Author's Notes –

Shout Out's –

DragonKying – The edge of your toilet? I'm not sure I want to know where you people are when you read this stuff.

Shadico – Thanks for your observation. I'm glad you're liking the density and the pacing. Tell me, are my zombies gross enough? Or should they have been grosser?

Dylanbiancamano – When I have time. Jokers Wild is a pretty big read, and I don't have the free time I did before this story ate my life.

JMV1997 – I'm sorry I've confused you. Can you be more specific?

Shugokage – Immortus has had six thousand years of military experience. It makes him hard to write, 'cause I haven't had any. I'm glad you like the way he's turned out.

Justafly – Nope. Fanfiction authors thrive on feedback. Any feedback. We're not particular. Just don't ignore us. J

Lord Anubus Judge of the Dead – Thanks!

Dizzy – Yeah, you're not the only one who's mentioned the cliff hangers.

RandomDalmatioan326 – Thanks for the encouragement.

V – Yeah. I'm hearing you.

Lord Vukodlak – Yeah. It's a classic trope.

Hairul – But you don't need all that hardware when you got one good hacker and a careless LAN admin.

Ok folks. With this chapter we will be wrapping up in the jungles of Central America. Be aware that I'm deliberately skipping over some tedious housekeeping. What happens to the live Immortus troopers? Who deals with all the dead bodies left in the jungle? Why can't Starfire just fly everbody out? Because then we wouldn't have a story. In this chapter we'll see Robin and Starfire buried alive under a sea of walking dead. Another exhibition of Cyborg's genius. And, of course, amazing heroics by the Changeling.

Looking ahead, we have some critical decisions by Raven, not all of which she's going to tell us, girl talk with Bumblebee, and vegetarian pizza.

The raging dead moved closer, flowing up the sides of the pyramid like a tidal bore. As the first line reached the ten foot mark, Jinx inhaled deeply, raised both her hands and snapped her fingers. There was a massive purple flare as the stone ledges on all four faces crumbled under the feet, trapping the first row of zombies in place, by burying them up to their needs and forming a wall of zombies. Their undead brothers, unable to pass them, began to crowd them from behind.

"Good work," said Robin.

Jinx smiled and drew a deep breath. Her hands were shaking. "Big hex," she said. "Can't keep that up long."

"You and the rest of us," Robin replied with a fatalistic smile.

"Incoming," shouted Bumblebee, who then adroitly wielded Robin's staff like a baseball bat, knocking a leaping zombie back over the wall of the dead down below them.

"Three more," shouted Kid Flash, pointing.

From close in above, Starfire's voice could be heard, "HAH! HAH! HAH!" As she adroitly punched out the motivators of three more leaping zombies with three carefully placed starbolts.

But Starfire had thrown hundreds, perhaps thousands of starbolts in the last hour. And nobody, no matter how passionate, could possibly maintain that much Righteous Fury for much longer. Her starbolts were now barely larger than her fists, and a pale green. Zombie icor no longer burst in huge gouts from their backs, but oozed from smoking holes in their chests.

"Just a few more minutes," Cyborg muttered, his nose buried in his one-handed keyboard. "I'm gonna have this."

There was a tearing sound. Appalled, Jinx looked down at her wall of undead as one by one, with supernatural strength, they wrenched their legs out of her trap, tearing off their own feet to do so. Most fell to their knees, continuing their crawl up the steep sides. Their rotting brethren leapfrogged them and bounded the rest of the way, and the Titans were completely engaged again.

Bumblebee swung Robin's staff like a demented recruit at Spring Training, baseball-batting zombie after zombie down the steep incline, only to have them roll to a stop a few feet away, stopped by the legs of the other raging dead, to rise and turn back toward her.

Raven raised her head and forced her eyes to focus. She lifted one hand from where she lay and extended it.

"Azarath, Metrion, Zynthos," she intoned, her voice hoarse.

A flash of dark energy extended from her hand, neatly ripping the motivator out of the chest of a leaping zombie, taking it out of the air like clay pigeon in flight. Then she collapsed back onto two elbows, chest heaving.

