patient zero, part i: anarchy (tf141!reader x simon riley, zombie apocalypse au)
author's note: this idea has been brewing in my head for way too long and my best friend has heard way too much about it. i have so much to do and instead my ass chose to do this. cw: regular zombie shit
the world had gone to shit.
the world had gone to complete and utter shit.
you knew the how, what, where, when, and who. what? the goddamn zombie apocalypse was upon you. where? everywhere. they were everywhere. who? the zombies. the zombies that used to be people. when? overnight. how? fucking mushroom virus or something. you’d heard a bit about it on the news a few weeks ago, but figured it was just another fear tactic. spoiler alert: it was not.
but if someone asked you why?, you’d probably say this was the ultimate punishment from god. and you didn’t even believe in god.
you’d been at your friend’s house, spending the night with her and catching up on what you two had missed in the past few months while you’d been out on some ops. you two had gone to sleep quite late, but her being the wellness junkie that she was, still went out for her run at 07:00 sharp that morning.
skipping it would’ve saved her life.
encountering the zombies was terrifying.
she wasn’t back when you woke up a little after 8, but you didn’t think too much of it. maybe she’d just gone to get you guys breakfast or something and the place was taking a bit long. it was a saturday morning, after all. you checked your phone and noticed that there wasn’t any wifi. nor was there any signal.
that’s when you heard the screams.
you jumped up out of bed and rushed to the window, only to find a startling scene in front of you.
a car crashed into a mailbox and woman running around screaming while two men chase her. to your dismay, another car speeds out of the driveway and subsequently, the cul de sac, almost hitting the woman. your brows furrow and your jaw drops, why the fuck didn’t they stop to help her? what insane shit was happening now? you grab your grekhova from your backpack, flipping the safety off and hurrying downstairs.
when you slam the front door open, you notice the two men bent down over the woman, who’s now lying on the ground, motionless.
“what the fuck?” you mutter to yourself, cautiously starting to walk over to them. “hey! what the hell do you think you two are doing?” you call out, cocking your gun at your side. the two flip their heads in an almost… inhuman way, and then your heart drops.
they start sprinting at you.
you instinctively raise your gun and start to walk backwards, eventually abandoning your sight of them and running back into the house, slamming the door shut behind you and locking it. it’s only a few seconds before they start banging on the door, making you yelp.
“what the fuck. what the fuck?” should you call 911? no, you had no cell service. you had to get rid of these two, you had to save that woman.
the men rudely interrupt your thinking, glass shattering next to you as an arm sticks through the sidelight. you scream, raising your gun again and facing the doorway. it’s rather thin and not a continuous pane of glass, so they’re not going to be able to get in — you realize you can use it as an observation technique, getting only slightly closer. the one who had broken the glass and was trying to claw at you looked a lot like the father of that sweet little girl you saw at the park sometimes when you would go out on a run with your friend. he had blood all over him, and that’s when you saw it.
the bite in his neck.
there was no fucking way. it was all a myth, it was all just movies.
but the bite was as clear as day, and suddenly, it all made sense. the chasing other humans, the car that sped out of the driveway and didn’t stop to help, the inhuman ways of moving, the guttural sounds coming from outside the front door.
maybe this was a prank. maybe this was an elaborate prank by the team to see just how far you would go if you thought there was a zombie apocalypse. were you a doomsday prepper? no. did you frequently think about what to do if one of these situations ever broke out? yes. you couldn’t help it. you had wondered your whole life whether it was your insanely strong intuition or just anxiet.
now you had your answer.
you get as close as you possibly can without him being able to successfully take a swipe at you, and you note everything.
the soulless eyes. the nature and location of the bite. the greying skin. the blood around the mouth — presumably from biting that woman. the horrid smell of… decay. yeah.
the fucking zombie apocalypse was upon you.
you raise your grekhova, take aim, and—
bang. bang.
you’d waited for your friend. after you’d checked on that woman (bite in her neck, that was all you needed to know), you’d spent a whole 24 hours doing preliminary apocalypse work — even saying that still made you wonder if you were insane. stocking up on water, nonperishables, batteries and flashlights. you grabbed a first aid kit and stuffed as much gauze and hydrogen peroxide as you could in it. as for weapons, you only had your grekhova (two mags) and a crowbar. you didn’t have a radio and it seemed like the entire goddamn electrical grid was down, so you had no hard evidence of what was happening anywhere besides this neighborhood.
but she hadn’t come. and she liked to take her runs into the city, so you had to assume the worst. had she been alive, she would’ve come back to her house straight away.
it was just you now.
