Chapter 2: The Girl Who Remains
"Merlin Hemione... your neck..."
"..Harry, listen to me. I'll buy you as much time as I can, but you need to get away NOW! Run as fast as you can, and don't look back."
" I can't leave you!"
" You can't save me! Just go!"
The last conversation he had with the girl who had been his most trusted friend had haunted Harry's nightmares for weeks. Now, staring at her shade, it played on his head in an interminable loop.
Hermione kicked Colin's lifeless corpse closer to the Shrieking Shack, stepping back involuntarily as it burst into flame.
"Interesting." she muttered. Harry took her in. Her bushy brown hair was the same, and in the moonlight she looked painfully like the Hermione of the past. But her skin was a few shades too pale, her eyes far too cold, and he had never seen Hermione Granger with that kind of predatory smirk on her face.
Her features stayed the same as he raised his wand, though her body tensed as if ready to dodge in an instant. Harry's wand arm shook as he ran through every possible spell for the situation. Finally he settled on one.
"Muffliato!"
Harry had thought Hermione was jealous of him when he had used the Prince's book to get ahead in potions. Looking at her now he knew he had been wrong. He had never seen Hermione's face contorted in an expression anything like the one she wore now- yet he knew at once it was one of envy.
"Odd spell choice." The revenant muttered. Harry wondered idly if she had discarded her wand or still had it tucked away in her robes as a keepsake.
"I wouldn't want anyone else attracted by the noise. Why did you kill Colin?"
Hermione chuckled darkly. " The better question would be why we didn't kill the little pest sooner. The only reason I didn't arrange an accident for him when we were at Hogwarts was because my conscience would never have let me do something like that." She laughed a cold, joyless laugh. " I don't have that problem anymore."
"Then why haven't you attacked me?" Harry snarled.
Hermione laughed. " I'm hungry, not blind. I saw what happened to Colin, and while I don't care about the lives of others I still would rather keep my own. You've obviously set up some kind of autonomous defense...somehow..." The revenant lost interest in Harry for a moment, and he incredulously watched as she stared off into the distance, biting her lower lip as she once did when working through a complex problem. She whispered some things he couldn't catch before her eyes widened and she looked back at him.
" A runic array?" She muttered in surprise, casting a rock over the line to it engulfed in blue flame. She then glanced at the bag of supplies he clutched in his hands. " Keyed to your magic so anything that isn't you or on your person is incinerated if it crosses your ward line. As an amateur you only would have access to a handful of tools- the most basic grammar, maybe a hundred words. Not much room for error, hardly any sophistication. But also no loopholes for clever intruders to exploit. Simple, but effective. I'm impressed." Hermione laughed mirthlessly. " You've finally done your homework."
"Not much else to do anymore, is there?"Harry replied.
"It's a pity really." Hermione said. " You were always brilliant when you put your mind to something."
"And it took the end of the world for that something to be Ancient Runes."
The revenant smirked. Harry stared at her for a moment. He looked at the skin on the right side of her neck. There wasn't a mark on it. "Paying attention again?" Hermione teased. " Don't worry, I didn't go to the trouble of healing my wounds just to toss myself on this funeral pyre."
"If you know you can't get past the barrier, why are you here? Aren't you wasting your time?"
The revenant licked her lips.
"Would you believe me if I told you we were running out of food?"
The back of Harry's throat suddenly became very dry. "...What?" He forced out.
Hermione cocked her head. " Oh, its simple math, really. Using round numbers, there were about 10,000 witches and wizards in Britain and 60 million muggles. About half the wizarding population was either killed after turning or devoured before their bodies could turn at all. That leaves 5000 infected magical people with bottomless stomachs. Each of us can go through 50 people a day, easily, and you're well aware of how quickly a pack of us can strip a corpse. That's 250,000 people per day, conservatively. And that's only direct deaths from infected wizards- not factoring in all the elves, goblins, trolls, werewolves and other creatures who turned as well. An infected giant could consume several city blocks singlehandedly- though their movement is constrained by the need for large cover during the day.
"There are also the indirect deaths that need to be considered. How many muggles died during the panic, after we crippled their infrastructure and decapitated their government? How many killed themselves rather than end up in our stomachs? How many were bitten and escaped only to turn themselves? A creature without magic doesn't stay infected for long, but long enough to bite someone else before they completely degrade and turn more of the food supply into rotten meat." Hermione growled bitterly.
