Chapter 17: Immediately after Chapter 16

Bonney caught up with Zoro just as he was crossing into Robin and Baby's backyard. She shoved him in the back after he finished beheading another zombie, both of his swords drawn and covered in sticky blood already. "You fucker! You totally just ditched all of us! What the shit, dude?!"

Zoro recovered from the push and flicked the blood off of his swords. Well, some of it at least. "I didn't ditch you. I was drawing them away. See?" He gestured toward the zombies around the area that had started following him. Two were closer than the others, within grabbing range.

Bonney scoffed and reached for her pistol, only to find it absent from the back of her shorts, where she had tucked it earlier. "Wh- Aw shit!"

It was up to Zoro to sigh and step between her and the zombies. He made short work of them while Bonney fidgeted, suddenly feeling quite vulnerable without a weapon at her side.

"Missing a gun?" Came Robin's voice. Bonney whirled 180 degrees to see Robin standing there, decked out like an FPS protagonist. In her indignant anger towards Zoro, Bonney had completely failed to notice Robin standing there. "Here, take the other rifle." She handed off the gun, significantly reducing her burden. Bonney took it gladly. The backyards were slowly filling more and more as the zombies spread out in search of fresh food.

Bonney fired off a few shots, dropping three zombies off in the distance. "Yeah! That's a good idea!" She and Robin heard Zoro say. He had backtracked to the strip of lawn between Robin's house and his house, where the zombies were filtering in from. "Keep drawing them over here so we can take out even more!"

That was the trouble with using guns, of course. You drew attention. It was clear that more zombies were drawn to this particular backyard, coming from the side yards on either side of Robin's house.

"Oh, well damn. This isn't very convenient," Robin said, bringing the rifle up again.

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Back at the Roronoa/Jewelry homestead, Coby was coming up blank on the weapons situation. He was stuck sorting through the kitchen, looking for knives in the drawers. "How can people as messed up as Zoro and Bonney not have ANY weapons?!"

Scowling, Vivi crossed her arms and said "Because Zoro just likes his swords. He's a bushido man. And it's not fair Nami gets the only gun available!"

Nami was holding Bonney's left behind gun, checking the clip to see how many shots were left. "It's hella fair. I can't run away or reach a zombie's head like this. You two can still fight better than me."

Coby handed Vivi a chef's knife and held one in his hand from the same set. She regarded it with some disdain. "These are their nice kitchen knives, we can't use these!"

"Sweetie, I doubt they do a lot of cooking anyway. It'll be fine, besides this is life and death here."

It was around then that the glass at the front window cracked and shattered from the weight of the zombies pressed against it.

"BOY, SURE AM GLAD BONNEY BRACED THE FRONT DOOR!" Nami shouted as the undead started literally falling through the gap.

Time to check in on Luffy and friends! After Franky had led a chunk of zombies away, the gateway was just a little more clear and they were able to inch closer inside. Luffy and Sanji swapped places, with Luffy sitting on the roof of the car and Sanji behind the wheel. This was done at Luffy's insistence after he caught sight of the minigun mounted on the jeep. "Get me to that!" He demanded. "Get me to that so I can use it!"

Baby was in the passenger seat with the window rolled down. She was leaning out the window and making it a little easier to navigate by opening fire with a pump action shotgun. After a few shots turned a handful of zombies to goo, she leaned back in. "Is zhis why zhey call it 'shotgun' when you want to sit in zhe passenger seat?" She chirped.

"I'm not sure, actually…" Sanji said. Their train of thought was interrupted when the van started rocking, being shoved against by swarming undead.

From the roof, Luffy yelled down "HEY! KEEP IT STEADY!" He struggled to keep his balance. The jeep was only a few yards away. If he really believed in himself, he could probably jump to it. Granted, that would mean abandoning his friends… But he couldn't do much for them up there anyway. He waited until the van was relatively steady and then took the most faith-filled leap he could manage.

He landed in the back of the jeep, almost losing his balance and falling right into the sea of chompy-bits. With a bit of dramatic flailing, he kept his balance up. "Whew! Almost bit it there. Wait, no, they would've bit me. Heh! Hahahaha!"

When he stopped finding his own joke amusing, he grabbed the grips of the minigun and tested how well it pivoted. He could turn it a good amount and could aim it downward enough to clear out anything in his way. He obviously couldn't shoot behind him, but there were enough in front that he could still deal some damage.

