#myrunnerfive

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I can’t believe there are zoms on this route! What am I paying people for!

I used to love the Pettson och Findus (Pettersson und Findus) books as a kid - and still do - and always wanted to try the style. The wackiness of ZR makes a good fit, I think!

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Chapter Thirteen: Homesick

Latest chapter in my Zombies, Run! Fanfiction. Spoilers for Season One, Episode Seven (yes, making this one last ;)) but also some back story on my Runner Five. Enjoy and let me know your thoughts!

“Hey, hey, hi. Well, I say hi…,” Sam was back and I had calmed down a little. I was still making my way towards the beacon, alternating between jogging and walking. I had taken the risk of getting a chocolate bar out of my backpack and eating it, but it had barely helped. I was all but spent. And I was beginning to think I that might not make it back. Abel seemed too far away and I had noticed a large group of Zombies to the right of me that I might have to circle around, adding some extra distance to what already seemed like a long way left to run. I was beginning to feel cold too, and a little light-headed. Thankfully, Sam’s voice gave me something to focus on.

“Possibly I mean,” he said, switching to a mock dark voice, “damn you, fiend who has taken the body of Runner Five and is using it for its own horrifying purposes.” I didn’t even have the energy left to smile. “Or…,” Sam hesitated, “possibly I mean… sorry you’re dead, Runner Five.” Not quite dead yet, I managed to think, but probably not far off. “That stuff’s weird, isn’t it? Not the people you actually know are dead. I know my parents are dead because I…I… er, yeah…,” the hesitation in his voice told me that he was holding something back but unlike with Steve after the accident, I didn’t think it mattered. We all have secrets now. And I trust Sam. “I know they’re dead and it was pretty horrible but…my sister, no idea. She’d just started her first year at uni. Law. She was actually good at it, liked it. Made my parents proud. No besmirching family honour. Came home with top grades in the class after her first term. You remember that Christmas before… the fall of civilisation?”

Yes, I remembered it well. It had been much like any other Christmas. Just me and mum and my brother at my mum’s flat. Watching old films, listening to carols, eating our body weight in food. My mum making special meals for me because I was now a vegetarian. I remember the warmth and the peace and the love – and the dull aching I always used to have in such moments that were near perfect, because I knew they would soon be over and I dreaded what came next. But even I couldn’t have imagined, on that particular Christmas, the dread that was to follow.

“All the praise for her…,” Sam went on quietly, the sadness in his voice in unison with the sadness in my heart. “I was jealous, man! And then the thing happened while she was staying with her boyfriend and we couldn’t get her on the phone and she never knew our parents had… turned and…,” he sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. She’s probably dead. But you never know, right?” Right. I guess you never know. You just hope.

“You know what else is weird?” asked Sam. “How some person you barely knew will suddenly just come floating into your head. Like this guy I used to see in engineering lectures. This really tall guy, red hair, gangly looking. I think his name was Steve…” I started at that, even though the Steve I knew had brown hair. He wasn’t very tall either. But your mind does funny things in situations like this. “Or maybe Simon, I don’t know if I ever spoke to him. He used to pick his nose in lectures.” Sam laughed. “As if no one could see him. We could all see him, man! And I hadn’t thought about him for a minute and then today, this morning, I just woke up from dreaming about him and I realised I couldn’t remember his name. He’s probably dead and maybe I’m the only person left alive who remembers him at all anymore and maybe, you know, maybe that’s how it’ll be with you, Runner Five. If you’re gone, who’ll be left to remember you?”

Well, I thought, thanks for that! But I knew he was right. Who would be left to remember me? And even if they did, would they remember me fondly? I hadn’t really made a mark on this world, neither the old nor the new one we lived in now. I didn’t think I had touched anyone in a way that would make them remember me. That would make them sad if I was gone. I had to do that yet.

