Chapter Text
Jeremy Heere was horrendously unprepared for the apocalypse.
That was to be expected, of course, given how unprepared he was for most situations, but the past week had only driven the point home.
Apocalypse of the Damned had taught him absolutely nothing. There were no cheat codes or second chances in the actual apocalypse. There would be no ‘Play Again?’ option if they died.
What little weaponry they had found within the Taco Bell was pitiful and nothing like the high-tech, easy-to-use guns that were so common in the game. Most of the sharper knives had been stuffed into Brooke’s purse for the mall raid, leaving the rest of the group to lock the doors and pray that they wouldn’t have to defend themselves against the undead with the remaining collection of forks and butter knives.
The posters plastered onto every window and door wouldn’t conceal them forever, and the few lights that still turned on were dim and cracked, leaving the restaurant looking more like a dystopian parody of itself.
(Really, the entire situation felt like it had been ripped from the action packed, post-apocalyptic novel that Jeremy and Michael had tried to write in seventh grade, before they discovered that past and present tense were two very different things that could not be used interchangeably and that writing was probably not either of their strong suits.)
Tucking himself into the corner booth closest to the door, Jeremy let the shadows conceal him from view. He tugged the sleeves of his cardigan over his trembling hands as if it would do something to hide the way that his entire body shook. At least he wasn’t crying anymore.
He should have been helping. With what, exactly, he wasn’t sure. Rich was outside with a list of things to do, Jake and Chloe were supposedly cleaning up the mess in the kitchen, and Jenna was helping Christine plot escape routes and raids. All Jeremy knew was that there was probably a variety of things that still needed to be done to help ensure that they all lived another day, something that he could have helped with. Hell, even Michael had been given a job, and theoretically, he should have been in worse shape than Jeremy. It wasn’t Michael that sat in an empty booth, shaking like a leaf and looking close enough to another breakdown that he was being left alone, though.
All in all, he felt pretty useless. Apparently the sentiment was felt by everyone else too, as someone had yet to assign him a task.
There were a few pages of some old newspaper stuck to the glass-panelled door, the front page story celebrating “Back to School!” overlapping the horoscope page. Jeremy fixed his eyes on it, as if he was challenging it to a staring contest like the ones he always used to lose back in elementary school. He briefly thought back to it, remembering the times that Michael would let him win because he was too jumpy to beat anyone else- a habit that Michael had quickly dropped when the two of them took up video games, much to a younger Jeremy’s disappointment. The memory was almost enough to make him smile.
Then, because the world didn’t seem inclined to let Jeremy feel okay for too long, the door swung open and Rich’s tiny frame barrelling into the Taco Bell with a shriek that effectively jolted Jeremy out of his reverie. Not even a full second later, Rich had slammed the door shut, back pressed to the glass, face red, presumably from running. There were a few long seconds of silence, Jeremy’s confused gaze locked onto Rich’s horrified expression.
“Get the forks.”
“What?”
“The forks,” Rich repeated, motioning vaguely towards the kitchen area. “We’ll need them. I might have accidentally given away our location to a few of the zombies in the back lot?” The questioning tone in his voice suggested that he wasn’t sure if he had just pointed the zombies towards six living, breathing meals, but the sheepishness and lingering terror in his eyes told Jeremy otherwise.
“You what ?” Christine’s voice drifted out of the back room, followed by footsteps and eventually Christine herself, armed with the forks that Rich had requested. “You went back there several times in the past few days without getting caught! Why now, when we’re short two people, would you give us away?”
She passed two forks to Jeremy and gave the remaining utensils to Rich, ignoring Jeremy’s weak protests- “Christine, wait, how am I supposed to fight zombies with forks , I don’t want to fight anything , can we just make sure that none of them get inside-” in favor of listening to Rich’s explanation.
