Title: Towards Its Own Darkness
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Universe: Zombie Cantos
Characters/Pairing: team - gen
Genre: Horror/Drama
Summary: Every zombie apocalypse has its beginning.
Author's Note: Liberties have been taken with the Arizona Sheriff's department. Even greater liberties have been taken with science – because, really? Zombies? Yeah. Longer note at the end.

Zombie Cantos: Towards Its Own Darkness

* * *

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still
Now.
There they are, the young moons, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen
The wheat leans back towards its own darkness
And I lean toward mine

Beginning – James Wright

*

But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.

Mitch Albom

* * *

They're looking for a remorseless killer.

He shoots his victims in the head with nary a second thought and then burns their corpses, and there are four people dead already when the Behavioral Analysis Unit shows up in The Middle of Nowhere, Arizona.

Reid sits up when he hears the reports of mysterious deaths on the SUV radio, but then Rossi flips it off, and they start talking about the profile, and that's that.

Or at least, that's what he thinks at first.

There's some hinkiness with the security footage that's available, and it can't be worked remotely, which means Garcia's there, riding along with them. She'd been giddy at the thought of using the jet, and is less so, now that they're actively discussing the case. Morgan's in the other SUV with Prentiss and Hotch, which means that there's not even the prospect of witty banter to cheer her up.

He tries to make her laugh with a joke about solipsism (and can almost hear Rossi rolling his eyes in the front seat), but it doesn't really work when it's followed up with a dissertation on mutilated corpses.

Burnt corpses in a small town, no less. They see big cities a lot. They see medium sized cities, and smaller ones too. It seems strange then, to think that they so often are called to a small town, in which everyone seems to know each other. Is it so easy to hide pathology? He thinks back to his tryst with Dilaudid – remembers how no-one seemed particularly fooled by his erratic behavior.

He's sure that the prevalence of serial killers in small towns must be a coincidence – perceptions of population density coupled with the fact that small town cops are less equipped to handle a murder investigation that their big city counterparts.

Still, they're dedicated officers, and, he discovers, when they make the round of introductions, pretty nice people. All too often they've been shunned by local police who feel that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is imposing on what should be their case.

There are four officers there, serving a town of over a thousand. The coroner, they're told, has a more fluid jurisdiction, but right now, they're the only town within a hundred miles that has four murder victims on their hands. All twelve of them are squashed into the police station now, and it's starting to get a little hard to breathe.

To give them some room as much as anything else, Hotch sends Reid and Morgan to the morgue with the coroner. They can learn a lot from a corpse.

The coroner's name is Jean Holloway, and she has a very nice smile. He gives her an awkward wave, and as soon as her back is turned, Morgan elbows him softly in the arm.

'What?' he whispers, not wanting his voice to be overheard.

Morgan just grins.

* * *

Emily and Dave go with two of the local cops to the crime scenes. Sam Harrison and Brian Clark had both grown up in the town, and four burnt corpses is a little beyond their expertise. Still, they're both pretty hardy anyway, which is good, because Emily gets the feeling that this isn't going to be an easy case.

She doesn't know just how hard it's going to be.

At the first scene, the smell of burnt flesh still lingers, as though the corpses had permanently soiled the area. There's no sign of any accelerant or ashes, which means that it's a dump site, rather than a kill site. Definitely not an impulsive killer.

They need to keep working the profile.

'Small town like this, where would you burn a body?'

'Couldn't be a crematorium,' Rossi says. 'Bodies are too intact for that.'

'No crematoriums in town anyway,' explains Harrison. 'Small place like this, they wouldn't get so much business.'

'It seems almost unnecessary,' Rossi muses, kneeling to the ground, his fingers brushing the dirt. It looks as though he's trying to determine what had happened by touch alone, which even for them is impossible.

'What do you mean?' asks Clark. He's young – fresh-faced, innocent. He, out of all the officers here seems the most horrified by what's going on, his face green with nausea. He scratches the bandage on his left hand – apparently there had been a scene at the station this morning – one that the team had missed by almost an hour.

'With the caliber bullet that was used, a headshot's going to be fatal,' Emily explains. 'Burning the corpse serves no other purpose than concealing identity – which didn't help – or sending a message.'

'What kind of message?' Harrison says with a bitter voice. 'I'm a sick son of a bitch, try and catch me?'

Rossi shakes his head. 'No, that doesn't fit with the bullet wounds. Shot to the head is methodical. An execution. It's as though this was some task that he had to complete.'

'Delusions, maybe,' Emily suggests. 'He could be killing them because he's under the misapprehension that certain rituals need be performed.'

'What, you mean like Satanists?' Harrison asks, clearly surprised by the suggestion.

Emily shakes her head, shooting an amused glance back at Rossi. 'Satanic cults are a myth. If this is ritualistic, then it's one person. Probably mentally ill. Obsessional, maybe.'

Emily jumps slightly as her phone rings in her pocket. Shedding the blue gloves that she'd put on to walk the scene, she answers it with a short, 'Prentiss.'

'You need to get back to the station.' It's JJ's voice, and she sounds almost…panicked?

