A/N: This is an AU. There are no Evos. Only zombies, which sort of take their place, except they're more widespread. And – I'd like to get this out there – this is not Calliday. It's Holix. Despite that it seems like Calliday in this prologue; it is definitely Holix.

Summary: 'What if your worst nightmare…couldn't compare to your reality? Unfortunately for him, Rex Salazar is living through this exact scenario every day of his life.'
Rex lost his parents at the tender age of eight, leaving him to be raised by his only living relative: His older brother, Caesar. Now, nine years later, he has that brother to the recent zombie plague. Never being one to just give up, Rex hits the road with the goal of finding a cure to the plague. In his travels, he meets another boy who's still human: Noah. They discover they have the same goal and thusly team up in hopes of achieving it. Eventually, they come across a secret agent who goes only by the name of 'Six', a scientist who seems to know a little more about the zombies than she's letting on, an escapee from an insane asylum, and an scorned teenage girl with kick ass moves and a thirst for zombie blood. These unlikely heroes band together, creating the first ever zombie war and working towards a cure for them at the same time, but finding so much more.

Pairings: Noex, Holix, Circeach

Warnings: Gore, violence, strong cursing, explicit adult themes…and zombie killing? (Due to the sex and future violence, the rating will later go to an M.)

Disclaimer: Because while I find it hard to believe somebody would sue a person for posting a story using someone else's characters on a website specifically designed to let people do that exact thing… It's always better to be safe rather than sorry. :)

"Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills. The people it kills get up and kill."
-Doctor on newscast, Dawn of the Dead

The Zombie Wars

Prologue: Dr. Holiday

Eight Months Ago…

There were a few things that Dr. Holiday really hated. Know-it-alls were among them, as were people who used senseless violence to solve all their problems. At the top of her list right then, though, were alarm clocks.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

She swung out blindly, nailing hers square on its 'Snooze' button.

Beep! Beep!

Or so she thought.

Holiday groaned inwardly and opened one eye a fraction of an inch, fumbling in the dark to see why it was still going. "Darn thing won't turn off…" she grumbled lethargically when she heard her fiancé groan and shift beside her.

"Hon," he tapped her on the shoulder, "It's your pager." Holiday rolled over to face him, finding said device being waved sloppily in the general direction of her face. She took it from Callan's hand and watched as he curled up on his side again and almost immediately fell back to sleep. Oh how she wished she could join him… But she knew she couldn't. Because this was another thing that was on her list of things she really hated. Being woken in the middle of the night by her pager going off. If somebody was paging her this late at night it only ever meant one thing: Something was horribly wrong at the plant. To confirm this, Holiday glanced down at the pager, squinting because her contacts weren't in yet, and read off 'C:751' before blinking slowly and letting that information sink into her still sleep-groggy mind.

"Code 751," she murmured to herself, already reaching for the contact case next to her more-than-slightly abused alarm clock. "I don't even know what that is… Damn Knight and his codes." She popped her first contact in, hurrying to get the second one in just in case it was something serious. And, really, it dang well better be. If it was just something like the security system was malfunction again she was going to hurt somebody.

As soon as she could properly see, Holiday checked to see who it was that had paged her and promptly frowned at the name. It was her coworker, Dr. Fell, and if she were to be perfectly honest he was far from her favorite person in the world. This was not only despite the fact that – if his attempts at flirting with her were any indication – he was very fond of her, but partially because of it. Regardless of whether or not she liked or disliked the man, Holiday did have him on speed dial for cases such as these and wasted no time grabbing her phone off the nightstand and calling him up. He answered on the first ring.

"Dr. Holiday!"

Said woman tensed at the obvious panic in his voice. In all the years she'd been working with him, Fell had never been anything but overly confident and calm. "Dr. Fell," she acknowledged tersely, "I'll have you know I've never once bothered reading White's code book and I therefore have no idea what a 'Code 751' is."

"Meltdown!" Fell yelled breathily into the phone. A constant whir of air in the background told Holiday he was running as he spoke.

"Meltdown?" she checked, the meaning that word brought with it not really sinking in yet.

"Yes; it's the reactor! We were running a systems test when there was a sudden power output surge," he explained hurriedly as Holiday tried to wake Callan by shaking him rather harshly. He grunted out an irritated "Hngg" by way of response and swatted her hand away. "We tried an emergency shutdown, but a worse spike occurred as a result. That led to a reactor vessel rupture, which caused a series of explosions. Now the graphite moderator is exposed to air—"

"Has it ignited yet?" Holiday interrupted, getting straight to the important part. She finally gave up shaking her fiancé and simply kicked him off the bed.

"Hey!" Callan cried as he hit the floor with a hollow thud. Holiday opted to ignore him in favor of listening for Fell's response, praying to whatever deity would grant her wishes that the answer would be no.

