#zombie survival hacks

[sirswooshnoodles]

Imagine a troupe of apocalypse knights on bicycles

why don't people in zombie apocalypse stories ever just wear suits of armor? you think any zombie is gonna get their shitty rotting jaws through this?

I'm gonna rip and tear my way through the zombie apocalypse completely unharmed because none of the undead hoards will be able to get through my plate mail

[acquired-stardust]

Resident Evil 2 Unicorn Cut Playstation 2024

[nsharks]

bleeding blue | apocalypse au

part thirty-five —other parts

pairing: Simon “Ghost” Riley x fem!reader words: 5.8k tags: death. blood and gore. zombies of course. AFAB reader. single dad ghost. enemies to lovers. menstruation. harm to a child. summary: After losing your companions, you run into a skull-masked man and his daughter. They are your last hope for survival.

Jagged rock burns into your palms. Slapping a hand up, you feel for the grassy ledge, barely visible in the darkness. You heft the backpack over it before managing to pull yourself up, landing on your stomach with a grunt through your teeth. The sneakers you scavenged from the closet are tight around your toes—better than Salome's thin shoes, but still far from pleasing as you stand and press on towards the road.

Moonlight guides you north. 

Not long until sunrise, judging by the sky.

Small white clouds puff around your mouth as the chilled air brushes the damp spot on your too-big jeans, the cuffs rolled and the waist cinched to keep them from slipping. You couldn't leave in the middle of the night, so you held a mug of water as a makeshift alarm. The moment sleep tried to steal you, the splash on your thigh ended it abruptly. 

You'd woken Blue up to tell her. At first, grey eyes scolded you in the dark. She looked away, ready to argue, before quietly reciting instead: the house they kept her in, the layout, any hiding places she may have seen.

"What about her?" you had asked. "Anything important to her. She probably saw antibiotics as a gift from God or something."

"Yeah. She would've," Blue muttered. "She liked to knit. And, um, talked about birds. Her husband owned the whole place, but he died. I don't know if any of that helps."

"It does. It's better than nothing." You gave her hand a squeeze. "Make sure he eats again. And check his back. You might need to drain it. You know how now, right? Nereida could—"

"I've got it." She slipped her hand away. "Just—don't do anything stupid, okay?"

"Of course not."

Sneaking out had been easy—only because Nereida was on watch. You slipped out the back and wove through the tall grass, barely stirring the stalks. Price would've caught you for sure. But you made it across the creek with nothing more than the slow unrolling of your jeans to slow you down, the cuffs dragging in the water and soaking through. You rolled them back up, but a kilometer up the road, they've slouched back down, heavy and clinging to your legs.

Time is an enemy you've already lost a day to. With a sigh, you drop onto the hood of a rusted car, pull the knife from your waist, and hack at the fabric’s ends. A serrated blade would make this easier. The hems are jagged, but at least they won’t get in the way.

Ghost’s fever is bad, but the real threat is sepsis—the blood poisoning, organ failure, the things you haven’t told Blue. At best, he has a week. At worst, another day. The thought has you scrubbing a hand over your tired eyes before pushing off the car. You toss the cut scraps into the grass just as a disturbance prickles the back of your neck.

You whirl around, dropping the knife in favor of the pistol. 

"Just me."

"Jesus. Kyle. I was ready to shoot."

"Honorable of you to give me a quick one."

You huff, bend for the knife, and slip it back at your waist.

He closes the gap, rifle and backpack slung over his shoulders. 

"Why wouldn't you tell anyone?" His brows lower. "I went to feed him, and Blue said you’d gone back. Hell of a surprise."

You give him your back. "I've already wasted time. I knew what you'd say."

"And what exactly did you think I'd say?" A hand on your shoulders pries you back around.

Your eyes drift up to his, narrow, then veer to the side. "That it's a long shot."

"Yeah, it is." His hand drops. He brushes past you with a sigh, long and ragged, adjusting the rifle on his back. "Come on, then. You're not the only one who gives a shit about him."

There isn't anything to be said as you trudge beside him, no argument able to form. You know his company is invaluable. Gratitude is still hard to find, even when he prevents you from going the wrong way. "We turned here last time." Apparently you hadn't paid much mind. The road fills the gaps of silence, dawn breathing life into the buzz of cicadas. Long drags of air fill your lungs: sweet flowers only, until, something else. A waft of charred meat.

"You should eat."

Kyle extends a piece of squirrel. Despite the twinge in your stomach, you brush him off. "While they were starving you, we were getting stuffed. Fatten the mares, get a strong foal—all that."

His jaw ticks. "Ah."

"Damn good food, too."

"Lucky you."

"Lucky us."

Conversation shrinks to a brief exchange of what Blue said. He doesn't look convinced it'll help much. The stench doesn’t sour the air until the first sign for Fleurbaix rises at your right—like a breath in your face. Humidity clings to it, thick and unmoving, until there’s nothing else to breathe. In the sunlight, familiar stone walls and red-shingled rooftops repulse you, almost more than the sight of aimless Greys—some weaving between clotheslines, most trapped within the fenced pasture. The cows, however, have already fled through a broken gap, eager to escape uphill.

"They should've lost interest by now. The blood isn't fresh," you mutter.

"Humidity. Less evaporation, more smell." He nods the tip of his rifle. "Over there. That one has a wraparound porch like Blue said."

The view vanishes behind overgrown trees as you crest a hill, descending toward the commune. Kyle motions you forward, weaving through structures, keeping clear of the Greys. As long as they can’t scent you, they will stay distracted. You step over a few stray bodies, faces picked apart by crows that scatter at your approach. Clinging to a stone wall as you follow, a bony hand bursts forth from a window—Kyle knifes its skull before it can grab you.

Other than that, there aren't any close calls.

You reach the house that fits Blue's description.

The door is wide open.

Kyle sweeps in with the poised rifle.

You are greeted by an already ransacked interior. Tipped chairs, half-yanked cabinets, tossed couch cushions. A sick understanding settles at your fingertips, curling them around the gun. 

"They were here. The women. They knew she would've hidden them."

More signs that this is just a dead end; a waste of precious time.  

Kyle lowers the guns and presses forward into the hall. "That doesn't mean they found what they were looking for. Check the rooms."

Maman's house is as expected, even in disarray. Quiet and balmy. You kick open the first door. Polished wood, gold-embellished hinges, a closet stuffed with white gowns. A knitting bag catches your eye. You sift through it, tossing out balls of red yarn. Nothing.

More nothing under the bed. 

You tear the painting from the wall, only solid stone behind it.

A family photo thrashes to the floor beneath a swipe of your fist. You find Kyle in the other room, where a smaller bed is tucked beneath a window—the sight makes it hard to breathe for a moment. The blood stain on the sheets. Somehow you know whose it is. Your stomach rips at itself. You force yourself to look away before you lose it. 

"The floorboards. They didn't look under them. Help me."

He raps the butt of the rifle against the wood. A hollow echo near the doorway offers promise. A knife jammed between the planks pries them apart. When you sink to your knees, all that fills your hands are stashes of faded euros. No pills, no vials. 

You rip up the notes and let the shreds feather through the air, leaning back on your palms as a quiet hiss leaves your teeth. "Where did you put them you vile, ugly, goddamn hag."

"Maybe her son kept them," Kyle murmurs, threading a hand through his hair. "He had the guns."

"No." Your voice is firm. You stand and pace. "She would've wanted them close to her. Antibiotics—she was saving that for the women. The births."

You reach for your knife and stab the mattress, slicing it open. Springs and foam. Books maybe. You run back to the shelf in the hall and rip them one at a time, flipping them open to see if any were hollowed out. Even the Bible is just a book. 

What else?

What else?

"How much time are we willing to spend looking for them, Twix?" he asks lowly behind you. "Maybe we check somewhere else. A town."

"They'd have picked them clean years ago." You toss the Bible to the floor with a thud. "This was our best bet. We had them. We fucking had them."

"And now we don’t. We can’t keep tearing this place apart. We focus on keeping him stable—keep the wounds clean, use what we’ve got. He’s made it this far without them. We just need to buy him more time. There might be another stash in one of the other houses."

You lean against the wall, eyes fluttering shut briefly. A deep inhale. "There's just—something I'm missing."

"Twix—" He sighs, running a hand down his face. "Alright. Let's do another sweep. I'll check the floors in the living room."

Thoughts race. A frothy tide refusing to settle. You press your thumb to the scabbed cut on your wrist, the sting sharpening your mind. Back in the cell. Morning sun slanting through the window. Obsessively studying what’s around you. Replaying everything you learned about that woman. A dead woman. If you could’ve told the Greys to hold off, let her speak before they tore through her neck, you would have.

In the midst, a dove’s call breaks through—three notes, too close in your ear. You must be imagining it, but Alexandre’s voice stirs in your head: La tourterelle chante pour toi.

He said that when he heard the dove.

Why?

Birds.

She talked about birds.

You push off the wall and follow the sound to the room where they kept Blue. The coo draws you to the windowsill by the bed, where the glass is cracked just enough for the curtains to stir, the stench outside seeping in. Twin beady eyes snap to yours, a mechanical tilt of its neck. A collared dove, you think. Paul used to rise early to listen to them.

"Where are they?" you press lowly, accusing. "You know, don't you?"

The bird doesn’t answer, only flutters down from the sill.

Your fingers grip the edge of the window as you kneel on the ruined mattress. Below, the bird perches in the flower box—no flowers, just dried weeds and a nest of twigs.

"Tell me." It watches the whisper curl from your lips. "Tell me, or I’ll rip apart your home."

It flutters off. Your arm lunges after it, clawing at the nest in blind retaliation. Twigs snap. Dirt kicks up into your eyes. You blink hard to clear it. A strangled sound catches in your throat—half a curse, half a cry. Then, something strange beneath. Sharp rust that makes you freeze.

You sweep debris off the top of a—a lock box—loosely buried within the soil. A breath lodges in your throat as you claw at the dirt, dragging the rusted metal loose, launching backward on the bed with it clutched in both hands. It can't be real. You give the box a sharp shake. Something rattles inside, and your chest tightens.

"Kyle!"

Thunderous slaps of his boots echo down the hall. He rushes in, scanning you with a sweep of his gaze.

"No, I'm—this is locked." You tug at the bolted metal. "Can you open it?" 

He doesn't question it. Relief flickers across his face, quickly replaced by grim determination. He raises the rifle and slams the butt against the lock. A sharp clang echoes, metal chipping but holding. Exhaling through his nose, he adjusts his grip. You meet his eyes and nod—keep going.

He hammers at the lock, pausing only to yank at it, testing for weakness. You wipe dirt from your jeans, watching. Whatever she buried here—it mattered. It had to. A dove lands on the windowsill, but movement beyond it sends your pulse spiking above the sharp cut of metal.

Greys.

When did they—

"Shit, shit, shit." You lurch from the bed. 

