Title: The Burden Of Dead Faces
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Universe: Zombie Cantos
Characters/Pairing: Reid, others - gen
Genre: Horror/Drama
Summary: In the fight for survival, Spencer Reid thinks about what was left behind.
Author's Note: This will be a series of non-chronological one-shots, rather than a multi-chaptered story. Long author's note at the end.
Zombie Cantos: The Burden Of Dead Faces
* * *
The burden of dead faces. Out of sight
And out of love, beyond the reach of hands,
Changed in the changing of the dark and light,
They walk and weep about the barren lands
Where no seed is nor any garner stands,
Where in short breaths the doubtful days respire,
And time's turned glass lets through the sighing sands;
This is the end of every man's desire.
A Ballad of Burdens - Algernon Charles Swinburne
*
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants
Isaac Newton
* * *
'Six minutes,' he says off-handedly to Emily, as they stand outside the police station, taking in the day's events. She pauses in the middle of lighting a cigarette.
'What?'
'It's just something I used to say to my mom,' he says. 'Every cigarette takes another six minutes off your life.' He feels a slight pang at the thought of his mother – it's been eight months, and he hasn't quite gotten used to the thought of not having her around. Never mind that he'd barely seen her. The rest of the team have some semblance of hope that their loved ones might survive – they're able-bodied, after all – but part of him knows that he can't hold out the same hope for his mother.
She stares at him, incredulous. 'Reid, corpses are rising from the dead, and you're worried about me smoking?' She shakes her head, but pockets the cigarette anyway. He's not entirely sure where she'd gotten them from, but apparently they're supposed to be some kind of stress relief. He doesn't care to test the theory. It's not the time, nor the place to foster a new addiction. It's not the time or the place to bring up old addictions either, but he doesn't tell Emily that. He's pretty sure she already knows.
He'd stepped out to get some air, because without power, the station is stifling in the heat. The sparse energy they get from solar and kinetic power isn't nearly enough to waste on air conditioning – at least not for the police station.
After the purge, there are only about a hundred people left. In terms of continuing survival beyond their own life spans, that population is beyond the point of no return. Even if they manage to hold out, the human race is doomed to extinction. There could be other safe havens out there, of course. Other strongholds of humans fighting against the zombie invasion. They're not exactly in a position to go out looking, though. Not yet. He thinks that that plan is at the end of a long list of other courses of action, mostly keyed to short-term survival.
Maybe one day, when the zombies have died out, or they've found some miracle way to cure the virus, they'll go looking, but right now, it's all about staying alive.
That's the assessment he'd given Hotch seven and a half months ago, because even though he's not technically qualified, he's the one with the most knowledge about survival rates and post-apocalyptic scenarios. It's a field of interest that's never really held much practical application until now.
'Are we ready?' Morgan asks from the door of the station. His t-shirt is stained with dried blood, and the rifle that's slung over his shoulder looks more like an extension of his body than a tool for survival.
The words aren't for Reid – he's been sitting out more and more of the recon and retrieval missions lately – he'd never been a field agent, and this experience is only hammering home that fact.
'Sure,' Emily nods, 'Hill and Bruty just finished loading the truck.' They give Reid a gesture of farewell, and Morgan tells him:
'See you soon.'
Reid knows that one day, not everyone will make it back.
He's a pragmatist, not an idealist. He deals in empiricism, rather than faith. It feels strange, then, to think that there might be an end to the madness that's consumed them.
He tries, though.
He doesn't stop trying.
As long as he keeps trying, survival isn't just a myth.
He steps into the quarantine room, pulling on the lab coat that hangs by the door. It's much cooler here, where they do use the air conditioning. The Arizona heat isn't really conducive to scientific experimentation.
'How're we doing?' he asks the woman in the lab coat at the end of the room – Jean Holloway. She's young (but not as young as Reid), with red hair and green eyes. She'd been the local coroner before the end of the world, and the only person that's really qualified to be doing this. Technically speaking, he's not really qualified, but degrees and certificates and letters after names really don't seem to matter so much anymore.
His eyes drift to the containment chamber – to the zombie that's strapped to a gurney. Really, sedation would be the best option, but they can't afford to risk contaminating the samples.
'No reaction,' she tells him grimly, with an added roll of the eyes. 'We're going to be fighting off zombies with our walking sticks before we find something that will cure them, won't we?' she asks.
He doesn't say anything – cure is the optimal solution, but he's beginning to think that their best bet might be some form of counter-virus. If they can't cure, then at the very least, they can find something that works better than bullets. Something that spreads. The trick is finding something that won't kill off the remaining humans.
'It's past the designated waiting period,' he says eventually. 'We should terminate.'
Jean nods. She takes a hypodermic needle from the drawer, and Reid finds himself looking away. He's never told her why she's the one that always has to draw blood, why she's the one that always has to administer the shots. The danger is minimal – zombie strength is no greater than human strength, and it would take some kind of super-strength to break through the multitude of restraints – but he still feels guilty about it sometimes.
He waits until she's taken the blood sample before picking up the machete from the table. They can't afford to waste bullets on creatures that can't fight back.
They take the body outside and burn it – Jean says a few words, because before it had become a brainless killing machine, it had been a person. A woman – someone's daughter. Perhaps someone's mother, someone's sister. An aunt. A best friend. Sometimes it seems so much easier to see them as something not human at all.
He thinks of his own mother, or rather, his memories of her. He doesn't want to ponder the possibility that she could be one of these walking dead. He takes some solace in the fact that she probably would have died quickly. Diana Reid had not been a weak woman, but a mental institution isn't the best place for survival even during the best of times.
He watches the flames flicker in the midday heat. There's still a long way to go yet.
He hopes that she would be proud of him.
A/N: At the risk of writing an author's note as long as the story itself, there are two issues I would ask your opinion of:
1) Pairings
2) Character deaths
In either case, choices will most certainly alienate some people, and I want to minimize that, but at the same time, in times of zombie apocalypse, certain things must follow. In such an isolated environment, it would be almost a given that there would be some pairing off, but would it be preferable to show either i) intrateam pairings, ii) OC pairings, or iii) implied pairings kept to the background, but ultimately let the reader decide. I'm leaning towards iii with a bit of ii mixed in, but I would be willing to consider opinions. Unfortunately, with the issue of character deaths, it's something that's not so easily pushed to the side. There are a lot of people that tend to avoid stories with character death in them, but it would seem unrealistic to show such an extreme situation with everybody surviving to the end. If you should review, please do leave your opinion on this. Otherwise, this will end with dinosaurs fighting off the zombies.
That's right.