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antimonyandthyme · 2 years ago

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The World is Yours

3k, Sebastian Vettel/Mark Webber/Fernando Alonso; Zombie Apocalypse AU

Warnings for descriptions of violence

“No,” Fernando says.

“Nando,” Mark says. “He’s just a kid.”

Kid is armed with a baseball bat, and he’s swinging wildly as a group of them converse on him. He’s smart enough to have his back against an overturned car, but not smart enough to avoid getting caught by them. So, that’s not Fernando’s problem. His motto for survival has been and will always be, Look out for your own.

Mark though—Mark. Fernando suppresses the brittle anger threatening to bubble out of his mouth. Mark’s still got that raw tenderness in him that gets him adopting limping dogs and abandoned strays, and that’s fine, Fernando’s fine with Mark keeping what humanity he needs to extricate himself from the dirt and keep going, except it’s going to get the both of them killed this instance. One, two, three, four—

Fernando stops counting. Even with full ammunition this fight wouldn’t be worth it.

“There’s too many,” he says through gritted teeth. “Mark—oh for fuck’s sake, Mark! Come back!”

Look out for your own. So Fernando goes running into the fray after Mark like the biggest idiot left on earth, right up there with the father of a kid with a bite mark in their last shelter, hiding his daughter until she ate the camp from inside out.

“You can’t blame him,” Mark had said stonily, after they emptied their semiautomatics into the same people they had shared breakfast with a day ago. “She was his daughter.”

“And now we’re on the road again, with two handguns worth of ammo left,” Fernando said. “You know what? I do blame him.”

Mark fires off three shots, neat and clean. Pop pop pop. Bullseye, each one finding the target in the neck. If Fernando had any energy left in him to get it up, he’d have tackled Mark to the ground and sucked him off, there and then. As it stands all he can do is advance forward under the cover of Mark’s terrifyingly accurate aim, and drive the perforated edge of his switchblade into the gaping chest of one of them, right up and out of its neck. It gurgles and falls twitching at Fernando’s feet, like some sick marionette performance show. Fernando stamps the heel of his boot into its neck for good measure.

The pile of walking dead is now turned toward them, attracted to the sound of gunfire and smell of fresh meat. The kid doesn’t waste any time. He swings his baseball bat in a low arc from under the chin of one of them, dislocating its head from its neck entirely. Despite himself, Fernando’s almost impressed.

From behind, Mark lets loose two more shots. The necks of the dead closest to the kid explode in a spray of black blood. It gets on them all like sludge, and the kid flinches back.

“Just don’t get any of it in your mouth,” Fernando yells. “Stop spacing out and watch yourself.”

Kid narrowly misses a chomp from an unhinged jaw of one of them crawling at his feet. He leaps back, and slams the baseball bat down in its head. The jaw dislodges entirely in a laughable crack. One, two, three, four—

Then there’s a click of the gun with no magazine left.

“Shit,” Mark says. There’s one of them headed right his way. The zombie swipes at him and he stumbles backward, landing awkwardly on one leg.

“Shit,” Fernando curses, and throws himself after the mutilated excuse of a corpse intent on taking a bite out of Mark. He doesn’t think, just launches himself into its back, and with all the force he can muster, rams his blade into the back of its neck. Its spine snaps, along with the last of Fernando’s niceties. He drives his knife into the corpse, again and again and again, furious with everything that can’t be put into words. They’ve taken all that is good out of this earth, and they’ll take Mark too if he lets them. What a wretched existence, both them and theirs—

“Nando!” Mark is shaking him. “It’s gone. It’s done. Stop that now, you’ll hurt yourself.”

Fernando stops. And then sense slaps itself back into his head. “Fuck,” he says, patting himself down wildly. One of his revolving nightmares: waking up with a wound and having to turn the gun on himself to keep from attacking Mark. It’s not the first part that scares him. It’s the way his jaw would unclick as he loomed toward Mark to take a bite. A year ago, this would have meant something different entirely. If Fernando still has dreams about leaving teeth marks all over Mark’s neck, he can barely remember them.