He gripped the trigger, braced himself for the recoil, and opened fire. Now, Luffy was not much for guns in the first place, and this was a weapon designed to chew through cover, so it absolutely had a kick to it. The kind that sent his aim going every which way. Fortunately, again, this thing was designed to chew through cover, and there were zombies everywhere. It didn't quite matter where he aimed.

Luffy bounced up and down, feeling his teeth chatter for a good fifteen seconds before the gun suddenly stopped firing. It let out a few pathetic clicks and it dawned on Luffy that it was empty. "A-awww! What a ripoff, that's all I get?!"

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"Was that the minigun?!" Bonney shrieked. "Aw man, are some of those assholes still alive?!" Zoro cleared out enough to peek down the side yard to see the situation out front.

"Oh hey, that's Luffy on the minigun. The cook and Baby must've made it back," he told them. "But uh… Looks like they're getting kinda swarmed.

Robin let out an exasperated sigh. "Really? I was kind of hoping they would be here to save us." She handed Bonney another pistol and unloaded her rifle onto Zoro. "Here, let me grab your third sword," she told him.

Bonney snorted behind them. "Yes, yes, I realized it as soon as I said it," Robin said as she pulled Zoro's katana from the sheathe. "I'll be right back, I'm going to go save them," in the same manner someone would announce they had to go to the library or else they'd get a late charge.

To her, it was more an inconvenience than anything. Once she cleared out of the backyard, and therefore the source of all the gunfire, the zombies went back to leaving her alone. They had no self awareness or object permanence. She snuck through the side yard, weaving through the undead as they lumbered toward the sound of Bonney's gunfire.

Luffy, Sanji, and Baby didn't really need saving as it were. Luffy was elevated in the back of the jeep and if any grabby hands got a little too close for comfort, he could crouch down and end them with a knife to the brain. The same went for Sanji and Baby, in the front seats of the van with the windows half rolled down, one by one dropping zombies that had the gall to reach inside.

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Robin approached Luffy first and held up a finger to her lips to keep him from calling out. She swung the sword to clear an opening to the jeep and climbed inside along with him. "Hello, Luffy. Day treating you well?"

"Kinda! I like getting to kill all these zombies, but… Kinda worried about how everyone else is doing…" he told her, bringing the knife down into a zombie's ear canal.

"Ah, well, let's see… Zoro and Bonney are in my backyard fending for themselves. You can hear them, can't you?" Robin said. She pointed to her house and the sound of automatic gunfire emanated from it. "Last I saw, Franky, Law, and Perona were at his house…"

"Actually they just left, they were leading a buncha zombies out of town in the Frankystein!" Luffy corrected her.

"Thank you for the status update. And as for Nami, Vivi, and Coby, they are safe and sound at Zoro and Boney's… house…" she trailed off as she turned to gesture at their place and saw the zombies fumbling their way inside through the broken front window.

Both Luffy and Robin stared, jaws slack, in silent horror.

"Get out of the way!" Nami barked, gesturing wildly for Vivi and Coby to clear out of her line of sight. She raised the pistol and fired off, counting every shot as it made contact. "One! Two! Three!" Every shot connected as a zombie was halfway through the window, causing their body to collapse on the windowsill. This made it just slightly harder for another zombie to climb in, now having to climb over a fallen comrade as well. "Four! Five! Six! Seven!" The entire windowsill was was covered up by zombie corpses, but it wasn't enough to completely stop the flow. "Eight! Nine! Ten! Eleven!" She stopped firing and took a deep breath.

"Nice work, Nami! What comes next?!" Vivi cheered, looking to her in expectation.

"Uh. That's it for me. I'm outta bullets. You two get to shine now." She looked embarrassed.

Coby and Vivi looked from Nami, to each other, to the hole in the wall, where zombies were using their rotted minds to figure out how to climb through the window. They both advanced, with some hesitation. Zombies fell through the opening and they were easy enough to dispose of before they could manage to get back to their feet. However, this put the couple too close to the window, and thus the range of grabbing hands, for their comfort.

Vivi hated this. She hated everything about it. To her, zombies were worse than fire or natural disasters. Those could come out of nowhere and wipe out everything in their path. But zombies were different. Everyone a zombie killed didn't just decrease the human population, it added to the number of zombies. If a tornado could level up and grow stronger based on its killstreak, we as a society would have just given up by now.

