Disclaimer: If I owned them, I'd have made the DVDs come out faster.
Warnings: character death, references to sex, expletives, the end of the world
Notes: DrummerJew did my challenge, so I repaid her with fic. This is insanity to the max. Surprise crossover at the end.
Miles to Go (do not go gentle)
The end of days begins when the last two minutes of Grey's Anatomy are cut off.
No, seriously.
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Later on in the papers, it will say that the power went out at 10:58.
At first they think someone flipped the wrong switch over at the power plant or something.
Then they hear about the bombs in Denver and Atlanta.
Then people start getting sick.
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It's just so expected that the world is ending and they still have to go to the kakistocracy that calls itself Arcadia High.
Everything is the same, almost. Teachers keep giving out assignments that will do absolutely nothing for Grace in an event of . . . well, anything, and the stupid jocks are still picking on the stupid geeks, and the cheerleaders are still more worried about their highlights than the fact that their IQ is rapidly hitting below room temperature.
But there's an underlying something that's everywhere. People are nervous, even though the government swears it's in control of the situation. As if the president could be in control of anything except his own bladder. Actually, Grace wouldn't be surprised if he's still using Pull Ups.
There are people who are planning to make a run for it - she hears her father talking to some of the people in his congregation - and there are people who already have.
Fewer kids show up to class and they're not at the arcade.
Price's office is empty one morning.
"It's the end of the world," Friedman says as they walk past a frazzled teacher who doesn't know where to send the class clown off to.
"It's not," Joan insists. Her eyes are wide, but her tone is sure. "It can't be. He won't let this happen. He can't."
Grace doesn't say anything.
Her mother died the night before.
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She remembers waiting up, in the living room, watching infomercials for products that promise to help you lose 70 pounds in ten days when her father came in through the back door. He let it close quietly, as if he were trying not to wake her up.
As if she could sleep. As if she hadn't been staying up all those years to make sure Sarah didn't asphyxiate on her own vomit or crack her skull falling down the stairs.
He looked genuinely surprised to see Grace up. Not surprised that she was up, but surprised that she was here at all, and she thought, It's almost as if he doesn't remember me.
That's when she knew it was bad.
"We've lost your mother," he said. Shadows flicker across his face.
The people on TV kept talking.
They'd lost her mother a long time ago.
But this, this was ---
It was the goddamn flu, okay? They have vaccines for that! Goodness knows Walmart Pharmacy keeps playing ads for it every seven seconds. People don't die from the flu anymore, not here, not in America, not in Arcadia.
Not her mother.
"The hospital was busy," her father whispered, and Grace knows what it means.
Everyone is dying.
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Her father dies before they even finish sitting shivah.
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Kevin goes off to the next town to follow some story for the paper and never comes back.
Mr. Girardi is always at work. The phone lines are dead and the networks overstressed, so no one can reach him, and he's never in when they look for him at the station.
Mrs. Girardi closes her eyes one afternoon and doesn't open them again.
Joan gets sick like she did the first time, ranting and raving about God. Grace isn't there when she dies - she went to get food and supplies from the store, which took forever because there wasn't much left that hadn't been looted - Luke tells her afterwards.
Grace sits by the foot of Joan's bedroom door and tries to understand. Not why Joan died, but that Joan had died in such an ordinary way. It just didn't seem like a Joan thing to do.
Grace would've expected fireworks, a balloon float, or some other glorious disaster.
It's just that Grace always thought Joan would live forever.
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"It's just you and me," says Luke.
He seems so young for a minute, like he's too small for his own body. He's shot up another two inches since the beginning of the year and now he actually has something other than a ride home from the tri-mathalon for an excuse to shave. He's skinny and as he bends over the shovel, trying to hack his way through the half-thawed ground, he looks like a kid in a sandbox, not someone digging a grave for his mother and sister.
He's always been a kid, no matter how weird-smart-old-man he seemed at times.
Grace hasn't been a kid since she was eleven years old.
She'll have to show him the ropes.
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In her dream, her father is sitting in their living room. Over on the couch is the guy Grace has seen around lurking around the school, the one Joan is friends with.
Was friends with.
"Dad," Grace breathes, and for a split second she thinks she's dead, and she's glad, glad that wherever she is now, her father is there with her.
