The Corduroy living room was full of various lounging children, their eyes glued to the TV screen. Paul had the distinction of being the oldest, and had laid claim to the armchair; Ashwin, Cassandra, and Elowen were all smooshed onto the couch, Ashwin on the arm closest to Paul, Cassandra in the middle, and Elowen leaning on the other arm. Danny and Faith were sprawled out on the floor. A melodramatic shriek rent the air of the living room and Elowen snorted,
"What a close up,"
"Dude, we did not see her that close," Cassandra agreed.
It had been a good idea to take a day to just relax and watch stupid, old horror movies. Cassandra at least was glad for the break from monster hunting - not only did she have more time to read through the two notebooks that weren't coded, but she wasn't sure her nerdy, un-athletic self was really able to chase things around the woods every single day they were in town.
"You've been texting for a while," Ashwin noted, leaning closer to Paul, "what's up?"
Cassandra shot him a skeptical look laced with 'seriously, dude? How desperate are you?' that he quickly shrugged off as Paul responded,
"Oh, it's just Lilith."
"W-who's Lilith?" Ashwin asked, heart sinking a little. She was probably a girlfriend.
"Oh, yeah, y'all don't live here. Lilith is the Valentinos' kid. She wears dark clothes and her hair's usually dyed a wacky color, maybe you've seen her around?"
"Maybe," Ashwin said, not willing to really do a mental inventory of all the people he'd seen in Gravity Falls when he could pay attention to Paul instead.
"We've known each other forever, so she sort of falls back on me when her other friend resources are depleted. Apparently most of her good friends kinda' backstabbed her today. Though they might just be slow to answer texts," he added, actually making eye contact for a second to Ashwin's delight. "it can take a while to reassure her."
Ashwin sat in silence for a moment, and though he almost decided against it, he asked,
"So, are you guys, like, a- a couple, or a thing, or- or, like, together, or anything?"
Paul chuckled,
"Nah,"
Please say you like guys instead, Ashwin's inner monologue prayed.
"we've known each other for so long, and apparently I'm not 'her type'," Paul explained.
"He sure is your type," Cassandra muttered.
Ashwin elbowed her, thankful her comment was covered by another shriek from the woman onscreen, chased by Planet People from Planet Planet.
"I almost think the 90s remake is worse," Elowen noted.
"Yeah, it makes even less sense," Cassandra agreed. "the director clearly had some weird artistic vision that just really, really doesn't pan out."
"The heart's just gone," Elowen agreed.
"You guuyys!" Faith whined, "Sshhh!"
A few sorrys were muttered from the couch as they settled in for the stirring conclusion.
Walking away from the Corduroy house in the fading light filtered through the trees Cassandra turned to Ashwin,
"Dude, you need to cool it."
"What?" he responded,
"You gotta' calm down about Paul. He's almost technically an adult."
"Wh- he's just two years older than me!"
"Which is still a big gap right now. He'll be a senior when he goes back to school. You think he gives you a second thought? I mean, other than as a chill friend of his sister?"
"I can live with that," Ashwin assured her.
"You aren't acting like it," she muttered.
"Do you have to talk about how Ash has the hots for Danny's brother?" Faith groaned, "Can't we talk about something else?"
"Comin' through, short-stuff," someone muttered, brushing past Ashwin, trying to hide their face in a hoodie.
All three cousins turned to watch them go, and Faith, who got the best look at them from her low vantage point, called after them:
"I like your hair!"
Caught off guard by the compliment, they turned back to look at the kids,
"Th-thanks," Lilith managed, accidentally giving them a brief glimpse of her red, slightly teary face and pink-and-purple gradient hair concealed under her balk hoodie, before quickly turning away. A red, heart-shaped pendant caught Cassandra's eye - the only bit of color dangling over her all-black ensemble.
"I guess that's Lilith," Cassandra mumbled.
"Hope she's OK," Faith said.
"Probably going to cry on Paul's shoulder," Ashwin grumbled.
"Dude, now is not the time to be jealous," Cassandra chided him, "looks like she's had a bad day."
Ashwin only offered a grunt in response.
"Cassandra Pines!"
The cousins jumped back as someone jumped out of the woods in front of them.
"Speaking of bad days," Cassandra muttered, face dropping from one of surprise to one of annoyance, "what's up, Mervin?"
