The Change

Summary: the world is wicked, the world is cruel. No one knows this better than humanity's emotional sewer system, Johnny C. But floods are a thing of the past, and the world is spiraling out of control, and it seems like maybe, this time, the lights have gone out for good.

Story:a crossover of Johnny the Homicidal maniac, "Dies the Fire", Invader Zim, and misc. names and places. In which the old world ends, and a new world begins.

Leading characters
: Johnny C., Devi D, Todd 'Squee' Castil, and the Zim and Dib duo.

Warnings: Murder, language, references to cannibalism, speculation on religion, and of course Johnny C. himself.


Death and the Lady descended like Night,

And wrapped it round their shoulders...

The city was the crumbling remains of a riot, fires that looked to have been going for days burned at the borders, and broken glass littered the asphalt. Johnny swore a red streak when he saw the 24/7 in a smashed ruin, leaking smoke and blacked goo that might have been smoothie a week ago.

Fucking horrible waste of a brainfreezie, he thought, homicidal urges gripping him with new fervor. When it dawned on him that he might never have any sort of frozen treat again… he didn't cry, but his eyes grew conspicuously wet.

"Nny," someone behind him started tentatively, "we kind of need to keep going…"

The thin man twitched. He had not given anyone permission to call him that, but it had, somehow, stuck anyway. And he didn't really know how to stop it either—his usual (fatal) methods were out of reach, currently.

"I know," he ground out, "but I owe this store a moment of silence."

So they stood in silence, until Johnny felt ready to leave. And then, and only then, did they leave.

Devi had suggested that morning that they needed vitamins and nutritional supplements, painkillers and antibiotics and so on, seeing as they weren't getting much of anything from their current diet and the world was looking a little harsher every minute. Johnny had volunteered to go at the last minute, curious to the state of his city and desperate to get out of the all-too full house. Somehow, he ended up leading this merry band of stupid.

Idly, he wondered if the green hair of the one woman in his group would attract malicious attention. It sort of stood out, and if he knew anything about standing out- which he did -it would take a lot more than the end of the worse as they knew it to keep citizens from noticing weirdos.

"There's a pharmacy on that hill," He noted, punctuating the statement with a wave of his favorite smiley-face-handled knife. It made him feel more at home.

Kevin was with him—Kevin, Derek and Gwen. According to Devi, it was Kevin and himself for any skirmishes, Derek as the brains of the operation, and Gwen for medical expertise. Speaking of which…

"So… Gwen. How exactly do you know about all these pills we're out to get?" He asked, sidling off next to her as they mounted the hill.

'Because I won't stomach any fucking druggies in my troupe.'

"I'm a qualified nurse," she replied, looking vaguely annoyed but too nervous to make a point of it. "I was working in a bookstore at the Change, but it was only supposed to be until I could find a job at a doctor's office. Hospitals run their staff ragged. Anyways, I know a thing or two about pharmaceuticals."

Ah. Not a druggie at all. Johnny felt maybe a little regretful of making assumptions—but, with the sort of people he attracted, could he really be blamed?

A newly decayed corpse sprawled across the middle of the road ahead, freshly putrescent and nauseating. Its purpled skin gleamed in the dim light, drawing the eye like a magnet. Derek muttered something about hurling, leaving Johnny to take up the lead and simply step over the mass of flesh like any rational person would do. As long as you didn't touch it, you'd be fine.

"It's just a rotting carcass," he tossed over his shoulder. "You'll see plenty more of those soon enough!"

Looking faintly sick, they followed behind him—walking around the obstruction instead of over it.

The four of them forced their way into the building, taking the scenic window route, since someone had seen fit to lock the only reachable door. The unreachable ones were blocked by things that the normal humans tried desperately not to think about. Johnny barely noticed.

It was dark inside the building, though it was daylight outside. One of the men reached for a light switch and halted suddenly, looking embarrassed. Electric lights were like a ghost limb that you just kept trying to use, even though you watched the doctors amputate it.

At Derek's nod, his companions went rooting through the shelves and the crates in the back. Johnny, however, stopped in front of a shelf of greeting cards, mesmerized.

Joke cards, sympathy cards, birthday cards, mother's day, father's day, and valentines day cards collaged the stand, a flimsy paper reminder of what the world considered normal before chaos hit. How did you describe the Change, anyway? What changed, exactly? Yes, the lights and the trucks were gone, but that was only the surface of the turmoil-real depths of change rested in the dark tides beneath.

Of a great and practically utopian society, a capitalist giant of industry and wealth and education, what remained now, only a week from Lights-Out? A shelf full of cards, and streets full of human waste.

He reached out and took one of the papers from its little plastic home, feeling a dying word rest in his palm.

