Jaune Apocalypse (Zombie AU)

"It's been a year and a half since Pyrrha died. It was all supposed to be a simple life for Me. A life without the complex nature of mortality, losing a loved one and potentially a future with them. Yet that's what I was stuck with…"

The streets were eerily quiet. The fog was thick, the smog even more so, and no life was seen on the streets of Vale. Grime and soot from burning cars and buildings line the gutters, old newspapers tumble like loose weeds across cracked asphalt as the chilled wind picked up. There was no buzz of electricity, no hum of engines. Not even the chirps of birds. All was dead.

"A year and a half ago, I was one of the most loved students at Signal High. I'm Jaune bye the way. Short, sweet, rolls off the tongue. Ladies...no, not anymore. My friends and I were some of the strongest, smartest kids to attend, being masters at either sports or classwork.

I can remember it all now, even after alienating myself from everyone. Ruby Rose, once my best friend, was a prodigy. Bumped up two grades thanks to her incredible knack for machines as well as being one of the best cross country runners in the school. She was kind, sweet and radiated with a modigational energy many strive for. And also pretty.

Weiss Schnee was one of the brightest and to be honest, one of the most beautiful girls in the world. To me at least. Yeah, I kind of had a crush on her in the beginning, and I am one to admit that I was a bit overboard on trying to swoon her. It was just that she complimented me one time and I thought she found me attractive, something that had never happened to me before. Eventually though, I learned that it wasn't going to happen. I apologized profusely to her, and expected to be berated because of her behavior, but she simply rolled her eyes and said that my dedicatication was rather charming, but I wasn't her type. We became good friends shortly after.

Blake Belladonna ascended to become the literary talent. She was silent, and her past was kind of shady, but it only added to the masterpieces of writing she would create. I'm a fan of literature myself and appreciate everything she made. Despite how opposite we were, we bonded quickly due to our love of writing and reading. She also may have introduced me to smut so…

Yang Xiao Long was the really scary one. She's actually the step sister of Ruby, with their Dad getting Yang's mom pregnant, but after giving birth her mother ran off with her old biker gang and soon after Ruby's mom met Yang's father and they had Ruby, however Ruby's mother died later on. Yang's mother leaving her and her adoptive mother dying really pressed her to be the best of the best. To prove to her birth mother that she was strong and to make her surrogate mother proud. She was the wrestling/boxing champ for the longest time, never being challenged or threatened and became the most intimidating girl around. However, if you really knew her, you would find a girl who had become a second mother to her sister and inherited her father's bad humor. We were good friends, especially when I got sick and vomited on her shoes.

Nora Valkyrie and Lie Ren really go together more than anything. They were two halves that made a greater whole. Where Nora was loud, wild and spent most of the time playing soccer, breaking a few legs in the process, Ren was calm, at ease, a bit lazy, and was quite the poet. I wasn't that good with poetry to be honest, but Ren always would step in and give me some pointers here and there while I have him ideas to work with in his own writing. Ren was also really good at yoga, and when I mean good, I mean really good so good that I would catch Nora always keep her predatory gaze on Ren's ass most of the time.

And of course, there was Pyrrha Nikos. She was...the most beautiful girl I have ever met. She was really too nice for her own good. She was the best athlete in the school, beating Ruby, Yang and Nora hands down and was also really smart. She was aiming to be in the Vale Vytal Olympics team, even if she was native to Mistral…"

Then, from a round a street corner, behind an abandoned truck, came the swift form of a young man, sprinting lightly as his flat-tops clubbed the sidewalk. His jeans were beaten up, his black hoodie even more so. Blonde hair was in a mess as he navigated his way through empty streets, clinging onto the straps of his bloated backpack very tightly.

"As for myself, I was pretty much good in every class I was in, but as a Freshman, I was a real twig and a target for bullying. I wanted to be like my dad and go into baseball, but I just didn't have the body to do it. No one believed I could do it. Pyrrha did, though. She saw something in me, maybe because I never saw anything in her and only noticed her as a girl, I don't know. However, she told me that if I followed her lead, did what needed to be done and keep doing it, then I could achieve my dream. Just keep moving forward. And thanks to her, and I don't want to brag here, but I became the best baseball player in school. And apparently good looking, too, since after tryouts I began to receive notes in my locker filled with girl's phone numbers.

