Early on, a review asked for a Walking Dead chapter, so...Potential spoilers for the comics!

Undead Hordes (and other problems posed by modern society)

Nick opened his eyes to silence. One hand snaked down to probe his bandage.

"I hate being shot."

Breath. There was a dull ache from his ribs, but he was in surprisingly good shape as he raised his head.

There was a coating of dust on his bedside locker, and the IV was dry. In Healen, then, where privileged customers got first choice. Still, this seemed a bit odd. How long could a coma patient survive without care, anyway? Nobody was nearby.

"He– Hello?"

Hordes of eager nurses completely failed to rush to his aid. He levered himself up on one elbow.

What is going on?

After a good half hour, he gained his feet. It took longer to work up the nerve to remove the catheter, although the printed instructions helped. No care worker of any kind arrived during this time, and he decided to file a complaint to the WRO when he got the chance. He'd paid insurance for better service than this, dammit!

Barefoot, he stumbled towards the door, taking a moment to call the elevator. A corpse tumbled out of it, bullet mark clearly visible between its eyes. It was not a recent death...two, three weeks at least. He walked back to the nurse station, opening drawers until he found a mastered Cure materia, before laboriously struggling into his WRO uniform and resuming his efforts to leave the building.

Something had happened here, clearly. He was not armed, as hospitals frowned on coma patients having easy access to weapons. Some kind of battle had taken place downstairs, with an expanding circle of wrapped corpses surrounding the front of the building. They were almost exclusively killed by headshots or strikes at the skull, although there was some evidence of explosives. Some kind of stand had taken place at the main entrance, and whoever had defended the entrance had disappeared.

The attackers were a strange blend. Men, women, and children, almost exclusively in civilian clothes, carrying few weapons and none drawn, seemed to have rushed well armed fighters at the building entrance... with predictable results. At one point, the mob had been raked with railguns from above, probably courtesy of Rufus Shinra's personal helicopter.

Most of the vehicles were gone from the carpark, but he found a delivery van that would travel, and went looking for his family.

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Edge was quiet, even moreso than usual. It had had roughly five hundred inhabitants pre-Deepground, but after the purges, now sported less than half that. And now, the streets were silent, dotted with the occasional rotting corpse as Nick walked into the centre, that monument to Meteor than Shinra had so kindly funded to replace after Bahamut had flattened it. No one stepped out to challenge him.

"Well, that's it for town. Built as a Refugee Camp, destroyed by Bahamut, slaughtered by Deepground. And now liquidated again. I know I'm not coming back to live here."

A noise. Nick turned. Several of the less damaged corpses had struggled to their feet and were advancing on him.

He breathed out. "Oh, it's just undead."

He walked away, leaving the corpses to slowly stumble after him before eventually losing interest.

At the edge of the town, someone called his name.

WRO Headquarters...

Two soldiers eyed the advancing horde of undead. Cait Sith had been in Kalm when the dead began to rise, and there had been plenty of time to seal WRO HQ.

"My turn."

"No, mine."

"Aw, come on, you did it last time! It'll probably be years before I next get the chance to shoot blindly into a mass of civilians."

"Oh, go on then..."

The soldier sat down at the gun turret. A low swathe swept the front ranks off their feet, piercer ammunition ripping away limbs. The advance continued, undead crawling forward.

The watching soldier raised a hand.

"According to our reports, headshots are the only sure way to bring them down permanently."

The shooter didn't look up. "Don't tell me my business. Heads are small bobbing targets that move around a lot at different heights. Whereas if I take the feet, they all have to crawl around, so even if they get past me, they'll wear their hands to nubs in a couple of weeks.

"And that helps us now, how?"

"Well," the soldier said, mowing down further ranks of advancing undead, as they struggled upright and staggered onwards, only to take a second burst a bit closer to the turret. "Legs are useful appendages. They can do all manner of things, from lifting considerable weights to facilitating the movement of the individual from place to place. Thus, their removal severely curtails these undead gentlemen in their attempts to feed off the blood of the living. Crawling, they'll have a much harder time getting over our barriers."

Two Armoured Personnel Carriers were parked across the entrance to the WRO HQ, the two soldiers manning a gun turret facing the canyons that an approach would need to be made from. There had been some undead that tried to advance over the cliffs, but they'd just fallen over the edge. Which hadn't quite stopped them, but it took extreme ill luck to fall foul of a zombie with both its legs broken in multiple places.

