[Psych fic] Zombie Apocalypse! Pt. 2
First part found here!
20.
Zombie powder. Bob had downplayed its role in the production of zombies, but Shawn has to think that it is more significant than his alterna-Gus has led him to believe. It is apparently an arcane mix of tetrodotoxin and datura (or some other hallucinogenic drug), that, when rubbed into the open wounds of, or ingested by, the victim, a docile state soon occurs - zombie-esque, in fact.
He uses this knowledge when he makes it into the police station, going into a fake trance and spitting out, “Sous chefs! Sushi! Pufferfish!”
His watchers can’t seem to make that last cognitive leap. Finally Jules says, “Tetrodotoxin!”
Shawn gasps. He points one hand at her and grins, smile huge on his face. “Yes!”
“That’s amazing,” Jules says. “The lab just came back with results of tetrodotoxin in the bloodwork of the guy who attacked you.” She beams at Shawn.
Shawn beams back, and then glances at Chief Vick, who does not look amused.
Shawn wisely refrains from insisting on zombie attacks. He figures he can bring it up again once he makes his grand finale presentation - which he figures will take place three days hence. (Shawn likes the word ‘hence’.)
21.
While Chief Vick has Jules and Lassy tracking down all the tetrodotoxin suppliers and users in the Santa Barbara area, Shawn grabs Gus and goes off on his own hunch.
The guy-half of the couple he saved just a few short days ago - he really hadn’t been happy to see Shawn. Shawn can only presume this is because the guy-half was either a) suicidal and wanted to get slashed to pieces by zombie-man; or, b) the guy-half had never been in danger at all, and the intended victim was not him but the girl-half of the equation.
22.
Shawn’s hunch proves correct. This isn’t much of a consolation when he is whapped upside the head with a block of granite, plunged into unconsciousness. It definitely doesn’t help when he wakes up and is immediately confronted with the vicious scowling face of the guy-half of the couple, his arms constrained and his legs bound together.
“You couldn’t just leave well enough alone,” Shawn’s abductor sneers. “You had to pull a good Samaritan act. God. Do you know how much my wife’s insurance policy is worth?!” And he raises an axe, as if he is about to behead Shawn - which is when the cavalry rides in to the rescue. Thank God for Gus and his freakishly fast feet that enable him to escape while Shawn gets captured.
Jules is the one to untie him, fingers nimble on the knots and hands stroking soft and kind against his rubbed raw wrists, and Gus is the one to insist on a hospital visit to make sure the murderous husband didn’t knock more than consciousness out of Shawn with that head shot.
But even though the bad guy is caught now, the case isn’t closed. Shawn mumbles as much on the drive to the hospital, saying, “He’s not the only one… someone else is doing the thing… making the zombies. We have to find… the zombie master…”
Later on he will be embarrassed for having said something as lame as ‘zombie master’.
23.
The doctor is not impressed with Shawn.
“Two hospital visits in less than a week?” he says, disapprovingly. He is obviously thinking, in his head, Some people lack basic survival instinct. If Darwinism still ruled the evolutionary gene pool, this guy would have been weeded out years ago.
Someone else who is not impressed with Shawn - Henry.
“I tell you one thing,” Henry Spencer says, a few hours later, standing at the foot of Shawn’s hospital bed. The medical professionals have decided to keep Shawn under observation given his recent frequent hospital stays. “I tell you to stay out of hospitals, so of course, what do you do? You land yourself back in the hospital.” He makes that squinched up face that Shawn knows means he is thinking, My son is an idiot. Henry makes that face a lot.
“Gee, Dad,” Shawn mumbles. “It’s not like I had this whole concussion thing planned out just to annoy you. It’s not like annoying you is my life goal.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Henry says grimly.
24.
The next morning, when Gus signs him out and picks him up (Shawn is feeling a bit like a child or a pet with the way his life is being micromanaged), the first thing Gus feels it is necessary to discuss is the overdue zombie movies.
“They’re going to revoke my movie membership, Shawn,” Gus says. “Thank God they can’t charge late fees.”
Shawn flaps one hand irritably at Gus. “Don’t be a stale cracker,” he says, off hand. “We have bigger things to worry about.”
“Uh uh,” Gus shakes his head. “Nope. You might have bigger things to worry about, but my movie membership card is the top of the list for me. You know I like my Friday night movie line-up!”
