AN: Here it is: the fanfiction that I've been sitting on for the past three weeks, agonising over whether i should upload it or keep it to myself! First of all, I'd like to say thanks for taking some time to read this story. Even if you're here under duress. Especially if you're here under duress. I decided to do a challenge where I hit the 'random' button on TV Tropes I and I would write a story based on that trope and lucky me got 'Everything's Deader with Zombies' so I did it and this is the result: the Legend of Zelda Zombie AU! Although technically it's a 'Re-dead Apocalypse Modern AU'. This is the first chapter of a story about zombies so it's a bit serious (and a bit short. Yikes!) but hopefully the subsequent chapters will be a little more light-hearted. What is definitely going to remain constant is the presence of descriptions of people's heads getting bashed in with baseball bats so if you don't like to see descriptions of people's heads getting bashed in with baseball bats then maybe don't read. Also, this is hopefully going to be a novel-length fanfic. We're in this for the long haul, ladies and gents!

Oh, and please review!

Link hadn't been able to sleep a wink that night. Even though he knew that he needed his rest more than ever for the stunt he was about to attempt his nerves had gotten the better of him and he had spent the entire night counting out the canned food he'd been collecting from the now-empty houses for his trip. Although he had probably assembled enough cans to build a new town in the dark, damp cellar where he'd established his base in the end he could only take a few of them with him.

Hyrule Castle Town was far away, yes, but he planned to shorten the journey by travelling by car. He'd spent the past few days checking people's houses to see if their cars were still there and if they had enough gas in them to take him all the way to Castle Town before finally settling on the one that had belonged to the Abbotts, whose cellar he was sleeping in. The Abbotts had left Ordon when the outbreak first began. Fled, Link assumed, but by some stroke of luck they had left their car behind. At any rate, if the car broke down on his way to Castle Town he needed to be sure that he could carry whatever he packed in his backpack without slowing down too much or overexerting himself.

He wasn't tired, though, despite the sleepless night nor was he anxious about the task he was about to undertake. It had become painfully clear that every moment he remained in Ordon was a moment of borrowed time. Today was the Day, he'd decided, and he would do whatever it took. Ordon might not have been a bigger village than it once was but there still couldn't have been more than two hundred people living there and it was still in the middle of nowhere. There was no-one left to help and no-one coming to rescue him, he would have to escape Ordon or else he would die there.

He waited for the noises in the street to subside, as they always did at daybreak, before he even dared to open the cellar door. Sure he was desperate but there was certainly no point in being stupid and getting himself killed. He slowly raised the door a fraction of an inch; just enough to peek through but not enough to be noticed.

Ordon was still exactly as it had been when he'd shut himself in the cellar the previous night: eerie, quiet and totally empty, the windows of the abandoned houses dark and cavernous like the eye sockets of enormous skulls bleaching in the sun. Here and there a toppled telephone pole or broken fence or odd bits of rubbish rolling across the street like tumbleweeds signified that humans had lived there once but other than that everything was as still and as silent as the grave. In the beginning he had prayed to the goddesses every night that when he got up in the morning everything would be back to normal but every morning he would awaken to the same desolate nightmare. The goddesses could be cruel when they wanted. Link knew that better than anyone.

When he didn't see or hear any shuffling feet nearby he scooped up his 'weapon', the gleaming aluminium baseball bat that he had used when he played on his high school's baseball team back before everything went to hell. His lucky bat, he'd called it. He hoisted himself through the gaping hole, shut the trap door as quietly as possible and scampered into the nearby garage.

Link cautiously approached the massive black SUV that was parked inside, glinting impressively in the half-light. Something was off though. Namely that there was a dead body sprawled across the hood of the vehicle and another one lying on the ground. Link felt a lump grow in his throat. He'd gone to school with those dead bodies. Alek and Miriam, he thought despairingly before forcing himself to give the corpses a few hard whacks with his bat to make sure they were really, really dead.