“Yeah, sorry!” Sam apologised. “Guess that’s not too inspiring.” On the contrary. It had given me an idea: perhaps making it back to Abel would be a start. And perhaps I could try and make friends there. Friends who, like Sam, would stay up in the middle of the night to help me find my way and who would remember me in more than just accidental dreams. “Runner Five!” said Sam. “Run on home, if you can.” I picked up speed again.

***

We buried Steve in a small clearing not far away from our camp, right next to where he and Ben had buried Lauren only days before. Then we went back to the farmhouse and buried the family that lived there too. It was gruesome work and neither of us spoke much, even though I really wanted to ask Ben the same question that I think Sam wanted to ask me about the previous Runner Five a few nights ago. What had Lauren’s last moments been like? Had she been at peace in the end? Like we would ever know, really. More than anything I wanted to ask if it had been Ben who shot her. If he had fired those three shots I had heard. The two quick ones and then, seeing they had no effect, that later, deliberate one in the head, just like he had done with Steve. I never did ask him. There never seemed to be the right moment, never a way to phrase the question that would not have sounded accusatory. What is more, I was afraid to ask. I feared what it might do to the awkward relationship Ben and I had developed, that truce we had struck to stick together, if I knew for certain that he had shot my best friend in the head at point-blank range. It didn’t even occur to me that watching him shoot Steve hadn’t stopped me trusting him. Whether that was because I hadn’t been as close to Steve as I had been to Lauren, or because I had seen with my own eyes that what had been left when we found him wasn’t really Steve anymore, I don’t know. The important thing is that I didn’t ask Ben and he didn’t say and that silence sort of stayed between us and also, I guess, with me. There seems to be no point to speaking when you can’t find a way of saying the things that matter without sounding wrong.

It took us hours ours to clean the kitchen of their blood. Not just the coagulated puddles on the floor and table but also the spatters everywhere. We took extreme care not to get any on us, terrified that we might catch what they’d had. Ben was convinced that the mother had shot them and taken off in the family car, given the apparent lack of a firearm on the scene or a vehicle in the yard. I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps the mother had turned (I wouldn’t have used that term back then, we hadn’t got as far, but it’s common enough now) and wandered off. Once we had cleaned the house, we moved in. I know it seems morbid, squatting in a murdered family’s home but it meant food for several days and shelter, clean water and even fresh clothes. Ben more than I had already started thinking the way we all think now: take what you can while you can, stay safely indoors for as long as possible or at least until you get your bearings. He recognised the place for the near-ideal location it was: remote and out of the way of other people, which meant out of the way of anyone potentially carrying the disease. It provided us with everything we needed while we recovered from our ordeal. Needless to say we were heartsick and exhausted. And no matter how much I insisted that I wanted to go home, Ben refused and I was too afraid to go alone. I wouldn’t have lasted a day.

Then I got sick. On the third day we were there, I woke up in the morning with a pain in my chest that quickly developed into a fully-fledged cough. It scared the hell out of us. We knew by then what a cough could mean and although neither of us said it, I think we both fully expected that I would be the next one with a bullet through my head. We didn’t know how I had been infected. After all, no one had bitten me and I had no serious wounds apart from my still aching shoulder and the scratches and bruises I had sustained in the car crash. But then, we couldn’t tell for certain if perhaps some of Lauren’s blood had somehow entered my system in the crash or if Steve had infected me after all when he had attacked me.

Those four days in which I was almost certain I was going to die are burned into my soul. I think they were the closest I ever came to giving up. I tried to phone my family several times a day but no one picked up, not even the answering machine. Which tells me something was seriously wrong and that it probably wasn’t the wisest decision I ever made to risk the Chill’s ire back at Mullins by having another go at it way after most of the phone lines had broken down. I know it now, I knew it at Mullins and I knew it back in the days after the outbreak but I think if I had admitted it to myself at the time, I wouldn’t have made it through. All I wanted back then was to hear my mother’s voice one last time before I died. Or before the disease claimed me.