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Every zombie in front of her had, at one point, been like her. They had struggled to survive, and at some point, that struggle ran out and they ended up very briefly dead. It had always bothered her, just as she knew it bothered Coby. But now was not the time for her weird pity.

"Y'know what, Coby?!" She yelled, kicking a zombie in the knee so it would stumble down and she could more easily stab it in the brain.

"Wh-what?" Coby struggled against a grappling zombie and shoved it away.

"Ever since we got here, we've been attacked and shot at and threatened and spied on and now THIS!? It's like everyone in the world wants us OUT OF HERE!"

"Sweetie, I really don't-yikes!" He nimbly spun away from a lunging bite and plunged his knife in the back of its head. "Think this a good time to talk?"

"Well-! Well, FFFFUCK THEM!" Hey if everyone else was going to toss the word around, why not her?! "They don't get to kick us out! W-we're stronger than that! I'm not afraid of these things!" Actually she was terrified, but maybe if she shouted loud enough, she could trick herself into thinking otherwise.

It worked on Coby at least. He stared at her like she radiated pure golden light. Pure golden light with a spattering of blood and sweat, but still. At once, he fell in love with her all over again. "Y-yeah! Yeah, fuck them!" Fuck these zombies!"

"The zombies and these raiders and everyone trying to chase us out! We kept trying to convince ourselves that we weren't set for this world but-!" She punctuated her statement by bringing her knife up through a zombie's nose. It was a bit more fresh than the others, so when its skull cracked open, she was sprayed with blood. "This is our home! We're not going ANYWHERE!"

"Who the hell do they-NGH!" Coby grunted as he wrenched the knife out of a zombie's throat. Its head toppled backwards as the body collapsed. "Think they are, huh?! They can't tell us what to do! They aren't even alive!"

"I've been stuck in this stupid world for six years now! Since I was twelve! And now that I've got something really good here?! Something really good on the horizon?! I'M NOT LETTING A BUNCH OF ZOMBIE JERKWADS RUIN THAT FOR ME!"

Coby and Vivi were not violent people by nature, but all that meant was the anger built up over time. Oh sure, they'd have little arguments or they'd stand up for themselves or they'd defend themselves from zombies, but they had never just unloaded. But Vivi had inspired something in Coby just now, and in turn, inspired something in herself. And they. Went. Crazy. Six years of pent-up aggression being let out like a pressure washer against a grimy sidewalk. Blood, eyeballs, intestines, and teeth went flying and made a real good mess of Zoro and Bonney's front room.

There was a momentary lull in the action when the stack of bodies in the windowsill kept more zombies from filtering in as quickly. Of course, the pile wouldn't hold and eventually they'd just push through, but the living could at least catch their breath.

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Nami clapped her hands and smiled at the two of them, spattered with gore and grease and brain matter. "Look at you two~! You're turning into little psychopaths just like the rest of us!" She said in an oh-so-cutesy voice.

Coby laughed uneasily. "Th-... Thanks, Nami…?" He looked to Vivi. "Hey, what did you mean when you said something really good on the horizon?"

Vivi wiped her blood-streaked face on her slightly less blood-streaked shirt sleeve. "O-oh. Uh. Yeah, I was… gonna tell you later, but… I think… There's a chance… I might be pregnant."

Back outside, Robin had to hold Luffy in a death grip to keep him from flinging himself off the jeep in order to get to Nami. "Luffy! Think!" She said, fully accepting the irony of such a request. She grappled with him like a person trying to give a bath to a cat.

"There's no time for thinking! I gotta get in there and save Nami before she ends up dead!"

"I know that, but you won't do any good if you end up dead too! You being dead will not make Nami happy!"

"But I gotta do SOMETHING!"

"Yes, I agree. So stick with me and we'll walk through the zombies and keep them from sniffing us out," she said as deliberately as possible, so he could understand. When she felt he was no longer trying to rush ahead, she turned towards the van. "Will you two be alright by yourselves if I take Luffy?"

"Yeah we're good here!" Sanji's voice came from the front seat. She could see him reach out to stab another zombie, adding to the pile building up in front of his door.

"Just do not forget about us!" Baby said over the sound of shotgun fire.

