Title: Republicans End the World...Accidentally

Author: tommygirl828 (at) gmail (dot) com

A/N: Written for the zombieficathon. Beta'd wonderfully by Steph and Lara, any other errors are all mine. Feedback always appreciated.

Crossposted: my livejournal, my website

It started out like most zombie situations do...with a Presidential Election.

Okay, that wasn't quite right.

It started out like most zombie situations do...with a group of angered Vinick voters, referring to themselves as Arnie's Allies, demanding an election recount because there was no way that another fucking Democrat won the presidency.

Okay, that wasn't quite right either.

The angered Vinick voters never intended to release the vials of various diseases they had stolen, let alone for it to end up in most of the Northeast's water supply. They were conservatives, not crazy (despite what most evil blue staters thought thankyouverymuch), and zombies running amuck didn't benefit them. No, the vials were never supposed to end up at that water treatment plant, but a member of the group was curious to see if he could get past security (Vinick would've had better security guarding our water supply – stupid liberals). It didn't help that the guy was also klutzy. Clumsy and curious were not a good combination, especially while inside a water facility.

And he totally planned to let everyone know what happened, but the whole dying thing got in the way.

So by the time Arnie's Allies realized what had happened, it was too late to stop it. All they could do was run, cry, pray and let the police know what had happened.

It wasn't their fault that the police didn't believe them until the first fifty patients were admitted to the hospitals.

And how could they have known that the combination of diseases they had stolen would mix with the fluoride in the water to create the Super Plague? No one expected a never-seen-before virus strain that caused people to come back to life. If life could be defined as moving around like an extra from 28 Days Later, chewing on people's arms, and moaning, "Braaaiiins." Never "hello," or "what the fuck happened to me?"...just "Braaaaaiiinns."

Besides, it wasn't like they didn't get theirs in the end. When the virus started infecting the already dead-and-buried, they understood true horror when the very decomposed body of Herbert Hoover took bites out of their legs. One could say, in the end, that no one suffered more than Arnie's Allies, a group that would go down in infamy as the dumbest bunch of conservatives who ever tried to end the world.

That wasn't really how the story started either, but it was filled with lots of technical terms and scientific jargon, so it would probably be best to skip right to the middle.

"Air Force One is currently in the air with the President and the First Lady, but where are the Vice President and Speaker of the House?" Josh asked, hurrying down the hall, shouting out to anyone who would answer. If they couldn't answer his question, it was best to get out of his way.

"The Vice President has been taken to an underground bunker. Unfortunately the Speaker of the House was eaten by one of his interns," Sam stated as he walked out of his office.

Josh grimaced and said, "Our line of defense is still holding outside?"

"I think so," Sam replied. He handed Josh a piece of paper and said, "According to our latest information, the disease is no longer airborne."

Sam ignored the annoyed expression on Josh's face, falling into step with him as they walked down the hall. He placed his hand on Josh's arm to slow him down a bit and added, "The only way to catch it now is to be bitten."

"That's not very reassuring considering how our best military defenses haven't been able to stop most of these things."

"Zombies."

"I refuse to refer to them as zombies, Sam."

"It's technically what they are, Josh."

"Think of a different name."

"The undead."

Josh pointed to his face and said, "This is my incredulous face. As Director of Communications, you'd better come up with a better name for it before the President speaks to the rest of the country."

Josh moved to the bullpen where Lou, Donna, and a few others were gathered around the television sets. The looks on everyone's faces told him exactly what he didn't want to know…the situation was getting worse. And to think, his biggest concern when President Santos took office was the situation in Kazakhstan. He never accounted for the possibility of zombies invading the Capitol or eating the Speaker of the House. Not that Josh hadn't envisioned a gruesome death for that bastard at various times throughout his career, but being eaten by an intern did not seem pleasant.

Josh glanced around the room with a nervous look. There didn't appear to be any interns that he had abused present or drooling for brains.

"What are you doing?" Donna whispered into his ear.