“Oh, god,” Shawn groans. “Just NetFlix! NetFlix!”
“It’s not the same,” Gus says, jaw set, glancing at Shawn from the corner of his eye. “You know I like to browse in person.”
Shawn lets his head thud back against the head rest. The goose egg bruise he has on the back of the skull aches in protest. Shawn doesn’t care - the pain at least takes his mind off of his idiotic best friend.
(It doesn’t occur to him that this is probably how Gus feels about Shawn, 99.5% of the time.)
25.
The murderous husband doesn’t crack under the pressure of interrogation - and his innocent wife is innocently clueless, tearful and heartbroken at the betrayal. If Shawn were not so recently concussed, he would attempt to comfort her via charm. As it is he struggles to keep the room from wobbling too much, and also to keep from puking up all over Lassy’s shoes. Though it would be kind of funny to see Lassy’s face were Shawn to do so.
Really they can only keep the murderous husband on physical assault and attempted murder - and there is no dispute over the attempted murder aspect of it, as Shawn can attest, having come this close to having an axe lop off his already much-abused neck. This has been a bad week for Shawn as far as injuries go. They can’t pin the zombie man almost attacking the couple on the murderous husband, not yet, not without more proof; and the murderous husband gets out on bail within a day.
Chief Vick assigns Buzz McNab to work as security detail for the weepy wife before she turns to Shawn. Her face is exhausted and her shoulders are slumped. “Well?” she says.
Shawn is too tired to mime gnawing on Lassy’s brains, so he just says, “Zombies.”
Chief Vick shakes her head at Shawn, but at least she’s not outright denying him this time. “Proof, Mr. Spencer. Bring me proof and I’ll see what I can do.”
Shawn never points out that it isn’t his job to give anyone proof - that is supposed to be left up to Lassiter and Jules, the actual investigative duo. He is supposed to provide leads, minor clues, hunches - not actually close the case for them. He’s mostly grateful that he gets to participate as much as he does. It’s more fun, this way.
26.
When Shawn gets back to his apartment that afternoon, it is to the sight of the building manager showing a duo of young women around his rooms.
Shawn says, “Excuse me?” from the doorway.
The building manager turns, and smiles reservedly at Shawn. “Ah, Mr. Spencer,” he says. “I am still waiting on your keys.”
Shawn blinks. “Um. What?”
The building manager looks impatient. He says, “Your keys. You broke your lease this morning - you moved out. Do you not remember doing this?”
No. No, Shawn doesn’t, because he didn’t, because he loves his apartment.
Just then his cell phone says, “You’re an idiot, Shawn. You’re an idiot, Shawn.” It’s his dad calling.
When Shawn answers, the first thing his dad says to him is, “You’re moving back in with me.”
“You don’t think that’s a decision I should make?”
“No,” Henry says, curt. “You’ve proven yourself too stupid to look after yourself. I am taking a preemptive strike against your idiocy. Who knows - the next time you end up in the hospital, you could be dead.”
“I cannot believe you,” Shawn hisses. “This is ridiculous.”
The building manager and the two girls who are trying to steal his apartment right from under him stare at him as if he is the best entertainment since prime time television.
“No,” Henry says, “What’s ridiculous is almost dying two times in a week and taking off for a spontaneous road trip in between. This is for your own good, Shawn.”
“How the hell did you manage to break my lease?” Shawn hisses.
“You’re not the only one who can forge signatures,” Henry says, terse and smug and oh, goddammit, Shawn wants to punch him so, so badly. “Dinner’s at seven. See you at home.” And Henry hangs up.
27.
Shawn drops off his zombie movie collection at the movie rental place, just so he can tell Gus, “It’s done already! Stop bothering me! I have serious detective work to do.”
His serious detective work consists of scoping out all the Voodoo places in town. There are only a handful, and of that handful, only one looks authentic and not gimmick-y.
All that accomplished, Shawn reluctantly heads to his dad’s house. He has to take a cab because someone has confiscated his motorcycle, and Gus refuses to let Shawn borrow his company car. Apparently Shawn has damaged it one too many times.
28.
Dinner is just as awkward as Shawn thought it would be.
Though dessert is pineapple upside down cake, which is just… awesome.
His fork poised to deliver another mouthful of delicious pineapple-y goodness to his mouth, Shawn pauses to say, “You do know I’m not staying here, right? I’m a grown up. I need my own place to stay.”
