Chapter Text
Now
Pep never thought of himself as a survivor before. Not in the classic sense — the hero with the golden smile, the unsurmountable wall of a body, the unbreakable spirit, laughing in the face of danger and adversity.
His story was one of survival, however. Survival at its most pathetic, awful, primal. Survival at its most human.
He welcomed the warmth of blood trickling down his dry throat. He’d gotten used to the metallic taste of it.
He didn’t know if this was the end of the story. They had made it out of there.
As his knees sank deeper into the mud, his nose burning with the pollution of the yellow-tinted air, he thought if surviving was worth it in the end. He looked at the peaceful face of the boy he loved so much in his arms. He didn’t know if it was a peace of sleep or if he had quietly stopped breathing somewhere along the way, but he didn’t feel the need to check. It was peace nonetheless.
This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but with a whimper
***
Then
For the first time in his life, Pep was grateful for a half-empty stadium. The game against Real wasn’t a disaster per se, but both teams were obviously exhausted and making stupid mistakes, missing easy chances. The 2-2 had been glaring offensively on the scoreboard for the past thirty minutes. Under it, Jose Mourinho was pacing back and forth with an expression that suggested his feelings towards the match were similar to those of Pep — an embarrassing mediocrity of a football game, but not consequential enough to get riled up about.
On the pitch, Pep found comfort in following Xavi and Puyol, the only ones from the Culés who seemed to have an ounce of fighting spirit left. The former was expertly manoeuvring the ball, opening up space for his unresponsive teammates, while the latter brought his usual captain bravado to the table, shouting and riling them up. Valdes himself hadn’t been doing a terrible job, and Pep knew the two successful goals from Real were to be blamed on the shoddy defence from Alves and Pique.
Things weren’t going too well for Real either, although their subpar playing had twisted itself into a sloppy rage, making mistakes due to frustration rather than tired helplessness. Their prized Cristiano was shooting left and right, seemingly with no care as to whether the ball would actually hit the back of the net, his long, toned legs carrying him all over the pitch aimlessly, as the player was shifting in and out of position with no evident objective in sight. Casillas had resorted to leaning on the goalpost, a gesture which betrayed the Goalkeeper’s lack of confidence in the opposing team. Pepe had turned into a blood-thirsty shark, flinging players left and right like flies, mercifully protected by the obliviousness of an amateur referee. The only indication that the man was actually on the pitch and had read the rules was a perfectly deserved red card he had given Ramos fifteen minutes ago after a horrendous two-footed tackle on Messi, and that was only after Puyol had intimidated him into it. A joke of a ref befitting a joke of a game.
Leo was now sitting next to Pep, pale and drowsy, sulking like a child, his right leg propped up on a chair in front of him, an ice pack resting on the damaged ankle. The pain meds they had given him had made his usually sharp eyes glazed and unfocused, and the typically inhuman speed and accuracy of his movements slow and aimless, his hands limp in his lap.
‘There’s like 10 minutes left, let me on. I think I can get us at least something,’ he slurred, looking to Pep with pleading eyes.
‘Don’t be daft, you can barely even keep your eyes open,’ the manager replied.
Pep wondered if he’d been too hard on his team the past few weeks. He hadn’t cut them any slack in training, despite the situation — the AECOSAN had started recalling heaps and heaps of products because of some crop infection on the other side of the globe, which in turn had make panicked citizens bulk buy. This resulted in empty shelves, terrible traffic and a general feeling of frustration and discontent. Sure, footballers didn’t have to worry about where the next meal came from like normal people, but they were still human, and the dread of things taking a turn for the worst had made a home in the pit of the stomach of every Spaniard. Pep could see that the team wasn’t up to their usual standard in training and had given them a rather firm scolding, carefully constructing his speech to include the slightly manipulative reminder of ‘needing to provide entertainment to the people in desperate times,’ which had successfully guilt-tripped most of the players into shape.
That wasn’t being reflected today, however. Perhaps it was the half-empty stadium. No people in desperate times to provide entertainment for.
