Title: The Cemetery Dawn
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing: Eventual Puck/Kurt; other minor pairings
Warnings: Character death and gore. Also: slash and femslash.
Spoilers: All episodes that are out, to be safe.
Disclaimer: All characters and settings(except those of my own creation) belong to Fox.
Author's Note: Title comes from the wonderful song Magenta by Hooverphonic. Also: this is the first part of a zombie AU that I meant to enter into GleeBigBang. There were some personal issues, I never finished it, and now I'm posting it in bits and pieces. This version is also a little bit longer than the one on my LJ.
Summary: Zombie AU.
Word Count: 1,543
Prologue
T.S. Eliot said the world ended with a whimper, not a bang. Maybe that's true, somewhere. But here, in the empty halls of William McKinley High School, that is not what happens.
This is what does.
Day One
Not a bang or a whimper. A scream.
It sounds like someone being eviscerated, or someone who has just watched their child die, or maybe someone who has seen too much and cannot think of what else to do. It comes from a boy, huddled by a bank of lockers, his books a haphazard pile by his feet. He screams and screams – in hatred, in pain, in fear. Some things cannot be kept inside. The sound echoes around the darkened hallways, and it does not stop even when it does.
But no one can hear it. They've all gone home.
Day Two
The next day, it starts with a gasp. A gasp of terror, a gasp of disgust – it doesn't matter.
What does matter is that a girl, named Azalea, has just found a dead boy by her locker. He doesn't look even remotely asleep. His eyes are red and staring and they look so awake that she thinks for a moment that he might reach out and grab her. His fingernails have made long scratches where he clutched his arms; blood drips for one of the long gashes. Azalea has got some on her. She wipes it off hurriedly, and that is where it should end, but of course it doesn't. As she runs screaming to the first teacher she can find, the disease is already working her way into her system.
Kurt
Mr. Schuester is the first to die. And Kurt sees it all.
Well, he's not really the first. There's the boy who started it. The girl who spread it.
But Mr. Schuester is the first person that Kurt really knows, trusts, even when he's denying Kurt a solo or not noticing the crowd of bullies circling around him.
He's also the first to be ripped apart, torn at by so many fingernails and teeth.
After the girl stops sobbing about the dead boy but before her fingers make their imprint in Mr. Schue's flesh, Kurt sees a glint in her eyes. A glint of hatred. A glint of hunger. Then, a sickening crunch, and Kurt is running as fast as he can. His feet hit the floor with hollow thuds. He's never been quite so afraid in his life, and behind him the screams go on and on and do not stop, combine into one loud roar, and Kurt runs faster.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
He comes to the choir room and stops, sliding a little and smacking his hip on the doorknob.
"Ow," Kurt mutters, and locks himself in, then slumps into his usual chair. He's not sure why he came here,
[ yes you are, because it means safety and friendship and where else would you go, anyway? ]
knows that, tactically, it is not a good place to be. His childhood obsession with horror movies tells him that much – too many windows, too few hiding places. Also, there's a loud rustling noise coming from Mr. Schue's
[ ripping, ripping, hot bolts of agony and he screams ]
office.
Shit, Kurt thinks, and grabs the nearest heavy object – a music stand. Brandishing it in front of him, Kurt inches towards the office. The rustling is getting louder. He opens the door as suddenly as possible and raises the music stand in a way that he hopes is threatening. It's only Puck, though, kissing down the neck of a partially clad Santana who is lying on Mr. Schue's desk. That's where the rustling was coming from, the papers under Santana, Kurt realizes as he drops the music stand with a crash. Both of them jump and stare at him as though they've just caught him making out in a dead man's office.
"What are you doing here?" Puck growls. "We're busy."
"I thought –" Puck arches an eyebrow. Kurt gives him an exasperated glare in return. "Do you really not know what's going on?"
Puck looks dumbfounded.
"The majority of the school is running around screaming in terror. How did you not notice?"
"Um. I thought –" Kurt smirks at the way Puck is mirroring his earlier words. " – isn't it a pep rally?"
"Honestly, Puckerman, there are times when your stupidity makes me wonder –" How you're still alive, he means to say. But he can't, not when he's just seen one of the only adults he even comes[ came ] close to trusting be literally torn limb from limb.
He swallows instead, then continues a moment later in a quieter voice. "I don't know exactly what's happening. Everyone started going crazy…attacking each other…it's," he laughs, a quiet, mirthless sound, "it's like zombies."
"Well, fuck."
The expletive comes from Santana; Kurt almost forgot she was there at all. Now, though, he notices that she's rummaging through the junk on Mr. Schue's desk. Finally, she huffs out an exasperated breath and breaks a trophy case, pulling out the biggest.
