Character: Sakura

Prompt: Sakura discovering that a patient who should be dead isn't. It's walking around chomping on people and making more. Can be AU, but would love if it wasn't.

Rating: R

Warnings: Zombies and Foul Language

Staying Dead

"God damn it, why can't anyone stay dead like they're supposed to?"

Sakura screamed as she dodged yet another lightening fast attack from a corpse that had been declared dead three days ago. A chuunin that hadn't made it back to Konoha in one piece. But she supposed she shouldn't be so surprised at dead people walking amongst the living, since just about nobody else in this insane world stayed dead.

First off, there had been Orochimaru and his Impure World Resurrection. Pulling out the first and the second hokage to fight the third during the chuunin exams. That should have clued her in that being dead and being dead were two completely different things.

Sakura took a page from Kabuto's book and used some chakra scalpels to cut the major tendons in the corpse-chuunin's legs and arms. The dead body collapsed, and while it was still twitching and gurgling 'Braaaains', it wasn't making too much headway in the moving department.

Then there had been Madara, Hidan and Kakuzu. Lunatics that should have died ages ago. Madara and Kakuzu because they had already lived beyond nursing home material; Hidan because… well, because he enjoyed dismembering himself on a regular basis, just to worship his insane God of Evil. The man had survived being decapitated, for fuck's sake.

Thankfully, the corpse she had just ham-strung didn't seem to possess any regenerative capabilities. It was still flopping around on the ground, but her attack seemed to have neutralized it for the most part. Now, she only had to take care of who knew how many other zombies.

But Hidan hadn't been the worst Akatsuki member. Oh no. The absolute fucking cake went to Pein or Nagato, or whatever that schizophrenic basket-case with a god-complex had called himself. First, the guy wiped out nine tenths of the Leaf population and turned Konoha plus the rest of its inhabitants into a smoking crater. A crater of nearly two square miles. And then, he went ahead and brought back every single fucking soul he had killed not even half an hour earlier!

Compared to the scale of Pein's resurrection, Sakura supposed that Konoha's current predicament wasn't very impressive. However, it was the next step on the evolutionary ladder.

Now, they weren't only dealing with undead ninja, like Orochimaru had resurrected. They weren't only dealing with corpses that could survive evisceration and dismemberment, like Hidan. And they weren't only dealing with a danger to all of Konoha, like Pein had been.

No, whatever was responsible for producing those undead was fucking epidemic. Anyone bitten by those nearly indestructible zombies inevitably turned into a zombie later on, after some kind of an incubation period. There was no way that it would make halt at borders or city limits.

And Sakura could feel that her own zombification wasn't too far off.

Three days ago, she had been called to perform an autopsy down in the hospital morgue. She had been just about to crack open the body's rib cage, when she had been attacked from behind. By a jounin who had died in her hands from strange poison symptoms not even 24 hours earlier.

Now, after three days of watching more and more Konoha citizens fall to the zombie plague, Sakura knew that the jounin had been the very first carrier. The one to bring the seed of disease into the heart of Konoha.

From then on, everything had escalated. By the time they had realized that the zombie was contagious, it had already infected several civilians and ninja. By the time they had realized that there was no cure, more people had been turned. By the time they had realized the only way to kill those zombies was complete immolation or annihilation, plenty high-ranking ninja had been bitten. Most of them knew suicide jutsus destructive enough that they didn't turn into zombies themselves. Or they had explosion tags. But Konoha had been hurt badly by the loss of people capable of killing ninja-zombies. Because, on top of it all, the undead retained their old speed and physical skills.

And so the plague had spread.

Sakura didn't know whether there was still any semblance of containment, or whether she was fighting a lost battle. Hell, for the past few hours, she hadn't seen another living soul.

She didn't know where the rest of the Konoha Twelve were. She didn't know where Kakashi or Yamato were. She knew that Gai had sacrificed himself to stop zombie-Tsunade, and that nearly every medic in the hospital had been bitten. The rest of them though…

But that didn't matter. Sakura had been bitten, too, and it was only a question of time until the infection woke from the dormant state she had managed to keep it in so far. Her last conscious action was going to be directing all her chakra into the explosion tag she had glued to her chest. She was going to go out with a bang, and she wasn't going to let any undead disease or snake pervert or self-made god resurrect her.

Until then, she was going to take down as many zombies as she could.

Baring her bloody teeth in an insane parody of a smile, she laughed hoarsely. "Come to me, you motherfuckers! Come to me! Let's see if I can't convince you to stay dead once and for all!"