Welcome to my first 'Walking Dead' fic! Well, my first-published fic. I started writing another one back in May, but it's much longer, and I don't expect it to be finished anytime soon.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own 'The Walking Dead' or any of its characters. Julia and Bert are mine, however.
WORD COUNT: 2,518
"And then she snarled at me like some kind of animal, lunged across the counter, and tried to rip my throat out!"
"And then what happened?"
"I woke up."
Glenn shook his head. It was dead in the pizzeria this time of night, so he was stuck sitting in the lobby area with his feet on the nearest table, waiting for either a call for a delivery or the end of his shift, whichever came first. He was bored as hell, but at least the company was good. Bert was one of the decent managers, and while Julia had only started working there that week, she seemed like a nice girl.
Bert sighed. "I'll tell you, I had a dream like that when I started working here, too. Except when I fu- fudged up and order, the pizzas came alive and tried to eat me." That got a small chuckle from Julia, who was laughing at either the story itself or Bert's attempt to avoid swearing in front of her. "What about you, Glenn?"
Glenn grimaced. "The entire city turning into a giant maze and everyone getting pissed because I couldn't find the places on time. And every time I looked, there were more orders materializing in my car, always to the opposite end of town from wherever I was. I don't know what it is about this place; maybe all new employees are cursed to have a work-related nightmare. At least you got yours out of the way in your first week."
Julia chuckled again, this time a little more weakly. "As long as they don't become a regular thing."
Just then, the bell over the front door jingled, and Glenn accidentally kicked the salt shaker over in his haste to get his feet off the table (couldn't have the customers seeing that, after all; not a worker lounging around, nor his tattered sneakers on the tabletop). "Shit," he breathed, ducking down to try and clean it up.
"Hi!" Julia chirped in her Too-Cheerful-For-This-Hour Customer Service Voice (trademark pending), "Welcome to Allegra's! What can I get for you tonight?"
Glenn was still crouched on the floor, with the table blocking the customer from view, but he could hear him or her slowly shuffling towards the counter while Bert went into the back to prep the kitchen. Whoever it was, they were taking their sweet time.
"Hello?" Julia's tone had gained a note of confusion. "Ma'am? Are you okay?"
Glenn poked his head up, and now he could see the woman from the back. She was blonde, wearing a blue sundress and sweater combo, and also walking unsteadily, and his first thought was that she might be on something, but he dismissed that thought. This was a fairly nice part of town, so it wasn't exactly normal to have druggies wandering in off the street. But the slow, shuffling steps seemed… off. Then he caught sight of what looked like blood running down the back of her neck and staining her sweater. Holy shit, was she bleeding?!
Julia must have spotted the same thing he did, because she then gasped and started moving around the counter as the woman drew closer to her. "Oh my God! Here, just come sit down. Bert! We need the First- AGH!"
At first, Glenn thought the woman had simply tripped and fallen, and so did Julia, because she raised her arms to catch the poor lady. Then the teenager suddenly screamed in pain, a scream that choked off into a sick gurgling sound very quickly.
"Julia?!" Glenn, who'd already been moving forward to help, bolted over, trying to pull the woman off her. His heart damn near stopped when he saw the bright red blood gushing from Julia's throat as the woman sunk her teeth into it.
In a panic, Glenn looked around and spotted one of those big-ass bottles of hot sauce on the counter. He grabbed it and smashed it on the psycho lady's head just as Bert came bursting through the kitchen door with a First Aid kit in hand. "WHAT THE HELL?!" his manager shouted, seeing the strange woman drop to the floor.
Glenn caught Julia as she fell, her hands weakly trying to reach up to her bloody throat. "Help me with her!" he cried. Bert took one look at the bleeding girl in his arms and bolted around the counter.
They had just managed to pull Julia to the corner of the counter when her attacker stood up. The hot sauce dripping down her head didn't look like blood, but it still added to the terrifying image of the sickly-looking face the (dead-looking face, like the gross corpses he sometimes saw on 'CSI') with the clouded-over eyes and the fresh blood painting her teeth and lips and the flesh still sticking out from between her teeth. The woman actually snarled at them, like some kind of animal, and lunged forward, her arms reaching hungrily. Glenn reacted on instinct, kicking her in the stomach as hard as he could and sending her tumbling back onto the floor.