He stops, yanking up the rifle to jut it toward the window, shooting a snarling one that clambers up on the porch. It flails back, revealing more alike behind it—many more—shambling out from wherever they'd been lingering. "Fuck—how!" He tucks the lock box under his armpit and grabs your wrist. "Come on."

The living room windows reveal just how many have begun to close in around the house. Faster ones are already at the front door, clawing at the wood. Kyle swears, yanking you toward the bathroom—higher ground, a window above the porcelain tub. He slams it open with the rifle, then hands instantly find your waist to lift you. You shed the backpack, pulling it through behind your feet to squeeze through blindly.

"Anything to climb?" he barks.

You look up. "A gutter!"

You grab it and tighten your core, hoisting yourself up as your sneakers scrape against the siding, the moans below growing louder as they round the corner of the porch. Your palms press into exposed rafters, the gutter serving as a shaky foothold, but the last push onto the roof eludes you.

A firm shove at your thighs sends you over. You scramble up, steadying yourself before glancing back.

Kyle is halfway up, rappelling fast—until a bony hand clamps around his ankle, yanking him downward. Disoriented from the rush, you slap for the gun at your waist, firing wildly—two bullets wasted before one lands, shattering the Grey's skull with a squeal.

He throws the lockbox. You catch it just as he hauls himself onto the shingles.

Your head reels as you watch Kyle drop to one knee and start picking them off. Four, maybe five drop with ease, but the rest move erratically—jolting, frantic. He slows, trying to track their unpredictable movements, each shot requiring more precision. If you had your bow, you could help. But the pistol? You don't trust yourself.

He grunts in frustration, adjusts his stance, then reloads as he circles the perimeter of the roof. That’s when you feel it—not a hunger pang, but a deep, familiar ache, piercing low in your gut. Then something wet. Warm. A slow gush down your leg. Your breath stutters as you glance down at the stain blooming red across your thigh.

"It's me," you say.

"What?"

"Fuck, it's me they smell. My period."

His gaze drops to your body, widening when he sees the evidence. You should feel exposed, but you don’t. The thought slams into your brain at the same time your hands move—unbuttoning, yanking at the fly. The moans below swell.

"We can use it. Look away."

His eyes snap back to yours, then dart away with a sharp exhale. "Christ."

You’re already shoving them down, tugging at the loose, borrowed underwear clinging to your hips. Gathering the fabric, you swipe at the blood slick on your thigh, pressing it deeper into the fabric. "It can buy us time—but not much."

You yank the jeans back up. You roll the underwear into a ball. Kyle looks over.

"There—throw it toward that house. The door’s open. If enough go inside, it might trap some. Then we run back to the hill."

Just as quickly as the plan is formed, you hurl back your arm and launch the decoy as hard as you can. It lands in front of the next house, far enough to release the breath caged in your lungs as heads snap toward it, bodies lurching away. Kyle slings the rifle over his shoulder, grips your waist, and helps you down—but the moment he lets go to steady himself, your foot slips on the gutter.

You land roughly on your side and lose hold of the lockbox. All of the breath leaves your body as you scramble to grab it. A strong hand beneath your armpit tugs you back up, and then you're sprinting. A quick glance back shows most are drawn away, but a few still trail you. Kyle snatches the handgun from your waist mid-stride and fires, dropping two before they get too close.

You duck beneath clotheslines, weave through wash bins still brimming with water. Trample roses. The pulse pounding in your neck drowns out everything but the next shot Kyle fires—enough to throw off your step. You don’t see the one lunging until it slams into you from the side.

You feel the jolt of the fall before you fully register the thing wrestling on top of you. Hair whips into your mouth, rancid breath spilling hot across your cheek. The strength is wrong—too fresh, too human. The hands grabbing at you are still strangely soft. A distinct bulge presses you down. Then a glob of dark-tinged saliva splats onto your eye, blinding you before you can make sense of it.

It's only a second of fight before a shot to the skull sends pulpy blood and brain onto your face. 

The weight is torn away as you scrub at your eyes. Part of you already knows before you look at the limp corpse. Time congeals. Blonde hair fans over the grass, framing a pale face with white eyes. The slip dress—the same one you pulled over her head.

Her swollen belly.

You go rigid. Kyle has to yank hard to get you upright.

"Come on!"

"They left her."

The words spill numbly from your lips.

When he shoots another Grey, your wooden, puppet legs move. You leave the body of her behind, adrenaline numbing you. After what is realistically only minutes but feels like hours, the thick trees envelop you once again, and when you finally steal a glance, you can't see them anymore. They've lost your scent for now. Enough for you to pause against a tree, swallowing air to catch your breath. 

You walk deeper into the vegetation until Kyle feels satisfied enough to stop and retrieve a canister of water from his backpack. He offers it to you. It takes a moment to steady it at your lips, then your throat allows some down. But your stomach spasms almost instantly, and you are wrenching it back up at the base of a tree, crumpling to your knees.

"Shit."

Hands collect your hair.

A few more dry heaves consume you, until you're breathing harshly through a hanging mouth.

"No… They didn’t—" A hard swallow. "They let her out. She was in the cell."

"What?" His voice brushes your neck, touch halting at your shoulders. Realization softens his tone. "You knew her—the pregnant one."

You wipe your mouth and stand. His hands stay at your arms a beat too long, grip firm, like he’s waiting for something—an explanation you don’t give. You don’t meet his eyes. "We need to move."

Your stomach still aches, but you don't vomit again. You walk quickly out of the trees and to the road. 

The walk back is spent scanning more closely to see if you've drawn more with your smell. By the time you reach the cliff, midday swelters. Lightheadedness teeters your first attempt down. Kyle tosses the box and rifle to the bottom, then carries you on his back, your fingers interlocking to keep you secure like the backpack that hugs his chest. 

A stop at the creek allows a shaky handful of water to splash your face. Taking off your jeans to wash your blood-stained thighs feels too much of a task. Instead, you watch Kyle finally finish striking the lock, the metal giving way under his relentless grunts. 

"Do you want me to open it?" He glances at you.

A slow shake of your head. Your knees sink before it. Fingers hesitate at the latch. If this isn’t it—if it’s empty—you don’t know what comes next. What fills the space where the smallest sliver of hope has wedged itself in.

The scrape of rusted metal.

At first, all you see is cloth. A yellowed shade of white. A beat of nothing. Then, your hands move on their own accord, unwrapping the contents, brushing hard plastic. The faint rattle of capsules makes you inhale before you even read the first label: amoxicillin. You go still. Dig through for more. Four, five vials. Even more than what you had on you.

The run back to the house is a battle against your own legs.

The smell of blood hits first—thick, metallic. Not human. A quick glance confirms it, Price carving up a hefty cattle he must've found.

He's saying something, to Kyle maybe. You don’t pause.

The front door swings open.

Blue—

She slams into you, arms locking tight, breath knocked from your lungs.

"I saw you from the window."

"You shouldn’t be on your feet," you manage.

She looks down. At your hand. At the pills.

Her voice trembles. "You… you found it?"

You nod.

Up the stairs. Blue tugging at your sleeve. Kyle's steps audible behind you. The bedroom waits. Stale air. Ghost—he's lying on his stomach the way you left him, but a smother of something sticky glistens on his back. 

"Honey," Blue mumbles, wincing as she lowers on the bed. "Ari... he found a hive. I was just about to put clean bandages, too. It helps, right?"

"Not as much as this should help."

Kyle begins lifting him.

"He was up for a bit, but he was... talking weird," Blue whispers as you kneel at Ghost's side, fight the shake in your hand to unscrew the cap. "He asked if you were sleeping outside—like, out loud, to himself. Then he kept saying ‘sparks’ and ‘Washington.’ Do you know what that means?"

The words barely register anything but confusion and the fact that he is even worse. It's Kyle who answers under his breath. "No clue." His gets Ghost upright without disturbing his wounds, steadying a hand at the back of his skull. 

When your thumb presses at his bottom lip, the dry, cracked skin resists. As you try to pry it apart, his eyes flicker open—unfocused. Dilated pupils shift to yours.

"I need you to open," you whisper around the tightness in your throat. "It's amoxicillin. We've got it."

Overgrown hair clings to his forehead, thick and unruly. Sharp stubble scrapes your hand as you try again to open his mouth. Labored breaths hit your knuckles, unnervingly hot, along with a release of words he murmurs through his teeth. "There you are... again. 

Your teeth graze your cheek. "Here I am. Now open, please."

He does—barely. The chalky pill makes it to his tongue. The rest blurs.

Waking up on edge is nothing new.

At first, you keep your eyes shut—squeezing them until the backs turn red. Then, true consciousness jolts through your limbs, setting a heavy heartbeat between your ears. Light floods your vision. Soft cheeks. Pink lips, pursed. Brows knitted tight.

"You make the strangest faces in your sleep sometimes."

"I..."

"Water?"

"Please," you croak.

Pins and needles prickle your fingers as you lift your head. A mug presses to your blistered lips, gentle fingers stroking the greasy hair at your temple. The gulp of water almost makes you moan. You're ready to down the entire things until it's pulled away.

"You're gonna throw up again if you keep going."

You lick your lips. "What?"

"You've been passed out for two days," Blue explains. "Except for when we tried to get you to eat and drink, but that was a fucking struggle. Nereida says you overworked yourself. Not enough sleep and water can kill you, you know." Her brow arches. "I told you not to do anything stupid, but I guess you've been doing that."

Two days.

You inhale through lungs that feel primitive. 

"He—"

"Before you ask, yes. We've been giving him the meds. Morning and evening. His fever finally went down last night. He's been out since."

Your eyes finally drift to the other side of the bed. A steady rise and fall presses warmth into the sheets. You scramble up, reaching over—his cheek meets your palm, warm, but not alarmingly so. Normal, almost. A faint flush dusts his skin, the color creeping back in. His back is freshly bandaged, but his eyelids still bear the violet tinge of exhaustion.

"It's helping." The words press into your teeth. 

The rest of the day passes in gentle fragments. 

A bowl of fire-braised beef pressed into your hands. You eat without tasting, slow chewing through lush fat, while Price and Kyle pore over a more detailed almanac they found in the house. The food settles heavy, to the point of discomfort, but stays down. 

Later, you wade into the creek with Nereida. She was the one who changed you while you were out—scrubbing the dirt from your legs, tucking fresh towels and a new pair of underwear beneath you. You only realize she added rosemary when a sprig falls out as you undress.

You listen to her talk. You don’t tell her about Salome. No. You keep it to yourself. The water is warm. At first, you don’t feel it. But as it swallows your shins and carries away ribbons of dried blood, the gentle current soothes, taking the edge off the sun, which turns the rocks along the bank scorching hot. Birds call from the trees—you don’t know what kind. Worm-like minnows tickle your sore toes.

Back at the house, you sit on the porch to wring out your hair. You catch Ari carrying Blue through the garden, her head tucked against his shoulder, bandaged feet dangling over the arm that hooks under her knees. They whisper about something. His steps are slow, pausing by a beautiful patch of flowers that, apparently, smell rancid by the way she leans in and recoils, making a face. When you look away, Kyle is staring at you across the grass as he hangs strips of beef over a tree branch to dry. 