Again, it was Ben who held both of us together, although I sometimes wonder how he held himself together, let alone me as well. Those moments after he had shot Steve were the only ones I ever saw him close to crumbling. When he knelt there, in the dripping forest, steps away from the body that had been his friend, the gun he had nicked from the police station next to him, his chin on his chest, just breathing. That’s all he did for about then minutes; he knelt there, breathing very heavily, his face turned away from me as I stood nearby, sobbing. And then he got up and got on with it.

I was too preoccupied to notice that my condition was affecting Ben much more than he was letting on. Yes, I know, I am not making myself out to be the most sympathetic character in this story, am I, selfish bitch that I was back then? I hope I am not so bad anymore. I really hope that I have managed to take a leaf out of Ben’s book (although perhaps not the part where he had me shipped off to Abel Township without so much as a goodbye). He was kindness itself, bringing me tea and hot water bottles and meals and medicine he had raided from the house’s medicine cabinet. He sat with me day and night. He even moved the TV into the master bedroom because neither of us could bear being in the living room as it was so close to where we the bodies had been. Together, we watched the world fall apart, each going through our personal hell. Those first days and weeks before we somehow adjusted were some of the worst in each of our own personal histories, weren’t they? When friends and family lost their lives, sometimes at our own hands, when we realised that no matter how hard we ever tried, the world would never be the same again. As Sam says, there is no going back to what was before, to the old ‘normal’, and I imagine it was back in those days when that realisation first hit home that many of us were closest to breaking point.

I only realised how much I wanted to live when I got better. When the fever came down and the cough improved and all I felt was relief. I woke up with my head on Ben’s chest, his arm under my head and for the first time in days I felt safe. I looked up at Ben who was smiling in what seemed like the first time ever. “Feel better?” he asked and I nodded sleepily. “Good,” he said and there was a flicker of something in his eyes, just very briefly. Something very dark. “Because I don’t know that I could have…” he broke off and took a deep breath. “I’ll get you some breakfast.”

Communication started to fail on that same day. TV and radio stations went off the air, clearly because their staff had either fled or died or turned. The phones died, mobile networks faltered. Eventually, the electricity went too. It was then that Ben decided we should move on. Our supplies had run out, we no longer had hot water, electricity or gas or any way of knowing what was going on in the world outside. Frankly, I think it was a miracle we had been left undisturbed for so long. Anyway, with the TV no longer working and the silence between us, with the advantages of the house no longer apparent, it became harder to ignore its horrific recent history. Yet it still had the comfort of beds and a roof over our heads and I think we were both afraid of what we would find once we ventured outside. I certainly was. I was always one to prefer the discomfort of a situation I know to the sheer terror of trying something new and in this shattered world of ours, the horror of the unknown has an entirely new, grey, shambling, deadly dimension to it. In the end, we lingered longer than we should have. That much became clear when Ben woke me from a fitful sleep one night because the house was surrounded by Zombies.

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HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOO asks for Five (watch out MANY are coming but Ive split them up to be nice :) also some of these are shamelessly stolen from ask games so the language might be odd but the ones that I did come up with are cool

What does Five like about their friends?

If Five could wish for one thing to come true, what would it be and why? How would this change their life?

Does Five have a moral code or a set of rules they have for themselves? If so, what made them adopt these morals or ideals? If not, why?

When a stranger meets your Five, what’s the first thing they notice about them? Is the first impression people get accurate to who they actually are?

What’s your Five like at their best?

What’s your Five like at their worst?

Is your Five talented at anything? How did they gain this skill and why?

What is your Five's go-to weapon?

Is your Five perceptive? Do they know when someone is upset or are they not good at reading people?

Holy moly, so many Five asks - I feel a bit nervous ahahaha. Let's see...

What does Five like about their friends?

Of course Five values stuff like loyality, intelligence, a sense of humour - but the most valuable things the best friendships have brought him are new perspectives and experiences. The first real friends he made after school taught him so many things and opened his mind so much - before they all turned into zoms, of course.

If Five could wish for one thing to come true, what would it be and why? How would this change their life?

This might be a spoiler, so I am leaving my text I've written for this out for now. Let's say that his wish coming true wouldn't necessarily change his life for the better - and it wouldn't undo the apocalypse.

