Who: Max and Zoey. Guest appearances by Mike & Gilman. What: AU: Max & Zoey are two survivors of an extinction event in the form of a deadly super-flu dubbed Captain Tripps by the media. Before the media died of Captain Tripps. (Based on The Stand) Where: Crow’s Landing. When: Early June, right as the school year ends. Warnings: Violent assault, Racism.
All Zoey’s friends were dead. The summer had been shaping up to be an amazing one. She’d had so many plans. Concerts in Portland, getting into trouble in The Woods, learning how to drive... she hadn’t really appreciated how much she had planned until it was all gone. Her mother was covered in a blanket on a couch in their trailer, and Zoey was never, ever going back there. Zoey liked to tell herself how much she didn’t care about her parents, but watching her mother drown in her own phlegm had been a distinctly raw and unsettling experience. Nobody deserved that, not even her mother.
Not anyone.
And the death was everywhere. Her friends started getting sick and one by one, they dropped off. Her Facebook was like a desert, even her twitter feed trickling down to nothing. Mostly, it was just her trying to find other people. Or at least that’s what it would look like if she could still access it. The network had gone down a week ago, and she was still feeling like she’d lost a limb. With nothing to plug her phone into, it had become nothing but a paperweight. A flimsy paperweight at that – didn’t stop her from putting it in her pack when her mother had started to smell. She checked a few trailers before she was tired of looking at corpses and headed straight for the grocery store. It was deserted, save for someone in the back office, facedown in cash. Tempting as it was, Zoey hadn’t been able to screw up the courage to enter the office and take the money. She could always try the bank, when she was feeling up to it. Which she definitely wasn’t.
So Zoey had made the grocery store her base of operations. After a week, she was feeling a little gross. Too much junkfood was a bad idea, and drinking cheap grocery store wine, she had learned even earlier, was a worse one. There was nothing to cook with, though, so she had started on the cans. As she ate a cold can of Spaghetti-O’s, pondering how long she could stand it before the stink of rotten meat and produce got to her, she heard someone struggling with the front doors. They weren’t automatic anymore, and Zoey had been forced to circle around back and climb in a window. She’d thought everyone was dead, and the thought was one she hadn’t dwelled on too much, both because it was creepy and because it was really, really upsetting. Here in the grocery store, though, so long as she didn’t think about the dude in the back, it was easy to pretend she was just... camping, or some shit. Zoey had never been camping in her life, but she imagined this was sort of what it was like. Just that most people didn’t have campfires with only old newspapers and Bic lighters.
She set the half eaten can aside and grabbed a kitchen knife with a tag still dangling from the handle, an unopened can of creamed corn in the other. So armed, she stalked through the aisles and shrank back when she got a brief glimpse of who it was. The old dude who ran the bar. She’d tried to pass as twenty-one and it hadn’t really worked on him considering she didn’t even pass for eighteen. Sometimes it worked on older people, who couldn’t tell the difference between different shades of young, but he hadn’t been fooled for even a second. He’d given her a coke and told her to please leave when she was done, on account of her being way too young to be in a bar.
Asshole.
Different feelings raced through her head once he was inside, strong enough to muscle past the stuck automatic doors. There were no cops in town to stop him from doing whatever he wanted. Zoey wasn’t really a fan of the cops, but she was feeling their absence acutely. Aside from her paranoid fear, she felt oddly hopeful, too. She’d thought everyone in town was dead, but she hadn’t exactly checked, either. If he was alive, maybe someone else was? She gripped her weapons, her hands sweating, and tried to screw up the courage to do... something. In the end, she went for the feral approach. She lobbed the can of creamed corn at him (Zoey didn’t have an especially mean fastball) and grasped the knife with both hands, her eyes wide as she thrust it forward in warning.
“This is my place!” she said, her voice echoing far too loudly in the big, empty supermarket, “So just fuck off, okay?”
Zoey liked to think she was being brave, but she looked very much like a scared little girl in that moment. The knife shook slightly, even gripped with two hands.