WHO: Eli and Serena WHAT: Zombies invade New Orleans WHEN: Some current time WHERE: New Orleans WARNINGS: Low. Language, eventual zombie-smashing. That sort of thing.
The city of the dead had earned its name; the mausoleums woke up slowly, doors pushing aside, the ground already sodden and swollen with underwater reservoirs pulsing and throbbing with life. The corpses rose slowly, clawing their way from the muck; some were fresher, ripe with gasses of decomposition, their bodies and faces misshapen from bloat, and others were sentinels from the sick swamps, their bones wrapped in Spanish moss. The living in New Orleans lasted longer than the living almost anywhere else; the city was crime-ridden, and most people had their own guns, weapons. They were also Catholic for the most part, superstitious; they prayed over their dead loved ones even as they shot them in the head. But the plague overtook the city, as they always did, and the Crescent City fell. All except for Serena, who had been in her tiny walk-up apartment in the Marigny eating canned tuna with a fork and staring out the window through a peek in the blinds. She could see them shambling, shuffling, fewer than there had once been but enough of them still. And then one day there was no more canned tuna, and she hadn't seen one on her street in days. It was sweltering, sticky-hot outside, the air rotten with the scent of decaying people and old blood, spoiled food. Serena pulled on a pair of fresh panties, jeans; she tucked the jeans into her knee-high combat boots, lacing them snugly. A wifebeater over a black sports bra, a motorcycle jacket over that; it was much, much too hot for a jacket like that, but it would protect her from bites. She had a Bowie knife in her back pocket, a tire iron clasped in one hand, and she moved slowly down the wrought-iron staircase from her balcony, creeping down until the soles of her boots hit the street.
Zombies. At first he hadn't thought it was real. It couldn't be real. The dead rising up? What an absurd thought, saved for scared highschoolers and cliche haunted houses on carnival grounds.
That was his belief, and he'd scoffed until he'd heard the screams. The carnie folk had set up just outside the borders, and hands broke through crumbling swamp-soil, desiccated corpses pulling themselves free of the earth that should have bound them down. The patrons grabbed whatever they could find; Big Dan had a shotgun, and it served him well--for a while.
For a while.
But carnivals were no places to set up defenses, and when guests died they just came back with the others. He'd crunched in a girl-child's skull with his crystal ball, when she'd come slavering through his tent-flaps after his blood; after that he'd ripped the leg off his stool and fought. But the fighting was pointless; there were more dead than alive, and that's when he ran.
He wasn't proud of it. But there'd been no reason to stay, not when he'd seen Lettie shambling amongst the crowd of the dead, knowing that she would have been with his other family. He'd run back to his trailer and grabbed supplies--a knife, some food, better clothes--then lit out for the city. At least buildings were defensible.
He had to hand it to his people; they were fighters. But they were outnumbered by dead. He'd holed up in an abandoned corner store, barricaded the doors and windows; once or twice he'd heard someone screaming, begging for help. Heard the screams change as they got swarmed.
Better them than him. But he hadn't heard anything in a few days, now, and when he'd cautiously pried a board away from the window he'd only seen a few straggling dead. Still...he had supplies. Wait it out. Maybe the government--or someone--would come.
No one was coming, Serena could have told him that; FEMA and the National Guard and all of the other people who could've helped them maybe once upon a time weren't here, weren't coming. She had been waiting for weeks and none of them had ever come. She was walking along the sidewalk, keeping to the edge near the buildings, and she made a soft noise in her throat, a stifled moan of despair when she saw a man missing an arm lurch toward her, wobbling violently to one side.
That was a girl. A living girl, by the looks, stupid enough to wander out on the street. First living person he'd seen in...days, really.
Elijah wasn't a heartless man. It was when there were groups of the damn things that he wouldn't let people in. But one girl, and one zombie? He could deal with that.
"Ssst!" The hissing carried but wasn't overly loud; he wasn't trying to attract attention.
"Hey! You! C'mere!" There was a small back door that he'd only half-blockaded in case he'd needed to make an escape.
"Come 'round the back! C'mon!"
He vanished from his little peep-hole and went to go pull the boards away. If she was smart, she'd come. If she was stupid...well, that'd just be one more shambling body to deal with.
Serena looked over when she heard the hiss, and her first thought was They ain't never made that noise before, but then she saw the sleek black man gesturing a little, his face between the boards, and she turned and bolted after him, circling behind the building, diving over the wrought-iron and rolling when she hit the ground. The concrete wasn't kind to her shoulder and she grimaced, wincing a little, adjusting the knife in her back pocket so that it didn't stab her in the spine, and then she was hurrying to the door and tapping it with her fingertips, trying to be inconspicuous.
