Yaelinnabeth Zombie Stage AU - Part 4
FINALLL PART OF THE ZOMST AU (for now)!!! Ik I said to heed the warnings last time but I'm so serious this is genuinely disgusting gore. Like. I grossed myself out a little writing this. Emphasis on the self-harm and cannibalism warnings. To skip the really disturbing scene, stop at the line:
"He drew a bottle of stolen whiskey from his bag and splashed it over a spot on his arm, then took his lighter from his pocket and heated the blade of the knife with it."
The worst of the scene ends at this line where you can resume:
"'There.' Yael panted, his heart racing, arm shaking. 'There, don’t worry, ‘Beth. I have a first aid kit. This will be fixed like nothing even happened.'"
TWs: Gender dysphoria, self misgendering (Inna is a transgender man who is repressed and presents as a woman), smoking, mental illness, religious trauma, self-harm, knives, blood & injury, pandemics of the zombie variety, police brutality, guns, axes, murder, gore, death, vomit, kidnapping (? sort of), corpses, dubious consent via the morality of dating a zombie, medical procedures, cannibalism, suicidal thoughts
Part 4 begins below the cut.
Yael stitched up Macbeth’s split skin with stolen medical supplies once they escaped the city.
Unfortunately, he had to keep a gag in Macbeth’s mouth at all times to prevent them from mistakenly biting and infecting Yael, but he switched it out regularly to keep it clean and only tore strips from his softest shirts to use. He clothed Macbeth after Macbeth was so rudely stripped in the incinerator. Because his skin was so cold now and his body showed rot, Yael kept him covered up in warm turtlenecks and loose sweatpants that didn’t chafe at his peeling flesh.
It helped disguise Macbeth from a distance, but anyone could tell in reasonable proximity to him that he was infected. His gait staggered. His skin was gray. Black rot crept up from his throat to his chin and jaw. Macbeth didn’t speak anymore but for groans and grunts, and his eyes had a certain vacancy that was hard to mistake.
They still had to lie low. They still had to run far, far away from that facility where Yael found Macbeth so no one could find them and take Macbeth away from him again.
Obviously, it hadn’t been as simple as Yael taking Macbeth back to his car and driving away. His car was undoubtedly still surrounded by dozens of people parked around him and soldiers patrolling the city limits. Escaping was no easier than getting in—it was harder, even, without the girls who were God knows where if they were still even alive—but Yael found the same gap in security that Naz and her friends had pinpointed to sneak in and used it to slip back out.
If one or two people had to get hurt for it…
It didn’t matter. He and Macbeth would be safe. They would be free.
Yael took them north, because that’s what they were supposed to do—explore the eastern seaboard, then head west. So, he decided, they would. The path was still intact. There were just—just setbacks, but Yael would clear the path for them every time. He would walk ahead of Macbeth whether his darling was blind or deafened or half-dead and move the branches in his path so he didn’t trip and scrape his hands and knees.
It was Yael’s duty, now, and he supposed it had been since he met Macbeth for the very first time. He just didn’t know it.
Macbeth had been quiet about what kinds of destinations he would like to see, but Yael remembered he let slip once that he would like to see mountains. That was all. Just mountains.
So he would see mountains, Yael decided. He would show Macbeth beautiful mountains.
Somewhere along the Appalachian Trail, after who knows how many days of hiking along backwoods routes and avoiding roads and towns, they came upon this old, abandoned township. A ghost town or something. Yael guessed it had to have been one of those places that had a population less than a hundred people. It was strange. It gave Yael a bit of a chill.
It was the perfect place to headquarter with Macbeth between their first round of explorations.
There was a spacious church nestled in the hills of the ghost town. The dirt path leading to the heavy wooden front doors was so weather worn that it had practically vanished.
Macbeth seemed to like it well enough, at least. He was calmer in the quiet of the old church with its dusty air and creaking beams, more than he was in the woods surrounded by animals.
The woods had worked well for a while. Macbeth would even eat the squirrel and rabbit meat Yael hunted for him.
For a while.
But Macbeth grew more and more displeased with his meals. He began to resent even the rawest, bloodiest catch, lashing out at Yael with disgruntled groans and snarls. He would do that thing again that he did when Yael first found him again at the incinerator, finding a place on Yael’s bared flesh to mouth at, gnawing frantically at his gag in an attempt to break through and reach the skin beneath it.
