Chapter Eighteen:
The Dead Soldiers Rise

Buffy drop kicked the first of the zombies the reach her. She then grabbed its gun and shot it in the head, remembering what Giles had once told her about zombies. If you disable their brain, they die again.
She then aimed the gun at some of the other zombies, not stopping to think and wonder what had caused the dead bodies to become zombies.
Lorne wasn't a fighter, but that didn't mean he was completely unable to fight when the time called for it. He grabbed the first zombie to reach him and got its weapon, a shotgun with seven shells. He shot its head off. Blood and brains splattered into the air. Then he displayed his horrible aiming abilities by wasting most of the rest of his bullets hitting nothing or just zombie limbs. When they got closer he was able to aim easier and three of the zombies dropped to the ground, finally at peace.
They could hear gun fire in the distance. That was good; there were more survivors.
Lorne was panicking now. His aim was getting worse. Then he was out of bullets and he had to retrieve another gun. A zombie jumped on top of him when he kneeled down to grab the gun from the closest body. It bit him and Lorne knocked it off.
Buffy spun around and blasted its head off. Dawn and Oz were still unconscious and dying. Lorne and Buffy were their protectors.
Giles was using a gun--a 9mm pistol--as well while Willow was using magic to kill the zombies running at them. Kennedy stared dumbly in front of her. She was sitting up and didn't seem to hear or see what was going on.
Lorne was pissing metal with his Uzi. Bullet after useless bullet hit nothing or had no effect. Buffy was shooting a single bullet at a time from her Desert Eagle.
Her last bullet hit a zombie's neck and that same zombie leapt on top of her. It thrust its head forward its mouth open and blood and drool dripping out. Its nauseating breath was hard to deal with and it was somehow overpowering her. How was it overpowering her? She was the Slayer!
The zombie's deadly teeth drew ever closer to her face and the zombie seemed to be smiling. It was snarling.
Buffy got her foot under the zombie and thrust upward. The zombie flew off of her and Buffy grabbed a 9mm pistol and blasted away at a bunch of other zombies charging.
Lorne was backing up from the crowd. He was running out of bullets quickly and had no bodies within feasible reach. And the bite mark on his shoulder was hurting like hell. Luckily for Lorne he couldn't be affected by the zombie virus, but it still hurt like hell.
Giles was able to get over to Buffy and Lorne. Willow stayed behind to keep Kennedy safe.
Giles shot a zombie off of Oz. Oz hadn't been bitten. He then shot another two that had gotten through Buffy and Lorne. He shot another in the distance--not killing it but slowing it down--and was then out of bullets. He grabbed another weapon. His eyesight was getting worse and he knew he was too old for this stuff.
When the last zombie in the area was killed, Lorne had been bitten once again and Giles had been knocked down. Buffy had a scratch on her cheek from slamming into the ground. That was it. They were lucky. Not as lucky as the group of soldiers seven blocks away, which sustained more than seventy-five percent casualties. A single block away was Alexander Harris, on his way to look for duct tape.

Meanwhile…

Xander was looking down at a soldier's body. He had seen the soldier the day before. They had chatted for a few minutes before going off and doing whatever they did.
If Xander hadn't understood how many had died in the explosions, he did now.
The soldier then opened its eyes. They were glazed and Xander understood they were dead.
"Oh shit!" Xander shouted and ran away as the zombie sat up. More were getting up all around. Even bodies that had been chopped apart were showing signs of life. It was obscene. The dead coming back to life.
Xander ran into a standing building and slammed the wooden door behind him. He then ran through the darkness, bumping into tables and chairs and walls on his way. Xander realized that he couldn't run very fast anymore. He only had one arm to pump for speed with. Most of the zombies had two. And the ability to ignore pain on top of that.
"Okay Xander, buddy," he whispered to himself. "What are ye gonna do, boy?" He then found the stairs. By found I mean stubbed his toe on and then fell on top of. He scrambled back to his feet and began to walk up the stairs cautiously. He hoped no one had left a toy on the stair case.
Upstairs he decided he would stay, at least for a few minutes. Until the zombies had passed… or broken in. Xander cringed at that thought, not wanting to accept it as a possibility but knowing it was one nonetheless. The prospect of getting devoured by the undead when you couldn't see them was not a very spirit-lifting one.
Then his working hand found something on a desk positioned against the wall.
A big, brand-spanking new roll of duct tape.