'JJ, what…' Her words are cut short at the sound of a gunshot on JJ's end of the line. It's muffled, but Emily Prentiss has heard far too many gunshots in her time to mistake it for anything else. 'JJ?!' There's a clattering sound, and then nothing but dial tone.

'Shit!'

She heads straight for the SUV, trusting that Rossi, Harrison and Clark are following.

'What's going on?' Dave asks her.

'Something's going on at the station,' she tells him, and it's the only excuse he needs to execute a rapid-fire u-turn that kicks up the once still dust.

* * *

Jean pushes the drawer shut on the fourth and – so far – final victim, the C.O.D being the exact same as it had for the previous three victims.

'But,' she says, waving a gloved finger in Reid's direction. 'I did have something else.'

She leads them over towards a microscope, where there are a series of Petri dishes lined up on the counter. 'I took some blood samples, and there is some really. Hinky. Shit. Going on.' She punctuates her words with pauses, as if to accentuate the severity of the situation. 'All four victims had the same virus,' she tells them. 'I don't recognize it, but then, I have a medical degree, not a microbiology degree. It's like nothing I've ever seen before.'

'Could I…?' Reid asks, and Jean raises an eyebrow.

'What are your qualifications?' she asks, apparently out of interest, rather than disbelief.

Before Reid can answer, Morgan butts in. 'He has three Ph. Ds – Math, Chemistry and Engineering.' At Jean's impressed look, he gives Reid a wink. Reid says nothing but steps towards the microscope.

Technically speaking, microbiology isn't his area of expertise either, but he's read a few books on the subject, and he admits – it does look strange. Before he can voice his opinion on the matter, though, he hears a loud thump coming from one of the drawers.

He jumps.

For a town this size, there's not much need for a sizeable morgue. As it stands, though, there are five bodies in there now – four are their murder victims, and the fifth is an older man whose body had been found earlier today. The morgue is the only place to keep the body until a representative from the funeral home from the next town over comes to pick it up.

'Which drawer is that coming from?' Morgan asks.

'5,' Jean says. 'That's Steve – the body we picked up this morning. Bite marks of some kind. Some kind of wild animal. Scared him so much he had a heart attack.'

There's another thump, and this time all three of them jump.

'You sure he's dead,' Morgan asks, skeptical. Jean shoots him a fiery look.

'You think I'm stupid?' she asks. 'Of course he was dead.'

'Well, in my experience,' Morgan retorts, not unkindly, 'Dead guys don't make this kind of noise.'

With a tiny shrug, Jean steps towards the drawer, pulling it open. Whatever they had expected, being attacked by a man with half of his face torn off had not been it. His movements are jerky, almost robotic. Reid's fingers are slowly unsnapping his holster, and beside him, he can see Morgan doing the same.

There's barely a split second between the corpse almost collapsing on top of Jean, and Reid pulling the trigger. Jean pushes the body off of her, clearly disgusted by the experience.

'What the fuck?' She stares down at the body in disbelief. 'There is no fucking way that guy was alive when I put him in the drawer.'

'That wasn't human,' Morgan says, and his voice is more somber than Reid has ever heard it. 'That was some kind of…monster.' Reid's almost amused at Morgan's sudden shift in opinion, but there's no time for talking about it now. Jean's right. There is definitely something very strange going on in this town.

* * *

Everyone seems to jump to attention the moment they hear the gunshot from downstairs. It's not the most common thing to hear a gunshot in a police station as isolated as this one, but Aaron Hotchner has been vigilant for a long time; he had been like this before Foyet, but his experiences with the Reaper had almost tripled his paranoia.

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you," Rossi had said once, and even though he'd said it in an overly cocky tone of voice, Hotch isn't about to disagree with it. Still, he hadn't expected it all to come crashing down in The Middle of Nowhere, Arizona.

He's so focused on getting down to the morgue, that he almost doesn't see the person coming at him from the right. It's not a person anymore, he realizes. The eyes are dead white, and the skin is a sickly green, and those moans are definitely not human.

What the hell is going on?

He throws a punch that hits the creature square in the jaw, but it doesn't deter it. Out of nowhere, JJ swings a chair at its head, and he jumps backward to avoid the follow-through. She has a hell of a swing, and it seems down for the count.

'What is that?' Garcia asks, her expression half-terrified, half-curious. The Sheriff – George Pegg – is standing in front of her, one hand on his weapon, the other held in a protective gesture.

'Prisoner we had in lock-up,' Pegg explains, his eyes looking down the hall to the cells. 'He went crazy, bit two of my officers this morning. Then he was out cold for a while. I guess he woke up.'

Hotch starts down the hallway, because if the prisoner had managed to get out, then it's not really good news for the officer that had been watching the cells.

Officer Benjamin Ryan is unconscious, bleeding from a head-wound, and a nasty looking bite mark on his arm that peeks out from underneath a once white bandage. It looks infected. Hotch can see the stain on the wall where the prisoner had thrown the law enforcement officer against it.

'I'll call Prentiss and Rossi,' JJ says when Hotch rejoins them in the main station. He nods, not sure what else to do or say.