Their last night on the trail without shelter was when Yael finally realized it. He tried to feed Macbeth some leftover meat, but Macbeth shrieked and tore the meat violently between his fingers, then shoved Yael to the ground, trying to access the juncture between his neck and shoulder.
All Yael could do was murmur, “I’m sorry, I understand,” and hug Macbeth with a sinking feeling in his stomach that must have mimicked Macbeth’s increasingly insatiable hunger.
Macbeth needed human meat like all other infected humans.
Yael couldn’t keep his hunger at bay forever…
…but he tried what he could until they found a solution.
So a routine began, starting their first night in the church.
“Don’t worry, ‘Beth.” Yael spoke tenderly to Macbeth as he knelt before him where he’d secured Macbeth for the night with restraints so he laid on their pile of blankets and pillows. Macbeth didn’t perk up from where he laid, looking awfully sickly and lethargic, until Yael pricked his own finger with the tip of Macbeth’s pocket knife. Macbeth raised his head at the smell, pupils dilated, and sat up, straining against his restraints. They were there for his safety so he didn’t wander off and get himself lost where Yael couldn’t protect him. The sight still broke Yael a little more every time.
He blocked it out.
It’s just Macbeth.
Macbeth understands.
Macbeth wants to be kept safe.
“Hi,” Yael said with a smile. “Snack time. I don’t have much yet, but I’m going to give you something to hold off the worst of your hunger until I do.” He raised a can of cold tomato soup that he’d found in the town and shook it around playfully. “This is mine. Don’t worry. I won’t force you to drink such paltry offerings,” he teased.
In his head, Macbeth rolled his eyes and shot back, How kind of you.
Yael’s heart fluttered happily.
It was what he always imagined, their little trip together.
Freedom.
Together. Yes.
While a little stream of blood ran down Yael’s pinky finger where he pricked himself, Macbeth watched, tracking the path like a starved animal.
Yael thought he’d better get to work, so he said, “Just a moment. That’s not all you’re getting, I promise.”
He drew a bottle of stolen whiskey from his bag and splashed it over a spot on his arm, then took his lighter from his pocket and heated the blade of the knife with it.
Then, without a doubt lingering in his mind, he began cutting into the fatty part of his upper arm.
It wasn’t shallow. It took effort to drag the blade through tissue. Yael noted, with clenched teeth and teary eyes, that this was a lot harder than a quick slash across the hand.
But he would do it for Macbeth.
“I w-would have done part of my thigh instead,” he gritted out, beaming at Macbeth as tears streamed down his face and blood gushed from his arm, “but in case this gets infected, it can’t be my leg. I at least need my legs. You get it?”
Macbeth stared at the deep wound. That foam was already beginning to trickle from his lips in a steady drip.
Good. He had an appetite for it. He hadn’t had one for all the rodents and birds as of late.
“There,” Yael choked out when a roughly jagged square-shaped strip of his skin came loose, and he peeled it away. He didn’t look at it. He didn’t look at the wound it left, either. Right now he was running on pure adrenaline, and it kept him from vomiting all over the floor and their makeshift bed from the agony. Instead, he was just happy that he could provide something.
“Say ahh,” Yael said, hooking a thumb under the gag to lift it for just a second—
—enough time to slip the bloody, wet flesh into Macbeth’s mouth and then yank his hand away so he wasn’t bitten.
Macbeth chewed once, then made a weak choking sound as if overcome and devoured Yael’s skin ravenously. Within seconds, he was swallowing, and Yael quickly placed one hand on his jaw to hold his mouth open as he wrangled the gag back into place.
“There.” Yael panted, his heart racing, arm shaking. “There, don’t worry, ‘Beth. I have a first aid kit. This will be fixed like nothing even happened.”
While Macbeth slouched in relief, his hunger sated for now, Yael went about tending to the deep, raw wound where a sizable chunk of his flesh was missing. He poured just a little bit of water from his canteen over the bleeding mess, enough to wash it off a little, and held gauze over the wound to slow the bleeding. After moments of this left in companionable silence, Yael placed fresh gauze over the wound and wrapped it.
“All better,” he chirped.
Of course, the pain didn’t go away.
He ignored it.
