Chapter Text
“The zombies are coming! The zombies are coming!” Someone screamed as soon as Link entered Kakariko Village, not long after defeating the ever popular Water Temple.
At first Link was just confused. Zombies. Did they mean like the monsters in what used to be the market place? How could that be here? But then he saw them too. Zombies. They were like at the market place and there were probably hundreds of them. All stumbling toward Kakariko. They let out cries and moans as they stumbled forward with their arms in front of them.
To make things even more confusing, Navi fell asleep almost as if she was under some kind of spell. What? Link caught her and put her in his pocket so she would be safe.
There was a scream. Link looked to the side of him and saw it was a random person who he had never talked to.
He tried to speak. He had to tell her that they—or rather—she needed to get out of here. Link had fought these zombies before and he could do it again even though there were so many of them. But like usual words wouldn’t come. Damn it!
Instead he tried to reach for her hand so he could pull her away, but she gave him a look as if he had done something stupid or unheard of.
“I think I can handle zombies,” the woman said, which confused him even more. She hadn’t been handling them well before.
Link didn’t know what to do but then they got closer. He had to fight them. And so he started doing just that. Link had beat three temples and some mini temples as a child before this. It shouldn’t have been that difficult. But there were just so many of them.
“Hurry up!” the woman yelled.
Link stared at her and once again tried to say something. More zombies came toward him and he managed to kill it before it could attack him.
Even though he thought he had seen these zombies before, they were slightly different. Those zombies… well… they hadn’t been quite like these ones. These ones smelled like they were rotting. And they didn’t just look generic. They looked like people he could have met when he was in the market place.
Back when there was a market place.
Link killed a couple more zombies, but then he followed the woman. Maybe she wasn’t from Kakariko. She looked different and she just held herself in a way he didn’t see very often here.
She led him to the windmill where about twenty people from the village were hiding. They were a lot less calm than Link and the woman were. A few of them were sobbing.
“This isn’t supposed to happen!” one of them cried, screaming very loud.
Link wondered if this could be something that Ganondorf caused. The zombies were monsters after all and yet… there was something different about them. There was something different like this. Part of him just had this feeling that this wasn’t right. That it wasn’t what was meant to happen. And that things were meant to happen a certain way. Or a few different ways, but not this way.
But maybe he was wrong and Sheik would soon show up and tell him about the next temple he had to go to so that he could make things like they were supposed to be.
Link went over to someone and tried to make them feel better just by looking at them. He wanted to say something comforting. Whether this was meant to happen or not, Link was going to solve it. He would save this people and then he would go back to saving Hyrule from Ganondorf.
But like before his words wouldn’t come to him.
Goddess…
The woman who had screamed apparently had a plan and she was now trying to tell them it. Link didn’t understand why she had screamed if now she was so calm but apparently, she wasn’t too worried about them.
“We need someone to head to the graveyard,” the woman said with a sigh. “We need someone to fetch something from there.”
“Fetch something from there?” someone asked. He was an older man. One of the men who had been doing construction here back when Link was younger. It was strange he was here now. They hadn’t been here before when he had come here to get the Hookshot.
“Yes,” she said and then she pulled out a lot of documents. “I’ve found these around town.”
Link blinked and then went over and looked at them. They didn’t seem to be anything special. They were just normal diary entries, except one of them had a weird ending.
“Itchy Tasty.” That was what it had said. Link read it again. The whole diary entry was about someone who had gotten bitten and then had gotten sick and…
“A disease?” Link finally managed to say as he put the papers down.
In the background, a song kept playing over and over again. The man who ran the windmill was playing it even faster than usual and it made Link dizzy.
“Stop playing that goddess damn song!” someone yelled.
The man just seemed to play the song even louder than before.
“They might hear the song!” the other man kept yelling. “They might hear that damn song and then they will come to us. They’ll eat us all.” He smirked and shook his head. “Maybe they’ll eat you first and then we won’t have to hear it anymore.”
A little girl who had been taken here was spinning around as if she didn’t have anything to worry about. Not the zombies or how so much of Hyrule was being taken over by monsters. She was even humming the song loudly.
“We need someone to go to the graveyard to get a key,” the woman said, ignoring that the man was still yelling at the person who owned the windmill and telling him that he hated his song. It was now pouring rain outside and thunder was booming in the distance, which made it almost impossible for Link to hear what she was saying.
Key?
“Yes, a key,” the woman said with a sigh. “I’m not some master of unlocking things so you’re going to have to get it.” She shook her head. “Then you’re going to have to get something after that too or someone is.”
But Link knew that it had to be him. He had to save Hyrule. Whether it was from Ganondorf or from these zombie like creatures or something else entirely. Nothing would stop him.
But this was a lot different. He half wanted Sheik to show up and teach him a song. Some kind of song that would heal the zombies or something. But he didn’t appear. Link was alone in the windmill.
Well as alone as you could be when you were with over a dozen other people.
“You don’t have to be the one to go.” She examined him. “You look like you’re a teenager or…”
She wasn’t even that much older than him. Maybe a year or two and yet she acted like she knew what was going on and how to handle it. Link might not know exactly what was going on, which was starting to be more and more normal to him, but he would manage.
He already managed.
“Yeah,” Link finally managed to say. He was a teenager and really since he had skipped seven years, seventeen seemed pretty old. It didn’t matter his age anyway. He was the one who should handle this. Not this random person.
“So you don’t have to…”
Link gave her a look, hoping that she would know that he wanted to do this. How hard could it be after all?
She sighed and shook her head. “Fine,” she said as she took a couple steps away before turning and looking at him again. “Do you want someone to go with you?”
“No,” Link managed to say. He couldn’t even imagine someone going with him. Besides Zelda, Sheik and the sages that he knew of so far, he hadn’t gotten much help. Not even all the sages were all that helpful at times. The only one he was able to still talk to was Saria.
“Are you sure?” the woman asked. She looked around as if she as trying to see if anyone would be a good helper. She must have seen that wasn’t the case because she sighed. “Maybe it is good if you go by yourself. You have a lot of weapons. Not the best ones for fighting zombies, but they should work. Maybe.”
They would work. If she thought that he needed a long distance item, then he could use his bow. He would be fine.
“Sure,” Link said and before she could say anything else, he left. The graveyard. That hardly seemed like the best place to go, but when he got to the entrance of the graveyard it was locked.
Just great. He couldn’t help but remember what the woman said about being a master of unlocking. If only he was one, then he would be able to go in. He looked around for a convenient place he could hookshot to but nothing.
Just great.
And that was when he heard someone behind him.
He spun around, expecting that it would be one of the zombies. But it wasn’t.
It was Sheik.