He shrugged and concentrated on the matter at hand.

"Where do we currently stand?" Josh asked, looking around the room for answers. He wasn't too pleased with the fact that CNN was getting more information than they were. That also probably had to do with the fact that most of the White House staff had already been evacuated while crazy reporters were out there in the midst of Zombie Armageddon, getting eaten one-by-one on television for the rest of the world to see.

Josh really wished he had thought to tape Geraldo Rivera's attack.

"The First Lady contacted me a few minutes ago. She says that she and the President want the rest of us out of Washington within the next hour."

"Not until we have a place set up outside the infection parameters to work from. Besides, it's no longer airborne. We should be safe a bit longer."

Donna rolled her eyes and said, "The bodies in Arlington Cemetery are wandering around the city eating people, Josh."

"So I've heard."

"Maybe that should be a sign to get out of here," Donna said.

"We've got the best defenses in the world outside those gates."

"Until enough hungry zombies come gunning for fresh meat," Sam commented.

"One, you're not helping. And two, what did I tell you about calling them zombies?" Josh replied.

"What would you prefer, Josh? That we refer to them as the deceased-challenged with a craving for flesh?" Lou countered, shaking her head. She glanced at a few of the other staffers and said, "We need to get out of here."

"I know, I know."

"And you should've left immediately to meet up with the President," Lou added. Sometimes Josh thought she enjoyed chiding him like a mother in front of the other staff.

"They haven't allowed Air Force One to land anywhere yet and they're not going to until this situation is resolved," Josh replied. He wasn't lying – he doubted he'd be able to meet with the President face-to-face anytime soon – but he also didn't plan to leave Donna or Sam or anyone else that he loved behind.

Josh glanced up at the television screen. Normally, he would've accused his staff of jerking off and watching old horror movies, but the abandoned cars on the streets, the screams that filled the air, and the emptiness of everything was all very real. The country was under attack from its own citizens. Josh shook his head, attempting to clear his mind and stay focused. He said, "Get everything in order here and I'll have another of the choppers brought up to get us out within the next fifteen minutes."

As the staff dispersed, Josh motioned for Donna to follow him. As she fell in step with him, he said, "The President is already meeting with the Joint Chiefs, and knowing the President, he won't let them leave the table until they've come up with a workable solution."

"Okay."

"And I know the President has already gotten the best medical minds together, including the former First Lady, to try to come up with a vaccine and cure."

"Are the Bartlets…"

"The minute trouble started, President Bartlet and his family were evacuated. He still has his own security detail. He's fine."

"Good."

Josh nodded. He sighed and said, "And maybe soon we'll have some answers as to why this virus seemed to affect the dead rather than the living when it went airborne."

"Maybe it's the apocalypse."

"Well, it's annoying."

"Josh."

"It is. No one has any answers aside from 'stay away from the infected' as though any of us want to get our brains sucked out of our noses."

"Thanks for that image."

"I won't let anything happen to you," Josh stated. He stopped walking and turned to face her. "I promise that much."

She caressed his cheek and said, "I trust you, and you need to trust yourself."

"What?"

"You're doing the best you can, Josh. No one expects you to have all the answers."

"Shouldn't I though? People are dead, Donna, or not dead as the case may be," Josh paused. He leaned against the wall and shifted his gaze to the floor. "We didn't react quickly enough."

"We reacted as fast as we could, considering how rapidly the virus spread."

"Thank God my mother was out of the country on a cruise when this thing hit."

"Yeah."

Josh reached over and pulled Donna close to him. This was normally out of bounds behavior for the workplace, but if there were ever special circumstances, Josh figured the thought of someone snacking on his flesh was one of them. He cupped her face and then rested his hands on her shoulders. He said, "And thank God you were already at work when this thing hit the DC area, well within the lockdown area."

"Yeah, well my workaholic boyfriend woke me up so I figured I should come to work. Who knew it would end up saving my life?"