“Listen, Chris, I thought the car was empty. It looked empty. The rest of the cars that I checked, they were empty. Man, I was just chilling and stealing shit from cars, how was I supposed to know? If you walked up to a supposedly-abandoned car and found a dead body inside, you would probably have screamed too.” Christine looked wholly unimpressed, but Jeremy had to give her some credit- she didn’t look surprised, either. “Then it sat up and slammed its face into the steering wheel- like, dude what the hell? You might have heard from in here, and it was like a jump scare- you know, the ones that aren’t scary but you scream anyways because it startles you? Like that. Except, it scared the shit out of me.”
Jeremy was still staring at the forks in his hand when something thudded against the window, loud and sudden, cutting Rich’s story short. Out of all the noise that immediately followed, Jeremy hadn’t expected the sound of Rich’s forks hitting the floor to stand out in his mind. It was a lot nicer (if that word could still be applied to the situation) than focusing on the screaming, at least. He’d heard enough screaming to last him a lifetime.
The assault on the window continued, the dull thumping spurring Christine into action. “Jeremy,” she called, already striding across the floor to one of the tables. “Can you help me move this? Give your forks to Rich- he’s going to stay at the door because I think he’d be the best at actually fighting with our… limited defenses. As for us, we’re going to turn a bunch of tables onto their sides and push them against the window as a second line of defense, in case the glass breaks.”
Jeremy hesitated, unsure if a few tables would be an effective blockade against a zombie, especially if it had already managed to throw itself through a window, but Christine was looking at him expectantly and Rich had already gathered the rest of the forks from the floor. Two consecutive thumps shattered the quiet and oh god he’d been standing there silently for way too long and now he was overthinking, the need to just stop over analyzing every single decision destroying whatever remaining hesitation he still felt. He rushed towards the table the Christine had chosen, nearly tripping over himself in his haste. He barely caught the sympathetic glance that Rich gave him as he handed over the forks.
They successfully tipped the table, one edge resting against the linoleum floor. Christine stood back, hands on her hips as her eyes flicked between the window and the table.
“Okay, now we have to get it over to the window. I think it would be better if we tried to lift it? It’ll be quieter, and it doesn’t look too heavy!”
By some miracle, between Christine’s tiny frame and Jeremy’s minimal arm strength- better than it had been in freshman year, when he couldn’t even do a single push up without his knees on the ground, but still pitifully lacking- they managed to drag the table into position.
There was a new mark on the floor from their attempt to carry it, with Jeremy taking the tabletop side and dropping his end of the table within a few steps.
(Jeremy had winced when it hit the ground, and Rich had chimed in with the suggestion that they just drag it along the floor, brandishing his forks in an awkward superhero pose and reassuring Christine that he was beyond ready to defend them if necessary and possibly even unnecessarily.)
Instead of helping Christine move the rest of the tables, Jeremy was sent to the back room to alert the others.
Jake helped her finish the table barricade.
Once every table and most of the chairs had been upturned and Christine had deemed the room sufficiently fortified, the six of them gathered a few of the remaining chairs together in a circle next to the counter. The thuds had slowed, coming less often, but they hadn’t yet ceased.
“Geez,” Chloe remarked, seemingly trying to lighten the mood despite the underlying layer of disgust in her words that could easily have been directed at both the zombies outside and the company she was keeping. “I haven’t seen anything so desperate to get into a room since Jake at his Halloween party.”
Jeremy tensed up at the mention of the party. Three feet away, ignoring the chair that Rich had dragged over for her and perched instead on the counter with a handmade napkin-map, he could see Christine frowning. Jake, at least, snickered at the joke, but it sounded strange and out of place in the hushed, uneasy atmosphere of the Taco Bell.
He didn’t want to be next to Chloe anymore.
Pushing himself out of the chair, he joined Christine at the counter, peering over her shoulder at the messy blue scribbles.
“It’s the mall,” she explained, tracing the perimeter with one finger. “Jenna and Brooke helped me with it- it’s pretty much just whatever they could remember about the layout. Not that it’s a bad map, obviously- the two of them are there often enough, after all, so we don’t have to worry that it’s inaccurate.”
Sitting a few feet away, Jenna nodded in agreement.