You should thank him. For not letting you do the stupid thing alone. But instead, you shift your gaze to the sun and watch its slow descent on your own, studying the way it casts an orange glow across the wild growth. It's the sudden assault of dark clouds that send everyone inside. A summer rain that bursts down without warning, without mercy. 

It hasn't relented by the time you fix a bowl of meat for Ghost. He has yet to ingest anything but bone broth and some plum juice according to Blue and Nereida. You chew off little pieces of the least fattiest parts into a bowl and give it to Blue. You go with her to feed him but stop short, keeping your distance. You simply watch from across the room as he manages to sit up on his own despite swaying, brushing away Price's helping arm, and chewing slowly with great effort. His eyes, focused and clear, flit upward to yours. You hold them for a moment, until the pull in your chest turns intolerable, and you look down at his bandaged shoulder instead. 

"Tastes good?" Blue murmurs, brushing the hair from his forehead.

He hums. 

"How do you feel?"

He swallows, then lifts a hand to her hair, thumbing at it. "Young again."

She places her hand over his, biting a smile. "You're so annoying."

She wipes at her eyes. 

Instead of easing, the rain intensifies as the night deepens. Distant thunder rolls closer, flashing into overhead lightning that only sharpens your edge. Blue spends the night with Ari in the living room, where Kyle helped them set up a small fort of blankets and pillows—a small distraction, but one she could use. It takes a nudge from you to push past her hesitation, to convince her it’s okay to leave Ghost’s side, just for a little while.

"It's good to have some space, if you need it."

That leaves you alone in the bedroom with him. He knocked out again after eating. You redo his bandages, relieved to find the wounds free of pus. New scabs have begun to form, fragile but promising.

But you can't lay down. You try—perch at the edge of the bed, press your palms into the mattress—then you're back on your feet.

The walls feel too close. The air too thick. His steady breathing should ground you, should ease something inside you, but it doesn’t. The storm is unyielding, pressing against the house, rattling the windows. It drives your nails into your palms, into the raw skin around them. A string ties itself around your ankles, pulling one foot in front of the other until you're in the hallway, hand blindly skimming the wall to guide you to the spiral staircase.

Upward.

The library. You don’t even realize you’ve come here until you freeze at the top of the stairs, staring at the wreckage left behind by your hands. Books lie scattered across the floor, pages severed and crumpled. A curtain rod rests askew, displaced in the quiet ruin.

When you finally move, it’s a mindless ordeal. The motions of putting the room back together—guided only by the stray flash of lightning—steal any thoughts before they can form. You kneel, gently stacking books against your chest, slotting them one by one back onto the oak shelves. Embellished spines offer familiar titles, even in French. A lot of Jane Austen.

"No Hemingway, huh?" you whisper, swiping a finger through the blanket of dust before bending for more books. You reach the last shelf, lips twitching. "I'm fixing you. Happy now?"

Of course, no answer. Only the faint slide of leather against the wood. 

He’s in the room before you notice.

The presence registers as a skim along the back of your neck.

But you don’t turn, hand freezing after you release Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, then dropping limp at your side. You know it’s him. You feel it in the shift of the air, the weight of it settling differently around you. More so in the slow, deliberate footfalls, each one measured, as if testing the ground. And if none of that gives him away, the warmth of his breath—heavy, uneven—spilling over your scalp does. It sinks into your skin when he reaches you, winds through your veins, curls your toes against the floor until they hurt.

You try to inhale, but the breath snags, fracturing in your throat. "You shouldn’t be up."

"I shouldn't."

His hand lifts, knuckles skimming the flannel draped over your frame before grazing your neck with a slow, unhurried sweep of his thumb. It trails down your arm, pausing at the last book in your grasp. He takes it from you—or maybe it slips from your weak grip. You can't tell.

With a deep breath, he reaches the shelf above you. The book doesn't fit at first, his hand unsteady, struggling to align it. A final rough shove of his knuckles forces it into place. He’s close. You knew he was, but now his scent wraps around you—mossy, salty, earth that you fall face-first into. His chest skims your spine. An elbow grazes your ear as he finishes.

And then he turns you.

His fingers curl around your shoulder, guiding you until you're facing him. Your feet slide to follow, reluctant and all too willing. Storm-filtered light catches on the sharp cut of his jaw, casting it in shadow. You brace yourself. An unformed breath fills your chest. You're unable to meet his eyes—though you feel them, tracing every inch of your face.

Wordless, he takes hold of your wrist. You don’t understand why until he cradles it in his rough palm, between your chests. His chapped lips lower to the tail-end of the healing cut, light enough not to stir pain.

His lips move.

But you don't.

It's as if every function of your brain is funneled into the nerves beneath each kiss he trails up your forearm. Soft, unwavering, yet each one lingering for a beat longer than the last. The next one lands at the crease in your elbow. A breath finally rushes out of your nose when he reaches the top of your shoulder, close enough to the pounding artery in your neck to invite heat over your cheeks. A strange heat. The same temperature of the moisture that begins to cloud your vision. 

You tremble. "Ghost, I—" 

You make a last-ditch effort to clutch the hem of his jeans before your knees can waver, his mouth finding your throat. He kisses the part of it that bobs. Then pulls away just enough to cup your face between his hands, forcing your gaze to his. What you are met with is twin, black eyes. They unnerve you. Like the ground beneath your feet, it feels like they might swallow you whole and spit you out. 

You can't breathe. The shaking is uncontrollable. Rapid blinks dispel the moisture in your eyes before you're gasping, pressing into him. "Please... please. Ghost, I—" you choke, "Please, I just—"

You sound scared, even to your own ears. Like you might get hurt if you he doesn't give you what you're asking for. But you don't know what you're asking for—don't understand why the soft kisses he places on your forehead and cheeks feel like too much and not enough at the same time. You clasp his wrist to pull his hands off your face, nails piercing into the skin there. He allows it—you hurting him—even when almost his entire upper half is swathed in bandages. 

"You're shaking," he murmurs.

"I'm fine." You exhale, but it’s uneven, shaky in its own right. "I just need—"

His thumb presses under your chin in attempt to still you.

A swallow forces down the lump in your throat. The ghost of an inhale. Then you lunge, kissing him. Not gentle or hesitant. But with a desperate growl, bursting forth from your mouth into his, your hand threading into his hair and holding tight onto his skull.

[sobrevivenciatwd]

Love this idea. May I add that I also think rockets, thrown firecrackers and drones are a fantastic zombie distraction.

Balloons are really good for distracting zombies. They swipe at them and knock them around, and then they chase the movement until they finally pop it.

[forsaken-headcanons]

"YOU CAN'T ON FROM LOVE, LOVE IS THE ONLY THING THAT NEVER DIES" - Kelley Lynn

It's more like an AU after what happens after

Post-forsaken [John doe and C00lkid tragically dies]

Jane doe

• Would distract herself with various works to not think about her loss

• Would really avoid talking about John doe as she assumes nobody will either really listen to her or care

• ^^She would try to isolate and distance herself due to this belief and not wanting to need to experience this all over again

• She tries to avoid places, items, or just anything that gives her the memories of her beloved late husband

• ^places like John's workshop (where i hc he likes to build and try stuff with the access of builderman's tools as an act of hobby, and he used to build various things for her)

• In mid- forsaken, she saw her husband die in front of her with their final goodbyes because the spectre decided John is useless and made his corruption worse

• She is quite jumpy and a bit aggressive due to forsaken and the trauma developed

• The common saying "get over it" affects someone a lot and makes them wonder if their love (both platonic and romantic) for somebody is in an expiry date, this ultimately drives Jane to avoid this very grief she needs to process

007n7 [no way i am letting this man slide without at least a sprinkle of this]

• Previous (very first headcanon of mine): He lost c00lkid pre-forsaken

• C00lkid was revived unnatural by the spectre like a zombie, hence his sunken fleshy appreance and how the minions spawn from the ground like zombies do in movies

• When he first saw c00lkid like this, he had a panic attack due to his developed ptsd from child loss and depression

• Shedletsky saw this and told 007n7 to 'snap out of it' and slapped his face (something you SHOULDN'T do when someone is having a panic attack!!)

• At the end of the round, 007n7 survived the round as a lms luckily, and when Elliot saw 007n7 still being put off by the whole "run or be killed" idea and is in the verge of crying or having a breakdown, he couldn't help but be an mean to him. He tries to hide this inefficiently with the quote "Get over it." [Elliot don't understand nor remember what he was thinking in that moment and feels guilty afterwards knowing that quote is anythingbut helpful]

• The last time 007n7 sees c00lkid is in his arms, in the position he used to cradle him as a pill baby, on the ground, on his kness, with tears rolling down his eyes, and singing one last lullaby to his poor little baby boy.

• This time, though, he handles the grief better. Even if his whole purpose of living isn't here anymore, that boy wouldn't be lost if he kept his legacy with the team C00lkid

• He experienced this exact same grief over again. While the pain isn't any lighter this time, he knows he needs to let himself grieve over his kid and the methods that help him. It's not easy, but it won't be easier to hold onto that either

• [No, he doesn't start exploiting again under the name of c00lkid, but instead with his coding skills he starts a small website that grows big for not only parents but also a friend, a child or a spouse grieve over their loved one anonymously and support] eachother (may be a bit cliché idea, but he would def start something under the name of team c00lkid to honour his son and bring out the joy his son brought to him to the world... with hacking 101)

Jane and 7n7: (These are all meant to be platonic)

• 7n7 would definitely help Jane to process her loss of John doe better, as they are in the same boat, and 7n7 knows how lonely it can be when losing a beloved one and being a somewhat outcast due to them being a killer

• He would ask Jane how her husband was pre-forsaken and what she loved about him and try to talk it little by little

• They would visit John doe's grave together, Jane would first hesitate as she can't bring herself to go there, but with support beside her she faces the ugly, sad, and depressing emotions while also feeling a bit of relief in her heart

• She later holds dearly to things John has crafted for her and preserve them neatly as pride for her lovely husband and displays them in their home

•[ She'd help 007n7 with the website and later on expanding it to a non-profit organisation to help others go over their grief. With one of John's work with the roblox logo as the main logo and a slogan of "team c00lkidd! Join today!"]

Thank you for listening to my yap session

🔫🐟

Aww. I like that they help each other get through it. That's adorable.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When private equity destroys your hospital

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 9-10), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

As someone who writes a lot of fiction about corporate crime, I naturally end up spending a lot of time being angry about corporate crime. It's pretty goddamned enraging. But the fiction writer in me is especially upset at how cartoonishly evil the perps are – routinely doing things that I couldn't ever get away with putting in a novel.

Beyond a doubt, the most cartoonishly evil characters are the private equity looters. And the most cartoonishly evil private equity looters are the ones who get involved in health care.

(Buckle up.)