"I'm glad you asked! C'mere, I got something to show you!"
"Dude, I've actually been enjoying not running panicked through the forrest, and I'm actually kinda' tired and hungry and want to go home and eat some pizza or something. Can't it wait?"
"I- it- Wh- I guess it-"
"Great," she responded, walking past him, "get back to me later, man. Like, tomorrow morning or something."
As the trio walked away, Mervin muttered to himself,
"Oh, you'll see sooner than that."
It was midnight, about five hours later, when Ashwin shook Cassandra awake.
"He's out there," Ashwin told her as she sat up, confused and only part-ways conscious.
"What?"
"He's literally throwing rocks."
"Who?!" Cassandra asked, trying to get her wits about her, not to mention get her hands on some pajama pants.
"Mervin," Ashwin clarified with disgust.
"…Mervin's throwing rocks at our window? How does he even know where we're staying?"
"You ask him! I'm not justifying him with an answer."
A clack of rock on glass gained their attention.
Cassandra groaned, tugging on some pants and begrudgingly stepping down the ladder. She opened the window and glared down at the boy.
"What?" she asked him curtly.
"You gotta see this!" he insisted, as if their earlier conversation had not been over for several hours.
"See what, Mervin?" Cassandra humored him, unimpressed. "Because chances are, it can wait."
"I rose the dead!" he boasted, beaming smugly up at her.
"You what?" Cassandra asked, a seed of fear growing in her stomach.
"I rose - raised? What's the proper past tense? - anyway, there's zombies walking around now. Isn't that cool?"
Cassandra was speechless for a moment, none of the multitudes of problems crossing her mind actually making it out of her mouth.
"No!" she finally managed to splutter, "It is not cool! Zombies? Like, actual, living zombies?!"
"Well, technically they're undead, but-"
With an exasperated, slightly terrified squeak, Cassandra ducked back into the room,
"Did he say zombies?" Ashwin asked.
"Yes," Cassandra confirmed, "and now we have to go stop them from taking over the town."
"How do you know that?" he asked as she scrambled back up into the loft, "You don't know they're trying to take over the town!"
After a moment of shuffling she practically slid back down the ladder, bag over her shoulder, having replaced her pajama pants with jeans and thrown a hoodie over her pajama shirt.
"That's not a chance I'm willing to take," she told him. "Are you coming?"
"I- I guess," he accepted.
"Great, get some pants on," she told him, looking the other way and checking her bag. Water, phone charger, flashlight, pencils, pen, personal notebook- "Crud," she snapped.
"What?" Ashwin prompted, only partway into his pair of jeans.
"I left the notebooks at Elowen's house."
"Crud," Ashwin agreed, fastening his belt and walking over beside her, "I guess we gotta' go get 'em."
"I'm almost positive I read something about zombies," Cassandra told him.
"Then let's go!" Faith interjected, standing beside them fully dressed.
The two teenagers stared at her for a moment, having almost forgotten she was there, and considering the pros and cons of bringing a nine-year-old on a zombie hunt.
"Oh, what the heck," Cassandra concluded. "Mervin!" she hissed back out the window, "We are coming down there, and don't you for an instant think this was a good idea! It wasn't! And if you made this up just to get us out of bed, I swear to god!" with that, Cassandra walked back over to her cousins. "OK," she sighed, "we gotta' be really, really quiet."
It took several minutes for the kids to creep as silently as possible through the cabin, most careful to avoid any noise the closer they were to their sleeping parents. After shutting the back door as carefully and quietly as she could possibly manage, Cassandra let out a sigh of relief, and wheeled on Mervin, waiting eagerly a few feet away.
"MERVIN!" she hissed, storming up to him, "What's the bright idea, huh?! Who thinks it's a good idea to summon the undead?!"
"Well, I mean, it's in the book," he pointed out, showing her the exact pages under a flashlight he'd brought.
Cassandra scanned the page, gaze settling on a particular section:
"No known weaknesses?!" she read aloud, "You summoned a creature that eats human flesh and has NO KNOWN WEAKNESSES?!"
Mervin thought it over for a second.
"Yes," he finally concluded.
Cassandra made an exasperated noise akin to an unholy combination of an exclamation, a grunt, a shriek, and a groan.
She took a deep breath.
"OK. So this is where we are," she told herself, trying to regain her composure, "we need to get to Elowen's, stat."