Robin swung his scarlet sword like a knight of old, dismembering and decapitating zombies left and right as they closed in. Soon there would be no more room to swing.

Aqualad stood his ground and provided perhaps the most creative solution. Unarmed and far from his element, he stood, legs firmly grounded and a shoulder width apart, waiting. When a zombie would leap for him, he'd grab it by its outstretched arms and, using its own momentum against it, spin around and fling it far out over the encroaching throng.

Speedy pinned three motivators with his conventional arrows, punched a hole in the crowd with his one explosive arrow, and then knocked down a knot of zombies with his remaining electrical arrow. Sparks few as the creatures thrashed and writhed in the electrical field. Then he shifted his grip on his bow and prepared to use it as a club.

It was, perhaps, Mas y Menos who applied the most bizarre solution to the problem. If one of the team dropped a zombie inside the perimeter, they would grab it and drag it over next to Cyborg. If an active monster managed to get inside, they would rip out its motivator to render it inactive, and the drag it over to Cyborg. In this way, they slowly built a fortress of dead meat around the machine-man, hoping to buy him a few more seconds.

Aqualad had known it would happen. He'd known since the last assault had begun. Weaponless, his technique would only work on one zombie at a time. When two hit him from different directions, he flung the first off the pyramid, but the second hit him in a flying tackle, knocking him off balance. Two more piled on and forced him to the ground. He rose for a moment, lifting the three dead men with him, but when five more jumped on, he was no longer able to force his muscles to lift the increasingly heavy pile of dead and rotting meat. The fish – man in the blue unitard vanished under a pile of rotting meat.

It was a small mistake. The wall of the dead had gotten too tall for Mas y Menos to casually fling more bodies on top of and they stopped for an instant to get better footing. In that instant, Mas was seized by a zombie, and pulled away into the throng.

"Mas!" shouted Menos, and vanished among the raging dead, looking for his brother.

Robin wielded the scarlet sword adroitly, but it was not his chosen weapon. Fingers, hands, and arms flew in abundance, but he was not quite strong enough to drive the sword through the rib-cages of his opponents quickly enough to stay ahead of them. One grabbed his sword arm and hauled him sideways. As he turned to try to wrench himself free, two more grabbed his other arm, holding him in place. Then three more leapt on him, and he disappeared beneath the rising tide.

"Robin!" screamed Starfire, from her close hover. She shot down towards the heaving pile of dead meat and began to unpile them with brutal efficiency. But she was too close. Rotting hands reached up behind her and grabbed her ankles. She shrieked and began to pepper them with small starbolts. "Hah! Hah! Hah!" she cried. Starfire might have been stronger than she looked, but she was also exhausted, and still only massed about 105 pounds. Six and then eight of the dead climbed her legs and hauled her to the ground, covering her with their flabby flesh as the pulled at her limbs.

Jinx shrieked as the top half of a corpse grabbed her by the ankles. Kid Flash whirled to go to her aid, but ran face-first into the festering chest cavity of an enormous dead man. The thing threw its arms around Kid Flash and the two tumbled down into the crowd, invisible in the threshing mess.

Changeling's allosaur form paused and looked around. He'd seen the others fall. Bumblebee was nowhere to be seen. There was only the small space around him where Raven crouched, exhausted, and Cyborg worked. He looked down at Raven's tiny form huddled on the rough-hewn stones below him.

"Last resort time," he thought.

He morphed, risking an instant in his human form.

"I love you," he said, and closed his eyes.

His jaw began to lengthen, and his pupils vanished. His spine twisted and stretched. Coarse fir popped out of his skin and grew long, and shaggy. His muscles knotted and thickened. His claws burst into vast talons on his hands and his feet. His teeth grew, lengthened and fused into fangs like teather-stakes. An enormous hump of muscle sprouted from between his shoulder blades and neck. His ears flared out, batlike, while the rest of his head became leonine in proportion. His arms became obscenely long, and heavily muscled. His legs were thick as tree-trunks. For the first time in millions of years, something new stood under the Central American sun.