Normally, he would never dream of looking at his phone during a game, but since the likelihood of a dramatic turn of events seemed almost impossible, he allowed himself to glimpse at his insistently-buzzing device.
AMBER ALERT: THE GOVERNMENT ADVICES ALL CITIZENS TO REMAIN INSIDE. IF YOU ARE NOT HOME, SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY
Christ, he thought. This really was getting serious. Whenever a situation like this one had arisen, Pep had always made a point to filter out the potential fear-mongering and keep his head in the game, but an amber alert from the government meant that things were spiralling out of control. Perhaps something had happened, a robbery or a riot, or worse. He started thinking how difficult it would be to get his team back to their homes. He imagined them all loaded on the small Barca bus, stuck in an endless line of traffic, crazy fans raiding them on all sides.
‘Who died?’ Asked Leo.
‘What?’
‘I asked who died. You look like someone has.’
‘No, it’s this—‘ Pep fumbled. He realised how ridiculous it was to be distracting himself which such things during a game against Real of all teams. ‘It’s this outbreak, contamination or whatever thing. There’s an amber alert,’ he said as he gave the phone to Leo who furrowed his brows while reading the headline.
‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘they weren’t kidding.’
Pep was startled by a sudden commotion from the stands. He frantically started looking around the pitch to see if something had happened, but all the players were just looking around, seemingly as confused as him.
‘What’s going on,’ asked Leo, attempting to raise himself from the bench, before dropping back down, face twisted in pain.
‘Don’t get up,’ said Pep, hurriedly pushing his shoulders down. He started gesturing and waving to Jose on the other side, who, along with Ramos, was making his way to the pitch to investigate.
The shouts from the stands suddenly started to sound a lot more like screams. Pep still saw no sign of accident or injury on the pitch, though both teams seemed to be frozen, looking at the stands above Pep in a mixture of bewilderment and something else. Fear.
Suddenly Pep heard a loud crash from above. Looking up, he saw a broken piece of fence flying down like an asteroid. The manager ducked just in time to avoid a collision, falling on the ground, unable to understand what the hell was happening. After the first piece of broken fence fell three more, this time with soft thuds against the grass. It wasn’t until they started moving that Pep realised it wasn’t just debris. Those were people.
The three fallen seemed rather slow and sluggish, but otherwise shockingly unaffected by the fall. One of them was a woman whose legs were bent at unnatural angles. Pep could only stare in shock and disgust as she started crawling across the pitch, clawing at the grass. His eyes shifted to another one, a large male, who instantly made eye contact with him, and Pep swore if he’d eaten anything today he would have thrown it up instantly.
Josep Guardiola had not only been confronted with angry mobs of people, but he’d also been on the receiving end of the aggression of angry athletes. Hell, he swore sometimes when looking at Pepe that Real Madrid had managed to inject him with some kind of ancient predator DNA — the sparkle of that guy’s eye when he almost kills a player with a successful tackle was downright psychotic. But this was something else. This was not a psychopath. This was not an angry man. This was not a human.
It was as far from a human as a hungry lion, or a threatened bear, or even a fungus as it drains the life force out of an unassuming organism. There was nothing but primal rage behind the eyes. Nothing in front of them either except for the comically shocked face of Pep Guardiola, who suddenly felt an awful lot like a piece of bloody meat on a plate. He couldn’t move. Then the man — the thing — charged. Pep closed his eyes awaiting the pain.
When nothing came, he opened them and saw what he was sure was the content of his night terrors for the rest of his life.
The thing, tackled to the ground by the third fallen figure, who had started gnawing at its neck, blood spurting everywhere. Pep couldn’t really assimilate the picture, as more and more seemingly ravenous people started to invade the pitch, flinging themselves all over the place.
He couldn’t breathe. He looked for the players, who were in a similar state of dismay. Mourinho was nowhere in sight. Ramos stood out like a signpost on the pitch, soaked in red. He saw people from both teams try to avoid the attackers as they tried to make their way to the tunnels, guided by a ruthlessly efficient Puyol on one side and an unfittingly collected Casillas on the other. What the fuck was going on?