The words were printed between swirls of silver and stylized flowers: It doesn't matter how bad the world gets, or how hard life is… you are my perfect world.

Oh, the irony. Would he never be free of it?

He tucked the card into his pocket and wandered to the window, wondering seriously, for the first time, about his future. Even mid-day, the sky was darkened from the smoking fires all through town. Campfires out of control, arson, you name it—it all ended with smoggy skies.

He'd killed a lot of people in his lifetime, too many to count even if he could remember more than three years back. But the Change had broken his record at least twice over. A whole city was dying, and it was probably happening in every city in America. The whole planet, even.

Well, he never had liked people, much.

"Who are you guys?" a shocked voice demanded from somewhere behind Johnny.

The murderer spun with his knife out, ready to fight and defend against crazed townspeople, but the sight stopped him about halfway across the room. The kid who startled him was short-ish, with glasses and an impossible swoop of black hair over his head.

"Don't I know you?" He asked, glaring at the hair. It tickled something at the back of his memory, something about weapons…

"Hey! You're that guy from the Wall-to-Wallmart." He glanced down at the very sharp, very shiny blade in Johnny's hand. "I did mention that I was sorry about that, right?"

Gwen popped her head up over a shelf. "Who's that Nny?"

"Nny?" the boy repeated, eyebrow cocked. "Um… I'm Dib. Me and my… friend are living in this store, ever since they rioted my house down. I… They killed my family."

A pained look crossed his face, and it intrigued Johnny—he hadn't had much exposure to people who actually cared about their relatives. He had killed a fat woman's husband once, stuffed his chest with skulls if memory served, and she just kind of stared for a minute. Then she went on lumbering about like the load of whale blubber that she was.

"So, you're kind of breaking and entering my house," Dib concluded. "And stealing my stuff."

"Touché," the woman replied, rounding the shelves. "But the stuff in this store won't last forever. What were you planning to do when it runs out?"

The kid's face completely crumbled behind his glasses. He glanced back at the door he'd come through, remembering something. Derek slid in quietly from the back room, just in case things went sour.

"We aren't sure. Zim's ship won't work, and I never studied any of the lifestyle elements of Native American cultures past the superstitious elements. And we don't even know if things will go back to normal. I thought we might—"

"DIB-BEAST!" another teen—presumably this 'Zim' person—shouted, bursting through the door behind Dib, "We have been invaded by filthy humanoids! There is a big, stupid male in the….Who are these, Dib?"

Johnny and company regarded the loud, shorter boy. He had no nose, and it was hard to tell, but maybe no ears either. Gwen, though, looked like she was appraising them in a different sort of way.

"You're…" Derek squinted in the dim light, "…green."

"It's a skin condition," the green boy snapped, rounding on his friend. "Why did you not tell me that we had visitors?"

"I just found out myself! And it's not a skin condition. He's an alien!"

The shorter boy caught him under the chin with a left hook, successfully knocking him to the floor.

"Have any of you been to Russia?" the alien demanded, turning to his 'guests'.

The three of them shook their heads.

"Then I'm Russian. It's very common in Russia. OH SO COMMON AM I!"

A metal appendage extended out from his backpack and offered Dib a metaphorical hand up. Metal? Moving metal? But nothing electric had worked since the night of the seventeenth!

"What is that?" Derek demanded with eyes wide.

"Alien technology!" the taller boy insisted, and was promptly punched in the forehead.

"My parents were, um, Russian secret scientists. It's very advanced. They used me as a guinea pig for medical experiments."

"Is that where the green skin comes from?" asked Derek.

"Eh… YES! Zim's many physical abnormalities are caused by experiments of parental units."

Gwen snapped her fingers. "That's where I recognize you from. You guys worked for an afterschool program before the change, right?"

The two glanced at each other. "Yes." They answered.

"My daughter was in your class. Tyler. Little blond one that screamed 'DOOM' every five seconds?"

"Oh! Yeah, we... Is she doing okay?"

Gwen ran a hand through her bright green hair. "Why don't you come back and see for yourself? I'm authorized to bring back anyone who'll help us, and Zim's Russian stuff will come in handy."

Johnny frowned behind the group. Not that he had a problem with the additions—he'd already decided that the Asian kid was okay, and he'd deal with the loud one somehow, but it would be nice if someone had asked him.

It was his house they were living in, after all. And his weapons they were using.


Dear Die-ary,

I had another dream last night, when I stopped to sit on a pile of blankets in the basement. It still smells like death, I think, because Devi wrinkled her nose when we took her to see it.

But the dream. I was walking along a dirt road, more of a deer trail through an empty plain, and up ahead I could see this big city-thing, made of stone or clay. I couldn't tell. But it was behind a huge wall of red dirt with little people milling around it in the distance. As I got closer, one of the men caught my eye, and I felt like I knew him. I knew him, and I didn't like him at all.