'You need to get back to the station,' JJ says over the phone, without any preliminaries, and Hotch sees the creature on the floor moving towards her almost in slow motion. He starts pulling his gun out, but before it's even halfway free of the holster, someone else beats him to it. A non-uniformed someone, standing at the door with a rifle.

JJ drops the phone in surprise, her eyes wide open.

'I thought it was out,' she says eventually.

The man with the rifle scoffs. 'Not gonna go down without a shot to the head, and even then, you'd best burn the corpses to make sure you're doing the job right.'

The words take a few seconds to sink in, and then Hotch has his weapon out, pointed at the stranger with the rifle. 'You killed them. You murdered those people.'

'Trust me, boy, that wasn't murder. That was survival.'

Hotch feels a rush of anger going through him. He hasn't been called "boy" in a long time, and he doesn't particularly want to, either.

'Down on the ground,' he commands. 'You're under arrest for the murder of Dean Whitlock, Stacey Chambers, Marcel Chen and Eric Kozlov.'

'They were dead long before I got to 'em,' the man says, not moving an inch.

'Put the rifle down, Harold,' the Sheriff warns, his own gun drawn. 'These people are from the FBI. You don't want to mess with them.'

'Don't you understand?' Harold says, his voice rising. 'These people are zombies. They rose from the dead. You're all going to die!' He swings his rifle towards Hotch, and Hotch finds himself squeezing the trigger, too late realizing that the rifle isn't pointed at him, but at the creature that's about to take a bite out of his neck.

Benjamin Ryan. The man that had thirty seconds ago been lying on a bench where Hotch had lain him is now lying dead on the floor, a bullet hole in his head. His still-open eyes are white, and in the brighter light of this room, Hotch can see that his skin has a deathly green tinge to it. He then looks towards the unbreathing body in the doorway, and realizes that he had just killed the man that was trying to protect them all.

'What's going on?' Morgan asks from the top of the stairs. He, Reid and Doctor Holloway are all breathing heavily, as if they'd just run a marathon.

Hotch's eyes are still caught on Harold's body. 'Zombies,' he says.

Reid's eyes widen, and Hotch gets the feeling he's about to learn every single thing he ever wanted to learn about the walking dead. He's not wrong. In fact, Reid's still talking ten minutes later when they hear the SUV screeching to a stop outside.

Pegg turns to Hotch. 'Clark was bitten too,' he says, as if only just realizing it. With a determined grimace, Hotch raises his weapon, ready to shoot anything inhuman that walks through the door.

Emily steps in first, mouth open wide at the scene before her. Hotch gestures her in silently, and she turns back only briefly before stepping in. Harrison's next, hot on Emily's heels. He hesitates a little longer, relenting only when he sees the bodies on the ground. Rossi is through next, for which Hotch is relieved, because shooting Clark while Rossi's still outside would feel like something of a betrayal.

The man that steps through the door last is clearly infected, now that Hotch knows the signs. Green skin, bite mark. He levels the gun.

'Wait, what's going on?' Harrison asks, seeing what Hotch is about to do.

'The dead are walking, Sam,' Pegg tells him, and the disbelief is clear in the man's eyes. 'Clark's about to become one of them.'

'That's ridiculous.' Harrison steps towards Clark, only to be thrown into the wall by the man that's just crossed the border between human and not human. Half a dozen guns seem to fire at once, and Emily's at Harrison's side before Clark's body's even hit the ground. He seems okay. Dazed, but okay.

'We need to check everyone for wounds,' Hotch says, taking charge of the situation. At the same time, though, he doesn't know what he'll do if one of his team are infected. He works every day to make sure his team goes home alive. He doesn't think he could handle having to kill one of them. Part of him knows that one day he'll have to.

'What now?' the Sheriff asks.

'It'll have spread through the town by now,' Hotch says. 'We need to save who we can.' He's almost surprised at himself for taking this so easily, but then, it's a lot like the job; evil's out there, save who you can. Can't save everyone.

He looks out through the open door of the police station.

There's work to do.

A/N: So the one consensus that was reached at the end of last chapter, is that dinosaurs versus zombies would be AWESOME. I will write this story, and it will be posted at my journal of original fic, which is depressingly empty right now. As for the other points, pairings, if used, will be confined to single parts, and only mentioned in the other parts if absolutely necessary. Will be a mix of OC and intrateam pairings, though, as some people mentioned, in such circumstances, intimacy is less about love and more about comfort, so take from that what you will. For those interested in the results, we had, in order, five votes for Morgan/Prentiss and Garcia/Kevin, four for JJ/Hotch and Rossi/Prentiss, two for JJ/Reid and Hotch/Prentiss, and one or less for everything else. I have some vague plans outlined in my mind, which I won't spoil by posting here.

And there will, eventually, be character death. I can't avoid it, but if I do jump around the timeline a little more, then people may be alive or dead, depending on the chronology of the situation. There will be warnings for all actual main character death scenes though, in case you'd like to skip it. For the person that was concerned I'd use Kevin's mauve shirt status as opportunity to off him, fear not. Kevin will outlast everyone else, and become Zombie Overlord. That's right.