I wrote this last night, in a bout of plot bunny related inspiration. It's not very good, but it amused me so I figured I would share it. Enjoy.
The booming echoes of gunfire didn’t shake her anymore. Kyleigh didn’t know when they stopped signaling that compulsive section of her psyche – the one that used to trigger hour long panic attacks that could only be calmed by Jay holding her to the floor and shoving an oxygen mask in her face – that registered that they meant everyone she knew was dying. Maybe it was the knowledge that everyone she knew was already dead, or the quarter mile of concrete that now separated them from the rest of the world; but, the gunshots still echoed through the ventilation. When she wanted to hear, she would stand by the vents, listen, and know.
She didn’t much like to know anymore, though; not when she had seven years of research to do in a little over three weeks.
As she stared at the endless table of beakers and test tubes, Kyleigh’s hands began to shake. She felt sick to her stomach and her vision blurred in an all too familiar way. “J-Jay,” she mumbled, craning her neck to try to see him where he sat in the hallway outside of the laboratory.
She leaned too far, though, and fell from her stool. The metal stool crashed against the floor, and her slight, disease-ridden body thudded with it.
“Ky?” Jay’s voice called from the end of the hallway. His footsteps sounded on the linoleum floors. “Ky, what happened?” He turned the corner and saw her convulsing on the floor. He frowned and grabbed a syringe from the table.
Kyleigh grabbed for it, but he held it away from her. “Tell me how to do it.”
“N-No, g-g-gimme,” she choked out as spasms racked her body. He held it back from her. “D-Do you w-want me to d-die-e?”
He sighed and handed it over. She jammed the needle into her forearm and shot the thick orange liquid into her bloodstream. After several minutes, her convulsions slowed and she regained her presence of mind. Soon she was sitting on the floor, eating saltine crackers Jay had dug out from a supply closet down the hall.
“When I turn,” he said as he cracked open a bottle of water for her, “don’t mess around with this antidote shit. Just put a bullet between my eyes and be done with me.”
“You know I couldn’t do that,” Kyleigh said, brushing a wavy strand of brown hair away from her thin face. “And don’t talk that way. You won’t contract anything so long as we’re down here.”
“That’s what we thought,” he said. “But they got you.”
She cringed and took a long drink of her water. She didn’t like hearing Jay talk about the epidemic like he did. It made her feel guilty for only being able to bring a few down with her, and at a cost. Jay was the only other member of their crew that made it down to the underground lab bunker with her, and he was the only one in all that made it down safely. One of the diseased – or as Jay would so intolerantly call them, Zombies – followed them down and bit Kyleigh before Jay could knock his head off. That’s how the disease was transmitted, saliva to blood.
The only thing keeping her alive was the serum developed by the scientists down in the lab before Kyleigh and Jay. They knew more than she did, had more training. Kyleigh was only a graduate student at the university, Jay hadn’t even studied medicine. He’d studied literature. He was the only one who wasn’t a med student on the trip, and deep down Kyleigh knew he loved the irony.
He was the least sensitive about the epidemic, as well. He refused to believe anything could be done about the disease. He didn’t think they – the diseased – had any of their old selves left in them, that they could be returned to their former states of being. Kyleigh didn’t know why he hadn’t already given himself up to them.
“Feeling any better?”
Kyleigh looked back at him, bringing her thoughts back to the present. He watched her with his shining green eyes under tangled locks of dark brown that spilled over his forehead. While Kyleigh made regular use of the chemical showers to clean herself, she didn’t think he had bathed in weeks.
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “I’m not making much progress though.” She looked up to the lab table and sighed. Nothing she had done so far left her with any promising results. It was almost too much for her one mind to handle. But she couldn’t stop trying. She had three weeks and some days before the disease would overtake her, serum or no serum, and Jay would have to pull out his shotgun and blast her through the head.
“I don’t know why you even bother,” he said, shaking his head and crumbling the empty plastic saltine sleeve into a ball and tossing it across the room. “There’s nothing you can do. Might as well make the most of the time you have left.”
“I have to try, Jay. It’s—”
“Stop,” he said, grabbing her wrist. “I know what you think, you know what I think.” His hand slid down her arm and he linked his fingers in hers. “Don’t waste your time, or your breath, trying to tell me differently.”
Kyleigh frowned. “But, Jay—”
“Ky.” He laughed, shaking out his shaggy hair. “Don’t make me dump the rest of the serum down the drain.”
She couldn’t keep the fear from her eyes at his comment. Jay had become a close friend, thrown with her by circumstance, but he was still such a puzzle to her. Part of her – a startlingly large part – believed he would do it, dump the serum down the drain and watch her succumb to the disease while he loaded his gun.
“Chill out, Ky!” Jay fell over laughing on the floor. “You ought to see how white your face just got. Damn, Ky, I like you enough not to kill you when you still have time left.”
