1
The Avengers sat and stared.
Fury had summoned them all to the helicarrier because the world was being eaten by alien locusts or a robot the size of the moon or Loki or something but nobody could think about that while a dead man was standing in front of them being alive.
"Hello," said Coulson. He waved at them.
They continued to stare.
"I'm not dead," Coulson pointed out unnecessarily.
The Avengers continued to stare at him in silence until Fury sauntered in with a shit-eating grin on his face.
"I," proclaimed Fury gleefully, triumphantly, while motioning excitedly at Coulson, "am a liar!"
2
There must be something wrong with Tony Stark's mind.
"Phil called?" Steve asked him carefully.
"Yeah, you know, Agent Phil Coulson. He wants you to go to his place to sign his trading cards and make out and stuff."
"Tony... Coulson is dead," said Steve gently, putting a hand on Stark's shoulder. "Remember? Fury showed us those trading cards, they were all..."
"Life-Model Decoy," explained Stark, "and fake trading cards. Phil keeps the real ones inside a safe inside a safe inside a secret volcano - the safes are fireproof, of course - and the volcano is inside..."
"Life-Model Decoy?" interrupted Steve.
"A kind of android. Robot that looks and acts just like you. You didn't really think Phil was stupid enough to try to face Loki by himself, did you?"
Steve hadn't thought Coulson was stupid, he'd thought Coulson was brave.
3
"Wow," said Natasha, peering into the coffin. "He looks so... dead." The morticians had done a decent job, you couldn't even tell that they'd refused to bother embalming him or anything on the grounds that he was only going to be cremated anyway, and Phil hadn't had any wounds that weren't easily hidden by his clothes. But Natasha had seen so many dead people there was no way she could convince herself that this one was just sleeping.
Clint leaned against her drunkenly and looked over her shoulder. "Yep, that's definitely a corpse," he muttered, then stumbled off to get another drink. Natasha watched him go, knowing that he blamed himself for Phil's death and wishing she could make him see that it wasn't his fault.
She hated wakes. They were so boring and depressing. Especially this one. She knew every single person here (Fury, the Avengers, Maria Hill, the guy in the corner using a laptop and glancing nervously at Stark every time it beeped, a few other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents) which meant that Phil hadn't had any family or friends outside his job who cared enough about his death to come look at his corpse.
She knew her own wake would be the same.
As she started to walk away from the coffin to give Bruce Banner a turn to examine the body, a waiter holding a tray of quail eggs grabbed her arm to ask her something. Unfortunately this surprised her and she accidentally threw him across the room. He landed on a table which collapsed in a way that somehow catapulted a sharp knife past Natasha's ear into Banner's left eye.
Fuck.
"Fuck," she told Banner in a comforting tone of voice. "I mean... it's... OK. You don't really need two eyes anyway, you'll be much happier with only one. Like Fury! Fury's happy, right? And... um... Odin..." Banner was clearly not comforted by her words and she slowly backed away from him, as did everyone else in the room. Except Stark, who was getting in his suit. And Thor, who was brandishing his hammer. And Rogers, who was pulling his shield from underneath a couch cushion (so that was why it had been so uncomfortable when she'd tried to sit there earlier!) And Clint, who was passed out in some flowers.
Natasha hid behind the coffin and covered her head with her hands.
The Hulk had never been to a wake before and at first he seemed too confused by all the flowers and sad people to smash anything. He leaned over the coffin and stared intently at Phil for a few seconds, then roared in his face.
Phil opened his eyes and sat up then he and his coffin fell backwards onto Natasha as he desperately tried to escape.
Best wake ever.
4
Thor knelt on the floor of the Asgardian prison cell and pulled his brother's lifeless body into his lap with shaking arms. The magical amulet he had intended to show Loki, a gift to Thor from their parents, lay forgotten on the floor.
"No... no..." he whispered, horrified.
Why would Loki do this to himself? The Allfather had been very lenient when deciding his punishment, he would have been let out of prison soon enough. And how did Loki do this to himself? He was practically immortal and had been locked in a cell with no magic or weapons.
