HOUSE M.D. / The Walking Dead
"Neglected Morality"
by meresger
Summary: In a world where the fight to survive often means benignly neglected morality, two ex-lovers reunite. A Chameron fic set in the post zombpocalyptic world of The Walking Dead. Get out your Axe-canes!
Disclaimer: I don't own House or The Walking Dead. If I did, Cameron never would have left, Chase wouldn't have become a dumb whore, Lori would have died in Season 1, Beth would never have existed, that whole annoying mess with the Governor never would have happened, and they would have spent more time with those cannibals after an entire fucking season to get to Terminus!
Chronology mashup: HOUSE ended in April 2013 on the show, 5 months before Wilson's presumed demise in September when Foreman had those fight tickets. From the pilot of TWD and what transpires with Lori's pregnancy, it can be inferred that the first case of Wildfire was around January, it went global about May, and the CDC went boom toward the end of July... which is one hell of a fast-moving pandemic! As such, for this story, Wildefire began in January 2014 and the global outbreak was a year after House's "death". Cameron's son would have been about a year and a half old and Chase would have been running Diagnostics for about a year.
HOUSE chronology: To refresh your memories, the show's events takes place between September 2004, when Foreman joins the team, and April 2013, House's funeral. Chase and Cameron married in April 2009, separated just before Thanksgiving, and signed divorce papers the following March or April. By the end of the series, Cameron was remarried with an infant son, probably born in late 2012 or early 2013, a convenient explanation for Cameron having no involvement in Chase's stabbing storyline.
Chapter One
Everybody Dies
(June 2014)
Metal chairs sit empty on an open athletic field, but there is no crowd of students in caps and gowns, no family members gathered to cheer on the graduates nor exhausted faculty eager for the reception buffet. The podium stands alone on a stage littered with leaves and bits of crape-paper streamers fallen from their scaffold where a banner proclaiming "Congradulations Graduating Class of 2014" flaps in a lonely breeze.
Beyond the field, the ivy-covered buildings are eerily silent and empty, the only sound the soft rustling of a plastic bag as it's carried by the wind across a wide sidewalk, past dusty bicycles left in their wracks.
The graduates are all gone, never to return for alumni functions, just as the lower classman will never return with backpacks full of books, texting madly about study groups and homework assignments as they crisscrossed the large quads until they too toss their caps into the air.
There will be no more graduating classes at Princeton University.
As few sprinkles of rain fall from the bloated underbellies of gathering clouds, the polymeric tumbleweed is carried onward, through the empty suburbs of Plainsboro, devoid of laughing children and growling lawn mowers, of summer day camp buses and mini-vans loaded for roadtrips and picnics at the lake.
The only buses sit empty, abandoned, on the streets with equally empty mini-vans.
It's as though The Rapture came down and removed every soul, not just the good ones, and left vacant an entire world: the downtown shops and restaurants on the brick-lined streets, the apartment complexes and office buildings where the city rose up from suburban sprawl into man-made canyons once full of activity - full of life.
Now they stand as looming monoliths, lifeless facades - monuments to a dying age, absent their makers and inhabitants both.
It seems at first inexplicable what has happened to Princeton-Plainsboro. Even a neutron bomb would have burned the shadows of the dead into the walls as it incinerated them.
There are no shadows here.
But there are crows.
A noisy flock of them descends upon the evidence of neither a supernatural apocalypse nor nuclear holocaust.
On the running track beside the large brick and masonry facade of a hospital, nestled between a large forest hollow and Lake Carnegie, festers row upon row of white-shrouded corpses.
In the summer heat and humidity the odor of rotting flesh, nauseating, fetid, seeps out of the plastic body bags, carried on the breeze, attracting flies and carrion birds.
Crows.
And the occasional raven.
"Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital" the sign on the edifice proclaims, and perched on the parking space sign for a Dr. Eric Foreman, Dean of Medicine, one of the larger black birds pecks at a pilfered eyeball, the venis fluid gushing milky and thick over a black clawed foot - before a rumbling sound causes the bird to take flight, abandoning its meal to bounce in macabre fashion on the pavement.
The rumble turns into the growl of engines, armored vehicles with "National Guard" scrawled onto their sides, barreling down Plainsboro Road. As the vehicles come to a stop in the hospital's parking lot, a woman in pink scrubs emerges from the glass doors.
Men in body armor carrying assault weapons with extra magazines stuffed into their vests jump down from the safe confines of their MRAP and the woman bounds forward, a relieved look upon her face.
"Thank god, you're here. We've got-"
Bullets strike the nurse in the chest, blood blossoming and spraying, and the doors beyond shattering to dust. Before the nurse has even fallen to the ground, carried several feet by the momentum of the rounds puncturing her body, the men and women, faces obscured by their helmets and goggles, trample past, barking and following orders. One booted foot crushes the eyeball on the way up the cement path to the now gaping maw of the entrance.
Through the shattered front doors they send a second barrage of gunfire to take down the cause of such merciless action: creatures that used to be people,
Walking corpses dressed in scrubs and lab coats with sunken, milky eyes and rotted gums that leak black fluid over gnashing teeth surge toward the soldiers. What started amongst the patients had quickly spread to the health care workers, as pandemics often do, and so the hospitals were left to quarantine themselves - until now.
Now comes the purging.
Behind a glass door labeled "Clinic" with a chain lock wrapped around the handles groan and rasp a horde of more creatures with tightly stretched, discolored flesh, like a mummified corpses left in a desert that remained in an old horror movie and were transplanted into a modern-day hospital - the oldest of the reanimated dead whose bodies are wasting away even as they clamor toward the glass, desperate to get to the living, to spread their disease with the drive of a literally insatiable appetite, never meant to be filled.
One of the soldiers grabs a grenade from his belt, pulls the pin and shouts a loud, "CLEAR!" and then the others scatter, ducking behind the admit desk seconds before there is a massive BOOM and the glass doors are reduced to powder, the former patients behind it ripped to shreds. The few with limbs intact enough to begin staggering out are taken down by flame throwers while a second team raises riffles to pick off those stragglers that crowd to the second floor mezzanine at the sound. As they fall over the railing like jumping lemmings, another team heads upstairs to continue the job, clear the hospital of as many as they can even though it already seems like a futile task.
But the CDC has gone dark, and they don't truly know what they are up against:
The Sixth Extinction.
On the fourth floor, a door shuts, a breath held as the gunfire nears.
This is the story of some of the survivors.
AN: This is a story that has been sitting incomplete on my hard drive for a long time. I felt the need to at least post an edited form of it.