The blue ink was dark, almost black against the brown fibers of the napkin. Christine’s finger hovered over one of the penned-in entrances. There was a label next to it, scribbled out and too messy to read.
“That’s where they should be entering.” She traced a path through the mall, before drawing her way back to the original entrance. “I think they’ll be okay.” Jeremy wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince him, or herself, or both of them. “They should be totally fine. Brooke knows her way around the mall, and Michael knows his way around the apocalypse.”
Jeremy decided not to dwell on his earlier realization that his and Michael’s top notch zombie-killing skills only existed in Apocalypse of the Damned , and just so happened to be very much useless in the real apocalypse.
Surprisingly enough, he’d been doing a pretty good job of not worrying about Michael, right up until Christine had brought it up. That being said, he’d been pretty preoccupied with their visitor on the other side of the glass.
There was nothing more that they could do about it the zombies outside, though, unless they wanted to leave the restaurant to kill it and risk attracting more unwanted attention- which, to Rich’s faux disappointment, they had decided was not their preferred plan.
So, essentially, they were sitting ducks in a dark Taco Bell, surrounded by the undead and with no way to contact Brooke and Michael.
It really was nothing like Apocalypse of the Damned.
The quiet dragged on, dull thumps and frustrated zombie noises- grunts? Groans? Jeremy couldn’t tell, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know- growing less frequent as time passed. No one spoke- under different circumstances, Jeremy might have considered it odd and potentially concerning that both Rich and Christine were silent.
And then, without warning, the noise stopped. It was almost as if they had been thrown into one of the 1920s silent films that Michael’s parents had once convinced them to watch.
( “Hey, Jer, buddy, I know we’re short on space but you’re sitting on my foot and it’s starting to fall asleep-”
“Hey! I want to sit next to him! Theresa, tell Mike to move so I can sit with Jeremy-”
“Shut up, the movie is starting-”
“Don’t tell your brother to shut up, that’s not nice-”
“Michael, I swear, if you don’t stop trying to tickle me, I will go sit with James instead-”
The two beanbag chairs in Michael’s basement-bedroom had definitely not been big enough to fit the eight year old twins, a thirteen year old Michael and a ‘twelve and three quarters’ year old Jeremy, and Michael’s eldest sister, a high school senior at the time. That much had been made clear.
Still, they had jostled for space in front of the television, shoving the beanbags together and trying to arrange themselves in a way that allowed them all to fit. It had only been mildly successful.
It had been fun, though. They had gotten through the Mells’ entire collection of silent films, with Theresa and Michael exchanging the most ridiculous dialogue that they could come up with, James’ and Jeremy’s laughter interrupting their made-up scenes. Josie had been sprawled across their laps, Jeremy’s hands twirling her hair into a sad attempt at a braid and then up into an even sadder bun that she still insisted he take a picture of, despite Jeremy’s protests.
He wondered if Theresa would still be able to come up with any witty dialogue for their current lives, in all of their silent-film-esque glory. )
Jake was the first to break the silence. “Did it give up?”
“I don’t know.” Jenna stood up, motioning for the rest of them to follow suit. “I would suggest getting ready, though, in case it hasn’t. If it breaks the glass, we need to be ready.”
The anticipation had Jeremy bouncing lightly on his toes, ready to bolt, which would have been fine, except his legs felt like they were going to give out at any second and everyone else seemed more prepared to fight, not flee.
Rich had distributed his forks, giving two to Chloe and splitting the remaining nine between Jake, Jenna, and himself. Christine was standing now, gripping the back of the chair closest to her. Jeremy had a fleeting thought that the metal legs on the chairs would probably provide them with better protection than a measly collection of silverware.
They waited in tense silence, facing the front of the restaurant, completely still- with the exception of Jeremy, who was shaking more than his dad’s shitty car did on gravel roads, and Christine, whose grip on the chair kept shifting in anticipation.
Jeremy wasn’t sure how long they had been waiting, but it had been long enough that he was beginning to hope for the best. Unlikely as it was, the possibility that the zombie had simply left was becoming more plausible by the minute.