Her father smiles at her, the same smile he wore for days after her Bat Mitzvah. "I'm proud of you, Gracie," he says. "I know you're going to do fine."
"Do what fine?" Grace narrows her eyes towards the guy in the tan jacket. He looks like he could be a popular kid. He has mastered that holier-than-thou attitude perfectly. "What are you making him make me do?"
The guy just looks at her.
Grace decides that if she can punch him in the face, then this isn't a dream.
"You have to leave, Grace," her father says.
"No," she says.
He reaches out and touches her hand. "There's nothing left for you here," he tells her softly.
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"Let's get out of here," says Grace.
Luke studies her for a long moment, but doesn't ask any questions.
He finds them a minivan that would've been Grace's worst nightmare back in the day, but the world ending and people everywhere dropping like flies has put things a little in perspective.
Still, she couldn't help herself. "You couldn't have found something less destructive to our planet?"
Luke glares at her.
It turns out to be a good choice, because they can fold down the seats in the back to store a lot of things. Like sixteen hundred boxes of Hamburger Helper and fifty gallons of water. A first aid kit. Canned peaches and tuna and a police-issued point-44.
Luke went and got it from the police station. He didn't say, but from the way his eyes were scrubbed red when he came out, Grace guessed that the gun was his father's.
He put Mr. Girardi's police badge into the pocket of his coat and it's been there since.
Grace has her father's yarmulke, one of Joan's scarves, and a sketchbook of Mrs. Girardi's.
She takes the stuffed whale her mother gave her when she was six. Luke doesn't say anything; he has his own ratty plush rabbit stashed in the back somewhere.
They leave at daybreak.
By the time the sun is overhead, Arcadia is a dim memory.
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They drive slow. The traffic isn't bad, because there isn't really any, but they have to get around all the stalled cars, and sometimes they look for survivors.
"Where are we going?" Luke asks. He consults the map with the same earnestness he used to spend on chemistry labs and physics projects.
Grace thinks it's a shame everybody is dead, because now is a good time to point out to everyone how pointless the stuff they made her do in school really was. How does stoichiometry help you figure how to get to a place that isn't filled with dead bodies? Is there even a place that isn't filled with dead bodies by this point?
"Just go wherever," Grace says. She leans against the window, tired.
The air smells like cooked flesh and copper.
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The only working stations on FM are country music, or Christian rock.
They listen to Achy Breaky Heart five times before Grace breaks the radio.
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It's so fucking cliché when they have sex for the first time that Grace wants to throttle somebody.
Of course, she and Luke are the only people around for miles - the only people alive for miles - so the whole throttling somebody thing doesn't work out.
Backseat of the car, rough and hurried fumbling; she doesn't come, and when he does, he leans down and holds her close, and she buries her face in his neck.
He smells like salt and sweat and the last traces of that disgusting pickled-egg aftershave she used to hate so much, and she thinks, He's alive. We both are, and for a split second she almost thanks God, before she remembers that this is the same God who let the world end.
She makes him use a condom, because, seriously, she doesn't fucking care that they're the last two people alive --- she is not going to be in charge of repopulating the earth.
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They find the baby in a parking lot outside of K-Mart.
Grace is the one who hears him screaming and when she opens the door, the smell is so rancid that she would've thought it was the kid's parents, slumped over in the front seats.
But no, it is all him. All screaming twenty-three pounds of him.
"Grace, we can't just leave him here," Luke says as he holds the rugrat at arm's length and tries to scrub him down with alcohol wipes.
Grace hates babies. It's a rule. It's not personal. She just has no use for human beings until they're old enough to vote. Nor does she have any use for most human beings afterwards.
How long did the kid stay in that car? she wonders.
In the end it doesn't matter if it's four days or four hours. There was never really a choice to begin with.
"You go wipe his ass while I install the carseat," she tells Luke.
The fucking giant piece of plastic and vinyl reeks of bananas.
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The kid's name is Ben. He tells Grace with a mouth full of Cheerios.
"Say it, don't spray it," Grace snarls, wiping the soggy crumbs from her shirt.
The runt thinks it's the funniest thing in the world and laughs, chewed up Cheerios flying everywhere.
Luke smirks. "Good job."
Grace puts him on babysitting detail and drives the damn minivan herself.
Ben cries until Grace shoves her stuffed whale into his arms, and then it's like magic. He sucks his thumb and closes his eyes and falls right to sleep.