“I almost forgot…” Yael reached excitedly for his bag and pulled his Polaroid camera out. “I got some pictures of the range while we were hiking. There were a few pretty birds, but I couldn’t waste our film on anything minor… but look. Look how beautiful. They came out really well.” He pressed a photo into Macbeth’s limp hand. “Isn’t it beautiful up here? It’s exactly what you wanted, Macbeth.”
He crawled closer to his companion and gently pulled him down to lie next to him in the blankets. Yael held up the photos, watching with a dreamy sigh as they caught the moonlight spilling in through the old, dirty stained glass of Saint Mary in the church wall.
It was beautiful.
It was...
“Maybe it’s not what we expected,” he whispered to Macbeth like they were sharing secrets right in the domain of Christ, like a confessional— “but I think it’s beautiful, regardless. You deserve to see beautiful things.”
He rolled over to stare at Macbeth’s golden eyes, which were hazy and stared right past the photos to the stained glass.
Yael smiled.
He could almost hear Macbeth saying, Yeah. It really is beautiful.
So it ended like this:
There were stories of a boy in the mountains who cut people down with an ax and stripped the supple flesh from their bones.
The first one found was a married couple of ranchers whose animals were left untouched.
The second was a hiker who simply disappeared in the area—not even his bones were ever found.
The third was a single man camping in the wilderness to escape the swaths of infected flooding the cities and towns.
And more missing.
Again and again.
Months went by, and bodies dropped.
For a while, the cases were ignored, because there were just too many people dying across the whole nation, too many people becoming infected, to focus on just a few bodies in the mountains.
And when state troopers finally tracked reports of suspicious individuals spotted in that shady ghost town a few miles off the trail, when they found traces of DNA left in the old church, it was already vacated.
When it ended, the boy was found in an abandoned apartment complex in the Carolinas in a city where the citizens had been evacuated due to infected numbers but for those who refused to give up their homes.
There, the soldiers raided the place.
They found the boy, shockingly young with the ends of his hair purple and his roots growing in brown. His arms were covered in bandages. Later, they found bandages over his stomach, too. There were pieces cut out of him, scarred over with thick, ropy tissue.
And they found the boy at night, startled awake in a pile of blankets with one of the infected hovering over him, arms bracketing his head, and teeth bared when he saw the troopers.
Immediately, the zombie, grotesque and dangerous as he was, was wrestled to the ground, gagged and chained up. There was an industry for things like him after all these months. There was a way for profit to be gained from wrangling them up. Besides, the job was to find the killer, not a zombie.
As for the boy, it didn’t matter if he was damaged goods.
They beat him unconscious before he was shipped back to his home state where they would sentence him.
Only after he was unconscious did they find the freezer with the body parts.
Food for a zombie.
The world swayed before Inna in a sickening blur of colors and nausea.
Yael didn’t hold back. He stated every detail plainly. He confessed to his crimes, his sins, as if they were nothing.
I just looked at the cattle and the sheep, Yael had told him, his expression blank. And I thought, you know, it wasn’t so different, butchering a human for meat. That’s what they would have done to the animals. Why should they not have had to ever fear the same fate?
Macbeth, infected. Taken away by soldiers.
Macbeth, eating… eating…
“You’re sick,” Inna choked out. Why would Yael tell her this? How could he? That her childhood friend was dead was all she needed to know. She didn’t need to know the rest, didn’t need to know that Yael had fed her friend human flesh and killed people for that flesh. This wasn’t Inna’s place. She never should have agreed to talk to the patient even if Eve wanted her to. Or, the moment she saw it was Yael, she should have left.
“You’re disgusting,” she whispered. Inna turned away from him, shaking her head so harshly that her hair tie began to free itself from its tangles. “That’s—that’s disgusting! You deserve prison, you deserve this. I’m not giving you your checkup. Find someone else for this. Find someone who pities you. You’re sick.”
Yael’s voice was quiet, and it had taken on a strange quality over the course of his story—not quite hoarse, but hollow, his tongue tripping over his syllables. “Don’t be mad, Innamorati, just because I did what you didn’t. I stayed with Macbeth.” A flash of anger and white hot guilt flashed through Inna’s core. “I did what I had to do to save him. And then I did what I could to keep him alive.”
“But he’s not!” Inna snapped. She rounded on Yael, jabbing her finger at him furiously. “If it’s how you say it is, then Macbeth is dead, Yael! The infected aren’t just sick. They’re gone. They’re walking corpses. The media’s labeled them zombies for a reason, Yael, they’re fucking dead!”