Jenna slowly placed her forks on the chair. Jake’s posture relaxed, a fraction of the tension dissipating.
And then they heard it. The telltale scuff of shoes on the floor, coming from the general direction of the counter. For a moment, they all froze, and five pairs of eyes locked on to Jeremy. The shuffling stopped.
“Jake.” Jenna’s voice was hushed, barely above a whisper. She wasn’t looking at Jeremy anymore, her eyes scanning the rest of the room’s occupants and eventually stopping to rest on Jake. “You were the last one out there. Did you close the back door?”
Her question was answered by a mostly-intact zombie stumbling out of the kitchen, dark hair matted with blood and one bite-ridden arm hanging limp by its side, lurching towards Jeremy.
He screamed, loud and sudden, scrambling backwards until the edge of the counter was digging uncomfortably into the small of his back. A fork flew past his head, missing its target by a full foot- one of Rich’s forks, probably.
The next fork made its mark, embedding itself in the zombie’s skull with a sound that Jeremy would never forget. The problem there was that, as disoriented as the zombie seemed, it was still very much alive- if that word could still apply- and it wasn’t long before it had gained its bearings, starting towards Jeremy once more. He struggled to pull himself up onto the counter, kicking his foot out as he slid back across the metal surface. The heel of his converse sank into its shoulder, the force of his kick propelling it back enough that he could safely push himself off of the counter.
He eyed the zombie warily as it launched itself at the space he’d just occupied, pitching forward as it collided with the edge of the counter. Behind him, he heard Jake and Christine arguing- trying to make a plan of some sort. A hand wrapped around his arm, Chloe’s chipped red nail polish standing out against the dull blue of his cardigan as she dragged him backwards.
The others were clumped together in the center of the Taco Bell, bickering in hushed voices as the zombie struggled to bypass the counter.
“That’s not going to work. These are forks- I can either go for distance or power.”
“Aren’t you the star of every single school sports team? We can back you up, keep it distracted-”
“This isn’t football.” Jake waved a fork in the zombie’s direction. “Christine, I’m sorry, but I can’t just throw utensils at it until it dies! See, if we had plates, I could take it out in a few minutes, courtesy of the frisbee golf team. But we don’t have plates. We only have- what, ten forks?”
“Actually,” Chloe chimed in, her condescending tone unbefitting of someone who had only put minimal effort into their survival, “we had eleven and you just lost two, so there’s only nine now”
“Nine forks. Even better. Thanks Chloe.”
Jeremy put his hand up, cutting Jake off. “What about a chair?”
Christine turned to look at him, and Jeremy gestured towards the few seats that still stood between them and the zombie. “A chair?”
“Um, yeah.” The others seemed to be taking his suggestion seriously, watching him expectantly. “I think it’d be more effective than forks, at least. They’re, uh, bigger and heavier.”
“Are you saying we should use the chair as a battering ram?” Jenna was the first to catch on.
“Yeah, that’s- that’s what I meant. We can use one chair to- to, um, distract it, and another chair to take it out.” Jeremy half expected someone to veto the idea immediately- no one did, though. If anything, they seemed to be waiting for him to elaborate on some grand plan that would effectively kill the zombie while simultaneously solving all of their problems.
Jeremy, unfortunately, had no plans beyond hitting the zombie with a chair until it died, which he assumed was the real-life equivalent of button-mashing- an ineffective habit that he’d taken to using whenever he got overrun by zombies in Apocalypse of the Damned .
“Is that it?” He tried not to cringe at Chloe’s tone, critical and demeaning, as if she was examining his entire life like the judges on the Food Network cooking competitions that he and his dad used to watch, sitting together on the couch with takeout or leftovers and arguing over who would get eliminated-
No. He needed to focus. That meant pushing the worry about his dad’s whereabouts aside to join his worry for Michael and Brooke. Just until the zombie was gone, and then maybe he could ask Rich to try and hook up a makeshift phone charger, or Michael, when he got back, because if Jeremy knew anyone that could charge a phone in the actual zombie apocalypse, it was Michael fucking Mell, but- later . Not when everyone was staring at him, and the zombie behind the counter was still trying to clamber over it like Jeremy had done.