He grabbed formerly-Alek by the ankle and yanked him off the hood with a violent tug, wincing when his head made contact with the concrete with a loud crack. He took out the car key, a flat, black piece of plastic about the size of a credit card and pressed the button to open the door. Nothing happened. Link looked at the car key in annoyance. When was the last time the Abbotts bothered to change the batteries in this thing? He wondered.

He chucked the useless key aside before crouching next to Alek to search the pockets of his jacket for the keys to the SUV. Obviously he and Miriam had had the same idea that he'd had and had been trying to escape when they were attacked so it made sense that one of them might have a second key on them. The real, old fashioned one that he should have taken in the first place. Unfortunately, Alek's pockets were entirely empty except for a fat wad of bills and some lint. Link put the money into one of the cavernous pockets of his green bomber jacket for safekeeping. He left the lint where it was.

He anxiously searched Miriam's body as well, doing his best to ignore the stiffness of her limbs, the pervasive smell of rotting meat and the utter depravity of what he was doing but Miriam's pockets turned out to be just as empty as Alek's, although he did manage to recover a container of mints. Who packs mints when they're fleeing for their lives? Link wondered in annoyance but he pocketed the mints too.

His eyes flitted nervously to the door that undoubtedly lead to the kitchen, if his hunch was correct and all the houses in the neighbourhood were laid out the same, yet he stayed rooted to the spot, frozen with indecision. The kitchen was as good a place as any to continue his search for the keys, he knew, and he probably wouldn't be able to get out of Ordon alive without transportation. On the other hand he also knew that the insides of houses were very dangerous and should be avoided at all costs, no matter how abandoned they seemed. He'd seen so many people get killed because they'd decided to take shelter in one of the houses.

But he'd been smart. Now he was the only one left and he had a decision to make on his own.

If he went into the Abbott's house, found the key and made it back outside he could be safe and out of Ordon within the hour. On the other hand, whatever had killed Alek and Miriam could still be around and if he went into the house he might never come out again, even if he did find the key. He could try to scout one of the other houses for another abandoned car. There were plenty. Hardly anyone had managed to survive even the first wave of the attack on Ordon, he had only survived due to what had most likely been an act of divine providence. But going looking for another car meant walking exposed through the streets of Ordon, investigating new, possibly hazardous areas, moving further and further away from his established shelter. And of course if he didn't try anything at all and just stayed in Ordon he was a dead man, no two ways about it.

Escape Ordon or die here, a voice in Link's head reminded him.

His eyes flicked back to the kitchen door, noticing that it was hanging slightly ajar, enticingly. Or perhaps forebodingly. Link took a deep breath and pushed the door open. Better the devil you know, he decided. The Abbott's kitchen looked surprisingly normal with everything still in its place and neat as a pin. The sunlight streamed through the white and green gingham check curtains that adorned the small window over the sink, bathing the room in warm light. Pots and pans still hung from their hooks over the stove, swaying in the gentle breeze. Even the cupboards were still closed, even though Link was quite certain that there was absolutely nothing left in them. It was more than a little unsettling, considering everything that had happened.

Link pushed his misgivings aside and got to work, pulling out a few of the kitchen drawers and searching them as quickly as he could without rattling anything inside but turned up with nothing yet again. Just as he decided that he would be better off searching for some sort of catch-all tray instead of riffling through the Abbotts' silverware a loud moan from behind him made his blood run cold.

He turned, slowly, and came face-to-face with his worst nightmare. Three re-deads were watching him curiously from their place in front of the archway that lead to the rest of the house, blocking his path. He hardly recognised two of them, their faces were so badly decomposed, but they might have been Mr. and Mrs. Abbott. Clearly, he'd been wrong about them skipping town. They'd been Turned all this time and had just been hiding out in some nook or cranny of the house waiting for someone like him or Alek and Miriam to do something stupid like come inside.

It wasn't them Link was afraid of, though, although he was plenty afraid of them. The one that truly terrified him was the one in the middle, flanked by Mr. and Mrs. Abbott's rotting frames. The one that was undoubtedly his mother. He hadn't realised that this was what had become of her. Tears immediately pricked at his eyes, threatening to fall but he quickly wiped them away. He'd have time to cry for his mother later, preferably when she wasn't trying to eat him.