Does Five have a moral code or a set of rules they have for themselves? If so, what made them adopt these morals or ideals? If not, why?

Five does not follow a strict moral code. Everything ought to be a little flexible if there are literal undead involved, and he doesn't have a real "set of rules" he follows. But if pressed, he would say that the strong always have a responsibility towards those who are weaker and that it is bad to think in categories of "valuable" and "disposable" when humans are involved. The Terry Pratchett quote about thinking about people as things resonates strongly with him.

When a stranger meets your Five, what’s the first thing they notice about them? Is the first impression people get accurate to who they actually are?

Five is misjudged quite often, because, let's be honest, he's not a particularly impressive guy at first glance. He's fairly short, always on the cusp of underweight, and very quiet. Most people would overlook him and wouldn't even notice a particular thing, or, worse, would be a bit wary of him and not put of lot of trust in him. But, hey, he's Runner Five! So of course they're wrong. He's not the fastest, he's not the strongest, but he never ever ever gives up.

What’s your Five like at their best?

Quiet, efficient, observant, tenacious. Just absolutely focused on the job, and quite good at it.

What’s your Five like at their worst?

Five can hold a grudge like no other. It takes a lot to make him truly mad, but if he hates somebody, he just can't. let. go. So Five at his worst is probably blinded by rage and senselessly pursuing revenge, against all better judgement.

Is your Five talented at anything? How did they gain this skill and why?

Five does not have any truly outstanding talents, but he discovered that he is a very good tutor at university. He is very patient and never gives the impression of judging someone for not grasping a concept. He has also a natural talent for all things involving numbers.

What is your Five's go-to weapon?

A baseball bat.

Is your Five perceptive? Do they know when someone is upset or are they not good at reading people?

He is perceptive, although not to an extremely unusual degree. But it helps that he gives off the impression of being very much not perceptive - as he does not react very much and often does not know how to show that he noticed something - so that people tend to reveal more than they might do otherwise, and sometimes, if they have to hide something, let their guard down a bit.

That's it, and thank you for asking! It was fun to think about it and putting vague ideas into words.

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Abel Township Welcome Tour

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That one mission where the enemy apparently had run out of bullets.

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“But you’re blond!” - “No”

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Taking a break during a quiet autumn run

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Season 8 Mission 26... loving it so far (although I have no clue what happens next).

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For the longest time, my Runner 5 didn’t really have a very defined personality, but since I’ve been drawing so many Fives and have seen so many great pictures of my Five, he has really come to life in my mind!

Here are some facts about my Five, for those who are interested. I always treat one season as one year, although I have no idea if that is correct ( and if it’s totally incorrect, I may have to adjust his age a bit).

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Just dealing with some zoms.

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Some missions just go badly.

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... can you still hear me, Runner Five?

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Five, I’m starting to feel like you’re not really hearing exactly what I’m saying. It’s getting mixed up with your hallucinations, but you have to listen to this. Listen. Listen! You can’t crack up. I know it’s tempting. Believe me, I know! But the world needs you to be compos bloody mentis. You mean something to people!

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Spoilers Season 3 - ?

My Runner 5 and the demon on his shoulder, Moonchild. I am so fascinated by this character, and I was so happy we did not lose her after season 3!

There seems to be a lot of talk about people’s personal 5s going on currently, which is really interesting! I was a bit hesitant to post this, as it only shows *my* Five, and he might be really different from your own. I would love to participate more in the general discussion about our own “vision” of Abel and its residents but  sometimes I just don’t have the time, and to be honest, all the content and different voices is a bit overwhelming (does anyone else feel this way? The 99+ at the top of the page kind of freaks me out...).

Partial credit must also go to @ijustcantwaittobeme, as our conversation inspired this picture!

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Well that was uplifting

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I guess everone has their personal Runner 5 - and that’s mine. He’s rather short, skinny and always looks like he needs something to eat, a hug, and at least 12 hours of sleep. The apocalypse is exhausting, after all.