Nicole wrote some of this chapter. That's why it sucks.

Nicole's Note: I didn't write any of this chapter. She just doesn't like the way some of it turned out, so she told me she was going to blame me.

Scout could not sleep. He'd been laying in bed for hours staring at the ceiling, but oddly enough even though it was well after midnight at this point, he didn't feel tired at all. Since he didn't feel like sleeping anyway, he got up and started walking around. Most of the team were night owls so chances were high that he wasn't the only one still up.

He could hear Medic and Heavy talking long before he even reached the end of the hallway. He poked in for a moment and was about to say something when he realized he probably did not want to be there right now and started to back out when he was spotted.

"Oh, Scout! Did you need something?" Medic asked. Some kind of purplish spleen or kidney or something that he was holding was leaking blood all over the floor. Medic dropped it into a cooler full of ice and kicked it aside.

"Uh...no thank you. What...what are you doing?" Dammit, the nerves were showing through in his voice.

Medic turned around and went back to slicing Heavy open and pulling out one of his lungs. Heavy was disturbingly conscious and nomming on a sandvich through the whole process as though he were sitting at the lunch table rather than going through a major operation.

"Nothing! Just a routine operation!" Medic replied cheerfully. He suddenly looked more suspicious. "Why? What have you heard?"

Scout spotted another bloodstained cooler with a label on it that read 'Water buffalo lungs 4 Heavy'. "I haven't heard nothin'! Certainly nothin' illegal!" he quickly said to cover his ass.

He was understandably skeeved by the random sights of the medical ward from the numerous health code violations to the coolers full of shady looking organs to the fountain of blood that suddenly spurted from Heavy's chest cavity and sprayed all over Medic after he nicked something he really shouldn't have. Right now he was just looking for an opening to leave.

"Oh, uh...that happens sometimes," Medic lied as he clamped a hand over the nicked artery to try and staunch the blood flow.

Scout had a hard time formulating any form of a response. He was too horrified watching Archimedes nesting in Heavy's intestines and pecking at the liver that may or may not have always belonged to Heavy while Medic had his back turned to try and find something to stop up the blood.

"I feel dizzy. Is normal?" Heavy asked with concern.

"Oh, ja! That's perfectly normal!" Medic replied cheerfully. He shooed his dove away and stuffed a white towel into the bleeding orifice. He went back to operating on him as though this actually solved the problem rather than merely dyeing the towel crimson. "That's just your blood pressure rapidly dropping!"

"You seem to be busy, so I think I'll go see what everyone else is doing..." Scout excused himself. Archimedes perched on a shelf next to the door and eyed him. "Hey, you stay away from me bird! I remember what happened last time!" he threatened it.

He was rather glad to be out of there and didn't know why he bothered stopping in. Last time he did, Medic tried to put parts from something called a "pink fairy armadillo" in him. He passed Spy's room, but he'd rather eat broken glass than hang out with Spy, so he kept moving past the door.

He was almost to the kitchen. He noticed as he approached that someone was in there because one of the lights was on. Hopefully it would be someone who wasn't legally insane.

Sniper had his head on the table, but it was obvious that he was still awake by the way he tapped on the beer bottle in front of him. The radio on the counter was playing white noise. The station had oddly cut out mid-song about thirty minutes ago with no explanation and he just didn't feel like getting up to change it or turn it off. Every once in a while he heard a scraping sound at the back door but dismissed it until he barely noticed it anymore. Probably it was one of those plague bearing raccoons that they kept telling Soldier to stop bringing inside with him.

The door creaked open and shut just as noisily. "Can't sleep either?" Scout asked.

"Insomnia. You?" Sniper asked.

"I'm not sure. Just can't sleep." He went into the fridge and got out his ninth can of Bonk that day. "It's really weird though. I don't even feel tired for some reason."

"Uh huh..." Sniper nodded. He listened to see if he could hear Scout's heart racing from where he sat.

Scout set the opened soda on the table and dug through the cabinets, grabbing a box of Froot Loops from the back. "Do you know whose cereal this is?" he asked. Sniper subtly shook his head. "Eh. I'm gonna eat it then." He ate a dry handful straight from the box and sat down at the table.

To Scout's credit, he didn't sit there talking up a storm like he usually did when he had someone alone, probably because his mouth was occupied with eating the last of the stale Froot Loops. Sniper finished off the last of his beer, which was warm and flat by now, and got up to drop the bottle in the can. The door creaked again and Pyro entered the room, suddenly looking offended to see that Scout was eating his cereal.