The three re-deads slowly advanced on him, apparently deciding that Link was an appropriate source of food. He had no idea how they'd managed to come to that conclusion, though, since his mother was the only one among them who still had any eyes. Link began to very gradually back away towards the door to the garage, holding his breath as his hand groped casually for the doorknob. Re-deads weren't very fast, he'd learned from experience, unless he moved too suddenly or made any noise at which point they would charge him.

As if on cue, Link stumbled on a broom that had been leaning next to the door, causing it to hit the ground with a loud clatter that pierced silence of the morning like a gunshot. One of the Abbotts, probably Mrs. Abbott, judging by the remains of what Link judged to be feminine clothing that still clung to her body, lunged at him. Link threw himself to one side, instinctively dropping into a crouch and rolling out of the reach of the other two as Mrs. Abbott collided with the door Link had just been trying to get open. The two remaining re-deads turned to Link while Mrs. Abbott tried to get her limbs back under her.

Link jumped to his feet and tried to make his escape through the door that led into the house, which had been cleared now that the re-deads were coming towards him. Then one of them did the very thing he had been dreading, it opened its mouth and let out a long, high pitched scream. It wasn't the first time he had heard a re-dead's scream but he sincerely hoped that it would be his last. A profound sense of dread gripped his heart like an icy hand. His blood ran cold and his limbs seized in abject terror, trapping him mid-stride and allowing the re-deads to slowly close the distance between them.

Link squeezed his eyes shut as tremors racked his body. It looked like he wouldn't be escaping Ordon after all. But at least he had tried. All that mattered was that he had tried. Things could be a lot worse, he convinced himself, although he was acutely aware that things could literally not be any worse. I'm going to join my family. And I can finally get rid of this damn crick in my neck that's been bothering me.

As he opened his eyes to get a last glimpse of the world before he was brutally dismembered a glint from the counter furthest from him caught his attention. His eyes widened to the size of saucers. No way, he thought. There was the car key, the real one this time, sitting literally five feet in front of him. If he could break free from his paralysis he still had a chance to grab them and get away.

Escape Ordon or die here, the voice in his head said again. And he certainly didn't want to die there.

He fought to regain control of his body, studiously ignoring the cold, clammy and slightly mushy grip of the re-dead that had decided to latch onto his arm. There was no way he was getting eaten when the means to his salvation was so close at hand. His fear evaporated, burned away by his newfound determination, and the spell seemed to break all at once, releasing him. All the effort Link had been pumping into his limbs to get them to move while under the effects of the re-dead's scream coursed through him all at once, causing him to shoot off like a bullet, out of the reach of the monsters and straight to the counter where the keys were sitting. The re-dead that had been holding onto him, Mrs. Abbott, had had its arm ripped cleanly out of the socket by the sudden movement and now lay uselessly on the floor. Not that it seemed to care, or even feel it as it was still charging at him, so completely focused on the task of eating his flesh that it didn't even glance down.

Link managed to seize the key and stuff them into his pocket before one of the re-deads, Mr. Abbott tackled him and he and the re-dead both went down hard in a tangle of flailing limbs. Link cracked his head against the counter so hard that he saw stars and lost his grip on the bat which went rolling out of his reach off to some distant corner of the room but he managed to get his hands up and around the re-dead's neck in time to stop it from delivering a fatal bite. Mr. Abbott's rotting face and snapping jaws completely filled Link's field of vision as he struggled to hold him at bay, a task which was proving extremely difficult. Mr. Abbott had been bigger than Link even in his normal, human state and the re-dead was significantly stronger than Mr. Abbott had ever been in life, as all re-deads were, and the boost strength Link had felt after overcoming the re-dead's curse had been short-lived and was quickly failing him. In a last-ditch effort to escape Link released the re-dead's neck and rolled to the side causing it to fall face-first against the floor.