And he was the reason I was there.

March 25, 1998


Squee flopped onto a chair that was leaking stuffing, a floor below the earth's surface. He wondered, as he pulled the strands of cotton away, how they would get new armchairs if there was no electricity. No factories. No lumber mills. No irrigation systems.

He hoped Pepito was okay. Scary kid, but nicer than most humans. Hopefully his underworld connections would save him—not even Squee's rub-off bad luck could trump that. Come to think of it, he hadn't been around the last week before Lights-Out.

The boy looked around Johnny's basement. He supposed it was his basement now, too. When Devi first arrived, Johnny had gone down and dragged all the left over corpses into a far down level—very, very far down. Johnny estimated ten stories. Then, with Squee's help, he had closed off the entrance seven levels down. And by closed off, he meant pushed two strange contraptions in front of the only door and left tables in front of those.

And when Johnny had mentioned that there were rats and roaches in his basement, the terrified boy had found a bottle of industrial strength rat-poison on a higher floor and poured the whole bottle along the drop-off into the blocked off room. Rats were scary. They spread plagues.

But since Devi got here with her people, the renovations had been a lot less horrific and scarring. Mostly it consisted of dragging chairs down endless steps and strategically placing blankets. There were about ten rooms on each floor, and they'd designated bedrooms first, leaving a lot of unused space for personal effects. Squee was helping move those in too.

He stumbled back up the stairs, trying to keep focused on the decorating plans. It was better than thinking about food, and was he ever hungry. It seemed like Johnny was the only one who never complained about the lack of meals, which was kind of funny since he complained about almost everything else. And he was so thin, too.

At the top of the stairs, Squee's mom was curled into a ball. He'd been making her take fewer pills the last couple days—she didn't seem to understand that there were no more refills—and it looked like that withdrawal thing was setting in.

He sighed and pulled out a bottle from his jacket. These were the ones that his mom liked best. It probably wouldn't hurt if she had just one.

"Mommy?" he started, "Mommy, I found one of those pills you like. The orange ones."

The red haired woman lifted her head. "Oh." She tried to smile. "Thank you. Mommy needed that. You're a good boy, Tim."

"It's T—" Todd stopped. He was suddenly unsure if he wanted to be Todd any more. Todd had bad luck and nobody wanted him If Johnny could change... "Squee. Mommy, my name is Squee."

"Okay," she agreed, and it was kind of sad. She looked so alone.

She hadn't always been like that. He'd seen pictures of her before he was born, on stage with a guitar or a piano. She'd looked beautiful. That was who he wanted his mom to be.

"Mom." he sat down beside her, handing her the little orange capsule. "You should sing for us. You used to sing, right? You should come out tonight. Everybody misses the radio."

She looked at him, and it was like she was looking up through an ocean, trying to break the surface.

"Maybe, Squee. I'll try. Your father won't like it, though—he never likes me talking about things before. It makes him sad."

No, it wouldn't make him sad anymore. He could thank Nny for that.

-Z?-

Devi heard singing from somewhere outside, and her first thought was to wonder where they'd gotten the CD player. Of course, that was absurd, and it was clearly a live person's voice out back.

But she didn't recognize the voice, even as she got closer. Had they taken in another person without telling her? It was bad enough that she had to make room for the green kid and his friend, but—

Squee's mother?

Across the campfire that had become the standard nighttime gathering, the typically useless woman was singing strong. When had things descended so far into the Twilight Zone?

But there she was, and the whole collection of people sat listening, taking in the music like desert seeps away the first rainfall of the year. Her clear soprano lifted them away from hunger and muscles aching from unaccustomed exertion. Better than sleep. Surreal.

In the end, Devi contented herself to sit as well, and listen. She recognized the song, vaguely, but had little time to place it before the sound tugged her away.

"I've seen the lights go out on Broadway,
I seen the ruins at my feet,
You know we almost didn't notice it—
you see it all the time on forty-second street."

Wind went whipping through the feilds, down the street, carrying the scent of fire and blood. Vatusia's voice caught in it and spun away into the darkness, and Devi's mind followed it into the empty plains of the midwest and the soot-blackened pits of the deep south, and to the crumbling ruins of New York City, where the skeleton buildings rose up above the corpse of America.

"They burned the churches up in Harlem,

Oh, like in that Spanish civil-war.
The flames were everywhere,
but no one seemed to care,
it always burned up there before…"

Through the haze of tiredness, hunger, and drunk on long-thirsted-for music, Devi wondered if maybe, just maybe, her resident void might have a sense of humor.

"I've seen the rats lie down on Broadway-
Oh, I watched the mighty skyline fall…"

TBC