The two soldiers would theoretically have no easy retreat if the undead broke through, but nothing had even come close to reaching them yet. Duty was even beginning to be boring as the attacks ebbed.

The WRO HQ was uniquely positioned to deal with a situation such as this, in that it was located in an isolated area, was fortified enough to keep out a reasonable attack. Some within were beginning to wonder what the Commissioner hadn't been telling them when he chose the site.

The mob of undead stilled. Many of them would still be animated, but piercer ammunition from a turret could do enough damage to blast them into immobility, and when the first swathe had toppled the front rankers, many heads had been reduced to knee height in time for the second burst.

One of the soldiers slapped his forehead. "Oh crap!"

"What? What's wrong?"

"I forgot my earmuffs!"

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Nick spun.

"It's me!"

"Oh, Sean. You scared me." Sean had been his partner on patrol, in the branch of the WRO that enforced local laws. Neither of them were born fighters.

"Sorry. Good to have you back, man. Come on, I know there's someone you'll want to see..."

Sean and a handful of survivors were living in a makeshift camp close to the limit of Edge, which was, yet again, a ghost town. After introductions and other necessary housekeeping chores were out of the way, including Nick's reintroduction to his wife and child, talk naturally turned to what this little band of survivors should do next.

"I don't think we need to do a thing. The WRO will clean this up pretty quickly like the DGs, they'll come find us eventually." Sean's opinion.

"I don't know, man. There's a lot of bodies in Midgar. We should get away from here."

"And how will they get out? The city has walls. Besides, do you know how to scavenge? Undead we can deal with, how about Guard Hounds? Kalm Fangs? This is the Midgar wastes, we're not going to find food anywhere. We have to stay until the WRO pick us up, it's the only way."

"Silence, sidekick! I'm an action hero now, I don't have time to listen to you! Also, everyone should start carrying guns, including my seven year old."

"You didn't ask me about this..." Nick's wife, Laura.

"Silence, woman! No self respecting action hero wastes time paying attention to his wife!"

And it appeared as though the argument was about to go badly for Nick, but fortunately some undead chose that moment to show up and prove his point for him. Their current location was proved to be unsafe, which may have had something to do with sitting around a fire at night arguing loudly with no one watching out for invaders, instead of, say, getting inside the vehicles once it got dark. So the party moved on to much safer locations, like a farm where undead were kept in the barn, a housing estate full of undead, and a fortified prison populated by same.

And Sean was shot by Nick's son for pulling a gun on Nick during a hunting trip, bringing to a close any dangerous ambiguity about the party's potential course of action. So that turned out fine.

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The world had faced challenges, but its people were all the tougher for that. They'd survived WEAPONs, Meteor, and DGs. The average citizens who were easy to kill were mostly already dead, and the tendency of corpses to dissolve into the Lifestream after death meant that there wasn't a wealth of bodies to be revived. Fifteen thousand undead came back to life on the Northern continent, but no one noticed, as they were all frozen into immobility anyway. Several tried to cross the Corel desert, but were quickly stripped to the bone by sandstorms and fell apart. Certain settlements, such as the ever unfortunate Edge, and Bone Village, suffered severe losses, but the WRO air fleet had the whole epidemic under control in just over a month. They introduced a new law requiring corpses to be burned upon death, and the world went on as though nothing had happened. Because given what this world had to deal with on the average day, nothing very serious had happened.

As you can see, I'm not particularly a fan of the whole 'Walking Dead' genre. The only really good example I've seen is 28 Days Later, which features 'infected' instead. And, considering that normal people on Earth can handle themselves pretty well in a Undead Apocalypse, I can't see the much more resilient FF7 people having that much trouble, especially as undead monsters already exist in the gameworld and people know how to deal with them. Oh well...

I'm out of slots, so this appears to be it, folks. Concepts that didn't get aired include the 'Tifa rape', 'body/gender swaps', and 'WRO/Turk Office Dynamic.'

I had a lot of fun, but if there's one thing I'd like you to take away from this, it's

DON'T PAY TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO ME!

I doubt it's necessary to say this, but write whatever you like, have fun with it, and don't pay too much attention to what people say. There are excellent fics written about every single one of the premises I've dealt with in this (I haven't read a good Mpreg, true, but I'm sure there's one out there).

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions, reviewed, or just read. Compliments are not compulsory.