"Why do we need Elowen?" Mervin asked, a bit taken aback.
"The notebooks are at her house," Cassandra explained, already heading that way.
"But we have a comprehensive study of The Falls right here!" Mervin insisted, brandishing his binder.
"No, we don't," Cassandra snapped, "we have a photocopied hodgepodge of a really old account of The Falls that doesn't even have a weakness for this thing you were dumb enough to summon!"
Mervin fell silent, his attempts to prove his mastery of Gravity Falls' Mysteries failing miserably. No one dared cross the angry, tired teenager as Cassandra stomped through the woods toward the Corduroys' house.
She stopped in front of the old cabin, however, trying to think through how to go about getting the notebooks out of someone else's house at 12:08 in the morning.
"What's up?" Ashwin asked, stepping up beside her.
"How do we get in?" Cassandra put forward. Ashwin thought it over too,
"We could wake 'em up," he offered.
"But we don't even know whose room is whose!" Cassandra pointed out, brandishing the flashlight at the house, "How would we ever-?"
A twig snapped behind them, and the kids spun around, shining the flashlight frantically through the trees. The light hit something, and it groaned.
Cassandra squeaked in terror,
"Oh, see, there's one," Mervin pointed out, "cool, huh?"
Cassandra let out a whimper of exasperation before dragging her cousins to get their backs to the Corduroy's house.
The zombie growled again, louder.
"Oh god, what do we even do?" Cassandra asked no one in particular.
"Run?" Ashwin offered.
"But- the notebooks-"
"Our survival wins," he pointed out.
"Right," she agreed, turning to run, and noticing the glint of another zombie's eyes. "Oh no-" they turned to the other side, and found another zombie, closer this time. Cassandra let out a long breath as the zombies crept closer, "I think we might be screwed," she mentioned, trying fruitlessly to back even closer to the house and away from the staggering, growling, groaning, undead.
With the bang of a door and the crack of a shovel hitting undead flesh and bone, Elowen was there, standing over a toppled zombie,
"C'mon," she ordered, grabbing Cassandra's hand. Cassandra instinctively grabbed Ashwin, Ashwin grabbed Faith, and Mervin was left to scramble after them.
"Here," she added, tossing the notebooks to Cassandra as they ran into the woods.
"Thanks. This is familiar," Cassandra noted, racing along beside Elowen like she had her first night in The Falls.
"Yeah, sure," Elowen gasped back, "except last time we were chasing a harmless, hairless weird-thing, this time we're running from zombies,"
"Yeah," Cassandra accepted, "you can thank Mervin for that."
"Mervin?!" Elowen hollered, skidding to a halt, "This is your fault?!"
Mervin winced back at the threat of the girl brandishing a shovel.
"…Yes?" he offered.
With an exasperated groan Elowen let the shovel fall to her side,
"Why?!" she asked, somewhat recovered from the initial shock.
"I thought it would be cool?"
Elowen let out a slightly different groan,
"If movies tell me anything, zombies are dumb and slow," she noted, light from the stars, the moon, the flashlights glinting off her glasses as she shifted them on her nose.
Wait-
"Since when do you have glasses?" Cassandra suddenly realized, snatching Elowen's attention.
"Is now really the time?" Elowen asked.
Cassandra shrugged, and Elowen kept talking,
"So, since the zombies haven't caught up with us, they're probably the dumb, slow kind. Which is good for us, 'cause it makes them easier to fight, but if they hit us in large numbers, we're up the creek without a paddle. Get looking though those notebooks," she ordered Cassandra, who dutifully set to work flipping through the pages. "The rest of us need to get the bluntest object we can get our hands on and be ready."
Faith snatched up a fallen branch, Ashwin brandished a flashlight, and Mervin fumbled to find anything at all.
"Zombies!" Cassandra hollered, startling everyone, "Says they might be mistaken for teenagers," she read as everyone realized she was, in fact, talking about a page the notebook and not a flesh-eating being staggering up to them. "Yadda-yadda-yadda, thought Robbie (whoever that is) was a zombie… gnome reference… Weakness!" she beamed, "OK, so, all you gotta' do is-"
"We got company!" Ashwin barked, catching sight of a new clump of undead coming at them.