“Uh. Yeah, that’s all I’ve got.”
Thankfully, Rich chose that moment to jump in- “Dude, I’m down for that. I can distract it if Jake goes for the head with another chair.”
Rich’s approval, while expected- considering the plan involved charging at the undead with a few weak metal chairs- was apparently enough to get the rest of the group on board. (Or maybe it was more due to the lack of a better plan, but either way, Jeremy wasn’t complaining. His only worry was that it would result in the same thing that his button-mashing usually ended with: death and Michael’s disappointment.)
They regrouped around one of the chairs again, and Jeremy listened as Jake and Rich talked over the finer details of the plan- where to aim, where to run, and what to do if it failed. It wasn’t a solid plan by any means- too rushed, and too reckless-but it was the only one that they had.
“Okay, one more time, what’s the plan?”
Rich groaned, heaving a dramatic sigh. “Christine, we’ve been over it a thousand times already, we need to get moving before it figures out that there’s a gap in the counter.”
“You guys will get out of the way,” Jake cut in, pointing at each of the girls and Jeremy and pantomiming pushing them to the edges of the room. “Rich will distract it, and then I’ll sneak up behind it and nail it in the head with a chair.”
“Thank you, Jake.” Christine nodded, pushing a chair towards him. It scraped across the floor with a squeak. “Okay. Are we ready?”
“No.” Rich grinned, rolling up his sleeves. A moment later, Jeremy caught him eyeing the zombie and pulling them back down to protect his arms. “But we gotta do it anyway, so let’s go.”
“Alright, on three. Three, two, one…” Jake whispered the words, as if the quiet countdown would help them focus, looking at each of them in turn as he counted. He wondered if Jake was intentionally treating the situation like a sports game or not.
“Go.”
Jeremy scrambled backwards until the back of his knees hit one of the booth seats, blindly trying to shove himself further back. In the same instant, Rich screamed and charged forward, brandishing a chair held legs-forward. Jeremy was struck with the thought that it was almost like a strange mimicry of medieval jousting, sans the horses and honor. Behind him, Jake was holding his own chair like a lifeline, slowly side-stepping his way around to the back of the zombie.
For a moment, it seemed as if the plan was going to work.
And then the zombie lurched sideways, blank gaze locked onto Chloe. Rich’s attempts to recapture its attention did little to deter it, and Chloe’s shrieking only seemed to spur it on even further.
A hand reached out and clung to Chloe’s jacket, dirty fingernails digging into her arm, catching on the fabric when she tried to shove it away.
Jeremy felt tears start to well up in his eyes, because oh god it’s going to kill Chloe, she’s going to die, it’s going to rip her apart right in front of him and he can’t move and Chloe was never really a nice person and she’d always scared the hell out of Jeremy and he was still wary of her after the Halloween party and the lack of a sincere apology and her lack of sincerity in general but she didn’t deserve to die, why couldn’t he move, why couldn’t he help her , and then Jake and Rich managed to drag it back. It wasn’t going down without a fight, though- it tore a hole into the sleeve of Chloe’s jacket as it went.
Rich and Jake ditched their plan of distract-and-attack and instead channelled their panic into killing the thing- but was it killing if it was already dead? Rich was putting his forks to good use, and Jake had broken the leg off of a chair, swinging it like a baseball bat. Jeremy tried not to notice the way that neither of them would look directly at the zombie.
Instead, he joined Christine and Jenna in crowding around Chloe, pulling on the torn sleeve until she shrugged the jacket off, all three of them moving in to look at her arm- although Jeremy kept his distance, peering over Jenna’s shoulder.
“I’m fine,” she snapped, smacking Christine’s hands away. No one mentioned the tears streaked across her face, the barely-there tremor in her voice, or the small indents on her arm from the zombie’s fingernails.