Pep stood frozen on his ass. He found himself staring at the mangled body of the first invader, the blood staining the bright green of Camp Nou’s grass like an angry brushstroke.
‘Pep!’ He heard from somewhere around him, ‘Pep, what’s happening?’
Pep thought he could actually feel the physical act of his head being screwed back on, his vision suddenly clearing as the reality of the situation dawned on him. A sudden rush of adrenaline overcame his daze and he rushed back to his feet. Leo was looking at him, uncharacteristically calm and frozen, seated in the same position as he’d last seen him. Pep didn’t know whether the Argentine’s unfazed demeanour was due to the painkillers the medics had pumped him full of or just pure shock, but he didn’t have time to contemplate now.
‘Can you get up?’ Leo nodded as he shuffled off the blanket and the ice pack, propping himself upright on two shaky arms, leaning against the bench. ‘Can you walk?’
Pep could see the gears turning in Leo’s head and determination darken his eyes, but as he took a step towards Pep on his bad ankle, he let out a barely-stifled squirm of pain, swayed dangerously, and crashed into the manager’s chest.
‘Fuck,’ said Pep, ‘fuck, fuck. We have to get out of here, hold onto me.’
With this, he hoisted Leo up by the waist and moved the younger man’s arms around his shoulders. The Spaniard started half-dragging them away from the pitch towards the tunnels.
Thankfully, the invaders seemed to be more interested in attacking whoever remained on the pitch rather than trying to exit the stadium. It was all a big blur, a mush of red and green, throat-ripping screams drowning out any other sound. Pep tried to keep his composure, having to slightly lift the deadweight that was Leo every time they came across debris, discarded water bottles, clothing, and god-knows what else thrown about in the ground, making their escape even harder.
The manager’s career as a footballer had proved beneficial in the strangest way — his years of training had left a positive mark on his physique and stamina, as he was carrying the smaller player with relative ease, while still going at a formidable speed, something someone else at his age would have struggled with. He couldn’t help but inwardly laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, realising that he was now implementing his playmaking skills of field-scanning in order to build a map of incoming dangers, his gaze shifting rapidly between the pitch and the exit.
They were almost there, the familiar hum of the LED lighting inside the tunnels barely audible, the claustrophobic red of their walls shining almost feverishly in the distance. Pep grunted and made a few more strides when suddenly his foot stepped in something soft and damp, which made a disgusting wet sound as his shoe dug into it. For a split second he stopped and looked down.
They say that in a shocking situation, you don’t see everything at once. Your brain cannot comprehend traumatic information quickly enough for it to be taken all in as a cohesive picture. Pep saw it in this order:
1. Dani Alves’s usually healthily tanned face was grey against the spatters of red
2. His eyes were glazed
3. Pep had stepped in something which did not belong outside of the protection of skin and muscles. Something that belonged inside the body. He did not want to find out what.
He stood there frozen for a few seconds until he felt Leo try shuffle away from him, slump over his arms awkwardly and vomit on the floor next to the lifeless body. This made Pep regather his thoughts — he glimpsed one last time at Dani’s corpse and continued towards the tunnels.
Finally inside, Pep didn’t stop for breath. The screams were getting fainter and fainter, and he was building a game plan in his head for his next course of action.
Get to the parking lot. Find a vehicle. Drive, and step on it!
Everything else could wait.
Up until that point, Leo had been making commendable efforts to ease the weight off of Pep’s shoulders, limping lightly on his good foot, occasionally even skipping when their pace had increased. Now, after the shock of seeing Alves and the exhaustion, Pep was fully dragging him, the younger man’s limp leg leaving behind a bloody trail. Whose blood it was, Pep didn’t know. As long as it wasn’t theirs, he couldn’t care right now.
As was bound to happen, Pep could hear the screams of the pitch increase yet again, the sonority of the echoes suggesting that they had made their way inside the tunnels. Shit, he thought as he made a futile effort to increase their pace.