Abel was woken up by the jingle of his phone and the horrid sound of vibrating tech on a wooden table. He glanced at the caller ID, fully prepared to simply hang up on whoever thought this was a good idea, but Wendy was not someone to call in the middle of the night for frivolous purposes, so he answered the phone.
Before he even managed a 'hello' she was telling him,
"There's zombies outside and I think one of my kids just went out there."
She didn't seem panicked, per se, more of an 'I thought you might want to know' tone, probably influenced by the fact that she sounded as tired as he was.
"There- there's zombies?" he tried to wrap his head around it, trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes, "And your kid- wait, are you saying you think our kids are involved?" he asked.
"Maybe," Wendy blearily offered.
Not bothering to hang up, Abel shuffled up to the kids room, and found the door cracked open. Not a good sign.
"Yep," he confirmed, looking around the empty room, "I'd say they're probably out there too. You up for some zombie hunting?"
"…Yeah, alright," she agreed. "I'll be at your place in a few minutes."
"Great. How's your sense of pitch?"
Two zombies toppled as Elowen hit one with the shovel and Cassandra landed a hit with the backpack, clearing a path for the group to keep barreling through the forrest.
"You said you found a weakness," Elowen remembered, "what is it? Shotgun? Chainsaw?"
"It's gotta' be another incantation," Mervin concluded, "something supernatural. A potion!"
"Let Cassandra talk!" Ashwin demanded, bludgeoning a zombie with the flashlight.
"It's three-part harmony," Cassandra admitted.
The group stopped, fell silent, and turned to Cassandra. Mervin was the first to speak up:
"What?!"
"That's what it says!" Cassandra insisted, showing them the page, which, sure enough, had a line proclaiming:
Zombies' only known weakness is three-part harmony. My sister and our Grunkle and I ended up singing karaoke to defeat them.
"Wow," Elowen acknowledged, "that's nuts."
"Do we even know any three-part harmony?" Ashwin asked his cousin.
Cassandra shrugged.
"We should get to the town hall," Elowen concluded, "there's a PA system. On a quiet night like this, it should carry through the whole county."
Nods were exchanged, and they headed for town.
The group hesitated, looking up main street. Maybe the trees had obscured the real numbers, or zombies were naturally drawn to artificial light, but it seemed like there were a lot more of them in town.
"Do we run for it?" Cassandra asked, suddenly having a much more severe version of the 'it's raining really hard but we need to get from the car to the store' feeling. Running through this could give you a little more than an uncomfortably soaked shirt.
"…Yeah," Elowen confirmed, raising her shovel. The rest of the group followed suit, brandishing their own makeshift weapons. "Ready?" she asked.
"Ready," Cassandra assured her, among other affirmative noises from the others.
"GO!" she shouted, and this rag-tag band of kids hurtled through town toward the town hall, hollering incoherently and swinging things haphazardly at zombies.
As the reached the front steps the zombies seemed to have realized that these kids were a threat and had used what little brain power they had to band together and mount a genuine effort to attack them.
Mervin hollered in fright, gaining everyone's attention as he frantically tried to shake off a zombie trying to gnaw on his wrist. Having succeeded he turned back to the group,
"No worries! Gloves and a jacket! Didn't break the skin!" he yelped in terror as another one overtook him and he began smacking at it with his binder.
"You guys go," Elowen told the cousins, swatting away what zombies she could, "we'll try to hold 'em off here."
"WE?!" Mervin squawked, "Who's we?!"
"Just go!" Elowen insisted. They didn't need to be told again.
"Where's the PA?!" Ashwin wailed as they ran through the halls.
"I don't know," Cassandra realized. "where's Faith?!" she added, looking around.
"PA's this way!" the nine-year-old hollered, barreling past them. Without question they followed her down and around in the labyrinthine building, skidding to a halt as she burst through a door. "Here!" she ordered, handing the receiver to Ashwin. "Turn it on!" she demanded of Cassandra, who looked the system over, flipped a few switches, and was satisfied.
"Checking, one, two, three-" Ashwin spoke into the mic.
"I hear it," Cassandra concluded, "I think it's working."
Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and in a moment, she had it to her ear. Over groans and moans of zombies she heard Elowen holler,
"It's working! Do it!"
"What do we sing?!" Ashwin realized, staring at his cousin in horror, finger poised to transmit again.
"Oh, jeez, I don't know," Cassandra responded.
"What has three-part harmony?!"