Behind them, Jake and Rich had completely destroyed the zombie, to the point it hardly even resembled a person anymore.
Jake coughed, dropping his chair leg. “We’ll take it outside.” He looked distant and unfocused, and Jeremy was worried that he would fall over before he could get the zombie out. Rich, on the other hand, rolled up his sleeves and nudged Jake’s shoulder, studying the disaster on the floor as if he was trying to figure out how to move it.
“Come on, Jakey-D, let’s go.” He arranged the zombie so it was more portable, wincing as he hefted it up and tilted his head towards the back door. “We gotta make sure to lock the doors this time.”
Once the remains of their intruder were out of sight, Chloe shoved her way past Jeremy, stalking off towards the back room. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me up when Brooke gets back.”
Jeremy could practically see the gears turning in Christine’s head- go after her, or leave her be? She hadn’t been bitten, though, nor had she been actually scratched, and none of them felt particularly safe approaching her, so Christine and Jenna exchanged a look and let her go.
“Jeremy?” His head jerked to look at Christine. “Do you think you can hunt down some paper towel from the kitchen? We should make sure that bloodstain gets cleaned up before it permanently stains the floor, or someone slips on it.” She pointed towards the floor, and Jeremy followed her arm until he saw the large pool of blood on the ground.
He thought of Jake, eyes clouded, and immediately panicked. “Is that-”
“No, none of ours, don’t worry.” She offered him a small, reassuring smile, and he gave her a grateful one in return. “Alright, now go, this blood isn’t going to evaporate all by itself. Oh, and while you’re back there, see if you can find Jake and ask him to bring me whatever cleaning solutions he can find, okay? He was organizing them earlier.” Christine shooed him away with a pat on the back and a gentle push, enlisting Jenna to help her move some of the tables away from the door, their chatter filling the silence behind Jeremy.
He wandered into the kitchen area, snagging a mostly-intact roll of paper towel from the countertop. There was a questionable stain near the top of the roll, but considering they were planning on using it mop up blood, Jeremy decided that it was would good enough.
His next goal was to find Jake and the cleaning supplies. It was quieter in the back, although Christine’s voice was still audible, the cheerfulness sounding forced but still familiar enough that Jeremy clung to it like a safety vessel.
Jeremy weaved his way through the half-installed appliances, looking for the telltale bright red of his Letterman jacket.
He found Jake by the back door, sitting on the floor with Rich crouched next to him, murmuring something to him. There was blood streaked in the exposed portion of his shirt. The door was locked. Jake’s eyes were closed, and he looked so much smaller than Jeremy had ever seen him, knees pulled up to his chest and fingers curled into the sleeves of his jacket.
“Hey.” Jeremy held tight to the roll of paper towel and tugged on the cuffs of his cardigan, feeling like if he was intruding on something important. It was too late to go back, though- Jake cracked an eye open to look at him, and Rich pushed himself to his feet, brushing imaginary dust off his knees.
“‘Sup, dude?”
“Are you guys okay?”
“Yeah, we’re cool. Jake thinks he might have known her from archery- she’d left the club ages ago, so it took him a couple seconds to recognize that it might have been her, but by that time we were... you know.” Rich made a swinging motion and a weird squelching noise, one hand clasped around an imaginary baseball bat. “He’s sort of shaken up. It’s fine, give us a couple minutes and we’ll be all good again.”
“It’s a lot different than running those fuckers over in a shiny, badass sports car,” Jake piped up, startling a laugh out of Jeremy.
He opened his mouth to offer some sort of lame consolation, afterwards, but Rich beat him to the punch with a less than subtle change of topic. "Did you need something? Or are the paper towels some sort of weird comfort thing? You know, like- ‘oh, it’s the literal zombie apocalypse but at least I can try and get the bloodstains out of my sweater,’ that kind of thing.”
“Oh, right!” He nodded. “Christine wants- or, well, she was wondering where the cleaning stuff was. She said you were organizing them earlier?”