‘Leo, help me out here,’ he said, turning to face the other man who was hanging limply from his arms, which were wrapped around Pep’s shoulders. He lifted his head up, face pale, eyes almost beadily dark as he tried again to stand on his right ankle, when his knees buckled and he bit back a moan.
‘Okay, okay,’ Pep said, ‘it’s okay.’ He was panicking now. There was no way they could make it to the parking lot at this rate. He decided that there were only two possible options for his survival right now:
Ditch Leo, out of the question.
Or sacrifice his back.
It was an easy choice.
‘Keep holding onto my shoulders,’ he said as he manoeuvred Leo’s lower body into his arms and started running like he never had before.
If they made it out of here, in the future his memory would probably idealise and dramatise the scene. A shining, heavenly, blinding light at the end of the tunnel. Their salvation.
The end of the tunnel was just a black spot.
The darkness of the night illuminated only by the faint yellow streetlights in the parking lot. He could hear them behind him, flinging themselves against the walls with sickening cracks and thuds and splats. How were they even still moving with those injuries. The human body was certainly a thing to marvel at. Pep found comfort in this thought as he felt the familiar pins and needles spread along his arms as he dug his fingers into Leo’s body. He made a point to take every turn as suddenly and brashly as possible, since it seemed the things’ coordination was lacking.
He finally made it out, his lower back on the verge of spasming up, his legs screaming aflame, and his arms almost numb. He started frantically moving his head in every direction, his chin brushing against Leo’s sweaty hair, who’d buried his face in Pep’s neck, his rapid breaths tingling against the latter’s neck. And then he saw it.
Now this image, he would romanticise for eternity. The bright headlights of a bus (a heavenly carriage varnished in Blaugrana red and blue) and Gerard Pique (giant Catalan Jesus himself) waving and jumping like a madman. Despite his body’s protests, Pep started running again. He felt everything in slow motion like one of those movies. His legs were moving as if underwater and it seemed like no matter how fast he went, Gerard and the bus were getting farther and farther away, while those humanoid animals that were chasing him were inching closer and closer. He closed his eyes and imagined himself training.
He forced himself to breath in through his nose and breathe out through his mouth.
In. Out.
In. Out.
The steadiness of his breaths also evened out the pace of his sprint, and the next time he opened his eyes, the bundle in his arms was being hoisted away by Puyol on the stairs of the bus, while Pep was being roughly pushed inside by Gerard. He collapsed on the floor and felt the bus start to twist and turn rapidly, his back aching with every bump in in the road, every accidental crash with a bin or a fence, when suddenly a calmness overcame his body when the smoothness of the road started gliding the bus away from the stadium.
He hadn’t realised he’d almost fallen asleep and the first thing he saw when he regained full consciousness were the comically large blue eyes of Gerard Pique staring at him in concern.
‘Pep, tell me now, were you bitten?’
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
***
The comforting hum of the bus engine would have lulled Pep to sleep if his mind hadn’t been racing.
Puyol, who had now taken up driving duty, had been filling him in for the past hour. Iniesta, ever the sensible one, had been following the news quite closely — Pep remembered clearly a year or two ago when Andrés had become somewhat of a hysteric hypochondriac after the Swine Flu fiasco, and though they used to make fun of him for it back then, his pedantic knowledge on the latest developments in transmittable diseases could be their only chance of survival.
The fungal infection had begun spreading sometime last year, first in Africa, affecting crops and produce. Slowly, cases of sick people started popping up all over the globe at an alarming rate, and food regulation agencies could not keep up with recalling products. Doctors named it a Cordyceps brain infection, CBI for short, with its current documented symptoms being an increase in aggression and the disappearance of rational thought. Increase in aggression is putting it midly, Pep thought as he recalled the images of the savage-like, barely-human things that had imprinted themselves on the back of his eyelids. Further development of symptoms had not been established yet. It could be transmitted through infected crops, fumes from fungal spores and bites from the afflicted, but since no one was really sure, Iniesta had advised that any possibly contaminated objects should be sealed or discarded of.
This is how Pep found himself at the front of the bus, shoe-less and trouser-less. At any other moment he would have felt embarrassed, however his ridiculous appearance was now the least of his worries.