Ah...so she was smart, then. It explained her surviving this long; she didn't look particularly athletic, but appearances could be deceiving. Well did he know that. Pushing the door open enough for her to slide through, he barely waited until she was inside before slamming it shut and beginning to replace the boards. The first person he'd let in...maybe it would make up, in some small way, for the others he'd let die.
Dusting off his hands, he stood, sized the girl up. She was only barely shorter than him, and she seemed fairly strong...
"Hey, sugar." His voice was a little rusty from disuse, and the con-man's lips quirked. He used to talk for a living...strange things, apocalypses.
"I'm Eli."
Serena let him get the door barricaded again, and then she lifted her brows. Her hair was henna-red with an inch or so of black roots, and her expression was distrustful, dark. She had pale skin with a smattering of freckles across her nose, a wide mouth, elfin chin. A damned cute girl, but too defensive-looking, scared of her own shadow. And still, that tire iron gripped in her hand, her nails in chipped purple polish. "Serena," she said quietly. Her voice was much more thickly-accented than his, rough and full-throated; she was not only from the bayou, she was from the crime-addled Ninth Ward, and questions morphed into 'axe you a queshun' and 'some'a dem cookies'.
Elijah lifted his hands, a little, when he saw the death-grip she still held on the tire iron. He didn't want to get murdered by some hair-trigger child who saw him as a threat, that was for damned sure.
"All right, Serena...look, why don't you just relax a little? I ain't a monster, not gonna hurt you, aight? We can get along so long as y'ain't plannin' on cavin' in my skull with that iron..."
"Ain't cavin' in nothin' till you give me a reason to. Why'd you lemme in?" she asked, her eyes so dark in her pale face; they flickered up to his, taking his measure, and she relaxed her grip on the crowbar microscopically. She lowered it to her side, the end touching the floorboards, but her gaze never wavered from him. "You alone in here, then?"
"...I dunno, sugar. You only had the attention of one, I guess 's why." Elijah shrugged, a little. "Yeah, I'm alone. You're th' first I let in. Others wanted, but...too many dead to allow them. They're thinnin' out though, ain't they?" A faint smile, there and gone again. "Few more weeks, maybe they'll all be gone. Maybe we c'n see if anyone else's left, then."
"Ain't gonna be no more," she muttered matter-of-factly. "City with a population like this and you only seen a few? Me too, an' I'm from the Marigny." It was a different part of town than this one, a ways away. She'd moved out of the Ninth Ward as a kid, had been hustled from foster home to foster home until she'd turned eighteen, and she'd bounced from cheap apartment to cheap apartment all over New Orleans and Metairie since. The city got in your veins, in your blood, when you were little. "I ain't seen a live person in weeks. They all got ate up."
"You came all th' way over here from there? Damn, sugar, you're brave." Elijah's eyes lit up with respect, and he clapped a hand on her shoulder; the news she gave, though, was sobering.
"There's gotta be others, though. Holed up like me, maybe. Someone's gotta be alive out there. I mean, c'mon. We can't be th' only ones left alive."
The touch of his hand on her shoulder made her jerk back as if he was made of fire, and she glared at him balefully, the stare of a stray cat facing a junkyard dog. "Don' touch me," she said simply, her voice tight with tension. "Ain't got t'touch me to say nothin'." She shied away a few feet, but didn't shut him out entirely. "And why can't we be? Maybe one, two more, but ain't a lot. We'd've seen 'em. I'm only out 'cause I ran out of food. Thought maybe it'd be better somewhere else."
The hand came up again, startled, apologetic. "...Sorry, sugar. Touchy sort'a guy. But you don' wanna be touched, I won' touch. Scouts' honor, for what it's worth."
A pause, and a low, defeated chuckle after her next words. "I dunno. Maybe we are. Jus' seems hard t'believe. Last man standin' in a world'a dead, y'know? Strange feeling." He glanced at her, sideways.
"I've got some food here. Lots, really. Managed to make it here before looters did, an' boarded it up tight. I got bottles of water, canned stuff, some applesauce an' things. You're welcome t'take a look 'round."
Serena was naturally suspicious, and it came to her attention that very few people genuinely did something for free out of the goodness of their heart. This man would want something in return for their attention; he would want payment of some kind, or he'd take it out in some kind of trade on her. She watched him carefully from behind her dyed, long bangs. "I'm awright. You can't stay in New Orleans, can you?" She studied him from head to toe, her gaze lingering on some of his more exotic pieces of jewelry.