Meanwhile…

Spike snapped the spinal cord of a zombie and then decapitated another with his fist. Angel did likewise and so did Faith. Robin and Fred snatched weapons from the dead zombies and began to blast away. Fred wasn't a great aimer and missed a lot, not as much as Lorne, though.
"What the bloody hell is going on?" Spike shouted.
"Zombies!" Angel replied.
"I know that!" Spike retorted as he slammed a zombie's head into the pavement, smashing it like a watermelon. "I mean why are they zombies?" "No clue!" "Great!" Faith leapt into the air and kicked a zombie's head right off its shoulders. Robin shot a string of bullets from his machine gun that tore one in two. Fred managed to kill a couple of them and disable a few others.
The five began to move. They didn't know where they were going. There were distant gun shots. They weren't the only ones left alive. That was good.
After about ten minutes of wandering and slaughtering zombies they stumbled upon the medical tent. It was half collapsed. Angel hoped that Gunn had been on the other side of the tent.
There weren't many zombies around in that area; just three or four. They used that lack of enemies to their advantage and disappeared into the barely standing half of the tent.
In there was a jumble of hospital beds, gurneys, paper, and dead soldiers who had been in the middle of a coma or something when the explosions had occurred. They had taken a bit to die, apparently, because they weren't zombies yet.
Angel gave up Gunn for dead, then he saw a black hand from underneath one of the piles of beds and gurneys. Angel grabbed the beds and soldier bodies and began to toss them away like garbage.
Sooner rather than later an unconscious Gunn was laying on the floor for them all to see. So was the head of the blonde Slayer he had been with at the time of the attack that had landed him in the medical tent in the first place. Angel thought her name was Monique but wasn't entirely certain.
Spike uncovered the rest of the Slayer with a bit more difficulty than Angel had had uncovering Gunn because the piles to the sides were getting bigger and it was hard to place something.
That was when Angel noticed just how large the medical tent was… and just how many people were in it. All or most dead by now. They would be zombies in probably a matter of minutes. They seriously needed to be gone by then.
Angel wondered how they could possibly take all of these zombies at once. Bombs, guns, magick, anything! He couldn't think of a damn thing that was feasible.
"Let's get these two out of here, quick," he ordered the other four. Fred was looking at her bleeding abdomen, still not certain if this was all just a dream. Spike and Faith were lost in their thoughts. Robin was the first to obey Angel's command. He picked up the Slayer and began to carry her away. That's when a zombie came crashing into the tent, its body on fire like and its eyes glowing like some homicidal, insane jack-o-lantern. It let out a shriek that none of them could believe for a second was human and charged. Angel jumped on top of it and tore its flaming head off and chucked the body and the head out of the tent before it could catch fire. He then saw the crowd sprinting towards the tent. The dead crowd.
"Son of a bitch," Angel muttered under his breath.
The other four looked at him. They were wounded and low on ammo and energy. They wouldn't survive the fight. Not even Angel and Spike. Angel had a sudden vision of his head being chewed off by a dozen zombies and shuddered. He had always secretly hoped that it would never be decapitation that killed him. Decapitation scared the hell out of him.
He turned to the others. He had about twenty seconds or less to make one final speech.
"Let's give these undead assholes hell." Then Robin and Fred began firing. Angel, Spike, and Faith grabbed whatever was around that was good for stabbing or slicing. Knives and scalpels were lying on the ground and on the over-turned beds and gurneys.
They began to fight against the horde of zombies, knowing that what waited for them at the end of the fight was death. Because the dead soldiers in the medical tent were opening their eyes and lifting their heads, hungry for human flesh in a much more grotesque way than Hannibal Lecter.
Zombies at the flap of the tent and zombies inside of the tent. They were sitting ducks that happened to be armed with guns and sharp objects and the knowledge to use them. Yet they were sitting ducks nonetheless.
Angel was bit twice and Spike four times. They didn't care about being bit because they knew the virus wouldn't take over them. Their blood wasn't pumping and they were already undead.
Robin's gun ran dry first and he broke a bed post off of one of the hospital beds and began to bash in zombie heads. Fred was managing to keep them at bay, wondering why she wasn't already dead from her wound. Her mortal wound.
When her gun ran dry Ashley managed to get out from under the beds and gurneys. She wasn't screaming anymore, just struggling. Not knowing yet that she could've flung everything off of her with just a thought.
And she saw the zombies. All of the zombies getting up and running. The piles of dead zombies. Decapitated or with snapped necks they were dead.
Without thinking about it she held out her hand without a moment of panic or a moment of fear. She didn't even feel the power drain from her considering so little of it had left her. And the zombies all dropped dead simultaneously. Some cut off mid-moan or mid-groan.
Then the five turned to look at the Ashley who had just saved their lives without even using any amount of effort. And Spike began to laugh hysterically.

