Chapter 4

Peter Parker sat atop a building, eating his sandwich as he vacantly watched the mob on the dark street.

It wasn't his fault. It couldn't be his fault.

But it had to be his fault. Surely. None of those people who had died had deserved to die. None of them could have stopped this, either.

He should have been able to stop it. He was Spider-Man, for cripes sake!

Guilt threatened to envelope him. He looked down at his sandwich. Nobody below would ever be able to taste peanut butter and jam like he was now. He should be with them, he could have saved them, he could have saved Aunt May-

With a roar, he threw the sandwich as far as he could. It all was his fault! Uncle Ben, Aunt May, everyone at school whether he liked them or not…

Panting, he froze as his stomach grumbled. That had been the last of the peanut butter… He peered over the edge and spotted it on the ground. The five second rule had already passed… thirty second rule? He shrugged. This was the apocalypse, he couldn't afford to worry about germs. He leapt to the building across the street and quietly crawled down the side.

All the zombies were across on the side where he had been, drawn by his holler. The darkness hid him as he walked into the middle of the street to retrieve his snack. Turning to climb back up, he saw a face in a shop window.

Was that… Tony Stark?

The face hid when they made eye contact. Peter ran and ripped open the door to the shop, cringing as the bell above the door chimed.

"Close the door! Close the door and get down, kid!" the voice hissed. Peter quickly complied, nearly catching his backpack in the glass panel as he did. He crawled over to the source of the voice.

"…Hey! Are you Tony Stark?" he whispered loudly. The voice shushed him. In the dark, Peter couldn't see his face.

"Yes, I'm Tony Stark. You need to get out of here, they'll start banging on the glass because of that bell," Tony hissed.

"Oh, cool, I'm your biggest fan, like, um," Peter stuttered, forgetting the situation.

"Kid! Now is not the time to fangirl, we need to get out of here!" He paused. "…Do you have superpowers?" he inquired, seeming to only just now that the kid dropped from the side of the building. Peter hesitated. It IS the apocalypse, everyone IS dead… I guess there's no point to a secret identity, he concluded.

"Yeah, I'm Spider-Man!"

"Spider MAN?" Tony asked, incredulous.

"Yeah!"

"But you're just a kid, kid!"

"I-" Peter's protest was cut off as two zombies smacked against the window. The two heroes ran to the back of the shop and found the stairs. Up they went, Tony deflecting Peter's comments and attempts at conversation the whole way.

"Listen, kid… people tend to die around me. Somebody just died the other day because I couldn't save them. You're going to want to do this on your own, trust me," Tony insisted as they reached the top floor and locked the door. Peter shook his head.

"But we're stronger together! Look, I've got this to travel on-" he shot webbing at a ventilation stack a few feet away. Tony stared. "I can do supply runs and stuff, and we can find more people and start civilization over again…"

"…Did you make that stuff?" Tony asked.

"Oh yah, and I have a couple years' worth of supply now. After everyone…" he gestured at the street, "You know… died…" he cringed, "I went and raided the stores that had the supplies. I should have enough stuff to last me until I'm your age!" he rambled, opening his backpack to reveal thousands of cartridges.

"Kid…"

"Mr. Stark, haven't you ever wanted to make the world a better place?" Peter earnestly pleaded, looking into Tony's eyes. "We have that chance now! We can make a new society, make it better than before!" Peter said, clearly getting excited. His guilt, while still present, faded to the background at the thought of reconciling himself this way. Tony thought for a minute.

"…Spider-Man…. Maybe you're right."

-0-0-0-

Bucky's undead body stumbled towards Steve. Tears ran freely down his face. It just never ended. He stood frozen as the unsteady corpse of his oldest friend made its way over to him. I'll let it bite me… I'll let you bite me, Bucky, and then we can be together again… He lowered his shield and bared his neck. Maybe I'll be with Her again…

Just as the blood-covered teeth were about to clamp onto his flesh, a familiar scream sounded in the distance.

It sounded like Y/N

Without a moment's hesitation, he swung his shield up and shattered Bucky's head. For just a second he stared remorsefully at the lifeless body before running in the direction of the sound.

A good half hour of searching yielded nothing. The flame of hope was gone entirely; he had just imagined it. He climbed a nearby ladder and curled up in the fire escape.

All he could do was cry himself to sleep. The two people that mattered most to him were gone.

-0-0-0-

Y/N couldn't help the involuntary scream when the zombie bit into her leg. The knife she had found on her hip came in handy as she ran it through the corpse's head. She grabbed Jackson's hand and limped away as fast as she could. They needed to get out of this city before it was too late.

She was still in a state of shock from other events to cry over the fact that she had just been sentenced to death; For whatever reason, Iron Man was actually real. She'd found so many newspapers reporting on the avengers, books about them… in every shop they went into to scavenge for food, there was more and more proof of their existence. Y/N couldn't believe it… but she had to.

This had to be some sort of alternate universe.

How she had gotten here, she really didn't know.

The kid kept insisting that she was an Avenger. She found her face in the discarded newspapers. She found her name in books at the abandoned library. She quickly concluded that she had been in this dimension for a while and had lost her memory somehow. The painful lump on her head probably had something to do with it.

She hauled Jackson into a small restaurant that looked empty and barricaded the door. Setting him in a chair, she pulled the peroxide she had scavenged out of her backpack and tended to the oozing wound on her calf. She wondered if it was worth it to waste the peroxide, she would be dead soon anyway.

Finally, she had time to reflect.

The fact that she was in an alternate universe wasn't even the hardest thing to digest. That first place position went to the fact that she looked entirely different than she remembered.

She had been absolutely shocked when, upon glancing in a reflective window, she saw her changed appearance.

Dark brown hair, nearly black, was tied up and out of the way. Releasing it showed that it fell to her mid-back and that it was slightly wavy. She was annoyingly short, and had an even more annoyingly pale skin-tone that had confused her when she first looked at her hands. She was thinner than she had been before, probably because she had been too busy dealing with the apocalypse to eat properly. Her well defined collarbones showed through her slightly torn shirt.

She really didn't know if she liked how she looked now. Honestly, she looked slight enough that she might fall apart if she had to battle a particularly large crowd of zombies. Up until now, she had been fine, but in the future they might not be so lucky…

Not that it mattered, she would be dead from this bite very soon.

She finished tying a scrap of her tee shirt around her leg and pulled Jackson to his feet. Outside of the city there would probably be fewer zombies, so outside of the city they would go. Jackson would have the most chance of survival there once she was zombified.

So, off they went.