“Jay…” She let out a long breath of air and lay on the floor, facing him. “Sometimes I really hate you, you know that?”
He grinned and grabbed her around the waist pulling her across the linoleum lab floor until she was pressed against his chest. “Aw, you’re just a crazy near-Zombie,” he said, his face close to hers. His breath smelled like crackers. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kyleigh felt that familiar turn in her stomach she got lately when she was close to Jay. A large part of her believed it was a part of the slowed progression of the disease; she was beginning to desire human flesh. However, a tiny part of her feared it was much worse; that what she desired was him – unrelated from the diseased desire to consume him, but not in an entirely different sense – that she was falling in love with him.
“Why did I follow you down into this dungeon anyway?” he asked, locking his eyes with hers. She hated when he did that; it was like he could see right through her, right into her thoughts, her soul – if she still had one at this point. “It’s a wonderfully awful place to be, and you’re lousy company.”
“Hey thanks,” Kyleigh said, shooting him a glare. “You’re not the greatest companion either.”
A mocked expression of insult spread over his face. “How dare you say something like that,” he said. “I’m delightful.”
Kyleigh burst out in laughter, burying her face in his threadbare t-shirt. Tears streaked her face as she laughed harder than she had in months. Jay tightened his arms around her, his shoulders shaking as his strong laugh accompanied her squeal.
After a long time, their laughter subsided into giggles and then into contented silence. Kyleigh’s face rested against Jay’s chest as he continued to hold her tight to him. He smelled like sweat and laboratory, never a pleasant combination, but it was somewhat comforting. Perhaps because Kyleigh knew she smelled the same way. She was due for another chemical shower.
“Hey Ky,” Jay said after a while, his words mumbled as his face was pressed against her hair.
“Hm?”
“I don’t know why I followed you down here,” he said. “All I know is there was no way I was going anywhere else. Not if this is where you were going.”
“It’s not like you had anywhere else to go,” she said, pushing herself back from him to look at his face. She expected a taunting smile to be plastered to his lips, but there was only the most serious expression she had ever seen Jay wear.
“I… I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“I know I say I don’t believe you can figure out a cure for this whole Zombie thing,” he said. “But, you almost make me believe it can be done. For your sake.” He paused, closing his eyes and shaking his head to knock his bangs out of his face. He opened them again and did another one of his piercing-your-soul looks. “I don’t know what I’d do if you were gone.”
Kyleigh pushed herself up and lifted her stool from the ground. “I have to get back to work,” she mumbled. She pulled on her gloves and grabbed a test tube and her notebook, throwing herself back into her calculations.
She heard Jay – though as if he were at a distance – get up and walk out of the room, mumbling something indiscernible to himself.
She didn’t see much of him for the next few days. He would always come by, never failing, to offer her some of their dwindling food supply and making sure she always had enough of the serum brought out from the supply rooms in case she had an attack. And she always did. They came closer and closer together, until instead of just a few a day she was getting them almost hourly.
He started hanging around the back corners of the laboratory, making sure she could give herself the serum when the attacks came, and always trying to get her to teach him how. She never did, though. For some reason, she just couldn’t let herself have that sort of dependence on him.
Her spirits were considerably raised, though, knowing Jay was lounging around within her sight now. He dragged in an old couch from the lounge down the hall and lay on it, the old radio he’d found some five months back sitting on his chest. He’d managed to get a signal all the way down in the lab, and listened in to the broadcasts sent out by a group of survivors who’d managed to get together and form some kind of understanding of what was happening out there.
Jay was addicted to it. He always had it playing, listening to lists of deaths and cities bombed. It was the UN’s newest strategy. The epidemic was centralized in North America, but slowly spreading overseas. They were shipping anyone suspected to have contracted the disease over to America and slowly bombing the areas known to be overrun with the diseased.
Kyleigh hated imagining that all her hard work might go to waste if a bombing was strong enough to destroy their bunker. Jay, somehow, saw some hope in it. Like if all the diseased were destroyed, they could be rescued and taken to some place untouched by the epidemic.
Except, Kyleigh would never be taken out of North America. Not unless she created a surefire cure. She’d be left to die by bombing or gunfire from some lone survivor, or executed right then and there by whatever official came to them with offers of safety.
After days of static-ridden death tolls, she couldn’t handle it anymore.
“Jay, shut that goddamn thing off!” she shouted, throwing an empty test tube against the wall and letting it shatter. She shuddered at the sound and grabbed a syringe, jamming it into her arm. Any outlash terrified her, anymore. The diseased were prone to drastic emotional outbreaks, and though she had always had a pretty short temper, she wasn’t taking any chances.
He dropped the radio, still playing, onto the couch and ran to her. He pulled the syringe from her arm and threw it to the floor. “You’re going to kill yourself,” he said. “You just took some; it can’t be safe to take more.”