Rich stared at him for a moment. “Wait, dude, don’t tell me you’re actually trying to get the bloodstains out of your sweater. I mean, I know I’m great at guessing games but-”
“No!” Jeremy cut him off, face flushing in embarrassment as he scrambled to explain. “No. It’s not for me. The stain on the floor from- from that, uh, that- it- the zombie. There’s blood. Um. Chris doesn’t want anyone to slip, and it’s kind of unsettling to look at anyways, so we- or, well, she thought it’d be a good idea to clean it up.”
“Oh.” Rich dragged out the word, presumably to give Jake time to respond.
“They’re in the storage room. The sleeping one. I was gonna move them but then.. you know. Something came up.” He shrugged, the movement looking faux-casual in a way that Jeremy didn’t think possible given the current situation. “They’re on the shelf to the left, somewhere near the bottom. Here, I can help you find them.”
Jeremy was quick to shake his head, motioning for Jake to sit back down. “Nah. I- I got it. You guys take your time to, uh, recover, and I’ll let Christine know where you are.”
He offered them a small, forced smile, shuffling back into the kitchen before they could argue with him.
He dropped off the paper towels, first, promising to return with some sort of bleach, ducking back into the kitchen and stopping in front of the storage-slash-sleeping room. He was dreading the almost inevitable encounter with Chloe, though. It wasn’t that he disliked her, it was more that he was terrified of her- between the events of the Halloween party and the way she wielded her social status like an executioner at a guillotine, she honest-to-god scared the shit out of Jeremy.
Chloe pulled the door open before Jeremy could talk himself through thirty scenarios that all ended with something equal parts horrible and unrealistic, one eyebrow cocked in irritation.
“I can practically feel your fear seeping through the door, Jeremy. You can come in, I’m not going to bite.”
His face went red, and he pointed towards the shelf behind her. “I- sorry, um, I just need- uh, bleach or Windex or something.” His voice cracked mid-sentence and he cringed, half expecting her to laugh at him.
She didn’t.
She stepped aside to let him in, and his feet scuffed along the floor as he scanned the room. There are cleaning supplies right where Jake had said they would be. Jeremy wasn’t sure which one Christine would want, and he could feel Chloe watching him, so he scooped up the first three bottles he could grab and hoped for the best, ducking his head as he made to leave.
“Jeremy.” Chloe’s voice stopped him, lacking its usual edge but still sharp enough to make him freeze. He risked a glance at her, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed. “Once you’re done with those, can we talk?”
“Uh--” He faltered, one bottle nearly slipping from his grasp.
“I’m not going to do anything to you. I just want to talk.”
Jeremy knew for a fact that even just talking to Chloe could knock his self-esteem down more than a few pegs- something he, oddly enough, wasn’t too keen on- but he found himself nodding anyways. “Okay. I just- I have to get these to Christine first.”
He lifted one of the bottles, and waited for Chloe to nod before he rushed out to the front area.
Christine and Jenna were standing over the drying stain on the floor, conversing quietly about finding a more secure hideout. The loose end of the paper towel roll, now set down on the chair seat, was crumpled and folded, like someone had been fidgeting with it.
He caught a few snippets of their conversation before they noticed his approach, pausing to take the bottles from him.
“I, um. There’s more in the storage room if those aren’t good enough.”
Christine gave him a small smile and shook her head, passing two bottles to Jenna and making a grabbing motion towards the paper towels. “These are plenty good enough,” she assured him. “Can you pass me those?”
Jeremy took the roll and tossed it towards her- or, rather, he tossed it in her general direction. She caught with with minimal difficulty, to Jeremy’s relief.
“Are- are you sure you don’t need anything else?” He was met with another head shake. “I’m heading back there anyways,” he explained, rubbing the back of his neck. “Uh-- Chloe… wants to talk to me about something, so I can grab something while I’m there?”
“Actually,” Jenna cut in, before Christine could dismiss him. “Once you’re done talking to Chloe, can you try and get her back out here? Once the others are back- and they should be back soon- we should discuss what happens next.”
