just a flu 2/?

Jan 28, 2011 00:12

Title: just a flu [2/?]
Author: sgnt_caitsy 
Rating: NC-17 for violence and gore (will change)
Pairing: Nick/Ellis
Summary: When a flu isn't just a flu.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
srry for ooc and lack of anything remotely sexy (bawwwww) ;3;

thanks to zoronoa for inspiration

part one

just a flu.

Ellis walked for a long time. The shirt on his back hung with sweat, the hair under his cap dripped into his eyes. He carried the axe he stole from his neighbour’s porch double handed.

It was just by luck that he’d ended up running into her first. She was alone - just like him - and brandishing something that could’ve been a baseball bat. The end was too splintered and bloody to tell. At first she’d just yelled at him, told him to leave, she’d even swung the broken bat at him a few times.

“You get the hell away from me, now! Not the first time I had to kill one of you, one of you talking ones,” Her arms were shaking though, the left one badly bitten, and Ellis could see that she was exhausted, the muck on her face disturbed by tear tracks. She wouldn’t be able to hurt him too much in this state.

“I ain’t sick, I swear,” he stepped forward slowly. She matched every one of his steady steps with a skittish stumble backwards. There was a sudden burst of automatic gunfire in the near distance. Hope bloomed up in the stuttering beats of his heart.

“Get away from me, you can lie - I know you can!” And the bites on her arms suddenly made so much sense that he could feel his eyes prickle.  The bat shook, her arms dipping and rising.

“I been bit ‘n scratched and tore all to hell, ma’am, I know I ain’t sick,” When Ellis stepped forward this time she sobbed brokenly. He smiled and kept it slow. He didn’t want to be alone out here anymore.

“I know it’s scary, I’m scared outta my mind myself, but I think I know a place we can go, a safe place,” he pointed to the blue sky, “I seen choppers flyin’ out towards the Vannah - that big, tall hotel.”

He’d been heading towards it for the past four hours now, watching as the towering building inched slowly forward on the horizon, the blistering heat and the bloated sick were slowing him down. If he kept going like this he’d never make it.

“We could help each other out,” Ellis put his hand on the bat and lowered it, her arms went willingly. It was six hours to sundown.

He made to speak again when she lunged into him, her dark arms squeezing him and her tears running into his shirt. The sounds she made were desperate and heart breaking. He rubbed her back gently and kept scanning the surroundings whilst she spoke apologies for people he didn’t know into his chest.

He spoke only when she’d stopped crying, “My name’s Ellis.”

“Rochelle.”

It only took them an hour to get to the hotel.

---

The car park surrounding the hotel was a mess. Police tape and some sort of biohazard sign bordered the gates and plastered the ground floor’s windows and doors. A couple of big trucks sat in the asphalt lot, the letters ‘CEDA’ bold on their side panelling. The doors were swung open wide, moving restlessly in a silent wind. Ellis didn’t like the fact that no one had been back to shut them.

He also didn’t like that there wasn’t anyone in the parking lot. It was deserted. Quiet.

Ellis went first, stopping and flinching when the flapping of police tape sounded like rasping growls and the shadows of the cars changed shape out of the corners of his eyes. Rochelle noticed but didn’t say anything. She hadn’t said much at all.

The doors weren’t boarded too well, a hard shoulder forced them swinging inwards on their hinges. He made sure to change that when they got inside, flipping a filing cabinet over and watching various client records flutter up through the air. He hoped there weren’t many people staying here.

Reception was just as quiet as the car park outside. Just as deserted.

Ellis turned to Rochelle, “Alright-“

He didn’t get far along before she was screaming, “Look out!” and he was turning round just in time to get a face full of something hard and unforgiving. He felt his teeth in his lips and then the world tilted and he was flat on his back, vision fuzzing in and out of colour like bad reception.

He could hear yelling - female. The girl he came with, Rochelle, she was in trouble. His head lolled as he pulled himself up, saw his hands grappling blindly in the air - getting up to his elbows before a hand was pushing his chest back down.

“Woah, sorry, you’re not getting up for a while,” It was a man’s voice, “That’s my fault, I guess.”

He could only mumble, “What’re yo-“before his throat was closing up and he felt light headed, he could taste the heavy copper of blood in his throat. A face appeared in his line of vision and - that wasn’t right. The face swimming in front of him was familiar. Ellis knew that face, he squinted his eyes and blocked the light, tilted his head like a dog that doesn’t understand.

Oh.