It's amazing how fast your mind works when you don't have to think. You already know. The Beast had no name for itself. If he had to, he would probably call himself "First Male," or "Alpha." He didn't think in any way that Cyborg, Robin, or even Changeling would understand. IHedidn't have Changeling's memories in any clear or definable way. His brain just wasn't built that way. But he inherited certain . . . imperatives from "The Other," as he thought of Changeling. The Alpha Female, the Mate, The Bearer-of-The-Cubs-To-Be, or, more simply, "Mine," was weary, and injured or sick, and could not fight or flee. And, as usual, the Other had allowed things to become far more complicated than they needed to be. The beta males and beta females of The Pack were down. It would be simplicity itself to take Mine and leap into the jungle, leaving behind this clumsy pack of Carrion-That-Walks. He could return both of them to his territory, far to the north. But he would not. Mine had nailed his feet to the ground as effectively as if they were sunk in concrete. He could smell the fear on her. It radiated off like the stink of the Carrion-That-Walks. She feared for the Pack more than herself. The idea of being a lone animal again filled her with far more terror than facing the Long Night that comes to all animals in the end. And Mine was right. You do not abandon the pack to jackals. All this passed through the mind of The Beast in the time it takes the slow minds of humans to blink. For the Beast didn't need to think. He knew."

The Beast threw his head back and roared his defiance. His voice echoed off of the stone walls of the city. It rang from the surrounding hillsides. He raised gigantic claws to the sky and called his fury to the jungle. Small flocks of birds as far as five miles away were startled into flight by the unholy sound. Panthers and other large predators raised their heads to listen for a moment, and then slunk away into the brush. Something new was declaring territory, and the lesser predators wanted nothing to do with it.

Immortus raised an eyebrow. In all his thousands of years commanding troops, this was something new. He gestured to one of his technicians, and the kiva flew a little higher.

The Beast began to lay about himself with fang and claw. His enormous arms swept up two and three zombies at a time, crushing them together into a foul paste, and dashing them to the ground. He spun, first on one heel, then the other, pulling them in from all sides. Pieces, small and large, scattered hither and yon, spattering their fellows with foul juices. The dead knew no fear. They felt no pain. And they never got tired.

Neither did the Beast. Where normal animals or mortal men would tire or die from wounds, the primal animal simply fought on. Grey ooze began to pile up at his feet as he continued to widen the circle of empty space around him.

Behind him, inside his fortress of dead meat, and within the circle of safety provided by the raging Beast, Cyborg spoke, softly.

"Oh man, I don't believe it. Of all the stupid, cocky, careless. . . ."

His voice rose. "Hey Immortus! I've got you now you son of a bitch!"

And his finger pressed the "Enter" key.

All the walking dead froze in place. The ones leaping through the air landed on the stone with moist thumping sounds, some bursting from the impact. Sudden silence reigned. General Immortus spun on his technicians.

"What is the meaning of this?"

The two techs scrambled frantically to their consoles and began to hammer away.

"Oh no, boys. Those doors are all locked down now," said Cyborg. "You're not getting back in that way. It'll take a factory reset to clear those passwords now. And you're not going to have time for that."

The Beast started to step away, and then stepped back. With exquisite care, he picked Raven up and draped her over one shoulder. Then he methodically began to walk around the shattered temple, picking up zombies, twisting their heads off, and throwing them down the pyramid. One by one, he dug out the fallen Titans. He carefully laid the Pack side by side at the center of the temple. He put Raven on the ground beside them and whined quietly.

Cyborg looked up at Immortus. "You really need to get with the times, old man. If you're going to use a industry standard Stark Industries wireless router, you really need to change the default password."

"What the devil is he talking about?"

Cyborg didn't bother to speak. He dialed his sonic cannon back up to ten, and blasted the ring around the Kiva. At the same time, Speedy fired his last arrow – the knockout gas arrow. It burst in the passenger area of the stone circle just as Cyborg's blast tore the ring loose from the stone. The kiva tumbled end over end back into the building where it had emerged from.