"Staff room!" Bert cried, and the two men dragged the limp Julia around the counter, through the kitchen door marked 'EMPLOYEES ONLY', and into the pizzeria's cramped break room. The lock had been busted a while back (the owner preferring to spend money on things that affected the customers instead of the employees), so Glenn shoved a chair under the doorknob in case Crazy Cannibal Lady kept chasing them.
Meanwhile, Bert laid Julia down on the floor, kneeled down next to her, and put his hand over her ripped-apart throat, trying to stop the bleeding.
It didn't seem to be helping. Julia was choking on her own blood, gasping for air that wasn't reaching her lungs. She was too weak to raise her own arms, and tears of pain and terror were streaming down her too-pale face.
"C'mon, Kid!" Bert breathed in a harsh whisper, "Stay with me!"
Glenn fumbled with his cell phone, thankful that it was still on his person and not lying on the table out there, and dialed 911.
"Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?" The words sounded stressed as hell and came tumbling from the operator's mouth in one breath.
"You gotta help us!" Glenn cried, "Allegra's Pizzeria; some psycho just attacked my co-worker! She's bleeding real bad! We're in the back room, but-" A terrifying thud made him jump – and made the improvised chair/lock rattle – and more followed, accompanied by inhuman snarling noises from the other side of the door. "Oh my God, the psycho's trying to get in!" He ran over and threw his weight against the door, trying to keep it shut.
"Sir, is the room secure?"
"For now, but I don't know how much longer the door will hold!"
"Alright, I've alerted police; what's your co-worker's condition?"
"She's- She's bleeding- Bitch tore her throat out with her teeth! Please, we need-" He stopped suddenly as Bert sat down with a defeated sigh. "Bert, what are you doing?! Help her!"
Bert turned and stared at Glenn, his eyes wet. "She's dead."
Glenn felt his blood run cold.
Julia was dead.
Julia was sixteen years old. Julia was less than a week into her very first job. Julia was someone's daughter, sister, and girlfriend.
And Julia was dead. She died while choking on her own blood on the floor in the back room of a strip mall pizza joint.
"Hello?" The 911 operator was calling out to him. "Sir, are you still there?"
Glenn swallowed. Wasn't it just ten minutes ago that she was telling them about a nightmare about a crazy customer attacking her? Had it even been five? "Sh-She's… She's gone. Julia's dead." He was pretty sure he was crying; he didn't even know the girl that well, but she was a nice kid, and it wasn't fair – she was sixteen, damn it!
"I'm so sorry, Sir. Is the attacker still trying to get in?"
"Y-Yes." The semi rhythmic thumping on the door against his back wasn't letting up, nor were the animalistic snarling noises. "Please, send the cops!"
"I've already put a call in to police dispatch, but you should know that we've been getting an unusually high number of calls, so it may take some time before they can get to you."
"WHAT?!"
"Sir, I'm sorry, but it can't be helped. I have some more calls waiting, so unfortunately I need to hang up."
Wasn't 911 supposed to stay on the line until help arrived?! "No, wait! Please don't-"
Click.
Glenn stared at his phone in shock before trying to dial 911 again. This time, however, all he got were the beeping sounds that told him the line was busy.
"Did they just hang up?" Bert asked incredulously. He was still sitting on the floor next to Julia's body, her blood staining his hands and shirt.
"Yeah. She said they were getting a ton of calls, and now I'm getting the busy tone, so I guess she wasn't lying."
"Are the cops coming, or not?"
"They are." Glenn swallowed. "But I don't know when. They're dealing with a ton of crap, too."
"What in the hell is happening?"
Glenn released a shaky breath. "I dunno. Guess we should be lucky that my first call went through at all."
They sat for a moment in near silence, the only sounds coming from Crazy Cannibal Lady on the other side of the door.
"What do you think she's on?" Bert finally asked, "She's got to be on something to do what she did. I heard on the news the DEA was looking into some new drug that makes people crazy. Maybe that's what's got the cops so busy; a gang on PCP, or something."
"This isn't Sunnydale," Glenn snapped, even though he knew the reference would fly straight over Bert's head, "And she didn't look like a gang member. I saw her when she walked in, and she was wearing a damn sundress. Does that sound like something a gang member would wear?"