"AND ON MY BIRTHDAY!" Thor bellowed, suddenly angry. He held the corpse by its shoulders and shook it furiously. Loki's head flopped around sickeningly, hitting the wall hard a couple of times when Thor forgot how small the cell was, until Thor grew weary of shaking the body and let it fall back into his lap.
"Why?" he asked quietly, desperately. "Why, Loki? WHY?"
"I needed to escape from my cell to retrieve your birthday present," explained Loki from the doorway. "Killing myself seemed the easiest way to go about it."
Thor looked wildly from the living man in the doorway to the dead man in his lap and back again.
"But.. you... dead... alive... what? How?"
"There are ways out of every realm, even Hel itself, for those who are intelligent enough to find them," Loki told him.
Thor, speechless, just stared at him incredulously.
"This was not even the first time I've died, you know."
Thor kept staring like a dead fish.
"Happy birthday, Thor," said Loki, stepping aside to let another person into the cell.
"Happy birthday, Thor," repeated the Son of Coul. "I'm sorry I'm not giftwrapped. I thought giving your brother the chance to effectively tie me up would be a bad idea. Actually it was probably a bad idea to let him bring me back from the afterlife at all, considering he's a bigger liar than Nick Fury and was the person who killed me in the first place and everything, but there are some trading cards I really need to avenge."
"Oh, brother, this is the greatest gift ever!" smiled Thor, hugging Loki and then Coulson. Then his expression grew serious, and he turned back to his brother. "Now you go back to the afterlife and bring back the rest of the innocent mortals you've murdered," he told Loki sternly. "And with no suicide this time!"
Thor was so happy his brother and Coulson were alive that it took him seven hours to notice that Loki had taken Thor's amulet with him when he left, and over a month to realise that Loki wasn't coming back.
5
"I really don't think this is a good idea," said Bruce as he looked down at the stolen, decaying corpse.
"Of course it is!" said Tony. "We're going to cure death! It's going to be so awesome and everyone will love us! Isn't that right, Phil?"
"It sure is, Tony!" went Tony out of the side of his mouth as he waggled Coulson's jawbone with his finger to make the dead man's mouth open and close. Two of Coulson's teeth fell out.
"Whoops! Well, we'll just put those back," said Tony, attempting to shove them back into Coulson's gums hard enough to make them stay there. He failed, and ended up surreptitiously dropping them into his pocket when Bruce covered his face with his hand in frustration. "There we go," he muttered.
"This is really, really wrong, Tony," said Bruce. "Illegal and wrong. We're... we're debasing a dead person."
"He's not going to be dead for much longer, Bruce," said Tony, patting him on the shoulder. "You helped with the equations, you know this stuff's going to work." A nearby machine beeped at them. "The reanimation serum's ready!" Tony opened the machine and removed a test tube full of clear fluid. "Let's do this!"
Bruce took the test tube from Tony and carefully filled a syringe with the clear serum. He couldn't shake the feeling that this was a bad idea, but they'd gone too far to back out now. After illegally exhuming a man's corpse it would almost be more wrong to just put it back without even trying to do anything useful with it.
Bruce inserted the needle into Coulson's heart and pushed the plunger down. For a few moments it seemed as if the serum hadn't done anything, but then Coulson sat up and grinned at them.
"Hey, Phil!" said Tony, "You..." Then he started screaming as Coulson roughly grabbed him by the hair and sunk his remaining teeth into Tony's neck.
Bruce thought, at first, that his friends were just fooling around. Until Coulson dropped a dying Tony on the ground and lunged at him.
Steve was awoken by a badly injured-looking young woman, who was attempting to climb in his bedroom window and moaning.
"You're going to be OK," he told her, jumping out of bed. "Just lie down on the ground, I'll call for help!" He grabbed the "cell phone" S.H.I.E.L.D. had given him and dialled 911.
"There's a woman here with half of her face missing!" he said urgently when someone answered. "I'm at..." He abruptly stopped giving his address when he realised the 911 operator was moaning quietly at him. He actually sounded a lot like the injured woman.
