He had a plan, he had a plan, dammit. Alaska. It would have been great! Just him, a lifetime's supply of Cheetos, and frozen zombie-cicles as far as the eye can see. It would have been great, the best plan ever, and as Grif had said before, everyone needs a zombie plan.

Too bad he joined the army.

Dexter Grif's life had been pretty simple before...well, just before. He'd joined the army because, at the time, it'd been his only option. He couldn't afford college, and didn't have the grades or the motivation for it anyway. Grif prided himself in his laziness and ability to bullshit his way out of almost anything, he'd even found a way to make the army less of a hassle than it would have been. Sure, he'd ended up as a bit of a punching bag for the more "model" recruits, but he didn't have to do as much work that way and the brass didn't have to deal with his insubordination and subsequent bitching. Everybody won.

That is until Richard "Dick" Simmons got transferred to his unit. For some strange reason Simmons actually enjoyed work. The guy was a few years younger than him and might as well of had the words "army brat" tattooed to his forehead. That guy had a stick so far up his ass Grif was surprised he could actually sit down. Simmons was annoying, bitchy, and a champion kiss-ass.

But, strangely, he was also Grif's best friend.

A best friend who dragged his ass out of bed to go do drills, who made sure he did his duties before the brass found out he'd been shirking them, who complained when he didn't clean his bunk or when he slipped away to go have a smoke when they were supposed to be cleaning the base.

A best friend that went on patrol with him, and put up with his attitude, and talked with him when the other soldiers thought they were too good for him (them. Nowadays they were seen as a pair. Grif and Simmons. If you wanted one, you just had to find the other. Grif wasn't sure how he felt about that.)

But still, even if having Simmons around meant more work for him, Grif's life wasn't so bad.

That is, until they were chosen.

Blood Gulch Testing Facility was about as charming as the name suggested. It was in a box-canyon in the middle of nowhere. They had been blindfolded when they were first brought there, some bullshit about it being top-secret and highly classified and that they didn't have the security clearance to know where the facility was. Grif didn't really care where they were, so long as he got out of work (he didn't know that soon that line of thinking was going to come back to bite him in the ass, almost literally).

It'd been a relief at first, kind of like a vacation. There was a lot less physical training (which suited Grif's exercise allergy just fine), but a lot more psychological analysis. It was strange having someone pick his brain, like they were interested in what they found there instead of disappointed like most of his teachers had been. It was kind of...nice, in a weird way, having that kind of attention. Everything was going pretty well.

And then the drugs started.

They said they were testing a new type of steroid on them, that it was harmless, that they wanted to see how it affected soldiers on the field, to see if it could help in their training.

No one told them about the side effects.

There were simple things, at first. Headaches that would spike in intensity until they eventually faded away, numbness of the limbs that wouldn't go away until hours after an injection had been made, mood swings that went from blissfully unaware to full on rage at the simplistic provocation. The first time Grif had antagonized Simmons while they were on it was almost his last when a bullet logged itself in the wall beside his head.

The medical staff lowered Simmons' dosage after that, and made a more thorough effort in confiscating all of their weapons.

They weren't the only ones in the program though, there was a whole other building dedicated to another team of scientists' and doctors' patients. Grif didn't know if the stuff they were being given was the same as theirs, or why they were split apart in the first place, but Simmons had figured it was because too many people were too much to handle and that they needed to be split up so that they were easier to take care of.

Grif thought it had more to do with the fact that it made them easier to control.

The other guys, whoever they were, were always refereed to as the 'Blues' in Grif's mind. Only because whenever he'd seen a doctor come from out of the other building they were always wearing blue scrubs, the same as the doctors over on his side seemed to always be wearing red. It was a little creepy, if he was being honest with himself.

It wasn't just Grif and Simmons who were on the 'Reds' though, which Grif sometimes wishes wasn't the case. Simmons might have been a pain in the ass most of the time, but at least he was someone to talk to. The others were...dicks mostly.

Franklin Delano Donut was an okay guy, most of the time. He had an uncanny ability to turn almost any conversation uncomfortable, but had such enthusiasm that it was difficult to tell if he was doing it on purpose or not. He was too much energy in too small of a space and had the ability to piss Grif off without even trying, but it was difficult to stay mad at the guy when he was so innocently eager about everything, that didn't mean Grif didn't try though.

Grif had known Sarge back when Simmons had been brought into his unit. Sarge had been their superior officer (Grif wonders who authorized that). He was the only one of his superiors he couldn't avoid when it came to doing bullshit things like training or running errands. All of his other commanding officers had eventually given up trying to get him to do more than the bare minimum, but Sarge was, to put if simply, fucking insane. He'd actually shot at him the first time he'd tried to walk instead of run how many godawful laps he had to do that day. Sarge had called it "lard-ass motivation," Grif had called it attempted murder, no one seemed to care when he complained about it.

Then there was Doc ("My name's DuFresne"), who Grif wasn't really sure why he was there at all. He didn't seem to hang around the Reds or the Blues exclusively, and he also didn't seem to be an actual doctor, or, at least, not one of the ones that were poking and prodding them with increasing frequency. He said he was a medic, not a doctor, which Grif didn't really seem to see the difference between, but they tested things on him too, so Grif didn't really care about the why behind it, only that he was more of an ally than the other doctors who were starting to become more of the "enemy" in Grif's mind.

None of the other Reds seemed to agree though.

"They're just doing their jobs, Grif, stop being so fucking paranoid."

"I'm telling you, Simmons, something's not right here. When are we supposed to leave, huh? They ever tell you that? 'Cause they sure as hell never told me." Grif had said, flipping a pencil between his fingers. He wasn't allowed to smoke here, which was total bullshit if anyone had bothered to ask him, and his fingers were getting twitchy with the need to be holding something. When they had taken their weapons away, Grif had felt way too vulnerably for his liking. He might not have been a great shot, but at least having it had made being where they were more tolerable. Now, all his hand could do was twirl a pencil, instead of accidentally shooting somebody. Which was good, but a gun might have gotten him a cigarette at least, before security mowed him down.

"I've told you, if you paid more attention to the lectures instead of seeing how many faces you can pull without getting caught then you'd know that we'll be done at the end of the month, so shut the fuck up and go to sleep."

One month turned into two, and two turned into three, and before they knew it a half a year had passed.

And that's when the world ended.