"Well, do you have a better explanation?!"
Glenn shrugged as well as he could while still pressed up against the door. "I dunno; escaped mental patient?"
"In a sundress?"
"Maybe she stole it!"
Bert argued back at him, but it was at that point that Glenn stopped paying attention to what his manager was saying, because his eyes had just caught sight of something that should have been impossible.
Julia was moving. At first, it was just her fingers twitching, which had Glenn wondering if Crazy Cannibal Lady wasn't the only one in need of a shrink. Then he saw her turn her head in Bert's direction. No, that wasn't right; Bert said she was dead. Did he make a mistake? No, he used to be a medic in the Army Reserves; he knew better than to mistake a person for dead.
Then Julia sat up, and Glenn was convinced that he was either hallucinating or having a nightmare, because dead people do not sit up! Her throat was still a ruined mess, and there was something wrong with her eyes. She looked dead, or at least she looked like one of the dead people on TV crime dramas, but she was still moving!
And she was staring at Bert, who was still talking, with an expression that could only be described as hunger.
"B- B-" Glenn's heart was hammering in his chest, to the point that he couldn't hear anything else, and his mouth was no longer co-operating with him, so he was unable to even get Bert's name out, let alone warn him, before Julia lunged forward, much like her attacker had, and sank her teeth into the spot where his shoulder met his neck.
Bert's screams of surprise and pain were probably echoing throughout the break room, but to Glenn, they sounded like he was hearing them underwater. Blood spurted out of his neck like a horror movie scene as Julia tore a section of flesh away and started chewing. She wasn't just biting Bert, she was eating him!
Glenn didn't know how long he stared at the horrifying, macabre sight of one of his co-workers eating another one alive. What he did know was the utter sense of primal terror when Julia stopped eating Bert – who was no longer moving and probably dead – and turned her dead, cloudy eyes on him.
What happened next like watching a movie; Glenn's body moved on autopilot, his mind feeling detached from it all. When Julia lunged at him, he dodged, diving for the table and chairs. He grabbed one chair – which turned out to be the crappiest one, with the wobbly leg and duct-taped plastic leather seat, because only the customers were worthy of spending money on good chairs – and swung it like an oddly-shaped baseball bat. Julia went down in the middle of her second charge, and Glenn bolted for the door, which was starting to give way under Crazy Cannibal Lady's continued assault.
He didn't even hesitate to rip away the first chair, which was slipping across the linoleum floor, although he did nearly trip over the damn thing before tossing it away and opening the door.
Crazy Cannibal Lady practically fell on top of him, but he held up the crappy chair like a shield and shoved. One of the chair legs caught her in the stomach, and if Glenn had been feeling anything other than terror and adrenaline right now, he would have been disgusted when he slammed her against the wall and the metal actually pierced her flesh and sank into her belly, not that it seemed to bother her in the slightest.
(He would later would later freak out about it in the relative safety of a friend's apartment.)
He knew Julia would be getting back up, if she was as inhumanly persistent as Crazy Cannibal Lady, so Glenn high-tailed it out of there. He crashed through the doors to the front, nearly wiped out when his foot slipped on the hot sauce – or was it the blood? – and scrambled out the front door to where the car was parked next to one of the EMPLOYEES ONLY spaces because some entitled prick thought they could take the last one when there were plenty of regular spaces available nearby. Glenn basically dove headfirst into his car, fumbled to get the keys out of his pocket, and dropped them twice before finally managing to start the car and peal out of there.
His heart was still pounding in his ears as he swerved around other cars, mostly drowning out their enraged honking. What the actual fuck even was that?! Was he hallucinating? Did they accidentally use the expired tomato sauce again?
Glenn just wanted to get home. He wanted to get back to the place he was currently staying at, burrow his head under the covers, and not come out until morning, when he would wake up and find that it had all been a horrible dream. Because that's what this was: a dream.
Right?
THE END
For those who, like Bert, didn't get the reference, Sunnydale is the hometown of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where people are constantly getting attacked by vampires and the authorities are always finding strange explanations for the attacks, from gangs on PCP to fainting and falling neck-first on a barbeque fork regardless of whether or not you even own a barbeque fork.