The Beast whined again. He could lick their wounds, but it wouldn't help much. The Pack were much weaker than the Alpha. That was the Way of Things. But Mine would not be pleased if they died of their wounds, and the fact that it was the Way would not make her any happier. The Other knew more about these things. He had fixed things like it before. The Beast looked around. He felt the sun on his fur, and smelled the wind. Behind the charnel reek of the Carrion-That-Walks, he could smell the clean scent of the jungle. It called to him. And his own territory to the north. Then he looked down at Raven. There really weren't any questions. He leaned down and filled his nostrils with her scent. And then he called the Other.

Changeling opened his eyes. His brain wasn't built the way the Beast's was, and he couldn't ever remember what he'd done when in that form. At least not clearly. But the Beast left him with certain . . . imperatives. The top of the building had been cleared of the walking dead. His friends and Raven had been carefully laid out. None were bleeding that he could see. And General Immortus' dead troops were frozen in their tracks. Cyborg's sonic cannon rang out just as Speedy fired his arrow. He turned just in time to see the kiva crash back into the building out of which it had come.

"NO!" he shouted. "Immortus!"

He turned to Cyborg, "Take care of the others!"

He sprang off of the pyramid, morphing into a streaking falcon as he did. He headed straight into the rubble after the pyramid.

Cyborg watched the dead for a moment. In about three second, every single one of them collapsed like a sack of wet bat guano. He checked each of the fallen Titans. All were badly bruised and clawed. Some had bites taken out of them. But all had survived. They'd been down so little time and the dead packed in so close they'd gotten in each others way. He cleaned and patched their wounds. He debated waiting for Robin to wait before relocating his shoulder again.

"But," he thought, "If he didn't learn the first time, he's not going to learn now."

The pain of the shoulder going back into the socket woke the Boy Wonder up.

"How is everyone?"

"They're going to whine a lot when they wake up. But they're going to wake up. Except Raven. Her I don't know about. She's not physically injured, just . . . "

"Physically exhausted," came Raven's flat voice. "I hope to Azar we're done. I don't have enough left blow out a match."

Cyborg smiled. "No more walking dead, anyway. I crashed their system. They were using a wireless network to broadcast command signals to the corpses. I hacked it. Well, not much hacking. For a military genius, Immortus is kind of stupid. He left his wireless router set to the default password: password."

"We have had the luck," said Starfire.

"Changeling," rasped Raven, sitting up and looking around. "Where's Changeling?"

"There," said Cyborg. "He left me to take care of you guys and chased Immortus and his troopers into that building.

Raven rolled onto her knees and then shakily hauled herself to her feet. Starfire and Bumblebee followed. Raven stooped over and picked up a rock.

"Raven," asked Cyborg, "What are you going to do with that?"

"I'm going to throw it at Immortus. It's all I've got left."

She headed for the stairs. Bumblebee hefted Robin's staff and followed. Starfire concentrated, hard, and pulled up two starbolts the size of lemons in her palms. Cyborg just shook his head as, one by one, his patients dragged themselves upright and limped, gimped, or wobbled their way after the bad guy. He looked at his power gauge. "5%" left on his mains. Then he followed them.

Anticlimax. They found Changeling by following the swearing. He turned out to have a widely varied vocabulary. He was on the ground floor of the building, surrounded by the smashed remains of the fallen kiva. Scattered about were the sleeping forms of Immortus' crew, knocked out by Speedy's gas arrow. But there was no sign of the Big Bad.

"What happened?" Cyborg asked.

Changeling didn't let up swearing but instead thrust an old mess of leather and hoses at Cyborg. It was an old-style World War II Wehrmacht gas mask.

"But where . . .?"

Changeling kicked the rubble on the floor.

"How many mole-machines can one dirt-bag own?" he snarled.

"You mean?"

"I got here just in time to see it disappear into the floor. He'll be a half-mile away by now, and in any direction. He can stay submerged for days. Weeks even. Cyborg began to dig.

"Don't bother. It fills in the tunnel after itself. Maybe Terra could have caught him, but we're not going to do it. Son of a BITCH."

"Dude," said Cyborg, "It's still a win. The cybernetic-zombie army is dead. The Dark Heart's buried under the wreckage, so there won't be any more zombies. And nobody died."

Changeling's eyes went wide. "Raven?"

He looked around in a near panic.

"I'm right here," she said.

