Archive of Our Own

Mostly-'80s time period, though with some advancements over reality: 'net of early 2000s, possibly early model iPhones.

He'd had a dream about a shitty life and a weird website.  Coming out of it, he'd held off and looked at the webpage again; yup, fairly normal in itself, some sort of Wikipedia-thing, but definitely not the layout that he was used to.  More like the late '90s with a slightly modernized GUI.

He'd awoken feeling exasperated.  Waking to reality, a world of zombies, he wanted to trade back for the crappy life in the dream.

He made some shitty instant coffee, but even that was a blessing to him as he looked out over the empty streets, the eerily quiet buildings.  Four-stories around here, not the two-story brownstones a few blocks away.  El Rincón Montañez was deserted.  Hell of a shame; their pernil used to be amazing, but they'd gone the way of Sette Colli, Leske's, Elegante, Casa Pepe, and every place else when it all fell apart.

Had it all gone to shit quickly?  Slowly?  The truth was that it had been both.  Before it all went to hell, some important people here and there had quietly receded from the public eye.  When reports came in of what was actually happening, loads of people had panicked over nothing, raiding stores and looting and packing their families into the car and taking off for the countryside.

Then there was nothing.

No hordes of undead ravaging the populace, no plagues following the corpse-littered streets and choked sanitation infrastructure.

The military had cordoned off places here and there throughout the country as zombies began to show up, and things had been as hectic as Pandemonium for a while there, but normal everyday life had carried on without really noticing the change... or the changes.

First it had been service interruptions and public transportation delays, fewer goods finding their way to the store shelves.  Slowly the local populations everywhere had decided less early-on than others had that the cities presented their occupants with very little in the way of options, should things go horribly awry.

Their populations had dwindled slowly but steadily, always in a trickle, never a torrent.

Then one day it all fell apart.

There's only so far that any system, no matter how robust, can compensate for system failures, bleeding itself dry while remaining metastable.

When the end came, most people hadn't seen it coming.

Oh, they had, just not the way that it did.

One day it was there, the next, maybe weeks later, it wasn't.

The zombies hadn't been the problem, just a catalyst.

A parasitic slime mold.  No viral components as such, but with some similar behavior.  The slime mold worked its way into the body, taking over the nervous system and creating organelles of its own within the nerve cells, along with what the news had called organoids of unknown purpose, mostly trunking from the nervous system.

“It's life, Jim, but not as we know it...”

Life.

Life was a Louisville slugger and whatever you could scrounge from the deserted A&P.

He'd made his way all through Bay Ridge, up through Dyker and some of Bensonhurst, and now he'd made his way back down to Sunset.  Grocery stores sometimes held a pleasant surprise, but more often unpleasant ones.  You wanted to hit houses and apartments.  The owners were almost invariably long gone or turned, leaving behind canned goods, blankets, all kinds of things that they'd left behind in their haste or deaths.

Maybe he'd head south for the winter some day, but he knew the area where he was.  He had no idea what he might run into anywhere else.  Besides, all of those post-apocalypse movies had lied to everyone: gasoline stays good in a car for only three to six months — less with alcohol added — maybe a bit longer in a tightly sealed container, and two or three years with treatment, but how often did that happen?

Alcohol could be used instead for a little while, but the seals would break.

That'd be one long-ass walk.

Diesel¹ would simply kill a gas engine within a few miles, but usually lasted just fine in trucks.  He didn't know if it would last forever though, and he wasn't getting any younger.

He felt better near the water, not that the water was any better.

The only good thing was that the undead weren't living dead corpses, or he'd have been in real shit.  The infection only took over living people.  Greenwood was still full of corpses just lying right there in their graves, where they were supposed to be.

The mold-zombies responded to human noises, and any other noise was just a focus without a chase, as long as you didn't silhouette yourself and then move.

There were still people around.  Wary.  Scared.  Hungry.

Some were good, too.

You could talk for a while, but it wasn't the same as it used to be, and everyone had the look.  That same look.  The look that said that they knew that it was only a matter of time.  That their lives were empty of whatever used to drive them.  That time itself was stalking them.

You could look into their eyes and see nothing.  A hollow emptiness filled with empty days and dread filled nights.

Was it any wonder that nobody stayed together for long?  Teaming up was a better long term strategy, but no one ever did.  Not for long, anyway.  You couldn't take seeing “it” in each other's eyes day in, day out.  The knowledge that it was all over and they just hadn't died yet.

Zs weren't the problem — not the real problem — it was that you were alone and on your own.

Stranded.

No community, no support.

O ~~~ O