Faith grabbed her brother's phone and called up some lyrics, propped it up on the table in front of them, and started the song off one of Ashwin's playlists.
"You know this one," she told her brother, "Sing," she told Cassandra, startling her.
"O-oh, OK," she accepted, reading the lyrics and coming it a bit behind the singer as Ashwin turned on the mic,
"I still hear your voice when you sleep next to me, I still feel your touch in my dreams…"
Ashwin took over without hesitation, his little sister taking the higher part:
"Forgive me my weakness, but I don't know why-"
As Cassandra started to remember her cousins belting this song she joined in to fill in as it built towards the chorus,
"Without you it's hard to suur-viiiive!"
"Cause every time we touch, I get this feelin'! And every time we kiss I swear I can fly!" their voices rang through the sleeping town.
Elowen grinned big as the zombies around them started to groan in pain, stumbling away.
"Can't'cha feel my heart beat fast! I want this to last! Need you by my siiide!"
As they broke off into true harmony, Zombie heads began to explode, and Elowen cheered, not bothering to help Mervin up as he scrambled to his own feet.
"Cause every time we touch, I feel the static! And every time we kiss I reach for the sky!" Ashwin was emoting dramatically into the mic now, "Can't you feel my heard beat so, I can't let'chu go! Want'chu in my life!"
Out in the forrest Wendy Corduroy and the twins looked toward the sound in town, brandishing a variety of blunt objects, their own voices hoarse, glad for the all-encompassing musical attack.
"That's our kids," Mabel reminded her brother with a nudge.
The impromptu dance party that had broken out in the PA room was interrupted by the ringing and vibration of Cassandra's phone again. When she picked up, Elowen hollered through the receiver,
"It worked! Their heads exploded!"
"Are we done?" Cassandra asked, distracted from her dancing.
"I think so!" the other girl responded.
"Guys, we did it!" Cassandra beamed.
With joyful hollers the cousins kept jumping excitedly to the beat for a moment, before becoming tired out, and heading back out of the government building.
Within moments of stepping out of the door Cassandra was practically toppled as Elwoen wrapped her up in a hug,
"You did it!" she cheered, spinning her friend around,
"Um, th-thanks," Cassandra accepted as she was set down, "I mean, it was really mostly Faith, but- W-woah, hey, your glasses are about to fall off, there," she noted.
Elowen quickly straightened her glasses and the group set off back toward their own houses.
"Zombie guts," Cassandra noted, gesturing to one of the fallen monsters.
"Wonder how they'll clean that up in the morning," Elowen mused absently.
"Faith, you did so good!" Ashwin beamed, grabbing up his little sister and ruffling her hair, "How'd you figure all that stuff out?"
"I looked at a map, doofus!" she retorted through a big grin.
"A map!" Ashwin realized, "See, you're so much smarter than me."
"S'why I call you doofus," Faith confirmed.
"I refuse to believe that zombies are really defeated by harmonies," Mervin scoffed. "it must be a good choice of song, or something."
"You think it's a Cascada song, specifically, that kills zombies?" Cassandra snorted.
"No! Well, maybe-"
"Oh, hey," Elowen interjected, throwing a gesture at Cassandra, "you asked about my glasses."
"Oh yeah," she remembered, "while we were in grave peril. Sorry about that,"
"Nah, it's cool. I almost never wear 'em because, you know, I'm a Corduroy. Can you imagine how weird it would be if there was a nerdy Corduroy? We already get enough flack for being super-strong hyper-emotional freaks, god forbid I was a nerd!"
"…Are you a nerd?" Cassandra prompted.
"I mean- I'm not- Yeah," Elowen admitted after a moment. "I'm a huge nerd. My math and science grades are really good, and I love sci-fi movies, and-"
"Wait, you're a NERD?" Mervin squawked, a vindictive grin spreading across his face, "you, a Corduroy-"
"Yeah, and I can still punch your teeth in," Elowen reminded him, brandishing a fist. "see what I mean?" she added to Cassandra.
"I guess so."
They reached a fork in the forrest path, and exchanged looks.
"See you tomorrow?" Cassandra offered.
"See ya' tomorrow," Elowen confirmed. "Awesome work."
"Hey man, you too," Cassandra assured her. "G'night."
"G'night."
And so they separated, leaving Mervin alone, just like he'd started.
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