She put on her glasses, slipped a robe on over the nightgown, and looked throughout the house. No Jane.
She considered going out and looking for her, but entering the kitchen she saw that Jane had thoughtfully left her a meal. After digging in for half an hour or so, she finally noticed a note on the refridgerator:
"Daria, don't be alarmed if I'm not home when you wake up. I have some errands to run that might keep me out past sunset, but if they do I'll just stow away at the high school like I used to a few months ago. I'll be back tomorrow. Hugs and kisses, Jane."
Daria was a little relieved that Jane's absence was planned. She decided, in lieu of venturing out into the wilds of Lawndale, to kick back in the living room and read the latest haul of books Jane had scavenged from Books by the Ton.
The first novel she plucked out of the box was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. It wouldn't be something she regularly went for, but she wasn't too picky these days.
As she read, her thoughts began to slowly wander. She recalled the day, some months ago, that she was in the garage, looking through old boxes of hers, that she passed out. That was just a day or two before Jane moved in, actually...
She realized that there were in fact more boxes upstairs of which she was unaware of the contents. Old books of hers might be up there...
Daria marked her place in the book and retreated upstairs. There, it was simple to pull the ladder down and climb up inside.
She squinted; even with her keen night-sight, she could barely make out anything in the attic. She climbed back down and retrieved one of the lanterns Jane kept in the linen closet, switching it on. Able to see now, she opened up the nearest box. Tax records. Daria closed it and pushed it to the side.
The next box had Quinn's baby things. Daria felt a little sad about what had happened to Quinn, but reflected that Quinn wouldn't have had a chance either way.
Daria was about to go through more boxes when she noticed someting unusual at the far side of the attic -- a door. Daria never had cause to come up here before, so didn't know where the door led. If she had to guess, she would say it was a closet. Daria approached the door and turned the knob.
Another Daria stood on the other side of the door.
XXXX
Daria gritted her teeth as she fired her shotgun into the charging wall of zombies. The shot knocked a few down, and a few more tripped over those, slowing the mass just long enough to allow Daria to climb up the ladder to the attic. She was unable to pull the ladder up after her, as the undead had already reached it and begun climbing up, but she managed to slam the door down and move a nearby box over it, buying her a few more seconds.
"How could I have been so stupid!" she cursed herself. Over the past few weeks, she noticed the number of zombies in town was dramatically increasing. When once she would only find a few of the unconscious undead in her daily scavenging, she would find upwards of several dozen on her street alone. She strongly suspected that the dead was somehow able to sense her, even from great distances, and had come for her. She had gotten extra lumber to reinforce the boarded-up windows and improve the strength of the doors, but just after midnight the weight of the zombies pressing on the house grew too much.
She was first alerted of this by a loud cracking sound and the increase in volume of hunger moans. She ran to the front door to discover that the frame itself was seconds away from giving in entirely -- she could see hands thrusting their way into the house -- and so Daria grabbed her shotgun (which she had thoughtfully left propped up next to the staircase) and dashed up the stairs just as the hungry, angry mob battered her door all the way down and rushed in.
In retrospect, staying in her house had been blindingly stupid. She had stayed out of an uncharacteristic sense of nostalgia and sentiment; the high school or the local Payday would have sufficed much better as fortresses, but Daria just had to act like a regular human being for once. And now it would cost her her life.
She contemplated the shotgun in her lap, and thought that at least turning the upper two-thirds of her head into a fine mist would be as quick and painless as she could expect. She looked around for any other option...
A door.
Daria stood and dashed to it, hoping for maybe a crawl-space entrance or something. If she could wait out the zombies until sunrise, she might have a chance. She turned the knob.
Another Daria stood on the other side of the door.
XXXX
Daria was about to speak when the other Daria abruptly fainted. For one brief moment she had thought the closet contained a full-length mirror, but the little details (the shotgun that she didn't actually have, the fainting, the fact that the other Daria was in fact alive) dispelled that notion quickly enough. Questions shot through Daria's mind: Where did Other Daria come from? How was she alive? How could there be two Darias?
Daria then noticed that the room the other Daria was in was, for the most part, a mirror of the attic she stood in herself. And then she noticed the door at the far end fly open, zombies climbing up, hungry for the living flesh before her. She reacted instantly, scooping up the shotgun Other Daria had let fall and firing into the dead (Jane had insisted on teaching her how to use the various firearms she had acquired, which paid off in spades now). After she slowed down their advance some, she reached down again and grabbed Other Daria by the jacket, pulling her forcefully into her attic and slamming the door. She searched Other Daria for ammo to reload the shotgun as she kept an eye on the door, waiting for it to rattle, fists pounding on it from the other side, smashing it down...
Nothing happened. The door remained silent. Daria decided to let sleeping doors lie, and focused on the new arrival. She wondered how Jane would react. Before she could do anything else, though, she started feeling hungry again, and retreated downstairs to the kitchen, where Jane had left the cadavers Daria fed on.
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Another new fic from me in a rather short period of time! I wonder if I'm actually more productive in the summer months than in the winter ones...perhaps I should move to a warmer climate and be productive all year 'round.
Anyway, this is my mashup of TAG fics Omega Jane and Illusions, available at these two links: . and . . He stated in a thread on the PPMB that people could go ahead and do whatever crazy thing they liked with his fics, so I took that as an invitation to write this thing up that's been quietly rolling around in my head for a while. (IF you think it sux and that I'm a doodyhead, TAG, I'll gladly take it down and punish myself and stuff).
By the way, since this is pretty much a sequel to Omega Jane, you should probably go and read that so you know what the heck is going on. I'm going to be writing this fic as if you already read Omega Jane, so if you haven't already read it a lot of stuff will go just flying over your head. It's also a damn good fic on its own, so read it no matter what.
Also, be sure to check my profile for the latest notes on my fics and stuff.