Okay, okay, no flesh wounds. He’s clean.

“I’m clean too,” Mark assures, at Fernando’s crazed look. He turns to the kid. “You?”

“I’m good,” the kid says, wobbly but upright.

“You’re welcome,” Fernando says. “Now get lost.”

The kid, of course, does not get lost. Because Mark offers to travel with him, staunchly ignoring Fernando’s murderous glare.

“I know a place,” Sebastian says. “It’s safe. Safe-ish.”

Fernando isn’t fond of amalgamations of people huddling for safety. See: The last shelter. Someone always ends up doing something stupid.

“It’s empty,” Sebastian continues, as if reading Fernando’s mind. “But it’s on higher ground, and I’ve started a plot.”

“A plot,” Fernando says slowly, not understanding. Like a plan?

“You’re not serious,” Mark says. “You’re growing stuff? You can still grow stuff?” He sounds hysterical. Almost as hysterical as Fernado feels. Hope is a dangerous thing.

The kid puffs his chest out. “Kale is hardy, and it’s good throughout the seasons. The carrots and onions aren’t doing too bad, even though they’re small.” He shrugs. “The tomatoes keep getting eaten by rats.”

Fernando glowers. Sebastian is very rapidly proving his worth.

They clamber back into their jeep after siphoning the gas from the overturned car, which was initially what they ventured out to do before encountering mister-damsel-in-distress. Fernando takes over driving duties, with Mark keeping his weight off his right foot. For the longest time, they all stare out their respective windows. No one shuts their eyes.

Adrenaline seeps out of them like a deflated balloon, and it takes Fernando fifteen minutes before he notices Sebastian bobbing his head quietly to some unknown beat through the rear-view mirror.

“Is that a Discman?” Fernando is incredulous. “Oh my god. A working Discman?”

Sebastian yanks out an earbud, almost sheepishly. “It’s probably going to die soon. I took it from—” He swallows. “My brother’s room, before I left.”

They’re silent for awhile. They’ve all got their fair share of dead people. Fernando doesn’t know what to do with another nameless one.

“Does it have speaker?” Mark asks, something painfully young in his voice.

Sebastian fiddles with it. Linkin Park’s Numb blasts out tinny and perfect. Fernando closes his eyes against the familiar tune. He can’t remember the last time he heard music. Or the last concert he’d been to, before all this madness began. Swaying with the crowd, a hand in Mark’s back pocket, the other curled around an ice-cold beer. For a moment, he lets himself taste.

He’s here at the end of the world, with the last working Discman in all of existence. He’s alive, as is Mark. As is a kid they just picked up, who keeps taking song requests. Maybe things could be worse. Elton John, then Nas. Mark gets teary when Summer of ’69 plays. Until they reach the hideout, when the battery very conveniently sputters its last breath.

Sebastian has traps. Mark’s looking a little too smug for Fernando’s liking right now, like See? I knew this kid would be useful.

The hideout’s through an abandoned neighbourhood that leads to some weird cul-de-sac on the top of a hill. Sebastian’s guess is its inhabitants fled to the city when the city was still accepting people. In hindsight, a fatal mistake, as the virus exploded in the heaviest populated areas. Sebastian explains how he raided each house until there wasn’t anything left for food. So with some remains that weren’t infected, he created a mulch that the seeds seem to have taken a liking to.

No one points out the implications of using dead bodies as fertilizer. Sebastian hands out three carrots, and they crunch it down like it’s their last meal. They can’t be squeamish if it’s for survival. They’ve eaten what they could when they had to, and stopped thinking about where it came from.

“Why were you on the road?”

Sebastian points at his traps. They’re stuffed with dead zombies.

“I got worried the traps wouldn’t be enough. I went looking for proper weapons.”

Mark fingers their last working handgun. “Yeah. Not much luck on that front.”