Meanwhile…

Andrew somehow managed to get the tent material off of him. He had been suffocating, so close to death. He heard distant gunfire. Lots of gunfire. Continuous and loud.
There were no dead soldiers near Andrew--he would later thank God for small favors--and he had no idea what had happened or what was happening.
The last thing he remembered was hearing an increasingly loud CD player shouting Weird Al Yankovich's "Amish Paradise", and then orange and red and yellow and heat. A lot of heat. Then suffocation.
Somehow he had survived almost an hour under that tent without dying. Another thing he would later thank God for.
He got up with shaky legs and dusted off his black shirt and blue jeans. He then surveyed the surroundings. Just like Angel and Connor, he also thought the Apocalypse had happened.
He walked down the cracked street and avoided smoldering bits and pieces of cars, CD players, etcetera. The buildings where all crumbled or partially crumbled. He didn't understand how this had all happened within the hour he had been out. Then he remembered the gunfire, which was still loud and clear, and wondered if it was happening instead of already having happened.
So Andrew walked in the direction of the gunfire, hoping to find Buffy and the others. To have things explained to him.
Instead he was going to find a massacre.

Meanwhile…

Gwen was suddenly standing in Los Angeles. Surrounding her was Buffy, Lorne, Giles, Willow, Kennedy, Dawn, and Oz. Dawn and Oz were lying down and bleeding profusely, though. All of them, except for the two unconscious ones, looked at her in bewilderment.
Gwen held up her right hand and waved "hello." She then looked down and saw that she was naked again, her clothes scorched away by the electricity. She was momentarily reminded of that "Terminator" time machine's rules. Only organic material can go through it. She supposed her new form of transportation was like that.
She then stole the clothes from a nearby dead body and donned them. She looked odd in camouflage slacks that were four sizes too large and a white T-shirt that was three sizes too large at least.
"Hello," she greeted in a kind voice. The group remained speechless and continued to stare. Gwen giggled nervously. That was how she met the Scoobies for the first time.

Meanwhile…

All over the country the dead were rising. Rodney Remus, Sean Berds, Harry Vega, Kevin Nerg (who--if you remember--had been blown in half), Jack Frierson, and even the president all raised to feed on the living. Along with all of the other dead bodies with their heads remaining. The amount of the undead largely outnumbered the number of the living. Those mentioned earlier having been rescued in the morning from their collapsed building… well, they were killed not ten minutes later.
Soon over eighty percent of the country was dead. Soon ninety.
The United States of America was becoming the undead capital of the world.

Hello, MorbidMan here.
I have a confession to make: I forgot all about Andrew for a few chapters. I have some good news, too. No, I didn't save 15% on my car insurance by switching to Geico. I got an XBOX! I don't have a game for it yet, but I do have a rented game: "True Crime: Streets of L.A." (kinda ironic considering this fic takes place mostly in Los Angeles). Anyway, back to the Author's Note that's relevant to the story.
I remembered Andrew because of this idea I got for a "Buffy" fic. It's about Buffy, Dawn, and Andrew having found a permanent place to reside. Somewhere in the U.S., of course. Buffy is out on patrol one night when a vampire, drenched in blood with his vamp-face on, jumps on top of her and pins her down, having caught her by surprise. He then asks her to help him. To help him overcome his vampire addictions and needs.
And all of those names mentioned in the beginning of the last section were characters I had described having died in the explosions in Chapter Fourteen that hadn't been decapitated or mostly decapitated.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter. See you next chapter.

(Warning: the following quote contains rated R content)

"My dad gets angry when I use profanity. Especially when it turns perfectly good sentences into perfectly disastrous sentences. For example:

Example A: Good Try.

Example B: Holy fucking shit you gimpy fuck, what the fuck was that?!

Maybe dad's got a point there." - Matthew Good "At Last There's Nothing Left to Say" (a good book)