Writing for The American Prospect, Maureen Tcacik details a national scandal: the collapse of PE-backed hospital chain Steward Health, a company that bought and looted hospitals up and down the country, starving them of everything from heart valves to prescription paper, ripping off suppliers, doctors and nurses, and callously exposing patients to deadly risk:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-02-27-scenes-from-bat-cave-steward-health-florida/

Steward occupies a very special place in the private equity looting cycle. Private equity companies arrange themselves on a continuum of indiscriminate depravity. At the start of the continuum are PE funds that buy productive and useful firms (everything from hospitals to car-washes) using "leveraged buyouts." That means that they borrow money to buy the company and use the company itself as collateral: it's like you getting a bank-loan to buy your neighbor's mortgage out from under them, and using your neighbor's house as collateral for that loan.

Once the buyout is done, the PE fund pays itself a "special dividend" (stealing money the business needs to survive) and then starts charging the business a "management fee" for the PE fund's expertise. To pay for all this, the PE bosses start to hack away at the company. Quality declines. So do wages. Prices go up. The company changes suppliers, opting for cheaper alternatives, often stiffing the old company. There are mass layoffs. The remaining employees end up doing three peoples' jobs, for lower wages, with fewer materials of lower quality.

Eventually, that top-feeding PE company finds a more desperate, more ham-fisted PE company to unload the business onto. That middle-feeding company also does a leveraged buyout, pays itself another special dividend, cuts wages, staffing and quality even further. They switch to even worse suppliers and stiff the last batch. Prices go up even higher.

Then – you guessed it – the middle-feeding PE company finds an even more awful PE bottom-feeder to unload the company onto. That bottom feeder does it all again, without even pretending to leave the business in condition to do its job. The company is a shambling zombie at this point, often producing literal garbage in place of the products that made its reputation. Employees' paychecks bounce, or don't show up at all. The company stops bothering to pay the lawyers that have been fending off its creditors. Those lawyers sue the company, too.

That's the kind of PE company Steward Health was, and, as the name suggests, Steward Health is in the business of stripping away the very last residue of value from community hospitals. As you might imagine, this gets pretty fucking ugly.

Steward owns 32 hospitals up and down the country, though its holdings are dwindling as the company walks away from its debt-burdened holdings, after years of neglect that have rendered them unfit for use as health facilities – or for any other purpose. Tcacik's piece offers a snapshot of one such hospital: Florida's Rockledge Regional Medical Center, just eight miles from Cape Canaveral.

Rockledge is a disaster. The fifth floor was, at one point, home to 5,000 bats.

Five.

Thousand.

Bats.

(Rockledge stiffed the exterminators.)

The bats were just the beginning. One of the internal sewage pipes ruptured. Whole sections of the hospital were literally full of shit, oozing out of the walls and ceiling, slopping over medical equipment.

That's an urgent situation for any hospital, but for Rockledge, it's catastrophic, because Rockledge is a hospital without any hospital supplies. Steward has stiffed the companies that supply "heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper." Key medical equipment has been repossessed. So have the Pepsi machines. The hospital cafeteria had its supply of cold cuts repossessed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/1agc1j4/comment/kolicqo/

It's not just Steward's nonpayments that reek of impending doom. Its payments also bear the hallmarks of a scam artist on the brink of blowing off the con. The company recently paid off a vendor with five separate checks for $1m, each drawn on "a random hospital in Utah" (Steward recently walked away from its Utah hospitals; its partners there are suing it for stealing $18m on their way out the door).

This company – which owns 32 hospitals! – has resorted to gambits like sending photos of fake checks to doctors it hasn't paid in months as "proof" that the money was coming (the checks arrived 22 days later).

Steward owes so much money to its employees – $1.66m to just one doctors' group. But the medical staff keep doing their jobs, and are reluctant to speak on the record, thanks to Steward's reputation for vicious retaliation. Those health workers keep showing up to take care of patients, even as the hospital crumbles around them. One clinician told Tcacik: "I watched a bed collapse underneath a [patient] who had just undergone hip surgery."

Rockledge has nine elevators, but only five of them work – the other four have been broken for a year. The hospital's fourth floor has been converted to "a graveyard of broken beds." The sinks are clogged, or filled with foul gunk. There's black mold. Nurses have noted on the maintenance tags that the repair service refuses to attend the hospital until their overdue bills are paid. The fifteen-person on-site maintenance team was cut to just two workers.

Steward is just the latest looting owner of Rockledge. After the Great Financial Crisis, private equity consultants helped sell it to Health Management Associates. The hospital's CEO took home a $10m bonus for that sale and exited; Health Management Associates then quickly became embroiled in a Medicare fraud and kickback scandal. Soon after, Rockledge was passed on to Community Health Systems, who then sold it on to Rockledge.

Steward, meanwhile, was at that time owned by an even bigger private equity giant, Cerberus, which then sold Steward off. That deal was performatively complex and hid all kinds of mischief. Prior to Cerberus's sell-off of Steward, they sold off Steward's real-estate. The buyer was Medical Properties Trust, who gave Cerberus $1.25b for the real-estate: three hospitals in Florida and three more in Ohio. Steward then contracted to operate these hospitals on MPT's behalf, and pay MPT rent for the real-estate.

This complex arrangement was key to siphoning value out of the hospital and to keeping angry creditors at bay – if you can't figure out who owes you money, it's a lot harder to collect on the debt. The scheme was masterminded by Steward founder/CEO Ralph de la Torre. De la Torre is notorious for taking a massive dividend out of the company while it owed $1.4b to its creditors. He bought a $40m yacht with the money.

De la Torre was once feted as a business genius who would "disrupt" healthcare. But as Steward's private jet hops around "Corfu, Santorini, St. Maarten and Antigua" as its hospitals literally crumble, he's becoming less popular. In Massachusetts, politicians have railed against Steward and de la Torre (Governor Healey wants the company to leave the state "as soon as possible").

Florida, by contrast, is much more friendly to Steward. The state Health and Human Services Committee chair Randy Fine is an ardent admirer of hospital privatization and is currently campaigning to sell off the last community hospital in Brevard County. The state inspectors are likewise remarkably tolerant of Steward's little peccadillos. The quasi-governmental agency that inspects hospitals has awarded this shit-and-bat-filled, elevator-free, understaffed rotting hulk "A" grades for quality.

These inspectors jointly represent a mismatched assortment of private and public agencies, dominated by a nonprofit called Leapfrog, the brainchild of Harvard public-health prof Lucian Leape, who founded it in 2000. Leapfrog likes to tout its "transparent" assessment criteria, and Steward are experts at hitting those criteria, spending the exact minimum to tick every box that Leapfrog inspectors use as proxies for overall quality and safety.

This is a pretty great example of Goodhart's Law: "every measurement eventually becomes a target, whereupon it ceases to be a good measurement":

https://xkcd.com/2899/

But despite Steward's increasingly furious creditors and its decaying facilities, the company remains bullish on its ability to continue operations. Medical Properties Trust – the real estate investment trust that is nominally a separate company from Steward – recently hosted a conference call to reassure Wall Street investors that it would be a going concern. When a Bank of America analyst asked MPT's CFO how this could possibly be, given the facility's dire condition and Steward's degraded state, the CFO blithely assured him that the company would get bailouts: "We own hospitals no one wants to see closed."

That's the thing about PE and health-care. The looters who buy out every health-care facility in a region understand that this makes them too big to fail: no matter how dangerous the companies they drain become, local governments will continue to prop them up. Look at dialysis, a market that's been cornered by private equity rollups. Today, if you need this lifesaving therapy, there's a good chance that every accessible facility is owned by a private equity fund that has fired all its qualified staff and ceased sterilizing its needles. Otherwise healthy people who visit these clinics sometimes die due to operator error. But they chug along, because no dialysis clinics is worse that "dialysis clinics where unqualified sadists sometimes kill you with dirty needles":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood

The bad news is that private equity has thoroughly colonized the entire medical system. They took hospitals, fired the doctors, then took over the doctors' groups that provided outsource staff to the hospital:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

It's illegal for private equity companies to own doctors' practices (doctors have to own these), but they obfuscated the crime with a paper-thin pretext that they got away with despite its obvious bullshittery:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

The financier who decides whether you live or die depends on an algorithm that literally sets a tolerable level of preventable deaths for the patients trapped in the practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

Private equity also took over emergency rooms and boobytrapped them with "surprise billing" – junk fees that ran to thousands of dollars that you had to pay even if the hospital was in network with your insurer. They made billions from this, and spent a many millions from that booty keeping the scam alive with scare ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The whole health stack is colonized by private equity-backed monopolies. Even your hospital bed!

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/05/hillrom/#baxter-international

Then there's residential care. Private equity cornered many regional markets on nursing homes and turned them into slaughterhouses, places where you go to die, not live:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

The palliative care sector is also captured by private equity. PE bosses hire vast teams of fast-talking salespeople who con vulnerable older people into entering an end-of-life system before they are ready to die. Thanks to loose regulation, the nation is filled with fake hospices that can rake in millions from Medicare while denying all care to their patients (hospice patients don't get life-extending medication or procedures, by definition):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

If you survive this long enough, Medicare eventually tells the hospice that you're clearly not dying and you get kicked off their rolls. Now you have to go through the lengthy bureaucratic nightmare of convincing the system – which was previously informed that you were at death's door – that you are actually viable and need to start getting care again (good luck with that).

If that kills you, guess what? Private equity has rolled up funeral homes up and down the country, and they will scam your survivors just as hard as the medical system that killed you did:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/09/high-cost-of-dying/#memento-mori

The PE sector spent more than a trillion dollars over the past decade buying up healthcare companies, and it has trillions more in "dry powder" allocated for further medical acquisitions. Why not? As the CFO of Medical Properties Trust told that Bank of America analyst last week, when you "own hospitals no one wants to see closed." you literally can't fail, no matter how many people you murder.

The PE sector is a reminder that the crimes people commit for money far outstrip the crimes they commit for ideology. Even the most ideological killers are horrified by the murders their profit-motivated colleagues commit.

Last year, Tkacic wrote about the history of IG Farben, the German company that built Monowitz, a private slave-labor camp up the road from Auschwitz to make the materiel it was gouging Hitler's Wehrmacht on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Farben bought the cheapest possible slaves from Auschwitz, preferentially sourcing women and children. These slaves were worked to death at a rate that put Auschwitz's wholesale murder in the shade. Farben's slaves died an average of just three months after starting work at Monowitz. The situation was so abominable, so unconscionable, that the SS officers who provided outsource guard-labor to Monowitz actually wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty.

The Nuremberg trials are famous for the Nazi officers who insisted that they were "just following order" but were nonetheless executed for their crimes. 24 Farben executives were also tried at Nuremberg, where they offered a very different defense: "We had a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to maximize our profits." 19 of the 24 were acquitted on that basis.