It was so persistent that Pyrrha, the girl I had slowly began to develop feelings for, asked me out on a date in front of everyone in the school during an end of the year assembly. All I know is, when we kissed that night after our Sophomore year ended, my heart belonged to her. Over the summer we really got intimate, and it was the some of the best months in my entire life.

However…

It was the night of the Junior's Dance. I was driving in my parents car, Pyrrha by my side. We were laughing and recounting the night. I chuckled when she retold how Weiss stomped up to Yang, dipped her down low and kissed her like mad on a drunk dare by Blake. She giggled when I was asked to dance by Neptune because Pyrrha and I decided to swap outfits and I came in a white dress while she was in a maroon suit. Everything was so calm and filled with joy.

I'm so happy that the last memory I have of her when she was alive was her laughing hard with tears in her eyes and her cheeks flush.

The next thing I know, I'm sore and stiff in a hospital bed.

I later learn that Cinder Fall, a girl who has been a sort of rival to my group of friends, got drunk at the dance, got into her car with her two accomplices and ran a red light at 60 MPH on a 25 MPH road.

They told me Pyrrha didn't feel a thing…"

His speed increased as the wind died down, replaced with the shuffling of feet and groans of hunger behind him. From around the same corner the man came out of emerged around five to six humanoid creatures, all in some state of decaying death. Half clothed, one -a one middle aged women- completely naked, half of her sagging breasts were missing with a lung hanging out. Feet raw and lips peeled back, the monsters stumbled and scampered quickly, to quick for the young man's liking, and snapped their hungry jaws at him and swung the remains of their limbs like wild predators.

"Because the passenger side was hit, I was relatively unscathed, though I was left with a nasty concussion and a broken wrist. Everyone I knew came to see me in and out of the hospital.

Ruby cried with me and glommed me in a tight, warm hug.

Yang would do the same but end up entering spouts of rage towards Cinder and her cronies, something that only ended when Weiss, who would give me a sad smile and reassuring words, would tell Yang that this was not what Pyrrha would have wanted.

Nora and Ren came in and would sit down, read to me a poem or a book, take a nap, and much like Weiss tell me everything was going to be ok.

Blake never saw me, I didn't know why, until I was discharged and expected one of my sisters but instead it was her picking me up. She said she didn't come to visit me because of how much I was so broken. She couldn't stand to see me as a mess because I represented a foundation to her. A light on the coast. We hugged, and she brought me home after telling me that her and our friends would always be there for me.

When I was home, Neptune and Sun came over and we played video games, though more than once Neptune would shamble his way into my space and hug me. It got awkward easily but I choked it up to just all the raw feelings going around…"

Dark blue eyes darted around as he approached an intersection. He pinched the hem of his shirt and brought it up to cover his nose. The smell of rot and death was unbearable. His right was blocked by a pile of corpses, shot up by military who used their remains to block off the roads outside the city. A good portion of them now were wiggling, ravunes cadavers. His path forward equally unpleasant, as the smog and mist were even more thick and the street lined with alleys. Any number of threats could be lurking around. His left side was his only option left. Path clear of death and fog, but revealed a broken bridge with a crashed helicopter snagged in the middle of the two halfs.

"The trial was a frenzy. Mercury and Emerald were bawling their eyes out. They all came out of the crash with scars. Emerald developed schizophrenia and PTSD, having to be hospitalized for her Senior year. Mercury lost both of his legs, and it ended his dream for being a sprint runner in an instant. And Cinder, her fierce beauty and sex appeal was forever tarnished by the horrid burn on her face, consuming one of her eyes completely, and losing her right arm with it.

Mercury and Emerald took the stand and blamed the whole mess on Cinder, ditching the person they once followed obediently just to save their own skin and making up accusation after accusation to try and get out of the situation as fast as possible.