"Hello?" Steve said uncertainly. "Are you OK?" The operator moaned louder.
Still holding the phone, Steve moved towards the window to help the woman into his room.
He really had no idea how she was still alive, let along conscious. Her face... And now that he was looking at her more closely he could see that there was a knife sticking out of the side of her neck, and there were wounds that almost looked like they'd been caused by human teeth visible through her badly torn shirt. She'd managed to get her upper body through the window and was leaning forwards, her head and hands almost touching the ground, flailing her legs around and attempting to propel herself further into the room. She was staring at Steve intently, never taking her eyes off him. Or even blinking.
Steve started to bend over to help her up, and she bared her teeth and reached for him.
Before they managed to touch each other, Agent Hill burst through the door and shot the injured woman in the head. Her body went limp as blood, brain, and pieces of skull spattered Steve's legs.
"You killed her!" said Steve, horrified. "Why..."
"She was already dead," Hill told him calmly. "Come on, grab your shield, I'll explain in the quinjet."
Tony was happy.
He wasn't going to die, ever. He'd beaten death. And if he bit all the people, they could be like him and none of them would ever die too. He was going to save them all. That felt good.
But he really wished he could get rid of the voice that kept saying things at him.
"Sir, I really must advise that you seek medical attention. All of my readings indicate that you should be deceased."
That would have made sense to Tony, once. It didn't now.
He knew he'd lost some of his smart. He didn't know how he'd lost it, but he had. The voice not making sense made him think about that and feel bad.
"Shut... you..." he managed to moan.
The voice shut.
"What exactly are these 'zombies' you speak of?" asked Thor.
"Mindless reanimated corpses which crave human flesh and infect other humans by biting them," explained Fury. "We're pretty sure they're Stark's fault. We know it's Zombie Stark's fault that the zombie problem can't be easily contained, he's been travelling around the world in that damn suit of his spreading the infection to every continent in the world."
"And one of the zombies is the Hulk," sighed Natasha. "How do you even kill a zombie Hulk?"
"Throw it into the sun?" suggested Clint.
"I believe I could convince my father to grant you use of the Tesseract, in reparation for Loki's crimes against you, if sending the zombie Hulk to the sun would save your world," offered Thor.
"Great. So now we just have to worry about Stark, and all the other zombies," said Fury. "Unless Odin'd be willing to throw all of them into the sun for us, too?"
"It is not his lack of willingness to assist us which would make that impossible, but the logistics of it. There are 'zombies' all over your world and new ones are being created every minute. Even the Tesseract is not powerful enough to send them all to the sun at once."
"Fair enough. OK, you have your father throw Hulk and Stark into the sun, we'll work on shooting all the other zombies and rescuing all the humans we can," said Fury. Thor nodded and went to contact Odin.
"Shouldn't we be working on a cure?" asked Steve. "Those are still people down there. We should be gathering the best doctors in the world and trying to find a way to help them."
"Those people are dead. Their hearts have stopped beating. There is no cure for being dead," said Fury firmly.
"And to look for a cure, we'd need to get a sample zombie for the doctors to work on, and it'd almost definitely end up infecting at least some of them. Have you never seen a zombie movie?" added Clint.
"The best thing we can do is stay right here, on the helicarrier, killing zombies from the air and rescuing humans whenever that's safe," said Hill. "That way we can be sure there'll be at least some survivors. There are no zombies here."
Jane Foster sat in her room on the helicarrier and examined the wound on her ankle.
It could be from the fence she'd crawled through on her way to the mall she'd ended up hiding in, like she'd told S.H.I.E.L.D it was.
She hadn't actually felt it happen and she hadn't looked at her ankle until the doctor here pointed out the wound to her, so she wasn't sure it was from the fence. If she told the agents that they'd probably kill her or leave her on the ground with the zombies. But the hole in the fence had had jagged edges which could have cut her and she'd been too scared of the zombies to be particularly careful not to hurt herself as she crawled through.
It could be from the fence.
But it could also be from the teeth of the still-moaning zombie head she'd had to kick away from her group of survivors while Captain America was rescuing them from the mall.