PE is committed to an ideology that is far worse than any form of racial animus or other bias. As a sector, it is committed to profit above all other values. As a result, its brutality knows no bounds, no decency, no compassion. Even the worst crimes we commit for hate are nothing compared to the crimes we commit for greed.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/retaliation#charnel-house

[sprout-fics]

I've got this apocalypse AU brewing in my mind, and no concrete ideas yet. Just this thought of being on deployment with the 141, Laswell in your ear, when all the sudden the comms start breaking up, Laswell desperately trying to convey something you can't hear. You're in the middle of nowhere, so you don't have any indication of what's happened the way you would if you're in the city, but something is deeply, terribly wrong.

I haven't settled on this being a zombie apocalypse AU, a sudden deadly plague, nuclear exchange, what, but I DO know that if there's any group that can hack their way amidst a rapidly changing, dangerous world full of humanity doing anything they can to survive- even sacrificing each other, it's the 141.

[elbiotipo]

If you think about it guns are pretty bad against zombies. If you point a gun against a mob of humans, they will stop even if they outnumber you but that's cause we understand whats a gun and are afraid of them. A zombie wouldn't care. Plus, you might stop a person with a single shot even if you don't hit a vital spot because of the pain, but zombies in fiction not only not feel pain, they can walk despite being half rotten, so they probably can take a few bullets before getting stopped.

Yes, exactly. Guns are effective because they generate a lot of pain at once when shot to stop/harm someone, and they hit vital organs so they're deadly when shot to kill. Zombies don't care about either of that, and if we're going for the typical "hit them in the head" lore, a headshot is remarkably hard to do compared to hitting body mass which is more effective in the case of humans (recent events have, uh, put this to the test), but less so for zombies. The only truly effective kind of gun against zombies would be some sort of emplaced machine gun, everything else will just run out of ammunition without you achieving anything. Though I'm sure the internet had this conversation a thousand times already and it's on the Zombie Survival Guide (Max Brooks is a hack though)

The other day I was talking with my friend about Project Zomboid and we concluded that in a country like Argentina, where guns just aren't widely available outside of police, the military and criminals (and even those are often handguns), the most effective thing for combat would be to go full medieval, get motorcycle helmets, padded clothes, improvise some lances (this is my knife-stick) or such. A single gun with six rounds is useless in such a case (it's also frankly useless for most things besides intimidating or murdering individuals), you have to get a bunch of people, organize them, think Roman or Greek tactics. Again, Max Brooks is a hack but he did this analysis well.

[letmedixonyou]

The Room of Old Sins: Chapter One - Colliding Paths

Read about series and find other chapters -> here <-

words: 4.7k

warnings: usual zombie apocalypse gore, themes of death and survival, violence

A/N: Hello, muffins! Here's the first chapter of the new series! I actually love it so much, I think this is my favourite series I've written so far. There's just so much going on! Enjoy! 🖤

The woods were dark. The only light out there was the full moon, shining through the branches of the trees. The air was thick with an oppressive fog that swirled and clung to every tree and shadow. The canopy above was dense, blotting out any starlight that might pierce through. The damp earth muffled footsteps, making the forest eerily silent except for the occasional crack of a twig, a snarl, or the rustle of my raincoat. It was a type of the scene I only ever seen in the movies.

The skeletal and gnarled tree shapes around me made me breathe fast and unsteady, their branches reaching out like twisted fingers trying to grab me at every turn. The fog catches on the branches, creating ghostly apparitions that fade in and out of sight. I was running as silently as I could, even though it was hard when you couldn't see where you were going.

A faint, fetid stench of decay lingers in the air, a grim reminder of the unseen horrors lurking beyond my vision. Now and then, the faintest hint of movement catches my eye, but it's hard to distinguish reality from imagination in this darkness. Even when I blink multiple times trying to let my eyes adjust to it, the nothingness has made its way to my mind, making my brain working at thousand miles an hour, making up things that weren't there.

Suddenly, a low, guttural moan rose from the depths of the fog, echoing through the trees and sending a shiver down my spine. The sound was followed by the shuffle of heavy, dragging feet, growing louder and more numerous. My heartbeat quickened as I realised I’m not in the presence of a couple of them—a group was out there, hunting, and it's drawing closer. I was fully aware they could smell me.

In this dark and foggy forest, survival became a game of nerve and wit. Every sound, every movement could mean the difference between life and death, as the relentless, undead menace stalked its prey. The night was endless, and escape seemed impossible, but I pressed on, driven by the primal urge to survive.

I sometimes think about how would it feel to give up. To let these creatures just chomp down on me and tear me to pieces. I always had such gruesome thoughts about life. When watching movies with my sister on a Friday night, I always tried to imagine what the characters would feel when they're close to dying. Would they see the light? Is there a point where they just know it's over? While I never thought I'd be living inside of a horror movie, thinking and keeping my brain sharp was the only fun I had these days. Imagination and occasional book or two saved me from going completely insane.

I squatted behind the tree, trying to breathe as quietly as possible. I knew they were close. I could hear them and smell their decaying flesh in the air. I can’t tell which way they’re coming from, the woods just echo their snarling, leaving me pinned down. My hand squeezed on machete at my side, getting ready for a fight.

I usually was really good at taking care of myself. But since I had to see my father die right in front of me, my ability to be vigilant and sharp dissipated slightly, making me less than a perfect fighter. I knew I would have to push through the walkers, no matter what, there was no escape for me, not in these parts of the woods. It was unfamiliar. I never ventured that far.

Finally, I could hear the group of walkers closest to me. I jumped out behind the tree, machete in my hands. I start hacking at them, one by one. Blood spilled everywhere, and got into my eyes, making it difficult to see where they were coming from. I cut the air a couple of times, retreating back. My feet stumbled on a fallen tree and I dropped on my ass, my machete flying out of my hand.

My eyes widen a little as one of the walkers eliminates the space between us, falling right on top of me. I tried to fight him off, hand in hand, but it wasn't the best idea. My forearm pressed against their neck, stopping them from biting me, as I struggled to get the knife from my boot. Their skin started to peel off at the sides of their face, and the smell of rotten flesh hit my nostrils. The jaw seemed to move a little to the right, as I pressed more intensely into their throat.

I thought I was a goner. I knew I was. There was no way I could survive this as more of them drew closer, getting down on their knees, ready to eat my flesh. I'd be one of them, just a walker, stumbling around with no memories of anything. The only thing I'd think about was eating. Hunger. Tearing flesh off of a human's body, the hot blood trickling down my chin and fingers as I munch on their insides.

Suddenly, a whistle of an arrow cuts through the air and the walker that was on top of me landed heavily on my body, not moving. The arrows flew one after another, killing every single one of them. I tried to look around, but the visibility was still as shit as it was before, so I focused on getting up. I pushed the dead walker off with a grunt and got up quickly, looking for my machete in the dark. I finally found it laying on a bed of moss, and I straightened myself, trying to see anything in the dark and fogginess of the forest.

“Lower your weapon,” I hear a voice from the forest, deep and gravelly, with a bit of a Southern accent.

I furrow my brow and I keep my machete up. My eyes scan the woods carefully, tree after tree, but I couldn't see a thing. My heart was beating frivolously, and I swallow hard.

“I’m pretty sure my arrow can reach you quicker than you can find me and kill me with your machete here, so I’ll say it again,” the voice just echoed in the woods. “Lower. Your. Weapon.”

I was profoundly aware that I couldn't win here. My brain screamed at me, telling me I should run, but I stayed rooted in place. I tried to weigh my options. If I run, he'll shoot and if I stay? Well, I had no idea what happens if I stayed. After a long minute, I put my machete down, my breath visible in the cold.

Finally, a silhouette came out of the shadows and I could sort of see the man that was speaking before in the light of the moon. His hair was covering his face, but I could faintly see the outline of his lips. His crossbow was at the ready, scanning the surroundings with eerie intensity. The silver light caught the edge of his rugged face when he closed in on me. His eyes focused, with an almost animal glint.

“Are you alone?” He asked, his voice commanded attention.

“Yeah,” I said, taking the hood of my raincoat off. “Are you?”

“I’m the one asking questions,” he stepped closer, pointing his bow at me. “Machete,” he extended his hand towards me.

“No fucking way,” I scoffed, looking at him like he was an alien. “It’s my machete. You can’t take away my only weapon.”

“I ain’t asking again. We can do it the easy way or the hard way,” the stranger’s voice was low and steady. “Trust me, you don’t want to see what the hard way looks like.”

I threw my machete at his feet and rolled my eyes. I understood why he was doing this. I probably am in his territory and he doesn't exactly look like the most friendly type. Crossing my arms on my chest, I watched him pick it up, his crossbow still pointed at my chest.

“What’s the point in all this?” I ask. I was weary of him, and he most definitely was weary of me. Both of us, ready to jump into action if the other one gets one step too far.

He doesn’t respond. He takes my machete and puts it through the loop of his black trousers. Still pointing his crossbow at me, he goes to each of the walkers and collect all his arrows. Then, he steps closer, the distance between us only an arm’s length and I could sort of see his face.

His piercing eyes, sharp with an almost predatory alertness. Shadows accentuate the chiselled lines of his jaw and cheekbones, highlighting the grit and determination etched into his visage. He's got a slight beard and a moustache. The darkness of the woods adds an air of mystery to his presence.

“Turn around,” he says gruffly.

I reluctantly turn around, no defensiveness in my moves. He’s got my machete and my knife was still in my boot. It wasn't for long though, because the man had clearly done this before as he reached inside my boot, taking the knife out of it. There was nothing I could do, at least not now. His hands grabbed mine and put a piece of fabric around it, tying them together. He pushed me forward and I took the first steps. His hand was firmly holding my arm like he knew that I was plotting my escape. We walked a little while and then turned into a building.

From the outside, it looked like some sort of a store, and when the man dragged me inside, I confirmed it with a quick look around. The empty shelves were pushed to the sides, leaving the middle of the floor free. The fire was illuminating the inside of the room, making it easier to see things. The smell of burning twigs in the air hit my nostrils. The building looked unsteady, the walls had cracks in them, almost succumbing to the fall. The quiet was almost deafening - the only sound was mine and the stranger’s feet on the floor when we walked towards the crackling fire.

The man pushed me down to sit next to the it. I looked up and saw his features with a bit more clarity. His long brown hair, was shaggy and slightly greasy, falling around his face in an unkempt manner. His face was almost unreadable, weathered, with a scruffy beard. His body was lean and muscular. He was wearing a black Henley top, a leather vest with angel wings adorned on it and black trousers. His shoes had two different laces, one red and one black.

He looked at me with piercing blue eyes. His hooded eyelids told me he was tired and the circle bruise under one of his eyes confirmed that it wasn't the first time he has done what he was doing with me right now. I guess the last time didn't go very well. He sat down on the other side of the fire, as far away from me as he could.

“You hungry?” he asks, a hint of a Southern accent coming out once again when he talked.

“Starving,” I admit.

It was almost three days since I’d eaten something properly. My belly rumbled on cue, the sound echoed in the empty space of the store, and I could hear the man huff.

He opened his bag that was resting on the floor next to the fire and pulled out a dead rabbit. His demeanour was slightly alert and focused, but not as fierce as out there. He took out a knife from the holster in his jeans and slashed the rabbit open, gutting it right in front of me. He stopped midway through and glanced my way, perhaps looking for some reaction, but I looked back at him, raising my eyebrow.