Josh kissed her and said, "Get your essentials and meet me in my office in five minutes. It's going to be tricky getting from the building to the helipad."

"Why don't guns work on these things?"

"My guess is that it's because they're already dead," Josh said.

"Do you think our friends are okay?"

Josh shrugged and said, "I have no idea. But I can't imagine some of them going down without a fight."

"I told you we shouldn't take the highway," Toby yelled at Andi. The kids were oblivious to what was going on, watching some DVD involving weird looking midgets, and that was probably for the best. Toby was not looking forward to having a conversation with them about zombies taking over the United States.

Toby noticed the pile-up of cars, swerving in and out of lanes to avoid hitting them until the number of cars was too many to avoid. He slammed on the brakes and they came to a stop. He punched his hands into the steering wheel, fear coursing through him, and said, "We either turn around or find some way off this road."

"Maybe we'll be safe here."

"Do you really want to risk one of children being eaten to test that theory?"

"You're not helping the situation by yelling, Toby."

"I'm yelling because we're in the middle of a disaster area with no foreseeable exit. I think that warrants a bit of yelling," Toby replied. He took a deep breath and said, "I want you to stay here with the kids. Lock the doors and at the first sign of anything that's not me, you gun the engine and get the hell out of here."

"What about you?"

"I'm going to walk up the road a bit and see if I can't figure out a way to get around this mess," Toby answered. He reached for the baseball bat he had used to get himself out of his brownstone and said, "First sign of anything. I mean it."

She nodded and he slammed the door shut behind him. He waited until Andi locked the doors and started walking down the abandoned highway on foot. He couldn't decide if the eerie emptiness was a good thing (abandoned meant no zombies looking for dinner) or a bad thing (it also meant no cavalry coming to save the day).

He made it less than half a mile before he spotted a small group making their way down the highway. Considering the way they appeared to move, one wouldn't think they were much of a threat, but Toby knew how fast these creatures actually were. He turned to head back toward the car, mentally calculating whether he could make it in time or if he should call Andi and tell her to go without him.

And that was when Toby noticed it, or him, or whatever one called the previously deceased Admiral Fitzwallace. It was wrong on so many levels and if he ever doubted God's existence, it was in that moment, fueled on by this crisis and the horror it was breeding. Toby wasn't sure that there was a worse image than seeing the shell of one of the best men he knew coming toward him with a blank expression.

Toby held his bat up and decided to make a run for it. He didn't want to go down like this, dead but not really. It wasn't right.

The group descended upon him faster than he expected. He managed to get in a few swings, purposefully aiming for Fitzwallace. If he was going down, he wanted to at least try to put the old man out of his misery, to save him from an endless life as a zombie.

He closed his eyes when the bat got kicked out of his hands and prayed that it would be over quickly. Instead, gun shots rang out and he looked up to see a large military truck hovering behind him. The zombies began to scatter at the sounds of the guns, but that was the only effect the guns had. It seemed though that the men who dispersed from the trucks had found a way around the zombies-can't-die loophole.

One group attacked with machetes, cutting off the heads of the attacking zombies, while another group set the zombies on fire. The zombies fought back, breaking necks and biting soldiers who weren't paying enough attention, but soon the uninfected were outnumbering the zombie ranks.

Toby bent over, resisting the reflex to vomit at all the carnage, and fought for deep, even breathing to return. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed one soldier douse Fitz in gas and he stepped forward, grabbing the machete from the man's belt. He said, "Do you know who this man was?"

"Sir, we don't have time."

Toby looked at Fitz and muttered, "I'm sorry" before swinging the machete and taking his head off. He handed the weapon back to the soldier and said, "He was the former head of the Navy. He died a noble death and deserved better than this."

"Everyone deserved better than this, sir," the soldier replied. He pushed Toby back toward the vehicle and said, "We're doing our best to save as many civilians as we can and to get them to the safe zone."