Yael stared at her. He looked so different from high school. His bare arms were scarred to all hell. His pallor was pale and strange like he was coming down with the flu; he probably was, after so long on the run. His neck and face were horribly bruised, and hardly a hint of his trademark purple dye remained in his hair.
When he spoke, he almost sounded sympathetic. “You’re crying.”
“No, I’m—“ She turned away hastily, touching her face to find it soaked.
Macbeth, something weak and miserable in her brain wailed. If I only hadn’t left him. If I’d just dealt with my own shit and focused on him. If I hadn’t been—so scared—of seeing myself in my friend who managed to find himself while I—just…
No.
Now was not the time.
She shut the voice down and glared at Yael, feeling with every cell in her body that she could kill him and not feel an ounce of remorse.
“You did this to him,” she accused, her jaw trembling. “You should have to live with the consequences.”
“I loved him,” Yael shot back. Then, again, his voice slurring, “Love ‘im.”
Inna bristled—
—then went still, something in the back of her mind ringing out like a bell, a warning, a reminder.
Her mother’s words.
The same words that could be found on one of those stupid informational flyers.
ONCE BITTEN TURN YOURSELF IN FOR QUARANTING + EXPERIMENTAL CURING IMMEDIATELY BEFORE SYMPTOMS SET IN!!!
And in smaller print:
Symptoms include lethargy, excessive sweating, lack of control over muscles, numbness at or around infection site, delusions, hallucinations, and excessive saliva. ONCE SYMPTOMS SET IN, IT IS TOO LATE!!! TURN YOURSELF IN IMMEDIATELY!!!
“Sir.”
Inna’s arm dropped where she’d been gesturing frantically. Yael lifted his head a little, swallowing.
Inna stared at the bob of his throat. Excessive saliva. And she had a feeling. She just had this feeling. It was risky, but if she could identify it herself after the special unit missed it, her mother would be impressed. She wouldn’t be able to control Inna so much, knowing how capable she was. “Yael. I need you to open your mouth. I’m going to shine a light in there. I need to see something.”
She quickly grabbed a small flashlight from the table, used for examining the insides of patients’ mouths and ears. When she turned back around, Yael still just stared at her.
Inna clicked the light on and shined it at him, hissing, “Open. Now.”
Yael opened.
And fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. She knew it. She fucking knew it. Of course they didn’t check the inside of his mouth for a bite. Why would they? There had been no recorded patients to have a bite there.
But there it was.
Teeth marks ringing around Yael’s tongue.
The marks were festering. They were blackening around the edges. Yael must not have noticed because the rot seemed to numb the bite site—a biological imperative for the zombies to spread rapidly.
Either that or Yael was lying to her.
He’d been nothing but painfully and horrifically truthful while telling Inna what happened to Macbeth, but Inna already knew how far Yael was willing to go to keep Macbeth safe. Maybe he was still deluded into believing he could get out of this and find him.
And like nothing crazy was happening, nothing out of the ordinary at all, Yael jerked forward and then almost tiredly sunk his teeth into Inna’s fingers.
Inna shrieked, and Yael unclamped his teeth like even he was surprised.
“What the fuck,” Inna hissed. She looked at her fingers. The bite was almost—almost gentle. She couldn’t see any blood. It wouldn’t take, would it? It couldn’t take. No.
Yael stuck his tongue out and ran his fingertips over it carefully, locating the site of the bite marks and the flesh necrotizing around it. For a moment, shock flashed over his face.
Then he huffed out something like an awed laugh.
“He bit me,” he breathed. “I must have forgotten what happened when they hit my head…”
“You bit me,” Inna shot back, her voice shaking, near hysterics. “Why the fuck—? You bit me. You bit me.”
“I’m sorry.” Yael almost did sound sorry. Almost. “I wasn’t thinking. But… Macbeth could still be alive, and this—this is the only way I can have any chance of getting out of here. I’m sorry.”
No. No. Why did I fucking risk that, what was I thinking, why, why—
“I’ll report you,” Inna stammered. “They’ll kill you.”
“And you,” Yael shot back. “You know what they do to the infected. I told you the truth. They burn them. That’s what they’ll do to me, to Macbeth, and to you. Your mother being a nurse won’t save you. The only way out is to free us both and run for it or I’ll tell them you’re bitten too. Put fresh gloves on to hide the bite. Undo my cuffs. Let me go.”