I couldn't see anything in his eyes. They were dead, and his poker face was actually trained to perfection. He kept working on the rabbit and I shifted uncomfortably, feeling the fabric on my wrists dig into my flesh.

“Is this really necessary?” I ask the man. “It’s not like I’m going to kill you.”

"Quit whining, and don’t give me a reason to regret not leavin’ you back there."

"Why didn't you? Nobody asked you to help me."

"It surely looked like you needed my help," I thought I heard him scoff at my comment.

I sigh deeply and looking around, trying to find something to focus on apart from the tingling sensation in my hands. He tied the fabric really tight and I started to lose feeling in my fingers. He wasn't even paying attention to me, still preparing the rabbit. I groan a little and shuffle in my seat.

Suddenly he gets up and comes closer to me, stepping behind me. The fabric comes off from my wrists and I rub them to ease away the pain. Now, I could see that the fabric was a red and white bandanna.

“That's better,” slips out of my mouth and I only get yet another huff.

I stand up on my feet and start taking my raincoat off, feeling the fire warming me up and my cheeks were burning red from the heat. He jumps towards me with a knife pointed at me. I don't even flinch, I just look at him, tilting my head to the side.

“Just taking my coat off,” I say, my hands up. I could see his face changing just for a moment before it turns to the serious one. He swings back around and goes back to his place by the fire.

There was something about this man that was so interesting. I couldn’t pin it down. Maybe it was because of the mystery of the situation. He rescued me from being chomped down on one of the rotters out there. But then he tied me up, mistrustful towards me. It was an array of confusion and a big ‘what the fuck’.

I take my bag off and then my raincoat, and put them next me. I sit back down on the floor, the fire between me and the man. The silence entails us again. I start playing with the laces of my boots, keeping an eye on the man's movement and I could tell he was doing the same.

“What’s your name?” I finally ask, breaking the silence. His eyes shoot a look towards me. “If I am stuck here with you, I may as well know who you are.”

“Daryl,” he says, his voice deep, rumbly, almost sending a shiver down my spine. “What’s yours?”

“Nixie,” I say.

"Nixie?"

"Yeah."

He nodded as if to say ‘Nice to meet you’, but I wasn’t sure. His stoic expression and brusque etiquette wouldn’t let me see any type of emotions he might have. I watched him as he threw the rabbit on the fire and covered it with some ashes, before wrapping the guts in some newspaper and throwing it in the corner of the room.

The silence between us was a bit awkward. I didn’t know if I should speak. I wasn't much of an outgoing person, but something inside of me was pushing me to make a conversation. I figured that Daryl was not much of a talker either, maybe even a bit of a loner too. He didn’t look like he belonged anywhere; like he spent most of the time alone. I could relate to that, I was stuck alone too, just taking it day by day.

We spent a couple of hours in silence and I didn’t even realise when I fell asleep. I must've been more tired than I felt.

I hear a loud bang right in front of my face and jump up, panicked, looking for my weapons. My eyes land on Daryl standing right above me, and then I look down to see the plate of meat by my bag. My bag that has been opened and clearly searched while I was sleeping. I furrow my brow and I bite down on my lip to stop myself from saying something I'd regret.

He searches my bag while I'm asleep and then just throws a plate of rabbit meat at me like I'm some kind of dog? What a dick…

“Eat,” he says pointing at the plate.

“Is it poisoned?” I breathe out.

"Try and find out."

My heart was still racing from the loud bang the plate made when it hit the floor. I sit up and take the plate in my hands, examining it. The rabbit looks like, well, not a rabbit anymore. Just strips of the meat on the plate. I pick some up and throw it in my mouth, chewing slowly, my tongue trying to taste it for any type of drug. I didn't trust him, not one bit. Who was to say he wasn't trying to kill me to have supply of meat or kill me so I wouldn't be a burden?

“You were asleep for 3 hours,” he says and I look at him, surprised that he would even talk to me.

“Oh,” I say, not sure what else to say, the awkwardness palpable, making the air a bit stuffy.

“What were you doing alone out there?” Daryl’s voice cut through the silence.

“Probably the same thing you were,” I say smiling lightly. “Trying to survive.”

Daryl's eyes narrow as he studies my face.

"It's dangerous out here. You should stick close."

"Thanks for the concern," I reply, my smile fading. "But I can handle myself. Been doing it long before we crossed paths."

"That so?" Daryl's tone softens just a fraction. "Well, don't get too comfortable. There's always something lurking."

"Comfort isn't really in my vocabulary," I respond, finishing up my rabbit meat. "But I'll keep an eye out. Thanks for the meal."

He nods almost invisibly and keeps looking down on his rabbit.

A brief moment of understanding passes between us before we both hear snarling and rustling beyond the building’s walls. I look at Daryl, he’s eyes already focused, trying to pinpoint where the sounds were coming from exactly. He gripped his crossbow from the floor and stood up.

“Can I have my machete back?” I ask with a bit of urgency in my voice, scrambling up to my feet and balling my hands into fists.

“No."

“Seriously, man?” I looked at him like he was crazy. “I can help you!”

Daryl shoots me a glare, his eyes darkened. He reaches for his belt and shoves the machete in front of me, the metal hitting my chest. I nod slightly and ready myself for whatever is about to come. He gives me a couple of silent signs to follow him and I do so, stepping carefully and lightly. We move through the building, coming out of the back doors.

I see some walkers to the right and I rush towards them. I slash at them with my machete while Daryl shoots them down with his crossbow. We work in almost perfect harmony, like it was a dance between us and the walkers. Heads are rolling, blood is splashing and we almost revel in the chaos, as if the carnage itself is the only thing keeping us alive. The world fades away for a moment, leaving just the rhythm of survival—swift, brutal, and unrelenting.

I look at Daryl after I kill the last one of them, and nod in appreciation, before I hear more snarling behind me. I turn and see more of them coming out of the woods. Didn’t take me long to realise that we are not dealing only with a few walkers. There’s an entire horde heading our way. My eyes widen and I run back to the building.

“It’s a horde,” I huff towards him. I never was one to run. I was probably the least fit person that is still alive in the apocalypse. “We won’t be able to fight it.”

“Back in,” he says and pushes me inside, closing the doors behind him and using his crossbow to block it.

He drags me away from the doors by my arm and throws me into a room that looks like a supply closet to whatever this shop was before the outbreak. The room was tiny, barely enough for one person, but Daryl came in and closed the doors behind us, his hand gripping the doorknob with all his might, making his muscles ripple under the long sleeves of his top. I could feel his back close to me, breathing slowly. There was barely any room to shuffle but I tried to anyway. He looks at me over his shoulder.

“Stop moving,” he snarls quietly.

“It's kinda hard when you're squashing me,” I whisper, but my movement stops.

My body freezes in place, trying to ignore the fact that I am locked in a closet with a stranger. I am not sure how long we stay inside there, hearing the snarling of the walkers, trying to get in, relentlessly banging on the doors. The only thing that stopped them from coming in was Daryl's crossbow, holding the back doors shut. We hear the arrowheads clinking against the metal doors. It seemed like the walkers were hearing it too, because every time it happened their snarls and moans were getting a lot louder.

We waited until the place quietens again. I feel Daryl moving and opening the doors slightly, to check out if it’s safe. He then pushes the doors open and steps out. I do the same after him, looking around alerted and focused, making sure that there was no other noises. I stretch my body slightly. The fire is still going and the building was free of walkers. The crossbow is still in the doors. Daryl looks at it but doesn’t take it out.

“We need to stay here for the night to make sure they’re all gone,” he says facing me, his face laced with a bit of concern.

“What then?” I ask him, putting my machete in the holster on my belt. “I mean, in the morning? What happens then?”

“I’ll take you to my people,” he says.

“Your people?” I cross my arms on my chest. “What for?”

He doesn’t answer the question. He completely ignores me and he makes his way to the fire and sits down. From his bag, he takes out a few branches. He lays them next to him and takes out a knife. He begins to sharpen them. I watch it all with a furrowed brow, unable to read him or to assess if his people will hurt me or not. I step towards him and sit next to my coat and bag. 

“Answer my question,” I demand, looking at him sternly. “What will your people do to me?”

“That is up to Rick, not me,” he says, looking up from sharpening the twigs.

“Who is Rick?”

“He’s a leader of our camp.”

“You’ve got a camp?” I ask, raising my eyebrow. “How many of you?”

“About 15,” He says, not able to pinpoint the exact number.

“Where are you located?” I ask.

“You’re asking too many damn questions.”

Daryl looked down at whatever he was doing, not giving me a straight answer which bothered me. I sigh heavily and I sit down again, brushing my hair away from my face. I felt unsure about this man and not knowing his intentions, or who his group was. For all I knew, they may be serial killers or cannibals. I get up from my seat and pace around the room before I can hear Daryl groaning lightly.

“We won’t hurt you. If we wanted to, you wouldn’t be standing here,” he says firmly, looking me up and down.

“Right, yeah,” I raised my brow amused at his words. "Because you scream all nice and trustworthy," my voice dripped in sarcastic tone.

Daryl tilted his head, giving me a sideways glance that was equal parts sceptical and annoyed. "Well, ain't that rich comin' from someone who's still breathin' 'cause I ain't shot 'em yet." His voice was low, with that signature rasp, as he shifted his weight. He looked up from what he was doing. "Don’t worry," he added, a trace of a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "I ain't trustin' you either."

I cross my arms on my chest and give him a bitter smile. “Good. Makes things simpler. Trust gets you killed anyway.”

He nods and I can nearly see a hint of understanding in his eyes before I look away. I stare at the flames, thinking about my dead family. My dad, my mum, my sister. I knew my father was dead, but I often thought about my sister and mum, maybe even silently praying to whatever was up there that they find their way to me, or I find my way to them.

The flicker of the flames cast wavering shadows across the make-shift camp Daryl has set for himself, dancing on the hard lines of his face. He sat, crossbow resting against his knee, his eyes darting toward me every so often, guarded and calculating. I didn’t look at him directly, but I could feel it—the weight of his suspicion pressing against my skin. I’d caught him once or twice glancing away, as if he was trying to decide whether I was a threat or just another liability.

I stared at the flames, arms loosely crossed, the silence growing heavier by the second. The only sounds were the occasional snap of burning wood and the far-off rustle of the night. Daryl shifted slightly, the movement drawing my eyes to him for just a moment. His brows furrowed, and you could swear his lips twitched like he might say something—but instead, he reached down and prodded at the fire with a stick.

Finally, he broke the silence, his voice gruff. “Firewood’s out. Grab some more.”

I turned to him, raising a brow as my lips twitched slightly into a smirk. “Oh, sure. And maybe I’ll build you a cabin while I’m at it.”

He grumbled, looking away and muttering under his breath. “Just do it.”