Henry smirks at him and doesn’t reply.
29.
That night before going to sleep, Shawn resolves that he needs to close this stupid case before he can devote all that much time and energy to finding a new apartment. He doesn’t even want to think about how breaking his old lease has damaged his renter’s credibility. Somehow he doesn’t think, “My Dad did it, not me,” will be a believable excuse, because really, no father is that insane - except for Henry Spencer, of course.
Closing this stupid case means he should probably go to the authentic Voodoo shop - the one that doesn’t actually have a name, just an uninviting storefront - first thing next morning.
Well. For the value of ‘morning’ where ‘morning’ equals ‘early afternoon’. Shawn has had a stressful week, he reserves the right to sleep in.
30.
The next day, at precisely two-fifteen pm, Shawn meets the zombie master.
She is a fifteen year old girl.
Jeez, Shawn knows that they’re starting kids early on pretty much everything these days - hell, he’s the poster child for “get ‘em trained while they’re young” - but, enslaving random people via toxic substance while still a minor? That’s a bit ambitious.
31.
Her name is Ogun, but her friends usually just call her Gun. She is a prodigy, trained in the old ways by her grandmere, and she has a quiet intensity to her that Shawn feels compelled by. She could easily take hold of and control the minds of others, particularly with the auxiliary of chemical aid.
She rolls her eyes at Shawn and says, “Seriously? You seriously think I’m setting people to kill one another? I’m training to be a priestess, Mister Spencer, I’m not out to be a homicidal psychopath.”
Shawn had entered the Voodoo store nineteen minutes earlier, browsed idly - found a selection of chicken’s feet he was seriously considering buying just to hide them around the Psych Office for Gus to find and be freaked out by - and had engaged the cashier in meaningless chitchat until his observational powers had caught him up to speed. Gun-the-prodigy was the culprit, the who-dunnit, and god, Shawn sort of felt bad about that. It was never fun hauling a kid in to the station (well, it might be fun for certain soulless cops like Lassy, but Shawn has too many of his own personal recollections of teenage trips to the big house, and he can’t help but wince and sympathize).
“I don’t know why you’re doing it, but I do know you’re doing it,” Shawn says.
Gun looks him straight in the eye. She’s tall enough - or, well, to be truthful, he’s short enough - to do this. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, and her voice is strong and sure and lying. Because she may have the confidence to pull the act off, to bull her way through it, but Shawn can read her like an open book.
It’s probably a good thing she got caught young. She’s charismatic enough that in a few years she could make a significant splash in the criminal world - as is, right now, she remains small potatoes.
32.
‘Small potatoes’, that is, until the point where she blows zombie powder into Shawn’s face, unexpectedly fast, and he coughs as he inhales a lungful.
Zombie powder tastes strange on Shawn’s tongue - like rotted decay, the ash of life disintegrated into dust - and Shawn spits it out, keeps spitting, tries to get as much of it as possible out of his system. He’s read up on tetrodotoxin. It’s not pretty. He can only hope he got a non-lethal dose, and, oh god, maybe his dad was right, maybe he is too moronic to be let loose on his own.
While he’s busy spitting the taste of graves out of his mouth, Gun has taken a bag full of chicken’s feet and started to hit him over the head and shoulders with it. Which, okay, sounds ridiculous, but actually hurts - because apparently chicken’s feet come equipped with claws, which are really more like miniature daggers, and they are digging through the plastic of the bag to bite into his skin.
Shawn wrestles the bag away from Gun; she is disheveled and fierce, and he is angry and scratched bloody, tiny rivulets of blood pricking through his skin at all the points where Gun’s attack broke through his skin.
“Okay,” Shawn says, “That is just ridiculous. A bag of chicken feet as a weapon? Seriously! That is just. That is just unbelievably ridiculous.”
Gun just glares at him. Then, all of a sudden, her gaze shifts to a point just over his shoulder, her eyes widen, and -
“There’s someone standing behind me with a weapon, isn’t there,” Shawn asks, weary. This really hasn’t been his week.
Gun nods and smiles a wicked smile.
Before Shawn get move or get out of the way, strong arms have reached around his torso, his neck; have squeezed. Shawn manages the last thought of, Hey, that REALLY hurts, watch the stitches! before he passes out from oxygen deprivation.