"My family is down the highway about a half mile," Toby replied, hopping into the back of the truck. He glanced around at the few survivors, all stunned and overcome with losses of their own. Toby wasn't sure that a safe zone was all it would take to salvage America.

If CJ didn't know that it would turn Danny into a brain-thirsty zombie, she would've killed him. He had insisted on sticking around for the story of the century, gotten angry with her for not abandoning him, and then couldn't understand why it was nearly impossible to get out of DC when the time came. Sometimes she was surprised that the male gender had survived so long. She guessed that the human species would probably have been extinct by now if it weren't for women.

She stopped next to Danny on one of the many side streets, a bag on her back and a hockey stick in her hand. She could only imagine how ridiculous she looked…though most people who would've given a damn about that were either long gone or brainless zombies attempting to eat her. CJ rested her hands on her hips and kept darting her eyes around the immediate area. She and Danny had been going like this for over an hour – intermittent running with hiding in abandoned houses when there were too many infected zombies to fight. There were several points where she wanted to quit, but she couldn't. There was no way she wanted to end up like one of these things, so she stayed focused on the goal. Virginia and the safe zones set up by the government weren't too far away and hopefully soon they would find a car that wasn't stuck in the parking lots of most roadways.

Danny looked up and down the street and motioned for the two of them to sprint another few blocks again. CJ groaned, but took off right beside him. Thankfully, CJ was in the best shape of her life, using some of her abundance of free time of late to take classes in Eskrima, a Pilipino martial art.

It also came in handy when fending off the attacks of zombies looking to chew on her neck.

Like the one that came darting toward her from around the corner. She heard Danny cry out to her and she had just enough time to duck and send the thing flying into the opposite stoop. Before it could get up, she kicked it in the head several times and then grabbed Danny's hand and started running again.

A few blocks later, Danny stopped, bending over and panting for breath. He murmured something about her leaving him behind and again she had to remind herself not to kill him. At least not until the crisis was over and she knew that he wouldn't come back to eat her brain. She forced a smile and asked, "Do you think this is further punishment from Bast for breaking that statue years ago?"

"You tried to glue it back together."

"But Bast doesn't seem forgiving. Maybe I'm eternally cursed."

"So basically, all of Northeast America, possibly the entire world, is plagued by this virus and it's because you broke a Bast statue years ago?"

CJ shook her head and said, "When you say it like that, I sound quite narcissistic."

"Not narcissistic, mentally unstable."

"I should've let that granny zombie eat you twenty blocks back."

"Nah. You love me. It's why you keep me around."

CJ reached into her backpack and pulled out a bottle of Gatorade. A few hours earlier, she and Danny had emptied out a neighborhood convenience store before starting on their journey. She couldn't help but wonder what happened to all the people that worked there, if they were all sick or if some of them had gotten away before the virus had spread.

From what CJ and Danny had learned, the disease was no longer transmitted via the air but rather through direct contact with one of the infected. But even when it was airborne, the initial outbreak wasn't nearly as bad as what was happening now. Only about half the people within the virus zones were sick. When the virus had started, the sick just died - not exactly a happy thing, but better than whatever they were now - but somewhere along the line, it mutated. No longer was it airborn, contagious only by direct contact by an infected person, but ironically enough, it was harder to escape.

There were a lot of bitings though because those damned things were fast and entirely focused on one thing – eating flesh.

CJ glanced around the area, gulping down half the bottle before passing it to Danny. She took a few deep breaths and said, "Well, love of my life, we need to get the hell out of here. I figure it's another five blocks before we hit the Potomac and then we should be able to..."

CJ hit the ground with a thud, unsure where the hell the three zombies currently hovering over her and Danny had come from. She groaned and kicked her legs out enough to push them back. She reached out for Danny and by some miracle, neither had been bitten.

Danny reached into his pocket and pulled out his gun. He fired it a few times, causing two of the infected to fall to the ground. CJ reached around and picked up the hockey stick. She had glibly commented to Danny that she didn't know how to hit a puck, let alone a person, and his response had been that people were harder to miss. She hoped he was right and she shut her eyes and swung the stick out. She was greeted with a squirt of blood on her shirt and the sound of a thud as the zombie's head fell to the ground.

