The Walking Dead But with Earthquakes Instead
Rick Grimes woke to the sound of rumbling. At first he thought it was his stomach, but realized that he was not hungry. An astute reader, having glanced at the title of this story, would probably come to the conclusion that it was an earthquake, but they would be wrong. The rumbling was actually him falling out of his hospital bed.
He shot to his feet, the gunshot wound he received earlier feeling like a much smaller wound he had gotten a while ago and agilely stumbled for the door. Upon entering the hallway of the hospital he was confronted with the sight of crumbling masonry and blood. He was horrified, but did not falter more than three times at the sight. He left the hospital, encountering no one, except for a lot of dead people covered in dirt. And one person who asked him for help, but he had a deep gravelly voice and that sent a wave of superstitious and surprisingly lucky dread through Rick, so he jumped over the man and left the hospital.
He did stuff for a while, but it was boring, so instead he encountered an earthquake. He tried to fend it off, but it shook and rumbled at him, and his bullets passed through it ineffectually, so he ran. But then that guy with a son found him and said his name was Morgan.
"I am a guy with a son, and his name is Morgan." The man stated.
"My name is Duane," the aforementioned son stated.
"Shane?!" Rick gasped, foreshadowing a character who would have been introduced had I remembered to include him earlier.
"Sure," the guy with a son said.
"Dad, you have to check him."
"Oh yeah. Hey, there guy, were you tripped?"
"What?" Rick asked, thoroughly confused.
The man glared in a fashion reminiscent of anger and pointed a gun at Rick's abdomen and/or stomach maybe. "I said, were you tripped?!"
"And I said 'what?'" Rick said again. "That means I don't understand the question."
"I thought maybe you didn't hear me. Sometimes that's why people say what."
"Oh."
The conversation halted for a while, as it had been written into an awkward corner. Soon more rumbling managed to get things back on track.
"I have to know if one of those shakers out there tripped you."
"No, why?"
"Well you see, that's how it starts. A shaker trips you and you don't get up. Or if you do, you're changed."
"Changed into what?"
"You start to develop a taste for rumbling, a hunger for shaking, a need for quaking until eventually you become a shaker too. Just like my wife and my son maybe."
"Yeah!" Duane said aggressively.
"Oh," Rick said quietly. "Maybe we should back up a bit. I still don't understand what a shaker is."
"That," the guy with a son said, pointing out the window. Rick looked at the window, but the blinds were covering it, so he was powerless to see outside.
"Let me open that," the man said, but as he did a horde of earthquakes charged into the window and started vibrating madly.
"Run!" someone said.
Everyone ran. But Rick ran faster and left the other two behind for two seasons. It was sad and Rick rode a horse depressingly, until he walked down a street into a swarm of earthquakes. He tried to run, but his horse tripped.
"Oh no!" Rick said, knowing what that meant as his horse let out a whinny of fear and started to quiver. Terrified of a horsequake, Rick ran into a tank but was rescued by a guy named Glenn.
"I'm rescuing you," Glenn said, kicking open the tank and dragging Rick out.
"Thanks Glenn!" Rick said.
"If you're going to be dealing with these shakers, you gotta know how to deal with them," Glenn said, pointing at Rick's seemingly useless gun.
"But how?" Rick asked, setting Glenn up to answer his question.
"You gotta shoot them in the head."
"Oh," Rick said. "I was expecting something that was more plausible."
"Nothing takes a shaker down faster than blowing its rocks out," Merle said, before being racist.
"Can't have that happen!" Rick said, arresting Merle for racism, but he got off with a slap on the wrist. Unbeknownst to Rick, the slap was ineffectual as Merle had cut his arms off!
"Come on, let's take you to the rest of our group," T-Dawg said, relishing his ability to consistently say things in front of other people. Andrea was just sad that Merle had left or been abandoned or something, because she kind of liked him. In a platonic way. With touching. Platonic touching.
When Rick got to the rest of the group, he was surprised to see his wife, son and the son of that one guy who said his name was Morgan.
"Duane?!" Rick said in shock.