33.
“An idiot, Shawn. You’re an idiot, Shawn. You’re an idiot, Shawn.”
“Okay, okay, I get the point all ready,” Shawn groans, but the tinny voice continues on:
“Idiot, Shawn. You’re an idiot, Shawn. You’re an idiot, Shawn.”
That’s when he realizes it is just his dad calling. Waking up after having been knocked unconscious is always just a bit disorienting.
He gropes around for his cell phone, flips it open; put it to his ear. His dad says, “Where the hell are you? Dinner started half an hour ago, I didn’t cook you a meal just to have you not eat it!”
“First of all,” Shawn says, “I didn’t ask you to cook me a meal.” He chances opening his eyes. It hurts. The room he finds himself in is, in a word, poor - dusty, ramshackle, broken furniture and faded wallpaper, thoroughly depressing. “Second of all, uh.” He pauses, then decides he should probably tell Henry to organize a rescue of some sort. “I don’t exactly know where I am. Uh. I’ve been kidnapped?”
There is a long pause, and then Henry quietly says, “What?”
“Yeah,” Shawn squints around the room, tries to figure out any detail that might help him out. He’s been tossed onto a rickety bed, lumpy mattress. The sheets, at least, feel clean, though perhaps a bit overly starched. There is a dim flickering light bulb casting inconstant light, and in the far, tall corner of the room a small, dirty windowpane. Its placement suggests that Shawn is in a basement room. “I was out, you know, investigating, and then I got… kidnapped.”
It sounds ludicrous, when Shawn puts it like that. Besides, what the hell kind of kidnappers would leave their kidnappee (kidnapped victim? Kidnapped subject? Whatever.) alone with their cell phones? That just doesn’t seem to fit with the unspoken kidnapping code.
“Shawn,” Henry says, exasperation and annoyance vibrant in his tone, “If you can’t make it home for dinner, a courtesy call is all I need. You don’t have to make up some weird story to excuse yourself. You’re not eight years old anymore.” And he hangs up.
Shawn blinks at his cell phone, which blinks innocuously at him. Then he snorts, and says, “Figures,” before flipping it closed. Then he rethinks that gesture, flips the cell back open, and speed dials Gus’s work phone.
34.
The conversation goes like so:
GUS: Coastal Pharmaceuticals sales representative Burton Guster speaking, how may I help you?
SHAWN: Gus! Gus, I’ve been kidnapped!
GUS: Shawn? I told you not to call me at work!
SHAWN: Hello? Did you not hear me? Kidnapped! As in, abducted! As in, held against my will.
GUS: Right. I’m so sure.
SHAWN: Oh my god, what is it with people not believing me about being kidnapped today?! Have I like, lied about this before? Have I been the boy who cried wolf?
GUS: Yes. I’m sure you remember back in grade six -
SHAWN: That was different! I was kidnapped! Mrs. Osmande didn’t let me leave the classroom for hours!
GUS: It’s called ‘detention’, Shawn, and you snuck out when her back was turned to phone me to break you out.
SHAWN: Whatever! I am serious this time! Kidnapped! For real!
GUS: Then call your dad. Or call the cops. Just don’t call me - I have quotas I need to reach before the end of the month.
SHAWN: Gus-!
GUS: Goodbye, Shawn.
SHAWN: But, Gus!
GUS: Goodbye, Shawn.
*click* *dial tone*
35.
Well. Shawn attempts to take Gus’s advice and call the cops, but just as he’s about to push in the last sequence of numbers that will get him Chief Vick’s office on the line -
The door to the room pushes open.
It looks like he’s just run out of time to get help.
36.
The little old lady who walks in through the door isn’t exactly a sight that strikes fear and terror in the hearts of all who behold her. She walks with a cane, and wears myopic glasses, and is just so, so old and grandmotherly and -
She smiles benevolently at Shawn.
“I trust you had a good sleep?” she asks solicitously.
Shawn finds it in himself to nod, befuddled.
“I find I must apologize for my grandchildren,” she says. “My granddaughter for attacking you, my grandson for choking you - I thought I had done a better job raising them, but, well.” She shrugs. “I don’t like to think what they would have done with you had I not walked through the door just when I did.”
Shawn can’t find it in himself to be suspicious of the little old lady. She’s just too little. And old!