"Wow, I guess no one can sleep tonight," Scout said without concern for the offense he had just caused the firebug.

"Mm-phm-hm-mmm-mm," Pyro replied.

Scout just stared at him. "I have absolutely no idea what you just said." He repeated whatever it was that he had stated. "Repeating it doesn't help. I don't speak mumble."

"He said he heard a strange noise outside." Engineer poked his head through the door behind him. Of course where Pyro was, Engineer would be not long after. "He thinks there's something out there."

"It's a desert. There's probably tons of things out there," Sniper pointed out. "And if it's anything like home, about half of it wants to kill us."

"Still ah'd rather check so he can go back to sleep," Engineer replied. Pyro looked at him and pointed towards the back door. He made his way towards the direction indicated.

Sniper remembered that the radio was on when the white noise was suddenly replaced with the earsplitting screech of the Emergency Broadcast System. He shut it off before it could wake up half the base and heard a dove that had been sleeping somewhere rustling after having been startled.

"You should probably listen to that. Maybe we're being invaded by commies," Scout pointed out.

"Last six times it went off was because someone sat on a button," Sniper replied. "I'm not about to trust it again."

Engineer reached the door, pulled back the curtain hiding the window, and stared through the glass with concern. "Uh, guys?" he said. "Mah dog is at the door, waitin' to come in."

"Mm-phm-hmm-hmm?" Pyro asked.

"Well nothin's wrong with that, really. Unless you count the fact that he's been dead fer six months," he replied.

They gathered at the window so they could see the hound dog, who was reduced mostly to a glowing eyed skeleton with decaying pieces of meat clinging to the dirt covered bones, liquefying organs spilling from the crushed ribcage, and a tire track across his back end from when Spy backed over him pulling out of the driveway. If the tire track wasn't enough to identify him, the dirty red collar that stuck stiffly to the dog's partially mummified neck declared that it was indeed Engineer's late German shorthaired pointer, Bucky. Bucky raised a paw and scraped it down the side of the door like he did when he wanted to come in. There were streaks of putrefied meat and mud on the other side, indicating that he had been scraping at it for probably hours.

"Well that's different," Scout replied.

"You see an undead dog standing at the door and all you can say is, 'that's different'?" Sniper asked.

"Well yeah. I've already seen ghosts, aliens, robots, vampires, gnomes, hats that defy gravity...oh, and there's a werewolf in the basement," Scout pointed out. "That kind of stuff's pretty normal around here at this point."

"Huh. Good point."

"Uh, guys?" Engineer said. "Bucky brought friends."

The darkness was now plagued with shining yellow orbs. One look at the undead dog's own glowing yellow eyes indicated that every one of the orbs was embedded in the rotting skull of a similar undead creature, and all of them were converging on the location.

"Oh great, another zombie apocalypse," Sniper grumbled. "Wonder how long it'll take for this one to blow over?"

5 minutes later...

They all sat in the kitchen together, a beer bottle in hand and Scout picking out and eating the marshmallows from a box of Lucky Charms, leaving the cereal pieces behind to eventually be ignored in the cabinet until they got stale and were finally thrown away by someone who got tired of looking at them. Sniper once more had his head on the table, though he wasn't even bothering to try to sleep now.

"How many are out there now?" he asked.

Scout got up and pulled the curtain back. The glowing eyed faces of several walking corpses stared back in at him, smearing drool and greenish corpse discharge all over the glass. He closed the curtain and walked back to the table, resuming his task of eating all of the marshmallows from the cereal.

"I'd say about a crapload," he replied.

Bucky howled at the other side of the door and scraped at it with his paws. "Ya know, ever since he died, ah thought ah'd love to see Bucky alive again. Ah was not actually expecting it to happen," Engineer sighed. "Ah remember how he figured out the lock on the window was broken and he used it to get into the kitchen. He was always a smart dog."

"That's what I thought every time my hamster died," Sniper agreed. "Then I found out that hamsters don't actually have nine lives and my mum was just replacing them every time they died and telling me that Boom resurrected overnight."

"Think we should tell the others?" Engineer asked.

"I'm sure they'll notice once they look out the window," Scout shrugged.

"Even still, might be nice to give 'em a heads up."

"Well we can't keep sitting in here," Sniper pointed out. "Eventually the place'll be overrun with 'em."

"Where the hell did they even come from?" Engineer asked.