"I haven't had anything to eat in 4 days." She said. " And finally, after all that agonizing hunger, I come across a healthy, uninfected wizard to keep all to myself." The revenant tossed a twig across the barrier and recoiled when it caught flame. " More of us could force ourselves through the wards, eventually, but I'd be lucky to get a few scraps of you that way, and there's a very real chance I would die without getting a morsel. There aren't many meals left. I intend to savor you no matter how long it takes me to get you."
Harry gripped his wand so tightly it nearly snapped, blood pounding in his ears. 'Kill her, kill her, kill her!' a savage voice called in his heart. He hesitated.
... He couldn't do it, not while the monster was wearing her face, using her voice. He knew that she knew it too. He looked at her smile, all teeth, and shook indignantly at the perversion of that smile, at the horror that maw had unleashed on the world.
"You gave me estimates for the others. What about you? How many people?" Harry said evenly.
The shade grinned. " I don't know. How many loaves of bread have you eaten in your life?"
The interior of the Shrieking Shack was in rather good shape. Over the course of the last two weeks Harry had spent several sleepless nights transfiguring and repairing the broken down furniture and walls into something usable. He looked at the creature comforts around the house, from his extra clothes down to his bed, and grimaced, remembering the cost of getting them.
Dobby had responded to his call as soon as Harry had escaped Hogwarts, somehow avoiding infection. When he saw the state of the Shrieking Shack the house elf insisted on bringing in books, and chairs and even carpets from the Gryffindor common room, until one day he apparated into Hogwarts and didn't come back. Harry had checked the end of the tunnel the next day and found an elf's body with its head smashed by the Whomping Willow. It had tried to claw its way into the tunnel. He had pushed the misshapen corpse into the sun and watch it dissolve into ashes, and then booby trapped the tunnel with everything he had.
Of course, Hermione knew about the tunnel to the Shrieking Shack too. With any luck she'd sneak past the Willow's blows only to get caught in a well placed blast of Greek Fire. He wouldn't count on it, though. She had always been too clever for her own good- spotting details anyone else would have missed. Sooner or later she'd find a chink in his armor.
'Would it be so bad?' Harry thought sullenly. 'Everyone I've ever known and loved is either a ravenous undead cannibal or meat.' He pulled a bottle of Firewhiskey out of his enchanted sack, twisted off the cork and took a hearty chug straight from the bottle. His throat burned and he began coughing uncontrollably, his weakened body rebelling at his treatment. It didn't matter; at least this took his mind off the demoness prowling the perimeter of his home, and the memories of how everything went to hell.
It had only taken one bite to bring down all of Britain. From the spotty visions he had seen, Voldemort had been experimenting with captured Wizards and undead, trying to perfect another form of immortality. It backfired.
Before patient zero was put down it had bitten Voldemort and Wormtail. Voldemort was out of the picture. Harry didn't think anyone but he could kill Tom but he hadn't had any visions since the first night or seen any signs of the revenant Dark Lord, and if magic could turn the living into ravenous corpses he supposed anything was possible.
Wormtail had spread it to every other Death Eater in the hideout. They had spread it to everyone else.
The infection took a few minutes to set in, a few minutes where the victim still had control of their magic. Terrified witches and wizards would apparate to safety only to turn their sanctuary into a slaughterhouse. It had happened to countless homes, to Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley... and the Ministry. Britain had fallen into chaos within 24 hours, and the ICW had ordered a quarantine of the islands.
Harry had tried to warn Dumbledore as soon as he had seen the vision, before he was even fully conscious of what it meant, but by the time the Order had mobilized the situation had already spiraled out of control.
Hogwarts had lasted two weeks. No one could apparate in and Dumbledore had cut them from the floo network and raised the wards to full power. The surviving wizards had fallen back there to regroup as the Muggle population was left to the wolves. Eventually, somehow, one of them made it into the castle. That was that.
Harry put his wand to his temple, thinking. He had to... no. His hand shook. He wasn't capable of severing whatever bonds tethered the twisted fragments of Hermione to the world. It was Hermione. But so long as there was even a chance that there was a living person he could hurt he couldn't let himself be turned.
' You could stop it all with one spell.'
He tossed his wand aside furiously.
Something primal in him rebelled against the thought. No matter how bleak his life had become, and it had been bleak, he had never considered that as an option. Gryffindors didn't take the coward's way out. So long as there was breath in his lungs he would fight. And if he did happen to get bitten at some point... well... he picked up his wand, pondering the best way to use his last moments of free will. " One spell." He said mirthlessly.
No sense casting it before then, though. He looked around the defenses of his little slice of sanity, walking into the training room where he could blast out magic to his hearts content and fuel his nascent wards. He had work to do.