"Eh? Y'mean right now? I'm not fixin' to go wandering, if that's what you're talkin' about. ...If you're asking me if I'm from here, nah." Another faint laugh. "Not from anywhere really. Grew up in the carnival. You can imagine how quickly that went to shit, when this whole thing started."
But that brought up sobering memories, of Lettie, and the only people he'd ever considered parents, and those expressive eyes darkened.
"...Anyways. If you wanna jus' stay a spell, then stock up and head out, that's fine. But I think we might be better off t'gether."
She didn't respond right away, just moved toward the pantry of food he'd mentioned. She eyed the rations critically, then picked up a mason jar of preserves. It'd been a long time since she'd had fresh fruit; once upon a time she'd biked to the market on the corner and picked up fresh produce almost every morning. She found a plastic spoon and settled cross-legged into the corner, her back against two walls, eschewing furniture. She was almost like a feral animal, like she wasn't used to kindness from strangers. The tire iron lay across her lap like a content housecat. "That where you got that charm? The carnival?" she asked bluntly, a mouthful of preserves chewed and swallowed. The fork gesturing toward one of the necklaces he wore. "You even know what that is, the gris-gris?"
"Of course I know what it is." Elijah pursed his lips a little, eyed the girl. "I ain't stupid jus' cuz I'm not from th' city, y'know."
His fingers went to the charm, caressed it. "M'mother gave it to me. Well. Closest thing to a mother I've got. Guess it's served me all right so far. I mean...I'm alive."
"Yeah, you know alright," she said bitterly, taking another bite of preserves. "I ain't say you were stupid. I just know a bunch of fuckin' hip queers in the Quarter who buy voodoo shit 'cause they think it make 'em cool." She shook her head. "All the fuckin' voodoo in this town, probably what brought them back."
"Dumb jackasses who don' know what they're doin' with it, more like." Elijah shook his head, a little. "All I did was tarot. Fake seances. Never really messed with any real sorta stuff...no one did. We knew better'n that."
"Maybe one'a them fake seances fuckin' worked," she mumbled, shoveling more fruit into her mouth before she set the jar, plastic fork jutting from it, to the side. "Anyway, whatever brought them back, it ain't ending. The new ones that die, they jus' walk around like nothin' happened. They don' even eat people like in the movies, you know? They jus' rip them apart."
"I know. Watched it." Eli's eyes darkened again; then the older man sighed, softly, and leaned against the wall, watching the girl eat--and then stop eating.
"I jus' don' know any more, what t'do. I wanna get out, see what there is, but then...I've been safe here so far. But I can't stay here forever."
"Got to get out, or we die here," she said simply. "The dead took the city back, you got to see that. Ain't nothin' here for the livin' but more pain." She looked away for a moment, picked up the jar again, resumed eating. She was full but it would do her body good to get the vitamins and nutrients from the fruit. "Get out of the south. Maybe on a boat."
"...Where'd we go on a boat, though? Upriver? Out in th' gulf? No guarantee that anywhere's better than here." Elijah turned and pulled a bottle of water out of a defunct cooler; it was lukewarm but better than nothing.
"I know I gotta get out of the city. I just don' know if anywhere else is better."
"The gulf," she agreed quietly. "Maybe out in the swamp. Find somewhere past the waters here." She shook her head. "It's a curse, but it can't be the whole world." Serena exhaled, then finished the jar of preserves, rubbed her stomach with the flat of her hand to help the food settle. "Who cares if it's better? It's different."
"Diff'rent, sure. Maybe worse." Elijah rubbed a hand over his head, sighing. "But if you think we can get to a boat, then maybe we can get out. Get to Mexico or something. Find some coastguard. Marines. Something...someone who's got better artillery."
She smirked. "Ain't nobody out there waitin' to rescue us, Eli," she said dryly, her trademark cynicism ripe and sharp. "You don' even know what's gon' be at the end, but you so sure it's gon' be someone tryin' to make things better."
"Yeah well, better than thinkin' 'oh fuck, everyone's dead, I'm gonna die too, might as well go die in the Gulf'." Eli's eyes sharpened, though his voice was still conversational. "If this damn curse ain't everywhere, then presumably there's people out there who ain't bothered by it. And if it is everywhere, you really think you're the only one with the 'boat in the ocean' idea? I know you seem real set on thinkin' that you're the cleverest and th' strongest and no one else survived, but girl, if we lived, others did too, and I ain't gonna discount that."