"No," Shane said evilly, "It is I, Shane, your bestest friend."
Shane started to do some ominously evil things, like rub his head or point guns at Rick when Dale was blinking, but the camp got attacked.
"These shakers are everywhere!" One of the guys who dies later said, before turning into one those guys who dies now.
"We've got to rescue Merle, he could give us a hand in taking down these shakers!" Darryl said, crossbowing an earthquake in the gut.
"Oh, I see what you did there," Glenn said. "Good one Darryl."
Everyone laughed at Darryl's clever play on words, even the earthquakes, which bought the group time to flee. Unfortunately just as they were about to escape, an earthquake bit Jerry and he was sad.
"You should leave me behind guys-" he started to say before he was left behind.
"Well now what Rick?" Shane said threateningly, looking back as the earthquakes leveled their camp.
"Let's go to the CGC."
"What's that?" Darryl asked.
"The Center for Ground Control. They would be best prepared to deal with shakers," Dale said.
"Why?" Rick's wife asked.
"Because their building was built to specifications designed to protect it in the event of shakers," Rick said, raising his walkie-talkie in explanation.
Everyone nodded and agreed. Soon they reached the center and managed to sneak in, until Jenner showed up and stopped them.
"Hey you shouldn't be here; I'm going to destroy this place at the end of this chapter."
"But we want to take showers without fear of dirt covering our mouthholes!" Andrea said.
"So you will," Jenner said, showing them the dirtless showers, which were in between the other kind.
Following a sexy, not dirty, shower scene, Jenner took them to the big open room described earlier.
"Let me tell you how this disaster happened," Jenner said, gesturing at the world, but since they were inside it looked like he was gesturing at the building, which somewhat confused some of the less intelligent members of the group like Carl and Jenner.
"K," that woman who dies at the end of this chapter said.
"Computer," Jenner said, picking up the mouse and speaking into it. "Main screen turn on."
Following that outdated pair of references, the computer opened to a hologram of a person.
"This person tripped. Rather than stomping them out of their misery, as is customary with a shaker, they agreed to let us study their transformation."
"Stomping! Of course!" Rick said, writing that down in his hat.
The video skipped forward, showing the hologram person start to be altered.
"Hey Jenner," Shane said as he groped at Lori when Rick wasn't looking, which was surprisingly often, "Somethings wrong with your hologram, it's…shaking."
"No Shane," Jenner said, drinking a milk jug of beer. "That is the transformation. Here, look at this." Jenner pointed at a growing mound of quivering dirt on the person. "Here is where it starts. Soon the flesh rots away, decaying to the virus and leaving behind a zombie. A zombie that shakes the very ground!"
Everyone nodded at the metaphor as the person started to lose form and become a mass of writhing flesh and earthquakes. It looked like something that would cause a lot of people to trip, which would have made it very dangerous if Jenner hadn't stomped on the hologram, killing the earthquake.
"Once they have succumbed to the trip, there is no stopping them. Only stomping them can stop them."
"But how is it spread? What happened?" Rick asked, questions which would not be asked again, despite Jenner shrugging and telling him to wait a few seasons.
"Now if you excuse me," Jenner said, "I have to remove this nail." Jenner unscrewed a pair of pliers from the wall, and the building began to make a countdown noise.
"What's that?" Dale asked.
"I have damaged the structural integrity of this building. Soon it will succumb to the shakers. You better run, and/or stay here because you fear the slow, shambling, ineffectual danger of the shakers."
"That would be me!" several people whose names no one remembered said.
Also Andrea, but she's alive in the next chapter so she's probably just lying.
"That was kind of a dick move Jenner," Rick said.
"So it was," Jenner answered.
With that, the two had an understanding and everyone who survived left. Surprisingly all the people who died stayed, which was quite an amazing coincidence. If Jerry had survived, he would have stayed as well, because he died.
The group watched the building fall to the powerful throbbing might of the earthquakes, but other than that everything seemed pretty okay.
But then there was dirt on Rick's hat. Ominous chord plays.
BUM BUM BUM