"It's about to." Holiday literally felt her blood run cold. "Holiday, get out! Get out now!"

"Right; of course. Thank you." She hung up the phone and clutched it tightly in her hand. This was bad; this was very bad.

Holiday took a deep breath before climbing hurriedly out of her bed and all but dashing over to her closet, grabbing a trench coat to throw on over her decidedly skimpy pajamas and slipping on a pair of boots once there.

"Rebecca… What's going on?" she heard Callan ask from behind her as she snatched her now empty contact case off the nightstand and slipped it into her purse. She opened her mouth to answer, but before she had the chance a blaring siren filled the air. Its piercing wail caused them both to cringe and automatically cover their ears.

"Grab a coat, put on some shoes and let's go," she told him, shouting over the warning sirens and already heading for their bedroom door. "The reactor's melting down and we need to be long gone by the time the radiation hits the air." Holiday hurried down the stairs, ignoring the confused "Say what?" that floated down after her and flipping through her contacts for her sister's number as she went. Beverly lived only a few miles out of town and the radiation would have no problem reaching her and her boyfriend, Tucker.

—

When Callan finally came down the stairs about two minutes later, having taken the time to slip into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, he found Holiday pacing back and forth in front of the door, clutching her purse and car keys in one hand and holding the phone to her ear with the other. She was saying something about 'get as far away as possible' and 'why does she never have her freaking phone' before abruptly hanging up and throwing the cell into her purse. "Why is the reactor melting down?" Callan asked calmly, but still loudly, as he walked up to her. She grabbed his arm and dragged him out to the car, telling him to get in and she'd explain later as she jumped behind the wheel and rammed the key in the ignition. Callan's door was barely shut when Holiday tore out of their driveway.

"We have to warn my sister," she told him briskly.

"You can't call her?" Callan asked, gazing out the window as the landscape flew past and thinking that this was unnecessary since there was no way Beverly wouldn't hear the sirens going off.

"I tried," Holiday bit out, "I got Tucker. He told me she's at work. Work! At this hour! I mean, she works as a make-up artist in a morgue; it's not like she couldn't do that in the morning."

Callan stayed quiet, knowing it was in his best interest to do so, as Holiday continued ranting. He'd once said fondly that when his 'girl's in rant mode, it'd take a nuclear explosion to shut her up'. This was, of course, a figure of speech. However, when the reactor blew up far behind them after a few minutes of driving, Holiday stopped dead in the middle of a word and didn't utter another sound until they reached the morgue her sister worked at. As she jumped out of the car, Callan gazed into the rearview mirror at the plume of smoke rising into the air a few miles back, wondering how fast the radioactive death-cloud would travel and distractedly noting that he was right. He could still very well hear the sirens…

It wasn't five minutes later that Holiday returned to the car. Without Beverly. "Where—" Callan started to ask, but was cut off as Holiday slammed her fists against the steering wheel.

"Damn it!" she cursed angrily. "She wasn't in there!"

"If she's not there and she's not at her home, maybe she's visiting your parents. Or somewhere else safe," he cast another nervous glass in the rearview mirror, "Either way, Rebecca, we need to go." Holiday looked up at him, eyes hard.

"I know," she whispered, restarting the car and speeding away.

The couple drove in silence for a long time, till a ridiculous thought struck Callan completely out of the blue and he let out a short laugh. Holiday glanced at him from the corners of her eyes as she drove. "What?" she asked shortly.

"Nothing, just…" Callan shook his head, smiling. "I was thinking. You know the movie Night of the Living Dead?"

"…Yes?" The answer sounded like a question not because Holiday was questioning if she was right in remembering the movie, but if Callan hadn't gone randomly insane.

"Well, I was just thinking, what if the radiation brings the corpses in the morgue back to life as zombies like in that movie?"

Holiday whipped her head around to gaze at him in astonishment. "Callan…" she whispered, quickly shifting her eyes back to the road. "That's horrible, not to mention impossible."

Callan cleared his throat nervously. "Well, I know… It was just a thought."

"Well, please, from now till we reach a safe location, keep your thoughts to yourself."

Callan bowed his head as Holiday scoffed and rolled her eyes. "Zombies," she grumbled, "Really."

Little did she know that in just a few weeks' time she'd be asking herself if Callan wasn't psychic…

A/N: If Fell's explanation of how the meltdown got started sounds familiar to you, it's because I ripped it off the Chernobyl disaster. :)

Keep in mind, this is only the prologue. The real story will pick up in present time in chapter one, and it'll be much longer. Chapter's will have who they're mostly relating to at the top, like this one said Holiday. Thanks for reading. Leave me a review if you have any comments, questions, or corrections. Or if you just wanna be super awesome. :)