Link scrambled to his feet and raced towards his bat while Mr. Abbott recovered himself and Mrs. Abbott and his mother converged on him, ready to tear him to shreds. Adrenaline surged through his veins and the next few moments went by in a blur. Link didn't know what he was doing but he executed it so perfectly, so naturally it felt like he was born to do it. His hand closed around the soft, purple grip of his bat just as the re-dead that had formerly been Mrs. Abbott grabbed Link by the arm and yanked him towards itself. Link somehow used the momentum to his own advantage, swinging himself in a circle around it instead of towards it. His other hand gripped the handle of the baseball bat, tightening his hold on it and he swung it with all his might at the monster, catching it in the side of its head.

Link had caved in a couple of heads before in his short time battling re-deads, but none quite so spectacularly. Mrs. Abbott's neck snapped to the side with a gruesome cracking noise but that was nothing compared to the sizeable dent the bat had left in the woman's now mushy and misshapen head. Link stared with a mixture of awe, relief and revulsion as Mrs. Abbott's body collapsed on the linoleum tiles of her kitchen and stayed there.

The growls of the other two re-deads snapped Link out of his reverie and back to the present and he bolted for the garage, feeling his pocket to make sure that the key was still there. Mr. Abbott tried to grab onto him on the way but after dispatching Mrs. Abbott with all the cold precision of a career killer Link had too much adrenaline pumping through him now to even flinch and dropped the man with one swift blow to the head.

He just managed to skid to a halt before he ran straight into the arms of the last re-dead that remained, now guarding the door. His mother. She opened her mouth and screeched at him but this time the scream produced nothing more than a tingling feeling in his extremities. She might as well have been demanding that he clean his room for all the good it had done.

Link hefted his bat to administer the killing blow but then faltered at the mast second. For a moment he worried that maybe he had been wrong and the re-dead's scream was still plenty effective but then he realised what was wrong with him. He couldn't bring himself to hurt his mother. Even though she had turned into a horrible, salivating monster, compared to the others he had seen she still seemed almost human. She still had her eyes, the same pale gold eyes that had gazed lovingly at him when she had come to tuck him into bed every night, the same eyes that she had passed on to him and his now deceased sister. Her hair was still drawn up in the trademark loose bun she wore every single day and only took down on very special occasions. She was even wearing her favourite dress, a cinched pink housedress with a pattern of tiny white flowers and nail polish in her favourite colour to match.

Link lowered his bat, defeated. He couldn't kill his mother. What sort of a person was he to even think of that? His mother snarled wetly and reached for him, almost as though she was planning to draw him into a hug and for a moment Link almost fell for it. That is, until she suddenly threw herself at him and grabbed his arms. Link panicked and swung his bat wildly, delivering a blow across both legs. His mother released him, making a high-pitched keening noise that failed to drown out the loud cracking noise her legs made as her knees broke. Link backed away, shuddering in shock at what he had just done and fighting to keep his breakfast down.

Link looked down at his mother, who now lay sprawled over the kitchen tiles snapping and foaming at the mouth in her desperation to take a bite out of him. He blinked rapidly, stunned, as his rose-tinted glasses finally shattered and he could see that those bright gold eyes of hers were now staring and devoid of any emotion, her pupils blown so wide that only a thin band of colour remained and what was left was tinged with red. Her hair, which once toed the line at stylishly unkempt was now and absolute mess. Her pink housedress was in tatters. Some of her fingernails and even a few of her fingers were entirely missing. The creature in front of him was not his mother, it wasn't even human. It was just a poor, hollow imitation of someone he used to love.

He turned away from it and made to leave through the door but the ugly gurgling noises made by the re-dead as it attempted to claw its way over to him made him think better of it. He paused for a moment in the doorway before returning to the monster's side and, after a moment's deliberation, planted his boot on its head to prevent it from struggling away as he tightened his grip on his bat and lined up his shot. It was the least he could do to honour the memory of the people of Ordon Village, he figured. The re-deads had gotten his father, his sister, his grandmother and most of his friends, all right before his own eyes. He'd tried to save them all. Of course he'd tried to save them. In the end he had failed them and afterwards there hadn't been enough left even to bury. He felt bad that he'd felt relieved that it also meant there wasn't enough left to come after him either. The least he could do was to give his mother peaceful rest.