"I dunno. Virus. Meteor. Voodoo curse. Pick your favorite," Scout shrugged.

Wait. Curse. All of them had a sudden wave of realization wash over them at the same time. "Soldier," they all said simultaneously.

Sniper stood up and chugged the rest of his beer. He slammed the bottle on the table and started towards the door. "I swear, I'm gonna strangle the fuckin' drongo right now!" he said angrily. "Why he can't just leave that bloody wizard alone..."

"Sniper, we don't know fer sure that this is Soldier's fault," Engineer pointed out. "It's just speculation at this point."

"No, but he's a bloody damn good start!" Sniper retorted.

Engineer got up and was about to try and stop him from leaving when they heard a clicking sound. They all turned around and watched Bucky squeeze through the now opened window and hop to the floor. His claws, which now seemed much longer and sharper in his dried out paws, clicked on the floor and a wave of dust wafted through the air when he shook off. The undead pointer looked straight at the group and growled. There was a thud behind him when undead bodies started to push their way inside through the open window.

Apparently Bucky still knew his old "you've ignored me when I wanted to come in, so I just let myself in" trick and jimmied the broken lock on the window.

"Uh..." Engineer said at a loss for words.

"Run!" Scout shouted.

He was the first one through the door and down the hall. The volume of zombies in the room quickly grew to an unmanageable amount as they continued to pour in. The others took off behind Scout. Bucky snarled and bolted after them.

"Can I strangle Soldier now?!" Sniper shouted as they raced through the hall.

"Not yet!" Engineer retorted. "Not unless we're certain this is his fault!"

"You just know it is!" Sniper shot back.

"Hmm-hmm!" Pyro shouted at them. Sniper didn't need Engineer's translation to know he had just told them both to shut up.

Scout took a spill when turning the corner. Pumpkin guts still lay strewn in the halls. "Shit, maybe we shoulda cleaned this up..." he said as he stood in pain.

"Or maybe not," Sniper replied. He grabbed Scout and pulled him back to his feet, yanking him along and standing off to the side.

Catching on quickly as to what he was doing, Engineer and Pyro quickly got to the side as well as Bucky rounded the corner. The dog was barely able to slow down and the momentum as well as the slippery pumpkin innards on the floor sent him flying until he fell down the stairs, landing at the bottom with a splat.

"Quick, before he gets back up again!" Sniper instructed.

They ran down the stairs and past the dog, taking off down the hallway while Bucky was still struggling to get back up. Sniper looked over his shoulder and was chilled when he accidentally made eye contact with it.

Bucky stared back at him with an angry and vengeful look in his eyes. It was almost like he blamed Sniper for making him slip and fall down the stairs. What had once been a sweet and friendly dog who liked playing Frisbee and falling asleep on the edge of Engineer's bed was now a creature that was made of pure evil and there was nothing but the will to inflict misery and suffering in the hellhound's eyes. As he stared back at him, Bucky almost seemed to be saying, "I'll get you for this."

He turned back around and realized he was in the rear. A sudden burst of adrenaline helped him catch up with the others. As they made their way down the hall, they quickly threw open a door and poured inside, slammed the door shut, and leaned against it before the zombies could catch up and begin pushing on it.

"What are you all doing in here?"

"Oh crap, we're in the spook's room," Sniper grumbled at the instantly recognizable voice.

"Spy, you ain't gonna believe this, but there's frickin zombies out there!" Scout replied.

"You're right. I don't believe you," Spy said skeptically.

"No, he's tellin' the truth. There really are zombies out there!" Engineer stated. Pyro nodded in agreement.

Spy looked from Scout to Engineer with concern. If it had just been Scout claiming the undead were chasing him, he would have just written it off entirely as a bad joke. Engineer on the other hand was a rather intelligent individual, intelligent enough that he had Spy's utmost respect, and he was usually far more inclined to believe him whenever he made a claim. Zombies though were pretty farfetched, and he couldn't help but feel a little skeptical.

"Zombies, you say?" he asked. They nodded. "Like in that stupid movie that Pyro dragged me along to?"

He had sat through the entirety of Night of the Living Dead thinking that everything that was happening was stupid and implausible while Pyro on the other hand spent the next several nights sleeping in Engineer's bed, holding his arm so he couldn't leave him just in case he had another nightmare, his normal routine after watching a scary movie.

"Yep," Engineer agreed.

"Move," Spy said.