you had shed a few tears but tried to restrain yourself from it, knowing dehydration would be fatal once you ran out of water. how you hadn’t had a full fledged mental breakdown you didn’t know; maybe it was the adrenaline.
you needed to get out of here. you needed to go back to your place, get the supplies you were missing. your bulletproof vest, your radio, your clothes, your suture kit, more mags.
so you tore apart the archival magazines she had, the really glossy ones that are impossible to tear, to create a layer of armor for your sleeves and legs over the hoodie and jeans you were wearing. you looked fucking stupid — you’d laughed at yourself in the mirror — but it worked. did it look much less badass than leather? yes. was it easier to move in? also yes.
you leave a note for your friend —
i don’t know if you’re alive. i hope you are. if you see this note, i’ve left supplies for you in that secret spot you use to hide the snacks from your niece and nephews.
—fawn
it was better to just use callsigns now. the world had fallen into anarchy — the last thing you needed was someone with a vendetta hunting you or your team down.
you take one of the picture frames off her wall, removing the polaroid of you two and slipping it in your pocket. and with that, you leave.
it was eerily silent. you hadn’t noticed any birds flying around overhead, and the usual hustle and bustle of a regular town was just… gone. any human you had encountered had been in a car and had sped past you, keeping to themselves. you’d decided to walk in order to maintain a low profile — typical army soldier type shit, you think.
you walk past a blue honda civic, and a very important memory suddenly flashes before you.
“guys, what if—”
“for the queen’s sake, not another one of these, please—”
“—what if there was a zombie apocalypse?” kyle and soap both groan, with soap repeatedly hitting his head against the dashboard. it had been a bad idea to put the three of you on stakeout duty, but here you all were, in a goddamned honda civic, mind you. it had been 36 hours. you were slowly starting to lose your mind.
“enough. enough. please, enough,” kyle begs you, sounding like he could start crying.
“no, ‘m serious,” you tell them, lying down over the three seats in the back. even looking at the ceiling was boring now; you had memorized every single stain in the fabric.
“bon, we’re serious too. ya’ need ta’ shut up. yer aff yer head.”
“scots don’t have rights in this car. now listen to me. we need a gameplan.”
“wha— where— how did ya’ even—” soap is cut off by the ringing of an incoming call request on your laptop, which you scramble to pick up. price and ghost are on the other side.
“hi!” you giggle, still laughing from the trauma you had been putting gaz and soap through.
“it’s going well, i take it?” price asks.
“absolutely not, price. the complete fucking opposite, we haven’t seen a glimpse of this guy, and fawn’s driving us fucking insane.” you can only grin at kyle’s complaining, well aware that you looked a little crazy to simon and price.
“called it,” simon adds from the other side of the screen, and you simply throw up a middle finger.
“sergeant.” you immediately put your it down, pouting slightly at price’s scolding tone.
“she kept givin’ us ‘what if’s’, talkin’ ‘bout the feckin’ zombie apocalypse. think you should pull her out, captain. ‘s too much for her.”
“hey!” you complain, immediately sitting upright. “i’m keeping morale high! and besides,” you turn your attention back to the captain and the lieutenant, “it’s a fair question.”
“what is, if the zombie apocalypse happens? knew we shouldna’ let you watch the last of us.”
“no ghost, listen. imagine it does happen.”
“fawn—”
“just humor me.” simon sighs, and you know you’ve got him. “what would the gameplan be?” simon thinks for a while and when price doesn’t shut it down, you know he’s waiting for an answer from his lieutenant as well.
“ideally we’d all be together.”
“and if we weren’t?”
“we would need a rendezvous point.”
“base?” price asks, slightly swiveling in his chair to get a better look at simon.
“no,” simon refuses adamantly.
“can’t trust the military,” you mutter quietly, knowing your own government well enough as an army soldier. “then whose place?”
“soap’s,” kyle says, making you cock an eyebrow. “his apartment smells so bad the zombies won’t even go near it.” you burst out in laughter and even price can’t hold back a grin on the other side of the screen while soap’s jaw drops.
“it dinnae! feck you!” you motion for johnny to keep his voice down. “not ma’ place. not because of what gaz said, but because it’s maist far.”
“my place, then.” you’d held team dinners a few times when a change of scenery had been needed, just out of convenience because you were a maximum 10 minute drive away from base.
“then it’s just survival. a cabin in the woods, gathering food, surviving the winters, all that.”
you stand there for a second, staring at the blue paint. you had no other leads. you needed your team. you’d be as good as dead without them, not because of their survival training, you had that too — but because you feared you would go insane alone. your team, your team of fucking muppets, was all you had left.
the blue paint stared back at you, and for a second, just a second, it almost seemed less insane than the idea of doing this without them.
part ii
⁀➷ more
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