Still, it’s an actual place to sleep. Sebastian’s jigged the entire outside vicinity with things that make a fuck-ton of noise if you so much as blow in their direction. If a zombie crawls through, yeah, maybe every other walking dead in the vicinity would know their location, but at least they would be awake. The master bedroom where Sebastian’s set up has a king-sized mattress that he’s willing to share.

Mark and Fernando stare, almost salivating.

“Uhm,” Sebastian says, a little flushed in the cheeks. “I can take the corner.”

“It’s your bed,” Mark says. “Where do you usually sleep?”

In the middle, because in another life, Sebastian used to be a cuddler. Fernando wants to roll his eyes. Of course.

They start off the night in three neat separate zones, and wake up legs tangled hair in each other’s mouths sour morning breath mingled like a fine perfume. Fernando can’t find it in him to be annoyed. It’s been an age since he slept this well.

If Sebastian thinks they’re overstaying their welcome, he doesn’t show it at all. The first two days pass by with relatively little incident, except the traps are getting a little too full.

“Fucking fuckers,” Fernando says, as he rams the sharp end of a shovel into the neck of the zombie scrabbling at the sides of the walls of Sebastian’s makeshift pit. As these bodies pile up, soon they’ll be able to climb out by stepping unwittingly on their dead predecessors. “I’m not sure staying in one place is such a good idea,” he says to Mark later.

“Seb has food,” Mark argues.

Seb? They’re on nickname terms now? Fernando bares his teeth. “What good is food if they ambush us in the middle of the night?”

“We’ll hear it,” Mark says, but it sounds strained, like that’s what he’s forcing himself to believe. There’s a reason why the zombies have been finding their way into Sebastian’s traps. They’ve still got brains, no matter how infected and decrepit they’ve become. They can smell live humans. All it takes is one to slip right by the jangling glass shards surrounding the house, and they’ll be defenceless on a stupid king-sized mattress that isn’t worth dying for.

“Whatever,” Fernando spits. There’s a part in him that recognizes that they can keep running for an age, but they’re not going to find anything better than this. The first few months after the epidemic they’d tried city after city, getting their hopes up each time, and in the end it’d all been the same, desolate, starving wasteland. Maybe this is Mark going, I think I like it here. I’m ready to put down roots in this black, black earth. “I’m going to look for ammunition.”

Mark stiffens in alarm. “You can’t go by yourself,” he says. His ankle is still bandaged with a makeshift tensor, courtesy of Sebastian, who goes about looking fresh-faced as hell but is probably the most resourceful of them three.

“I’ll come,” Sebastian says. Stupid kid. “Mark’s right, you shouldn’t go by yourself.”

Fernando bristles and stalks off. Sebastian follows him like some suicidal puppy.

They’re in luck. There’s a police car half beached on the curb and the road, in one of the suburb’s No Parking zones. Sebastian chuffs out a breath of laughter.

He stops laughing when he realizes the man still trapped in the seat-belt. Skin pallid, red veins crawling down his exposed arms, eyes sunken but still somewhat clear. That’s the disease in its first phase. This man got turned maybe an hour ago.

Fernando pulls out his switchblade.

“Wait,” Sebastian says, panicked. “He’s still—”

“Still what?” Fernando snaps. He doesn’t have time for more raw tenderness; he’s already got Mark to deal with. Why does this kid have to be just the same? So that they can remind Fernando he’s got nothing left beating in his already gaping chest? “Still human? Give him a few hours and he’ll be trying to eat your face.”

“You don’t have to,” Sebastian’s voice is raised now. Fernando wants to slap him. “We can just take his ammunition and go.”

“And let it live another day to come back and bite us in the ass?” How dumb can this kid get? He shoves Sebastian backward. “If you can’t stomach it, at least get out of the way.”

Fernando throws open the door of the police car. The man makes an aborted attempt to defend himself, raising his arms up to his face, before resignation kicks in and he lets his arms fall. Do it, his gaze seems to say, and Fernando knows this one scene will be added to the highlight demo reel of his nightmares. The switchblade goes in easy, non-serrated side for the least pain. Fernando reaches for the Beretta by the ex-policeman’s hip.