The current plan was to drive until they were out of the city, then drive until they found a gas station, and then drive some more. Pep wasn’t complaining, he’d seen the state of his beloved Barcelona as the bus wandered and swerved around the narrow city streets — messy, bloodied, infested, aflame. They’d cracked open a window at some point when they’d gotten onto the highway and the air still reeked of death and disease.
His managerial instincts had not been subdued by the chaos of his circumstances, if anything they were sharper than ever. As he stared out into the liminal void of a road, only illuminated by the eery glow of the streetlights and the bus, he was assessing their current situation.
The minute he’d opened his eyes on the floor of the bus, Gerard Pique’s face inches above his own, he’d started evaluating. Barcelona’s team bus had, by routine, been pumped up with gas during the match, which meant they didn’t have to worry too much about running out.
The victim count was currently unknown. The only people they knew for sure were dead were Dani Alves and Mourinho. Culés and Madridistas alike had started roaming frantically around the pitch, when Casillas and Puyol had ushered everyone they could find towards the bus. Currently, an exhausted Casillas had sprawled his body along the length of the back seat. In the row in front, Xavi, David Villa, Iniesta and Marcelo were quietly murmuring amongst themselves. Busquets and Cesc were both dozing off, while Pepe had taken a row to himself, arms crossed and brow furrowed in contemplation. Further ahead, Ronaldo, Pique and Ramos were having a somewhat heated discussion. When Ramos’ voice would accidentally swell beyond a loud whisper, Geri and Cristiano would shush him, pointing to a sleeping Leo in the seat in front of them, and Sergio would roll his eyes like a scolded student.
As he examined the defender’s grim appearance, Pep found himself thankful for Barca’s dark kits. The usually brilliant white of the Madridistas’ jerseys was now tainted with the evidence of the horror show of Camp Nou. For a second, the manager wondered whether the blood on Ramos’ shirt was Jose’s, but he shook the thought out of his head.
He knew the head count wasn’t ideal, but he was thankful for every one of the players alive on that bus. There was a real problem though, which was starting to loom more and more threateningly over everyone’s head with each passing minute.
Save for a sandwich or two, and for the packet of half-melted chocolate in Leo’s rucksack, they had no food. And save for a bit of lukewarm gatorade and a flight-sized bottle of water, they were lacking in the hydration department, too. Pep could only imagine the state of the stores at this moment, so stopping any time soon would be out of the question. However, a bus of exhausted, famished athletes was a recipe for disaster. He pinched the bridge of his nose in anticipation of the inevitable migraine. He opened his mouth to express his concerns to Puyol, but looking at the captain’s pale, stoic face, suddenly as if having aged 10 years in an hour, he decided it would have to wait until morning. He knew Carles was probably thinking the same thing.
Just as the manager rested his head against the seat with a tired sigh, Puyol spoke, ‘I never thought I’d see a pensioner running like that.’
Pep scoffed in reply. ‘Careful, Carles, you may be captain, but I can still fire you.’
‘Ooh, I’m shivering. Those tighty wighties are truly intimidating,’ Puyol said with a smile, nodding at Pep’s bare legs. ‘Seriously, it was impressive. I thought you wouldn’t make it, those things were so close behind. You were unstable at first, and then something changed and you just— you just ran as if you were twenty. And with Leo as well.’
‘I needed to get him on that bus. I had an objective,’ said Pep, recalling the feeling of determination that had drowned out his panic. It was familiar, ‘I just imagined I was on the pitch.’
Puyol laughed, ‘Christ, the mindset of you people. Not everything is football.’
‘I’m glad it was for me today.’
‘Yeah, me too.’
There was something which had been nagging Pep since he got on the bus, ‘Why did you wait for us?’ He asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, why didn’t you leave. You risked everyone’s lives.’
Puyol sighed in reply, ‘You idiot, what do you think.’
Pep didn’t need any more elaboration. He met Puyol’s gaze in the rearview mirror, sleeping Leo’s reflection between them. He gave him a tight-lipped smile.