Cinder was silent, mainly due to her vocal cords being damaged. However, her eyes burned with unhinged fury. When Mercury was giving his testimony, acting over dramatic and making a show out of the trial, Cinder silently ran up towards the cripple with a shard of glass she had found in the road and stabbed it into his shoulder.

Assault and attempted murder was added to the verdict of guilty for vehicle manslaughter…"

"Good enough." Jaune said in a rough voice. He released his right hand in order to pull the aluminum bat he carried strapped to the side of his pack, giving it a tested twirl before sprinting again. The zombies that were trailing him had almost caught him, but alas he ran down the bridge.

"Senior year began as a quiet one. No real excitement or adventure like the years prior. I distanced myself from the rest of the school body, including my friends. I plunged myself into my sports life more than ever. I refined my skills and tied every movement and technique of the game to the memories I had of my true love.

When I swung the bat, I remember her ponytail tickling my nose when she sat in my lap.

As the rumbling snap echos up my arm after slamming the bat into the spreading ball, an image of her breathing heavily and her exposed breasts covered in sweat, nipples hard and pronounced.

When I threw my bat, sprinting with all my might, I recalled how her hand gilded up my arm, to my shoulder and onto my nape as she stared with love during the slow dance that very night.

And when I slide into home base, I saw her spinning in that short red sundress as we walked back to her home in Mistral, begging me to embrace her with that pout I will always cherish…"

The helicopter belonged to one of the three major news broadcasters, Vale National News or VNN as illustrated along the side of the vehicle in faded purple letters. A large trench was carved out into the bridge where the helicopter came down, eventually going through the whole thing near the middle. Now wedged between the two half of the bridge, the only real way across was by skipping across the helicopter. The trench was too narrow and deep enough that he wouldn't be able to get out in time. The railings and cables holding up the structure were covered in the mist's moisture, and would take time to navigate. Time he did not have.

The zombies were closing in, so Jaune swung his bat at the helicopter. If it held after the hit, he would jump. If it fell into the water below, he would be forced to fight off the undead.

The hit echoed, but the crash held. Jaune breathed in, prayed to The Brothers, and jumped.

His right foot touched the roof, held traction, and allowed him to swing his left forward, over the carnage to the other side.

A wrinkled hand crashed out of the already cracked windshield and sized his right ankle.

Jaune yelped as he fell to the ground. His bat went flying out of his grasp and the weight of his bag knocked the wind out of him. Removing, he looked behind him and saw what was once a local anchor wearing a headset reduced to a pail green mess, dull eyes targeting his muscle flesh.

Then his pursuers came out from over the lip of the helicopter, stepping up and quickly losing traction on the metal surface without good footing.

The weight falling down on the helicopter was enough. There was a groan, and Jaune sore that even the zombies stopped what they were doing. And then, all to quickly, the ground gave out from under him.

Jaune thought about a lot of things then. How the world went to shit. Were his family alive? How were his friends? Would he ever play baseball again?

Would he finally see Pyrrha again?

Then, he was snagged.

A suicide net, strung across the underside of the bridge, had caught Jaune before he slammed into the surface of the cold drink beneath him. It was strong. Strong enough to hold him as he twisted to loop his hands into the netting like the rope wall in school.

It was not strong enough to hold the weight of a helicopter.

The net snapped sickeningly, and Jaune closed his eyes as he felt needles in his face as the brisk air blasted by him. The net had swung forward, but thanks to the many coils attached to the bridge, Jaune was saved from hitting the water. A loud, deafening crash echoed around as both the helicopter and the dead splashed into the water.

Jaune trembled, limbs quaking as he refuses to open his eyes just yet. He wanted to cry. To laugh and sing. He wanted to sleep. He wanted a lot of stuff. Yet now…

"L-let's go home." He whispered to no one in particular. He scaled the broken net and manurved over it till he reach the opposite bank.

He returned to the bridge, retrieved his weapon of choice, and stared out.

The wind had now swept most of the fog away, revealing miles of destroyed, decrepit and incinerated landscape. This was no land for the living anymore.

The dead were in power, and Jaune Arc was running out of time.

"Her life may have ended, but mine will go on. That I promise." -Jaune Arc