Kid Flash and the twins were as tired as anybody, but at Robin's suggestion, they'd run ahead and confirmed that the verti-jet was still intact. The smoke plume from earlier had apparently been the burning guard shack, although when Immortus had decamped he'd activated some sort of self-destruct feature on his air yacht and couriers. Mento would not be pleased with the results on his paint job.

Wearily, the titans climbed back into their transport and started the long flight back to Steel City.

They weren't airborne more than fifteen minutes before there was a problem.

"What do you mean, 'no showers,'" shouted Bumblebee to Cyborg.

"Hey," he said sharply, "I didn't design this bird. Just eat something and try to get some sleep. We'll be home in a few hours."

Changeling rummaged in a locker. "Mento usually keeps provisions . . . AH!"

He leaned back in triumph and help up handfuls of foil packets.

"M.R.E.'s" said Bumblebee incredulously.

"Mento's old, cheap, and doesn't like to 'waste resources on creature comforts.' But you should see the on-board chemlab!"

"Just gimme the food."

The Titans all ate and then collapsed into the padded chairs to sleep. Too exhausted to think and not bothering to worry about what people thought, she found Changeling in the rearmost seat, climbed into his lap, and went to sleep with his arms around her. Right before she embraced sleep, she whispered, "I heard what you said."

"Sorry," he said. "I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I needed to say it before . . ."

"Don't be sorry."

She snuggled close. Cyborg cut the lights down to half.

Five hours later, Starfire was the first to awaken. She inhaled.

"Ew. I smell like the inside of a Trovarian blortworm. She rose and headed aft. On her way she passed a bleary-eyed Jinx as she sat next to a sleeping Wally.

"Problem?" asked Jinx.

"No," said Starfire, "I am merely going to the bathroom to do the 'damage control.' I am the 'ick' and wish to not be the 'ick' when boyfriend Robin awakens."

"Not a bad idea," said Jinx, waking up a little more. "No showers, but let's see if we can at least partially repair the hotness index in the sinks before the boys wake up."

By silent consensus the next pair to use the bathroom to tidy up was Raven and Bumblebee.

"Oh Azar," said Raven, taking one look in the mirror. "I look like I took a shower in rotten blood."

"You are not really rockin' the exploding corpse look, girl."

Raven glared at her for a second, and then took off her cloak. She went to hang it on a hook and then looked more closely. Shrugging she removed the jewel from it, and stuffed the disgusting garment into the trashcan.

The girls each began to try to remove as much of the filth from their arms faces and necks as they could.

"So," said Bumblebee carefully. "The sleeping arrangements in the back row caught some people's attention this trip."

Raven froze, and then plunged her head under the faucet. The sink ran black. When she emerged, Bumblebee was still there, watching her with a gimlet eye.

"So, you are dating everybody's favorite shape shifter now?"

Raven flushed maroon. "It's complicated."

Bumblebee rolled her eyes.

"Girl, I saw you crawl into his lap last night. You moved like you were goin' home."

Raven rinsed her hair again.

Bumblebee continued. "Complicated, huh? Bit of advice girlfriend?"

"What," said Raven.

"A man who lets you sleep in his lap covered in rotten blood, with bits and pieces of zombie dripping off of you, hair like a corpse-bird's nest, and smelling like an open grave and is still attracted to you is probably a 'keeper,' you know what I'm saying? Men don't hang around forever. If you feel the way I think you do, you best 'uncomplicate' things and tell him so. And soon. Or he's going to look for a woman who's not so 'complicated.'"

Raven pulled out the tiny subcompact that Jane had insisted she start carrying. In it were a solitary tube of lip gloss, a tiny, black eyeliner cartridge, some very pale purple eye shadow, and a miniscule amount of perfume. She applied the emergency perfume behind her ears, on her neck, and on her wrists.

"Well," she thought, "At least now I don't smell like an open grave."

She took the seat next Changeling for the rest of the flight home. She spent the time alternately watching Changeling sleep and thinking about what Bumblebee had said.

By the time they dropped off the Titans East in Steel City, Raven had made a decision. She sought some privacy and broke out her Titans communicator. She put it into cell phone mode and made a call.

"Chef Blackstock, I need a favor."