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While Luffy and Robin began cutting a silent and bloody path toward Nami, Vivi, and Coby, Bonney and Zoro were clearing their way across the backyards to their house. The lawn was littered with gore, and Bonney briefly pondered if it would kill the grass. Zoro shrugged. "Nah, it's… Fertilizer. It's good for it. That's how it works."

They cleared out the lollygaggers in their backyard and climbed up the steps onto their deck. Bonney peered through the back door and saw the front room through the hallway. "Holy shit! They're still alive, and they totally fuckin' turned our house into a butcher shop."

"Hell yes," Zoro said, his eyebrow raised. Actually, both of them were raised but no one could see it. He stood guard on the porch while Bonney threw the door open.

"Yo! You all still fuckin' alive in here?!" She called out, stepping inside.

Coby and Vivi were chittering about something she couldn't hear, and Vivi turned to look at Bonney like she was Santa on Christmas morning. "Bonney!" She chirped. She quickly glanced at Coby, "We'll talk about this later,"

"Wh-!" Coby stammered.

"You can't just pull that!" Nami said.

Ignoring the glares from her husband and best friend, Vivi sparkled at Bonney some more. "I'm so glad you're still alive. Sorry about the mess. Is Zoro with you?"

"Dude, do not even fucking worry about the mess. You guys are rad as shit. Let's just keep stomping bitches," she said, nodding to the zombies pressing themselves against the corpses of their fallen brethren in order to get to the tasty flesh inside. She pivoted around to face the back door. "YO! CYCLOPS! GET THE FUCK IN HERE! IT'S BIG FUCKIN' LAST STAND TIME!"

As Bonney reloaded her rifle and tossed a fresh clip to Nami, Nami told her "Y'know, Zoro isn't missing an eye. He still has both of them. He's just blind in one. He's not… really a cyclops."

"What?" Bonney said, confused. "Cyclops has two eyes."

"Nnnoooo? Bonney, do you… know what a cyclops is?"

"Uh, duh? He's an X-Man. Shoots energy beams from his eyes? Him and Zoro are both charmless pricks with no sense of humor and big fucking sticks up their asses."

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Robin and Luffy had managed to carve their way up to the driveway, but the front porch wasn't quite as spread out as the rest of the outpost. The zombies were packed like sardines against the window, clawing aimlessly to get inside. The living duo couldn't just shoulder past like they normally would. There simply wasn't enough room to do so.

Robin grabbed Luffy by the collar and tried to pull him toward the side yard. "Come on, we'll go around back and get in that way."

"But this way is shorter!"

"Luffy, we cannot fit up there." She tugged him away from the porch just as machine gun fire sprayed from the window, downing some zombies and sending bullets sailing across the cul-de-sac. "See? Even if we go up through there, we'd just get shot."

Luffy scowled, but reluctantly let Robin lead him around the house.

Back at the van, Sanji looked around. The zombies were just starting to thin out, enough so that it was noticeable compared to the hell they first drove into. "Hey, you wanna drive into the driveway there and back them up? Looks like we're all converging there anyway," he asked her.

Baby flashed him her usual charming smile. "Absolutely! And may I say? This has been one of the better dates in my life~"

Sanji turned on the ignition and inched the van forward, bumping past the zombies that still cluttered the way. Baby reloaded the shotgun and climbed over the seat into the back to pull out the rest of the guns they brought. When Sanji settled in the driveway, they cleared out the handful or so in their immediate area and then simultaneously climbed out of the car and scrambled onto the hood. Well, Sanji scrambled. Baby gracefully swung her leg up, brought the rest of her body up, and then similarly swung onto the roof of the car in one fluid motion.

They were both sitting on the roof of the van, not unlike a romantic moonlit picnic where they would eventually get to third base. Except it was midday and there were zombies everywhere, so no time for groping yet. Sanji, curious to see what would happen, fired off one of the flare guns at a zombie. The flare embedded itself in the zombie's eye socket, and it didn't seem to even notice the sudden intrusion until the flare actually detonated, causing most of its face to burn off. Its skull illuminated for a brief moment, creating a real life Ghost Rider, before its brain scrambled enough to bring it to the ground.

"Ooohh…" both of them cooed simultaneously.

This action would mark the beginning of what Bonney referred to as the Last Stand. All nine of them, now equipped and gathered in one location, against the remaining 272 zombies still wandering around Little Garden. Oh wait, did I say 272? I meant 221. Almost forgot about Franky's group…