CJ wiped the blood away and said, "That was disgusting."

"And you were worried about hitting something."

"It squirted me with blood."

"Not on purpose. That was a side effect to its head coming off," he replied. Danny removed his sweatshirt and used it to wipe the blood off of CJ. He chucked her chin and said, "Now we've got to run. Others will smell the blood."

There were some things that Sam didn't discover about himself until he was stuck in the middle of a global crisis. Like that he could work a gun and sword with deftness, or that he had no qualms about killing the infected people in order to save the lives of himself and his friends. It helped if he didn't think about the zombies, or undead, or whatever Josh wanted him to call them, as people. They weren't citizens with names and faces and lives of their own. They were just the shells of those people.

Sam also discovered that he could undertake flying a helicopter based off the few lessons he took about ten years ago. So when the growing group of zombies managed to take out Lou, two assistants, and the two pilots of the chopper, someone had to get them out of the situation. Josh was ready to send them back into the White House and there was no way they were getting out of there alive. Now that the zombies had broken through the gates and last remaining line of defense, it would only be a matter of time before they were all discovered in one of the offices.

These zombies weren't like the ones in movies. They were smart, adaptable, and so strong that walls and gates were nothing. The only chance for survival was to get in the air and get the hell out of dodge.

"Sam, are you sure you can fly this thing?" Josh asked.

"Hopefully."

"That's not easing my mind here," Josh replied, buckling into the seat. He called to the back and said, "Hold on tight."

"It's been ten years since I flew and it wasn't a military chopper," Sam replied. He glanced at Josh as he managed to get the chopper off the ground and away from the ensuing bloodfest. He forced a small smile and said, "Here's to hoping that if I do crash this thing and we die horrible deaths that it's outside the infected zone."

Josh nodded and said, "Even better would be if you didn't crash the chopper."

"True."

Sam kept his eyes focused on the equipment and the sky. He could still see Josh out of the corner of his eye. Josh's eyes were looking at the ground below the helicopter. Josh covered his face with his hands and said, "I waited too long to evacuate."

"You couldn't have known they would break through the gates."

"I should've known."

"You're not God, Josh. You couldn't have predicted this."

"I swear I saw Mrs. Landingham in that crowd of zombies," Josh said with a shudder. He said, "How are we going to stop this?"

"We'll find a way."

"It might involve bombing most of the upper east coast," Josh replied. His eyes lingered on the ground and then he glanced around the back of the chopper. Sam noticed how his eyes rested on Donna for a few seconds before focusing back on Sam. Josh said, "How could this have happened? How could some crazy Republicans have gotten their hands on bioweapons?"

"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Sam replied. He met Josh's quizzical gaze and continued, "Well, no one could've guessed that people would turn into zombies, but it was a pretty safe guess that a disease would be released into the populace at some point. It's the world we live in."

"Yeah, but couldn't it have happened on a Republican's watch," Josh muttered.

Sam chuckled. At least some things would never change. For the time being, that would have to be enough.

In the end, it took several bomb drops and military attacks on the ground to take out the remaining infected. Word quickly spread through the troops and the civilians still trapped in the Northeast that the ways to stop the zombies were beheading and setting them on fire.

In the end, the Northeast was in a case of disarray unlike anything before, months of rebuilding and body removal. There were other breakouts that spread as far as Asia after the unknowingly infected boarded planes in New York City to various destinations before anyone knew what was happening.

In the end, friends and family were lost, the dead were scattered across a number of states, and no one could get the images of whatcould'vebeen their fate out of their heads.

In the end, all of Arnie's Allies were dead, which really pissed Josh off because he wanted to burn them at the stake. Sam pointed out that they were liberals and opposed the death penalty and suggested he take a vacation with Donna. Josh was happy to oblige.

Fin