Jeremy nodded, and was promptly shooed back to the kitchens- “God help us all if you keep her waiting for too long,” Jenna had added, as he left.
Chloe was still leaning against the door when he returned, examining the tear in her jacket sleeve, the rest of the fabric bunched up in her fist.
He coughed quietly, and her head jerked up. “You’re back.”
“Uh, yeah.” He nodded. Stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and pulled them back out again, clenching them into fists at his sides. “You- you wanted to talk to me?”
He remembered the last time Chloe just wanted to ‘talk’ to him.
He didn’t want to remember the last time Chloe just wanted to talk to him.
She seemed to sense his discomfort and waved him into the room, giving the folding chair a pointed glance- Jeremy wondered if she was feeling as weird about this as he was.
Probably not.
As he sat down, he couldn’t help but think that it felt like an interrogation. Except interrogation rooms weren’t just repurposed Taco Bell storerooms, and they didn’t smell like a strange mixture of tacos with the faintest traces of bleach. Or maybe they were- Jeremy had never been interrogated before. Not officially, at least.
“Jeremy.” Chloe snapped her fingers in his face, frowning. She was standing in front of him with her arms crossed, which only served to strengthen the feeling of being interrogated. “Pay attention.”
“Sorry.”
She studied his face, presumably to make sure he wasn’t spacing out again.
“I want to apologize,” she said, eventually. Jeremy tried not to let his surprise show. Judging by Chloe’s sigh, he hadn’t succeeded. “Don’t look too shocked. The zombie was a wake-up call. I’ve done a lot of shit that I shouldn’t be proud of- shit that I’m not proud of, but I can’t undo it. The least I can do is make sure people know I’m sorry for most of it before they- or I- die.”
Jeremy nodded. He understood what she was getting at, for the most part.
Chloe cleared her throat, and suddenly she didn’t seem as intimidating. “Starting with you. I owe you a lot more than just an apology for what happened last halloween, but it’s all I can do right now.”
Jeremy winced at the memory. She was right, but that didn’t mean he wanted to talk about it. “Chloe-”
“Wait. I’m not done.” He shut up. “I don’t expect you to forgive me right off the bat, or at all. I just need you to know that I’m sorry, and I know that it’ll take a lot to make it up to you, but I’m willing to make that effort.”
The silence that followed dragged on for a few seconds too long, and Jeremy briefly wondered if Chloe could see him struggling to respond.
“You’re right,” he started, choosing his words carefully. “I don’t think I can completely forgive you yet. For- for the party, and for everything before that, too. But I appreciate the apology. It’s a start.” Chloe nodded, and he managed to give her a half-hearted smile. “I… uh, I hope I’ll be able to accept it one day.”
The smile she gave him in return was more genuine than most of her smiles.
Despite everything, though, Jeremy could only handle so much time spent alone with Chloe Valentine.
He pushed himself off of the chair, its legs scratching against the floor. “Um. Jenna and Christine are holding a meeting out front. They asked me to let you know.”
Jeremy lingered at the door, holding it open. Chloe made no move to join him, holding up her jacket to inspect it.
“What are you waiting for?” She raised an eyebrow, directing her words at Jeremy without glancing his way. “They asked you to let me know. You did. Job’s done. Now get out- I need to figure out if this is fixable and I can’t do it with you staring at me.”
“Right. Uh, sorry.” He let the door shut behind him.
Jenna and Christine were sitting at a booth when he returned, Rich sitting precariously on the edge of the table. Upon closer inspection, Jeremy caught sight of Jake sitting next to Christine, mostly obscured by Rich’s torso. The blood was gone, paper towel roll and cleaners arranged neatly on another table.
He slid into the seat next to Jenna and found them playing what Christine has deemed ‘road trip games’ with a stack of napkins, waiting on Michael and Brooke and Chloe.
It was nothing like Apocalypse of the Damned, and he was still floundering in how lost he felt, but then Rich pushed the napkin across the table towards Jeremy with a declaration of war and a hastily scribbled tic-tac-toe board, and all he could do was take the pen and settle down to wait.