Luke sings to him, sometimes, usually off-key. His repertoire is limited to the Periodic Table song, the present passive Latin verb endings to the tune of We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
"Thought you hated sports," Grace says one night as he's rocking Ben to sleep.
Luke looks away, and when he turns back to her, his smile is sad, and she knows he's thinking of all the times his family made him go to Kevin's games and he hated every second of it.
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"Do you think he knew?"
The afternoon sun is blindingly bright. Grace puts her feet on the dashboard and slinks down in the seat, covering her face with her hoodie.
Luke doesn't have to see her to know she's talking about her father. "Know what?"
She's grateful for the hoodie, that he can't see her. The sun warms her face through the fabric. "I hated him for leaving me to deal with her. But I didn't blame him for it."
She closes her eyes and sees nothing but red: the color of ripped flesh.
She swallows.
"Unfortunately, because I'm me, I only told him the first part."
Luke is quiet. Ben babbles to himself in the back, and Grace can make out some of his words. The kid is so weird, you know? He says "truck" when he means "dog," and he calls everyone Anna.
"Grace," Luke tells her as the car makes a left turn, "there is not a doubt in my mind that your father understood."
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Grace makes Luke stop at a Borders to pick up some reading material for Ben. Ben seems pretty happy to be chewing on Luke's copy of Physician's Desk Reference, but Grace is tired of listening to Luke explain to him how the entire world being wiped out by the flu wasn't exactly unexpected.
"There have been several compelling cases of precedence," Luke exclaims, almost cheerfully, probably happy to have someone listen to his science psycho-babble. "The Yellow Fever epidemic in the late 18th century, the Spanish flu in 1918 . . . SARS, back in '03 should have been a bigger deal, but we stopped it, and now this, this is different because it's engineered and the DNA of the virus has been altered to make it more resili ---"
"Can't you traumatize him by telling him about the boy cried wolf, or Santa, or something remotely normal?" Grace asks.
Luke raises his eyebrow at her. "Santa?"
"What? Some old, fat guy dressed like a stop sign breaking into your house once a year and eating your milk and cookies --- if that's not traumatizing, I don't know what is."
Luke spends an hour gushing over the selection in the natural science section while Grace picks up a couple of classics: Anasazi Boys, 1984, and How to Get Your Toddler to Shut the Fuck Up. For the rugrat, she gets Goodnight, Moon and the True Story of the Three Little Pigs, which she has always preferred to the original.
She's reading Runaway Bunny to him when Luke appears with a hardcover edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "This was my favorite book when I was little," he says, rubbing his fingers lovingly over the spine.
"Hot for the Queen of Hearts?" Grace probes.
His brows furrow. "I appreciated all the philosophical concepts behind it, and I'm sure you're aware Lewis Carroll was a mathematician."
Ben tugs on Grace's sleeve and says, "Bunny."
Say what you will about the knee-nibbler, but he has good taste.
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At a gas station in Omaha, they finally run into another person. Five of them, actually, a family from Dallas, the only family from Dallas, that survived.
Grace has never been much of a talker to begin with, and suddenly seeing someone else, someone who isn't Luke or Ben, unsettles her a little.
What does she know about these people? They could be serial killers, extended relatives of the Manson family.
Her mouth feels stiff, her tongue dry, as if she's forgotten how to form words. Luke makes up for her by rambling on about flu strains and nuclear winter and his theory about using the stars as a guide to where they are going.
"You mean follow the big one in the East?" Grace jabs him in the chest. "What are we, the three freaking wisemen?"
The family tells them that they heard along the way that there is a town up in Canada where survivors are gathering. "Just a little north of the border. You can get through to it from Montana," the father, a tall, sunburnt man - even in winter - tells them.
Then they are gone, and it's Luke and Grace and the runt again.
"Do we go?" Luke asks her as they finish filling up their tank.
"Are we survivors?" she asks.
He smiles and nods at Ben, who's crawling across the floor of the van in search of fallen rice crispies and Cheetos. "Like cockroaches."
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There are good days, and there are bad days.
Good days are when the sky is the color of pink lemonade and the tips of tree branches are starting to green, and the open road is so beautiful Grace can almost forget that there's nothing left but her and Luke and everything inside their car. Nothing, nobody, just them against the world, which doesn't sound as frightening as it does an adventure.