“Fuck,” he yells, as someone rams into him from behind. It’s Sebastian. Fernando’s about to cuss him out when he realizes the two zombies now clawing at the open door of the police car. Sebastian had slammed him out of the way.

Stupid, stupid. Of course. The man’s blood hadn’t turned yet. It’s still red and coppery, and its now attracted a horde of them to their location.

“The car,” Sebastian hisses. He doesn’t say, I told you so. “We have to get back to the car.”

No chance. There’s now at least twenty of them milling about, most of them in a feeding frenzy by the police car, but there’s two or three of them who have started wandering in their direction, directly in the route to their car. Fernando glances down at the Beretta in his hand. It has what, at most six shots? And anyway, firing it will only attract attention.

He fucked up. He seriously fucked up. He thinks about Mark waiting for them, hobbling around on his bandaged leg.

“If I grab their attention,” Sebastian says, voice steely, “will you be able to get to the car and come get me?”

“What the fuck?” Fernando says dumbly. “You think you’re the Flash?”

“I’ll go past this block and out into the open. You pick me up from there.”

“No,” Fernando says, even as the zombies gain five paces to them. “Fuck no, I’m not letting you—”

“I’m faster,” Sebastian says like it’s a fact, and how the fuck would he know? “I’m way faster than you, old man. So follow my plan, and get the goddammed car.”

Fernando shuts his mouth with a click. He hands over the Beretta, and his last shred of faith, to Sebastian.

Sebastian wasn’t lying. Sebastian is fast. Finally, Fernando allows himself to be impressed.

Sebastian bangs on the lid of a garbage can, hollering up a disgusting racket, and as the zombies mindlessly swarm after him, he takes off and leaves them all in the dust as Fernando watches with his heart in his throat. He creeps silently back to the car. There’s one corpse pawing mindlessly at the window. Fernando slits its throat dispassionately. All that’s on his mind is getting Sebastian. Getting Sebastian, then getting back to Mark.

The engine sputters to life. These days he’s gotten real good at driving. He swerves right up into a cluster of zombies, backs up, spins around, tires squealing. If he goes through the alleyway, he might just catch Sebastian at the end of the block. He doesn’t know how much stamina the kid has, running at the speed he was. Fernando careens through, bulldozing over a corpse, cracking the windshield with a dangerous creak. He takes the corner, one eye on the road, the other one looking for a tuft of brown, curly hair.

There. Barely outpacing a group of zombies now.

Fernando slams his foot on the gas. It’s a head on collision he’s going for, and he braces himself for impact.

The airbag deploys. The zombies go flying like bowling pins. Sebastian stares at him through the broken windshield like he’s lost his mind.

“Get in,” Fernando says, bossy even when he’s seeing stars.

Sebastian climbs in obediently, for once at a loss for words. They pull away at the airbag material and dump it out the car. Useless now. Sebastian hands back the Beretta. He hadn’t even had the chance to use it. Well. They get something out of this after all.

Sebastian finds his tongue when they get back to the hideout. “Thank you,” he says.

Fernando says, “I look out for my own.”

Sebastian peers at him, delighted. “You mean—?”

“Stop making such a big deal out of it,” Fernando says gruffly, but Sebastian won’t stop smiling now. Mark greets them at the entrance with a frantic hug. Fernando understands his anxiousness. The sun is starting to set.

“I got nervous, so I set fire to the pits,” Mark says.

“Huh,” Sebastian says. The charred remains mean that the traps will last longer. Less matter for climbing zombies to stand on.

“Huh,” Fernando agrees. Maybe they’ll stay here after all.

That night, it’s Sebastian in the middle again. Fernando holds him tightly, one arm thrown protectively across his middle to reach for Mark’s shoulder. In his head, the Nas lyric he’d heard for one last time, a few days ago.

The world is yours. The world is yours.

#athy texts #fanfic #rpf #zombie apocolypse au #sebbonso

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