The others protested as he reached for the door handle and tried to open it. Instantly Bucky's head shot through the crack in the open door and the hellhound howled and snarled as he tried to force his way in. Spy shoved at the door, trying to keep it closed, and heard moans and snarls coming from down the hallway and growing nearer. Finally Bucky pulled his head back out and the door was shut. Moments later there was a pounding and clawing at the other side of the door as the rest of the undead caught up.

"Was that the dog I backed over in the driveway?" Spy asked.

"Yep. That's mah Bucky," Engineer nodded.

"Alright, I am inclined to believe you now..." Spy said while they backed away from the door.

"Now what?" Scout asked with worry.

"Well it's too dangerous to go back the way we came..." Sniper suggested. "Anyone got any ideas?"

Sniper flicked Private Paws off his shoulder through the dirt with undead on their tail. Unfortunately there were more on the horizon headed their way.

"Well, at least we made it this far," Engineer stated. "It was a good thing that Pyro had that ham in his pocket so we could use it to attract those bears to fight off the zombies."

"Yeah, it's just unfortunate that we made the last known specimens of the endangered Teufort black bears turn into zombies and caused them to go extinct in the process," Sniper agreed.

"Well at least they're flammable," Scout agreed. "Unfortunately the car was too..."

Pyro shook the detached gas can from his flamethrower sadly when it didn't make the familiar sloshing sound of a full tank of gasoline. "We'll refill it, buddy," Engineer reassured him.

"Gentlemen?" Spy interrupted them.

They looked around and realized that they were surrounded. Scout tagged Spy and shouted, "Not it!" before turning and running the opposite direction.

Pyro fired a flare into the crowd, causing several zombies to erupt into flames. The heat and light attracted the rest of the undead towards the burning few, giving them all a chance to escape the way Scout had gone.

"Pyro, no! Not that way!" Engineer shouted when Pyro panicked and ran back towards the building. He broke off from the rest of the group and chased after him, leaving just Spy and Sniper.

"Great! Where do we go?!" Sniper asked. He realized that he heard no answer and looked around. Spy was nowhere to be found. "Thanks, spook..." he growled under his breath when he realized that he'd just been completely abandoned.

He looked around and saw an open doorway. He decapitated one zombie with his kukri and shoved another aside on the way to the door, slamming it shut behind him. He tried to lock it and started screaming several foreign swear words that he'd picked up from his teammates when he realized that it was broken and didn't latch properly.

Sniper's father had often been fond of the old adage, "When life closes one door, it always opens another". What that adage failed to mention was that the reason the other door was closed in the first place was because there was a horde of flesh eating zombies on the other side of it.

That was what he was facing now as he heard windows smashing and the wet thudding of decomposing matter hitting the ground behind him. He knew the second he stopped pressing on the door, it would swing open and even more undead would come raining in on him from outside, but he had no idea where to go from this point. With zombies coming at him from all sides, he was trapped. Sniper looked over his shoulder and saw several illuminated eyes watching him from the dark shadows at the other end of the room, and all he could think was, Well fuck.

A door at the top of the stairs swung open. "Sniper!" Scout called to him. "This way!"

Sniper was oddly relieved to hear Scout's voice shouting at him from the top of the stairs. He'd assumed the little wanker had gotten eaten when he didn't hear his mouth flapping for a while. He took a deep breath, prepared to run, and released the door, sprinting up the stairs as it swung hard enough to leave a dent where it collided with the wall.

Night of the Living Dead lied. Even with their limbs too stiff to run, those damn zombies were still fast enough to keep up. Sniper could see them just a few steps behind him when he and Scout shut and barricaded the door. They both backed away from it. It shook on its hinges as the undead banged on the other side.

"Now what?" he asked Scout.

Scout looked around and felt a sinking feeling when he realized they were trapped. "I don't know," he admitted.

Sniper realized that the only way out would be to jump from the window and hope that there was nothing undead down there to break the fall with its teeth. "The way I see it, there's only one way we can go," he admitted.

"You're not suggesting we..."

Before Scout could finish his sentence, Sniper grabbed him further away from the door, which shuddered in its frame from the sheer force of the zombies pressing on the other side. It wouldn't hold out much longer.

"I am," Sniper replied.

He dragged Scout along for the ride as he bolted towards the window, Scout obviously having no trouble keeping up with his quickened pace, and before he could protest, both of them smashed through the glass and plummeted to the earth below. The force of the impact left Scout somewhat dazed and more than a little dizzy. Sniper felt a sharp pain run straight through his chest and realized that he had landed on a rock. He hoped that he hadn't broken any of his ribs in the fall. Neither of them had much time to recover from their injuries before they realized the others were calling to them.