Puck is staring at her. "What exactly are you doing?"
She marches out into the choir room, trophy in hand. Kurt and Puck follow without thinking.
Santana turns to face them. "I'm going to find Brittany," she says. "Coming?"
"What – are –" Kurt splutters. After a moment of trying to regain speech, he hisses, "Are you insane? If you go out there with a trophy to defend yourself, you will die."
Her face is like stone. "What would you suggest?"
"Staying here?" Puck interjects.
Santana rounds on him. "If you think I'm leaving Brittany out there to –" She stops abruptly, and then practically snarls at Kurt, "I would think that you wouldn't want to leave Aretha out there anyway."
Kurt feels a rush of guilt. He had completely forgotten about Mercedes, about Tina, about Finn…about pretty much everything but this room. He swallows. "Yeah. Okay. But there has to be a better way than storming out into a crowd of zombies."
Puck actually winces. "Could you not use that word?"
Kurt raises an eyebrow that says, really? , then turns back to the situation at hand.
"Okay," Santana acquiesces. She stands straighter. "So what's your brilliant plan, Fancypants?"
Kurt ignores the insult [ from School of Rock, no less – really, Santana? ] and surveys the room. A memory comes to him – watching reruns of Buffy every Saturday with his dad. It had worked out surprisingly well – plenty of violence for his dad, and Kurt got to ogle Angel and later, Spike. Spike. His favorite episode, School Hard, had been the first one with Spike in it. Buffy had been separated from her friends…she had gone…
"Through the ceiling," he says. The other two look at him, nonplussed. He continues, "This is one of the older rooms, it's got a drop ceiling. You can push up the tiles. We could go up in it, hear when it's quiet down below…"
Santana and Puck say nothing.
"Like in the Breakfast Club?" Kurt tries. Still no response. Kurt rolls his eyes. "Oh, stop looking at me like that. You asked me for a better plan, I gave you one." He pauses. "Unless you'd prefer to go out there?"
Someone chooses that moment to slam against the door, hard. The screaming is right outside by now.
Santana looks at the door, then at Kurt. "Alright," she says. "Let's try it. But you're going first."
Mike
There should have been a before, and there should have been an after.
But like when you've been cold for so long you can't remember what warm is, Mike can't remember what it had been like, before. Before all he could think about was will I see the next day?
Before he had seen people screaming as they died.
The fact that he, Matt, Artie, and Tina are crammed into a tiny janitor's closet really isn't helping matters. The door is shaking, too, trembling on its hinges as though it could fall any second. It's really not a comforting sight. Mike closes his eyes, leans into Matt, and waits.
Emma
It had all happened so suddenly.
One minute, Emma is listening with exasperation to just why Karofsky needed to shove Kurt into a locker with a wink and a whisper of homo, and trying to explain to Brittany why spray painting ducks all over the cafeteria is not a good thing to do.
The next, she and about fifty students are barricaded in the cafeteria, and she is yelling at them to shut up, do they want to die? It works surprisingly well to subdue them; the screaming from outside isn't hurting, either. Emma lets out a shaky breath and thanks whatever Powers that Be that there is blue paper over all the windows, to add atmosphere, according to Figgins.
Off in a corner, Brittany is comforting a shaking boy, her hand rubbing soothing circles on his back as she tells him to look at the ducks, aren't they pretty?
Emma smiles in spite of herself, then goes to comfort a group of sophomores.
It's her job, after all.
Mercedes
For Mercedes, it starts when Kurt races past the classroom in which she and Quinn are tutoring Finn. And really, the fact that it takes both of them to tutor Finn is sort of ridiculous.
Anyway, they're trying to explain to Finn that yes, words can look different than the way they're said, when all of a sudden, they hear what sounds like a man screaming.
[ they'll find out later that it was Mr. Schuester, and they'll shudder at the image of red and screaming and agony beyond belief, but for now they are blissfully ignorant. ]
About a minute later, Kurt runs by, feet hitting the floor in a way that sounds almost painful. His face is terrified and sad, and his eyes are swimming. He goes by, a blur of designer clothing, and they sit there, staring at the space he left behind.
Finn breaks the silence.
"Am I on crack, or did Kurt just run by looking like someone set his Paul McCartney on fire?"
"Stella," Mercedes corrects automatically. "And yes he did. I wonder what's up with that?" She gets up and peeks out into the hallway, but Kurt is long out of sight.
"It's probably nothing," Quinn says from right behind Mercedes, making Mercedes jump about a foot.
"Stop walking so quietly," she hisses. "You're going to give me a heart attack someday."
Quinn doesn't appear to be listening. She says, "Do you hear that?"
Mercedes does. It's screaming.