Inna stared, horrified.
They were naked and had clearly been opened up. Their insides were red and glistening even in the dim light. Chunks of them were missing. Yael could see the rot forming in Macbeth’s body.
She shuddered and steadied herself against the counter.
She hated him.
She hated him.
She wanted to fucking kill him. It would be easy. She could just kill him and tell them it was self defense because he was infected, and they would probably believe her.
That was the horrible thing. Inna could probably do it if she was brave enough. She could get away with it.
But she didn’t.
She gripped her hair by the roots, her vision blurring. And she had only just been bitten. No one would show symptoms this early. No, it was all panic and horror at her own fuckup, not just this one but fuckup after fuckup after fuckup leading her to this moment.
Inna drew in a shaky breath. She grabbed a pair of scissors from the desk.
For a moment, Yael’s increasingly hazy eyes focused on Inna’s hand, going still.
He knows I could.
He knows I could.
He knows I could.
She approached him and stared him down, a part of Inna wishing for him to feel the fear that she could murder him in the middle of the exam room if she wanted to.
Instead, Yael relaxed.
He stared back with an unyielding yet softened look.
He knows I won’t.
She gritted her teeth, released a shaky breath, and sliced through the thick cuffs keeping Yael tethered to the table.
Nobody would ever know it, not Yael, not Innamorati, but that day when Macbeth left for the city, he was desperately seeking his way out.
It wasn’t because he didn’t want to be with Yael. It wasn’t because he didn’t want that future together that Yael spoke of so fondly.
It was, in fact, that he wanted it very badly.
Macbeth wanted Yael, wanted them to be together forever, wanted Yael to never leave him or sideline him for another. Yael’s love was his to hold onto, and the fact that he couldn’t control Yael’s wanderlust terrified him. Macbeth always wondered how a person like Yael, full of passion and curiosity, could have fallen for someone like them. Someone who pushed people away. Someone who couldn’t ever express their feelings like they wanted to. Someone who had no remaining ambition for life, who was already exhausted of the whole affair by age sixteen, who would just suck the life out of someone like Yael.
But Yael did.
That terrified Macbeth more than if he hadn’t, because when he finally had someone like Yael, he found it harder with each passing day to stomach the idea of letting go.
The idea hurt so much, in fact, that Macbeth would rather die than have to experience such a thing, to watch Yael fall for humanity at large during their travels and realize he was made for more than Macbeth.
He would rather Yael died too than to go on to love another.
So Macbeth roamed the city and contemplated how he could take himself and Yael before their road trip was to begin.
How he could convince Yael to go with him willingly. He didn’t want to take Yael by force. Not at all. He didn’t know if he could even do it.
But… if it was just… a pact, like the one Yael made for him all those months ago…
Macbeth contemplated, and considered, and anguished, and thought he must be the worst person in the world.
He was going to give up. To just buy a stupid new suitcase and some groceries to have something to show for his hours-long excursion when he returned home. Macbeth wasn’t lying when he said he truly and genuinely was going to leave it, to let it lie, because in his heart, he couldn’t do it.
But that was when the sirens started.
When his phone blared an alert.
And he didn’t have to do this either when he realized what was happening. There wasn’t a single one of these infected persons in sight who were apparently spreading in great swarms. He could go inside. Seek shelter as recommended. He could text Yael and say he was being held up in the city, but that he was safe, and he would return as soon as possible.
Macbeth didn’t do any of those things.
Macbeth had spent his whole life wishing for the kind of love and companionship that he found with Yael.
He finally had it.
And he wouldn’t lose it.
If this was the way that presented itself… if he could just become someone, something that Yael couldn’t abandon, couldn’t dream of leaving for so much as a second out of the guilt in his heart…
Macbeth didn’t shelter.
He read the report of the blocks of the city that were under attack by this surge of horrifically sick, decayed humans who had become something else entirely.
And Macbeth just started walking towards them.
ZOMBIE STAGE
Round 1 - Yael vs. Macbeth
Round 2 - Innamorati vs. Toki
Round 3 - Winners Compete!
Where the Show Never Ends!
~
Thank you for anyone who read all the way through this silly goofy AU, I appreciate it immensely <33 Tagging @lulling-riot @awaggaa @nottoonedin @fl0wers4herfriends @ivanttakethis @4listr