"Scout!" It was Engineer. "Sniper! Get up!"

Scout instantly regained awareness of his surroundings and the undead that were rapidly converging on their location. Looking for the others, Scout found Engineer and Pyro had already scaled the nearby roof to safety, while Spy was still on the ground, debating whether to run to them or just save himself. The roof. Of course! Why didn't he already think of that himself?

"Sniper, get up!" Scout shouted, shaking Sniper back to reality.

"I'm up," Sniper groaned, clutching his potentially broken rib with one hand as he got up.

"Come on, let's go! They're coming!"

Scout quickly outpaced him in their race to the roof. Jumping up towards the edge with outstretched hands, he just barely missed grabbing onto the roof by an inch, but was thankfully caught by the duel efforts of both Pyro and Engineer. They both worked together to pull him to safety. Thankfully he was the lightest of their teammates, or this would have been a lot more difficult.

"Sniper! Behind you!" Spy shouted in the meanwhile. Figures he'd already decided to make his way onto the roof and abandon him yet again.

Sniper pulled his kukri and spun around, embedding it in the skull of a zombie that had tried to get the jump on him. He pulled it back out of the now re-dead carcass crumpled up in the grass and, still clutching his rib and limping from the fall, tried to make his way back to the roof.

"Oh crap..." Scout said as zombies poured out in front of the building. There was no way in hell Sniper could reach them now.

"Shit!" Sniper exclaimed when they began to cut off his escape.

He stopped his run briefly. He of all people knew how dangerous it was to stand in place for too long like a deer about to be hit by a speeding car, and yet he had no idea where to go from there. He looked about for an alternate escape and thankfully caught sight of a ladder leaning up against an adjacent roof. Right now it was going to be his only bet for survival.

Sniper bolted for the ladder, sidestepping one zombie, killing another with a swing of his kukri, and was nearly there when suddenly a hand shot out and grabbed his leg, tripping him and causing him to fall on the ground, painfully landing on his rib. If there were still any doubts that it was broken before, it was for certain broken now. Sniper could hear the sickening crack from the force of the landing and the pain growing even worse every time he breathed.

"Fuck..." Sniper groaned, aware that the undead were closing in around him.

A gunshot quickly dispatched the errant zombie holding him hostage and instantly he could feel the grip on his leg loosening. Sniper was more than a little surprised to see that it had been Spy that had just saved his life just now. He hadn't time to thank him as he scrambled to get up, temporarily forgetting the pain of his broken rib and practically jumping on the ladder. He scurried up like a rat about to be dragged from a hole by a vicious cat as zombies closed in around him from all sides.

"Sniper! You're almost there!" Scout shouted encouragement after him. Sniper could hear them all frantically shouting at him to hurry and get to safety as he made it to the top. He wished they'd shut up.

The ladder wobbled under him. Sniper quickly grabbed the side of the roof and clung on for dear life as the ladder fell to the side amidst the crowd of ravenous zombies that waited below, reaching for him and biting at the air as they attempted to drag him down and devour him. He thrashed when two of them grabbed him by the legs and pulled, his grip on the roof worryingly loosening.

"Sniper, hurry!" Engineer shouted, as though he wasn't already trying hard enough.

With the very real threat of being dragged down and devoured, Sniper felt a strong burst of fear-fueled adrenaline. He barely heard the gunshots, barely noticed the hands on his legs loosening as the zombies fell to the ground dead beneath him. In an instant, he pulled himself up onto the side of the roof and crawled rapidly away from the edge before collapsing in the middle under his own frantic breathing and fast paced heartbeats.

He didn't get up again.

That noodle incident explaining their escape is because for the longest time there was a gap there since I didn't know how to write that part and I was running out of time to finish, because I have to start writing about Christmas now for a job that's actually paying me. The paid jobs kinda have to take priority over the fun.

Also: Yes there is swearing in this chapter and all over this fic in general. Please do not complain about it. I know I put swearing in a fic for a franchise that usually censors their swearing. I'm not going to censor it because it looks weird having an M-rated fic that can't even use a few no-no words.

I'm just pointing that out because people complain about me doing that all the time. If that's the biggest complaint you have with my writing, I'd be happy, but it's not really something that I'm concerned about.