Chapter Text
About once a month, the dead of Gravity Falls rose to walk the earth.
It had been terrifying, the first few times Ford experienced it, but quickly devolved into a minor annoyance. By about the fifth or sixth time it happened, Ford had accepted it into his routine. The diner served a cheesesteak dinner every other Thursday, the paper came on Saturday mornings, the Northwests held their summer celebrity nuisance-fest every year, and once a month there was a zombie uprising.
Apart from the few memorable incidents where Ford had been obliged to throw together an antidote for an unfortunate townsperson with a chunk bitten out of them, the dead had started to blend into the background of everyday life in Gravity Falls. In fact, the regular zombie uprisings had become so mundane that Ford had almost forgotten about them.
He definitely remembered now.
It was his own fault for losing track of time, Ford scolded himself as he hurried through the undergrowth. He’d known the full moon was coming, known that paranormal activity picked up with increased lunar influence, known that they were close to due for another graveyard-break. He just hadn’t realised how close, and now here he was, caught unprepared out in the woods without even his trusty boom box slash flamethrower. If he didn’t make it back to the Institute of Oddology alive, hopefully Fiddleford would be able to restrain him long enough to put the antidote together. And hopefully the blood would still be fresh enough to rinse out of his clothes.
“What a nuisance!” Ford muttered to himself, breaking right to avoid the fissure of green light and the unearthly moans that burst through the trees to his left. He didn’t slow down, though – the crunch and crackle of the undead horde crashing through the woods behind him was getting louder. “What – is the purpose – of having a shambling horde of corpses – pour out of the earth – every month?”
An enormous fallen tree loomed in his path, but Ford didn’t break stride, bracing both palms against the trunk and vaulting over it. He thought, for a moment, as his feet struck ground, that he was clear – but then he tried to take a step forward, and was hauled up short by a sharp yank around his arms. Ford spun, as best he could, to see the tail of his overcoat snagged on a jutting branch.
“Oh, for -” Ford snapped, tugging on the fabric. “Excellent. And now I’ve ruined another garment. What a fantastic night this has turned out to be.”
With one final yank, Ford’s coat tore free of the branch. He could hear the thick fabric tear, but didn’t have time to spare to check how bad the damage was. The eerie green glow pouring between the trees back in the direction he’d come threw huge shadows of the advancing dead against the fog, great outstretched arms reaching out to grasp him and drag him back.
They were closing in. Ford cursed under his breath. If he got bit again, Fiddleford would never let him hear the end of it –
Ford turned to run, and froze.
The stinking, decayed corpses of three former residents of Gravity Falls leered back at him as they shuffled out of the trees. Between the three of them, they had almost enough parts to make up one whole human. One whole, extremely ugly human.
Ford took one stumbling step backwards, the backs of his legs hitting the tree trunk. Maybe the zombies hadn’t seen him – or scented him? They seemed to have about one intact eyeball between the three of them, a grotesquerie that reminded Ford sharply and absurdly of Greek mythology. Fitting. He’d outwitted a phoney muse, only to be devoured by ersatz Fates. How – well, ‘ironic’ wasn’t the correct term…
The leading zombie opened its desiccated mouth and let out a triumphant groan, reaching out for Ford. Ford shrank back against the fallen tree behind him. He could hear the shambling hordes crashing through the undergrowth towards him, drawing ever closer. There would be no escape the way he’d come.
Ford squeezed his eyes shut, huffing out a long, exasperated breath. Well, hopefully Fiddleford still had some of some of last month’s antidote somewhere in the Institute’s stores. Maybe, if he could retain enough focus, he’d be able to test his hypothesis about the relative desirability of brains based on intellect…
There were a series of short, sharp sounds, like the snap of dry tree branches underfoot, the thud of heavy footfalls.
The shuffling, the groaning and moaning, stopped abruptly. The silence that flowed in to fill the space they left behind was thick and somehow more ominous than the noise of the advancing hordes had been.
Ford dared to crack one eye open.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting to see, once he opened his eyes. Perhaps a fallen tree? Possibly Boyish – or had the ‘Manly’ caught on, yet? Poor Dan had been trying so hard to spread it – Dan Corduroy with an axe or Shandra Jimenez with a boom box? Maybe poor Susan Wentworth, bitten again trying to get all of her cats out of reach of the undead.
Whatever he was expecting to see, it certainly wasn’t what met his gaze when he opened his eyes.
The zombies lay on the needle-carpeted ground, skulls smashed, limbs scattered, greenish ooze slowly soaking into the earth. Ford almost didn’t recognise the figure standing in their midst, at first. He seemed…bleached, somehow, drained of colour, even his long, once-dark hair prematurely greyed, as though someone had dumped an entire bag of flour over his head and let it settle in. In places, Ford could swear he could see the bone glowing through his unnaturally pale skin, bluish-white and ghostly.
But it was the eyes that caught Ford’s gaze, and held it, even as the roar of the approaching dead behind him grew louder. Irises such a pale blue-white they almost blended with the whites around them, marred by the sharp black pinprick of the pupil, not the milky-white of the zombies pursuing Ford but a piercing, mournful, intelligent, and above all living stare.
“Stanley…?” Ford breathed, and his brother – his brother’s ghost? – raised his head, revealing a livid red mark marring the ghastly pallor of his throat. It looked, Ford thought, with a bitter sinking feeling, like it had been made with a rope. “What – what are you doing here? Where have you been? Did you hide my Journal? What – what happened to you? How -”
Slowly, ponderously, as though each movement required an enormous effort of both strength and concentration, Stan raised a hand to his mouth and gestured. Lips zipped. The motion gave Ford a better glimpse of that horrible crimson mark on Stan’s throat, and Ford couldn’t help an involuntary shudder.
“If you’ve been bitten,” he started, and then couldn’t seem to think of a way to finish the sentence. If Stan had been bitten, then Stan would be right there with the other zombies trying to devour him, not saving his life. If Stan had been bitten, he would be cracking his usual terrible puns, only most of them would now be about brains. If Stan had been bitten, his eyes would be shrouded with the milky-white film of death, not bright and sad and fixed, unblinking, on Ford.
He didn’t blink. Tesla and Sagan, didn’t he ever blink?
“Come with me,” Ford said, finally, reaching out and grasping Stan by the wrist. Part of him expected it all to have been a trap, for Stan to lunge forward and bite a chunk out of Ford’s skull as soon as he was within reach. Part of him expected his hand to simply pass through.
But Stan was solid enough, though the chill of his flesh made Ford’s skin crawl.
“Come with me,” Ford repeated, and Stan nodded dumb agreement. It was strange, Ford decided, not to hear Stanley crack a joke, make a bitter comment, even just utter his signature blather. Strange, and wrong. Perhaps it was this wrongness that made him so polite, that made him bite his tongue. “Please. Maybe – We might be able to help you.”
A wry grin slowly stretched across Stan’s pallid face, grotesque and horrible, not reaching his eyes. He met Ford’s gaze, and then, slowly, deliberately, shook his head.
No.
“No, you won’t come, or no, I can’t help you?”
Stan just shook his head again. No.
Ford squeezed Stan’s wrist, gripped by a sudden, irrational terror that had nothing to do with the animated corpses even now lurching towards him. “Come with me anyway.”
Stan’s shoulders shook in a soundless laugh, but he let Ford drag him along.