She pushed him back. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just can’t listen to all the suffering anymore.” She pointed to the radio across the room. “We both know people are dying, that the world is giving up on any survivors still here. Do we really need to hear about it?”
“Calm down, Ky,” he said. He pulled the gloves off her hands and led her away from the table. “You need a break, you’re working too hard.”
“I can’t stop working,” she said. “I need to find a cure; I don’t have a whole lot of time left.”
He unbuttoned her lab coat, pulled it off her, and threw it to the floor. She wore a thin tank top and old jeans underneath. “You have time for a break,” he said. “Come on, come hang out with me.”
“Jay, this isn’t the time to be hanging out,” she said. She bent to pick up her lab coat but he grabbed her hand and pulled her away before she could.
“Ky, come on,” he said - though it was more like pleading. “If we’ve only got two weeks left, I want to spend them hanging out with my best friend. Not watching her stress over chemicals I don’t even know the names of.”
He pulled her into a tight hug, despite her struggling, and held her for a long time. “Please,” he said. “You’re killing yourself worrying over this, when we could be having the time of our lives.”
“The time of our lives while the world is dying?” she asked. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s life if all of our friends and family are already dead?” he asked. “We have nothing to go back to up there. Even if you were, somehow, able to find a cure, what would it mean for us? We’d only get to look out on what used to be our world. There’s nothing left for us there. All that’s left for us is right here, between me and you.”
“That was very poetic,” Kyleigh said softly. “But you’re wrong. There’s nothing for us down here either. What can we do? Listen to the radio? Or, as an equally terrible alternative, sit under the vents and listen to gunfire take down anyone left that we might have known up there.”
Jay laughed and took a step back from her. “Wait right here.”
He came back a minute later with a bottle of wine in each of his hands. “Here.” He handed her one and uncorked it. “Whoever was down here before us must have liked cheap-ass wine, so why not make use of it? They’re not coming back to drink it.”
Kyleigh took a small sip, swirling it around in her mouth like her mother used to do when she hosted wine tastings at the country club back home. It was a vibrant array of tastes for such inexpensive wine, especially compared to the stale water they had been drinking for weeks. “Not bad,” she said.
Jay laughed and wrapped an arm around her waist. “You only say that because you’ve never had any better,” he said. “You’ve always been dryer than a desert.”
“Hey, I’ve had my fair share of drinks,” she said. “You didn’t know me pre-epidemic, you have no room to talk.”
He took a long drink from his bottle and laughed, spinning her around a few times in a strange sort of dance. He rested his forehead against hers and exhaled, blowing wine-breath over her face. “Well, what was pre-epidemic Kyleigh like?”
“A med student,” she said, laughing. “I guess I wasn’t really the biggest partier, but I had fun.”
“Mmm, fun with sutures and test tubes?” He laughed at himself, always imagining he was funnier than he actually was.
“Regular people fun,” she said. “I went out, danced, drank, had sex, did things young people do.” She was exaggerating, of course. She hadn’t been out to a bar since undergrad, and even then it was more like once a month with her celibate roommate. Since med school, she hadn’t left much time for a social life.
“Did pre-epidemic, regular people fun Kyleigh happen to have a boyfriend?” Jay asked. His face drifted closer to hers, his nose brushing her cheek.
She felt her face flush bright red, and hoped he wouldn’t notice. She felt that same turning of her stomach she always did. “No,” she said. “She didn’t.”
“Well good,” he said softly. He lifted her face to his and pressed his lips against hers. Kyleigh’s head spun, her heart racing. She urged to push herself away and run for the lab table, to grab a syringe and jam it into her arm, because she was near sure she was finally losing it to the disease, but she couldn’t tear herself away.
Jay dropped his wine bottle; it rolled across the floor, spilling red wine over the white linoleum. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her to him. Kyleigh let her bottle fall as well, and awkwardly rested her hands on his chest.
After a moment, he broke away and locked eyes with her in the way only he could. “I love you, Ky,” he said, “and I know that you love me too, but you’ll never say it. So here I am, saying it for you, all you have to do is let it happen.”
Kyleigh bit her lip, the taste of the wine thick in her mouth. “Okay.” It was all she could say, all she could give of herself, but he understood. He saw right through her. No, right into her. He saw right into her very core.
He pulled her close to him, kissing her again, and slowly pushing her backwards, back across the lab to where the chemical shower was concealed by a makeshift wall of crates.
Kyleigh only had a week left. A week left before the serum would start becoming ineffective. Jay had eventually let her get back to work, now too invested in her to let her fail. And Kyleigh let him turn the radio back on, trying to understand that it was the only thing that kept him sane anymore.
After a few days of serious concentration on both their parts, Jay jumped up from the couch, cheering, and ran to Kyleigh. He grabbed her from her stool and swung her around, kissing her and laughing.