Rolling my eyes, I stood up and went to the doors. I took his crossbow off and put it on the ground. Swinging the doors open, I trudged off into the darkness. The sharp chill of the air was a stark contrast to the warmth of the flames, and I couldn’t help but keep glancing over my shoulder. Trust didn’t come easy these days—not for me, not for him.

I gather some twigs and bigger branches off the ground and I wrap them with the bottom part of my top, making a basket for them. When I returned, arms full of wood, Daryl glanced up briefly, then back to the fire. “There,” I said flatly, dropping the bundle beside him with a clank. “Don’t burn it all at once.”

He gave a faint nod, leaning forward to toss a piece into the flames. “Good job,” he said after a beat, his tone dry, yet almost grudgingly appreciative. “Guess you’re useful after all.”

I snorted lightly, crouching back down across from him. “Don’t get used to it. This ain’t a partnership.”

Daryl gave me a short, humourless chuckle, the corner of his mouth twitching into a brief smirk. “You think I want a partner?” His gaze flicked toward me, sharp and unimpressed. “You ain’t my first choice either.”

The two of us locked eyes for a moment, the tension thick but familiar—neither one of us willing to give an inch. Then, with a mutual, silent understanding that neither trusted the other but would tolerate it for now, both of us turned your attention back to the fire.

I laid down on the floor, using my bag as a pillow and my raincoat as a blanket, and I drift off, squeezing the handle of my machete. I was tired, yes. But I slept with one eye open, because I'll be damned if I lose my vigilance around Daryl.

Tag list:

@d3l1c4t3s0vl

[artbyblastweave]

I Am Legend is the predecessor of a lot of contemporary zombie fiction, and in particular a lot of survival horror zombie games. The blueprint for the gameplay loop is there- a single survivor with an increasingly fortified and built-up compound, scavenging during the day and hunkering down at night to withstand the siege. One thing I think a lot of zombie games lose when trying to capture that loop, though, is that Robert Neville knows a lot of those people. He's fortifying his actual house where he lived before the apocalypse, a lot of the infected outside are his neighbors, some of them know him and taunt him by name.

Zombie games usually don't model this element because I think a major appeal of zombie games, from a resource allocation perspective, is that it's a fast and legible way to introduce a huge volume of enemies that you don't need to characterize on an individual level. Anonymity is a virtue. On the cheaper side that translates to copy pasting the same handful of sprites or models; on the higher end, you get systems like Project Zomboid or Left 4 Dead, with the ability to algorithmically generate swarms of differentiated zombies on the fly. In both cases you are not looking at characters who are being written. On the flipside, a lot of open-world zombie survival games have protagonists with deliberately tenuous connections to the setting which they inhabit, for purposes of character customization. Understandable, but it precludes any telltale-TWD-style "I knew the people who ran this shop" moments. It ultimately amounts to a whole bunch of strangers trying to kill each other. One of my earliest ever ideas for a game involved playing as the single human survivor of an isolated hamlet in Colorado, whose population has otherwise been completely infected; the gimmick being the amount of development time sunk into every individual zombie. There would be a static number around the map, individually modeled, with extensive environmental storytelling in their homes and workplaces developing their personal connections to each other and to the player character and acting as a characterization vehicle for both. Your goal as the player would be to kill the static set of one or two hundred zombies, gaining the run of the town to yourself, using your involved knowledge of the community to your advantage. Combat as a tense and occasionally frenetic affair, dependent on positioning, planning, and Trap-making rather than a straightforward hack-and-slash rampage. Has anyone ever attempted something like this?

[acquired-stardust]

Resident Evil 2 Unicorn Cut Playstation 2024

[disturbingstar]

TV/Comic Death Comparisons

Otis

• In “Save the Last One” Otis is left to be devoured by walkers after being shot in the leg by Shane Walsh.

• In the comics, Otis is devoured by walkers in the Prison. He is put down by Rick Grimes after reanimation.

Sophia Peletier

• In “Pretty Much Dead Already”, Sophia is revealed to have been bitten by a zombie and reanimated, and is later shot in the head by Rick Grimes after reanimation.

• In the comics, Sophia is still alive.

Dale Horvath

• In “Judge, Jury, Executioner”, Dale is disemboweled by a walker on Hershel's farm and mercifully shot in the head by Daryl Dixon.

• In the comics, Dale dies much later during the group's conflict with the Hunters, after being sustaining a bite from a walker. He is shot in the head by Andrea before reanimation. His death is similar to that of Bob Stookey from the TV Series.

Shane Walsh

• In “Better Angels”, Shane is stabbed to death by Rick Grimes, and is shot in the head by Carl Grimes after he reanimates.

• In the comics, Shane's death happens much sooner, roughly a day after the attack on the Atlanta camp. Instead of being premeditated like in the show, Shane's attempt on Rick's life is a “spur of the moment” event, brought on by Shane losing his mind due to several factors. Unlike the show, Shane is shot in the neck by Carl Grimes. After discovering that people reanimate regardless of the circumstances of their deaths, Rick travels to the Atlanta campsite to put Shane down, shooting him in the head.

Lori Grimes

• In “Killer Within”, Lori dies during a C-Section giving birth to Judith Grimes. She is shot by Carl Grimes before reanimation.

• In the comics, Lori survives giving birth to Judith, and isn't killed until the Governor's second assault on the prison, when she is shot and killed by Lilly Caul. This also results in the death of Judith, who is crushed by Lori's corpse, unlike the show where Judith is still alive.

Andrea Harrison

• In “Welcome to the Tombs”, Andrea is bitten by an undead Milton Mamet, whom Philip Blake stabbed and left in a room with a tied-up Andrea. Rather than die from infection, Andrea chooses to take her own life by shooting herself in the head.

• In the comics, Andrea dies much later during the war with the Whisperers. While leading a giant heard away from Alexandria, she is bitten on the neck while saving Eugene. She eventually dies from infection and is stabbed in the head by Rick Grimes after she reanimates.

Hershel Greene

• In “Too Far Gone”, Hershel is decapitated by Philip Blake after Rick refuses to vacate the prison. In “After”, he is put down by Michonne, who stabs him in the head.

• In the comics, Hershel gives up on life after his son Billy is killed during the second prison assault. He is executed by Brian Blake, who shoots him in the head.

Philip Blake

• In “Too Far Gone”, Philip is stabbed through the back by Michonne Hawthorne, and is later shot in the head by Lilly Chambler as he lay dying.

• In the comics, Brian Blake is killed by Lilly Caul, who shoots him in the head and kicks his body into a group of zombies.

Gareth

• In “Four Walls and a Roof”, Gareth is hacked to death by Rick Grimes.

• In the comics Chris, Gareth's comic counterpart, is brutally slaughtered by Rick Grimes, Andrea, Abraham Ford, and Michonne Hawthorne.

Bob Stookey

• In “Strangers”, Bob is bitten on the shoulder by a walker. To spare Sasha from watching his slowly die, he decides to walk out into the woods, where he is knocked out by one of the Terminus remnants. He wakes up, only to discover his leg has been eaten by the Termites. When Bob reveals he's been bitten, Gareth decides to return him to the church. He eventually succumbs to infection in “Four Walls and a Roof”, and is put down by Tyreese Williams before reanimation.

• In the comics, Bob is a former army medic living in Woodbury, who patched up the Governor after the latter endured brutal torture at the hands of Michonne Hawthorne. In the novel series, Bob continues to serve as the town's doctor following the second prison assault until his death of a heart attack. He is then put down by Lilly Caul before reanimation.

Tyreese Williams

• In “What Happened and What's Going On”, Tyreese is bitten on the arm by Noah's zombified brother. His arm is sliced off by Michonne to stop the infection from spreading, but Tyreese dies due to blood loss anyway. He is stabbed in the head by Michonne before reanimation.

• In the comics, Tyreese dies sooner, during the second prison assault. He is decapitated by Brian Blake after Rick refuses to vacate the prison. His zombified head is later stabbed by Michonne Hawthorne. His death is similar to that of Hershel Greene from the TV Series.

Ron Anderson

• In “No Way Out”, Ron holds Rick at gunpoint after witnessing Rick hack off Jessie's hand to save Carl. He is stabbed through the chest by Michonne, which causes him to reflexively fire his gun and shoot Carl's eye out.

• In the comics, Ron is devoured by zombies when he starts panicking and making too much noise. Carl's eye is accidentally shot out by Douglas instead. His death is similar to that of Sam Anderson.

Abraham Ford

• In “Last Day on Earth”, Abraham is picked by Negan Smith to be executed. Negan smashes Abraham's head with his baseball bat, Lucille, off-screen.

• In the comics, Abraham is shot in the back of the head and through the eye with a crossbow bolt fired by Dwight. His death is similar to that of Denise Cloyd.

Glenn Rhee

• In “The Day Will Come When You Won't Be”, Negan Smith smashes Glenn's head with Lucille after Daryl attacks him.

• In the comics, Glenn's death is similar, but happens under slightly different circumstances, as Glenn is the one who is chosen by Negan to be executed.

Olivia

• In “Hearts Still Beating”, Olivia is shot in the face by Arat as retribution for Rosita trying to kill Negan.

• In the comics, Olivia dies much later during the conflict with the Whisperers, when she is decapitated by Alpha.

Carl Grimes

• In “The King, the Widow, and Rick”, Carl is bitten by a walker while taking Siddiq back to Alexandria. In “Honour,” Carl shoots himself in the head after saying goodbye to his friends and family.

• In the comics, Carl survives the entire duration of the series.

Paul “Jesus” Rovia

• In “Evolution”, Paul is stabbed through the heart by an unnamed Whisperer.

• In the comics, Paul Monroe is still alive.

Alpha

• In “Walk With Us”, Alpha has her throat slit by Negan, who then decapitates her and brings her head to Carol. Her head is later recovered and put down by Beta.

• In the comics, Alpha's death is pretty much identical, although the circumstances of her death are slightly different. Negan doesn't lure Alpha away by claiming to have captured Lydia, but she instead approaches him after banishing him to sleep outside the Whisperers' camp. He also brings Alpha's head to Rick instead of Carol. In addition, Alpha's head is not known to have been put down afterwards.

Rosita Espinosa

• In “Rest in Peace”, Rosita is bitten on the shoulder and succumbs to the infection. She is then put down by Eugene before reanimation.

• In the comics, Rosita is one of the pike victims.