Bad days are when she and Luke get on each other's nerves and Ben gets an ear infection and there's no medicine and they have a flat tire and have to walk seven miles to get to a has-been garage.
Bad days are when they start running out of food, and the goddamn prairie never ends, just grass and grass and grass everywhere, gray-green like a grandmother's soft, sad eyes.
Grace will never understand why Dorothy ever left Oz.
Chickenshit lions and idiot scarecrows are still better than fields that stretch out forever, into nothingness.
Bad days are when she goes to sleep and dreams about God and her father and Joan and she wishes they were with her, except then she wakes up and Luke is there, his arms around her, and he is warm, and real, and she gets up and keeps on going.
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It's getting harder and harder to remember their faces.
Her father's.
Adam's.
Joan's.
"How long has it been?" she wants to ask, but doesn't, because it's been too long, and not long enough.
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They run into people again, sixty miles past the state line between South Dakota and Montana. A middle-aged man with his blonde stepdaughter, who is about Grace's age and has Grace's scowl.
"You two heading up to Canada, too?" Luke asks.
The blonde girl simply rolls her eyes at Luke, and Grace wants to slap her. Instead she lets Ben run wild with a jar of jam and then smearing his hands all over the girl's jeans.
"We're not going anywhere in particular," the man says.
There's something strange about the way he talks. He's too calm, like he's not scared at all about what happened and what may happen. Like he's already seen all of it.
He looks over at Grace and winks, and Grace wonders if he thinks she and Luke and Ben are some trailer trash family from West Virginia. They certainly look it, which annoys Grace a little, but it's not like she gave a crap what people thought about her to begin with.
The guy rummages through the back of his truck and comes out holding a grocery bag. "I've got the ingredients for s'mores," he tells Grace. "There's more than enough to share. Care to join us?"
Grace doesn't want to trust him - you can't trust a person who wants to share his s'mores when there's barely anything left to eat - but she hasn't had anything chocolate since Chicago (horribly drafty, lots of rats) and she's not going to say no to a Hershey's bar.
She holds Ben in her lap and teaches him how to roast a marshmallow while Luke and the blonde girl figure out the graham crackers. Is she hitting on him? Because Grace can take her out, even with only a stick that has a marshmallow hanging off one end.
The girl's sour expression never changes, which Grace takes as a sign to save her can of whoop-ass for later.
The man finishes making the first s'more and offers it to Ben, who, hyped up with sugar, proceeds to run around them in circles until he topples over from sheer exhaustion.
"Lovely boys you've got there."
The man nods to Grace as they watch Luke carry Ben back into the van to tuck him in. Grace almost snorts at the boys being called lovely. And then at them being referred to as her boys.
"Your daughter looks cranky," Grace says, and the daughter stares at her with murder in her eyes, but the guy just laughs and hands Grace a s'more.
Their hands touch for a moment - his hand is large and brown, and cool, despite the fire, and it reminds her of her father's.
Grace feels light afterwards, she doesn't know why.
When it's just her and Luke left outside, they lie down by the glowing remains of the campfire. The air smells like smoke, but in a good way, like it does after the Fourth of July and you're stuffed with hamburgers and fries and waiting for the fireworks to start.
The sky is strings and strings of phosphorous lights and Luke tries to point out the constellations to her.
This one here is Andromeda: she was caught between her mother and father.
That one there is Orion: Artemis loved him, killed him by accident, placed him in the heavens so he wouldn't be forgotten.
But all Grace can see is the kitchen of the Girardi's house.
She sees Adam and Joan and her and Luke, cramming for a chemistry midterm the night before.
She sees her father, her mother, her grandmother, Becky Coogan before that sleepover.
She even sees Friedman and Glynis, perched on their stools, bug-eyed with protective goggles, anxiously waiting for their beaker to start bubbling.
At last, breaking the silence, she says, "We should go to bed."
Luke smiles at her sleepily, and she can see where his glasses have begun to crack. She makes a reminder to raid a Lenscrafters in the next town and get him a new pair.
He yawns, pulls her up to her feet, and kisses her.
"Early day tomorrow," he says, walking her back to the van, and Grace thinks there are worst places to be right now.
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They never make it to the border.
For those of you unfamiliar with Dead Like Me, the father and daughter Luke and Grace meet at the end are Rube and George. They are grim reapers.