“What?” she asked, irritated. As time wore on, she grew more and more frustrated with her own failure and unleashed that frustration on whatever was closest. Every day she felt the disease weighing on her more and more.
“There are others, Ky!” he shouted. “Others working on a cure! And they’re not too far from here.”
“So what?” she asked. She picked up her overturned stool and sat back down. “For all we know they could be dead.”
“No, Ky, they’re broadcasting, live, right now,” he said. “They say they’re close, so close, they’re just missing one piece. That one piece could be you, could be your research. We have to find them.”
She shook her head, leafing through her notes. “We’ll never make it,” she said. “We have no idea what it’s like up there now.”
“Ky,” he said, turning her around, holding her face in his hands. “We have to try. If it means a cure, if it means you’ll live, we have to try.”
She looked back at her notebook, filled with her research. There was no way she could finish in the short week she had left; no way she’d be surviving. If there was some shred of hope, could she really let it slip past them?
“Alright,” she said at last. “Let’s go.”
Jay kissed her again and set off frantically filling a backpack with food, serum, and ammo for his shotgun. He was ready in minutes, standing by the door, holding his hand out to Kyleigh. She still sat on her stool, though. She flashed back to every time Jay had complained about her work. Why waste the time we have left? Surely the possibility of gruesome death presented by leaving the bunker was a huge waste of time.
“Ky,” he said. “Come on. We’re going to go find a cure.”
She stood at last, shedding her lab coat and gloves, and took his hand. The part of her that was still her knew she would follow him anywhere. They walked down the hall to the stairs. Jay pulled back the barricades and undid all the locks. The door opened into a musty stairway that stunk of dirt and disease. Kyleigh coughed and looked back to the clean air of the bunker, knowing that now she had let Jay get this far there was no turning back.
He pulled her into the dim light of the stairway, closing the door behind them.
They travelled upward for a long time, what seemed like hours, before finally breaking the surface. It was night, and the air wasn’t fresh like Kyleigh remembered night air being. It stunk worse than the stairway. Like never-ending death.
“It shouldn’t be very far that way,” he pointed down the abandoned street. Kyleigh nodded and walked ahead. He kept a step behind her, his gun at his side, ready to protect, to kill.
They didn’t run into any trouble for some time, and Kyleigh was starting to feel good about the decision. Maybe they would make it after all; maybe the diseased had already been driven away from this city.
“Jay, I think we might make it,” she said.
All she heard in return was a scream, a curse, and a gunshot.
Kyleigh spun around, getting an eyeful of Jay grasping his bloddied arm as he stood over a Zombie he’d just shot in the head. He looked up at Kyleigh, not fear but resolve in his eyes. He handed her the gun and the backpack. “Do it,” he said.
“No,” she said. “No, Jay, I can’t. You can’t ask me to do this.”
“Do it,” he said. “You have to. You promised, remember?”
He had made her promise, long ago, that if he were bitten she would end him before he turned completely. She had promised, but never intended to keep it. She just couldn’t, she couldn’t imagine taking someone’s life like that when there was a serum that could keep them alive a while longer.
“We’re going to find the others,” she reminded him. “We’re going to get a cure. You’re going to be okay, you’re going to live like me.” She reached for the backpack slung over his shoulder, to pull out a syringe to give him the serum, but he pulled away.
He shook his head, tears shining in his eyes. “No, Ky,” he said. “We’re not. There’s no others. There’s no cure. All I’ve been listening to for the past week is static.” He paused and glanced down at his bloody arm. “We’re the only survivors left. I just couldn’t… I couldn’t sit around and watch the disease kill you. I had to get us out of there, so we could just get it over and done with. You’ll end me now, and then the disease will end you.”
“Jay…I can’t…I just can’t…” she insisted, tears streaming down her face.
He pulled her to him, kissing her deeply for the last time. “Please, Ky, I love you,” he said. “I’ll see you soon, some place where the Zombie’s won’t be able to get us.”
He stepped back from her and crossed his arms in front of him.
Kyleigh lifted the shot gun with shaky arms and wiped tears from her face. “I love you,” she whispered, pulled the trigger, and shot him right between the eyes.
She pulled her notebook from the backpack and a pen, scribbling a few words at the bottom of the last page of notes. She tossed it, and the shotgun, aside and pulled a small handgun from the backpack. Bottles of serum tinkled across the cement as most of the contents of the bag spilled out over the sidewalk.
She spun the cartridge of the gun like she’d seen someone do in a movie once, though it wouldn’t matter which chamber it landed on, they were all loaded. She placed the gun to her head and pulled the trigger, leaving behind only the spilled miscellaneous contents of one backpack, the bodies of two lovers, and a note at the back of a notebook full of research.
Scribbled in the back of that notebook, at the end of a page of scribbled research notes, were only a few words in a med student’s careful handwriting: Don’t waste your time.
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