He raised his bat, whispered a silent prayer for his mother's soul to the goddesses and swung.

That day ended up not being the Day after all. It had taken Link a long time to drag the bodies of his mother, the Abbots, Alek and Miriam to the back yard and set them all alight, a feat that was much easier achieved in movies than in real life. By the time the corpses had been reduced to piles of charred bones, which he quickly buried in shallow but separate graves in the yard nightfall had already come. No matter how desperate he was to escape Ordon he didn't think he'd ever be so desperate that he'd risk going out at night, even in a vehicle. Re-deads were a hundred times more active at night. And a hundred times more vicious. A scrawny guy like him didn't even stand a chance against them.

When he got to Castle Town he would have a new life. He would find a new place to live and a new high school to go to or else he would just get a job and a re-dead would never bother him. He was jolted out of his reverie when a re-dead wandered into his field of vision and began picking at the remains of some poor Ordonian citizen.

Link shook his head to clear it. He could never have that life he wanted. Not as long as the memory of Ordon still haunted him. He would spend the remainder of his days reliving the good times in empty lot where he'd played catch with his father as a kid and the not-so-good time his friend Elliot given himself up as a distraction to hold a horde of re-deads at bay for just long enough to give their little group sufficient time to get to safety while Elliot himself was torn to pieces.

He wouldn't be able to pass an ice-cream parlour without remembering the one that his coach used to bring the baseball team to congratulate them for a game well-played by treating them to a scoop of Ordon's famous pumpkin ice-cream. He and the team had had to hold out for almost a week on a melted vat of that Ordon ice-cream and assorted sprinkles when the horde first hit Ordon. As it was now Link never even wanted to see an ice-cream cone ever again.

He jerked himself up from the ground, went downstairs and collected a couple of pots and pans and the extra container of gasoline he'd planned on taking along with him in case the SUV stalled for gas. He realised that he was about to waste good petrol but he figured that he valued his peace of mind more than he dreaded having to walk from Ordon to Castle Town. He unlocked the front door and threw it open with a loud bang, drawing the attention of the re-deads nearby who began to moan and stagger awkwardly in his direction. It wasn't nearly enough.

"I'm right here you fetid piles of shit! Come and get me!" he all but screamed, banging the pots and pans together for good measure.

More re-deads began to converge on his location. Link locked the door, pulling a sofa in front of it to ensure that it stayed firmly shut, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He poked his head out the window and emptied the container of gasoline over the crowd of re-deads that had gathered, emitting the horrid low moans that they made when they had spotted prey that was not quite within their reach. More were approaching from a distance, attracted by the noise made by their compatriots.

"That's right, guys, live meat! Right here!" he yelled as he struck a match and threw it into the crowd.

He spent the night sleeping fitfully in the back seat of the Abbott's SUV with the windows up and a few extra supplies he'd collected while going through the Abbotts' house clustered around him for safekeeping: a couple of flashlights, a few more tins of food, another backpack, a pair of aviators and a warm knitted beanie striped with various shades of green.

He wasn't exactly spoiled for choice where it came to shelter, after all. He'd made sure that every, last re-dead burned until it was nothing more than a pile of blackened bones. After that was done he'd driven around town and burned the houses, starting with the Abbotts', of course, the fences, the farmhouses…hell, he would have burned the river if it was possible. Then he dunked himself in the spring to wash off any ash and re-dead bits that might still be clinging to him, changed his clothes and got ready to leave. It was only a matter of time before someone took notice and came to see what was wrong now that he'd gone and sent Ordon up in a pillar of smoking plague.

Come morning, Link roused himself from sleep and forced the contents of a can of baked beans down his throat before he started the vehicle. There was no sense heading out on an empty stomach. The headlights lanced through the morning fog, casting an eerie light on his surroundings and attracting the attention of a few stray re-deads that were still milling about the area. Link put on the sunglasses to protect his eyes from the morning sun and gunned the engines.

The last memory of home he had as he left Ordon behind was that he had only ever earned his learner's permit and didn't actually know how to drive.