“Now,” she says, “I would like you to tell me exactly why my grandchildren felt the need to assault you in the manner they chose.”
And Shawn opens his mouth to explain.
37.
By the end, the little old lady’s face is troubled, her eyes frowning and sorrowful. “Oh, Ogun,” she says to herself. Then, to Shawn, “I have found strange receipts, a lack of recent supplies - I confronted Ogun over the matter, but she was evasive and chose not to answer. Her brother helped cover her tracks.”
The little old lady breathed in a deep, shuddering breath. “I can only assume she has been selling a mix of zombie powder to the public. I can’t imagine where she got such a thing to sell - she must have made it herself. She always was much too talented.” She takes her glasses off her face to dab at her eyes; it makes her look almost naked, vulnerable, and Shawn shifts in the vague shame that he has upset her. He has always had a simultaneous weakness and extreme fear for little old ladies. “I just cannot believe she would use my teachings in this way…”
“Do you know why?” Shawn asks, gently.
She slips her glasses back onto her face and laughs the laughs of the wryly desolate. “Look at this room. Don’t you see? We’re poor. Ogun is young, she wants things that I can’t give her. I hadn’t thought she wanted them quite so much…” Her voice trails off, and her gaze goes to a distant corner before re-focusing on Shawn. “She will be granted leniency, yes? As a juvenile?”
Shawn nods. “Yes. And as far as I can tell she never personally drugged anyone and made them attack someone else, so, that counts in her favor. But she will have to go into juvenile detention, for at least a little while.”
“Well,” she smiles. “It’s not as bad as it could have been, I suppose.” And she reaches out and pats his hand.
38.
Gus and Henry are both appropriately remorseful over not believing Shawn when Shawn told them he had been kidnapped. Shawn milks this for all it’s worth, smirking and obnoxious.
He takes a two week long holiday to recover from all the physical abuse. And also to find a new apartment. Though, actually, he has enough saved up in various stocks and bonds (two words which betray that he has, in fact, paid attention to Gus over the years - he has money stored away, he has net value) to afford a condo. That’s a little bit too much stability for him, but, well, it bears consideration.
39.
“Zombies!”
Chief Vick rolls her eyes at him. “Yes, zombies,” she says. “Congratulations, Mr. Spencer, on being right yet again.”
“Zombies,” Shawn says, smug.
Jules smiles in amusement, and Lassiter sort of… glares.
40.
The wounds on Shawn’s neck have healed up, though they look still slightly raw, red lines crisscrossing, the story of Shawn’s near-death carved into his skin.
Ogun testified to selling illicit substances to certain individuals who were later charged for murder. Gun’s testimony helped significantly in her rehabilitation goals - her stint in juvie got cut by at least a half. Her brother was put on probation, but otherwise suffered little; their little old lady of a grandmother kept her grim watch over them.
Shawn still sees his blood on another man’s face when he closes his eyes. It’s one of those images he doesn’t think will ever leave him. There’s not much he can do about that, so he learns to live with it.
41.
Eventually Henry starts to feel a bit guilty over the whole, “You’re an idiot, Shawn,” message he left on Shawn’s cell, that has become the ringtone. To alleviate his guilt, he steals Shawn’s cell phone and attempts to erase his message. Unsurprisingly - given Henry’ complete and total lack of electronic ability - Shawn’s cell phone ends up broken. This doesn’t help Henry’s guilt complex in the least, though Shawn is philosophical about it - he had been meaning to delete a bunch of outdated contacts from his address book, and this is just a faster way to do it.
He does sort of miss the, “You’re an idiot, Shawn,” ring tone though. He’s conspiring to get Henry to leave another such message on his new cell phone’s voice mail. By ‘conspiring’, Shawn means, ‘pulling stupid, foolhardy stunts that are guaranteed to get Dad’s face squinched up in that certain way that means he is thinking that I am an idiot.’
epilogue.
“What are you wearing?”
Shawn looks down. “What? You don’t like it?”
Gus rolls his eyes. “It’s ridiculous. ‘I fought off the zombie invasion and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’? That’s just stupid.”
Shawn grins. “It’s true, though. And I did it all on my own.”
Gus makes this face that is half guilt and half annoyance.
“Dude,” Shawn says, “Movie marathon night?”
Gus glares. “You use your own card, Shawn.”
Shawn huffs, but secretly grins.
Reviews are appreciated!