Title: Freckles
Fandom/character: Dawn of the Dead (2004), Ana
Prompt: No. 17 – Brown
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: This is one of the first installments in a 100-story challenge from Live Journal. Much like my old college creative writing class, we are given 100 words and a topic and free reign to riff on them. Some of these stories will follow the movie canon, some won't; some will be long, some short; some may even follow in sequence. Ratings, timelines, tone will vary. They all will focus on Ana and the people around her.
The heat radiated off the gravel roof, and she flipped her forearms over, pale side up. She somehow doubted she would live long enough to get skin cancer. Freckles though, she was getting those in abundance. Hundreds of little brownish ones that crowded her skin.
Just yesterday, she had sat sunning herself in this same spot with Nicole and Monica. They had read old fashion magazines and watched Terry, Tucker, Michael and C.J. play volleyball. The mood had been light all day, and the women unmercifully teased Terry and C.J. for letting the taller men team up against them.
"Hey listen to this," Ana said, reading from last month's Vogue. "One of the big pharmaceutical companies is working on a cream that will let you get a tan without getting freckles. Think they're still working on that?"
"I hope so because you need it," Nicole teased, crinkling her nose at the older woman.
Ana had archly pointed out that Nicole had no room to talk about somebody else's freckles. The girl sobered then, looked at Ana with tear-filled eyes and said she had gotten her red hair and freckles from her mom.
"I always hated her for this hair and my pasty white skin," she sniffed. "I never got to tell her anything different."
Nicole staggered to her feet. "I-I gotta find Chips, he gets scared," she cried, and started screaming the dog's name, filling the air with her voice and their intensified wails from below. She ran for the other side of the roof.
"Issues." Monica rolled her eyes, turning her attention back to her Cosmo.
"Oh, for God's sake," Ana said, scrambling to her feet to go after the girl. She ran past the now-halted game, ignoring Terry and Michael's questions.
She found Nicole on the edge of the roof, looking down at the crowd outside one of the doors. They had yet to notice her, so she watched them in silence, hugging herself as tears ran down her young face.
"Hey," Ana began, speaking softly to avoid unwanted attention. "I'm sorry." She glanced down at the lot, trying hard to ignore the smell rising up from the ground. She pushed aside the thought that they rotted in the sun and hated her because she didn't. She just freckled.
Nicole shook her head, her short hair swinging. "It's not your fault," she said, still staring at the parking lot. "I wonder if she's down there? Maybe David and Nicky too… and, and, that hot guy from Old Navy."
"You know, Nicole, it's not really them anymore," Ana replied. "It's just their bodies. There's some… something else at the wheel." She hoped she was right about that, God knows she wondered sometimes herself. The thought of Luis down there, trapped in a putrefying shell, still woke her at night.
"Don't you think it would be easier to just be like them?"
"Sometimes," Ana said with a sigh.
They stood there for a long time, watching those things crowd into the parking lot.