corporal Mitchell.
"That's enough, corporal."
"He's fucking killed the women!"
"You killed the women, corporal."
"Only 'cause this fuck led 'em out to the Infected!
You fucking son-of-a-bitch--" Memory pressed the ice-cold barrel of
a rifle to Jim's forehead.
"That's enough, corporal."
"You're gonna let 'im live? After all that you're
gonna let this little fucker live?"
"Bring him here."
"What?"
"I said, bring him here."
It had been that very night, hadn't it? That very
night, in front of the window overlooking the pale lawn with the girls'
bodies still strewn about, the Infected's corpses lying around them like
so much garbage. West had forced him to stand there, clinging to the window
sill, forced his eyes to the sight, the shimmering, indistinct shapes through
the rain-drenched windows, as West stripped his wet clothes from his fevered
skin and told him things that were now lost to memory.
Punishment, then? Maybe that one time, but every
occurrence after that, it didn't seem to follow...
Although nothing really seemed to follow these days.
'The answer to Infection is here.'
The answer to here is...
Jim pushed the open door aside to admit him, out
into the cold night air that rushed to fill his starved lungs that had
grown so used to the oppressiveness of the inside. He walked out from the
safety of the overhang, for some reason lonely for the absence of rain
that seemed such a staple in everyday life.
He still walked heedless of the rough gravel underneath
his bare feet and heedless of the shouts of Jones on the night watch as
he walked across the path, the warning shot as he cleared the fence, the
cries for backup as he landed on the other side and began treading across
the grass, thankful for the dew still collected along the ground. He looked
up only when he heard the sharp growls at the very end of the range of
light, and smiled as he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted:
"HELLO!"
And they appeared, hesitantly at first, as if retaining
some last shred of human consciousness somewhere in their defunct brains,
before beginning to charge.
Jim was surprised to discover he wasn't afraid.
Nothing seemed to hold much terror anymore, not in the face of what he'd
had to deal with almost nightly for the past two months.
Or was it that he had retreated into his sheltered
place in the corner of his mind, without realizing it? Was it that everything
he had done to himself for the sake of sanity a sort of unconscious training
in preparation for this moment, as he stood there still and unmoving in
the middle of the lawn, arms spread wide in welcome?
The first Infected to come near him, having avoided
the land mines and tripwires, was a female, black skinned with unruly hair,
eyes like fire, blood pouring from a half-decayed maw of a mouth.
Jim smiled at her.
He flinched only when her head flew apart at the
impact of a spray of bullets, tearing her flesh to shreds and shattering
bone and brain. She flopped down not two feet from him, parts still twitching
spastically.
Jim turned around, shielding his eyes against the
floodlights to catch the silhouetted form of Major Henry West, his rifle
aimed.
Eye contact gained between the two men, West made
a short gesture to his other soldiers, who continued to pluck off the other
Infected surrounding Jim, as he climbed down from the front porch hanging
to the outer wall.
"Why are you doing this to yourself, Jim?" he said
above the gunfire. His voice extended only so far that Jim could hear it,
and not the soldiers behind him, although from the look on his face West
wouldn't have minded if they had heard.
"I think I have to," was Jim's reply.
"But I was going to keep you safe."
"I don't want you to. I want to die with Selena
and Hannah. And Mailer too."
"You said you loved me."
"I guess we both lied, then."
West's uncomprehending expression turned to horror
as his eyes flitted over Jim's shoulder. "Jim--!"
Jim turned in time to see them. Three Infected,
all teeth and blood and stabbing eyes--
And then a shot, heard above all the others, the
one Jim had barely enough time to hear before everything went black, and
his own blood splattered across the silver grass.
Better dead than Infected.
West pulled his trembling hand from the trigger,
for fear that the nervous twitch rising up through his muscles would make
him shoot again, and again, regardless that Jim was already dead.
"I... really did, though," he murmured, staring
at the corpse as all around it the Infected were shot down one by one,
kept at bay from devouring the new flesh that lay twitching on the lawn.
"I really did. You don't understand...
"You just don't..."
THE END
-----
finished at exactly: 18:19, 27 October 2003.
A Craptor Productions fanfic
K.A. Rose
No Irishmen were harmed in the making of this fanfic.