It was the man with the Mercedes, with the laughing girl and the leather seats (don’t scratch the paint job). Something fragile snapped in the back of his mind, “Yu’re a fucki’ jerk.” It was hard to talk with a disoriented brain and swelling lips, “That assho’ frum yester-“

“Some call me asshole, it’s Nick for short,” Then the man was grinning. Ellis wanted to put a fist in that grin. Beat his way into his face and check the break lines in his brain. Ellis snuffed laughter out of his bloody nose and tried to bring his lazy arms off the ground. Nick held him down with little effort, embarrassingly little effort.

“Coach, how’s it going over there?”

“Good, son, good, I think we got ourselves a couple of healthy survivors here,” Ellis couldn’t see who was talking, he sounded older though - authoritative. He moaned through a wave of nausea and tried to curl in on himself, only getting halfway before feeling like throwing up.  A hand on his face guided him onto his back again. Blue eyes looked into his briefly before turning away, apparently satisfied with whatever they found.

“Okay, good, this guy’ll be fine in a few,” Nick stood and spoke whilst fumbling for something in his suit pockets - the same suit from yesterday, “Well at least I think he will, hell I’m no doctor,”

“Watch him, will you, Coach?” He called over his shoulder while walking somewhere he couldn’t see. If he had any common sense he wouldn’t stray far, Ellis hoped he did though- just so he could watch him get whaled on by zombies.

“Will do, Nicholas.”

Nicholas, Nick, what a jerk.

A large face moved into his line of sight. A bald, black man. He was smiling down at him with startlingly white teeth, “Hey there, sorry about the face, son, it’s kind of the right atmosphere for shoot first and ask questions later, don’t you think?”

He laughed to himself and Ellis could imagine the middle aged gut jiggling and pushing against the man’s belt, “Friends call me Coach, you can too if your jaw ain’t too swollen.”

Ellis groaned. In other circumstances he probably would have laughed had it not been him prone on the ground. Hell, he couldn’t help but grin painfully, old fashion southern hospitality coming back to bite him on the ass. His momma always used to say a smile is worth your while. She was probably dead though.

Coach extended a large hand to him and he gripped it tightly as he hauled him up, Rochelle’s small hands pushing him from behind. He felt a little better after getting reacquainted with the horizon line.

“I guess you two folks are immune like us,” Coach stated while stretching his back, Ellis heard it crack twice before he gave a long sigh, “Looks like we got ourselves a team.”

Rochelle spoke from behind him, “How long have you two been here? It is just you two here, right?”

“Right you are ma’am, Nicholas and I only got here a few hours before you two thundered through the front door. You made quite a bit of noise - enough to wake the dead if you pardon the expression,” Coach chuckled, the gut that Ellis had imagined pushing heartily against the man’s shirt.

“So there isn’t anyone to get us out of here?” She still sounded hopeful, despite the bruising on her throat and the torn skin on her legs.

Coach shifted uneasily, “This place has long been deserted, we’ve only cleared the bottom floor but there’s abandoned tents and all sorts of government equipment just lying around.”

“Where’d that other guy go? Nicholas?” Rochelle asked, tentatively looking towards the door. “It’s not too safe to be by yourself.”

“Ah, he won’t have gone too far, boy looks like he’s been roughed up some before I found him,” Coach started off towards the nearest corridor, “He may be a bit headstrong, but stupid he ain’t.”

Ellis and Rochelle followed him in silence. They had to pick their way between the corpses on the ground, some had their hands outstretched. Ellis stepped on one of the beckoning hands and tried to ignore the sick thrill he got when all of the fingers broke. He felt like screaming at them, yelling obnoxiously and laughing into their rotting faces that they tried to get him but they couldn’t. He didn’t though, he lifted his foot - ignoring the way the fingers held to his boot momentarily- and walked on. The fingers held the impression of his boot almost perfectly, in the days to come the flesh squashed deepest would rot first and Ellis’ boot tread would blacken the skin first.

Nick appeared after they’d rounded the first corner, a sad looking cigarette drooping from his bottom lip. He turned almost guiltily, dropped the butt to the floor and ground it out, “I always promised my ex-wife I’d quit.”

Rochelle laughed lightly, Coach looked like he’d heard the joke before. Ellis concentrated on standing up straight.

Nick hoisted a shotgun Ellis didn’t notice before up onto his shoulder and gestured before them with a wide sweep of his hand, “Shall we?”

They moved forward as a unit, everyone except Nick carrying their weapons with both hands, the late afternoon sun casting their shadows over the dead.

c:
also apologies for mistakes :'I

fanfiction

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