[crappymixtape]

crappymixtape recos

going to try and do this at least once a month – sharing fics that have just blown me away ❤ so many talented writers on here omg 🥺 show them some love and BE KIND, REBLOG! xoxo, 💿

❤ “project sunshine” series +18 only – @a-dealwith-god ( TW: typical violence, child abuse, horror, gore, and depictions of mental illness // when another product of Hawkins National Laboratory escaped a long-survived nightmare alongside her sister, she crashed into one unsuspecting teenage boy and dragged him deeper into the dark mysteries that made up their hometown • steve x reader )

❤ “simmer” series +18 only – @upsidedownwithsteve ( welcome to hawkins’ number one diner! where the staff don’t wanna be there and the linecook is a grumpy metal head who likes to argue with his boss and ignore everyone else. but the new waitress can’t hack the rude customers and the regulars can be a little… much • linecook!eddie x waitress!reader )

❤ "from bug’s summer fic fest" – @lovebugism ( reader is clingy but doesn’t wanna come off as clingy so she asks eddie if he wants to be alone and he reassures her he couldn’t go anywhere without her • eddie x reader )

❤ “a quest for bed” – @luveline ( eddie fights to get his usually shy and moderately intoxicated girlfriend to bed when you insist on clinging to him at every turn • eddie x reader )

❤ "lyric request" – @familyvideostevie ( lyrics: “i didn't know you then and i'll never understand why it feels like i did” • steve x reader )

❤ “i can see you” +18 only – @fairyysoup ( TW: read at the link // the secret history of your long and arduous relationship with steve harrington aka the 5 times you pined over each other, and the time you actually did something about it • steve x reader )

❤ "post-game james" +18 only – @theemporium ( james potter post quidditch game shower smut – thinking about his sweaty pecs and big hands and thick thighs • james potter x reader )

❤ "public kisses" – @starryeyedstories ( you know steve would be the mom to kiss his girl in front of the gang because he knows they hate it • steve x reader )

❤ "all i really want is you" series +18 only – @loveshotzz ( a series of slow burn blurbs between older!neighbor!widower! steve x fem!reader – updated every wednesday • steve x reader )

❤ "zombie au" series +18 only – @luveline ( TW: various, read at the links // stranger things AU – reluctant allies to friends to lovers, takes place during the apocalypse • steve x reader )

❤ "injured with eddie" – @eddiemunsons-missingnipple ( stubbing your toe in front of eddie and he acts like you’re dying • eddie x reader )

❤ "the summer of '89" series +18 only – @delphispoeticals ( this is truly going to be a fantastic stranger things meets dirty dancing series and omg just wait til we can read it • dancer!steve x reader )

❤ "dependency problem" +18 only – @writersblockedx  ( TW: drugs, substance abuse, alcohol // when you return to cousins this year, you find that conrad has picked up similar bad habits you once had • conrad fisher x reader )

❤ "a lesson in romantics" series – @stvharrngton ( a multi-part series where reader is the new art teacher at hawkins high and the history teacher, mr. harrington, takes a shine to the new girl. mutual pining ensues on their road to love • steve x reader )

❤ "learning in public" +18 only – @ohcaptains ( you didn’t think he’d enjoy it that much...didn’t think he’d want more, too • carmen ‘carmy’ berzatto x female! reader )

[sadiecoocoo]

newest bit of TBB zombie fic that I'm working on. I've made it to 11,000 words already! (but still have a lot more to write)

Echo removed the hand he held to Tech’s mouth. Tech shuffled a bit away, still concealed by the overturned bed. He fought the urge to peek behind it, to see the trooper’s positions. It would risk his own being discovered. He could hear more stumbling footsteps join the group. More troopers were actively entering the room. Tech turned quickly back to Echo, who had a serious and determined look on his face. He didn’t miss the hints of pain and the way his hand shook though. Tech signed quickly how many he suspected being in the room. Echo nodded stiffly. They were vastly outnumbered, and Tech estimated that he had undercounted. He frowned as he tried to come up with some sort of plan that didn’t end terribly. “Hello?” One drawled, accentuating the “o.” Tech tensed as he heard the footsteps move closer. He unholstered his blaster. A few of the troopers cackled again. They sounded manic, and brought chills up Tech’s spine. He held his breath as the footsteps got closer. He lost count of how many were in the room, too many for them to take. Why had he let Wrecker leave them alone? His lip trampled as his heart sped up. Echo placed an equally shaky hand on Tech’s shoulder. He knew he was trying to ground the splicer, but it only seemed to make it worse. Echo could be one of those monsters in a few hours if he didn’t get to work right now. The footsteps were right at the overturned bed. Tech could feel the trooper looming over them, his shadow peeking through gaps. Tech clenched his fists, holding his blaster like a lifeline, which it usually was. Tech saw the trooper place his hand on the top of the bed, as if he were about to look over. They would be spotted. They would be ambushed and terrifyingly outnumbered. They would be killed. He moved to place his back against Echo. He didn’t want to be the reason the ARC died. Echo had been through so much and had bounced back. How can someone possibly bounce back from being torn limb from limb like the corpse Echo had described had been? This was Tech’s fault. He let Wrecker go, he would have stayed if Tech asked him to. He forgot to seal the door after Wrecker left, not thinking about the fact that doors can’t be sealed from the outside. Why couldn’t he think right? Why was he messing up? Why wouldn’t he just jump out and give Echo a chance at finding some way to escape instead of sit here like a toobie? Oh maker, the trooper’s head was peeked over the bed now, he would be able to see them in seconds. No, no, he couldn’t leave his brothers alone. They were somewhere in this facility and they needed him and Echo to survive. They needed them for so many things. Who would fix the Marauder? Who would hack into separatist systems? Who would- A loud clatter made Tech jump. The trooper stopped in his movement, and turned away. He turned away. He didn’t see them. There wasn’t a swarm of zombie troopers attacking them. They didn’t know they were there. Echo grabbed Tech’s hand and pulled him into a tight hug. He gladly accepted it. They had both almost been murdered, he could stand to accept a hug for surviving. He released a shaky, quiet breath. There were tears leaking onto his cheeks, though he couldn’t tell if they were from relief or the quickly dissipating fear. Beep! beep! Beep! Both clones froze. With wide eyes, they turned their head to look at the machine Tech had been running tests on the samples with. It had gone off. It had found something. Tech didn’t even get the chance to be happy that he found something before the bed they hid behind was thrown to the side by two undead troopers. Many more were gathered behind them, their dead eyes shining in the red emergency lighting. Echo grabbed Tech again and shielded him as one lunged, teeth barred in a horrific, bloodied grin.

I put a lot more than usual, but I'm really proud of this part of the fic and wanted to share it ahead of time :)

if anyone would like to be tagged once I finish this, I'd be happy to do it, just let me know! <3

[radio-free-beth-sarim]

We talk about how we're currently living in a cyberpunk dystopia and yeah, we probably are. It's difficult to tell from the inside I guess. But that often seems to come with a sense of nihilistic futility. That capitalism has progressed to the point where the best you can do is give up and try to survive.

Fuck that! That isn't cyberpunk! Cyberpunk is about subverting technology for personal and anti-corporate means! It means using technology in the margins of life! Using human ingenuity and creativity to tell the corporations to go fuck themselves!

We live in a cyberpunk dystopia? Then be a fucking cyberpunk! Jailbreak your phone! Hack your Playstation 5! Learn to code! Use open source software! Build a pwnagotchi! Pirate the media that the corporations won't provide you because they used it as a tax write off! Set up a plex server and share it! Take back your tech or the corpos fucking win!

Ice T had a line in the movie adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic:

SNATCH BACK YOUR BRAIN, ZOMBIE! SNATCH IT BACK AND HOLD IT!

[teecupangel]

I saw this amazing idea from another fandom that could be used to keep Desmond alive: his ghost possessing his own body. Not only that but whenever ghost! Desmond gets out of his body it becomes zombie! Desmond so there's two Desmond's sharing a body while trying to live(heh) in the modern time.

Oohhh, this sounds interesting.

Does this mean that Desmond’s body starts to decompose when he’s not in his body?

Or would that be too much and we’ll just let zombie!Desmond act as a usual zombie, looking for ‘food’.

Now, there should be a reason why Desmond would willingly (or unwillingly) stay out of his body. It could be that there is a limitation placed on the possession itself and Desmond could only stay for around half a day and the other half has to be him floating around as a ghost. He learns of this because the first time he returned to his body, he tried to stay there as long as he could and he’s just yanked out of the body after exactly 12 hours.

Of course, the first time this happens, he was still imprisoned in an Abstergo facility and… well… zombie!Desmond definitely had a lot of preys to eat then.

… does this mean that Desmond could accidentally start a zombie apocalypse.

Thankfully, the moment zombie!Desmond started attacking people, the entire facility went on lockdown and dropped heavy roll up covers for all entrances and exits, including windows.

This did mean that everyone is stuck inside with a growing zombie horde courtesy of zombie!Desmond.

And ghost!Desmond is just floating nearby, freaking out because he knows how this is played.

He does not want to be patient zero!

He tries to get back to zombie!Desmond but he’s pulled away each time, only able to take control for maybe 3 to 5 minutes.

Until…

12 hours passed and Desmond finally takes control.

As every single zombie turned to face him.

Because he no longer registers as one of them.

No.

He registered as ‘prey’.

And Desmond slips out of his body voluntarily this time, letting zombie!Desmond take control before the other zombies attack him.

And now…

He has to think of a way…

To kill every zombies here in approximately 12 hours… without the zombies attacking him and before Abstergo remotely opens the roll up covers to find out what has happened.

.

Berg and Sigma team enters the building from above later on.

They had lost contact with the facility 25 hours ago, the last transmission they received was an automatic message from the facility’s security system summarizing that the lockdown was due to an unknown highly volatile virus of unknown origins.

The security system cut off all connection to the outside world per protocol (a protocol that become the norm after an unknown hacker that has no connection to Erudito hacked a different facility and used the connection to send out different viruses to other facilities, many classified information were destroyed during the attack, including data about known Isus and Sages). Protocol states they wait 24 hours for any communications from the people in the facility or the security system before trying to breach the facility.

There was nothing.

And when they got there…

The security system had been destroyed together with all the recordings in the facility and its own black box.

And the entire place…

… was nothing more than a place of death.

No one survived.

There were signs that they had killed one another.

No.

They tried to eat each other.

Was this…

The ‘virus’ that the security system had pinged?

They could not be sure.

All they knew was…

The underground parking lot’s cover was not locked.

A person could lift it up and slip out before it fell back down.

So they had to make sure…

… to account for every single person.

Because if this was a real virus that can do such a thing…

They were looking for a potential carrier.

“Sir. Sofia Rikkin is in line 1.”

Berg nodded at the man to his right before he clicked a button on the portable radio connected to his earpiece, “This is Berg.”

“Is this right, Berg? You counted 80 bodies?”

That did not sound good. Sofia Rikkin was usually calm and a bit cold but she sounded like she was ready to tear Berg’s throat out if he said the wrong thing.

“We’re recounting the bodies but, yes. Our initial and second counting both-”

“There should be 81 bodies, Berg.”

Berg looked at the tablet in his other hand, “The list of personnel in this facility when it went on lockdown says eigh-”

“Because it’s not a personnel.”

He really wished she’d stop cutting him off.

But it was more important to hear what she was saying right now.

“Berg. The 81st body is the 2nd attempt to create an Isu body. A lot of data were destroyed during the attack years back so we used Sample 17 to plug the missing links.”

“Are you saying the possibly missing 81st body is Desmond Miles?”

“… possibly. Find that body, Berg. There haven’t been any tests done to that body yet so we don’t know what it can do. For all we know…”

“… it could be the original carrier of this unknown virus.”